WORK
Bait and Switch
Ehrenreich's 2005 investigation of white-collar unemployment — the book whose documentation of the career-coaching industry and displaced-professional terror reads now as a field manual for the AI reskilling economy.
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (Metropolitan, 2005) applied Ehrenreich's immersive method to white-collar unemployment. She posed as a laid-off public relations executive seeking re-employment, attended networking events in the Atlanta suburbs, worked with career coaches, submitted to personality tests, and documented the industry that had grown up around displaced professionals. What she found beneath the industry's apparatus — the seminars, the branding workshops, the motivational consulting — was something the apparatus was designed to conceal: the terror of people who had built their identities around their professional roles and who, stripped of those roles, did not know who they were. The displaced executive was told to smile, project confidence, reframe unemployment as 'transition,' treat structural disruption as a psychological condition curable by cheerfulness. The book was a sustained documentation of the bright-sided ideology's operational infrastructure.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book prefigures the AI reskilling economy with uncanny precision. The career coaches Ehrenreich documented — charging