Napoleon Blown Apart.

About three decades ago, or ten amerikkan invasions of sovereign Middle-Eastern countries ago, I read an article in The New Yorker. A portrait of a high-ranking general who decried the current modus operandi of war. The infrastructure of how we fight.

The general, whose name I forget, talked about the amerikan war to oust sadaam hussein and he talked about the materiel needed to fight that war.

How we had to move thousands of tanks, thousands of trucks, thousands of humvees, ping-pong tables, air-conditioners, cots, coke-machines. Not to mention millions of tons of weapons and munitions and food.

He used a phrase that stuck with me.

He called all that "moving the metal mountain."

That's good writing. (Better writing than you'll likely find in advertising.)

I read this about the year 2001.

Moving the metal mountain, it occurred to me is an apt metaphor for a giant ad agency pulling together eleven-teen teams, 97 planners and 44 account people to concoct a pitch for a client that won't likely yield any profit for at least four years, by which time the account is once again in review.

Diego Garcia, indicated by the red dot. It's more out of the way than the Chocolate Factory
was when I worked at Ogilvy the second time.

The general proposed an alternative to moving the metal mountain. Highly-mobile units that can sweep in, apply irresistible force, accomplish their objective and be back on Diego Garcia before dark. The US and UK have thousands of troops on the archipelago, but you're more likely to get a straight answer from Cindy Rose of WPP than you are to find out much more about the deployments there. (Though iran six months ago iran launched two Khorramshahr-4 ICBMs at the base. We're told they did no damage.)

The iranian-built Khorramshahr-4 can travel at 16 times the speed of sound over 1,200 miles and can carry 3000 lbs of explosives.

Around that same time as reading about the metal mountain, I also read an article in the paper version of the Atlantic. It was about a fourth generation fighter pilot who was now flying and killing at that time in Afghanistan, and probably Pakistan, though that would have been omitted for various geo-political reasons. 

I remember the pilot saying that his was the last generation of pilots who will actually fly. It would not be long, he asserted, that unmanned killing machines will be run like video games from underground bunkers in Langley air force base under well-manicured lawns in suburban Virginia. 

This pilot talked about drones back when the word referred primarily to bumble-bees, not warfare.

I bring all this up because last week, humble little GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company got an RFI that was closer to the sort of RFIs that went out in the 1950s than what the world of advertising looks like today. As they used to say, Napoleon's armies looked more like Roman armies from 1800 years earlier than they looked like World War I armies from just a century later.

I have the sense that a similar dynamic reflects today's withering ad industry. Like the military proclivity where generals prepare to fight the last war, or in the case of pete hegseth, the rape and enslavement of most of the amerikkkas by spanish conquistadors (and small pox.)

In fact, the very structure of the holding company seems as outmoded and dated as an un-tattooed art director. The ad industry (that phrase is also spectacularly obsolete) isn't riveting in an age of welding, the ad industry is riveting in an age of 3D printing.

Many years ago, and I've written about this before, I read a bit by two-time Pulitzer-winning historian, Barbara Tuchman:

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts... After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. 

This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

On the other hand, comrade Lenin is reputed to have said, "There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen."

In the case of amerikkka, and the industry formerly known as advertising, I'm inclined to agree with Lenin over Tuchman. 

So much has changed so completely. 

And there are three ways to deal with giant changes.

1. You can deny it and conduct business as usual.

2. You can deny it and fight to hold onto previous practices.

3. You can embrace that change and prosper.

Very few people and social organizations ever come close to path number three. One and two will bring you to eventual obsolescence either quickly or quicklier. 

Those are the choices followed by most clients and most agencies. They know something is rotten in the state of advertising, but they're used to it so they try to make it work.

It never works.

My point in all this, though oblique, is simple. The dominant complacency of the ad industry--the holding company--is almost wholly obsolete. Outside of enriching a few already rich men, I can think of no functional reason why anyone would need a holding company.

When Marion Harper, the progenitor of the first advertising holding company formed IPG, it had a reason for being. If McCann had the Buick account, they were shut out of growth in the automotive space. That's not good for shareholders. 

But if a company owned McCann and Campbell-Ewald, you could have Buick and Chevy. Buy more agencies, buy more growth potential.

Later when so much big business went global, a client like IBM needed a central advertising brain--located in New York--and a lot of satellite offices around the world to follow orders from the main office. No one at the time wanted 164 different campaigns in 163 different countries.

But those bonafide reasons have disappeared.

Clients care little about conflicts anymore. And very few clients want a world-wide "one-voice" campaign. 

So while the reasons behind the holding companies have disappeared, they dominate still the industry.

Just as the way the world fights wars has changed but we still equip ourselves as if we're fighting World War II. 

