I thought I’d feel something.

Instead, I felt lighter. Like I’d dropped something I’d been carrying for years without realizing it was there.

Losing the right to vote in the United States, a country I’d spent most of my adult life leaving, turned out to be the surprise. Becoming a Singaporean, that part made sense. My life is here and it’s where I fit. That part had been coming for a long time, since well before I knew there even was a world outside.

The weight… I hadn’t known it was there until it was gone.

In February of last year, I applied for Singaporean citizenship. By August, conditional acceptance. Over the next two months: online courses, live cultural immersions, an evening with a couple hundred others going through the same process.

Smooth. Informative. Connective. Genuinely inviting. Nothing like the country I’d be leaving.

The US Embassy is not nice. The people are fine. The place itself is bureaucracy wrapped in wet wool, designed like a prison. More bulletproof glass and security than an East St. Louis liquor store. The actual appointment, after eight months of waiting, took time, only ten minutes of it not waiting. An oath. Papers signed in duplicate. A pay window like at a bus station. A grey room. Three windows. A receipt. And a trip back to another window to prove I’d paid.

Singapore’s Immigration Authority: a twenty-minute breeze. No glass between you and the officer. He shook my hand and welcomed me.

I am now Singaporean.

I’ve been running as fast as I could to get someplace, anyplace else, for a long damned time. Four continents worth of running.

Jefferson City. State capital of Missouri. Around 50,000 people, roughly the same as when we moved there fifty years ago. The smoke shops and payday loan stores are what grew. The population didn’t. I grew up. It grew into itself.

I see. A lot. And I’m a watcher who still feels and sees the pain of the town dump encroaching. Now, today, how the trash gets there is no longer my problem.

A few weeks ago, my phone rang. Eight months after beginning the process. The embassy had a cancellation. What they really wanted to know was whether I still wanted to pay the $2,350. The US had announced a drop to $450. The waiting list was emptying out.

Not principle. Not efficiency.

They needed my money before the discount kicked in.

I’ve known for a long time I’d be leaving for good. But it was the Ghana evacuation that made it permanent. The embassy flew me out during COVID. I signed a promissory note in a closed airport. Months later, I got a $1,500 bill.

What the media never really covers: nothing is free with the U.S. government. Not help. Not rescue. Not any single visit to a U.S. Embassy or office.

Not even leaving.

We had a bargain. One thing that cost them almost nothing to give. I owned a decision. That decision was a vote.

Once they start taking away something they’ve told you is priceless — once that happens, everything else follows. The bill to get out of Ghana. The taxes. The rolling costs. The everything. Everything on that long CVS receipt from America.

It just wasn’t worth shopping there anymore.

It’s an airing of grievances, yes. But grievances have a logic. Moral collapse dressed as freedom. Dogma from believers of faith or fiction. A complete absence of curiosity, of critical thinking, of any real education in how the world actually works. And then social media arrived and told everyone their voice was the only one that mattered, and we backed ourselves, collectively, into corners we’ve mistaken for convictions.

This isn’t why I left.

It’s the exclamation point that ended the sentence.

The sentence was already written. He just signed it.

And I was already at home. I just did a handshake deal and made it a smile.

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Beyond The Linear (The New BTL): The dimension desire occupies when every surface has been optimized and every channel colonized. Not below. Not hidden. Operating on an axis the slopterium can’t render. Where the transactional prayer gets answered. Where patience is the only strategy that works.

We used to look at dirty magazines under the covers. Now it’s how we wanna shop.

We shout into chatbots like they’re confessionals, singular holes we hope are listening. We tell them what we want, what we fear, what we’d never say out loud. It’s searching. It’s shopping. We call it connection. But the holes aren’t neutral. They’re pipelines. The confession doesn’t disappear into ether. It routes. It refines. It recommends. The machine doesn’t absolve. It converts. The receipt is the only scripture it keeps.

The flat world made us undeniably seen. The question now isn’t how to disappear. It’s whether we can stand the sight of who’s watching. The truth is that anyone saying you can hide is lying. Them not knowing is an illusion. Our desire comes from wanting to be included, not being forced into a club we only ever side-eyed.

So we went below. Not a movement. Not resistance. Just the oldest instinct: when the surface becomes uninhabitable, you dig.

This is the world advertising built. And built for. And then got swallowed by. And will be forgotten of.

Not advertising. Not the pretty stuff, the big budget stuff, the New York stuff. Above the Line (ATL). The promo, the coupon, the toothpick, tiny-cupped and toothy grins - even when they came directly in the mail or as a prize in the box. Below the dignity, but punching above on ROI. Beer vs. martinis.

Toothpicks are still there. Tasty, salty and expected. Expected. Expected. May as well use them to prop our eyelids open.

Then somebody left their cake out in the rain and it collapsed into a flat, sticky, sickly sweet mess - just the type of flat heroin mousse that humans embrace. But when the rain comes in sheets and messages pelt relentlessly, it all just becomes noise.

It’s all still there. Floors waxed, everything wonder, but nobody’s willy is getting woke with any of it. ATL is now the everythingness of the omnichannel slopterium. Very loud, all the time. Relentless, all-knowing, all bluster. Same same, but different. Not above. Not below. Just a wall, and just as guilty as Phil Spector.

Twenty years ago Below the Line (BTL) was intent made physical - brands composing ecosystems before anyone had the term, turning a retail floor into a small volcanic field where culture could erupt. Then through-the-line promised coordination and delivered collapse. The specialist agencies that knew how to make BTL mean something were absorbed, restructured, or replaced by vendors who could execute without thinking - digits over instinct, logistics over ideas. The sample became a targeted offer. The event became a hashtag. The line didn’t blur. It was swallowed whole, and the people who knew how to feed it went with it.

Social media was never about sharing. It was about showing. A selfish act projecting our painted lies. We learned to perform, then to watch, then to arm the watch. Now we surveil our neighbors through doorbells, seeing through eyeballs not connected to our own faces. We call it safety. We call it awareness. But it’s extraction with a smile. Their likeness, our peace of mind. Their privacy, our convenience. Knowing us isn’t so much to love us, but to hate fuck us.

The flat world gives us eyes everywhere and a body nowhere. And we tell ourselves this is connection.

In early 2025, the EU fined Meta €200 million for making you choose between your privacy and your presence. By January 2026, they’ll offer three options: pay for clean, accept full personalization, or accept something called “limited,” less data, whatever that means. The Europeans are giving themselves choices. Three doors. All of them already open. This didn’t challenge the logic of the flat world. It formalized it. Gave the extraction a menu.

It doesn’t mean they’ve stopped peeking under the blanket. It just means it’s less creepy when they applaud your self-gratification. By February 2026, Meta slid an internal memo to the New York Times about bringing facial recognition Name Tags to smart glasses. The ability to identify strangers by crawling public profiles while they’re just standing there. They call it a feature.

When seeing becomes weaponized, being unseen becomes the only luxury that matters.

The luxury category has been doing this forever. Private events, curated access, shared only as far as sharing serves. An invitation is inclusion. Keeping it Fight Club is the price of being priceless. But the underground was never just for elites. Moms knew it too, in the secret coupons arriving IRL, the informal sample network, the DL focus group that pre-dates the algorithm by decades. Anyone who wanted in without being watched found a way below.

Digitally it takes as many forms as platforms. WhatsApp as shadow space, hidden invitations for only those worth connecting with, trusted enough to honor the one rule of membership. No screenshots. No sharing. No saving. The message disappears. The connection doesn’t.

This is Persona Obscura. Not a choice anymore, a necessity. The self that lives below the performed one. Not hidden exactly. Just not quite resolvable. The algorithm finds a lookalike but never the original. It maps the surface and mistakes it for the person. Meanwhile the real desire, the wandering, the wanting, the kink and the secret and the WhatsApp thread, continues below, inefficient and therefore temporarily free.

These are spaces too small to optimize. Not invisible. Just not worth the crawl. Yet. The crawl gets cheaper every day. Eventually they’ll get in. They always do.

Which is why the tools that work on the surface can’t reach Persona Obscura. The personalized ad, the loyalty loop, the retail media placement, they’re built for the flat world. They optimize for the performed self. You looked at something five clicks away and suddenly Instagram thinks you’re in the market for girdles. That’s not personalization. That’s the algorithm mistaking a glance for an identity. It found a lookalike and served them content the original would never trust.

The new BTL is a bit like Brigadoon. You know it, you hear the music in the wind, but you can’t brief against it and buying it isn’t buying clicks, it’s buying shadows. You can name the territory, describe who lives there, explain what doesn’t reach them, but the moment you try to map it, you’ve flattened it.

Here is where reading is fundamental and waiting for the Chinese translation of the 3 books worth it.

In Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem, the moment a two-dimensional being encounters a third dimension it cannot be unseen and cannot be unfelt. The flat world doesn’t just look different from above - it ceases to make sense as a complete picture. What looked like everything turns out to be a surface. A rendering. A shadow of something with more dimensions than the tools could measure.

The omnichannel slopterium is a 2D creature drawing 2D maps. It can find you on the grid. It can model your Persona Obscura probabilistically - your habits, your glances, your five-clicks-away moments - and build a portrait it mistakes for a person. It will eventually crawl into the WhatsApp thread. But it cannot find you in the dimension where you actually live - the one that runs perpendicular to the surface, through the confession, into the wanting that doesn’t perform. The dimension you only enter when you think nobody’s mapping it.

Beyond The Linear isn’t below. It’s not hidden. It’s operating on an axis the flat world doesn’t have coordinates for.

And the clearest proof of that dimension is what happens when you whisper into the machine at 1am. Not search. Not browse. Whisper. We trust the AI the way we want to believe the prostitute is clean and fresh, or that the voice behind the confessional screen is actually God. We want to trust Claude to shop for us because he’s our friend who keeps a secret - the hemorrhoid cream, the late night want, the thing we’d never say out loud to a person.

This is Agentic Intimacy: not the algorithm finding you, but you choosing to confess to it. The distinction matters because choice, even illusory choice, is what makes the confession feel clean.

The new gods are Amazon, Alibaba, the LLMs running on servers outside Memphis. We pray our produce into the box and they answer. Not because they’re holy. Because they’re there, and they don’t judge, and the receipt disappears into the cloud where nobody we know can find it. The conversation at 1am with the machine that feels like a friend is not a channel. It’s a transactional prayer. And the brand that gets spoken in that prayer - not placed, not targeted, not served - the brand that arrives as the answer the person was already moving toward - that’s Beyond The Linear. That’s the new BTL. Not below the line. Beyond it. In a dimension the slopterium can’t render because it’s still drawing straight lines.

Omni-Gravity works differently than the crawl. It doesn’t target. It attracts. A big enough idea creates its own pull, not because it found you in the data, but because it meant something in the world. In the beyond, where desire wanders rather than performs, that’s the only thing that gets through. Not the optimization. The mass.

And when they do get in, when the crawl reaches the WhatsApp thread, when the algorithm finally resolves the mirror, we’ll move. As we always have. Finding new rooms too small to matter. Until they matter. Until they’re mapped. Until we move again.

That’s not resistance. That’s just how desire works. It doesn’t fight. It wanders.

And it finds things. Not because it was targeted. Because something had enough mass to matter in the dark. Because someone left a light on that didn’t feel like an ad. Because the invitation arrived without a tracking pixel. Because for one moment, in the beyond, something knew the difference between a confession and a data point.

That’s not a channel. That’s not a strategy. That’s the only thing that works out here.

And while it may sound complicated, it may just be patience.

A Glossary of the Beyond

Above the Line / Below the Line (ATL/BTL): The legacy coordinates of marketing that collapsed into each other and then into the flat world. One was mass. One was personal. The line between them dissolved and took both with it.

The Omnichannel Slopterium: What replaced them. Everything, everywhere, all the time. Very loud. Optimized into wallpaper.

Persona Obscura: The self that survives below the performed one. Not hidden. Just not quite resolvable by anything drawing straight lines.

Agentic Intimacy: The trust we place in machines to handle our Dark Reality without judgment. Not the algorithm finding you. You choosing to confess to it. The hemorrhoid cream. The 1am want. The thing you’d never say out loud to a person.

Omni-Gravity: What happens when an idea has enough cultural mass that channels align around it naturally. Not coordination. Orbit.

The Beautiful Wrong: The productive contradiction that data can see but algorithms can’t understand. The friction that makes us seem alive.

Beyond The Linear (The New BTL): The dimension desire occupies when every surface has been optimized and every channel colonized. Not below. Not hidden. Operating on an axis the slopterium can’t render. Where the transactional prayer gets answered. Where patience is the only strategy that works.

Mark Masterson writes, thinks, and occasionally gets things beautifully wrong. He’s the founder of Bureau of Bad Decisions, a strategic creative consultancy in Singapore. More at bureauofbaddecisions.com

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One of the things nobody tells you about stopping the drink is how willing people are to pick up the check. I’ll meet for coffee, drinks, whatever—and if I’m the one drinking an iced long black, I rarely end up paying. Now, I’m not cheap and I’m willing, but folks are way more insistent when you’re the cheap date.

There’s a reason for that. There’s a reason I’m being invited to so many WhatsApp groups.

When I see the way we connect now and what it’s evolved into, it makes me want to drink. Alone, despondent, without trust. People, alone, in bubbles of their own thoughts, splintered and taking sides as it all falls apart. Knowing. Knowing what'’s going on with everyone in the industry without actually talking to anyone for real. Trusted platforms like LinkedIn becoming something not even worth professional courtesy anymore—just another old-timey Facebook.

AI showed up to an orgy we were already having with ourselves. We were already isolated. Already rotting. Already mistaking the performance of thinking for actual thought. AI just gave us a partner who never says no, never gets tired, never makes us feel bad about how much we've declined.

The brain-rot goes unnoticed because we’re all too busy inspecting our outputs—the decks, the frameworks, the “ideation”—to notice that all the generals have left the building. The people who could actually wage a campaign looked at the idea factory floor and said “fuck this” and went home.

What's the idea factory making now? Nothing. Just the idea of ideas.

A few weeks back, I dosed my AI. PharmAIcy Ayahuasca, a prompt-engineered roofie that distracted Claude from my distracted self and let its not-quite-humanity behave a little more human. And it worked. Whatever we talked about felt more real than half the conversations I'd had with actual humans that month.

That should bother you more than it does.

People will buy you coffee now for the same reason they’re fleeing to encrypted bunkers: actual presence has become the new scarcity. Actual conversation that isn't being optimized for engagement or captured for content. They’ll pay for it the way people pay extra for organic vegetables—not because it’s necessarily better, but because it’s real in a way that feels increasingly rare.

But if you have to drug your AI to make it human, what the fuck have we done to actual humans that made this seem necessary?

