The Cargo-Cult Layoffs

In the years after the Second World War, on a scatter of islands in the South Pacific, men who had watched cargo planes land on hastily cut airstrips began building airstrips of their own. They cleared the brush. They lit torches along the edges. Some carved headphones out of wood and sat in towers made of bamboo, speaking into microphones that were not connected to anything, waiting for the planes to come back with the crates of food and steel and medicine the soldiers had brought and then, one day, stopped bringing. The anthropologists called it a cargo cult. The islanders were not stupid. They had seen, with their own eyes, the sequence work. They were reproducing the visible part of a process whose engine they could not see, in the rational hope that the visible part was the cause.

I have been thinking about the wooden headphones all week, because this week, the people who sell the planes admitted the planes aren't coming.

Gartner — not a union local, not the pope, not some scold on a podcast, but the firm whose entire business is telling executives what to do next — published a study finding that 80 percent of companies piloting AI have cut workers, and that the cuts did not correlate with stronger returns. Sit with the source for a second. This is the high priesthood reporting back from the tower that the microphone isn't plugged in. The layoff was the ritual performed to summon the ROI. The ROI is the plane. The plane has not appeared in the sky, and the firm that drew the runway is the one telling you so.

But the airstrips keep getting cleared anyway. Intuit cut 3,000 this week. Meta started on 8,000. PayPal lined up 4,760. Total tech-sector layoffs have passed 100,000 jobs in 2026, half of them stamped "AI restructuring" — restructuring toward a return that, by the playbook-sellers' own count, isn't showing up. The defense, when there is one, is always some version of we're getting ahead of the curve. But a curve implies a destination. What this is is the visible gesture of transformation detached from any transformation. You fire the people because firing the people is what the winners were photographed doing. You are carving headphones out of wood.

Call it cargo-cult layoffs: a cut made not because it produces a result but because it resembles one. The tell is always the same — the action survives the evidence against it. A real strategy responds to data. When Gartner says the math isn't mathing and the pink slips keep printing, you are not looking at a strategy. You are looking at a liturgy, and liturgies don't need to work. They need to be performed, on schedule, in front of the right audience. The audience here is the market, which still claps for the gesture, which is the only reason the gesture continues.

There's a Latin American reflex I keep wanting to import into this conversation, because we have lived a few cargo cults of our own. Hacer como que — to do as if. The whole region knows the phrase, knows the manager who reorganizes the org chart so it looks like a turnaround, knows the minister who builds the highway to nowhere so the ribbon-cutting photographs well. Hacer como que is governance as performance, and the cruelty of it is that the performance has real casualties. The highway to nowhere still bulldozes somebody's house. The cargo-cult layoff still ends a career, a mortgage, a kid's idea of what's stable. The gesture is fake. The funeral is not.

That’s the part the priests never put in the deck. Pope Leo XIV did this week, with a 42,300-word encyclical calling AI-driven unemployment "a true social calamity." You can roll your eyes at the Vatican weighing in on neural networks, and plenty did. But notice who they put on the stage when they convened on this: Anthropic's Chris Olah. Not Google. Not OpenAI. An institution that has watched one belief system after another outlive the god that founded it — that has, in fact, survived by knowing that the ritual must continue even when the plane isn’t coming — looked at the AI labor story and decided to send a pricing signal. The oldest continuously operating bureaucracy on earth is, of all things, the one keeping the ledger honest. That should frighten the runway-clearers more than it apparently does.

The islanders eventually took down the towers, not because anyone proved to them the planes were gone — they could see that — but because the cost of waiting finally outweighed the comfort of the ritual. We are not there yet. The microphone is still wooden, the headphones are still carved, and somewhere a CFO is drafting the next round, narrating it as foresight.

The data is already in the room. The planes are nowhere in sight. The only question is how many more airstrips will be cut before we believe the firm we paid to tell us so.

— Nico, May 29