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On the empty 47th floor of the downtown San Francisco headquarters of the social media company Ur, gazing down upon the sea of tents that crowded Sitlintac Park, stood the third-to-last employed user experience writer in all of Greater Silicon Valley.
Morgan Bernd didn’t know he was the third-to-last, but figured it was something around that since everyone else he knew had been laid off years prior and Ur had only kept him on to train the AI on the finer nuances of ensuring Ur users felt a sense of agency as they navigated the latest update to the legacy mobile platform.
He was like the mobile platform — useful only for the profits it brought in from retiring millennials, long isolated from the younger generation of novelty-obsessed Urverse vibe coders who saw it only as an embarrassing necessity in the age of personal drones — and he knew his time was near. News of the upcoming layoffs had already leaked to the press, as it always did, and by the end of the week he would no doubt join the millions of former creative professionals who now lived on California Basic Income.