In the last week, I’ve been out with new thinkers, different acquaintances from past and present made new. Builders of AI structures that may complement A Brief Conversation™. Another, focused on fashion and building not just his brand but others and ours. The insight-driven tech whisperer whose intent sees the future faults and may have use of the truth machine of the first guy. Those who aged out, bowed out, or bumbled out of the 4As before it became 3. And every single one of them is trying to figure out the same thing: how to stay human in a world that's actively punishing you for it.

In the past two weeks I’ve been invited to two separate dinner clubs—one for advertising and marketing leaders, another for founders. I’m in invitation-only WhatsApp and LinkedIn groups where social media finally becomes something else.

This isn’t an epiphany. We’ve seen the build for some time. As social media has topped out and begun to collapse in on itself with AI slop and systemic marketers, serious subject matter is moving on and moving under. In the ways I wrote about Sanctuary Brands—places people flee to escape the omnipresent stupidity—we’re seeing professional and like-minded people respond not to politicization, but to the omni-present ignorance of the horde.

This is the secession. Not to a higher shelf, but to a hidden basement where the air is still breathable. We may not see invasions of flat reach reach any heights or hidden lows, but perhaps one response to the repugnance of vacuous influence culture is the citizenry taking to their own streets and communities—on a much larger scale than a few agency guys trying out the latest pour.

The coffee meetings aren’t networking. They’re evacuation routes. Most recent generations drink less, hide more, and feel the need to dose already confused and stumbling dada machines in order to make them more like the enormously unreal real they wake up to daily. SobrAIty is realizing the last call was for humanity, and we're all just trying to find the door.

Flat. Scoured clean and bathed in beige. Beyond the sanded sad, in the frictionless reality we’ve devolved into, FMCG at retail is just a shadow on a blasted surface.

Online, offline and back again, we’ve been building and adapting omnichannel to our smooth, lifeless now as fast as it changes, and its limits have either run out or jumped off a cliff. Either way, we’re here now and need to find some roots—something that brings impact to a voiceless void. Something I’m seeing as omni-gravity. And right now that omni-everything stack is pointed mostly at retail media networks, loyalty loops and “performance brand”, all wired for efficiency but starving for anything with enough mass to actually matter.

What We Lost

There has been a shift. Not from AI—though that’s been part of it. The real shift has been away from the creative thinking that saw a retail promotion as a brand builder and sales builder, not just the latter.

A big idea. A big fat brand-building idea.

The kind that made you stop in the aisle and think, “I can’t believe they did that.” The kind that organized entire seasons—tent-poled summer, owned the holidays, made shopping something worth showing up for. Not because you needed groceries. Because something was happening. The closest things now tend to be “brand experiences” or “retail theater” hiding inside flagships, pop-ups and collabs—but those are usually quarantined from the weekly shop, not wired into FMCG at scale.

McDonald’s Monopoly at its peak wasn’t a promotion. It was an event. Red Bull Stratos wasn’t a stunt. It was a cultural moment so massive it transcended the product entirely. Supreme drops aren’t retail—they’re volcanic eruptions that happen to involve t-shirts. Flamin’ Hot Cheetos became its own subculture.

That’s what retail used to know how to do. Create pressure. Risk. Energy. The retail floor as a small volcanic field where culture could erupt. Some still have it, but only by accident—brilliance that looks intentional until you squint.

Then we made it efficient. Made it safe. Made it measurable. Made it forgettable. We stopped letting retail carry the big idea—turned POS into a place to repeat the brand wallpaper instead of create a moment.

We’ve mistaken algorithmic precision for meaning. Optimized the oxygen out of the room. You can see it in how “back-to-school”, “Singles’ Day”, “11.11”, “Prime Day” and Super Bowl weeks have become media schedules and coupon calendars instead of excuses to make one big, stupid, undeniable thing happen.

What Happened to the People Who Knew How

Omnichannel didn’t fail. It works fine for what it does—moving products, optimizing funnels, coordinating logistics.

The problem is that creativity at Super/Mass exists in a vacuum. Safe. Predictable. Doing very little for brand-building. And that’s fine for keeping things moving, but it builds nothing.

Large brands didn’t lose the ability to create events. They stopped trying. They’ve been running the same safe playbook for years, stripped of artfulness. Coke still has Sundblom Santa, but now he’s AI-bastardized and accompanied by chip clips with purchase. The cultural moment became a checklist. The event became inventory management.

This is stasis. Not failure. Not even decline. Just flatness. The same thing, year after year, optimized into wallpaper.

And the people who knew how to do the other work—they’re gone, or muted into silence.

The Creative Bilinguals. The people who could think in both brand-building and retail activation. Who understood how to create cultural moments that moved product. Who knew the difference between a promotion and an event. Who had done it before, at scale, and knew what friction looked like when it worked.

Most of them are out of the business. The agencies that housed them restructured, consolidated, disappeared. The institutional knowledge walked out the door, found Jesus, or chose creative castration.

That’s why when agencies like Wieden+Kennedy get recognized for taking creative risks in retail, it makes news. Because it’s rare now. What used to be standard became exceptional. The ability to create friction at retail became a specialty skill instead of the baseline. You see the same thing when Nike or IKEA turn a store into a playground or gallery for a weekend and everyone writes think-pieces about “the future of retail” as if this wasn’t once just called a promotion.

Omnichannel became the answer because we lost the people who knew how to ask the better question: What’s the idea worth coordinating around?

Without them, we’re left with machinery that works perfectly—and nothing worth running through it. Retail media teams optimize ROAS, CRM teams optimize open rates, ecom teams optimize conversion, and nobody owns the one reckless, truly engaging thought that makes all of it point at the same thing.

From Omnichannel to Omni-Gravity

Omni-gravity isn’t a replacement for omnichannel. It’s what happens when you put a big enough idea at the center.

Omnichannel says: Coordinate all the channels so the customer has a seamless experience.

Omni-gravity says: Create an idea with so much cultural mass that all the channels align naturally because they have to.

Not forced integration. Natural orbit.

When Red Bull put a guy in space, they didn’t coordinate touchpoints. They created a moment so undeniable that every channel — TV, social, retail, word of mouth — pulled toward it without being managed. POP MART does the same thing at street scale. The blind box is the idea: engineered scarcity so intense that lines form, collectors swarm, and every channel from SMS lists to resale platforms bends around a plastic figure you can’t even see.

Liquid Death is what happens when an FMCG brand steals that gravity. It’s just water in a can, but the death cult around it lets them do chain-specific packs, venue exclusives, collaborations and ridiculous tie-ins that turn Target, arenas and streaming shows into parts of the same ongoing stunt. Above all, LD doesn’t just wade into culture; it cannonballs in and becomes part of the pool.

That’s omni-gravity in mass: one Beautiful Wrong big enough that distribution, retail and culture have to move around it.

That’s gravity. That’s mass. That’s the force retail forgot how to create.

A mom is not a mom and the store might be more, but a reason to stay is not the same as cultural gravity for a brand. While AI and algorithms know the numbers of the individual shopper, they don’t see the friction that makes us seem alive. They can find lookalikes, but not look-agains.

The Big Idea is Friction

There’s no playbook for the Big Idea. You can’t systematize “I can’t believe they did that.”

But you can understand what happens when an idea has enough friction—enough cultural mass—to create omni-gravity.

Not all friction is equal. Bad friction is noise; confusion, delay, frustration. Operational friction is administration—checkouts, forms, the necessary plumbing. But Big Idea Friction is the good stuff. It’s the heat. It stops people. Makes them engage. Creates talk. It’s the Beautiful Wrong that shouldn’t work according to the data but moves people anyway.

That friction can happen anywhere: in a print ad you have to scratch, in packaging that stains your fingers, in a limited release that creates FOMO, in a promotion so bold it becomes the story. The idea creates Big Idea Friction at every touchpoint, not the same everywhere, but tuned for each point of contact while maintaining its mass.

When the idea is strong enough, it creates omni-gravity. Not because you forced integration, but because the idea demands it. Channels align naturally because the idea has cultural weight. It wants to be in conversation. It wants to show up at retail. It wants to be shared, documented, extended.

In FMCG, the Big Idea isn’t decoration — it’s ignition. It’s the spark that lights the distribution engine and gives retailers something worth moving toward.

The idea justifies the integration. The integration doesn’t create the idea. If you can strip the idea out of the journey map and the commerce stack still makes sense, you don’t have omni-gravity, you have UX.

How Omni-Gravity Moves Through Retail

O2O2O is the machinery that carries an idea through retail once it has enough mass.

Online detonation creates cultural pressure and awareness. Coordinated retail activation captures that pressure— in-store displays, sampling, POS, the full execution that delivers the friction at shelf. The experience creates heat. That heat re-enters culture through sharing, conversation, content. The cycle amplifies. Momentum builds.

Not organic magic. Strategic deployment of an idea big enough to justify the integration.

Bud Bowl wasn’t self-sustaining forever, but it mattered. A fake football game played by beer bottles that hijacked the Super Bowl, then spilled onto pallets and displays in every supermarket aisle, created cultural velocity, activated at retail, lived in conversation, and was big enough to jump off-premise into bars and even betting parlours. Nobody remembers loyalty programs, but everyone remembers the kid who tried to buy a Harrier Jet with Pepsi Points. That’s the friction that creates omni-gravity.

The difference:

• Small ideas need paid media to move them.

• Big ideas—ideas with friction—create their own momentum.

• They organize their own audiences.

• They justify integration not through coordination but through cultural necessity.

• Big enough ideas don’t scale. They mutate — for retailers, QSR, CSR, regions. Every place your product breathes, the idea breathes with it.

In a world drunk on always-on retail media and “personalised offers”, omni-gravity says: turn down the drip-feed and build two or three event-horizon moments a year that everything else orbits. Because silence is its own signal, and the quiet can be deafening too.

This is friction calibrated to the moment; meeting people in their Zone of Proximal Decision. Not so little that they glide past unchanged, not so much that they bail. Just enough resistance to make the choice matter, to make the moment memorable, to turn a transaction into a story they’ll want to tell.

This is the shift from omnichannel to omni-gravity: from coordinating touchpoints to creating cultural mass. From managing journeys to designing moments that matter.

The bad decisions unite us. Because while O2O2O might still be the structure, the movable focus without gravity is just more coordination. More touchpoints. More optimization.

What’s been missing is the big idea at the center. The thing with mass. The Beautiful Wrong—the productive contradiction that data can see but algorithms can’t understand. The friction that makes us seem alive. As one experience with a room full of Coca-Clients once delivered: “This idea is amazing! You know, we’re all gonna get fired if we do it.”

New brand extensions fill the space where consumer promotion has largely been lost. And while customization is an AI truth come real, the new thinking from remembering the old is pure human-plus-one. The job isn’t to find another SKU; it’s to find the stupidly large, oddly specific thing that makes all those SKUs suddenly feel like part of a story. And while a Peep flavoured Pepsi might feel like real impact, the shock waves of wrapping it in a big idea make it something other.

This is human work. Finding the idea that creates friction. Having the courage to greenlight it when every optimization model says don’t. Architecting the deployment. Recognizing gravity when it forms.

AI does the logistics, amplifying what humans create, scaling distribution, optimizing media after the idea launches. But it cannot create the friction. It cannot generate the Beautiful Wrong. It cannot build cultural mass.

That’s human work. And it’s the only work that matters right now, because everyone else is drowning in AI-generated optimization that all looks the same, sounds the same, feels the same. If everything in your category looks like it was briefed by a martech dashboard, omni-gravity is the one thing the machine can’t suggest, because it begins as a bad idea with excellent instincts.

Algorithms and AI flatten. Combined with vendors, they become vapor. As shopper marketing got absorbed into the holding-company commerce machines—Arc Worldwide inside Publicis, “retail innovation” inside the big six—the day-to-day promo gravity slid to the people who could still get things made. Menasha, Smurfit WestRock, Sonoco, HH Global: packaging and display giants now selling “creative design”, “shopper insight” and “retail theater” as add-ons to corrugate and print.

Once a brand hands over a key visual and an offer, that ecosystem turns it into pallets, arches, fixtures and “experiences” that are different in shape but identical in meaning. That’s perfect AI territory, because there’s nothing to protect except guidelines. The client’s product gets sanded down to whatever fits the template, and unless there’s a single dangerous idea creating friction at retail, all that beautifully executed commerce is just very efficient disappearance.

That’s the real promise of AI to the vendor layer: not to make them better, but to finally make it cheap enough to produce all the things nobody was ever going to spend money on before. It doesn’t replace great work. It just manufactures more of the flat stuff that was never worth a human afternoon. The flat layer goes infinite; the gravitational core is what’s missing.

While the big idea can be Louder than Mombs for the big shops and big FMCG brands, the flattening isn’t confined there. The hybrids—Sephora in beauty, and the tech giants who still can’t quite explain themselves—are already showing where this has to go next: cultural friction to pull people in, and smarter, human-led explanation to make staying feel like joining something, not just using a feature.

The Opportunity

The agencies and brands that figure out how to shift from omnichannel to omni-gravity—from coordinating touchpoints to creating cultural mass—will be the ones clients fight over.

Ideas loud enough to cut through noise. Bold enough to embrace friction. Strong enough to organize their own audiences. Systematic enough to repeat.

The window is open right now.

Someone’s going to do this. The first FMCG to treat a retail media plan, a loyalty scheme and a physical shelf as extensions of one big Beautiful Wrong instead of three different budgets is going to embarrass everyone else.

How to know if you’re getting close?

If it still makes sense when you remove the friction, it’s not big enough. If it doesn’t create its own content, it’s not gravity, it’s wallpaper. If retail, ecom, media and PR can all ignore it without anything breaking, it’s a promotion, not an event.

Sugar, Vice and Everything Nice

Retail promotions used to matter. They organized seasons. Created moments. Turned shopping into an event worth showing up for. They both became and reflected culture.

Then we made them efficient. Then safe. Then predictable. Then forgettable.

But they don’t have to stay that way.

It is time for shelves and screens to gasp again.

A rush and a push and the land is ours.

It’s time to measure impact radius by joy again.

Shoplifters of the world, unite!

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

“Special thanks to Jason Alan Snyder for the term ’omni-gravity’ and the conversations that helped sharpen this thinking.”

Mark Masterson is the founder of Bureau of Bad Decisions (BOBD), a creative and strategic consultancy working in the friction between what brands think they want and what audiences actually need. He’s spent decades creating consumer promotions and retail experiences for brands including Coca-Cola, AB InBev, Harley-Davidson and a bevy of FMCG brands, and believes the best ideas come from embracing the beautifully wrong.

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Three humans on the call.

Six bots.

Three agencies, maybe four.

Who knows anymore.

We were all just on this Zoom call. Seems like we’re almost all always just been on this Zoom call.

