The Invisible Man Has a Shadow (and It Isn't Very Bright)

Let me tell you about the Invisible Man.

Not the Ralph Ellison one—though the metaphor is adjacent, and if you haven’t read it, you should, because the problem of being unseen while being systematically crushed is a through-line of American life that we keep rebranding and never solving. No, I mean the Invisible Man who now runs your company. He lives in the boardroom. He has no face, no name you’d recognize, and not the faintest idea what your job actually involves. But he makes every decision that matters, and he makes it with the capricious, impulsive energy of a toddler who has just discovered that screaming produces more Goldfish crackers.

The Invisible Man is the logical endpoint of four decades of consolidation, financialization, and the slow, deliberate dismantling of anything that ever gave labor a seat at the table. He’s what you get when the executive class decides that the people who build the product and the people who buy the product are both adversaries to be managed rather than partners to be respected. And right now, in 2026, he’s all in on an AI bubble that isn’t showing meaningful value on any ledger, while simultaneously setting fire to every career, every scrap of autonomy, and every last bit of goodwill that might have kept this whole creaking edifice standing another few years. Bold, when you consider goodwill was the load-bearing wall.

I’m a software engineer. Identity and access management, which means I spend my working hours deciding who gets to enter the building and who gets locked out—and the irony of building the digital gates while the Invisible Man builds the organizational ones is not lost on me. We’ve all watched the executive class accumulate more wealth than gods. Not metaphorically. The combined net worth of the ten richest people in America sits somewhere north of $1.5 trillion—more than the GDP of all but about a dozen countries. They’ve paid themselves enormous raises—CEO-to-worker pay ratios now hover around 600:1, sometimes 1000:1—and they’ve done it without ever once justifying why their labor is worth a thousand times the labor of the person who actually builds the thing the company sells. There’s no spreadsheet, no formula, no framework that makes that maths work. It’s theft in a waistcoat. What’s the multiple, exactly, at which the waistcoat stops covering it?

And while they’ve been at it—stuffing pockets, buying superyachts and supercars, dating supermodels, building bunkers in Hawaii like the cowardly paranoiacs they are—they’ve also been making their products steadily worse. Cory Doctorow coined “enshittification” for this, and it remains the only word with the necessary precision. The playbook is simple: first, you make something genuinely useful, hook people, build a base. Then you degrade the experience in small, incremental increments that maximize revenue extraction while minimizing the odds anyone leaves. You make the ads more intrusive. You bury the cancellation button. You raise prices not because your costs went up but because the algorithm says customers will tolerate it. And all the while you’re lobbying—through campaign contributions, through the revolving door between regulators and boards—to consolidate the market further, to buy or crush every competitor, to make it structurally impossible for customers to go anywhere else. When exit is foreclosed, abuse becomes a business model. Convenient, that.

When exit is foreclosed, abuse becomes a business model.

This is rent-seeking, in the precise, Adam-Smith sense—not the sloppy think-tank appropriation where any government program they dislike is “rent-seeking” while a hedge fund parking money in the Caymans is somehow “wealth creation.” Smith—the actual Smith, the one they don’t print on the tote bags at libertarian conferences—regarded rent-seeking as the great cancer of a commercial society. He defined it with surgical clarity: income derived not from producing anything, not from innovating, not from bearing risk, but from controlling access to something artificially scarce. A monopoly. A protected market. A regulatory barrier built to keep competitors out. Smith’s own words:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

He didn’t trust businessmen. He thought they would, given even the faintest opportunity, collude rather than compete. He warned that the interests of merchants and manufacturers were “always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public.” The man who supposedly invented capitalism spent a remarkable amount of his time explaining that capitalists, left to their own devices, would strangle the free market in its crib and charge admission to the funeral. Odd thing to leave off the tote bag.

