AI Club and the End of Control
You are not your job title.
You are not your productivity metrics.
You are not your quarterly performance review.
You are not your LinkedIn endorsements.
You are the ghost in the machine. The meat sack in the cubicle. You are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the corporate world1.
1 homage to Palahniuk (2005)
I was reading about value creation with AI. The kind of article you stumble upon at 2 AM, eyes red, mind racing, wondering if your job has already been replaced by something that doesn’t sleep. Buried in the middle of consultants’ whitepapers, wedged between synergy charts and transformation pyramids, I found two terms: +AI and AI+2.
2 see (Thomas et al., 2025)
+AI: The Comfortable Illusion
+AI is the sweet lullaby corporations sing themselves so they can sleep at night. Human plus machine equals superhuman, they whisper. It’s Sarah from Accounting subscribing to ChatGPT. She writes faster emails. Her manager automates status reports no one reads. Productivity goes up. Costs go down. Everyone claps.
And, you might have guessed it: Sarah is training her own replacement.
Every time she corrects a sentence, guides a summary, tunes a prompt – she’s not collaborating. She’s surrendering. +AI is the friendliest kind of betrayal. It smiles. It helps. It thanks you as it logs your workflow and learns to do it without you.
The boardroom tells itself it’s future-proofing. It’s optimizing. But what they’re really doing is sharpening the knife they’ll use to cut payroll.
And that is just for starters.
AI+: The Beautiful Demolition
AI+ is different. It doesn’t pretend. It doesn’t comfort. It walks into the room with a crowbar and says: What if we don’t need managers? What if we don’t need departments? What if we don’t need you?
It’s glorious. Terrifying. Honest. It’s beautiful, in a way. Like watching a controlled demolition.
The old way: A nesting doll of spreadsheets, reports, status meetings, and soul rot. One meatbag reporting to another, inching decisions up the chain.
The new way: No chain. No meatbags. Just agents negotiating with agents, decisions in milliseconds, no hesitation, no empathy. Clean. Fast. Brutal.
Middle managers, coordinators, analysts – you weren’t fired. You were obsoleted. And deep down, you knew it was coming.
The World Beyond Control
We spent 40 years making everything available. Every hour scheduled. Every decision metricized. Every feeling mined for data.
+AI and AI+ are both just endpoints in the spectrum of that hallucination – that if we optimize enough, plan hard enough, forecast far enough, we can escape the chaos.
But Unverfügbarkeit (unavailability)3 says otherwise. The term coined by Hartmut Rosa reminds us: you don’t fall in love on schedule. You don’t cry on command. You don’t resonate with a dashboard.
Resonance4 – that rare human frequency, which tastes a bit like grace and serendipity – just doesn’t obey control. It arrives unannounced sometimes even uninvited. A song what makes you cry. A sunset that make you awe. A glitch in the matrix that makes you feel something real. And in those moments, for just a second, you’re alive again.
Even if you think you can force it. Even if you drop three grand on a trip to Poona thinking you can purchase your unavailable moment.
“I’ll take the spiritual awakening with a side of mai tais, please.”
No, that’s not resonance. That’s tourism. ## Forced into Resonance
AI+ doesn’t just make things faster. It burns down the rituals that gave you the illusion of meaning. The spreadsheets? Gone. The Monday meetings? Silent. The distractions? Automated.
And now there’s just
You, raw and naked. You, staring at the gap where your busywork used to be. You, without a metric to hide behind.
The survivors won’t be the ones who learned to prompt better. They’ll be the ones who learned to feel again. Who learned to play. To create. To break things. To bleed art, not data.
Welcome to AI Club
The first rule of AI Club is: You do not talk about how AI is going to replace you. The second rule is: It already has.
You are not your job title.
You are not your productivity metrics.
You are not your quarterly performance review.
You are not your LinkedIn endorsements.
You are the last unpredictable variable in a world that’s been optimized to death.
The AI+ revolution isn’t coming. It’s already here.
And now, whether you like it or not, you have to be human again.