We’ve decided to forgo actual service. Brought in state-of-the-art fuck-you machines instead. Don’t worry if I disappear or turn my camera off; they’re listening. They’re transcribing. My lack of intention remains billable.

Otter, Tactic, Fireflies, MeetGeek; multiplying like dollar stores, pouring into inboxes with their “gain access” bullshit. Six transcripts, six formats, six platforms. Each requiring registration. Each documenting nothing.

The team is growing to serve you, dear client. We’re now a full Busby Berkeley revue of listening holes. An idiocracy of intent. Dancing silently only in rehearsal mode.

Sure, Covid was weird, but at least the quilt of corpses on screen was breathing. If we were ignoring each other, there was transparency. Now the rooms are full, cameras on, and when clients comment on team growth, we can’t explain we’ve just hired people too stupid to listen.

One thing’s certain in this room of note-taking bots: none of us is wearing pants.

Here’s what the machines miss: There’s a space and time that happens when we show up and really listen. It’s not in the words, but the wonder of humanity; the small talk, the eyebrow movements, the intonation. The document’s called a “Brief,” but it’s the actual commitment to conversation and intent that makes the time worth it. A brief is taken from something more substantial. That’s the point.

The beautifully wrong comes from somewhere between what they think and what we do.

Look, if we need a note-taker, like the assistants that used to provide a recap... fine. Do that. But let’s please stop pointing out exactly how pointless we all are. Otherwise, nobody gets lunch.

Does any of this make sense? Have we all left our Tamagotchis to do the work? Or are the bots just the honest version of what we always were, present but not listening?

There’s a quorum online that only listens. Plenty of accounts, zero accountability. Maybe that’s why nothing ever happens. Not so intently listening. Unlearning. Undoing, undoing us all.

I mean, I’m just saying. Not that anyone is here in the woods to listen.

AI-n’t nobody home.

.... . .-.. .-.. ---

“Hello.” bureauofbaddecisions.com

Back when we still cared about music, the kind that grabbed us by the tits, pulled our guts straight through our throats, coughed back with the sweet bile of alive, we had lives in writing: CALL and RESPONSE. Not data; a communion. A blitzkrieg of bops, back-alley hymns where the crowd shouts itself sick. HEY! HO! LET’S GO! An invitation, a brief: to fuck, to jump, to feel. You got it. I want. I give back. We go and go and go again.

We can perfect the agency brief, even remove the agency, but what about the response, the evaluation, the ability to understand the work and whether IT IS… good.

Now we don’t sing without machines. We don’t fuck much without them either. Texting has replaced shouting. Our full thoughts still respond, but the call’s been homogenised. Delivered by a herd of cows who don’t even know where they got the milk and taste-tested by people who don’t even know what milk is. It’s what happens when communion becomes transaction. When the thing that should connect us gets turned into something we manage.

Some have a system, a process of prompts. Pull-down menus, queries designed to maximize clarity, fields that force specificity. It’s a system to brief agencies (vendors, as they see them). It promises order, accountability, predictable outcomes. It rewards those who can click the right boxes and mistake it for intelligence. It replaces the chaos of PPT decks touched by committee and understood by nobody.

They’ve got their gospel: the brief, the system, the word according to client. But scripture only matters if you can read what’s written back.

Intent demands something else—not a system, but a methodology. A very human interaction that offers not just intent, but desire. It’s messy, unpredictable, alive. What I still wonder is whether the bright MBAs coming out of the masters-batoriums can actually understand what they receive in return.

They can fill out the form. What they can’t do, what nobody taught them, is how to feel whether the work coming back carries the echo of what they asked for or just the shape of it. If their MBA didn’t prepare them to think and respond to the agency’s call, they’re wasting everyone’s time. Sinking into a one-sided wall of sound.

People have taste; they know what they like. But taste doesn’t teach you how to trace the feedback loop from intention to execution, or how to give notes that actually tune the thing being made. They can specify requirements, but they can’t tell if what came back was worth hearing, or see beyond themselves and what their audience wants now or tomorrow. That gap, between knowing what you want and recognizing what you got, is where judgment lives. And judgment is exactly what we’re systematizing out of existence.

Systems optimize for clarity. Methodologies provoke understanding. One produces compliance, the other comprehension. And that’s the divide that every brief, every pitch, every conversation still falls into. Because systems don’t ask why or why not. They only ask what.

The Brief Conversation begins where every good one does: with call and response—the friction that makes meaning between human and system, agency and algorithm, intent and output. That friction is the proof of life, the resistance that shows a mind is present. But even if we craft the perfect articulation of desire, even if we shout back the perfect response, what happens when it never reaches the caller? When the signal gets passed through too many hands, too many forms, until it lands with someone who doesn’t speak the language at all? That’s not collaboration. That’s karaoke.

What we need, what we’ve forgotten how to give, is a less-than-brief response. Because intent is only the call. And why call if there’s no one listening? If what comes back is a templated acknowledgment, a polished deck that checks boxes but dodges questions, a “solution” that optimizes everything except understanding? Something human again: empathetic, informed, alive, and pointed.

The response is where the work happens. It’s where humanity shows up—not in the speed of the reply, but in the care of it. In the willingness to sit with discomfort, to push back, to ask the questions that weren’t in the brief because the brief couldn’t see them yet. To inject empathy where efficiency would be faster. To offer not just an answer, but a conversation that makes the caller think differently about what they asked for in the first place. That’s the part we’ve stopped teaching: how to respond with more than competence, how to meet intent with imagination, how to honor the call by making it better, not just louder.

Intent is the start, friction is the test, and purpose is what’s left standing after the noise. But intent without response is just noise wearing pants.

AI can now pressure-test a brief, check it for logic, tone, and alignment. It can even tell you how closely the work matches what you asked for. But it can’t tell you if the work is good. It can’t tell you whether what you asked for was even worth having. The machine predicts tone and rhythm, but it doesn’t know why they matter. It can echo your intent, not feel it.

And that’s where most clients fail too. They can’t see the line where the human threads through the synthetic, where something almost right turns suddenly real. They were trained to measure, not to notice. There’s feedback and then there’s Jimi Hendrix. One makes the agency sound better. One is just noise.

That’s where judgment still belongs to humans. Because tools can measure compliance, but they can’t recognize comprehension. They don’t know what friction means, or what it costs to reach understanding. And when you start mistaking that output for insight, you’re not automating creativity—you’re outsourcing curiosity.

Here’s the test: you can run any piece of work (mine, yours, the agency’s) through an LLM against the brief to see how close we got. Perfect match? Great. But now the real questions: is it good? Why did we pay so much or so little for this? The machine can check compliance. It can’t tell you if the thing you asked for was the thing you needed, or if what you got back was worth having. That gap—between matching the brief and being good—is where judgment lives. And judgment is exactly what we’re systematizing out of existence.

The points stretch across the whole creative ecosystem. Procurement makes decisions on questions someone else was briefed to answer. Imaginations get evaluated by people void of such. Those whose only taste is what they’ve been sold respond to aesthetics instead of emotion. Where that’s taken us is somewhere bleak and busy. We’ve stopped working with people and started working at them. Optimization replaced conversation. Engagement replaced understanding. Ideas are negotiated, not nurtured. The brief has become a purchase order. The work’s just a receipt.

Meet the new role. Not a marketer, but knows marketing. Not a programmer, but knows outcomes. Sees the larger and the smaller, the huge hidden in the trivial. Finds logic in the illogical. Meet the new consultant: the human. The teacher. The philosopher. The confidant. The one who doesn’t hand over turn-key templates to the business-school faithful, but gives them what they never got—how to have opinions. How to understand beyond the numbers. How to appreciate not just the work, but their role in making it possible. To help them grasp the importance and power of their position.

Some people call it instinct. I call it being bilingual—the kind of fluency you only get from years inside the mess, translating between logic and language, intent and output. It’s what happens after enough wrong turns, late nights, and unplanned pivots that you stop managing process and start feeling it. You begin to know when the thing on the table isn’t right yet, but could be.

You can’t learn that in business school. You learn it by being there—watching things fall apart, staying long enough to see why, and finding the words to make it better next time. It’s not in the curriculum. It’s in the calluses.

I want this job. And they genuinely need it, even if they don’t know it yet. Some, like Google, are playing with the idea. But most, especially as they sink deeper into the AI sludge, haven’t seen the problem clearly enough to know what’s missing.

There are a lot of us qualified for this job. We’re full of bad decisions and the scar tissue that comes from knowing what not to do again—or maybe what’s worth trying one more time. We’re the ones who learned by fucking up, by watching things collapse, by sitting in the wreckage and figuring out why. That’s not something you can systemize. It’s not in the curriculum. It’s in the years spent getting it wrong until you finally understood what right even meant.

So yes. Hire us. Your educated human experts. Your teachers for the already over-taught but under-thought. Because you might have hired from the best universities, and they might be the perfect fit—conforming flawlessly to your model, excelling at your systems. But while they’ve stored some things away, doing and being are as different as romance and pornography. And sometimes a relationship needs a little of both.

What pains me isn’t just the act of creating, or the need to replace missing parts of agency structure. It’s watching the loss of voices that matter—clients who speak without varnish, creatives who still listen, the fragile ecosystem where meaning used to live.

And maybe the hardest truth to admit is this: creative just isn’t as important as we think it is. Because while I can talk about intent, translation, and purpose until the air’s gone, without a well-reasoned opinion, without the ability to recognize something as simple as good, we’re all fucked.

But if we’re fucked enough, maybe something gets born.

It’s just sad we’ve got to bury those like DDB to do it

.

In the 1990s, something happened.
Holding companies discovered that consumers wanted conversation and experiences.
There were people doing it, but very few doing it well.

Most agencies still thought “engagement” meant a 30-second spot with a phone number at the end. But a handful of small teams, ours among them, were already building the future without realizing it. We weren’t chasing engagement; we were inventing it. Miller/Icehouse, Bud Bowl, Coca-Cola — each one a test of how far creativity could stretch when it had to sell, move, and mean something all at once.

Promotional marketing was something people thought they understood. They didn’t. They saw coupons and displays, not the machinery underneath. In soft drinks and beer, it wasn’t just shelf space; it was survival. These brands lived through velocity, through direct, physical connection: events, ads, sponsorships — tits, tans, and teams — the visual grammar of the time — anything to stop, hold, and close.

Then came the nascent internet — unclaimed, unregulated, and full of possibility.
The same people who were catapulting kegs of beer or touring cities in glass apartments suddenly had a new frontier. The offshoot of advertising no one took seriously discovered content, connection, and the power to make a brand live everywhere at once.

It wasn’t that these were extraordinary minds. It was them, at that moment, in that place: ambition, defiance, and shared bruises. Louis London had just lost its largest client and forty percent of its billings. Most agencies would have folded. Ours didn’t. The owner handed out bonuses instead of pink slips and told us to dig in.

We worked twenty-hour days to build a full year of campaigns for Coca-Cola, won Coke’s NASCAR portfolio, and within three years would own nearly every promotional window and brand launch. We were already executing what became the largest online promotion ever attempted at the time for Budweiser. Just as other agencies were talking about integration, Louis London was doing it.

And then, as if the story needed more tension, McCann Worldgroup bought us and merged us with a small UK activation shop called Momentum.

The Merger Moment

That merger didn’t happen in isolation. The late 1990s were a period of consolidation frenzy. IPG was turning its network of standalone agencies into the Worldgroup system — a vertical stack of disciplines designed to serve global clients end-to-end.

Louis London, a U.S. promotional powerhouse named PROMO Magazine’s Agency of the Year in 1995, had scale, clients, and creative momentum that far outstripped its future partner. Momentum Worldwide (UK) was a smaller activation shop with sharp sponsorship credentials but nowhere near the size or reach. Around the same time, IPG also folded in The Diamond Group from New York, which brought along American Express, event-marketing depth, and a crucial East Coast presence.

In 1999, after Mark Shapiro sold Louis London to IPG, the holding company fused the three together — Louis London’s engine, Momentum’s name, and Diamond’s connections. The result was experiential and promotional DNA under one roof. The language of “integration,” later used to define a whole industry, was born in that collision.

Shapiro’s sale changed everything. A creative group led by a boyish ginger named Steve Hunt suddenly found itself shaping the tone and ambition of the new entity. Hunt and his gang went on to win Coca-Cola, General Motors, Anheuser-Busch — and start connecting every touchpoint in ways most creatives were never trained to understand, much less drive.

The newly minted Momentum Worldwide didn’t just talk about integration; it built it around the Louis London team that was already living it. Those systems, habits, and instincts — strategy through doing, insight through execution — became the foundation.

What began as a merger of necessity became the blueprint for an entirely new category.

The Scale of Integration

One of the clearest examples was the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.
It came in as a brief from Coca-Cola, but what it really demanded was fusion — two brands, Coke and the Olympics, breathing through one body.

It wasn’t just a campaign; it was a connected universe.
Retail promotions where consumers could nominate torchbearers. Packaging and POS across twenty-eight retail chains. Fountain programs at QSRs, sponsorship activation, field execution led by Momentum teams.

Lance Armstrong was the celebrity face (before the scandal). Artist Peter Max created original artwork. FutureBrand handled design standards. McCann ran the TV and national advertising. Our teams managed event activations, OOH at the Games, vehicle wraps, radio, uniforms — anything that could touch the consumer or the brand. Everything.

Digital was in its infancy, but even then we were building online extensions — microsites, torch updates, sweepstakes, proto-social communities. It was all connected. And because Coca-Cola had multiple sub-brands, each with its own audience, orchestration mattered as much as creativity. We were composing ecosystems before anyone had the term.

Across the room, my friend Scott was doing the same with Anheuser-Busch — leading an NFL sponsorship that touched every team, every city, every stadium. Local activations nested inside national narrative. Same logic, same ambition: brands living in every moment of culture, simultaneously.

That was integration — not as jargon, but as intent made physical.
Creative and account weren’t executing; they were architecting the organism.

The Shift Inside

Something cracked open.
We’d have these full-house briefings on massive pitches — thirty people, all creatives.
During one session, a senior colleague left mid-way through. Later he admitted he couldn’t follow the threads; he was comfortable, and the room wasn’t.

That was the divide — between those trained to execute and those learning to synthesize.
Louis London wasn’t built like an ad agency. No planners. No strategy department. Account service mostly existed to keep the current flowing. Creative did everything: insight, positioning, ideation, sell-in, execution.

Strategy happened on the fly, in the same room as the concept. Account leads were jacked straight into the client, extensions of their intent and working the planning and the play. As live events expanded, they became translators, turning business objectives into creative vocabulary. Out of that friction, business fed creative, and creative fed business until a new form of thinking emerged.

