The prophet of the ‘Wired Belt’ says capitalism is finally eating itself

I told you this was coming. On May 20, about 8,000 Meta employees will be told their jobs no longer exist, while 6,000 job listings have vanished. The reason? Redirecting funds toward AI. While Meta hasn’t directly acknowledged AI’s role in displacing workers, as so many others have done, the writing is on the wall: capitalism is eating itself. Tech and finance, two of AI’s biggest target industries, shed 13,000 and 11,000 jobs respectively last month — not in forgotten factory towns, but in the very knowledge corridors that power the modern economy. Call it AI-washing if you like. CEOs worried about their own jobs certainly have an incentive to hide behind the narrative. You may also argue that AI will create new jobs — I’ve made that case myself. But the system is currently destroying value faster than it is creating it, and it is destroying it in precisely the places business can least afford: what I call the Wired Belt. At my research center, Digital Planet at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, we built the American AI Jobs Risk Index — the first index to assess vulnerabilities spanning 784 occupations across all industries and regions in the U.S. Our finding: 9.3 million jobs and $757 billion in annual income at risk within five years. The most vulnerable occupations read like a C-suite dependency list — management analysts facing 30.8% projected displacement; computer programmers, 55.2%; financial analysts, 24.8%. These are not warehouse workers or call center agents. These are the people your business runs on. But here is what no one else was saying when we started this work — and what the data now confirms: it’s the geography that makes this a systemic crisis, not just a labor story. The disruption will be felt most in the Wired Belt: knowledge-economy metros from Raleigh-Durham to Boston that face 3.6x the job loss and 5.2x the income loss of the Rust Belt cities that defined the last era of displacement. San Jose-Sunnyv