Corporations desperately want what we all have and what we can build.

About a year ago I wrote about companies stripping themselves to the studs—not just cutting costs but searching for their Minimum Viable Humans limit. Exploring what the corporation actually needs people for. Twitter was a very public prototype for this line of thinking, the work involved, and the consequences. The human cost has been extremely high but all things considered Twitter is still here. I won't argue that it's a shell of what it used to be, but no fucks seem to be given and the layoffs continue en masse.

Jack Dorsey recently cut over 4,000 people from Block and described it like a cleanse. A smaller company would give them space to grow the right way, he said, as if people were clutter in the garage. Zuckerberg keeps marveling that one employee can now do the work of entire teams—the same teams he hired, managed, and extracted value from for years before waking up one day to consider them optional. Oracle deleted thirty thousand from the books while mid-level businesses cut entire departments of 50-100 people without making a single headline. These aren't warnings. These are victory laps from men who praised the masses for their incredible work and then relabeled humans as bloat. And now they want praise for removing it.

What they aren't sharing is what's keeping them up at night: their irrelevance made possible by scrappy, comparatively tiny companies who aren't tied to shareholders, government regulations, operations that will always have at least one foot in the past—playbooks that are now worthless. The foundations that we created since the 90s and evolved over time are liquid magma. They might not show it, but I assure you the tech bros and their cross-domain siblings are running scared because one person with a laptop and a $100-a-month Claude account will start to chip away at their value proposition to both buyers and investors. And here's the kicker—the part I love—is that these individuals don't have to come up with a different version of the thing we already have because everything is liquid.

We're living through some very scary and disruptive times but history proves that this is the moment when our wants and needs shift the most. Tradition? Out the window. History? Exactly that. Long term relationships? In this economy, uh it's been swell, catch you on the flip side.

It probably doesn't feel like an advantage. It feels like exposure. But exposure and freedom are the same thing described by people in different moods. The billionaire bros would love nothing more than to tear everything down and rebuild from scratch, but they've got shareholders and regulators and the accumulated weight of their own empires slowing them down. You and I—whether we're solo or running a small team—are already standing on the cleared ground they're still demolishing walls to reach.

We have an asset that their money cannot buy. The freedom and ability to use new thinking and tools to create the future. We don't need investors. We just need to stay curious, rewire our brains as to how things are vs. how they could be, learn new skills, gain new perspectives, and build aggressively. This is a once in a generation opportunity to hit the reset button across professions, domains, and industries. We are living in a singular moment in human history when our ways of thinking and our technology are shifting simultaneously (read chapter 1 of Creative Intelligence).

Just so we're clear, I'm not thrilled that we're here. I think most of us would prefer to take the blue pill and go back to eating steak and drinking dead grapes. But we're all out of the Matrix one way or another and whether you feel like it, now is the time to move, but not alone.

Anil Dash recently wrote about coders with soul seizing this moment to build independently and look out for each other. He's right. But this isn't just a coder story. This is everyone's story. It's time to start forming communities. Real ones. Not social media, LinkedIn—let's grab a time for virtual coffee bullshit. Actually find and connect with people. Builders across disciplines—coders, designers, writers, strategists, people who make things. Communities formed and held together by trust, alignment on first principles, and mutual investment.

This is the one thing corporations structurally cannot replicate. Community requires actual humans. Not human resources. Not human capital. Humans who remember what you're working on and check in because they care, not because a project management tool sent them a notification. The companies that have been shedding humans as the reason why they fail to innovate and thus the stock isn't performing are not going to out-community you. This is our second superpower that Zuckerberg doesn't understand and cannot buy. Think about all of the communities that corporations purchased and how quickly they all turned to shit. This isn't a coincidence.

But don't go looking for a community to join. You don't build this by launching a Discord server or posting "looking for my people" on Bluesky. You grow it. Pick two or three people you're already in real conversation with—people whose work you actually follow, who'd notice if you disappeared. Make it deliberate. Not networking. A mutual commitment to show up for each other's work, to pressure-test each other's ideas, to build things together. That's the seed. Everything else grows from there, or it doesn't. Either way you're not alone anymore.

We can't will the past to come back and we should not wait to see what happens but instead make things happen. The sooner we exercise these new powers the sooner our futures will start to take shape.