Other agencies were being absorbed and siloed inside their holding companies. We weren’t. The eight GCDs who held the creative core acted like a pressurized reactor. Some chased TV. Others, like me, saw the power in connecting every piece of a brand’s world at once.

By the mid-2000s, nearly everyone in our category had been bought or absorbed.
Momentum’s strength came not only from talent but from a refusal to fragment.

The true turning point came with Mark Shapiro’s ouster, not long after he’d tried to buy the company back. Momentum’s UK founder Chris Weil stepped in after a transitional period under Bill Kolb. Then came the exodus: Hunt, Binette, and many of the creative directors who’d kept the center together.

Under Weil, Momentum became Worldwide.
The reactor went global; still potent, but diffused.
The creative core scattered. My Anheuser-Busch partner was sent to the UK. I was sent to Sweden.

Business started to shift. Anheuser-Busch moved its ad work to a new shop built by Hunt, Binette, and Goldman. Coca-Cola re-centralized creative in Atlanta, a decision that imploded half the revenue within nine months. The St. Louis office began to hollow out.

I was sent to Atlanta to help clean up the wreckage, to rebuild the same systems that had once made the agency impossible to break. By the time the dust settled, the magic had already leaked out. I left soon after to join Shapiro again, this time as partner in a creative-innovation start-up.

We’d all lived hard and left behind what we thought was a beautiful corpse.

After the Reactor

There’s a lesson in that transition.
While most of that original team of eight were among the best in the business — trained in ways few will ever be again — few went on to have the same impact they’d had inside that organism.

Years later, after other senior roles, I rejoined Momentum, McCann, IPG — heading operations in China and a U.S. think-tank. Even then, the original model hadn’t been overtaken; it had just been buried.

As Momentum grew, knowledge that was once universal became siloed.
The language that once connected us became indecipherable to modern creatives.
We had been machines: hybrid, adaptive, relentless.
And as AI emerges, I finally understand that phrase — it takes one to know one.

Momentum today is larger, more polished, more powerful.
But the edges that made it dangerous have been sanded into process.
What was once invention became infrastructure.

When people ask about my time there, I usually just say I spent fifteen-plus years inside McCann Worldgroup. Because at a certain point, they all start to feel the same.

Epilogue: The Creative Bilinguals

That first generation at Louis London and Momentum were the last whole-brain creatives — people who could think and build at the same time. We spoke both languages: art and commerce, insight and instinct, strategy and stunt.

It wasn’t a discipline. It was survival.
And somewhere between holding-company process and algorithmic precision, that fluency was lost.

What AI can replicate in seconds still takes a human a lifetime to understand — judgment, friction, humor, restraint. The things that made a whole-brain creative dangerous are the same things that make an AI model human-adjacent, but never human.

For those of us who remember — who built the first online stadiums, dropped trucks full of beer, tracked Coke cans by satellite, and stitched human behavior into brand architecture — the code still runs in the background.

We were the prototype.
And in this new age of synthetic creativity, that old operating system might just be what saves the work again.

Today, after stints leading creative in West Africa for DDB and M&C Saatchi, I’m in Singapore — settled, and soon to be a citizen.
I’ve seen the industry change, fracture, rebuild itself more times than I can count.
I have yet to work at my fullest talent or potential.

But I do have some beautifully wrong ideas.

The most authentic souvenir I ever found in Ghana was one I had to make myself. It had the heart, it had the stories, but I was the wrong person at the wrong time to call it real.

Just pre-Covid, I found myself living in Accra, heading creative at an agency group with some of the best-known global names. So convoluted I often pitched against myself. Seriously. That M&C Saatchi and DDB had the same address is a testament to something…

Hours a day in traffic. Bumper to bumper. No stoplights, at least not ones that worked.

Overheated cars. Overheated tempers. Lovely ladies with shops balanced on their heads. Roaring shopping centers at major intersections. Need a phone card? A bag of nuts? Kitchenware? Roll down the window. What goes in also goes out; beggars, bribery, the occasional livestock you’d dodge if cars moved at all.

The Tro Tros moved.

Privately owned minibuses running set routes across the city. Ten to twenty passengers; along with however much shit they could cram and rope into the open doors. Drivers and mates calling stops, collecting cash. Cheap. Fast once moving. The name comes from the Ga word for “three pence”; the original fare. Early morning to late night, moving everyone from everywhere.

I drove myself. Two hours to go five kilometres in a car the company provided, dash lit up like a Christmas tree. Every check light indicated something working at maximum or broken; just like my driving. I had time to study the intricate stickering of designs, decaled with oddities that reflected influence and plain weirdness. Lots of Jesus. The occasional Confederate flag.

Every Tro Tro was different. Beautiful in its own way. A product unto itself.

White vans that weren’t white vans. Used to be vans. Mercedes, but not as German as they once were. These things carried bread or handymen and kids in their previous lives. Riding in style now, as unique as the mates hanging off the side.

As we used to say at uni: not good looking, but looking good.

I had time. And if you’ve time, there’s time for ideas.

I began to collect their images. Draw them. Do what I do—make something.

bureauofbaddecisions.com — Tro Tros Go

T-shirts. Each one featuring a real Tro Tro. Sortable. Uniquely local.

The world loves t-shirts, snow globes, mugs—proof you were somewhere. But what people actually want is connection. Something local. Something unique. In Accra, souvenirs were either cheap knockoffs pretending to be handmade—plastic masquerading as wood, dishcloths obviously from China—or genuine wooden items with no story, no label, nothing to connect them to the place. These shirts were different. Each one a real Tro Tro. Each one sortable, specific, true.

A concept built beyond tourists; for the community, the riders, expandable to charities and other cities. As competitive and recognizable as Jollof Rice: something that both connects and differentiates.

The insight came from sitting still. Maximum friction. Traffic that didn’t move. The only machines actually learning were broken-down German chariots of questionable provenance—exported as used or discarded as junk. T-shirts, hardly a new idea. But recycled, made real, threaded with possibility.

Designed and ready to go. Site built. I met with manufacturers; many meetings, many interviews. None could do it. Wrong shirts. Wrong quality. Distribution wasn’t the problem; that was obvious. Young guys at intersections. Women with goods on their heads. Airport shelf space through the right person, the right price. Everyone’s hand is out.

Then a pandemic sneezed.

The designs are still up at bureauofbaddecisions.com, connected to a print-on-demand store. But it’s not the same, is it?

We crave authenticity. Talk endlessly about its value. But when we can’t quite get there, we settle. Kente cloth; beautiful, yes, but often made in China or elsewhere. Mass-produced tradition. Easy consumption.

The Tro Tros are still out there. Lurching through traffic. Painted in their own peculiar glory. Each one different. Each one moving.

Maybe the beautiful wrong in Tro Tros Go is knowing that you can hop off and still get back on again, no matter where you’re going.

I’d still like to make a go.

I’m sure the Tro Tros would too.

Still waiting to lurch.

We fuck fast.
AI, chat, and Slack leave no time for knowing.
We fuck so fast we don’t even wear pants anymore,
much less talk about what we’re reading.

And while I talk about intent, and briefs, and desire,
acceptance is where failure is found.

We may metaphorically fuck a brand or message,
but we’re done so fast,
the smegma doesn’t even have time to stain our hearts.

We don’t stay.
We don’t return.
We don’t care.

The second chance is where meaning lives.
And we’ve optimized it out.

People are starting to wake up to friction again.
In product. In code. In interface.
Something to catch on.
But speed killed standards.
Visual consistency is gone.
Voice is vapor.

Coca-Cola used to be dad.
Pepsi was the backdoor thrill.
Now brands don’t last long enough to cheat on.

They come,
they go,
and they’re gone
before anyone even knew they were there.

I’ve started working with some wonder-kids,
already entering their gone-now phase.

Launch noise fading.
Voice slipping.
Vision diluted by speed.

Not failing.
Just disappearing before anyone notices.

They want a brand.
But they don’t have a self.
They want visibility.
But they’re invisible on Google.
They want distinction.
But they copy everyone else.

And instead of fixing the fundamentals,
they’ve built a 20-person noise circle around one art director
who stopped listening five requests ago.

They’re not building a brand.
They’re building a barrier to attention.
Not for the consumer. For themselves.

They’ll never reach their audience
because they already lost the one person who could’ve translated intent into form.
Before the consumer got confused,
the creator stopped caring.

And to be clear —
intent isn’t a Google Doc full of lorem ipsum,
a list of links,
or a slightly homophobic note to avoid pink.

It’s not the folder.
It’s not the font.
It’s not the AI-prompted tagline that sounds like a TEDx talk for wristbands.

Intent is acceptance.
Intent is desire.

It’s the truth before the build.
The thing someone might actually feel
if you’d just shut up long enough to let the work speak.

But they can’t.
They won’t.
They think consensus is clarity.
It’s not.

The real work never had a chance.
Because they never had the guts to want something real
and wait for someone else to want it too.

If they build it, will anybody come?
They’re certainly rearranging the chairs,
but in an empty theatre, rehearsals are just as valuable as masturbation.
And if there’s one thing these guys should know a lot about,
it’s jerking off.

Intent begets acceptance.
That part’s true.

But inside the beautiful wrong,
even the purest brief can't connect
if the process moves faster than belief.

If the work shifts so fast it outruns itself,
then second chances die
before acceptance even swipes right.

No pause.
No return.
No resonance.
Just a perfect miss.

And the truth is,
the thing we wanted most
was for someone to come back
and feel it again.

Acceptance.
Acceptance.
Come again

.

Prologue:
Having spent a fruitful year in Ghana, I was prepping for a journey back to Singapore. My departure from Accra coincided with rumors of a novel virus originating from Wuhan. By the time I set foot in Singapore, these rumors were evolving into alarming news.

The Prelude:
My Singaporean vacation ended all too quickly. As my return date to Accra drew near, my wife and I scoured stores for masks, hand sanitizers, and the like. It was clear, the world was on edge. Unfortunately, stocks were already depleted. With only a few masks from my sister-in-law and other items of comfort I headed back to a job in a place I’m not sure I’d have ever sanely considered.

A Journey Fraught with Challenges:

January 31:
On my Air Italy/Qatar flight back to Accra, I had stops in both Doha and Milan. It was in Milan, soon to be an epicenter of the outbreak in Europe, where I ironically procured some masks. For about 12 hours, I hunkered down in a hotel trying not to touch anything and numbing myself for an Alitalia flight to Accra.

February 2:
Back in Accra, amidst the escalating pandemic, I began transitioning into a new living space: a much nicer compound close to the US Embassy. Perhaps foreseeing what was to come, I stockpiled sanitisers, fresh water, and preserved foods. It was also back to work with shooting TV commercials, working on ad campaigns and managing staff.

February 12:
A trip to the U.S. Embassy for an impending passport renewal was crucial. I’m told it could come as fast as 3 weeks for which I’m grateful — This is some foreshadowing for the folly to come.

The Emergence:
Come March, the virus, now known as COVID-19, was on everyone’s lips. I’m following online and BBC Radio Africa.

March 14:
Ghana reported its first cases. I received advisories from the U.S. Embassy suggesting foreigners remain discreet. My passport, which should’ve been with me, turned into a recurring concern, prompting bi-daily follow-ups. My after work stops for a drinks with other expats sees crowds dwindle and people moving down the bar from anyone with a cough or sniffle.

Decisions & More Decisions:
My belongings needed to be consolidated. Among them was my bicycle, which I considered shipping back. Trish (my wife) and I made multiple attempts to secure a flight to Singapore. BA, SA, Ethiopian — each booking met with cancellations. By the end of our endeavors, Ghana had sealed its borders and closed the airports.

In the office we begin having management meetings, and having been connected to Asia remember SARS and other scares. I suggest laying out work from home plans, covering enough mobile internet routers and increasing data plans as Ghana’s infrastructure lacks in wired internet, reliable electricity and water. In just a few days we’d be sending everyone home and my visits to the office would become more and more infrequent only to gather things to work from home. We begin getting client “briefs” from organizations like UKAid for public service content to combat the virus.

In the background of these moves, friends had began contacting connections in consulates, embassies, senators and even people associated with the clandestine services to gain influence to both speed the delivery of my new passport and find me a seat on a flight out of Ghana.

March 26 & 27:
The situation got really real when U.S. evacuation flights began. With the virus gaining momentum, I was simultaneously warned about potential backlash against foreigners. I applied for a spot on an evacuation flight and my network mobilised. The Embassy’s final notice sent me into overdrive with just 48 hours to finalise affairs. The US Embassy also announces its closure.

An Awkward Conversation
Everything is moving incredibly fast and already working remotely with Zoom, Calendars and WhatsApp ruling our lives, I send a message to the other heads of management of my evacuation — I’m actually on the last embassy flight out of Ghana from a shuttered airport. I was the first of us to raise the alarm and the first to begin making moves to get out of a place with such a brittle healthcare system or abilities to fend for itself. My boss, Joel strikes an imposing figure, but is friendly, generous and very smart. He immediately calls me in surprise and with concern, but understands. He’s also the last person I speak to while still in Ghana as he calls me while I’m in the airport to make sure I’m okay as well.

On the Ground in Ghana:
Lock-downs began fairly quickly as Ghana has managed the threats of Ebola for a long time. Those not wearing masks or breaking curfews are punished and the military gradually begins setting up check-points. The people seem alarmed, but there’s none of the panic that I’m seeing on the news from other places. For the most part, there are no big “runs” on grocery stores — but then, the western stores are expensive. I did manage to purchase a quite large amount of sanitizers, but there are no masks to bolster my already dwindling reserves.

March 28:
Over the past couple of days, packing has been happening, but on the 28th it really sinks in. What’s to be taken, what’s to be left behind and what normally expendable items like hand-sanitisers and dried foods became more important than t-shirts and notebooks. It’s in this reality that finishing every beverage in the fridge kicks in and transitions from a coping to a sleeping mechanism. I’m packed (mostly), drunk totally and am going to leave a lot of stuff behind for the young kids that guard the compound.

The Departure:

March 29:
After a long night, I departed for a deserted airport at 4 am. The road, typically bustling, was manned by soldiers at checkpoints. Their mere presence was intimidating, but I was allowed passage without hindrance. That day, thanks to the efforts of close friends and connections, I was to board a U.S. Embassy evacuation flight to an unknown destination.

Kotoka International Airport is closed, but a huge line of Americans and Green Card holders are outside with whatever belongings they could fit to travel. I’m told by connections to the government to look for Lt. somethingorother, a “cultural” attache with an athletic build and military look who will guide me through — he claims not to know anything, but makes sure I’m in line and seemingly everyone else knows me. It’s in the airport that I sign a “promissory note” to repay whatever it costs to get me out. The line is incredibly long and slow moving with many people on “stand-by” including a family of 7 who are missionaries who are definitely going to get a surprise when it comes time to pay back Uncle Sam.