When the British fought the Argentines over the Malvinas (Falklands) the 430-foot HMS Sheffield, built at a cost of $25,000,000 was sunk by an 18-foot long exocet missile costing about $1,000,000.

$1,000,000 missile.

Destroys $25,000,000 ship.

This sort of change has happened in warfare.

And it's happened in advertising.

Do you really need hordes of people to write a pharma commercial or a Buick commercial or a Verizon commercial? No, but that's how we do it.

We haven't woken up to it yet.

Shelve It.

I thought I had it solved but it turns out that some problems can't be solved.

I'm talking about my book problem, my book buying problem.

Back about a decade or so ago, when my New York three-bedroom could hold no more books (each room, except the kitchen) was lined with bookshelves and each shelf, floor-to-ceiling was double-stacked with volumes, I made the reluctant transition to reading e-books.

There's a convenience there that outweighs their suckiness. But not every book, can really be enjoyed digitally. The books that can't, really, are the books that are too big or too map-filled or too illustrated to even be read while sitting in your favorite chair. These are the books that I spend my non-digital-book dollars on today.

Many of them are as large as a one-year-old, and you need a table in front of you to manage them. Those books you have to buy physical copies of. This week, for instance, a used but pristine copy of Bartlett's Quotations arrived at my Connecticut doorstep. You need this as a real book, not a digital facsimile. Sure there's an indexability to having a compendium of quotations. But the real beauty of a bound edition is the serendipitous joy that comes from random perusal. Each page contains at least one present. 

The key word here is random. The random and magical joy of finding something you weren't looking for.

In any event I thought I had solved librum inundatio when my wife, L, directed the almost-complete rebuilding of our Connecticut seaside cottage. Again, each room, each corner, each cranny and each nook was lined with bookshelves. I thought I'd finally have a place for everything--and perhaps everything in its place.

But now all those places have no place for any more. 

Even in our dark age, or perhaps, Dark Age, the thinking, the writing, the art keeps coming. And I keep buying.

It's all made worse by the near instant accessibility of everything. I must get six book emails a week. From university presses (their UI almost always sucks) to small independent book-sellers that seem to know my head with their astute and curofferings and therefore seem to proffer exactly what I'm looking for that I never knew existed.

Just now I got such an email from John Sandoe books in London.

I woke up this morning, and I'm traveling today, hoping to write a blogpost but having no topic. That's when I opened up the email from John Sandoe. 98.79-percent of people in advertising could learn how to talk to people with respect from an email with writing like this, where the audience is not treated like they're imbeciles.

On Sandoe's site I saw this book. 

I've read books by Edmund De Waal before and I like him. 

More, as I re-begin my weekly work of writing this blog, and I have no ideas at the ready, nothing burning me up inside, nothing to write about, I tripped over this title.

"How to begin" is the central question creative people face pretty much every two minutes for the entirely of their lives. (How to end being the other central question. How to continue being the third of the unholy trinity.)

Of course I bought the book.

I don't have any room for it.

And maybe not having enough room for books is the greatest blessing a person can have.

The Religion of AI.

If you believe as I do in ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that is the hypothesis that the development of the embryo of an animal emulates the evolution of the animal's remote ancestors, you may see similarities between the rise and rise and rise of AI and how modern religion came into being. 

Anemones. Just for the Haeckel of it.

Of course, I don't believe in the literal science of Haeckel's  debunked theory of ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (ORP) but I believe that most things--belief systems included--are birthed through a set of similar steps. 

A child learning to ride a bike might resemble a person beginning to learn to ski or fly an airplane. Learning to read might follow a course not entirely dissimilar to how you learn to use the Adobe creative suite or fill out a timesheet on something called "workday." Similarly, a child learning to walk might resemble a large social organization 'learning to walk,' that is navigating its way through a new market or territory.

To my old but 20/20 eyes, AI is today accompanied by an omni-presence and a zealotry such that it looks a lot like Christianity from almost 2,000 years ago. A lot of what the world did as it adopted that belief system is just what the world is doing now as it adopts the AI belief system.

Here are twelve similarities I've noticed. (BTW, I'm working on this as an idea. It is not yet fully-formed, so go easy on me.)

ONE: Religion and AI are incredibly powerful and potentially a force for good. They can transport you (and all of humankind) to worlds of staggering wonder and goodness.

TWO: Religion and AI are incredibly powerful and a potential  force of Armageddon. Left unchecked, or without proper beliefs guiding them, they can destroy all.

THREE: Religion and AI are incredibly complex. Do not question how they work, how they've obtained their wisdom and prescience, just accept their rightness. In fact, to question religion and AI is dangerous and heretical.

FOUR: Religion and AI, like catholicism and protestantism, rule the world. All seeing 'market-forces' like the inter caetera bull of Pope Alexander VI in 1493, will divide the world between different AIs as it sees fit. This dividing line--which is imaginary-- is also law. What's more, it applies even to realms, lands, companies, and others as yet unknown and undiscovered.

