High-Tech Work Is a Luxury Organ

High-tech jobs are luxury organs of civilization.

That sentence sounds dramatic, but it’s also the cleanest way I’ve found to describe what’s going on: the work we call “tech” isn’t fake, but it’s fragile. It sits far from basic survival, and it only stays valuable inside an ecosystem that can afford abstraction—money, contracts, institutions, and the baseline assumption that most people will behave honestly enough for the whole machine to keep running.

When that machine runs smoothly, you can make a great living moving symbols around a screen.

When it doesn’t, the symbols stop being worth what they were.

The hidden dependency behind “high-tech”

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

A frontend engineer’s salary doesn’t come from code in a vacuum. It comes from a chain of trust:

• People believe the money they’re paid will still mean something later.
• Banks and payment rails function predictably.
• Contracts and obligations are enforced (or at least enforceable).
• Fraud exists, but it’s contained enough not to poison everything.
• Time horizons are long enough to invest now for payoff later.

High-tech work is what you do when society has surplus—after food, shelter, energy, logistics, and security are handled. The more abstract the work, the more it depends on trust-heavy coordination.

So yes: if those conditions weaken, a chunk of high-tech jobs evaporate. Not because the skills suddenly become useless, but because the market for those skills collapses when the system can’t justify luxury layers.

It’s not “tech vs baking.” It’s where you sit on the stack.

People love to frame this as: “So what, programmers become bakers?”

That’s not the real divide. The real divide is the survival stack—how close your work is to irreversible human demand.

A rough model:

• Survival layer: food, water, shelter, energy, basic health
• Coordination layer: logistics, transport, maintenance, repair, operations
• Abstraction layer: finance, software, media, R&D, much of “knowledge work”

Most high-tech sits in the abstraction layer. When systems are healthy, that layer explodes. When systems degrade, society shifts attention downward:

• “Nice-to-have” becomes “cut.”
• Long-horizon bets become irrational.
• The tolerance for waste drops.
• People start caring about tangible outputs again.

That doesn’t mean “regression.” It means re-grounding.

What happens when the churn slows

High-tech economies require a kind of constant circulation—money, demand, hiring, risk capital, customer spending, organizational growth. When that churn stops:

• Tech jobs disappear fast (because many were funded by optimism and surplus).
• Over-specialized roles get punished first.
• Anything dependent on speculative budgets gets squeezed.

Historically, during disruptions, people slide toward jobs that are coupled tightly to reality:

• Engineers become mechanics or operators.
• Specialists become generalists.
• Designers become craftspeople, teachers, salespeople—anything tied to immediate value.
• Yes, food and repair survive longer than “growth hacking.”

Not because those jobs are “primitive,” but because their demand is non-negotiable.

Is “stability” measurable?

Not with one magic number. But it’s measurable in the only way that matters: can you safely rely on abstractions and long time horizons?

I think of it as a set of proxy signals:

1) Trust and coordination

• How predictable is contract enforcement?
• How corrupt is the system (in practice, not ideology)?
• How stable are regulations and rules?

When these slip, high-tech is the first to feel it because high-tech is built on assumptions of predictable enforcement.

2) Economic churn

• How fast does money circulate?
• How much investment is going into productive capacity versus speculation?
• How much of the economy is just financial engineering?

When money circulates without producing real value, you’re living in late-stage comfort—often right before people start noticing the hollowness.

3) Complexity vs return (the brittle one)

• More education required for the same quality of life
• More bureaucracy for the same output
• More layers of process for smaller gains

When complexity keeps rising but returns flatten, the system becomes fragile. It can keep going, but it snaps harder when stressed.

4) Social coherence

• Polarization
• Institutional legitimacy
• Willingness to sacrifice for a shared future

When people stop believing the system is fair, they stop protecting it. And trust is the substrate that abstraction sits on.

Where are we on the curve right now?

Past peak stability. Not collapse.

If you imagine a curve like:

Growth → Golden Age → Peak Abstraction → Fragility → Shock → Re-simplification

…the feeling in the air is that we’re no longer at “Peak Abstraction.” The world still runs, high-tech still pays, and daily life is not Mad Max. But it’s also not 2012.

The vibe shift is real:

• Fewer people can enter the high-tech “promise land.”
• Fewer mistakes are tolerated.
• “Innovation” competes with rent-seeking and internal politics.
• Systems are kept afloat by debt, narratives, and monetary engineering more than by clean productivity gains.

That’s not collapse behavior. It’s late-empire optimization behavior.

Why everything feels anxious even when nothing has “collapsed”

Three forces create the ambient dread:

1. Abstractions are saturated.
   Another app, platform, or SaaS product doesn’t automatically create new value. Competition tightens, margins shrink, and people develop better bullshit detectors.

2. People sense fragility subconsciously.
   Even without a single catastrophic event, rising surveillance, rising rules, and rising precarity create low-grade paranoia.

3. The floor hasn’t dropped, but the ladder is wobbling.
   You can still live well. You just can’t assume linear progress, guaranteed demand, or permanent institutional protection.

The real takeaway: collapse isn’t a cliff. It’s a sorting mechanism.

The popular mental model is a sudden “everything breaks” scenario.

Reality is uglier and more boring: systems often degrade by shedding what they can’t justify. They punish over-specialization and reward grounded competence. People rarely go broke overnight—they go broke because they refuse to move down one layer when the environment changes.

That’s the key: adaptation isn’t abandoning tech.

Adaptation is anchoring tech to something real.

The “bridge class” survives

The most resilient people are the ones who can translate abstraction into tangible value, or bridge layers:

• Tech + logistics
• Tech + energy
• Tech + food