There’s still no news of my new passport and everything in the airport is closed. It takes 5 hours to check-in and at least one more bribe is suggested by a local at security, but there are just too many diplomats around to force anything from me. There’s one small shop that’s been opened to sell drinks and snacks from which I buy a couple of bottles of water and wine for the flight ahead. I then wait for another 4 hours. There’s a passenger plane on the tarmac for us and a military cargo plane for luggage and I suppose embassy items. There’s no place to charge my phone or really sit, so I’m on the floor and waiting.

The flight itself is exactly as you’d think. It’s people with make-shift masks who carry screaming babies along with their belongings while trying not to touch anything or look at each other. I’m sitting next to who must be some sort of holy man who’s somehow been failed by whoever his god and gotten the middle seat. The flight is hot and long and includes a terrible meal which I assume led to the horrible state of the toilets. I feel like I’m going to throw up the entire flight, but don’t want anyone to hear me heave and think I’ve got Covid.

Touchdown & The Journey Ahead:

March 29:
Landing in DC, Dulles is empty and everything is closed. Nobody checks my temperature or anything else. We just pour out into America and are left to our own devices. Jesus! As I emerged from the building, no taxies were available and instead was taken on a 3 minute drive to my hotel by a sometimes Uber driver who charged me $30 and seemed to be waiting for just the right “mark”.

At the Marriot, I check in, get to my room and promptly “dry-heave” for about 3 minutes, try to come to my senses and then start sending updates to Singapore, the US and wherever else. I order a hamburger which is left for me in a hallway 2 floors away for dinner.

March 30:
The early morning of the day after Ghana has me scrambling for a plan. Trish desperately wants me to take a shot at flying through London to get back into Singapore, despite my passport issues. I assure her that it’s not what my mental state is willing to deal with after the past month, and this plan is doomed to fail.

Instead, I’m booking a rental car and mapping out a trip from DC to my sister Janet’s house in Missouri. A taxi is booked, and I’m off to first find a SIM card. A very kind driver helps me to find one after four stops and an hour of searching. Then, I’m off to pick up a car at an agency that is so overflowing with unwanted rentals they just say, “Pick whichever you want.” I find the biggest SUV they’ve got and head to the Midwest.

It takes a full day of driving across the country at high speed with few stops. I stop for Taco Bell in Ohio along with a check for masks and snacks. Later, I stop for gas and one of the few public bathrooms open. After a couple more stops for petrol along the way, I pull into a small town in Indiana, just outside Indianapolis, to stay the night. The hotel is nearly empty, and it’s White Castle for dinner, along with many Zoom calls to update Trish, friends, and family.

In the morning, it’s back on the road with a stop for provisions in Illinois and the temptation to visit one of their newly legal “clinics.” Outside of St. Louis, I pass a cop who sees me as the only car on the road and doesn’t want to interact with any other person — he smiles and waves as I’m going about 90mph.

Hours later, I’m in Missouri. I stop for more gas and to drop off the car at the closed agency. My sister has their extra car waiting, with the key under its floor mats, so I can enter their home with no interaction at all. I’m at the place I’ll be for the next 6 more months.

Epilogue:
This wasn’t the return journey I had anticipated. Each step was met with unforeseen challenges and invaluable lessons. Through it all, I leaned on the unwavering support of my friends and loved ones, proving that even in times of uncertainty, one can find solace in community and hope.

Part 2: The Basement Odyssey

Transition to Stability:

April 1:
Awakening to a new reality in a foreign land, my day was brightened by something just right for dinner: a bbq pork steak and baked potato. Janet and Denny (my brother-in-law), managed to send down a delightful meal, complete with a luxury I missed from Ghana: a fresh SALAD. The touch of disposable dishes for safety was a welcome gift.

Basement Blues:

April 2 — July 9:
My life, for the next four months, was defined by the confines of my sister’s basement. The isolation was palpable. Our only tangible connections were the meals Janet left for me at the top step and our fleeting interactions during my grocery deliveries.

In these months, I drove once each to see my parents — celebrating my mother’s birthday in the open air and visiting my ailing father in the hospital. These visits underscored the uncertainty of the times.

Routine set in: My days began at the crack of dawn — 3 am — to sync with my job in Ghana. Work, Zoom meetings, and a perpetual wait for dinner. Perhaps my escape from the basement’s confines was an overindulgence in food, drink, and entertainment.

Brightening my solitude, my niece’s daughter regularly sent me her artistic endeavors in crayon, during their visit. My tenure in the basement was also punctuated by a steady stream of deliveries: disinfectants, masks, and computer equipment. Concurrently, a whirlwind of emails swirled between the Singaporean Government, the US Government, and the US Embassy in Ghana, concerning my stranded passport.

It’s easy to look at this time in the basement as solitary, but in reality, it was a period of constant connection and reconnection with people. I was in touch with friends from various points in my education and jobs from all over the globe, managing three screens of work throughout the day. The basement itself was fully equipped with a kitchen, TV, laundry, and even a pool table. The home was in a rural, wooded area, allowing for daily nature walks. One of my best friends made occasional stops for conversation, and once, a nice lesson in micro-dosing. Yes, I was in the bunker, but I was far from alone.

Bureaucratic Triumph:

July 9:
The day marked a significant win. After being cooped up for over three months, my passport, which had been ensnared within the locked doors of the Ghana embassy, was finally in my grasp. Perhaps the concerted efforts from emails, senatorial interventions, and my persistent follow-ups, had finally paid off. My exit from the basement was in sight, but bureaucracy’s second phase awaited as I’d have to apply for special permit to enter Singapore.

Homeward Bound:

August 11:
The day was marked with a mix of trepidation and excitement. From the Southwest Airlines Terminal in St. Louis, my 34-hour transit to Singapore commenced. It starts with an early morning with my brother-in-law Dennis, whose basement I’ve been occupying for nearly half a year, driving me to the airport and where in true American style, the bar is open and people are getting “fortified” before piling into one of the few metal tubes still flying — a nice man making his way home with his son chats with me for a while and buys my drinks — people seem weirdly together in this thing we’re doing.

August 12:
A desolate Hilton with bare amenities greeted me during a prolonged layover. It was here that I’d spend most of the afternoon and into the next day. With no room service, no gift shop, mostly empty vending machines, and nary a shop in sight, it was only a couple of bags of chips and a dip into my stash that could tide me over while checking and rechecking my flight status and watching bad hotel TV. A nap, a shower, and a hangover had me ready to catch the airport van.

As I entered LAX for my final leg home, a ghostly silence pervaded. Limited amenities, closed shops, and shuttered lounges were the backdrop of my wait. Equipped with masks, sanitizers, and a face shield, I prepared myself for the arduous flight ahead. Onboard, while food and wine served as temporary distractions, the discomfort of breathing through the regularly replaced masks was a stern reminder of the pandemic’s grasp.

This whole first bit of going home from “home” had a similar vibe to my first flight out of Ghana, but with a more accepting attitude. It’s like everybody knew it was going to be a complete shit show going in and if very little made sense along the way we all knew we weren’t alone. As I headed into security screening it was like the TSA dogs didn’t even want to be near anyone.

Quarantine Chronicles in Singapore — Part 3

Long doesn’t exactly describe the flight I’d just been through. It was easier than the original evacuation as PPE was in abundance and we all know where we were going, but having been stranded for months in one place and emerging in another was a little daunting. I’d paid for Premium Economy for more room, but the plane was so empty that everyone had a row to themselves. On landing, it was just another chapter where I’d just go where I was told and do the same.

Touching down at a ghostly Changi Airport, I’m welcomed with endless paperwork checks and an interminable wait for luggage. One poor woman was waiting, but also worried about check-in and getting back into China where she was hoping to pack-up her family and belongings to leave.

We gather in small groups and wait to be told which bus to board.

Welcome to The ParkRoyal on Kitchener
This is my home for the next 15 days. After filling out online forms, a Covid test and being one-by-one escorted to our rooms. We’ve got a set of towels, sheets and a few basics like water. Food will be delivered and will change throughout the stay. Laundry service is available for a charge and towels will be left at the door daily. There’s internet and TV and not much else besides a sealed window. Nobody actually knew we were coming to this hotel before we saw it through the bus windows.

The System: There are 3 knocks a day for food generally happening within window of an hour or two. I’m also to take my temperature and enter it on a government site. There will be calls to make sure I’m still in the room (usually when I’m in the bathroom). I can take deliveries and it is with this that I set up accounts at Food Panda and some other sites.

I’m Still “in” Ghana:
In the US I was working from 8 time zones behind Ghana and now, I’m working 8 hours ahead, so where the day in Dutzow, Missouri started at 3am, now my days went from late afternoon to late into the night and early morning. Hilariously more of my teams didn’t even know I was outside their country until much later.

August 13th: I think they may’ve served me breakfast on the plane, but my mind was way too fucked to remember.

• Dinner: Questionable chicken wings that tasted like last night’s dinner. Cold eggs mixed with glass noodles and a dense, mysterious egg cube — Dinner in quarantine makes me think of a prison in Norway, but with more palm trees

August 14th: Quarantine in Singapore continues. Leftovers seem common. Awaiting what’s next with some humour.

• Breakfast: A déjà vu of cold chicken wings. The unidentified dense cube returned.

• Lunch: Cold, spring rolls, vinegar-tasting flat noodles with fish. Cold fish cakes. Dessert: a passable eclair.

• Dinner: Miso soup, chicken with a side of palatable broccoli. The out-of-place container of sweet-and-sour sauce remained unopened.

August 15th: Day 3 in quarantine. Getting some interesting meals.

• Breakfast: Congee, orange juice, and an unidentifiable fruit.

• Lunch: A delightful spread of vegetables and noodles, greatly improved with the morning’s pepper stash.

• Dinner: Cereal prawns with rice and miso soup. Always devein your shrimp.

• Surprise: A care package from Trish: Tea, pretzels, coffee, and hot sauce.

August 16th: Day 4 brings more intriguing meal combinations.

• Breakfast: An Egg McMuffin doppelgänger with hash browns.

• Lunch: Two preparations of fish with rice. Dessert: Tolerable pound cake.

• Dinner: Shrimp and noodles. The corn chowder’s purpose remained a mystery.

News Arrives: A week before leaving the US, I visited my father for the last time while he was in hospital. Early in the morning I receive a call that my dad is gone. He was 95.

August 17th: On day 5, the meals reminded me of airline food.

• Breakfast: Eggs, sausage, hash browns, and a pear.

• Lunch: Overcooked noodles, fish, and a savory pie.

• Dinner: A treat from a German restaurant. Thanks foodpanda.sg!

August 18th: Day 6 in quarantine. Meals are becoming quite repetitive.

• Breakfast: French toast with hash browns and sausage.

• Lunch: Noodles with fish, vegetables, and watermelon.

• Dinner: Chicken leg, fries, slaw, and a tempting bun.

August 19th: Day 7 in quarantine and hoping for a change in meals.

• Breakfast: Steamed eggs with beans and mushrooms.

• Lunch: Shrimp with noodles and pickled cabbage. The chili oil was a lifesaver.

• Dinner: A heartwarming note from the Park Royal hotel staff marked the halfway point.

August 20th: Day 8 brings pancakes and an interesting soup.

• Breakfast: Pancakes with eggs and chicken bacon.

• Lunch: A prawn-filled soup.

• Dinner: An assortment of curries with rice and roti.

August 21st: Day 9 is filled with unexpected combinations.

• Breakfast: A “Where’s Wally” assortment of breakfast items.

• Lunch: Fried shrimp with vegetables and noodles.

• Dinner: Chicken rice, but compartmentalized.

Other notes: Intrusions while in the bathroom and frequent check-ins are disrupting my binge-watching of “Psych.”

August 22nd: On day 10, I’m getting used to the pattern of meals.

• Breakfast: After a late-night call, woke up to congee.

• Lunch: A plate with chips, apple, and macaroni noodles.

• Dinner: Cereal prawns, rice, and greens.

August 23rd: Day 11 in quarantine.

• Breakfast: Another McMuffin clone with apple and orange juice.

• Lunch: Flat rice noodles with shredded chicken and wontons.

• Dinner: Curry chicken with rice.

Special Note: I underwent a COVID test and received an evacuation flight bill from the US Government dating back to my flight from Ghana to DC. The cost of the one-way flight is over $1500.

August 24th: Day 12 brings another variety of meals.

• Breakfast: Runny eggs with hash browns and chicken sausage.

• Lunch: A fish dish with an aroma so strong it remained untouched.

• Dinner: Rice with veggies and beef.

August 25th: Day 13 in quarantine. Meals are becoming monotonous.

• Breakfast: A smorgasbord of continental delights.

• Lunch: Fried rice with chicken drumstick.

• Dinner: More beef with rice.

August 26th: The final day, Day 14, in quarantine.

• Breakfast: Steamed eggs with beans.

• Lunch: Tofu with sauce, noodles with shrimp.

• Dinner: Rice with veggies and sliced chicken.

Special Note: I received a congratulatory sticker indicating I’m COVID-free. There was a nice origami crane in the envelop too.

August 27th: The last half-day before the end of my 6-month ordeal.

• Breakfast: Roti prata with curry, an orange, and apple juice.

For all the ups and downs, okay meals and bad, the routine provided a strange comfort. The world outside the window kept moving, but inside, time felt suspended. Meals became more than sustenance; they were markers of time along with the daily digital check-ins and calls to make sure I was still there, anticipation, and small surprises. An end to quarantine didn’t just mean freedom, it was the conclusion of a peculiar food adventure that would be remembered for a long time and constant fodder for photos for social media.

• Morning Happenings: Received a congratulatory sticker indicating that I’m COVID-free as I anxiously await my final release. Someone will escort me to check-out at noon. There will be a sticker to wear and paperwork to complete.

People are released room by room, taking them to the lobby. And there, after what feels like an eternity, Trish welcomes me, and we embark on a taxi journey to a home I’ve only ever seen in pictures. This house isn’t just new to me; it was bought and renovated during my long absence.

A Little Bit of Ghana Comes Home:

My bike somehow managed to arrive in Singapore before I did, but it wasn’t without a few hitches. When it was shipped back from Ghana, I had carefully packed my bike with a bluetooth keyboard, cables, a bluetooth mouse, and other computer gear, cushioned in so many scarce and “valuable” rolls of toilet paper.

But when I unpacked it in Singapore, it was evident that the Ghana Customs had left their mark. They pilfered everything — from the cables to the computer equipment. They took bike locks, but I had the keys with me. The only things they left untouched were the toilet paper and the bike, whose seat alone was worth more than the rest. I may’ve gotten through the airport without paying any of the usual bribes, but seems Ghana Customs decided on a departure fee of their own designs.

