the the truth nobody wants to say out loud is that most people with authority didn’t earn it.

they inherited it.

they faked it.

they politicked their way into it.

they sat in meetings, approved other people’s work, & called it “leadership.”

they were great at navigating the game of perception.

they were terrible at building anything real.

and now the curtain is being ripped off.

ai changes everything.

not because it replaces humans, but because it obliterates the barriers to becoming useful fast.

before, learning was slow.

execution was expensive.

mistakes were fatal.

today, anyone with a laptop, curiosity, & a few prompts can become dangerous in days.

you don’t need 10 years in an industry, you need 10 hours of ruthless focus, real feedback, & the ability to iterate in public.

the power structures that governed the last century were all built on scarcity:

scarcity of access

scarcity of knowledge

scarcity of tools

scarcity of distribution

scarcity creates hierarchy.

hierarchy creates institutions.

institutions create gatekeepers.

gatekeepers tell you who’s allowed to matter.

ai is anti-scarcity.

which makes it anti-institutional.

which makes it deeply threatening to everyone whose value came from hoarding, filtering, & credentialing.

you can feel the tension cracking right now.

the people who’ve built nothing, who know nothing, who’ve coasted on vibe & title for a decade, they’re panicking.

they’re defending their turf.

they’re using words like “nuance” & “context” & “decades of experience” like magic spells.

but the spell is broken.

because the people who used to be outside the gates are just walking around them now.

they’re not asking for permission.

they’re not waiting to be credentialed.

they’re building faster, learning in public, proving their value with every commit, every post, every prototype.

we are living through the collapse of symbolic authority.

the resume is dead.

the title is dead.

the institution is dying.

and the future, it belongs to those who ship.

one more thing.

this isn’t just about careers.

this is about power.

because institutional hierarchy wasn’t just a career ladder, it was a control system.

it told you where you were allowed to sit.

who you had to listen to.

whose ideas mattered.

that system is breaking.

and not everyone’s ready for what comes next.

because the experts matter less now.

& the amateurs might be taking over.

the death of expertise