In January 2000, Pets.com paid $2.2 million for thirty seconds of Super Bowl airtime and sent a sock puppet. Nine months later the company was bankrupt. The sock puppet survived. The lesson did not.

Issue 50 of The Sunday Signal. This week I go back to the beginning — not the beginning of this newsletter, but the beginning of the pattern. Forty years of technology disruption, told without the survivor bias that distorts every boardroom presentation. Who lost in the mainframe era and why. Who lost in the web era and why. Who is losing right now in the AI era, and why the mechanism is identical every single time.

Then the investor's guide. Because the most dangerous sentence being said on earnings calls across the world right now is "AI is helping our business." Most of the people saying it are wrong. Some of them know it.

I give you a hot list — companies already dying, companies that cannot be touched, and the one question that separates them. Plus the Week 17 layoff tracker: Snap's CEO says the quiet part out loud, Oracle executes the largest single-company workforce reduction of 2026, and why an HR software company cutting its own staff to become "AI-first" is the most ironic signal of the year.

The sock puppet of 2026 is standing at the front of the room. The question is whether you act before the bankruptcy filing does it for you.

The Sunday Signal is a weekly newsletter and podcast on AI disruption, the future of work, and Britain's economic future. Published every Sunday at newsletter.djr.ai