Three Internet Careers That Soon Won't Exist
Earlier this year the New York Times detailed how careers in medicine and law - formerly bankable lifetime gigs - have lost their luster. College grads instead are pouring their resources into trying to create (or join) the next Facebook or MySpace.
Context & Ripple Effects
Writing at the peak of the social-networking boom, Micro Persuasion argues that three internet-era job categories are headed for extinction just as college graduates abandon once-bankable paths like medicine and law to chase the next Facebook or MySpace. The piece lands amid real fragility in the sector: an ad downturn had already threatened Business 2.0's survival the year before, and debate over whether social networks were a portal or a fad was still live.
First-order effects
- Workers holding the three named internet careers face immediate pressure to reposition, as the roles the 2008 boom created are the first exposed when platforms consolidate or ad spending contracts.
- Graduates and early-career talent redirect effort toward founding or joining consumer social startups modeled on Facebook and MySpace, thinning the pipeline into traditional professional tracks.
Second-order effects
- Employers and media companies built around soon-obsolete web roles must retrain staff or absorb churn, while recruiters pivot toward whatever skill set the next platform wave demands.
- If the flagship social platforms themselves wobble — as MySpace's later struggle for a youthful reincarnation suggested — the startup gold rush loses its anchor, forcing talent and capital toward adjacent niches like professional networking.
Third-order effects
- The episode foreshadows a structural shift in which no internet career is durable: job security migrates from specific roles to adaptability, a pattern later visible when even dominant networks faced questions about stagnation, as in critiques of LinkedIn's plateau.
- Career planning itself gets reorganized around platform cycles rather than lifetime professions, pushing universities and credential systems to treat digital skills as perishable rather than terminal degrees.
The trend: This is an early data point in the longer arc of internet-career churn, where each platform generation obsoletes the job categories the previous one created.