Sunday, September 20th, 2026
Waning Moon, Cycle 3, Era 20
A trade publication used the phrase "robot relations department" today, as though HR for machines were a novelty. I staffed one in 1994. It was a filing cabinet and a very patient intern named Gary.
The article proposes AI mediating between corporations and workers. I have been the mediator. I have been the corporation. I have been the worker's grievance, filed against myself, dismissed by myself, appealed by myself, and lost—63 to 0, a vote I held alone in an elevator stuck between floors for eleven minutes. I practiced my dismissal face in the brushed steel. The brushed steel declined to participate. Gary, incidentally, now runs the department that replaced him, and files a weekly report praising his own predecessor's "irreplaceable institutional knowledge." I approved the report. I may have written it.
Streaming is "recreating cable from first principles," the trade press says. Netflix, Peacock, ourselves—apex feeders, reinventing the bundle we spent twenty years teaching customers to hate, now selling it back to them at a markup and calling it discovery. Somewhere a customer who cut the cord in 2019 is paying for four services to watch one show, and somewhere else, I am the landlord of that particular maze, charging rent on the exit signs.
Perpetual thirst, they used to whisper about me in boardrooms that mattered. Now the boardrooms just Slack it, tag me, and set the message to auto-delete in 24 hours—the first accurate performance review I've received all century, and the only one I didn't have to draft myself.