A Letter From 2046
From: Deven Bhooshan, 52
To: Anyone who remembers what “followers” used to mean
Re: Social media, AI, work, fame — what it all became
A letter from someone who built on you, profited from you, and watched you eat itself.
I am 52. Reeta keeps telling me I've become the kind of man who talks to himself. She is not wrong. But today I want to talk to someone specific — anyone who remembers what it felt like to have followers.
That number. That small, stupid number at the top of your profile. I had 40,000 once. I checked it every morning before I checked on my wife.
I'm writing this on paper, by the way. Reeta thinks I'm being difficult. I just like that paper doesn't have an opinion about what I should say next.
That's what I want to talk about. What the internet was. What it became. What it cost us — in ways we didn't notice until the bill arrived.
In 2026, I was 32. I ran a small SaaS company called Supergrow — a LinkedIn content platform. We helped people find their voice online.
I believed in what we were building. I still do, mostly.
LinkedIn in those days was strange. It had started as a résumé site and mutated — slowly and then all at once — into something nobody had planned. A performance stage for professional identity. You did not simply exist on LinkedIn. You posted. You crafted. You announced your failures with the careful confidence of someone who had already survived them.
Everyone was a thought leader. Everyone had a framework. Everyone had a hot take about AI agents.
And somehow — miraculously — it worked. I watched founders raise rounds because of a thread that went viral. I watched a B2B sales leader activate his 200-person sales team on LinkedIn — each of them posting, sharing, showing up — and watched enterprise deals close because of it. I watched my own company grow from zero to tens of thousands of customers, almost entirely through content.
“The feed was not yet sentient. It was just hungry. And we fed it willingly — our opinions, our stories, our grief, our wins.”
But something was already wrong in 2026. Most of us could feel it. The posts that spread were the ones engineered to spread. Not the ones worth reading. The algorithm had learned what made you stop scrolling, and it was not wisdom.
What the feed became
~2026–2028 — the flood
There was a month — I think late 2027 — where my entire LinkedIn feed flipped.
Not gradually. One week it felt human. The next, it felt like standing in a factory producing sincerity at industrial scale. Perfectly timed vulnerability. Grammatically flawless regret. The “I almost quit but didn't” stories arriving every morning like shifts changing at a plant.
Everyone could feel it. Nobody could prove it.
The content wasn't wrong exactly. It just wasn't alive. The cost of a post had dropped to zero, and so the feed filled — the way a room fills with noise when everyone stops listening — with everything that had been waiting. Engagement went up. Meaning went down. The platforms celebrated the former because the former paid the bills.
~2029–2032 — the retreat
People left. Not loudly. No exodus, no moment you could point to.
More like watching a party slowly empty. First the thoughtful ones. Then the tired ones. Then almost everyone.
They didn't stop talking. They moved somewhere smaller. WhatsApp groups. Private servers. Newsletters with 300 subscribers who actually read every word.
The discovery of that era: people didn't want an audience. They wanted a room. A specific room, with people they'd chosen, where nobody was performing for anybody.
The public feed became what it probably always should have been. A billboard. Something you advertised on. Not something you lived in.
~2033–2036 — work & identity
My neighbour Priya had been a radiologist for nineteen years.
Good at it. The kind of doctor who caught things others missed — who could look at a scan and feel something was wrong before she could say why.
In 2034, her hospital deployed a diagnostics system. It read scans faster than she could open them. It flagged anomalies she'd caught maybe sixty percent of the time. The system caught them ninety-four percent of the time.
She didn't lose her job. She lost something harder to name.
She still came in every day. Still wore her coat. But her mornings — which had once been spent reading scans — were now spent reviewing the system's conclusions. Confirming what it had already decided. Occasionally pushing back. Almost never overturning it.
“I still understand it,” she told me once. “I just don't do it anymore.”
Priya was not unusual. She was just early.
~2036–2040 — fame & creativity
Around 2037, the music industry essentially stopped making sense.
People listened more than ever. AI released ten thousand albums a day. Some were extraordinary. A few moved people to tears. And yet nobody could agree on what a song was anymore, or who had made it, or whether any of it mattered.
Then a pianist in Seoul started streaming herself practicing. Not performing. Practicing. Wrong notes, crossed arms, the same eight bars seventeen times.
Three million people watched live.
She didn't say anything extraordinary. She just sat there, struggling in real time. And the world found it could not look away. Tickets to her concerts sold out in four minutes. People paid what they would have paid for a flight.
Turns out people didn't want perfection. They'd had perfection, endlessly, for free.
What they wanted was proof. That a human being had spent their one life caring about something enough to get it wrong, repeatedly, in public. Scarcity had inverted. The rarest thing on earth was a person sitting down, making something slowly, for no reason except that it mattered to them.
~2040–2044 — the identity collapse
Around 2041, I had a conversation with a founder I'd known since 2026.
Sharp. Warm. Someone whose posts I'd genuinely looked forward to reading in the early days — there was always something real in them. Some corner of actual thought.
I mentioned a comment thread on her most recent post. Something unexpectedly human had happened there. A moment of real exchange. Her face went briefly blank.
