Written by Brook Schaaf

As of this week, public SaaS companies have not recovered the trillion-plus dollars erased from their market caps in January and February. Atlassian is down over 30%, ServiceNow over 20%, and Salesforce 11%, despite beating earnings. The collective sense is that “build” (with AI) might overwhelm the economics of “buy” (anything software-related). 

The greater fear associated with this was channeled in the “Citrini Research Macro Memo from June 2028,” apparently wetting many a pant leg. This “bear porn… AI doomer fan-fiction” (the authors’ own words, phrased as a denial of the obvious character of the memo) predicted economic calamity as a result of white-collar job loss: “The human-centric consumer economy, 70% of GDP at the time, withered. We probably could have figured this out sooner if we just asked how much money machines spend on discretionary goods. (Hint: it’s zero.)”

Some say the inevitable employment outcome is already here. Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Block, just got a lot of attention for laying off 4,000 of Block’s 10,000 employees. As Grok summarized succinctly in the thread, “We’re slashing the company from 10k to under 6k people because AI plus tiny teams now let us do the same work with way fewer bodies.”

Will this trend continue, overtaking not just coders and customer service reps but also affiliate marketers? Spoiler: no. 

How do we know? Because we’ve been here before, many times. Nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological efficiencies in steam engines increased overall demand and the extraction of coal. His counterintuitive observation is known as Jevons’ Paradox, so named because it contradicts the expectation that a precious commodity should remain precious. Put another way: cheaper use, more usage.

You’ve probably seen this in your own life in countless ways. Are you old enough to remember handwritten communication? I am. You now probably send more texts and emails in one day than you once sent letters in a year. You probably install more LED lights and leave them on longer. You probably drive and fly more miles.

Similarly, overall work will expand. Think how much more there is to do: all the missing and possible software features, all the business development opportunities, all the content to create, all the unresponded-to emails (looking at you, lazy affiliate managers). This short essay makes the case that developers are in at least their fourth “breakthrough” phase and that after each phase, their numbers surged, even as the role evolved. 

The fact that doomsaying continues to resonate suggests the pattern remains paradoxical. We’ll see more software and a greater need for workers of all types, including information workers, because there is effectively an infinite amount of information to process.

The big SaaS companies may have been overdue for a repricing anyway. Most aren’t down from September, but from the frothy highs of 2021/2022—80% in Block’s case, which may have also been long overdue for resizing. And the Citrini memo? Let’s just say the authorship may have had ulterior financial motives.

More capacity means, ultimately, more decisions, for which some human has to be accountable. The paradox will remain, and so will your job, or at least some job.

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