If I Could Generate This in Thirty Seconds, Why Did You Send It to Me?
Productivity theatre.
I recently asked a management team to write pre-meeting memos. I didn’t actually care about the documents; I cared about the cognitive friction required to make them. A good memo forces you to wrestle with a problem before the meeting.
On the surface, the submissions looked better than ever. But I had to wonder: how much actual thinking had occurred?
This highlights a unique challenge AI poses for management. Because managers trade in artifacts rather than code—memos, decks, and strategy documents—their output has traditionally served as proof of cognitive effort. Writing a thoughtful document took time, and time was a proxy for rigorous thought.
AI enables a form of intellectual cosplay.
The document survives, but the thinking disappears.
AI has destroyed that equation. While the cost of producing these artifacts has collapsed, the cost of consuming them has not. A ten-page memo now takes minutes to generate, but it still takes twenty minutes to read.
This imbalance is how we get work slop. Work slop isn’t just AI-generated text; it is lazy workplace communication generated to demonstrate activity rather than advance a decision. You know it when you see it; the strategy deck that feels comprehensive and well crafted but leaves you feeling strangely empty and confused about what to do next. The frustration isn’t that AI wrote them, it’s that no human added anything consequential to them. The bigger frustration is the act of mindlessly exporting work from the creator to the reader for sake of outdated managerial formality.
AI enables a form of intellectual cosplay. The document survives, but the thinking disappears.
Ultimately, this shift exposes an uncomfortable corporate truth: we have long confused documentation with progress. Now that information can be manufactured for free, we face a new question: If I could have generated this myself in thirty seconds, why did you send it to me?
The artifact is no longer proof of thought. Moving forward, leaders will be judged on the clarity of their conclusions, the pace of execution, not the volume of their output. The winners won’t be those who generate the most content, but those who deliver the goods with the least amount of organizational overhead. In the process, AI will inevitably trim management ranks, reshaping bureaucratic hierarchies into lean, nimble, and highly execution-focused teams.
Pod 186: The AI Pushback
Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack
Regulation is coming to AI, as politicians scramble to “do something” in response to a growing chorus of discontent over the technology. ChatGPT is advertising it as a souped-up Clippy to help with date-night recipes and sibling road trips. What happened to superintelligence and curing cancer? Disruptrive forces always invite pushback, as Bari Weiss is learning at CBS. In PvA OT: Anonymous Banker on People Inc’s AI-hedge with MGM and why YouTube ecosystem events are far better than typical media events.
FIELD NOTES
Anthropic’s recursive self-improvement post lands at a moment when even AI boosters are trying to sound less religious. The company’s challenge is to keep the safety halo while explaining why machines building better machines should make normal people feel calm. » Anthropic: When AI builds itself
Token costs exceeding salaries is the perfect image for AI’s awkward enterprise adolescence. The machine may be smart, but the business case has to survive procurement. » Semafor: AI token costs are exceeding some employees’ salaries
Bot traffic passing human traffic is a clean marker of the web’s new operating reality. The internet is becoming an environment where machines fetch, summarize, scrape and transact while humans are increasingly the source material. » Cloudflare: Traffic Worldwide
Portable AI memory matters because whoever controls the memory controls the user. The last platform era locked up the social graph; this one will try to lock up the thinking self. » X: Garry Tan on portable memory
Sulzberger’s warning pushes publishers to finally admit that quiet accommodation was a strategy of managed decline. AI companies need journalism as raw material, and journalism needs to stop pretending attribution is compensation. » NYT Company: A.I., Journalism and the Uncertain Future of the Public Square
The 60 Minutes meltdown is a live case study in what happens when prestige media becomes a turnaround asset. The brand still has authority, but authority is much harder to modernize when the people who built it experience change as vandalism. » WSJ: The Meltdown Inside ‘60 Minutes
“Backrooms” matters because it proves internet-native storytelling can move from subculture to box office without asking Hollywood for permission first. Young audiences will leave the house for movies that feel like they came from their internet, not their parents’ franchise library. » WSJ: ‘Backrooms’ Turns an Online Obsession Into Box-Office Gold
AI search is turning the web into a citation lottery with shrinking odds. Publishers can still appear in the answer, but appearing in the answer is a much worse business than receiving the click. » X: Tim Soulo on AI search optimization
People Inc.’s “non-session” revenue is the new media company survival metric. Traffic once made the model legible; now resilience means licensing, syndication, commerce, events and any dollar that does not depend on a human clicking from Google. » MarketBeat: IAC Conference Highlights People Inc. Pivot, AI Licensing Upside and MGM Bet
FIFA’s dynamic-pricing mess matters because the World Cup is supposed to be the people’s game arriving in the most yield-managed country on earth. The tournament will still produce joy, but American capitalism is determined to charge a convenience fee for it. » WSJ: How FIFA’s Biggest World Cup Unleashed a Summer of Price Gouging
GOOD PRODUCT
Jack Antinoff on the genius of Happiness Is a Warm Gun:
”I have never felt anything more like heroin than this guitar change…. I mean, this is the greatest recording ever made.”
Buc-ee’s works because it understands the road trip better than most luxury brands understand luxury.
Clean bathrooms, brisket, scale, absurdity and a beaver mascot create a clearer promise than a thousand brand decks.
Spot on with the intro. It will be much harder to substitute productivity for true analysis and an ability to think critically. In the long run, I think this will be good. But it will start to be more obvious who is good at pressing buttons and who truly knows ball.