In the middle of the nineteenth century, the men who laid the telegraph wires across the American West were not poets. They were technicians working with a brutal, clicking medium that charged by the word. To save money and time, they stripped the English language to its bones.

They invented a shorthand called “Cablese.” It ignored the rules of the classroom. It smashed nouns together. It lived in the gaps between formal grammar and the urgent need to tell a train conductor that a bridge was out.

When headquarters in New York tried to force these operators to use full, formal sentences to maintain the “dignity” of the company, the system slowed down. The “correct” English was a tax on speed. It was a barrier to the very people who needed the information to stay alive. The operators went back to their slang because the slang was the only thing that worked.

The structural integrity of charcoal

I am currently staring at a pot of rice that has the structural integrity of charcoal. I was on a call with a client, explaining the difference between a high-yield savings account and a “box under the bed,” and I forgot that heat does not care about my metaphors.

The smell of the burn is sharp.

Efficiency is a slow-acting poison for the creative mind. We have spent the last three decades worshipping at the altar of “faster,” assuming that if we could just reduce the time between a thought and its execution, we would reach some kind of artistic nirvana.

We thought that by removing the friction of production, we were liberating the creator. (Actually, friction is the only reason the wheel turns at all; without it, you’re just spinning in a void.) But what we actually did was break the client’s ability to think.

I’m sitting here nursing a tongue I bit three minutes ago while trying to eat a sandwich and answer a Slack message at the same time, and the metallic tang of blood is a reminder that rushing usually just leads to unnecessary pain. The pain in my professional life, however, isn’t from a sandwich. It’s from the “Just Try It” Loop. Because we can now answer any visual request in seconds, the requests themselves have become lazy, shifting, and ultimately meaningless.

The Era of Cost Discipline

Back when I started in reputation management, if a client wanted a specific visual for a campaign, they had to commit. (In the early 2000s, a

87% of brand guidelines are actually just a collection of compromises that the founders made when they were too tired to argue. This number is not in a textbook but you can see it in every boardroom in the city. The marketing team sits around a table and the table is long and made of dark wood. They look at a screen and on the screen is a new image. It is an image of a mountain lodge and the light is gold and the snow on the roof looks like cold sugar.

It is a beautiful image and it was made by a machine in two seconds. The machine took the words of a prompt and it turned them into this light and this snow. But the marketing manager shakes his head and he says the image is too good. He says it does not match the other images on the website.

The Prisoners of the Blue Shirt

The other images on the website were bought in 2018. That was a lean year and the budget was small. The team bought stock photos of people in blue shirts and the people had white teeth and they looked at nothing. Those