The practice economy

When your job is gone, what comes next?

AI is burning through the corporate world like a forest fire, but it’s not burning trees. It’s burning jobs.

This feels sudden. But it’s a predictable consequence of economic revolution: a pattern that has been unfolding for 12,000 years. This is our third.

Every economic revolution follows the same arc. A new form of work creates an expansion of possibility: new opportunities pull people in. Then over time, the work is compressed: optimized and automated, so fewer people are needed to do the work.

The first compression: the farm. Not just a job lost. A whole world dissolved. The auction in the yard. The grain elevator, the school, the county fair, gone in sequence, like dominoes.

The second compression: the factory. Thousands of jobs disappear in a single announcement. Workers waking at 5am for years with nowhere to go, the equipment left in place because it cost too much to remove.

After every compression the work still gets done, and it’s more productive and profitable than ever. But most of the people are no longer required.

The third compression is the one we’re in. The corporation is the coordination layer, made up of meetings and memos and management and process, and it has been quietly contracting since the 1980s. Restructuring. Globalization. Automation. With each round the structure deteriorated. Corporate work was already compromised. AI is just the accelerant.

The compression of corporate work shows up in office vacancy rates, hollowed-out downtowns, empty hotels. An ecology collapsing.

View the interactive chart on Claude.ai.

When you take the farmer out of the farm, the worker out of the factory, the office worker out of the org chart, the world doesn’t just change. It ends. Daily rhythm, purpose, sense of place. None of it survives. Some don’t make it through.

The shape of corporate work requires conformance to a regime. A hierarchy with a precise pecking order, insulated from the community around it, held in place with rituals: the performance review, the all-hands, the strategy offsite.

The purpose of a multinational corporation is to generate profits at scale. Everything else is window dressing.

Technology has always disrupted work. But this compression is structurally different. It’s not automating tasks within the corporate layer. It’s dissolving the coordination layer itself. Even coding, the work of building the technology, is being displaced.

Denial is one response. Keep presenting the title to a world that no longer needs it. The other response is to return to a way of working that’s older than history, that’s all around you, that never disappeared.

The work the corporation forgot.

The practice economy is what keeps a community running. It’s knitted together through relationships, reputation, and service. It’s the most resilient form of work in human history, compressed by every economic revolution. It always comes back.

While the office towers were going up, floor by floor, the barbershop, the family restaurant, and the dry cleaner kept doing the daily work of the community. Too small, too local, too human to show up in labor statistics. The economists stopped counting them. They kept working.

This is the original economy. Older than agriculture, older than the written word. People weaving their lives and work into a meaningful whole, where everyone has a role. The therapist. The architect. The lawyer. The chef. The shape of every practice is the same: personal relationships, service, meaningful value exchange, and reputation as the only currency that matters.

View the interactive chart on Claude.ai.

The practice economy is self-correcting in a way the corporate world actively prevented. A bad plumber gets a bad reputation. The feedback loop is short and personal. You don’t need HR, compliance, or a customer service department. You know your customers by name. They know you.

The corporate form broke that mechanism on purpose. Distance is what enables extraction. When you insert enough layers between the person doing the work and the person receiving it, you can optimize the transaction without living with the consequence.

In the practice economy, it’s much harder to outrun or evade consequences.

Corporate work is collapsing.

The compression is real, and it’s not reversible. The picture on the other side is genuinely different.

Work that doesn’t require flying across the country to sit in a room with people you’ll never see again. Value that doesn’t depend on planned obsolescence or manipulative marketing. Work that doesn’t destroy the environment or generate mountains of waste. Reputation that compounds rather than resets every two years when the org restructures.

Less extraction because the feedback loops are short. Less waste because craft work is high-value, low-throughput. Less manipulation because you know your customers by name, and they know you.

We’ve navigated compressions before, and there are things we can do to mitigate the pain. The New Deal put displaced people to work building roads, bridges, national parks. Our infrastructure is crumbling. We could do that again.

Universal healthcare would remove a major source of anxiety for anyone trying to build something small. You wouldn’t need a corporate job just to keep your family insured.

And we can regulate platforms like Airbnb, Uber, and DoorDash to reduce lock-in, so people can bring their customers and their reputation with them when they switch. We already do this with medical records. Your doctor doesn’t own your chart. The same principle applies to your reviews, your ratings, your customer relationships. Practices create reputation. That reputation should be portable.

What to do now.

The practice economy will welcome you. But it will also ask you questions that corporate life never did: what do you contribute to your community, why does it matter, and who pays for it?

That question isn’t punishment. It’s a return. What you can do for others is what counts.

The most important skill in the practice economy is learning how to create a customer. It took me three years to figure that out. I’d spent my career in the newspaper business, and when that industry compressed, I had to take what I knew and find a way to make it work without an organization to support me.

I have a friend who runs a local newspaper. One man, all by himself. He’s been doing it for forty years. He goes to the community meetings, knows the gossip, knows the neighborhood the way only someone who’s been showing up for four decades can. He regularly scoops the major media. He knows his customers. His customers know him. They read, they subscribe, they buy ads, they write stories, they send him story ideas, they send other people his way. He makes sure that city hall hears their stories. And when they die, he writes their obituaries.

What you already have is where you start. Your skills, your knowledge, the relationships you’ve built, the problems you’ve already solved. The things people already come to you for before you figure out how to charge for them. A conversation. Then another. Then a transaction. Then a relationship. That’s how you create a customer.

You won’t replace your corporate salary on day one, or year one. But you’re not starting from zero. Keep your day job as long as you can. The benefits are real. But it’s not the destination. It’s the funding mechanism. Build your practice on the side, conversation by conversation, until it can stand on its own.

The job that’s ending is the one you already hate anyway. The job where someone else decides what you work on, who you work with, whether you’re valuable, when you have to show up and when you can leave. The job that pays the bills but takes something from you every day you show up.

What comes after is yours.

This is the work we do every day at the School of the Possible. It’s hard work, but it’s also good work.