by WorldTribune Staff / 247 Real News February 24, 2026

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by over 800 points on Monday, with software and other so-called “white-collar leverage” firms taking double-digit hits.

The Portfolio Armor blog attributed the drop in large part to one Substack post:

“Citrini Research and Alep Shah published ‘The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis’ over the weekend — a fictional dispatch from June 2028 describing an AI-driven recession: A ‘human intelligence displacement spiral’ where white-collar workers are replaced by GPU clusters, their incomes vanish, and with them the consumption that props up everything from DoorDash orders to prime mortgages,” the blog noted.

On Monday, firms dealing in payments, staffing, consulting, etc. dropped hard. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF (IGV -3.21%↓) shed nearly 5%, wiping out more than $200 billion in software market cap in a day. Names like American Express (AXP -6.22%↓) , DoorDash (DASH -2.25%↓) , CrowdStrike (CRWD -9.17%↓) , and Datadog (DDOG -9.85%↓) all took big losses.

Did the post really sink the market?

“Not by itself,” Portfolio Armor noted. “But it crystallized anxieties a lot of investors already had — and it raised real questions about where AI is taking the economy.”

How is the AI wave different from past advancements?

“Because this time, the technology isn’t just automating a specific task. It’s eating the general capability we used to call ‘white-collar work,’ ” Portfolio Armor noted.

• Generating and editing text and code

• Summarizing and analyzing documents

• Drafting contracts, slide decks, marketing copy

• Writing and reviewing software, even with complex legacy systems

“In previous cycles, you could dodge disruption by ‘moving up the stack’ into more abstract work — project management, coding, strategy. Now the stack itself is being automated,” the blog stated. ” ‘Learn to code’ isn’t much comfort when the thing replacing you also codes, and does so faster, without getting tired, and for a flat monthly API fee.”

If AI really does all the things the Substack scenario fears — makes operations dramatically more efficient, slashes software and service costs, accelerates drug discovery, speeds up R&D — the scary part, the blog noted, isn’t “AI makes the pie smaller.” It’s “the pie gets bigger while a lot of people lose their slice.”

The Citrini/Shah post hit a nerve, the blog continued, “because it forced investors to confront something they’ve half-suspected for a year now: What if we’re right about AI’s capabilities — and that’s actually bearish for a lot of human capital?”

The view at Portfolio Armor:

• The disruption to white-collar work is real and likely understated.

• The net economic impact of AI can still be positive if we get the distribution and policy side roughly right.

• For investors, this argues for less leverage, more exposure to AI-resilient or AI-enabled cash flows, and a willingness to own “heavy assets, low obsolescence” alongside the shiny stuff.

The blog concluded:

The market just had its first “Substack panic.” It won’t be the last. But AI doesn’t get to write the whole script from here. Policy makers, voters, and investors have a say in what the 2028 timeline actually looks like.

And if we really are headed into an era where GPU clusters do the bulk of white-collar work, one practical implication is simple:

You’ll want fewer liabilities, more assets, and at least a few positions in things AI can’t replace.

I spent 100 hours over the past week researching, writing and editing the piece we just put out.

It’s a scenario, not a prediction like most of our work. But it was rigorously constructed, dismissing it outright requires the kind of intellectual laziness that tends to get…

— Citrini (@Citrini7) February 22, 2026

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