Technology Has Destroyed My Livelihood

Hey everyone 👋,

In my previous posts, I talked about many topics. Every one of those posts was a piece of the same broken mirror. Today, I am picking up another shard. This one cuts deeper than the rest, because this one is about the thing that was supposed to save me but instead helped finish me off. Technology.

I am not writing this as a critic. I am not writing this as a philosopher. I am writing this as someone whose livelihood was destroyed, slowly, quietly, and almost completely, while the entire world kept clapping for the thing that did it. Everyone talks about technology like it is oxygen. Like it is sunlight. Like the only possible response to it is gratitude. Well I have been breathing this oxygen for years and it has been poisoning me. I want to explain exactly how, and I want to make the case so clearly that no reasonable person can look away from it.

The Biggest Lie in Modern History

Here is the lie: technology is a great equalizer. Anyone with a laptop and an internet connection can change their life. That is the story they sell on every stage, in every keynote, in every inspirational YouTube video made by someone who already had money before they touched a keyboard. And the lie works because it contains just enough truth to be believable. Yes, a person with a laptop can learn to code. Yes, a person with internet can access information. But access is not opportunity. Information is not income. And a laptop does not feed you when every company on Earth is looking for someone cheaper, faster, or more connected than you.

I grew up in a poor village with no internet, no computer, and no cell phone. I wrote about this in my first post. When I finally got access to the digital world, I did not waste it. I studied. I built. I wrote code, published projects, wrote blog posts, entered hackathons, created GitHub organizations, and pushed myself harder than most people I have ever met. And the result? Nothing. Not a damn thing. Years of effort, and the system treated me like I did not exist.

So do not tell me technology is a great equalizer. A great equalizer does not leave people behind based on their name, their country, their accent, or how many LinkedIn connections they have. A great equalizer does not reward the person with an existing network and punish the person who is building from zero. What technology actually does is give the illusion of equal footing while the ground is tilted so far in one direction that half the people on it are sliding off the edge. That is not equality. That is performance.

I Did Not Lose My Livelihood Because I Was Lazy

Let me make this clear, because people love to assume things. I did not lose my career because I sat around doing nothing. I lost it while doing everything. I took on four contracts at once, working for clients who paid me 2 freakin dollars an hour. I built full systems, delivered them, and was discarded the moment the launch was done. I wrote a book. I built awesome projects. I maintained open source tools. I competed in hackathons. I stayed up coding through nights that turned into mornings that turned into more nights.

And still, no recruiter hired me. Still, recruiters ignored my applications. Still, the industry looked right through me like I was transparent. I did not fail the system. The system failed me. And technology was the mechanism it used to do it.

Think about that. The same tools I spent years mastering are the same tools the industry uses to filter me out before a human being ever sees my name. My resume goes into an automated system. An algorithm scans it. A keyword match decides whether I am worth a conversation. And just like that, years of real work, real skill, and real pain get reduced to a score that a machine spits out in less than a second. The person behind the resume does not matter. The machine does not care that I built an entire AI agent system from scratch in Rust. It does not care that I can think. It does not care that I am hungry, displaced, and fighting for my life. It just checks boxes. And if the boxes do not match the template, it throws me away.

That is not efficiency. That is institutional cruelty wearing a mask of progress.

Technology Punishes the People Who Need It Most

The harder your life is, the more technology costs you. Not in money, although that too. It costs you in energy, in time, in emotional weight, in the relentless demand to keep up with a world that never slows down and never looks back.

If you are stable, if you have a home, a job, a support system, a full stomach, and eight hours of sleep, then learning a new framework or updating your skills is an inconvenience. A weekend project. A fun challenge. But if you are fighting to survive, if you are displaced, if you are hungry, if your country has been destroyed by war, then every hour you spend learning a new tool is an hour taken from survival. Every sleepless night spent debugging code is a night your body does not recover from. Every rejected application is not just a missed opportunity. It is a blow to a foundation that was already cracked.

I became someone who could function technically while falling apart internally. I could ship code and solve problems while running on nothing. And the industry saw that output and said, not enough. Learn more. Build more. Be faster. Be cheaper. Be grateful. That is what technology asks of people like me. Not to grow. To grind. To bleed into the machine and thank it for the privilege of being used.

The cruelest part is this: the better you get, the more the system expects from you, and the less it gives in return. Skill does not protect you. Effort does not protect you. Discipline does not protect you. In a system that values connections over competence and branding over substance, the person who works the hardest can still end up with nothing. And they usually do. That is not a bug. That is the design.

The Job Market Is a Rigged Game

People love to say the best candidate gets the job. That has never been true, and technology has made it less true than ever. Hiring today is not a competition of skill. It is a competition of visibility, positioning, and algorithmic favor. A person can be the most capable engineer in the room and never get into the room because a machine decided their resume did not contain the right keywords. A person can have 10 years of real-world experience and be rejected by a system that prioritizes a degree from a specific university or a referral from someone already inside.

I have applied for more jobs than I can count. I have tailored resumes, written cover letters, practiced interviews, cleaned up my GitHub, polished my portfolio, and done every single thing the advice columns and career coaches tell you to do. And the response, almost every single time, is silence. Not rejection. Silence. No reply. No explanation. Just the sound of effort disappearing into a void.

And here is what makes it worse. The companies that reject me still use technologies I understand better than most of their teams. The frameworks I helped test, the tools I contributed to, the patterns I learned before they were trendy, all of that lives inside the products these companies sell. My work, and the work of millions of developers like me, is already built into the foundation. We just do not get to live in the house.

