I am staring at the blinking cursor, that rhythmic little heartbeat of digital anxiety, demanding I be brilliant (once again), or at least noisy, before the first coffee readers hit the social-web-stream. The AI fed Content Industrial Complex aka LinkedIN wants a hot take on the latest generative AI miracle or the sudden implosion of a social platform we all pretended to love for three years because the metrics behaved nicely in PowerPoint. It wants five leadership lessons from a sandwich I ate yesterday, or a deep dive into synergy, a word that should be legally restricted to physicists attempting nuclear fusion. It wants me to shout how I turned down a 6 digit deal because my LinkedIn content has traction. Sigh. Since people outsourced their communication to Chat GPT and co, the virtual world is shouting at a volume normally reserved for jet engines, and adding another shout feels less like strategy and more like tossing a deck chair off the Titanic to see if it floats. I watched a webinar last week where a man in a painfully expensive vest and Dilbert grade corporate hair explained the future of work using thirty-two slides of stock photos featuring people pointing at nano banana generated blue glass walls. He didn’t say anything true. He just pumped the silence full of expensive premium air because he was terrified that if he stopped talking, he -and his expensive consultancy fee- might disappear. It made me nostalgic for the era when we only spoke because we’d actually killed a mammoth and needed to explain which bits were edible. Or we launched something real, like Bluetooth, or digital maps… Now we talk to prove we are still rendering properly in the simulation.
Sometimes the most strategic move on the board is to shut the hell up.
We have confused motion with progress. We measure output in decibels instead of resonance, which explains why your inbox looks like a crime scene of unread newsletters and your LinkedIN is polluted with a plethora of increasingly unhinged empty-headed posts. I’ll be blunt: if what you publish doesn’t make someone stop scrolling and feel a real, physical twitch of emotion, anger, delight, even a low-grade existential itch, then you are not contributing. You are littering.
I ‘m (re)reading William Gibson, the science-fiction writer who basically hallucinated the internet before the rest of us had modems, and thinking about his idea of the Sprawl. In his books it’s the Boston–Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, cities fused into one continuous organism where borders don’t matter anymore. Corporations run it, governments trail behind, and people survive by hacking, trading, or disappearing into the cracks. The Sprawl isn’t futuristic because of technology, it’s futuristic because human life has adapted to permanent saturation. It’s a place where information moves faster than ethics, and nobody is really in charge, they’re just reacting.
We live in it now, except it’s not neon and chrome. It’s recycled questionable “wisdom”, reheated by large language models that have read everything and understood just enough to be bloody dangerous. I walked through Brussels last week, past the gray European Union buildings where very serious people write very serious rules about systems they barely use, and noticed the pigeons have cracked the code. They don’t have a content calendar. They eat crumbs, defile monuments, and fly away. There’s an elegance to that kind of immediate, unmediated existence that we’ve sacrificed in our frantic attempt to become “thought leaders”. We are not leading thoughts. We are herding cats in a thunderstorm while insisting it’s a strategic roadmap.
So what should I LinkedIn about today. Absolutely nothing. I am going to listen to an old dusty jazz record, something atonal and messy, and drink a beer that tastes like bitter oranges and poor decisions.
The internet will survive without my opinion for twenty-four hours.
