The Invisible Man Has a Shadow, and It's Fucking Stupid

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 existence that we keep rebranding but never solving. No, I’m talking about the Invisible Man who now runs your company. He lives in the boardroom. He doesn’t have a face, doesn’t have a name you’d recognize, and doesn’t have a single goddamn clue what your job actually entails. But he makes every decision that matters, and he does it with the capricious, impulsive energy of a toddler who’s just discovered that screaming gets him 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, the Invisible Man is all-in on an AI bubble that isn’t showing meaningful value on any ledger, while simultaneously setting fire to every career, every shred of autonomy, and every remaining scrap of goodwill that might have kept this whole creaking edifice standing for another few years.

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—that I’m building the digital gates while the Invisible Man builds the organizational ones—is not lost on me. We’ve all watched as the executive class has accumulated more wealth than gods. Not metaphorically. The combined net worth of the top ten richest people in America is somewhere north of $1.5 trillion. That’s more than the GDP of all but about a dozen countries. They’ve paid themselves massive raises—CEO-to-worker pay ratio is now hovering around 600:1 or 1000:1 depending on which company you’re looking at—and they’ve done it without ever once justifying why their labor is worth a thousand times more than the labor of the person who actually builds the thing the company sells. There’s no spreadsheet, no formula, no philosophical framework that can make that math work. It’s just theft dressed up in a waistcoat.

While they’ve been doing that—stuffing their pockets and buying super yachts, super cars, dating supermodels, being super creepy, and building bunkers in Hawaii like the cowardly paranoiacs they are—they’ve also been making their products worse. Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” for this, and it’s the only word that captures the phenomenon with the precision it deserves. The playbook is simple: first, you make a product that’s genuinely useful, hook people on it, build a user base. Then you start degrading the experience in small, incremental ways that maximize revenue extraction while minimizing the chance that people will leave. You make the ads more intrusive. You make the cancellation button harder to find. You raise prices not because your costs have gone up but because the algorithm says customers will tolerate it. And all the while, you’re bribing politicians—through campaign contributions, through lobbying, through the revolving door between regulatory agencies and corporate boards—to let you consolidate the market further, to buy up or crush every competitor, to make it structurally impossible for customers to go anywhere else. When exit is foreclosed, abuse becomes a business model.

This is rent-seeking. I mean that in the precise, Adam-Smith sense, not the sloppy think-tank appropriation where any government program they don’t like gets called “rent-seeking” while a hedge fund manager parking money in the Caymans is somehow “wealth creation.” Smith—the actual Smith, the one they don’t put on the tote bags at libertarian conferences—saw 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 designed to keep competitors out. Smith’s exact 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 contrivance to raise prices” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, book 10, chapter 8).

He didn’t trust businesspeople. 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.

At the same time—and this is the labor side of the equation—they’ve been working for 40 years to eliminate every obstacle that once stood between them and treating workers like factory hands in a 19th-century mill. Unions busted. At-will employment made universal. Non-competes and arbitration clauses weaponized. The social safety net shredded so that the cost of losing a job is existential terror. The gig economy invented so that a whole class of workers can be classified as contractors with no benefits, no protections, no overtime. The goal, never stated aloud but 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, a RTO mandate, a 60-hour week with no overtime—because the alternative is falling into a void where healthcare doesn’t exist and rent still needs to be paid, but may not be.

The executive class has outdone itself. It’s actually impressive, in the way that 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—is from the very people they’re bribing and the very shareholders who are, if you follow the money up to its source, the same 100 people dressed in a hundred different holding companies. These people weaponize every element of the American tax code to ensure they never have to pay for roads, or schools, or god forbid crayons for a teacher. Jeff Bezos—and I’ll get to that parasitic piece of shit in a moment—paid an effective tax rate that would make a barista blush. 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 not currently 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 a religious devotion in search of a revenue stream. The AI isn’t working out on paper. The hallucination problem hasn’t been solved. The enterprise use cases, outside of 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 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 18 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 to 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 ass during a 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 but dissolves when you try to touch it (would this be a penumbra or an emanation? anyway…). 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 and the urgency that surrounded it is forgotten by the Invisible Man, but not Pat’s kids who didn’t see their dad at the swim meet or Ashley who quit because she couldn’t handle the stress and chaos every day.

This is the part that really fucks 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, if there are metrics at all. The dashboards are lies. I’m a mathematician, I’ve been seeing these get progressively less accurate since 2016. Everything seems to have this growing implicit urgency, this constant low-grade panic, like everything’s always on fire and every single person across every discipline is on trial for their very 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 and terror, let’s talk about Jeff Bezos for a moment. There’s a quote—and it’s not taken out of context, despite what his PR machine would like you to believe—where he wished for his employees to “wake up every morning terrified.” This wasn’t a metaphor for healthy urgency. This was a billionaire, a man whose wealth exceeds the GDP of mid-sized nations, explicitly articulating a philosophy of management through fear. He wanted his warehouse workers—the people who pissed and shat in bottles because bathroom breaks were tracked and penalized; the people who left their shifts bruised, broken, and traumatized; these people who committed the unforgivable crime of… …working for him—to wake up every morning terrified.

