ACEssaysWork →

The Essays.

Browse: Marketing After the Machine →Browse: Work, AI & Judgement →Browse: Systems, Culture & Human Nature →
The Last AnimalREDUNDANT9 min

Work, AI & Judgement

The White-Collar Coalfield: Why Your Job Is Having Its 1984 Moment

Margaret Thatcher didn't destroy the coal industry because she hated miners. She destroyed it because the economics of extraction had permanently changed, and the same economics are now closing in on your desk.

9 min read→
The Last AnimalDELUSION8 min

Systems, Culture & Human Nature

The Single Stock Delusion: Why Your Job Is the Riskiest Investment You Own

No fund manager is legally allowed to put more than five percent of your retirement into one company. You just voluntarily put a hundred percent of yours into one employer.

8 min read→
The Last AnimalSource8 min

Work, AI & Judgement

Work Just Went Open Source

Individuals and small partnerships are learning to plug into value creation the way code plugs into an open source project, and the firm is the one being disrupted.

8 min read→
The Last AnimalGood9 min

Marketing After the Machine

The Model Doesn't Know You're Good

Brand equity, pricing power, and what gets lost when a machine decides who deserves to be recommended

9 min read→
The Last AnimalC-Words8 min

Marketing After the Machine

C-words in marketing: culture, community, and cult

Every industry has words it reaches for when it wants to sound like it's doing something important. Marketing has three that get passed around boardrooms like a flask at a football match: culture, community, cult.

8 min read→
The Last AnimalKIDNAPPED7 min

Marketing After the Machine

The $68 Billion SEO Murder: How Google Kidnapped Your Customers

In an era of zero-click journeys, your website is no longer a storefront, it is a silent defendant in a trial where you are not allowed to speak.

7 min read→
The Last AnimalSUICIDE7 min

Marketing After the Machine

The D-Day Delusion: Why Your Five-Year Strategic Plan is a Financial Suicide Pact

In a volatile market, the ultimate competitive moat is not your strategic position, it is the velocity of your feedback loops.

7 min read→
The Last AnimalARBITRAGE7 min

Marketing After the Machine

The Ghost of Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner Ad: Why Your 2016 Marketing Playbook Is Driving You Off a Cliff

In an era of infinite, cheap AI-generated noise, the marginal cost of human trust has become infinite.

7 min read→
The Last Animalgolden age7 min

Marketing After the Machine

The golden age of DTC is over

The Post-Arbitrage Era: Why Your 2016 Marketing Strategy Is Driving You Off a Cliff

7 min read→
The Last AnimalOpinion3 min

Marketing After the Machine

The Machine Already Has an Opinion

On why agentic shopping will not free us from brand value. It will only move where the value gets decided.

3 min read→
The Last AnimalIntelligence10 min

Marketing After the Machine

The Customer Journey Is Dead. The Customer Intelligence System Has Replaced It.

Fifty years of decision science saw this coming. We just didn't expect the machine to arrive so fast.

10 min read→
The Last AnimalIsn't5 min

Marketing After the Machine

Small Until It Isn't

On why the smartest people in the room will dismiss the biggest shift of their lives, and feel responsible doing it.

5 min read→
The Last AnimalCosts4 min

Marketing After the Machine

What the Answer Actually Costs

Building with AI has become easy enough that nearly everyone can do it, so it no longer separates anyone. This is an argument for the thing that does separate them now, which is cost: how many tokens a result actually took, and whether you can afford to keep getting it.

4 min read→
The Last AnimalSTRANGER5 min

Systems, Culture & Human Nature

THE STRANGER’S CAR

How we learned to trust strangers, machines and stars on a screen faster than we learned to understand the danger.

5 min read→
The Last Animalfunnel7 min

Marketing After the Machine

Where did the funnel go?

LLMs have not made the customer journey faster. They have moved it somewhere else entirely. Understanding where it went is the most important question in marketing right now.

7 min read→
The Last AnimalDecides16 min

Marketing After the Machine

Who Decides When the Agent Decides?

The AI agent doesn't have a childhood memory of drinking Coke at the beach.

16 min read→
The Last AnimalBreakdown11 min

Marketing After the Machine

The New Order Always Begins as a Breakdown

Systems improve because intelligent people notice what is broken, gather evidence, debate the alternatives, and eventually design something better.

