Yesterday I wrote a post about how I’ve had it and I am leaving the corporate world with a key insight and thesis: Corporate America will implode within 5 years. The cause? Cybersecurity and accounting over bearing policies and protocols.
I won’t get into all the details here as I exit corporate America but I will showcase the key pieces of dirty laundry. First, have you guys heard of something called AI? ChatGPT? Gemini? Claude? Well those are all the hottest raging tools right now but too bad if you’re in corporate America because all you’re going to have access to is some watered down Microsoft-lite crapbot or “Microslop” as it’s called in the trade.
Why, you ask? Well every large corporation has a dysfunctional organization called Cybersecurity whose sole purpose seems to lock down and “fort knox” every piece of hardware and software and networking/online tools so that you can’t really do anything innovative or useful. It’s like having a garage full of tools but all you get to use is the air compressor in the corner because everything else is “too dangerous” to use. That’s not an exaggeration, it’s been a problem I’ve been dealing with for at least a decade. Computers are so locked down and walled off from all but the Corporate approved watered down and sanitized “safe” products like Microsoft Office. You see no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft products, you just live in misery while using those inferior products.
I’ve showcased a bit on this blog all the trading (options flows, black scholes, put ratio, bull credit spreads, covered calls), travel and other tools I built using AI but I can’t do any of that because it’s “too dangerous” to allow inside a corporate network. Ironically, the reason the nazis are so strict is because just about every major corporation has suffered at least one if not more cybersecurity infiltration that have caused real damage and cost real money and most of this was BEFORE AI tools came onto the marketplace. Well the paranoia has now reached epic levels and corporations are becoming dysfunctional because of it. Most employees can’t do anything “cool” because it is too dangerous. I wrote this post to point out how far behind Microsoft “productivity” tools are in comparison to AI.
Here is my typical conversation with cybersecurity goons:
- Me: “I want to install Claude (or any AI tool) to automate 80% of my work!”
- Cybergoon: “You need to open a ticket then get approval by the cyber director, the CIO, the VP of Risk, our General Counsel, the secret governance committee that only meets once a month at a day and time that only works if you’re in Europe, the Pope, Congress, the FreeMasons, the illuminati and get a secret shake/wink from Bob down in the basement.”
- Me: “Forget it, I will do it the long way that costs 100x more and takes 40x longer.”
- Cybergoon: “Don’t get mad at me, I don’t make the rules!”
The irony is that the CEO or some other exec will be at a town hall telling employees to embrace AI and use the new modern tools to make the company more efficient (and the eye rolls cause the earth to rotate a bit faster).
The other component of the corporate apocalypse are the accounting nazis. This group generally has a “use it or lose it” mentality when it comes to budgets and if you have a project budgeted for Q3 but can’t get it started because the cyber nazis are holding up all the approvals you now have to fight a battle on a new front, the spreadsheet jockey accountants.
The problems don’t stop there, endless reorgs to the point no one is left that understands the business or why certain things were done, contracts signed, projects approved or delayed or what the overall corporate strategy might be. The last firm I worked for didn’t really even have operating models for various departments and this was a multi-billion dollar global organization. It was a total joke and now the heads of these organizations have visions of AI running the place for peanuts.
Then you have the bi-polar sociopath management that can’t decide if return to the office is needed because it builds “culture” or just let everyone work from home because AI is going to replace everyone anyway and “culture” is irrelevant or it’s just a couple of lines in a soul.md file. I think one sure outcome out of AI and remote work is that commercial office real estate will go extinct like the dinosaurs did way back when. That crash can’t be more than 2 years away at the rate we’re going now.
Finally you have a huge demographic problem. Everyone I worked with on my team was over the age of 50+ and while there were a few young people, we always seemed to be understaffed and overworked. I don’t want to sound like an old boomer waging my fingers about the work ethic of young people but it is clear to me that work attitudes have changed dramatically over the last two decades. I don’t blame young people for not giving a crap about staying late and over extending themselves when the rewards seem very paltry. If I were in their shoes, I would do the exact same thing and I have, the only difference is I don’t need the money now but they sure do so they put up with it but only to an extent.
I don’t have any answers to any of this, just observations that it’s not going to end well for most of society when the crash comes. I’m glad I was able to build a large diversified nest egg because I can’t do this crap anymore. I can’t deal with the every growing “prison” mentality of cybersecurity nazis nor their accountant counterparts.
What I predict for the future are thousands of autonomous AI apps running loose on the Internet, some doing good for society and others wrecking havoc. Of course the reaction will be to lock things down even more perhaps even segmenting the Internet into regions or just nations instead of a globally collected network. I think that’s a decade away but I read recently that AI bots now account for more Internet traffic than humans so perhaps it will come much sooner.
I will focus on building with my own solutions with AI tools for the things that will make money for me and make my life better.
It was a great run but I’m done.