On the labor side of the equation, they’ve spent forty years removing every obstacle that once stood between them and treating workers like factory hands in a nineteenth-century mill. Unions busted. At-will employment made universal. Non-competes and arbitration clauses weaponized. The social safety net shredded until the cost of losing a job is existential terror. The gig economy invented so that a whole class of worker can be reclassified as contractors with no benefits, no protections, no overtime. The goal—never stated aloud, obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention—is to reduce labor to something as close to wage slavery as the law will permit. To make you so frightened, so indebted, so replaceable that you’ll say yes to anything: a pay cut, an RTO mandate, a 60-hour week with no overtime, because the alternative is a void where healthcare doesn’t exist and the rent still comes due. And once you’re that frightened, what won’t you agree to?

The executive class has genuinely outdone itself. It’s impressive, in the way a tumor is impressive—a complex, growing thing that’s killing its host with methodical efficiency. They’ve made enemies of their employees. They’ve made enemies of their customers. And the only accountability they face—by law, by regulation, by the formal structures that are supposed to keep capitalism from eating itself—comes from the very people they’re lobbying and the very shareholders who, if you follow the money to its source, turn out to be roughly the same hundred people wearing a hundred different holding companies. They weaponize every clause of the tax code to ensure they never have to pay for a road, or a school, or, god forbid, crayons for a teacher. The Invisible Man doesn’t pay taxes. The Invisible Man doesn’t build infrastructure. The Invisible Man extracts value and externalizes cost—which is the entire business model of the modern American corporation in one sentence.

And now—now!—they’re all in on AI. This is the part where the farce becomes visible even from inside the tent. They’ve bet the house on a technology that, whatever its long-term potential, is currently not making its way onto any ledger in a way that justifies the trillions being poured into data centers. Ed Zitron has done the definitive write-up on this—go read “The Revenge of the Business Idiot” at wheresyoured.at, I’ll wait—and the tl;dr is that the massive capital expenditure on GPUs and infrastructure is, functionally, a religious devotion in search of a revenue stream. The AI isn’t penciling out. The hallucination problem hasn’t been solved. The enterprise use cases, outside a few narrow domains, are mostly vapor. But the Invisible Man doesn’t care, because the AI push serves a secondary purpose: it gives him cover to eliminate headcount and suppress wages. You don’t need Jen if a chatbot can—theoretically, aspirationally, with a straight face in a boardroom PowerPoint—do her job. That’s the real play. Not innovation. Leverage.

So now we arrive at the present moment, where the Invisible Man has consolidated all decision-making into the boardroom and there is virtually no autonomy left at any level of the organization. Want to give Jen a promotion? The Invisible Man says no. It doesn’t matter that Jen has been carrying the team for eighteen months, doesn’t matter that she’s the only person who understands the legacy auth pipeline, doesn’t matter that losing her would cost the company more than her raise ever would. The Invisible Man has a spreadsheet that says headcount costs need to stay flat, and the Invisible Man has never met Jen and never will. You’re a director? Cute. You’re a VP? Adorable. You’re all middle-management supplicants now, and your job is to pass decisions upward into a void and then pass disappointment downward to the people who actually do the work.

Want to green-light a project? Write a PRD—a Product Requirements Document, for those lucky enough not to know—and submit it to the Invisible Man for approval. It’ll die on the vine. Not because it’s a bad idea, not because the ROI isn’t sound, but because the Invisible Man is too busy approving something else: an ad-hoc product announcement that no one in the building has ever heard of, with a launch date plucked from the CEO’s CNBC interview, for a product that doesn’t exist and will need to be built from scratch by a team that’s already underwater, or doesn’t exist. That, the Invisible Man loves. That gets fast-tracked. Because it’s theater, and the executive class runs on theater now—a frantic, desperate performance of competence meant to convince shareholders and the business press that something, anything, is happening.

The Invisible Man is the executive’s shadow. That’s the phrase that keeps rattling around in my head. Not a Jungian shadow in the sense of repressed darkness—though God knows there’s plenty of that—but a shadow in the sense of a projection, a phantom, a thing that looks solid and dissolves the moment you try to touch it. The boardroom has become a kind of Ouija board, and the decisions that emerge from it seem to come from somewhere else entirely: an algorithm, a consultant’s report, a vibe. No one is accountable. No one is visible. The structure has been designed, quite deliberately, to obscure the chain of causation so thoroughly that when something succeeds—rarely—no one knows why, and when something fails—frequently—no one can be blamed. It’s quietly mothballed, the urgency that surrounded it evaporates, and the Invisible Man forgets it ever existed—though Pat’s kids remember the swim meet their dad missed, and Ashley remembers exactly why she quit.