11 min read→
The Last AnimalBehave8 min

Marketing After the Machine

The Procrustean Bed: What Happens When We Force Living Systems to Behave Like Machines

Nassim Taleb’s Procrustean bed warns against forcing markets, audiences, and organisations into rigid frameworks. A sharp look at why artificial stability creates fragility.

8 min read→
The Last AnimalKilling4 min

Marketing After the Machine

The Hidden Force Killing Transformation Inside Big Companies

The biggest barrier to transformation is the one nobody will say out loud

4 min read→
The Last AnimalProblem8 min

Systems, Culture & Human Nature

You Don’t Have an Analytics Problem

Most organisations treat measurement as a data problem. It is a thinking problem. The Digital Marketing & Measurement Model exists before any tool, any dashboard, any report. That sequencing is everything.

8 min read→
The Last AnimalAgrees12 min

Marketing After the Machine

Everyone In Your Industry Agrees. That's The Problem.

What planetary physics reveals about the consensus you think you chose.

12 min read→
The Last AnimalDraft8 min

Marketing After the Machine

We Are the Draft

You are not living through a mature chapter of history. You are living through page one.

8 min read→
The Last AnimalSponsored8 min

Work, AI & Judgement

Your Best Memory Is Already Sponsored

Music, memory, and the most powerful mechanism no one is measuring

8 min read→
The Last AnimalEverything8 min

Work, AI & Judgement

The Five Skills That Will Keep You Relevant When AI Takes Everything Else

AI isn't the threat. Mediocrity dressed as productivity is.

8 min read→
The Last Animalancient7 min

Work, AI & Judgement

The Body Didn't Get the Memo

Culture moves at the speed of ideas. Biology moves at the speed of natural selection. Everything confusing about the modern world lives in that distance.

7 min read→
The Last AnimalLadder11 min

Work, AI & Judgement

You’re Not Building a Career. You’re Climbing a Ladder

Status was always the game. Now someone else is running the scoreboard.

11 min read→
The Last Animalmachine7 min

Marketing After the Machine

Your brand doesn't exist in the machine.

Why decades of building recognition can't buy you a recommendation.

7 min read→
The Last AnimalIntelligence8 min

Work, AI & Judgement

Education Was Designed for the Industrial Age. Our Children Are Growing Up in the Intelligence Age.

When knowledge becomes universally accessible, the central question facing education changes fundamentally.

8 min read→
The Last AnimalLosing7 min

Work, AI & Judgement

Google Isn't Losing to Better Answers. It's Losing to Less Work.

The real shift isn't about model quality. It's about friction — and what happens when synthesis gets outsourced by default.

7 min read→
The Last AnimalAlways5 min

Systems, Culture & Human Nature

The Story Is Always the System

History is taught as a sequence of liberations. Divine authority gives way to law.

5 min read→
The Last AnimalTrap12 min

Marketing After the Machine

The Gutenberg Trap

Why the democratisation of content will probably produce the opposite of what it promises

12 min read→
The Last AnimalSignal18 min

Marketing After the Machine

The Signal Economy

Why reach is dying, memory is rising, and most marketing is structurally invisible

18 min read→
The Last AnimalFallacy8 min

Work, AI & Judgement

The McNamara Fallacy and the AI Usage OKR Trap

Companies that spent the last two years announcing AI transformation are now announcing AI metrics. Which sounds like progress. It isn't.

8 min read→
The Last AnimalUnderstanding9 min

Systems, Culture & Human Nature

The World Has More Information Than Understanding

The explanations are multiplying faster than the understanding. The modern world does not have an information problem. It has an interpretation problem.

9 min read→
The Last AnimalSmell6 min

Systems, Culture & Human Nature

Jargon Is a Smell, Not a Signal

The more complex the language in a conversation becomes, the more useful a simple question becomes: do people actually understand what they're talking about?

6 min read→
The Last Animalwrong8 min

Work, AI & Judgement

Most People Are Solving the Wrong AI Problem

They're asking how to use it faster. The real question is what happens when execution stops being the constraint at all.

8 min read→
The Last Animalwrong12 min

Marketing After the Machine

Brand Versus Performance Is the Wrong Debate

The industry argues about reporting lines as if they were laws of human behaviour. They aren't.

12 min read→