AUSTIN, TX — Roughly ninety minutes into a workflow he had described that morning as “just moving stuff back and forth real quick,” insurance claims analyst Devon Whitaker, 41, arrived Tuesday at the unavoidable conclusion that he is middleware.
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Whitaker, who spent the day pasting a 600-word client summary out of Claude, into ChatGPT for “tightening,” back into Claude for “a second opinion,” and then into a third tab for reasons he could no longer reconstruct, said the realization landed somewhere around the eleventh handoff.
“I’m not using the tools. I’m the part between the tools,” Whitaker said, alt-tabbing on reflex. “I don’t write anything. I don’t decide anything. I carry text from one building to another building and then I go get a sandwich. I’m a Ctrl-V with dental.”
Researchers say the condition is now widespread. A February survey from the Institute for Applied Redundancy found that 43% of American knowledge workers spend the majority of their day transporting output between two systems that could talk to each other directly, with an average human relay latency of 14 seconds — a figure the report called “the worst documented performance of any integration layer, including fax.”
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“What we are looking at is the most expensive USB cable ever manufactured,” said Dr. Marguerite Okonjo-Bailey, who studies human-in-the-loop labor at Northwestern. “It requires health insurance, it complains about the office thermostat, and it introduces typos. But it can be blamed, which no API can, so the market has priced it accordingly.”
Industry groups reject the characterization. A spokesperson for the Consortium for Responsible Model Deployment stressed that “the human remains firmly at the center of the process” — a statement Whitaker acknowledged was technically accurate in the way a router is at the center of a network.
Whitaker’s employer has since reclassified his position from Senior Analyst II to Analyst, Coordination, and asked him to document his own process in a shared spreadsheet, which he has correctly identified as onboarding paperwork for his replacement. Management denied this, noting the spreadsheet is required for a compliance review and will absolutely not be handed to a vendor in March.
Colleagues report Whitaker has begun using the language of infrastructure to describe his personal life, referring to his commute as “scheduled downtime” and his marriage as “a stable but deprecated dependency.”
As of press time, Whitaker had pasted this article into both models and asked each one whether the other believed he had a soul.