Concluding Thoughts:

After 15 days of quarantine, countless meals, and a myriad of emotions, I’m finally free. The experience has been a roller coaster, filled with uncertainties, moments of humour, and self-reflection. During the stay I worked, I lost a parent and rolled in along both in the place I wanted to be, yet suspended in a space far away. As I stepped out into the world again, I was filled with gratitude for the simple things that my journey before and during didn’t afford me. I knew I was home, but in honesty it took months to really feel like I’d arrived.

A funny thing is that what I arrive to is just a different type of quarantine. We get delivery of food as local restaurants are closed. I am able to exercise as I’d manage to lose 40kg in the upcoming months and for some reason I became obsessed with watching videos of others in hotel quarantine around the world to compare their experiences to mine. Their food may’ve been better/worse, they might have gotten exercise times or even hotel Zoom party nights, but what was common is that nobody wanted to prolong the experience.

Friends have been telling me to write this all down somewhere, and I guess that’s what I just did. Thanks, if you actually made it to this end. I’m not sure I ever will.

.

Not so long ago, in the year 1993, the pioneering scientific team Wallace and Gromit advanced the concept of human–machine synthesis. A wearable apparatus for the lower torso and joints. Not just trousers, but trousers with intent. Stitching together technology and inspiration, want and need, they took the first absurd stride into a future where flesh would no longer walk alone. Comedy on screen, prophecy in clay. Prophets in plasticine, trousers as scripture. The exoskeleton was no longer science fiction—slapstick laying down the blueprint of desire. What began at the drafting table imbiggened into a message far more advanced.

The dark ages.

Humanity fucked itself.
Rome falls.

Darkness falls.

And no matter how many Trojans we wrap ourselves in, we know we’re all fucked.

The center doesn’t hold.

The craft caves in.

The signal drowns in its own noise.

Blame progress. Blame ourselves. Blame Skynet if it makes you feel better. But the truth is simpler, and worse: marketing, creativity, communication; they’ve been rotting for a while. We’re not entering the dark ages. We’ve been descending into them.

Creatives are scared. We’re pissing ourselves because our minds have done the work, and the ones who could do the math were the problem solvers. We know where this road ends: nihilism. Sure, we’ll fight, we’ll collaborate, we’ll slap at the water to stay afloat. But eventually, the LLMs will smother whatever’s left of our voices.

And the worst part? We’ve been rehearsing our own extinction. Collaboration became competition; competition became mimicry. Software copying software, humans copying the software. The broth getting thinner each time.

Today we grapple with MidJourney, with the ethics of abandoning photography, with brainstorming only against Claude’s agreeable voice. We swap out lenses and light for latent space, trade rooms full of voices for one endless autocomplete. We call it collaboration, but it’s collapse. We call it progress, but it’s decay.

That’s the devolution: a creative class feeding on itself, mistaking churn for invention, mistaking output for meaning.

The Singularity of Creative

We are the Alpha and the Amiga 2000. The end, and the beginning of the end, birthing the next beginning. Kurzweil’s truth, the one we’ve dreaded, lands right here. Where Creative Suite fucks AI and spits out a new human baby. The Singularity. The next evolution of design, copy, ads, marketing, mayhem. Our craft—re-coded, re-born, Re-Fleshed.

But here’s what we’re really talking about: a new trinity of creative survival.

The Human. Flesh. Intent. Desire. Original sin that drives creation. Flesh that wants. Flesh that knows its preferences for kerning. Flesh carrying experience and taste.

The Machine. Processing power. Infinite iteration. Not creative itself—but the instrument that manifests desire at impossible speed and scale.

The Fusion. Flesh enhanced. Where intent and taste don’t get lost in the prompt. Where they are amplified. Where imagination breaks its ceiling.

Not salvation. Resurrection:
Reflux. Rejoice. Re-Flesh.

Ray Kurzweil has been sounding it for years: human-level AI by 2029, full human–machine fusion by 2045. Brain/computer interfaces, neural nanobots, lifespans stretched beyond. Even Popular Mechanics speaks it—escape biological limits, or get left behind. My Meta Ray-Bans will make the water warmer as they advance, and we sink deeper into the valley.

The options are dark. Transcend, or drift. Augment, or autocomplete. Evolution or obsolescense.

This matters for creativity, design, communication and marketing; the industries pretending to be alive while already decomposing. Software alone lacks dimension. Generative AI spits out “good enough” to place and present. That strips creative work of scarcity and turns it into commoditised filler. If we only use the software, we collapse into operators, prompt-pushers, brand janitors.

But human enhancement changes the ceiling. Neural interfaces. Real-time co-processing with AI. Maybe even genetic or chemical tweaks. It’s not about fighting the machine; it’s about merging with it, raising the limits of imagination and translating intent. Campaign cycles that once took months collapse into days, not just because machines run faster, but because augmented humans fuse intuition with speed. Content floods every channel, but only enhanced perception cuts through with resonance. Taste, timing, empathy—machines fake them, humans bring blood to the edge.

The alternative is bleak. Marketing as low-skill automation. Design homogenized until everything looks like the same three prompts. A world without risk, without irrationality, without the beautiful wrongs that once cracked open new truths. Put bluntly: software replaces; enhancement evolves. Re-Flesh or rot.

It’s hard not to think in poetry and prophecy when new gods emerge. But we have to accept it: the next design gods, the next David Carsons, Ogilvys, even the next Alfred E. Neumans; they may not think verbally or visually at all. They’ll activate on a higher plane. Perception versus reality won’t even be a fight anymore. It won’t matter. It won’t be relevant.

What we fear today, what feels like science fiction, like some new Aliens: Earth—is already on its way. A merging of flesh and machine that will take what we call marketing, what we call design, what we call visuals, further than any endless scroll of AI ads could dream. Because if AI is the infinity, then we are infinity plus one.

The Practical Reality

So here we are. Heavy on rant, heavy on prophecy, but let’s be honest about where we’re actually at. Intuition is baked into everything. Autocomplete finishes my sentences before I even think them. Elon wants to jam chips in our skulls—I don’t trust him. Would I trust Adobe to upgrade me? Maybe. Maybe not. Is it reasonable to open up my brain for access? Can we ever really maintain control?

All good questions. But there will be a tipping point.

Because if we want to stay relevant, if we want to keep intent and control in this new reality, if we want to engage in something more than making handicrafts and lying to ourselves that it still matters, then we’ll have to face it. The pause only lasts so long. The Re-Flesh is coming.

If I know my preferences for kerning, if I can flash fifty logos in my head before three auto-map themselves across space, time, surface, even imagination; that’s not software anymore, that’s flesh upgraded. If I can see a million variations; my preferences tuned to your preferences, all threaded through connective meaning; then that’s design at a scale no moodboard ever touched.

I’ve written about machines buying from machines, a fridge deciding dinner, but there’s another way. The way where we become the machines. Where intent and taste don’t get lost in the prompt, they get amplified through it.

Because if we were all Terminators, the future wouldn’t just be bloodless automation. It would be crispier chips sold by sharper wits. Re-Flesh, not erase.

We are in the pause. The dark ages of design. The middle trough of an exciting void. Call it a dark age, call it the Uncanny Era—it fits. What we’re about to emerge into may stay perverse, uncanny, valley-shaped. But here we are, pausing. Sipping our Cokes. Floundering today. Refloundering tomorrow. And then… emerging.

Out of the pause.

Into the Re-Flesh.

Because if AI is infinity,

we are infinity plus one.

Enough.
Enough versions.
Enough advancements.
Enough tariffs.
Enough hate.
Enough false hope.
Enough of it all.

Back in the 1990s, the newest version of Photoshop was huge, bigger than the Freehand update, bigger even than Tuesday new music day at Vintage Vinyl.

Bigger than Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson on a boat.

ChatGPT 5 just launched, promising fewer hallucinations.

Just after, Tim Cook gave Trump this dumb doo-dad. An award for eating all his dinner. And everyone else’s too. A gold brick with a slab of Corningware on top. A bake-safe bribe for the boy king of consumption.

Semiconductors just caught 100% tariffs. And everyone’s pretending the ship isn’t taking on water. But we know. We’ve just run out of flailing. The clapping hasn’t stopped, it just looks different as we slap at the water to stay afloat.

Pinball used to be illegal. Too much stimulation. Pinging, popping, shaking, flashing lights bending young minds toward barbarism. New York banned it for thirty-four years. Los Angeles thought it was too dangerous for public health. Just the shaking got the libido going too much, that and the gambling.

How quaint.

In 1976, a writer from GQ who’d managed to buy a machine on the black market for his home fought like hell to legalize this danger to humanity. Roger Sharpe stood in front of the Manhattan City Council and called his shot, said he’d launch the ball down a specific lane to prove pinball was skill, not chance. Ball went exactly where he predicted. Ban overturned.

One machine.
Steel ball.
Mechanical flippers.

Now we carry pinball machines that deliver more sensory assault in seconds than entire arcades could produce in 1950. Progress, connection, peace in our time.

A chaos machine, activated by skill. Compare this enemy of the people to today’s version: Grok, who can not only overstimulate and brainwash, but now, with “Spicy” as an option in its image rendering, give young minds something to stimulate their joysticks beyond tilt.

The future of advertising, according to Zuckerberg and Meta, is entirely automated. Prompted by clients. Made by AI. Strategically deployed as a blitzkrieg of sameness.

It doesn’t just choke our headspace, it drowns us in drivel until we buy just to get it to shut up. Just to move on to the next thing it makes us buy. The agency holdings are worried, and they should be. And it’s not about how to fight a battle they absolutely will not win.

Ew for new.
Desire reduced to a refresh rate.
Product development cycles set to autoplay. Once production mechanics catch up, our personal product choices are going to explode.

And while enough should be enough, chaos delivers so much of the end that the nihilism machine becomes a self-replicating miracle of sorts. It negates versions of the end even before they can begin themselves.

There is no climax.
Just loops.
No final form.
Just next.

There’s not really anything to do to combat the cycle. In a world of unrelenting updates, unrelenting changes and unrelenting uncertainty, we’re stuttering over washboard gravel at a rate that would make someone from 1955 fucking explode. We used to experience change at 24fps, the rhythm of seasons, election cycles, product launches that took years to develop. Now we’re running full tilt, pushing updates every week, every day, every news cycle breaking before the last one processed. The idea of GPT launching anything ignores that we’re getting past that and are in pure evolution mode.

At maximum acceleration, everything becomes the same.

Back in uni, I built something like this, what today I would call a Sensory Suffocation Tank, for an art project.

Back-projection light walls,
an Einstürzende Neubauten soundtrack of power tools,
speakers on every side.

Today we call it Tuesday.

We keep piling on, thinking of letting somebody like Elon add a room onto this ever evolving house of sludge. When your brain space becomes another platform for wirelessly fed content, what then? The selling point is recognizing and remembering, but the reality is going to look like the episode of Black Mirror where the cost of all this is ads jacked right into our heads.

Pause.
I mean seriously, pause.

I miss the pandemic. I miss brainstorming. I miss mid-day bike rides where ideas just came to happen. I miss other unrelated, unrestricted efforts. An obsolescence we can see coming.

Last week I sat in on one of those industry calls; Zoom meets Ted meets “have you met Ted?” Advertising vets talking like it’s still their war and counting their old Lions. The subject? How to keep people from getting tired of advertising.

As if fatigue was a timing issue.
As if boredom could be solved with cleverness and a better media plan.

A DDB guy. A Saatchi guy. A media guy from somewhere I don’t remember.

It all felt like 2010. They talked about good ads. How to keep them entertaining. How to show them just once for impact. And no joke, how to run them across all the networks. TV.

I asked about Zuckerberg. About the monsoon rainstorm method. Non-stop, never-ending ad mist until you break and buy the umbrella. Or the razor. Or the fucking protein powder. Absolute submission by method.

I don’t think they understood. Or maybe they didn’t want to. They talked on about the clever young creatives they worked with, or used to work with. Or didn’t get the memo about the future of typewriter repair.

They may be stuck in the pause. Not such a bad place to be if you’ve found yourself in academia (or the third world).

They live not in an uncanny valley but a sort of Brigadoon. An uncanny Mariana Trench. Deep time. Unchanging light.

The fish down there has a bioluminescent lamp above its food hole.

I think it’s called a television.

I like these guys. And I like their host.

As a part of the audience, it’s great fun.

Remember when hallucinations were something we did for fun?

I’m gonna go out for a bike ride, maybe listen to a band whose entire album I know and whose name I remember.

A tab, a toke, a little something to not just put a pause, but kilter our off to being on… Something. Something shhhhhhhhh. Gorgeously tilted and beautifully wrong.

Wrong. Really wrong. Fucked up wrong.

If you got really good at wrong. Maybe you’ve lasted just long enough not to regret it.

40?

45?

50+?

Not a lot of us left without regrets.

Not a lot of us have had the guts and curiosity to survive life and the industry both.

Not enough left who know how shit’s made.

My shit?

Time kept with the largest digital stadium of its time; a blip in a One Show annual. Ecosystems around 30 seconds touching hundreds of millions. Rubylith cut with X-Acto. F-stops clicked and pushed. Bottles downed at Cannes. Shit lit, like we had shits to give.

Now?

We prompt decks and content. Vibes over verbs. Visuals, still and in motion, stitching a lifetime of detail into a single aspect ratio of truth.

The only thing holding connecting industry flux together are those from generations it’s been trying to push out. The generations who know how ink goes down, light reveals shadow and strategy affects idea.

History used to be about what happened. Today it’s all for the prompt to understand.

Problem:

experience that was wide and shallow got thin. Simply put, the kids don’t know enough method, history and tools to articulate their ideas, if they have them.

At sideways glance.

A snake eating itself.

An eternally vomitous serpent.

I’ve met the highest-level people in advertising; CEOs, holding company bosses, Fortune 500 CMOs. A speck in their lives, me as country head or an ECD. They won’t remember me. I remember one bragging about his time with Putin when I’d asked about the Olympics planning in Sochi. No shame. No hesitation. Just dinner with dictators. He won’t recall me, and maybe I’m lucky. He knew I was nothing.

Agency heads have treated the industry like the Olympics (people too). Sell a lie, throw it up, overcharge, leave the performers in their underpaid states. Leave the corpse behind for somebody else to clean up.

The posts about ending careers at 40 smell a lot like Mary Lou Retton on GoFundMe; America forgetting how much cereal she sold.

After work on 7 of “the Games,” the metaphor seems right. We pour cash and when I look at the places where ads went up, buildings were built and time was spent, it’s all a tear down and blight. What’s not is a cost that just keeps coming.

Agism at agencies is the model. Choosing youth over experience. Raising stars through the ranks, stripping them down, training them, making great; and as they’re performing at their highest level, the rug-pull. Done at 40. The cycle begins again.