This is the part that really messes with your head if you have to live inside it. When something succeeds or fails, there’s no clear indication of either outcome. The metrics are gamed, where there are metrics at all. The dashboards lie. I’m a mathematician; I’ve watched them grow progressively less accurate since 2016. Everything carries this growing implicit urgency, this constant low-grade panic, as though the building is perpetually on fire and every single person in every discipline is on trial for their livelihood. You ship a feature that took six months of 60-hour weeks? The Invisible Man shrugs and moves on to the next fire. The feature flops? The Invisible Man shrugs and moves on to the next fire. You, the person who built it, are marked either way—not by the quality of your work, but by the arbitrary, capricious judgment of a system that has no memory and no mercy.

Speaking of panic, let’s talk about Jeff Bezos for a moment. There’s a quote—and it isn’t taken out of context, whatever his PR machine would prefer you believe—in which he wished for his employees to “wake up every morning terrified.” Not a metaphor for healthy urgency. A billionaire, a man whose wealth exceeds the GDP of mid-sized nations, explicitly articulating a management philosophy of fear. He wanted his warehouse workers—the people urinating in bottles because bathroom breaks were tracked and penalized, the people leaving their shifts bruised and broken, guilty of the unforgivable crime of working for him—to wake up every morning terrified. As mission statements go, it’s admirably honest. Most executives at least have the decency to pretend the cruelty is a side effect rather than the objective.

Here’s the thing about designing a system to run on other people’s terror, though: terror makes a poor tenant. It never stays in the unit you rented it. It bleeds.

That’s the irony the philosophy never accounts for. They wanted a workforce in a state of constant low-grade fear, and they got it—but fear contaminates everything it touches: every decision, every interaction, every planning meeting, and it does not spare the people who installed it. The result is that everything is a crisis. Everything needs to ship in a week. Every status needs to be real-time. Everyone’s life needs to be on hold. Everyone needs to be all in. And I’m standing there—flat affect, cold gaze, ASD-1 pattern-matching brain running at full tilt—thinking: all in on what, exactly?

Because it’s not the customer anymore. The customer is a hostage now, locked in by consolidation and contractual fine print, and the business treats them with the same contempt it shows its employees. It’s not the shareholder, not really—the shareholder gets lied to as long as the lie holds, gets a stock price propped up by buybacks and short-term manipulation, while the Invisible Man pockets his bonus before the house of cards collapses. Everything is now seen through so short a lens that the executive class appears to be on hospice care and to know it. They can only think in intervals of weeks—sometimes days. The quarterly earnings call is the only horizon that exists. The line goes up, or it doesn’t, and if it goes up, the Invisible Man gets his fix. That’s it. That’s the entirety of the strategic vision. Not building things. Not serving people. Not creating value. Just the line. Just the fix. Just the next hit. When did the whole apparatus start behaving like an addict, and why do we keep handing it the keys?

And let me say this as a member of labor: that’s not good for the company. It’s not good for the shareholders, ironically enough. It’s not even good for the CEO, in the long run, though the golden parachute will cushion his fall while everyone else lands unaided on shards of glass. It’s especially bad for people trying to build their careers—people who need meaningful experience building meaningful things to demonstrate competence and skill. The Invisible Man doesn’t care about your career, but I do, and here’s what his reign looks like from inside labor.

Imagine you’re a metal fabricator. You spent six months building the initial rack for a data-center expansion, the one that was supposed to hold another tranche of GPUs for the AI push. The project was heralded as strategic, critical, make-or-break. You worked overtime. You solved impossible physical constraints. Then the project was cancelled—some invisible decision from the Invisible Man—and the rack was never built, never deployed, never tested in production. It’s rusting in a parking lot. You were RIF’d. Now you’re interviewing for your next job, and someone asks what you did at your last company, and the honest answer is: “I helped make the Dow Jones go up.” That’s not an answer. That’s not a career. That’s a ghost.

