[PERSONAL] Koe's Future of Work argument: when AI eats labor, people pay a premium for meaning — perspective, story, the human behind the work. Beautiful. But read his own three generators of meaning and one of them is status ("recognition for your contribution"). He even admits "you play a status game every day whether you virtue-signal about it or not."
First framing: meaning and status are just both present in the mix; no contradiction.
The Live Wire: what if the "meaning economy" is the status economy wearing a hoodie? Strip the warm vocabulary and the mechanism is identical to the old one — you do visible work, an audience confers recognition, the recognition is the currency. Koe says the future pays for meaning; his own framework says meaning contains status as a load-bearing third. The uncomfortable read: "meaning" may be the word a status-seeker uses when status-seeking has become low-status to admit. The spark: every economy that claims to transcend status games is a status game that found a more flattering name. Essay potential — The Status Game Wearing a Hoodie. Held in tension with the three-generators page and the meaning economy page.