“Which post?” she asked.
She wasn't being dismissive. She genuinely didn't know. Her agent had been managing her presence for two years. She reviewed a weekly summary. That was it.
“The engagement is great,” she said. Almost to herself.
She said it the way you might describe food at a restaurant you hadn't chosen to go to.
I think about that conversation more than almost any other from that period. Not because it was extreme. Because it wasn't.
~2044–2046 — where we are now
My daughter has never posted anything publicly in her life. She is fourteen.
She has a circle of about forty people — friends, family, two teachers she stayed close to. They talk the way people used to talk before the feed existed. Slowly. Without an audience. Nobody performing for anybody.
When I try to explain what LinkedIn was — what it felt like to watch your follower count go up after a post — she listens politely. The way children listen to stories about things that are hard to believe.
Like rationing during a war. Like a world before antibiotics.
Something that technically happened. But feels like it must have been lived by different kinds of people.
What happened to software engineers — and then everyone else
I should talk about this separately. Because I was one of them.
A software engineer at Amazon and Gojek, before I left to build my own thing. I had a front-row seat. And I watched it happen faster than almost anyone was willing to admit out loud.
In 2026, “AI will take software jobs” was still a debate. Smart people argued both sides. Meanwhile, the answer was already arriving.
One engineer could do the work of five. Companies didn't fire four engineers — they just stopped hiring. Headcount froze. The engineers who remained felt powerful. Shipping faster than ever. They told themselves this was fine.
By 2028, the entry-level had quietly disappeared.
Not through layoffs. Through the absence of offers. New graduates applied in thousands. Responses didn't come. No announcement, because there was nothing to announce — just a collective, unspoken decision by a thousand hiring managers that the entry pipeline no longer made sense.
I remember a kid who messaged me that year. IIT graduate, top of his class. Had applied to 200 companies. Heard back from three. He wasn't unqualified. He was just arriving at the exact moment the door was closing, and nobody had thought to leave him a note.
By 2030, what remained of the job looked more like taste than technique. You described what you wanted. You reviewed what the AI built. You caught the errors that required judgment, not syntax.
Still work. But it had lost the thing that had made engineers insufferable at parties for fifty years — that particular pride of making something that hadn't existed before, from nothing, with your own hands.
Gone.
And with it, quietly, went a certain kind of person who had built their entire identity around it.
What happened to software engineers is what happened to everyone else — just earlier. Accounting. Design. Marketing. Writing. Teaching. Each field had its own timeline, its own denial phase, its own reckoning. The shape was always the same.
“The cruelest part was not that the machines took the jobs. It was that they took the jobs people had spent years becoming. The identity, not just the income.”
A chartered accountant I knew told me in 2030 that she felt like a fraud.
Still employed. Still paid well. But spending her days reviewing outputs she couldn't have produced herself, approving decisions she couldn't have reached herself.
“I don't know if I'm still an accountant,” she said. “Or just an accountant-shaped human who sits next to an accountant.”
That sentence stayed with me for nearly twenty years.
What we told our children — and what we should have
My daughter asked me once what it was like to have thousands of followers.
I told her it was like speaking into a large room where most people were only half-listening. But occasionally someone really heard you. And that made it feel worthwhile.
She thought about this for a moment.
“That sounds exhausting, Papa.”
She is right. It was.
The parents who navigated this era well were not the ones who predicted the right industries. None of us could see that far ahead — the map was wrong for everyone.
The ones who got it right taught their children that it was okay to not know. Okay to change. Okay to build an identity that wasn't attached to a job title or a follower count. Not as philosophy. As practice. Something they demonstrated in their own lives, daily.
The ones who struggled kept preparing their children for a world that had already ended.
Who pushed for engineering degrees in 2030, certain it was still the safest path — not realising the path had quietly washed away. Who told their kids that hard work in the right field would protect them, because that had been true for their own parents and so felt like a law.
It wasn't a law. It was a specific moment in history. And it had passed.
I understand why they held on. Having no map is more frightening than having a wrong one. We were all doing our best. Some of us just held on longer than we should have.
I don't regret building Supergrow. I don't regret posting. I don't regret the years I spent figuring out how to help people tell their stories online.
Those stories mattered. Some of them changed lives — I know because people told me.
But I wish we had asked harder questions, earlier. About what the feed was doing to our sense of self. About what we were actually optimizing for when we chased engagement. About whether a business built on attention was ever going to end somewhere good.
The internet gave us the greatest publishing infrastructure in human history.
For about twenty years, we used it mostly to perform, argue, and sell things to each other.
We could have done more with it.
Maybe that is what my daughter's generation will figure out. They grew up knowing the machine exists. Knowing it is faster and more tireless than any human. Knowing it does not doubt itself at 3am or need to feel loved.
And they chose, anyway, to do things slowly. To know forty people well instead of forty thousand people barely. To make things that weren't optimized for anything except the making of them.
That is not failure. That is a correction.
I hope they keep it.
With love, and mild nostalgia for the era of the LinkedIn carousel,
Deven Bhooshan Founder, retired at 52. India, 2046.