Minor note for Bezos, if I ever have the displeasure of meeting you in person: I will wish the exact same pitiless horror upon you and your family: waking up every morning terrified. Not in a threatening way—I’m not an idiot, your lawyers are already drafting a letter—personally, I hope all your assets get seized by the people that made them possible, and you live forever as service worker at a Denny’s in Alabama so that everyone can meet Mr. Prime as he works to make sure he can make rent. I want you to experience, just once, what it feels like to really stand on the edge of a knife every day, to know that one bad quarter, one algorithmic shift, one invisible decision from an invisible man could destroy everything. I want you to feel the immeasurable distraction and toxicity of living in that state, the way it corrodes your health, your relationships, your ability to think about anything beyond the next 24 hours. You wished that on tens of thousands of people. You built a system that made it structural. Apologize for being a bully and an asshole or I stand by my position, and I stand with the thousands of people who crawled out of your warehouses demoralized, disabled, and permanently fucked up. You parasitic piece of shit.

But Bezos is just the most visible example of the philosophy, and the philosophy has metastasized. Now, this panic that CEOs wanted their employees to feel is an ever-present anxiety that the executives themselves can’t shake. That’s the irony. They wanted a workforce in a state of constant low-grade terror, and they got it, but terror doesn’t stay where you put it. It bleeds. It contaminates every decision, every interaction, every planning meeting. The result is that everything is a crisis. Everything needs to be delivered in a week. Every status needs to be in 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: what the fuck are we all in on?

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 treats 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, and the Invisible Man pockets his bonus before the house of cards collapses. Everything is seen through such a short-term lens now that it’s like the executive class is on hospice care and they know it. They can only think in intervals of weeks—sometimes days. The quarterly earnings call is the only horizon that matters. The stock 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.

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 competency and skill. The Invisible Man doesn’t care about your career, but I do, and here’s what his reign looks like as a member of labor.

Imagine you’re a metal fabricator. You spent six months putting together the initial rack for a data center expansion, the one that was supposed to hold an additional quantity 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. The rack is 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. You point to the Dow Jones and say, “I helped make that number go up.” That’s not a fucking answer. That’s not a career. That’s a ghost.

Imagine you’re a designer. You mocked out 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 just a sales demo that 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 hard questions. You vibe code some AI slop POC, a proof-of-concept so brittle, so full of hallucinated responses, 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 (despite your protesting) 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, but it was never built to scale and when it fails your team is RIF’d because you clearly don’t know what you’re doing here. Some of them have kids with medical needs. Some of them were barely hanging on and working nights and weekends trying to out-swim the current that just crushed them. Some of them blame you because you said it would be ok and it may cost them their home. Then you interview somewhere else, and they ask you to explain the scaling strategies you’ve used across multiple orders of magnitude. 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 pretending it drives.

Imagine you’re a manager. You’ve spent three years watching your teams get demoralized and infuriated every single day. They’re operating under duress with constant stress and constantly changing requirements. People are burning out, quitting, quiet-quitting, breaking down in one-on-ones. They want to know what they did to be the target of what feels like some deeply personal corporate consequence. You’re RIF’d because your team isn’t hitting their KPIs. As they see you deactivated on Slack they all know that was the only thread they were hanging onto. Then you interview at another organization and they ask you 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 acknowledged 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 away autonomy from you, accountability from himself, and removes all purpose, and then he wonders why “engagement scores” are low. He treats your career as an externality, a cost to be minimized, and then he acts surprised when the labor market fills up with people who can’t answer basic interview questions because they’ve never 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 show value from an office that’s rested too long on its laurels and made too many enemies out of the customers and employees who made the entire operation possible. The executive class knows, on some level, that the model is breaking. The cynical part of me thinks that the executive class’s bet that they could replace labor with AI so they wouldn’t have to deal with the challenges of competent people didn’t pan out and now they’ve over-leveraged, throwing good money after bad. They know the AI isn’t delivering miracles. Sure, it’s a great tool. I can use it as an assistant or not. Either way. But it’s not a Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer, Designer, etc. They know the 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. They’re throwing everything at the wall. They’re lighting fires just to show they can hold the hose. And in the process, they’re 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 the banality of evil that 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 saying there’s a conspiracy. There doesn’t need to be a conspiracy when the incentives align so 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 clear, the direction is unmistakable, and the Invisible Man is winning.

So what do you do? Real damage has been done. It’s not too late to toss aside the tired, worn tactics that have no merit, the ones borrowed from moronic, toxic idiots like Jeff Bezos and the billionaire class. But tossing them aside requires something that the Invisible Man is structurally incapable of: remembering some simple truths.

Your people are your most important asset. I know that 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 fucking 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.

Also, 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 strategically with you, not 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 scale 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 knows its legitimacy is crumbling. They’ve made enemies of everyone—employees, customers, the broader public—and the only move left is to pretend, with increasing desperation, that everything is fine and the line is going up and the AI will save us all. It won’t. Nothing will save people that believe this kind of shit in the long run 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 forced 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 becomes visible again—dragged into the light by the sheer weight of the people who are done with his bullshit.

Go read Ed Zitron’s piece. It’s better than this one, and I’m not being humble. He’s not only a prolific writer, he’s spent a lot more time in this space and he’s a true research journalist. Not just some winging blogger. 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 has ever failed to fire will see in an interview 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 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.