The title could be re-stated:
The economy is screwed, tech is just the scapegoat.
People who already had plenty absorbed the cheap money, until there was basically not enough value left to go around for consumers to be able to carry on the way that was expected.
>this isn’t a tech specific "failure",
Nope, looks like every "market" has become more nonideal, and the more "financialized" they are could be what's making certain markets worse.
Not every job is actually on a "market", some are deep in and others not so much.
In the old days people held on to their jobs for so much longer that it's a really big difference when the actual "job market" in so many areas was virtually insignificant compared to 21st century rambling as the norm.
Regardless of pay, the more your job is part of a market, the more you would be subject to market forces beyond your control.
Markets are "always" irrational except for those times when they are neither in your favor nor against you. If a neutral situation holds for a period of time, that can be negotiated with a more "straightforward" approach than when volatility is the dominating factor. People might think with almost "engineering-style certainty". Once there are wild swings, it can be like a sine wave where half the curve is positive and the lower halves are negative. It still balances out to neutral but you may not know where you are at any one time. Every positive excursion will not last very long and be followed sooner rather than later by a negative equivalent in some way.
With a significant cycle occurring, then the only truly rational, neutral times are those brief zero-crossing events when the market reverses from favorable to unfavorable or back again.
If your only real opportunities occur when the market is in your favor, then you are dependent on the market being irrational which you need, but is about as uncertain as it gets. Opportunities like this can reverse more easily than the mainstream where they more often merely fade.