... Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting.

It started out simple enough. Agents removed friction.

Subscriptions and memberships that passively renewed despite months of disuse. Introductory pricing that sneakily doubled after the trial period. Each one was rebranded as a hostage situation that agents could negotiate. The average customer lifetime value, the metric the entire subscription economy was built on, distinctly declined.

Consumer agents began to change how nearly all consumer transactions worked.

Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars. Machines do.
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In this cycle, the job losses have been concentrated in the upper deciles of the income distribution. They are a relatively small share of total employment, but they drive a wildly disproportionate share of consumer spending. The top 10% of earners account for more than 50% of all consumer spending in the United States. The top 20% account for roughly 65%. These are the people who buy the houses, the cars, the vacations, the restaurant meals, the private school tuition, the home renovations. They are the demand base for the entire consumer discretionary economy.

When these workers lost their jobs, or took 50% pay cuts to move into available roles, the consumption hit was enormous relative to the number of jobs lost. A 2% decline in white-collar employment translated to something like a 3-4% hit to discretionary consumer spending. Unlike blue-collar job losses, which tend to hit immediately (you get laid off from the factory, you stop spending next week), white-collar job losses have a lagged but deeper impact because these workers have savings buffers that allow them to maintain spending for a few months before the behavioral shift kicks in.
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