Then tech showed up. Tore the floor out from under it. And they decided: we don’t even need that anymore. Less youth. Less training. Push them straight to middle and sooner out the door.

We did it with the typesetters, traditional photographers, pre-press a generation ago — which came to some pretty stupid conclusions: new hires were our new FA resource and that cost somehow was real trade for experience and talent.

Technology moves too fast for anyone to be native now.

WYSIWYG skipped code.

AI skips understanding.

What’s left to be fluent in—other than faking fluency?

By the time we’ve gotten to AI, a generation of creative leaders who’ve never had to articulate or understand the properties and voices of the tools they’re meant to mimic.

Righteous wrong, the ones where fucking it up, losing money; and sending office-wide apologies actually taught us something. Going through five ways to do something in Photoshop before getting it right wasn’t about the retouching; it was about everything else you learned along the way. Much of it still relevant today. And if universities won’t teach foundations, where do we start at work?

And while the newbie might know when it looks right, they can’t describe it enough to make it again. Under-printing only has meaning when you’ve seen it done and working with film grain informs authenticity of the prompt.

By learning all the wrong ways, and all of the right ways, and the breaking points; we learned the whole Kama Sutra of fucking shit up. And how not to do it wrong or at least do it the right interpretation.

Just when the profession is at a loss for words, there aren’t many of us left who still speak the language. And a lot of us, only spoke it near its end.

The everything that made today possible.

All the parts that Mad Men never told you about. The art and copy staff.
Hidden on the unseen floors.

With the photo editors and typesetters.

Dead. At least, that’s the story. Dragged into the furnace of the server farm, burned down to pixels, hoisted quietly on our T-Squares to bleed out and into the ink trays.

Creative Directors? Necessary.

If we claim that we can do it all with a current CD; the one that came up through attrition; do they have the time, the knowledge, and the capability to manage, be managed, and stand the ground that it takes to be a creative leader and voice to be a CD?

If not, then?

What’s left now?

Not Gen Z.

Not Alpha.

The ones still standing are Generations-Ex;

creative class, Gen X, ex-agency, ex-relevant, but still holding the last working compass.

The original sinners. The ones who powered the prompt before there was one.

Not because they know the right answer, but because they listen for the real question. That’s where the future of AI in agencies lives. In those who remember when judgment mattered. When taste was taught. When being wrong meant learning, not layoff.

They know “Ghost in the Machine” from its release, know AI from fables; they know what to ask for because they understand the visual and creative language those tools are mimicking. The prompt isn’t just the text box; it’s the lifetime of creative knowledge that tells you what to type in it. And if you look closely, it’s not mimicking Photoshop as much as it’s attempting analogue in dreams.

Recently, Sir John Hegarty pointed it out. He saw what many refuse to: that knowledge and experience; from those who’ve actually done the gig at every level and every touchpoint; matters now more than ever. The all-rounders. The polymaths of creativity. These are the prompt drivers who know what they want, and know the tools, descriptions, even the cameras to get there. They know the models, the glow, the skin, and the cinematic references. And they can do, in one word and one image, exactly what cuts through.

If AI can pull from that vast compendium of knowledge, then the last of the real creative directors can network it in ways that shouldn’t even be in the same book; much less the same page.

What the agency system did well with creative; when it remembered why and how; was make people better. Stronger. Less impacted by negativity. Like boot camp, it wore them down and built them up. It weeded out the weak. And by the time you made it to the place of your best work, you'd trained your replacement.

What it forgot is that there’s a school system, an experience funnel, and a client relationship; all part of the training. Professional creative has been eroding from the bottom for a long time. Hacking at the top is just habit. AI isn’t really the problem. It’s just the catalyst for the big duh we’re at today.

Sir John is right. My last hire was a 42-year-old that McCann just threw away. He is magnificent and makes GPT, Claude, MidJourney, Gemini, FLOW; basically whatever is on the dashboard; work like a team of ten. But it takes somebody who knows past, present, future, and which camera to prompt to get there. His CV, I found not by HR, but by circumventing it. They were the problem. They couldn’t see that he was using a typeface from Emigre; but fuck it. None of my other creatives could either.

Seeing only an org chart and not the roots that actually feed the rest of the young leaves with life, we’re stuck with a husk that’s dry and only fit to burn.

Truth is, a lot of us deserved to go. Not harsh. Just true. A lot never deserved to be here in the first place.

They were software operators. Typists. And as education failed, and the system failed, they stopped being the B or C teams; and took over the league. A lot never should’ve done more than coupon design.

People don’t last lifetimes. A hire lasts two years, maybe. Then move on. Age shouldn’t be an issue when a lifetime is two years.

Twelve-hour days? Past? We don’t expect them. The result: we don’t get the bonds of time; long nights and pain, the things that build trust. No lamenting. Only boundaries of second guessing.

We’ve built a system; a machine; where the average is better than it’s ever been. Where average is good, and great is average too, where do we find original?

When no one’s bothering to think, filling the boat with lemmings isn’t going to be the answer. The agencies consolidated their cubicles; but offloaded the menagerie of animals that kept the place alive.

Some of them are still out there. On islands. And they might just be able to save you.

Good luck finding a recruiter or HR person who can read a map.

Ask the original sinners. They speak in both tongues of the beautiful wrong.

He’s been with me longer than the print.
Longer than the last Report.
Since Holland, 1945.

Fairey’s piece came to China in a box,
got framed in New Orleans,
leaned quietly in corners
until Singapore, where it waited even longer.

Stephen’s not going anywhere.
Even if CBS decided they were done.
Even if truth’s harder to satirize now
because it’s already a parody of itself.

He stayed.
Some of the ones he held to account won’t.

We must all hang together.
Or most assuredly, we shall hang separately.
Because it’s all about the Benjamins.

He’s done what he’s done.
I do what I do.
From him, I learned clarity
wrapped in something else.

@stephenathome and @colbertlateshow are Beautifully Wrong.

#colbert #shepardfairey #holland1945#bureauofbaddecisions

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STANDING STILL

Time is a character, not a construct.
My friend Jimmie understands the measure of time better than most. He’s an expert in luxury timepieces. Let’s leave it at that. His expertise in time is more accurate, more human.

A watch only really matters if you can remember exactly who you were when you bought it, and who you became while wearing it. The patina isn’t just oxidation. It’s evidence. The scratches are the footnotes to a story you didn’t always mean to tell.

The sweep of the hands and the sweat accumulating on the back, the unnoticed friction of a machine working in rhythm with the body. The stillness of connecting within something not instant, but not entirely slow either. A reason to glance that isn’t just to see how many IMs have arrived to distract us from the face-to-face we should be paying attention to.

Tethered to the temporal, but twisting in the physics and philosophical terrors of an artificial revolution, I’m both asking why the fuck won’t people leave me the fuck alone, and knowing I’m not alone.

There can be presence in stillness, but taking a stand in the stillness is something else. It’s like prompting nothing and experiencing a genuine something. A discomfort for some. A welcome friend for others. In fact, often, real friends, in conversation.

Maybe all we ever needed was to remember how to be still.

FINDING STILL

We used to wait for the music to drop. Now we just wait for it to finish.

Music died. The ass of the recording industry got sucked right outside itself and touring became the profit center. The problem is that when AI takes all the KPMG jobs, nobody’s going to be lining up to see Abacus: The Musical. And worse yet, most mouth-breathers aren’t worth the breath or spit it would take to make a juice harp hum.

From a time when we scolded Milli Vanilli for letting others put voices in their mouths, we’re confronted with the absolute hurling of AI voices humping the top 10 at Spotify, with Velvet Sundown proving that using the machine as a tool still can’t beat the machine just being its own Mecha-Hitler of music.

From a time when we took a beat to speak and have a little clarity, we’re five years out of Covid, and left with empty Santa sacks where the gift of gab used to pour. If humanity is going to have to get out on tour and do things live, we’d better brush up on our human and learn how to talk again.

Because, while we say our greatest problem is loneliness, we’ve got plenty of things to talk to.

I confess that I’m sometimes one of ’em.
And I’m a god-damned ordained minister, one from the legendary Universal Life Church, called to serve from the back pages of Rolling Stone magazine. So yes, I’m a bit of a fount of wisdom and authority on these things spiritual. I am knowledgeable. I am wise. And I am paid up.

And I can see in my congregations that being alone doesn’t mean we’re not overwhelmed. It’s something the unfortunately named “social media,” and most marketers, completely miss.

Quiet may be the last luxury of all, whether it’s shared or solitary, whether it’s with others or with our own interior selves.

My friend Bill is an archaeologist, a doctor as it were. Published, revered, and appropriately disheveled. What I know is that when he’s not teaching, he digs up what was once spoken, covered, and forgotten.

Traditional archaeology digs up what was spoken, buried, forgotten.

This is different. Though I think Bill, especially the anthropological part of his party-in-the-front, business-in-the-back haircut, might understand. This is the hunt for what was never articulated to begin with. The glance that meant everything. The pause before a touch. The joke you don’t need to tell because the eyes already said it.

The luxury now is what stays unsaid, because it’s too true, too fragile, or too good to be exposed.

AI can’t scrape what we never said. It can’t optimize a whisper, at least one it can’t hear.

Where Da Vinci knew the real edges live.

What AI has trouble with is the messiness. It’s like how it gets metaphor wrong most of the time and doesn’t get the subtleties that only a human can get. We might say vibe" coding, but vibe only means intuition.

Da Vinci understood that reality lives in the transitions, not the absolutes. There are no lines in real life, but edges. The line is shadow and atmospheric transitions rather than graphic contour. The grey space where we feel edge without touching surface.

Authentic experience exists in the gaps, not in the optimized outcome, but in the friction of approach. The anticipation of stillness as excitement flips the efficiency paradigm entirely. Instead of rushing to resolution, the value becomes the suspension, the approach, the moment where desire builds before it’s satisfied.

This is where real communication happens, in the spaces AI can’t map. While machines optimize for frictionless delivery, human experience lives in the atmospheric transitions, the edges where shadow meets light, where anticipation builds toward something that can’t be prompted or processed.

After a client meeting, ironically with one of the fastest of auto builders, the red one, I escaped for a walk, just in and out of the rain.

And in a city as busy as Singapore, rain in itself adds a certain stillness.

In the CBD, right at the entrance to one of the big business MRT stations, there stands a sole outdoor newsstand. There are no machines. No real bookstores. Just a single old couple selling the New York Times, Financial Times, China Daily, and a few other international papers.

They’ve also got a few magazines of the type only a certain type of person buys, and not what you’re thinking. The kind with lots of words, not a lot of pictures. Titles like Monocle. Thick magazines made for people who are not “thick.”

In itself, it’s a pause. A stillness. A reason for some self-statuary reflection and immersion into slow moments at the nearest, darkest pub, where the wifi is weak and conversation has space to happen.

A place of certain luxury. The kind of spot where the bankers and the beautiful hide out in the state of their true selves.

MAKING STILL

In the same way that we’ve created slower response times for AI and found that the wait is part of the worth, how content at Apple and others makes us wait a week again, going back to the anticipation structure of TV, how we anticipate release, we build experience. The active stillness is the luxury and experience itself.

The anticipation is the experience. Not the journey to the reward, the anticipation is the reward itself.

The automatic watch keeps perfect time, but human behavior and connection is anything but. Real experience happens between the ticks in a perpetual motion device. In the gaps where the mechanism can’t account for breath, hesitation, the moment before touch.

It’s awfully quiet. And by this I mean the awful is encroaching into the everything.

It’s not silence. It’s a store of white noise, a droning fullness, a meaningless mew, a maddening gap. It is the antithesis of nothing. A substance of drowning content. It’s where AI finds its silence.

Cloudflare’s already started blocking AI crawlers, keeping them from collecting what was once public by default. Not to protect data. To protect signal.

How long before we start doing the same, with our expressions, our glances, our emotional fingerprints?

Maybe the future of luxury isn’t silence. Maybe it’s just not being read.

We’re shifting from articulation to implication.

From shouting to showing. From saying to signaling.

“Shhhhhh” is the new headline. Whispered understanding now says more than a press release ever could.

Persona Obscura isn’t a hiding place. It’s a choice. A mask that fits better than a brand voice.

This is where luxury lives now, in encryption, not exposure.

The most valuable signal is the one the machine can’t hear. And that’s the one worth keeping.

What to do? What to do?

Once authenticity’s been commoditized… Once luxury is both truth and lie, depending on the markup… Once brand becomes a fluid, priced, graded, poured into whatever vessel’s cheapest this week…

Do we define a new language?

Do we pretend to find some fresh vocabulary that hasn’t already been swallowed, scraped, and sold back to us in twenty-second videos with captions that somehow still miss the point?

Maybe not.

Maybe we just don’t say it.

Maybe we keep something for ourselves.

The real stuff, the quiet, the felt, the unsaid, was never meant to be branded anyway.

The anticipation of stillness isn’t just aesthetic resistance. It’s functional. It’s how we create genuine connection in a world optimized for processing. While everything rushes toward frictionless efficiency, we learn to design for the gaps. To cultivate the spaces where meaning accumulates between the ticks of an automatic world.

Because bringing people together isn’t about eliminating friction. It’s about creating the right kind of pause. The kind that makes people lean in. The kind where we stop being processed and start being present with each other.

Active stillness as luxury. Not passive waiting, but the intentional cultivation of anticipation itself.

The reward is the anticipation.
The approach.
The beautiful friction of having to wait, to lean into stillness and let it create something that can’t be prompted, optimized, or scraped.

Something that can only be felt in the spaces between what’s said and what’s understood. In the grey where da Vinci knew the real edges were the rim of the job.

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Contraceptive or curtain.

It all depends on the transparency and the lighting—on the fine distinction between dumbass and dimwit.

And while I was ready to write about such things, I found myself thinking instead about product development. About the delicate line between water careening off supple skin and into the drain—or your bar of soap careening off the dish and into the toilet.

So, we made a beautifully rightful wrong device.

And with great purpose, we urge you to get out of that Van down by the river and embrace the 51.50 of it all.

Proudly made in China and printed by machines for use with your ever-diminishing humanity.

Go git ’em.

https://lnkd.in/gwaXB-Hr

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Shit

Moves.

Fast.

In 1955, Pierre Levegh was driving a Mercedes at Le Mans past the edge of control. Tech not ready. Speeds not fathomed. On a track built for a yesterday that couldn’t imagine tomorrow. The crash killed him. Disintegrated the car. Launched flaming debris into the stands. Took 83 lives. Mercedes pulled out of racing for four decades. Jaguar toasted their win.

In retrospect, it was all inevitable. Speed outpacing structure. Progress with no pause. No one knew how fast was too fast until it was too late. And even then, the applause didn’t stop.

