There is a particular genius to blaming a tool for a decision made by a person. Twenty-plus tech companies, Monday.com among the latest, have now cited AI as the stated reason for significant layoffs in 2026. Simultaneously, Bloomberg reports that the stock market is in open revolt over how much those same companies are spending on AI infrastructure. The technology is simultaneously too expensive and too efficient. It's costing jobs and costing fortunes at the same time.
The Double Bind of AI Spending Narratives
The contradiction is almost elegant. Executives stand before shareholders and say: we must spend billions on AI or die. Then they stand before employees and say: AI has made your role redundant. Both statements are deployed to protect the bottom line, but they point in opposite directions. A 2023 paper in Labor Economics by Acemoglu and Restrepo found that automation narratives consistently outpace actual automation displacement, functioning as what they called a "preemptive legitimation" of workforce restructuring. The AI era has turbocharged this dynamic. The layoff is real. The technology as cause is, at best, partial.
Mass Layoffs as Cultural Signal, Not Just Economics
What makes this moment strange is how normalized the framing has become. There is no pushback on the premise, just a running list of companies that have used the same language. The enshittification thesis has always predicted that platforms optimize for extraction over time. What we're watching now is that logic applied to the workforce itself. Workers are the product being optimized away. The market's revolt over AI spending suggests investors have started to notice that the emperor's infrastructure bills are enormous, and the returns remain speculative. At some point, the blame has to land somewhere other than the algorithm.