Worms.

One of my first big bosses, a recent inductee to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, was John C. Jay, who steered the creative department at Bloomingdale’s in-house agency in the early 1980s. Later, John helped make Wieden & Kennedy great and Nike as hot as they ever were. 

John had an amazing array of talents. But perhaps more than anything, he could spot a trend long before anyone else. I guess in ancient Mesopotamia or Athens or Rome, he would have been reading animal entrails and telling fortunes and serving kings and emperors. In our world today, he served the kings of commerce.

Trend-spotting appears on no list enumerating my protean talents. Sure, I can look at a line of baseball stats and guess someone’s going to be good. I can even look at an annual report, and comment on the viability or “vaporability” of this purported trillion-dollar company or that. But as for seeing things that aren’t even blips on the radar-screen, I’m as blind as a Single A umpire.

That said, I’m sensing something now, that belies the heavy-handed bullying that we’ve been bludgeoned by for so long by various un-accountable tech-bros and their willing executioners in finance, banking, PR and marketing.

In short, I think the AI “solve” everything bludgeon we’re clonked with today is the 2026-equivalent 1880’s “miracle elixer,” medicine show ads that have always been such a part of the world. Who doesn’t want something that will cure everything with no pain, work, cost or side-effects. (That in a nutshell, after all, was the essential promise of the tump kakistocracy.)

As a digression—and I’m good at digressions—the Treniers in this clip below sing a song of Hadacol, a popular remedy in the “dry” south, that really just got its users drunk off their keisters. Not a bad metaphor for trillion-dollar valuations of companies that have never come close to turning a profit. 

The Treniers sing Hadacol.

Hadacol was 24-proof magic elixer, popular in “dry” counties in the South.

All that being said, I think the worm might be turning.

On Friday morning, I sent my FFB (friend from blogging) Dave Trott an article from the Times by John McWorther. I know Dave is interested in an ever evolving and mutating language and in New York. This article was about why The Bronx has a The in it, and how many young people are, today, dropping the The, which I would never think to do.

Dave sent back a short clip, nominally in English, from the movie “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The clip, below and well worth watching, contained this line: “He’s cold as a coma.”

It ain’t much of an epiphany, but never in 32 trillion years will an algorithm, a pattern-matching machine come up with language like the above.

It’s still 6AM on Friday morning as all this is happening, and I read this book review in The Wall Street Journal. Containing the line I’ve highlighted below.

If freedom is the essence of music, captivity must be its mortal foe. Yet in “The Midnight Special,” a fresh new take on American music, Colin Asher profiles five artists whose works were shaped by incarceration.

Never in 32 trillion years will an algorithm, a pattern-matching machine come up with language like the above. 

Next, I read an essay by the great Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times.

It contained these adroit sentences.

After about ten years and I’d guess a trillion-dollars of AI is a miracle blitzkrieg, these observations are telling. There’s been scarcely a dissenting voice to the chorus of AI miracle-ness permitted anywhere.

Then there’s this.

On the front page of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.

I’m no John C. Jay. 

But maybe, just maybe I’m seeing the drunk-ness is sobering up.