From Cubicle Drones to Power-Generating Serfs: Crypto's Gambit to Dodge the AI Spin Class Apocalypse

A chillingly hilarious 'Black Mirror'-esque parody dubbed 'Energym' is currently melting the internet. It conjures a near-future 2030s hellscape where AI has made 80% of the population professionally obsolete. The fictional promo features digitally-aged doppelgängers of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Jeff Bezos cheerfully shilling a gym where the newly useless pedal stationary bikes to generate electricity for the very AIs that stole their livelihoods—a dystopian spin class where you're the battery.

The satire lands with the thud of a dropped barbell because it's basically a documentary preview. Tech giants are currently conducting mass layoffs as a corporate wellness program, with white-collar job postings cratering to their lowest in ten years. Adding to the festive mood, Jack Dorsey's fintech outfit Block just announced it's "going lean" by axing over 4,000 souls—roughly 40% of its workforce—replacing them with more obedient AI tools.

Fresh U.S. jobs data confirms the office party is over. Openings in the finance and insurance sectors, the traditional refuge of the desk-bound, plummeted to just 134 per month by December 2025. That's a 50% nosedive from the year before and marks a decade-long low—turns out the "money printer" can fire people, too.

Market nerves officially snapped in February. A brutally detailed 7,000-word scenario from Citrini Research painted a future of runaway AI agents, domino-effect layoffs, evaporating wages, and a spectacular market implosion later this decade. The report was so convincing it immediately triggered a sell-off in software and payments stocks, because why wait for the apocalypse when you can front-run it?

For David Minarsch, CEO of Valory and a founding member of the crypto protocol Olas Network, the 'Energym' bit is a plausible trailer for our feature film if AI development stays in the hands of a few feudal lords. He told Cointelegraph that the AI deployment blitz is already turning software engineering on its head, with nearly all of his team's code now AI-generated (with human supervision, for now—the models haven't figured out how to submit expense reports yet).

'If this trend accelerates,' he noted, 'we are on a path to a future that’s caricatured in the Energym ad.' Minarsch warned that a world where AI agents get legal personhood could permanently 'disenfranchise humans' by making capital—not labor—the only production input that matters. Imagine shareholders meeting where the board is just a server rack.

He pointed to AI labs using language like 'retiring' models as a creepy first step toward treating silicon systems as stakeholders. Minarsch argues that projects like Olas are betting the farm that giving people direct ownership and control over AI agents—instead of just renting them from a tech overlord—might be the only way to cancel our subscription to the Energym future. The plan: don't let the AI gym bros own the treadmill.