College Graduates Are Losing the Clone War

College grads, it may be time for different approach, not just in getting a job but in life.

If we scrape away the hype and the humbug, this is the corporate economy in a nutshell. Sorry about the bluntness, but alas, there’s no way to sugarcoat calling Ultra-Processed Life what it really is.

We’re all sheep to be sheared, living commodities. As consumers, the goal is to extract as much of our earnings and capital as possible by any means available, and do so as often as possible. As employees, the goal is to extract as much value as possible from our labor. My Man Jeeves (Mint Ed... Wodehouse, P. G. Buy New $10.99 (as of 06:21 UTC - Details)

Yes, we’re each unique. So are sheep. I could tell you about Bootsy the sheep, such a character, for individual sheep are unique, too. But that doesn’t mean they’re not commodities whose value and purpose in life is to be sheared to profit those doing the commodifying. We’re all commodities, just like sheep.

Corporations have vast expertise in the psychological tricks of making it appear that the corporation really, really cares about you: yes, you, the consumer of their products and services (you’re special!) and you, the employee / 1099-contract worker / gig worker–you’re special!

Actually, we’re not special. We’re just commodities being processed to extract as much money / value as possible from each transaction or hour of labor, and an integral component in that extraction process is to mask the heartbreaking truth behind warm and fuzzy stories, signals and images–we really, really care about you, you’re important. Yes, we are important, in the same way sheep are important because they’re the source of profits.

The cold-steel truth is we’re interchangeable. Ideally, we sign up for a high-interest credit card and charge our way into a high balance we can never pay off, but if we pass up that offer or default, we’re replaced by another sheep in line to be sheared.

The individual who replaces us at work may not be as good as we were, but we remain replaceable. If the value of our work can be commoditized, that makes us more easily replaceable. And if the commoditized work can be automated, that’s a slum dunk for the corporation, because the commodity AI agent / software process doesn’t require stupidly expensive healthcare insurance, doesn’t need training and won’t sue us.

The work that can’t be commoditized / automated requires experience, and if we don’t have the necessary mix of experience to create value on Day One, we’re a commodity of no interest.

Which brings us to college graduates sending out 90 resumes and being ghosted or rejected by the cloned HR (Human Resources) bots deployed by all 90 corporate employers to weed out everyone but those few with the requisite experience. Which in the case of recent college graduates, is near-zero because they’ve been university students with minimal opportunities to gain high-value / intensive work experience. The Ethics of Liberty Rothbard, Murray N. Best Price: $9.63 Buy New $19.00 (as of 02:25 UTC - Details)

Here’s a real-world example of high-value / intensive work experience: I was speaking with a frontline healthcare tech and her first job was working alone on the night shift: no supervisor, no co-worker, just her and the patients. In these situations you learn fast or quit fast.

There are innumerable accounts online of the commoditization of applying for a job and the commoditization of rejecting applicants. ‘I feel helpless’: college graduates can’t find entry-level roles in shrinking market amid rise of AI.

There’s a Catch-22 here that everyone sees: you need a university degree, and so you have little high-value work experience, but we only hire people with a university diploma and 3 to 5 years of the exact type of experience we need so the employee starts generating value on Day One.

(The Catch-22 in the novel of the same name is the military service member who requests to be relieved of hazardous duty due to insanity is obviously sane, so their application is rejected.)

No corporation wants to waste the money and time to train a green employee with a university diploma of uncertain but likely low value. They want to poach a highly experienced employee from some other company that invested scarce resources in training the employee.

The analogy here is a Clone War: the recent grad incorrectly assumes getting a job offer is a numbers game, where volume / quantity will eventually generate “bingo”–a job offer in the grad’s field of interest.

But HR has a digital army of clones programmed to find a reason to reject our application / resume, because that’s the commoditized job of HR: process applications and resumes as quickly and cheaply as possible, which boils down to commoditizing the rejection process. Magnesium Glycinate 40... Buy New $15.29 (as of 05:16 UTC - Details)

In the current zeitgeist of Ultra-Processed Life, the recent grad’s response is to commoditize counter-strategies by using AI agents to tweak the resume so it gets through the clone army by guessing what triggers rejection and inserting some signal that evades the work experience requirement.

Battling commoditized clones with commoditized clones is a dead end. Fabricating work experience may be tempting but that will be revealed in the first interview, or the first week on the job.

College graduates, it may be time for a completely different approach: don’t fight in the clone war, realize you need experience and the way to get it is by de-commoditizing yourself and your job search by pursuing a path of what I describe in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy as accrediting yourself by doing real work and documenting it in ways that verify its value and your ownership of that value.

I wrote the book 12 years ago, but since I’ve been a student of AI since the mid-1980s, I anticipated what’s happening today in the workplace and economy, and laid out a way out of the clone war’s commoditization.

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