Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid, Sunday 2nd May 2026

While you were busy doing a real job, the world’s most expensive LinkedIn notification has been rebranding your impending redundancy as a “growth mindset opportunity.” It’s time to stop listening to a man who thinks “Vibe Coding” is a professional skill and start seeing the “AI Divide” for what it truly is: a desperate, corporate protection racket designed by a “futurist” who couldn’t predict a sunset unless it was written in a $500 whitepaper.

Listen, before we start, let’s just take a moment to look at the word “Futurist.” What is a “Futurist”? In the old days, a futurist was a mentalist in a silver jumpsuit who thought we’d all be eating pill-form roast dinners while commuting to a moon colony via jetpack. Now, it’s just a title for a man in a sharp suit who’s managed to monetise the act of stating the fucking obvious with the hollow conviction of a cult leader selling “ascension” for forty quid a month.

And here he is. Banal Merde. A man who looks like he was synthesized in a lab from the DNA of a LinkedIn “Top Voice” and a wet cardboard box.

His latest piece of career-advice-slop, “The New AI Career Divide,” is the kind of breathless, sycophantic corporate fan-fiction that makes you want to go and live in a cave and communicate only through the medium of throwing stones at consultants.

The Great Platitude Pipeline

He opens with that quote, you know the one, it’s the “Live, Laugh, Love” of the tech-bro world: “AI won’t replace people. People who use AI will replace people who don’t.” Oh, fuck off, Bernard. It’s a slogan for a mid-level management seminar in a windowless hotel in Slough. It’s not an insight; it’s a threat wrapped in a “growth mindset” tortilla. It’s Sam Altman’s way of saying “I’m going to automate your job and if you complain, it’s because you didn’t learn how to type ‘make it more corporate’ into a chatbot fast enough.”

Bernard calls this “compelling.” I call it the verbal equivalent of a landlord telling you that you aren’t being evicted, you’re just being “transitioned into a nomadic lifestyle.”

The “Divide” (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Grift)

The “Divide” Bernard is so terrified of is basically this: there are people who spend their days doing actual work, the nurses, the plumbers, the people who actually know how a fucking boiler works, and then there are the “AI-enabled” elite.

According to Bernard, you need to learn to “work with AI” urgently. What does that actually mean, Bernard? Does it mean learning how to ask a glorified autocomplete to write a passive-aggressive email to your boss? Does it mean spending eight hours a day “disassembling your job into tasks” like you’re some kind of industrial-scale LEGO set?

It’s a classic protection racket. “Nice career you’ve got there, Dave. Shame if it were to… fragment. Tell you what, buy my book, ‘100+ Amazing Ways to Let a Machine Think for You,’ and maybe the ‘Divide’ won’t swallow you whole.”

The Vibe Coding of a Fraud

He mentions “Vibe Coding.” Vibe Coding! We’ve reached the point where the people who used to sell us “Synergy” and “Blockchain” have run out of real words and are now just raiding the vocabulary of a confused TikTok influencer.

He writes about “wage premiums” for AI skills. Look, if a company is paying a 20% premium for someone who knows how to use Midjourney to make a picture of a cat in a spacesuit, that’s not an “economic shift.” That’s a collective hallucination. It’s the Emperor’s New Clothes, but the Emperor is a LinkedIn Influencer and the clothes are a $500 PDF on “Prompt Engineering.”

The Final Insult

Banal Merde isn’t a visionary. He’s a middleman for the apocalypse. He’s the guy who stands on the deck of the Titanic and tries to sell the passengers “Premium Luxury Drowning Strategies” while telling them that the iceberg is actually a “disruptive opportunity for personal buoyancy.”

He talks about “Human Skills” like empathy and creativity as if they’re some kind of backup generator you kick in when the AI breaks. “Oh, don’t worry, once the machine has taken your salary, you can still use your empathy to feel really, really sad about it.”

It’s a fraud. It’s a grift. It’s a multi-million dollar industry built on making people terrified of a future that Bernard and his mates are actively trying to shite into existence.So, Bernard, here’s a prompt for your AI: “Write a 500-word apology for being a vapid, careerist charlatan who contributes nothing to the world but noise and anxiety.” It’ll probably give you a better result than anything in your books. Because at least the AI doesn’t have the gall to pretend it’s “advising boards.” It just knows when it’s being a prick.

Many thanks for reading!