The middle narrows, and the sand is still running
“Remove the middle, and you remove the only floor that knew how to disobey.”
The signal
On Monday 26 October, Microsoft offered around 60,000 employees the chance to leave: 27% of its workforce, in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and India. No layoffs: an email, an offer, a deadline in early December. The door isn’t shut; it’s held wide open, with a smile.
The list of teams involved reads like an X-ray. Invited to leave: finance, human resources, but also Windows, Xbox, Copilot and the artificial intelligence teams. Those who manage, and those who design. Even the people building the AI are invited to make way for their creation, which is either irony or consistency. Excluded: sales, marketing, security and some engineering roles. Those who sell, and those who guard the machines. And the offer stops at level 70, just below leadership. The top is not concerned: nobody asks an hourglass to turn itself over.
The picture is clear: a top that decides, a base that touches customers and hardware, and a middle that empties. An hourglass.
Companies have always rehearsed the society to come. The factory made the working class; the office made the middle class. What companies invent, society often ends up living. If the company takes the shape of an hourglass, society may well follow.
One voluntary exit plan proves nothing. It is a clue. And clues deserve to be followed.
The slope
The clue is not an isolated one. Since the 1990s, economists have observed what they call, with their usual flair for poetry, job polarisation: middle-skill jobs melt away while both ends hold. Computers started the job; AI speeds it up, without even asking for overtime.
The reason is simple. The middle turns one piece of information into another: an instruction into a procedure, figures into a report, an idea into code, and one meeting into another meeting. That is exactly what the machine does well, without fatigue, without coffee and without an agenda. What melts first is not the least useful, but the most translatable.
Déjà vu
We think we are describing the future; we may be describing the past. For centuries, society had this shape: lords at the top, peasants at the bottom, and a handful of clerks in the middle to keep the registers. Progress would take us back to the Middle Ages, then, but with wifi.
The middle class is not the natural order of things. It is a parenthesis, opened by industry, which needed millions of foremen, accountants and clerks. We took it for a law of physics; it was a labour requirement. If AI no longer needs it, the parenthesis can close. That would not be a revolution but a return, which is always more humbling.
The relay that never disobeys
One difference, however, changes everything. The clerks, the soldiers, the civil servants were people. They passed orders on, but with a precious manufacturing defect: they could have doubts.
History is full of these saving breakdowns. In February 1917, in Petrograd, soldiers are ordered to fire on the crowd; they end up turning their rifles the other way, and an empire totters. In November 1989, in Berlin, a border officer, overwhelmed and without clear orders, lifts the barrier; a wall falls without anyone really deciding it. Power had planned for everything, except the person in the middle.
That is the real role of the middle floor, which no job description mentions: to slow things down. The civil servant who “misplaces” an absurd file, the manager who passes the order on but forgets half of it, the foreman who looks the other way. We call it inefficiency. It is often conscience, poorly paid.
Replace that middle with a machine and the problem disappears, the way an alarm disappears when you unplug it. The order travels down intact, at the speed of light, without a sigh or a coffee break. No algorithm has ever resigned on principle, signed a petition, or taken a diplomatic sick day.
The elite would not even need to cut itself off from the base. It would stay connected, through a perfectly polite interface. The ideal relay: it passes everything on and holds nothing back, least of all its objections.
Let’s be clear
Nothing is written, and it would be slightly comic to predict the end of society from an HR email.
An elite that cuts itself off from the base is sawing off its own branch: it needs customers, and a customer without a salary has the annoying habit of buying nothing. Henry Ford understood this before anyone, which did not stop him from being Henry Ford. Societies also keep their counterweights: the vote, the law, competition between powers, and that old human habit of not letting things happen.
As for the 60,000, they are eligible, not condemned. Many will stay. A slope is not a fall; it is a slope. But no slope has ever levelled out because people refused to look at it.
The new lever
Look at who is being protected: those who keep things secure and run the infrastructure. A delicious detail: the machine replacing the middle needs electricity, air-conditioned servers, and hands to fix it when it coughs. Artificial intelligence remains, for now, highly dependent on natural intelligence holding a screwdriver.
So the lever may not have disappeared. It has simply moved, from the office to the machine room. Those who hold it don’t always know it, which suits everyone except them.
An hourglass has two meanings. Its shape tells you what is narrowing. Its sand tells you how much time is left.
Questions for the road
- Is my job to decide, to touch the customer, or to move information around?
- If the middle empties, how will young people learn to climb?
- Who, tomorrow, will still be able to say no to an order?
- And do those who maintain the machine know the power they hold?
The sand is still running. The question is what we will do before it has all reached the bottom.
Sources: ChannelNews, Yahoo Finance (26 and 27 October 2026).