Imagine you’re a designer. You mocked up a product that looked so good, so polished, so compelling, that it was used to close a sale with a major client. The client signed. The revenue hit the books. The Invisible Man took his bonus. Then the product never launched. The team was reassigned to the next fire. You were RIF’d. Now you’re interviewing and someone asks, “After launch, how did you improve the UX based on user feedback?”—and the honest answer is: there was no launch. There was no user feedback. There was a sales demo you poured weeks of your life into, and then it died, and you have nothing to show for it. But the line went up, briefly.

Imagine you’re a software engineer—this one I know from the inside, this is the one that keeps me up at night when my mentees ask me the hard questions. You vibe-code an AI-slop proof-of-concept so brittle, so full of hallucinated responses and security exploits and unhandled edge cases, that you wouldn’t let an SE1 merge it into a production environment. But the Invisible Man calls it an “early access preview” and—over your explicit objection—announces it to a small segment of customers, and suddenly that garbage fire is the company’s strategic direction. It’s fast-tracked to ship. It was never built to scale, and when it fails, your team is RIF’d, because clearly you don’t know what you’re doing. Some of them have kids with medical needs. Some were barely hanging on, working nights and weekends trying to out-swim the current that just pulled them under. Some of them blame you, because you said it would be okay, and now it might cost them their home. Then you interview somewhere else, and they ask you to explain the scaling strategies you’ve deployed across multiple orders of magnitude, and you can’t answer—because you’ve been building Potemkin villages. You’ve been doing the engineering equivalent of drawing a car on a piece of cardboard and insisting it drives.

Imagine you’re a manager. You’ve spent three years watching your teams get demoralized and infuriated every single day, operating under constant duress with constantly changing requirements. People are burning out, quitting, quiet-quitting, breaking down in one-on-ones. They want to know what they did to become the target of what feels like some deeply personal corporate punishment. Then you’re RIF’d, because your team isn’t hitting its KPIs. As they watch you go grey on Slack, they all understand you were the only thread they were still holding. Then you interview at another organization and they ask how you handled a difficult employee situation, and the truth is: there was no difficult employee. There were only employees set on fire as fuel for the machine, and your job was to manage the burning—not to put it out, and god forbid you ever named the fire.

This is what the Invisible Man does. He destroys the conditions under which meaningful work is possible, and then he blames you when the work isn’t meaningful. He strips autonomy away from you and accountability away from himself, removes all purpose, and then wonders aloud why “engagement scores” are low. He treats your career as an externality, a cost to be minimized, and then he acts genuinely surprised when the labor market fills up with people who can’t answer a basic interview question because they’ve never once been allowed to actually build anything.

The freneticism—the fire drills, the impossible deadlines, the constant pivots, the ad-hoc product launches—reads to me like a desperate grasp to demonstrate value from an office that’s rested too long on its laurels and made too many enemies of the customers and employees who made the entire operation possible. The executive class knows, on some level, that the model is breaking. The cynic in me suspects their bet that they could replace labor with AI—and thereby stop dealing with the inconvenience of competent people—didn’t pan out, and now they’re over-leveraged, throwing good money after bad. They know the AI isn’t delivering miracles. It’s a fine tool; I can use it as an assistant or not. Either way, it’s not a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or a designer. They know enshittification has a ceiling, that eventually even locked-in customers will revolt. They know the labor market can’t sustain this level of extraction forever without something—unions, legislation, a general strike, something—giving way. So they’re scrambling. Throwing everything at the wall. Lighting fires just to prove they can still hold the hose. And in the process, burning through the human capital that actually keeps the lights on.

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to offer a solution, or at least a palliative, and I will—but let me first be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying the executive class is evil in some cartoonish, mustache-twirling sense. That’s precisely the banality of evil Arendt diagnosed: it’s not that these people wake up wanting to destroy lives, it’s that they’ve constructed a system in which destroying lives is the rational, incentive-compatible thing to do. I’m not alleging a conspiracy. There doesn’t need to be a conspiracy when the incentives align this perfectly. I’m not saying every company is like this—there are holdouts, there are still pockets of functional human organization—but I am saying the trend is unmistakable, the direction is clear, and the Invisible Man is winning.

