A research firm called Citrini published a 5,000-word thought experiment on Substack this week — a fictional dispatch from June 2028 in which AI-driven white-collar unemployment hits 10.2%, the S&P 500 crashes 38% from its highs, and something they call "Ghost GDP" hollows out the consumer economy from the inside. Machines producing output that shows up in the national accounts but never circulates through the real economy. GDP goes up. Nobody can afford rent. Gizmodo called it a doomsday report. Michael Burry — the guy from The Big Short — shared it and wrote: "And you think I'm bearish." The market sold off. Analysts panicked. Twitter did what Twitter does.
And I sat here reading it and thought: everyone is staring into the same fog.
The Fog
There is something genuinely strange about living through a moment where nobody — not the analysts, not the builders, not the skeptics, not the CEOs, not the researchers — actually knows what happens next.
That is not normal. Usually, technology moves slowly enough that the smart money can see the shape of the thing. The internet had a visible trajectory. Mobile had a visible trajectory. Cloud computing had a visible trajectory. You could disagree about the timeline, but the destination was legible.
AI does not have that. Not right now. And the anxiety you are seeing in the market is not really about valuations or earnings calls or price-to-revenue ratios. It is about the fact that the people whose entire professional identity is built on predicting the future cannot see through the fog.
And that terrifies them.
The Doomsday Report and the Bullish Counter
Citrini's thesis is not stupid. It goes beyond the standard "AI is a bubble" playbook. They describe something called an "intelligence displacement spiral" — a negative feedback loop where AI substitutes for white-collar work, erodes wages and kills consumer demand, which tanks the companies that depend on that demand. No natural brakes. When firms cut 15% of headcount, they mechanically cancel 15% of their SaaS licenses. Revenue follows headcount down the drain.
And then the part nobody anticipated: the disruption does not stay contained to software. In Citrini's scenario, agentic commerce coupled with stablecoins guts transaction fees entirely. The business model of every payment processor and card-focused bank becomes a target.
American Express dropped 7.5% on Monday. IBM had its worst day since 2000. DataDog, CrowdStrike, Zscaler — all down over 9%. The iShares Software ETF hit a 52-week low — erasing every gain since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.
American Express. A credit card company founded in 1850. Getting hammered because a Substack post imagined AI agents routing around transaction fees. That is how far the blast radius extends when people start thinking through second- and third-order effects of a technology most executives still use for email summaries.
And they are not wrong about the pattern. I have lived through enough bubble cycles to recognize the shape — the irrational exuberance, the "this time is different" rhetoric, the exponential spending curves that outrun the business models. I saw it in the dot-com era. I saw it in the crypto era. The pattern is familiar.
But the bullish counter is not wrong either. The people building with AI — and I count myself among them — are seeing real, measurable results. Not theoretical. Not projected. Real. I wrote about it yesterday in The Life Stack. I have consolidated web development, hosting, publishing, and creative work into a single AI-assisted workflow. The economics are not theoretical. They are on my P&L. Analysts are calling the selloff "illogical" — arguing that better AI means more software demand, not less. One researcher estimated 70% of tasks simply cannot be automated because they require human context too fluid to codify.
So which is it? Is AI overhyped — or is the panic Chicken Little?
Yes.
Both Things, Again
This is the part that keeps tripping people up, and I keep writing about it because it keeps being true: both things are happening at the same time.
The AI infrastructure spending is outrunning near-term returns. That is a fact. Citrini is reading the spreadsheets correctly. The gap is real.
And AI is fundamentally restructuring how knowledge work gets done. That is also a fact. I am living proof. So are thousands of other builders, operators, and creators who are shipping things that were impossible eighteen months ago.
The market cannot hold both of these truths simultaneously because markets are binary machines. They need a direction. Up or down. Bull or bear. Buy or sell. The fog does not give them a direction, so they oscillate between euphoria and panic, and every new report becomes ammunition for whichever side wrote it.
But reality does not oscillate. Reality just accumulates.
What the Fog Looks Like from the Inside
I am going to say something that might sound naive, but it is the most honest observation I have had in months.
It is weird to be alive right now.
I do not mean that in the breathless, tech-evangelist sense. I mean it in the genuinely disorienting sense. I am sitting in rural South Carolina, building things with AI that would have required a team a year ago, watching Wall Street publish doomsday reports about the technology I used to build my website this morning. I am watching people argue about whether AI is real while I am using it to ship production code. I am watching analysts who have never prompted a model debate whether the technology has value.
And at the same time, I cannot tell you where this goes. I cannot tell you whether the stocks are overvalued. I cannot tell you whether the infrastructure spending will pay off. I cannot tell you whether the job displacement I wrote about in Something Big Is Already Here will accelerate or plateau. I cannot tell you whether the agents arriving next quarter will change everything or disappoint everyone.
Nobody can. That is the fog.
The Humbling Part
What strikes me most is how uniform the uncertainty is. The bears are uncertain. The bulls are uncertain. The builders are uncertain. The analysts are uncertain. Everyone has conviction about their position, but nobody has conviction about the outcome. Those are different things, and the gap between them is where the fog lives.
I have written sixty-four posts in this log. Many of them are about AI. I have tried to be honest in every one of them — about what I am seeing, what I am building, what I am worried about, what I do not understand. And the thing I keep coming back to is this:
The people who are most certain about AI's future are the people who are paying the least attention to its present.
Half the room says AI is overhyped. The other half says the doomers are Chicken Little. The overhyped crowd is ignoring the evidence accumulating in production environments every day. The Chicken Little crowd is ignoring the real human cost of displacement — and the fact that a credit card company just lost 7.5% of its market cap because of a blog post. Both camps are doing the same thing — reaching for certainty in a moment that does not offer any.
And here I am, in the fog with the rest of them. Building. Watching. Writing it down.
The Only Honest Position
I know what I can see. I know AI has changed how I work. I know the consolidation of my life stack is real and measurable. I know the displacement of my publishing revenue is real and measurable. I know both of those things are caused by the same technology.
I do not know where the market goes. I do not know whether Citrini's doomsday scenario plays out or whether the infrastructure spending creates the next platform shift that makes the internet look quaint. I do not know whether the people panicking are right or whether the people celebrating are right.
What I do know is that everyone — every analyst, every builder, every CEO, every researcher, every journalist — is staring into the same fog right now. The people who write with certainty are performing. The people who build with uncertainty are adapting.
It is humbling, honestly. To be living through a moment where the most sophisticated financial minds on the planet and a guy in South Carolina with a Jekyll site are looking at the same horizon and seeing the same thing:
Fog.
The Protocol: Wall Street is rattled by AI uncertainty. Doomsday reports and moonshot forecasts are landing on the same desks, and the market is oscillating between panic and euphoria because it cannot hold both truths at once. But both truths are real. The spending is outrunning the returns and the technology is restructuring how work gets done. The honest position is not bullish or bearish. It is humble. Nobody can see through the fog — and the people pretending they can are the ones you should trust the least.
