The Quiet Part Out Loud

Last Thursday, Jack Dorsey fired 4,000 people and said the quiet part out loud.

Block — the company behind Square and Cash App — cut nearly 40% of its workforce in a single day. Not because the business was failing. Revenue was up. Profits were up. Dorsey just decided that "intelligence tools" had made those people unnecessary.

His exact words: "Something has changed."

Wall Street loved it. The stock jumped 25% overnight. Morgan Stanley upgraded the company. Goldman raised their price target. Four thousand people lost their jobs and the market celebrated like it was Christmas morning.

I sat with that for a bit.The Part That Bothers Me

It’s not that AI is changing work. I use AI every day. I run a creative agency where it’s woven into how we operate. I’m not pretending the tools aren’t powerful, because they are.

What bothers me is the cheerfulness.

Dorsey didn’t sound conflicted. He sounded optimistic. Like he’d found a cheat code. And the analysts didn’t ask about the 4,000 people. They asked about the margin improvement.

There’s a word for when you can talk about eliminating thousands of livelihoods and the room nods along: normalisation.

We’re watching it happen in real time.

Here’s what I’m seeing in the creative industry, because that’s the world I know.

The middle is disappearing.

Not the bottom. Someone still needs to brief the AI, check the output, manage the client. And not the top. If you’re genuinely excellent at what you do, you’re busier than ever because excellence stands out more when everything else looks the same.

But that broad middle? The competent-but-not-exceptional designer. The solid copywriter who could turn around decent work reliably. The editor who was good enough. That tier of work is evaporating, because "good enough" is exactly what AI does best.

I know three freelancers who’ve lost 60–70% of their client base in the last six months. Not because the clients found someone better. Because the clients found something cheaper. The work isn’t as good, but it’s close enough, and it costs almost nothing.

"Close enough" is the most dangerous phrase in creative work right now.The Apprenticeship Problem

Here’s what nobody’s talking about: where do the next generation of excellent creatives come from?

Every brilliant creative director I know started by doing mediocre work. You learn taste by producing things that lack it. You develop judgment by making bad calls and watching them fail. The middle of the market isn’t just an economic tier. It’s a training ground.

When Dorsey says AI can do the work of 4,000 employees, he’s not just cutting costs. He’s cutting the pipeline that produces the people who eventually become irreplaceable.

We had this conversation in film about fifteen years ago. Digital cameras meant anyone could shoot. The gatekeepers panicked. But what actually happened was the barrier to starting dropped, which meant more people could develop their craft, which meant the overall standard rose.

AI could do the same thing. Give a young creative superpowers. Let them prototype faster, iterate cheaper, punch above their weight while they’re still learning.

Or it could do the opposite. Skip them entirely. Replace the apprenticeship with an algorithm and wonder, five years from now, why nobody can do the work the AI can’t.What I Keep Coming Back To

I think about my team a lot when I read these stories.

We’re a small agency. Seven people. Every one of them matters, not as headcount, but as humans who bring something to the work that I can’t get from a prompt. Judgment. Instinct. The ability to read a room, to know when a client says "we love it" but means "we hate it." Cultural fluency that no model trained on the internet actually possesses.

Could I run leaner with AI? Probably. Would the output suffer? Eventually, in ways that are hard to measure until it’s too late. There’s a version of efficiency that looks great on a quarterly earnings call and terrible on a five-year timeline.

Dorsey’s bet is that the machines are good enough now. My bet is that "good enough" has a ceiling, and the companies that invest in humans who can exceed it will win in the long run.

I might be wrong. He might be wrong. But at least when I’m wrong, nobody loses their mortgage.

If you run a business, or freelance, or make things for a living, here’s what I’d sit with this week:

Are you building skills that make you irreplaceable? Not indispensable, nobody is, but genuinely difficult to replicate? Can you do something that requires taste, or judgment, or a point of view that’s actually yours?

Because Dorsey just told you what’s coming. And the market cheered.

The quiet part is out loud now. What you do about it is still up to you.

Sam