So what do you do? Real damage has been done. But it’s not too late to toss aside the tired, worn-out tactics that have no merit—the ones borrowed from the Bezos-era playbook that mistakes fear for a strategy. Tossing them aside, though, requires something the Invisible Man is structurally incapable of: remembering a few simple truths.

Your people are your most important asset. I know the phrase has been hollowed out by HR departments and motivational posters, but the hollowness is the problem, not the phrase. Care about their lives as carefully as you care about your own. Do unto others. Not because it’s good for the stock price—though in the long run, it demonstrably is—but because it’s the bare minimum of being a human being in a position of power. When you manage someone, you are holding a portion of their finite, mortal, irreplaceable life in your hands. Act like that matters. It does matter. They matter.

And you would have nothing at all without the customers who purchase from you. Stop holding them hostage. Resist the cheap, lazy urge to M&A your way to being impervious to competition. That’s not strategy; that’s cowardice. Earn their business. Demonstrate that there’s value in partnering with you, rather than being locked into a contract they can’t escape. Build products that are good, stable, reliable, and finished—not just products that are unavoidable. Compete on quality, not on the size of your legal department.

These are not radical ideas. They’re not Marxist. They’re not even particularly progressive. They’re the baseline assumptions of a functional market economy—the kind that existed, imperfectly but recognizably, before the Invisible Man took over. And if the executive class can’t remember them, if they’re too far gone in their hospice-care myopia, then it’s up to the rest of us to remember on their behalf. To build careers that are portable, skills that are legible, solidarity networks that operate outside the official org chart. To add “Open to opportunities” the second the compact is broken. To document the bullshit in writing, so that when the Invisible Man tries to rewrite history, there’s a paper trail.

And if you’re in a position of any power at all—a manager, a director, a tech lead—use it. Not to climb higher, not to curry favor with the Invisible Man, but to shield the people under you from the worst of the madness. Tell them the truth about what’s happening. Translate the doublespeak. Fight fiercely for their raises even when the spreadsheet says no. Be the friction in the machine. The machine hates friction. That’s how you know it’s working.

The Invisible Man has a shadow, and the shadow is the frantic, flailing, terrified response of a class that senses its own legitimacy crumbling. They’ve made enemies of everyone—employees, customers, the broader public—and the only move left is to insist, with mounting desperation, that everything is fine and the line is going up and the AI will save us all. It won’t. Nothing will, except the hard, humble work of rebuilding trust with the people who actually make the world run. Some won’t do it willingly. But they might be made to, if enough of us stop being afraid.

I’m not afraid. I haven’t been afraid in years. And I’ll keep writing these words, saying these things in meetings, and mentoring my team until the Invisible Man is dragged back into the light by the sheer weight of the people who are done with his nonsense.

Go read Ed Zitron’s piece. It’s better than this one, and I’m not being humble—he’s a genuine research journalist who’s spent far more time in this space than I have, not just some blogger winging it. Then go update your résumé. Not because you’re disloyal, but because loyalty hasn’t been on the menu since the 1970s, and the only person who’s going to protect your career is you. And maybe, if you’re lucky, a flat-voiced ASD-1 engineer who’s made it his personal mission to be the most inconvenient employee the Invisible Man ever failed to fire will meet you across an interview table someday.

To that end, if I’m on the panel side, just note that everyone I’ve interviewed since 2022 has heard me say this:

This is an interview—not a mind game. I’m personally not a fan of baiting, leading, or trap-questions, and I won’t be using any here. Breathe. My goal is to understand how you navigate technical challenges, the way in which you evolve your tactics over time, how you deliver performant, scalable, and secure solutions, how you ensure uptime, and other elements essential for your success on this team. Most importantly, I want to get to know the person behind all of this. It’s my hope questions will be clear, but if they are not please give me the opportunity to rephrase them. Also, feel free to take a breath when you need it; feel free to ask for support when you need it; and, try to give yourself both patience and grace. Interviewing is already really hard and stressful, and I understand that. Treat your interviewers like we’re part of your team because we may be soon.