Technology did not make the job market fairer. It made it faster. And speed without justice is just violence with better branding.

War Broke the Ground. Technology Buried It.

I come from a country that was broken by war. I did not choose that. I did not cause it. But I carry it in everything I do. War does not just destroy buildings. It destroys continuity. It destroys the quiet assumption that if you work hard today, tomorrow will be a little better. When that assumption is gone, everything becomes heavier. Work becomes heavier. Hope becomes heavier. Getting out of bed becomes an act of defiance.

Technology pretends war does not exist. The industry does not adjust for people whose educations were interrupted, whose infrastructure was destroyed, whose families were displaced. They do not build systems that account for instability. They build systems that assume everyone starts from the same place and punish anyone who does not.

I watched the rest of the world adopt new tools, attend conferences, network in coffee shops, and build careers while I was trying to figure out where I would sleep next week. I had the same curiosity. I had the same intelligence. I had the same hunger to build. But I did not have the same ground to stand on. And technology does not give you ground. It gives you tools that only work when the ground is already there. Without stability, access is meaningless. Without safety, opportunity is just a word.

The internet did not close the gap between me and someone in San Francisco or London. It made that gap Ultra HD. It let me see exactly how much I was missing, in real time, on a screen I could not always afford to charge. That is what technology did for people like me. It did not lift us up. It made the fall more visible.

Learning Became a Trap

I used to love learning. I used to sit with a problem for hours and feel genuinely alive when I solved it. That feeling kept me going through years of difficulty. But technology turned learning from joy into obligation, and then from obligation into pain.

The pace of the industry is designed for people with margin. New framework every week. New paradigm every month. New set of tools, new way of thinking, new expectation to meet. If you do not keep up, you are irrelevant. If you do keep up, it costs you your health, your sleep, and whatever emotional reserves you had left. The treadmill never stops. And the people running it do not care that some of us started the race carrying two hundred pounds of trauma, poverty, and displacement on our backs.

I kept learning because I believed it would eventually convert into stability. That was the promise. Learn and you will earn. Build and you will belong. Improve and you will be seen. But the conversion rate is broken. I have more skills now than I have ever had, and I have less stability than I have ever had. That is not a coincidence. That is the system working exactly as it was designed to work. It extracts learning from people, turns it into labor, and pays back in scraps. If you are lucky. If you are not lucky, it pays back in silence.

The worst part is that technology has turned the love of learning itself into a liability. If you are the kind of person who genuinely loves to understand things, the industry will use that against you. It will give you harder problems, tighter deadlines, and less money, because it knows you will keep going anyway. Passion is exploited. Curiosity is monetized. And the people who feel the most are the ones who get burned the fastest.

The Industry Sold Us a Religion

Let me say something that will make people uncomfortable. The tech industry is a religion. It has prophets: founders who stand on stages and talk about changing the world. It has scripture: blog posts, documentation, and thought leadership that tells you how to think, what to build, and what matters. It has rituals: standups, sprints, hackathons, and conferences where people gather to celebrate the faith. And it has a promise of salvation: if you work hard enough, if you believe deeply enough, if you give enough of yourself to the machine, you will be rewarded.

But like every religion that has ever existed, the rewards go to the priests, not the believers. The founders get rich. The investors get richer. And the engineers, the people who actually build the thing, get a salary if they are lucky and get nothing if they are not. The entire system runs on faith. Faith that the next project will lead to a better job. Faith that open source contribution will be recognized. Faith that effort will be rewarded. And that faith is what keeps people grinding while the people at the top keep extracting.

I believed in that religion for years. I sacrificed my time, my sleep, my health, and my hope. And what did I get? The same thing every true believer gets when the church turns out to be a business: abandoned, confused, and too deep in to easily walk away. Technology is not neutral. It is not a tool. It is a system of belief that converts human labor into shareholder value and calls it progress.

What Technology Actually Owes Us

Technology was built on stolen labor. I said it in my previous post about LLMs, and I am saying it again. The models were trained on our code, our writing, our answers, our open source contributions. The platforms were built on content we created for free. The algorithms were refined using data we generated with every click, every search, every message. We are not the customers. We are the raw material. And the industry has gotten very good at extracting value from us while giving back just enough to keep us producing.

If technology truly served people, it would not leave the most vulnerable behind. It would build systems that account for instability, displacement, and unequal starting positions. It would create hiring processes that actually evaluate human capability instead of running keyword matches on broken ATS software. It would pay the people whose knowledge it was trained on. It would measure progress not by how fast it moves but by who it leaves behind.

But it does none of those things. Because it was never built to serve us. It was built to serve the people who own it. And we were always just fuel.

I Am Still Here

After everything, I am still here. That is not a victory. It is a fact. I did not overcome the system. The system is still running, and I am still getting crushed by it. But I have not disappeared, and I refuse to be quiet about what happened to me.

My livelihood was not destroyed by laziness, by stupidity, or by lack of effort. It was destroyed by a system that promises access while delivering exclusion, that celebrates innovation while ignoring the people it displaces, and that wraps exploitation in the language of progress until no one can tell the difference anymore. Technology helped destroy my livelihood. And I know I am not the only one.

If this post makes you uncomfortable, good. It should. Because the story of technology is not just the story of people who made it. It is also the story of people who were broken by it. And until that story is told with the same volume and the same urgency, nothing will change. The machines will keep getting smarter. The people at the bottom will keep getting quieter. And the ones at the top will keep calling it the future.

I refuse to be quiet. And if you have been through what I have been through, you should refuse too. Because silence is not resilience. Silence is surrender. And I have surrendered enough.

Till next time 👋!