Memetic Warfare 101: Viral Memes about AI Job Loss

How I'm using memes and AI to spread the word about AI, jobs, and Post-Labor Economics. We've tried warning people with history and data, now it's time to break out the memes.

As internet culture has saturated the world, memes have taken on a new gravitational weight. My wife’s digital rhetoric professor defined a meme as a “the smallest unit of culture.” That’s a fitting definition once you reflect on it.

This is “Pepe the Frog” meme, which I think started on 4chan. It has since become a brand, an identity, and a shorthand for many things. When the internet was not fully mainstream, only terminally online trolls made and shared these memes. Now everyone sees them.

What is “memetic warfare”? Memetic warfare is to memes what drone warfare has become in Ukraine. My cousin and I were building remote controlled aircraft back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, including radio controlled rockets. We had remote controlled aircraft and helicopters and what today you just call “drones.” It occurred to me back then “these could easily be weaponized” but of course we were not systematically attempting to hunt down Russian snipers in the hinterlands of Ukraine. Our basement projects were the ‘Pepe’ equivalent of a technology that has now matured.

Drone warfare in Ukraine has gone through rapid innovations, almost a natural high pressure of evolution and selection. First, they were all radio controlled, then jammers were brought in, and now all the FPV (first person video) drones are controlled with spools of fiberoptic wires—unhackable and radio silent. Just as drone warfare has now been professionalized, so too has meme warfare.

This is my most powerful meme so far. It tells the story of seamstresses losing their jobs to automation and machines in one frame. The formula is simple—one high context image and one sentence in one frame. A story in a snapshot.

Many people today react to AI and robotics saying “my job is too complex to automate!” To which I respond with a job that no longer exists as we understand it today. This meme went viral, with over a million views overnight. A few commenters pushed back “well, technically, there are over 100 million sewers today!” It’s true that seamstresses were not prestigious jobs even during their height. However, comparing a decent middle class lady’s job in the West to a sweat shop factory job that pays starvation wages in Thailand today is a bit of a stretch. Other commenters pointed out “this is so typical… men coming in to take women’s work.” I hadn’t thought of it that way!

But that’s the power of a good meme. It carries a lot of epistemic and cultural baggage and thus serves as a bit of a Rorschach test: people see what they want to see in it.

The early days of aviation were viewed with skepticism by many in the military. This meme uses irony and historical fact to call out normalcy bias.

This meme didn’t do quite so well, I think likely because many people are not as aware of the history of aircraft. It seems so obvious in hindsight that the biplane would soon give way to the monoplane, the jetfighter, and even gigantic airliners. People take it for granted that technology improves over time—but only in hindsight.

I made this meme to push back against the people who criticize AI as it is today. “It still can’t do X! Ha ha.” To which I usually just respond “Golly gee, you’re right! I never thought of that! This brand new technology that you didn’t even know about 2 years ago has clearly reached it’s zenith and will never improve from here on out!”

This meme represents a common category error. It’s true that people will always need food, and therefore farming is never going away, but this guy (a farrier) is assuming that the industry of farming would never change. The entire job of farriers has been relegated to hobbyists and a few horse ranchers.

By the time this meme rolled off the press, people were on to my game. They said “yeah, but now there are tractor engineers and tractor mechanics!” Which is true. But the point the of this meme is to warn developers and coders that “just because software is never going away doesn’t mean your job isn’t.” Microsoft and Google already generate 30% of their code with AI, and this technology is still in its infancy. It would be quite silly to assume that the need for developers will rise indefinitely. In fact, forecasts show that the global total number of developers is expected to rise for only a few more years, perhaps reaching it’s apogee by 2028 to 2032. After that, it’s going to follow the same curve as manufacturing. In absolute terms, US manufacturing employment peaked in 1979. America now employs only half of that number today in 2025, even though total manufacturing output has continued to climb. This is the nature of automation. Whether or not automation ultimately creates more jobs (which is still hotly debated) the point is that your current job is toast.

Despite the fact that manufacturing employment reached its employment zenith in 1979, manufacturing output has nearly doubled since then. Software engineers are about to hit the same thing in the next couple of years. But the problem with charts like this is that many people are not data literate.

The same thing has happened with agriculture. Statistically speaking, farming jobs in absolute numbers peaked in America in the 1910 census with over 12 million farm jobs. Today, that number is down to 2.5 million. Farm jobs, in absolute terms, have collapsed 80% even though farming output is roughly 600% higher than it was in 1910. But once again, most people are not trained to have a good intuitive sense of the math. AI is doing the same thing to coding that industrialization did to farming—you need a tiny fraction of the same number of people to dramatically increase your output!

The blue line is just a statistic. But it also represents an entire way of life that has all but gone extinct. In 1910, a third of all American jobs were farms, now it’s around 2%. This is the fundamental nature of automation, but everyone thinks their job is immune.

I’m sure there were plenty of farmers who couldn’t imagine automating their job away. As people are saying today “it’s not that a machine will take your job, it’s someone else using the machine who will take your job!”

I did not create this meme. My format and tone went viral, and this meme appeared on Reddit. I created a meta-meme—I defined the format, the tone, and style. The meta-meme went viral along with my memes, and now I’ve equipped an entire field of people with the tools required to embed cultural values.

This horse-tractor meme leans into the absurd. Not only is that farmer now out of a job, so is the horse as well as even the tractor (which has since been replaced by larger, more sophisticated equipment).

More and more stories are popping up of ChatGPT outperforming real human doctors. Many lives have been saved by this technology. Combine that with the fact that it is better, faster, cheaper, and often safer than human doctors, and the writing is on the wall. Humans practicing medicine will soon be a thing of the past.

What do you do when a tool can code better than most developers, can diagnose medical issues better than most doctors, and can provide legal counsel better than most lawyers, and that tool is only $20 per month?

You go all in on that tool.

Many doctors are very skeptical of AI. They shouldn’t be.

The primary cognitive failure here is “normalcy bias.” Despite what many humans believe about themselves, it’s actually pretty hard to image the world we know changing. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Eons could pass with very few paradigm shifts. One generation to the next would live the same lifestyles, under the same seasons, and with the same technology. We have simply not evolved to intuitively understand fundamental shifts in lifestyle and technology during our lifespans.

A lot of people cope by saying “well it will just make me 10x more effective!” Will it though? Or will it make you totally irrelevant? As many people pointed out in response to this meme; the steam engine was great for ship owners.

Now the question becomes “who does AI really benefit?” Whether it’s manufacturing or farming, if you compare white collar work to those jobs, and we can surmise that many knowledge worker jobs are going away, who really benefits?

The owners of capital of course!

There’s a sort of Stockholm Syndrome with work. Across the globe, the vast majority of people are checked out, disengaged, or burned out from work. Yet they want to keep their jobs. What they really want to keep is a semblance of control and economic agency.

It’s somewhat ironic: globally, 60% to 80% of people are burned out, disengaged, quiet quitting, or otherwise hate their jobs. Generally speaking, the more developed a nation is, the higher that ratio. No one is happy. Yet, when I tell people “AI is going to take your jobs and liberate you to pursue your meaning” some people say “where am I going to get my sense of purpose from?”

Most people are already checked out and derive very little meaning from work???

What if we just let go of these notions and embrace the future?

“Daddy, what does ‘work’ mean?”

I suspect we’ll look back at the current era and think that wage slavery was not much better than actual slavery. “You mean you had to work for someone else or you starved? You went homeless? How barbaric!”

The end.