Open Office, Closed Future
Corporate AI rhetoric celebrates ‘unlocking human creativity’ while using polished language and startup theater to disguise straightforward job elimination. The cartoon mocks how euphemisms like efficiency, potential, and innovation make displacement look visionary.
A sleek, glass-walled AI startup stages a celebratory ribbon-cutting for its new autonomous coding system. At center, smiling founders in minimalist turtlenecks pose beneath a giant illuminated slogan: “OPEN FOR HUMAN POTENTIAL.” They applaud as a robot arm snips the ribbon. In the same frame, the office is silently reconfiguring itself: standing desks flatten into airport-style conveyor belts, carrying away workers’ plants, coffee mugs, nameplates, and framed family photos toward a side door labeled “EFFICIENCY GAINS.” A few employees stand awkwardly at the edge, half-cropped from the ceremony, watching their belongings glide past while the founders remain focused on the photo op. The humor comes from the pristine optimism of the launch event colliding with the obvious physical removal of the humans supposedly being ‘empowered.’