Disposability by Design: The False Promise of Roles
We have entered a period not marked by mere technological progress but by a deliberate recalibration of value, labor, and disposability. Businesses are not subtle about making people redundant—whether for political, strategic, or economic expediency, lines are being drawn and redrawn across every sector. Artists, founders, directors: if you aren’t already adapting, you risk being treated as a cost—subtracted unceremoniously once your function is replicable or obsolete.
The point is not that roles are changing. The point is that roles are always constructed to be discarded. As creative leaders, you’ve watched systems erase workers—outsourcing, automating, slashing. Now, with platforms like ChatGPT 5 moving swiftly into finance, health, programming, and even the cultural sectors themselves, labor’s established identities have lost their stability. Work is redefined at the convenience of those running the system, never the other way around.
The Myth of Identity as Function
Too many have internalized job titles as personal identity. Years of labor morph individual vision into institutional function: artist becomes “creative producer;” founder becomes “arts administrator;” director becomes “brand manager.” The moment redundancy arrives, it is not the role that disappears but the self that felt merged with it. This is by design: job descriptions isolate useful characteristics, distill them into process, and outsource or automate as soon as optimization demands it.
Artists have always straddled the line between labor and vision. Yet even here, characteristics—ways of seeing, building, explaining, listening—get compressed until they look like lines in an HR spreadsheet. In a paradigm shift catalyzed by AI and relentless efficiency, the label “teacher” or “nurse” dissolves into a menu of tasks, not a locus of value.
Systemic Efficiency vs. Enduring Purpose
The system is not sentimental. It rewards efficiency, not presence. Monthly paychecks anesthetize radical thought. If someone has invested years at an organization, the routine and the promise of income solidify the belief that the function is the person. But as creative founders and directors know, the system always seeks a cheaper supplier, a platform to swallow the manual, a system to make the artist redundant—first from the margins, then from the center.
New jobs emerge as others disappear: technology sets off cascades of destruction and construction. Yet these new roles are rarely designed to fit the displaced; they are built for those who refuse to be defined by a single title or static set of activities. The market never asks who you are; it asks what you create—right now, within or outside the sanctioned infrastructure.
Mindset as Infrastructure: Reconstructing Work Around Value, Not Title
This is not another call to “rebrand yourself” or “develop new skills.” It is a demand to reorient from function to value. The title is not the purpose. The salary is not the validation. For creative solution-based thinkers—directors, artists, systems-builders—the imperative is clear: dismantle the old attachment to roles, and reconstruct around process, activities, and characteristics that align with vision.
What is rarely articulated: purpose is not a job description. It is the accumulation of skills, attitudes, frameworks, and visions that outlast the shifting definitions of work. Anyone leading in culture knows this: the function is only as valuable as the mindset you bring to it. When a set of tasks becomes obsolete, the possibilities rest in your capacity for redesigning, not simply applying, your thinking.
Tool: The “Function-to-Value Mapping” Exercise
As a practical response to redundancy and technological displacement, use a Function-to-Value Mapping exercise. On one side, list every routine task or characteristic you have provided in your roles—teaching, designing, explaining, coordinating. On the other, for each item, write a potential context or platform (community, digital, institutional, independent) where this creates new value. Then, identify at least two that do not require your old title or system to be deployed.
Example: “Explaining complex ideas accessibly” (teacher, director, curator) → Possible contexts: cross-cultural project translation, online knowledge products, consultancy for non-arts sectors.
Repeat quarterly. Track which values persist, which need to be rebuilt, and which offer leverage as you shift out of prescribed roles.
Reflection
If your skills and mindset have always outlasted any title, what investment—in yourself or in the infrastructure you build—matters once traditional organizations no longer need you to exist as a role?
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