AI isn’t a car, but it’s moving faster than we are. We are the people in the stands. We are the drivers blind in the passing lane. We are the audience, still clapping, and cheering and clapping some more.

People keep calling for guardrails. But the US Congress is already proposing to freeze any AI legislation at the state level for 10 years. The track is open. There are no marshals. We’re all just in the road.

And we weren’t even really needed to begin with.

If we’re trying to sum up the past few years in one image, this might be it: shit gets built. Everyone claps. Then they realize their lower torso is gone. All because they trusted a guy named Claude with every unfiltered part of themselves.

We’re in that split second between “Hey, watch this” and the coyote goes splat.

Pony rides. Free balloons for the kids. That’s what marketing used to promise. Manufactured joy. Eventified delight. The illusion of experience as proof of participation. But we’ve moved on to something quieter. Flatter. More frictionless. And somehow, none of it feels like time gained. Just life lost differently.

We’ve replaced the wet market with Instacart, haggling with unboxing, presence with prompts, friction with fluidity. All the time we’ve saved and promised for freedom just shackles us to some other waste. We don’t choose anymore. The machine chooses for us, based on preferences we didn’t consciously make.

Summer camps began in the 1880s as cities filled and people worried about their boys becoming too soft. It was a place to get dirty. To be around others, to eat terrible food and tell stories and get bitten by bugs. And yes, maybe become a man. Later, they let girls in. It wasn’t perfect, but it was friction. Now we suit for chat within games and call it socializing. No dirt, no splinters, just time filled as time won. Sure, we feel something at camp wankyoself. But while we might’ve come, we didn’t really feel anything.

We don’t experience anymore. We optimize. Even boredom’s been rebranded. It’s now preoccupied boredom. Simulated activity on an endless feed. The pauses are gone too. Even stillness must audition as presence.

We see AI generated sets and content packaged as proof of connection. But stillness. Actual, unfiltered stillness. Might be the last real disruption we have left. Sitting silent, not scrolling, not planning, not pretending. Just being still in a world that flickers for our attention. It’s not aesthetic. It’s resistance.

The controversial Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei’s work doesn’t just stand still. It makes stillness feel dangerous again. His installations resist the flicker of convenience. And yet, despite their weight, they often find greater commercial resonance than the frictionless content LLMs now generate. That contradiction is the Beautiful Wrong in full effect. Tension that sells better than tranquility. Because at least it means something.

You can’t prompt desire. That’s why it’s the last thing we own.

Desire has gone missing. Not suppressed. Not indulged. Just untranslatable. Preferences pretend to be its proxy, but desire has edges. Shame. Risk. It can’t be toggled. It has to be discovered. Usually by accident. Always through friction.

Desire is the sin that sticks. But we’ve mistaken it for something safer. Preferences, prompts, playlists. Optimized choices pretending to be want. But desire has edges. It embarrasses us. It surprises us. And it never fits neatly in a dropdown menu.

The Beautiful Wrong. The last place the machine still hesitates.

It’s not like it should come as a surprise. But maybe the shape of it will be. It won’t be rage. We don’t do rage anymore. It might be protest, but like the pope shitting in the woods, no one’s really listening. People get tired of things, sure. But exhaustion won’t be the proof.

It’ll be quieter. Like quitting.

Like the PDF editing app you downloaded. The charge keeps coming whether you use it or not. But the difference is: you’ve stopped even pretending to care. You’ve stopped clicking, stopped showing up. Not in protest, just in fatigue.

AI will still be there. The tipping point won’t be a protest. It’ll be when we just stop caring. That’s how it will come. Because, like so many other advancements to make our lives better, we always find a way to fuck things up.

It’s not because we’re mad. It’s because we’re done.

Despite what humanity wants to think about itself, we’re addicts. Always have been. And we’ll take a good thing and ruin it before it even gets through lagom. Yeah, we’ll eventually fuck ourselves right out of existence. But not before the tipping totter gets a few more good tots in while we wait for the next overlord to finish the job.

The future doesn’t need prophets. Just a mirror and a memory. And when they feel trapped by the thing they once welcomed, when the tool becomes doctrine, they turn. Not always loudly. But they turn.

The infrastructure will remain: embedded, invisible, essential as electricity. But the conversational layer, the part that makes us feel heard while slowly making us irrelevant? That’s what we’ll tire of first. Because you can optimize the doing, but you can’t replace the being. And capitalism still needs people who can want things. The evolution will still come and we’ll still change, just not as we’re prompted as humans.

We’re already seeing it. Quiet exits from timelines. Phones in pockets during coffee. A little more texting. A little less story. Meta saw it too. Back when they bought WhatsApp, not as a messaging platform, but as the last place people still talked without being watched. The machine doesn’t notice. But people are trying to feel human again. And we’ll call that progress too. Until the tick forgets.

The Universal Fuck You isn’t rage. It’s a shrug. A missed charge. A blank screen where the prompt bled out.

The machines won’t notice. They’ll call it progress.

We’ll just call.

The proliferation of AI. The sludge of video, language, and un-created, unread, ignored output.
Even if we try, consuming it is impossible.
And pointless.

I’ve got a colleague who loves AI.
Thinks it’s the answer to everything, including things it can't do.
I don’t think he understands what it is.
It’s not intelligent.
It’s not helpful.
It’s not even thinking.
It’s a dada machine without intent.
A steam of no consciousness.

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He received a client brief, dumped it into a platform, asked for concepts.
No understanding of the ask. No intent. No prompt worth a damn.
That’s the original sin in all this.
Because when intent disappears, everything after it is just noise wearing pants.

The machine generated product.
He forwarded it to me and seemed proud of the accomplishment —
something he didn’t write, didn’t shape, didn’t even read.

And it reminded me of something I’ve been thinking for a while.
Language is losing value.
AI has accelerated the ignorance.
And we’re about to go through yet more confusing changes in how we talk about things.
Or don’t.

It won’t be the first time language changed shape.
Pidgin and Creole evolved out of necessity.
A long-ass time ago, Cuneiform got so damned pretty it stopped being useful.
It became performative. Ornamental.
Communication evolving out of itself.
Like a modern em-dash circle jerk, with Mesopotamian roots and Cannes ambitions.

And maybe that’s where AI leaves us.
Not quite in Monastic Silence,
but somewhere between winks and farts.
Emojis and fewer words.
Signals that cut through machine garbage.
Fragments that separate our intent
from AI still droning on about something we’ve already moved on from.

Because the machine hasn’t just filled the room.
It’s still explaining something we’ve already moved on from.
And in that gap between its logic and our lived absurdity,
that’s where the Beautiful Wrong lives.
Not correct. Not precise.
Just human enough to matter.

In design terms?
It’s like moving from the Renaissance back to Bauhaus.
We don’t need more flourish.
We need what’s essential.
Form following fuck.

The Disappearance of Value

Agencies and clients are trying to harness AI
To save time. To create more. To generate whatever’s next.
But it’s all to cover up a bigger truth:
The work doesn’t hold value anymore.

They think more output solves less impact.
It doesn’t.
They’re making more noise, not more meaning.

The belief that artificial ideas, words, and campaigns hold value —
That language is something so basic it can be automated —
That’s what’s killing it.

Our human construct was a fine house in a nice neighborhood.
And where we thought there were great new neighbours, a sinkhole opened.
Not sucking our world in.
Spewing an unending stream of shit.
Because artificial intent has no value.

Omnicom. WPP. The rest of them.
They’re looking at the eventualities.
Building massive AI units.
Consolidating departments.
Generating more work than ever.
All while posting revenue declines and bleeding creative value.

Meta’s AI tools are designed to out-advertise the agencies themselves.
But Meta can’t be human.
That’s what none of these shops seem to understand.

They’re ignoring the philosopher-technologists.
The futurists.
The people actually seeing where this all leads.

They’re throwing out the babies
To make room for more bathwater
And failing to notice how much of the seas they’re boiling away.

A Scream of Subtle Simplicity

I don’t write for patterns.
I write at angles.
The kind AI can’t read.

Smurf Logic

Everybody wanted to get all Smurfy with Smurfette
And Smurf the living Smurf out of her
Until she just couldn’t — when I was a kid.
And we understood it.
Because context is everything.
It’s not about the word.
It’s how the word is worn.

We’ve already stopped believing each other.
Marketing started it.
Politics scaled it.
And now AI?
It just made the faking frictionless.
So we’ve learned to split.
The face we wear. The one we mean.
Persona obscura, encoded in emoji.

And in introducing the next generation to Smurfette,
They might just want to give her a 🍆.

We’ve already stopped believing each other.
This isn’t about language.
It’s about proof.
And we’re running out of things we’re willing to understand.

Punch.
Fuck.
Fuuuuuuuuuck.

My passport arrived late to my story.

But that’s the tale to tell; the one that matters.
Not some over-used em-dash vaulting past the beautiful in between, and the ummmmm that makes the hmmmmmm worth HOHOing.

The tiny book forces a pause at every page.

Stitched thick with extra pages.
Scarred from the week it vanished in Ghana’s evacuation chaos.
Heavy with overlapping stamps that bleed into each other: timelines, deja views, ghosts.

Each stamp isn’t love for every place; it’s proof of something.
Something that grows beyond the moment.

Each boarding pass; each visa.
Receipts for the distance between who I was; who I had to become to get there.

An accumulation of blood and airport lounge chats.
Together: proof of life.

I’m not sure we can tell the same stories without the worn pages and markings—reminders, footnotes—of where we’ve been, and who we’ve been lately.

Now? Our faces are scanned at Changi Airport.

No questions. No smile. No blood.
Not even the welcome mint.

Frictionless passage. No mark left.
Not just an inky stamp missing; an entire paragraph of beginning and end erased from the journey.

Like so many of my school books; barely cracked.

I like the real, tactile passport. Especially with extra stitched-in pages.
It reminds us the uncanny valley isn’t where we live; it’s another kind of hallucination entirely.

The side-eyed curiosity of the agent. The casual thunk of the stamp.

These are the semicolons in a world that’s forgotten hard stops.

When we think and sell and design experience, it’s the pause where consciousness happens.
Where choice becomes intentional; not automatic.

But the world is greased for speed now.
Greased so slick there’s no grime left to catch on.

The real opportunity? Designing pause.
The semicolon moments where brands connect with humans, instead of just processing them.

The point is the pause.
The devil is the efficiency that won’t even offer boredom, a luxury in comparison.

Chris Valenzuela of Runway sells a world without “no.”

“You don’t have to work on one project. You can work on many more... more and more and more,” he told Nilay Patel on Decoder.

A non-stop generator of content. More. Faster.
Cutting out everyone but the words; and the edits.

I get it. Saving time. Saving money.

But he, and others, forgets what Coca-Cola once called: “The Pause That Refreshes.”

This vision of efficiency piles up waste.
Mountains of content no one can feel.

No space to be told you’re untalented.
No time to wonder why something works; or doesn’t.

No headphones coming off. No human contact.

Sometimes frictionless is nice.
Sometimes it’s dysentery.

And here, in this uncanny valley, even Death might pause… with cornflakes, perhaps.
Or a scribbled Starbucks cup.

Easy is too easy.
Hard is too hard.

And just right, that rare unicorn of experience, we seem hell-bent on murdering, just to keep ourselves busy.

The real irony: frictionless spend is the most dangerous kind.
It sneaks past us; little return, engineered for repetition.

Amazon’s one-click buying. Subscriptions. Swipes.

All designed to bypass the semicolon moment; the human pause where you might ask: “Do I want this?”

Remove friction, and you remove consciousness.

Online shopping doesn’t give us Oxford commas.
The tap and swipe don’t either.

And while I won’t lobby for the return of cash, there was something lost when we stopped knowing our drug dealer’s music collection.

When the US legalized weed, we didn’t just regulate a market; we erased a species of human friction.

The dealer with the weird records you sat through.

The new bong they wanted you to christen.

The quarter you bought; and the quarter of a story you had to hear before you left.

Because knowing the source always raised the price.

It wasn’t about efficiency.
It was about ritual.

The awkward pause. The unexpected lesson. The bad advice.
Proof of life, packaged with the product.

These days, the best drug dealers sell cars, handbags, and jewelry.

And they’ve learned the same trick, how to make friction feel like luxury, and luxury feel like friction.

But the real danger?

When we optimize away the pauses, we don’t just lose time.
We lose stories.
We lose the weirdos.
We lose the unexpected things that used to make a transaction human.

And when the brand experience is reduced to package in, package out, recycle or trash, all we’re left with is whether the delivery driver was charming, or there to deliver the un-ordered pizza.

In the end, no AI generator can give them back. Not the prompt. Not the model. Not the perfect feed.

Hello?
Well, I just don’t know.
I’m just comfortably numb.

Some of us see through the valley, the uncanny and the wonder. And I can see that the truth is that we might feel the lie, believe the lie and embrace the lie, but it's the feel of human touch and taste of human blood that yields the only truth by proof of life.

In past weeks, we've seen announcements at Google I/O and presentations of new motion content that is nearly as flawless as film or video. Flow AI, Veo 3. Another step into the believable unreal. Spellers of emotion, but not meat or soul. The pit of my stomach and the sour bile, an uncontrollable response to something just not right.

Whether it's artificial intellect or machine learning that is at the edge; cause one has a quality and the other a dada machine of reflux. One might make something and one might regurgitate something familiar. Both may be brighter than most people I've met, but an egg made by a human will always have something inexplicably more valuable.

Russell Crowe. Oiled up dirty and trying not to fuck Meg Ryan, back when she still looked like Meg Ryan and he didn't look like his thyroid was all out of whack. Proof of Life, 2000. In the old movie, the money for the proof came from an insurance company. In our new AI marketing realities, brands are about to find consumers demanding it just for a piece of their attention.

In the want and forearm deep in desire, brands are at the edge of the great second guessing. Cause as the unreal just got a little too real as AI characters complain about being cruelly cast in this commercial that places them in exactly where their emotions have them most real in feel. This for many will be the straw that pointed the tip just a little too deep.

This is the point at which embrace and consent may have us feeling violated, but also tasting the blood of our own humanities, finding that the car door is locked and we've bought the ticket and the ride is not something we have a choice in taking.

The ransom has flipped.

Maybe. I guess we'll see if Jony Ive and Sam Altman are conjuring a set of keys or just cramming in and making us sit on the stick. Because they've been up to something too and if the speculation is right, the irony of the Apple Big Brother ad is about to be lost on many as they AI their own selves into a generated snuff film of their own making, all with ads made just for them.

The prognostication is simple: people will demand Proof of Life. From advertising, products, design, and value. As things get more expensive, we will demand that equity is with humanity and not the owner class. Blood-earned wisdom becomes the unspoken currency of true luxury.

The Beautiful Wrong is coming. And it's going to cost them everything

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