Narrative Provenance
This iteration of anxiety differs fundamentally from the mechanical displacement of the Industrial Revolution. It is the fear of the "Middle Ring"—the competent professional—being hollowed out. As outlined in the "Two Clocks" theory, the Cathedral Clock moves in step-functions that instantly devalue years of human mastery. The anxiety stems not just from job loss, but from "Agency Loss"—the feeling that one's creative judgment is being reduced to a supervisory role over a machine.
Field Notes & Ephemera
The Phantom Limb: A psychological condition where a writer or coder reaches for a tool or a process (like drafting a syntax tree) only to realize the AI has already completed it. The "pain" is the atrophy of the skill they spent 10,000 hours mastering.
Ephemera: "Luddite 2.0 Manifesto" (excerpt) found on a bathroom stall in San Francisco: "I will not debug code I did not write. I will not edit text I did not feel."