FIVE: Religion and AI are not to be questioned. Even thinking about questioning their supremacy is a sin--punishable by essential excommunication and/or death or accusations of 'Luddism.' As Nat 'King' Cole sang, "you're the lowest form of human, you're a square."

SIX: Believers in Religion and AI have the only path to salvation, light and eternal life. Non-believers are destined to either burn or be enslaved and tormented.

SEVEN: Burning, enslavement and torment for non-believers is not cruel. Non-belief is so evil it warrants the punishment received. You're either with us or against us.

EIGHT: Religion and AI will run into people who have different belief systems and different ways of managing their world. But because a different way of living and thinking is different, our form of Religion and AI are unable to see or consider it. Different is wrong.

NINE: Religion and AI had high aspirations. As John Donne wrote in "Paradise Lost," religion was originally meant to "justifie the wayes of God to men." Likewise AI--in its original intent was meant to find a cure for cancer, alleviate traffic, help solve eternal riddles. Before long and via widespread and practical adoption, Religion and AI will be used primarily for fund-raising for Religion and AI and to make cat videos quickly and for IPOs (fund-raising.)

TEN: Religion and AI are so complex and inscrutable that only a few "priests," can understand their language (code or Latin) and speak to the gods. Priests/tech bros become conduits to the all-powerful and therefore must be all-obeyed.

ELEVEN: Religion and AI will create their own 'virtuous circle.' They will use their powers to make themselves more powerful and anything contrary to their accumulation of power is cum hoc ergo propter hoc is to be ignored, disparaged or destroyed.

TWELVE: Religion and AI will remain unchecked and propagated by those made richest by Religion and AI. The richest will promote and thereby get richester.

--

1493. Papal Bull.

We trust in Him from whom empires and governments and all good things proceed, that, should you, with the Lord’s guidance, pursue this holy and praiseworthy undertaking, in a short while your hardships and endeavors will attain the most felicitous result, to the happiness and glory of all Christendom. But inasmuch as it would be difficult to have these present letters sent to all places where desirable, we wish, and with similar accord and knowledge do decree, that to copies of them, signed by the hand of a public notary commissioned therefor, and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical officer or ecclesiastical court, the same respect is to be shown in court and outside as well as anywhere else as would be given to these presents should they thus be exhibited or shown. Let no one, therefore, infringe, or with rash boldness contravene, this our recommendation, exhortation, requisition, gift, grant, assignment, constitution, deputation, decree, mandate, prohibition, and will. Should anyone presume to attempt this, be it known to him that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God and of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul. Given at Rome, at St. Peter’s, in the year of the incarnation of our Lord one thousand four hundred and ninety-three, the fourth of May, and the first year of our pontificate.

 

2026. Silicon Bull.

We trust in AI from whom empires and governments and all good things proceed, that, should you, with the Altman's guidance, pursue this holy and praiseworthy undertaking, in a short while your hardships and endeavors will attain the most felicitous result, to the happiness and glory of all humankind. But inasmuch as it would be difficult to have these present letters sent to all places where desirable, we wish, and with similar accord and knowledge do decree, that to copies of them, signed by the hand of advertising agencies, pr firms and social platforms (which we own) and sealed with the seal of any trillion dollar valuation company and officers thereof, the same respect is to be shown in court and outside as well as anywhere else as would be given to these presents should they thus be exhibited or shown. Let no one, therefore, infringe, or with rash boldness contravene, this our recommendation, exhortation, requisition, gift, grant, assignment, constitution, deputation, decree, mandate, prohibition, and will. Should anyone presume to attempt this, be it known to him that he will incur the wrath of Almighty Altman and of the blessed apostles Amodei, Zuk, Huang and Musk. Given at Silicon Valley, in the year of the incarnation of our Lord two thousand and twenty-six, the second of October, and the year of our pontification.

How To.

One of the things that was in full-flower back when I was just starting out as an adult, was buying a daily newspaper or two and spending an hour or two reading them.

We did that before news was ruined because it became ratings-driven, not information driven. And before news became manufactured and sensational because due to a drive for ratings it's always on. I read somewhere not long ago, that if you don't work for the state department, there's no reason to check the news more than once a day. Our "age of anxiety" might be directly related to the ginning up of the words "breaking news."

I've always been a newspaper reader. Not just the fancy-schmancy pages of the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, but I've always enjoyed local papers, too. When I was in college and the library had fifteen or twenty papers from around the world, I'd often go through a dozen or so of them searching for funny little items and quirky stories. I'd use this page flipping as a way to relax my brain from the onslaught of serious news. Also, I like Blondie and Beetle Bailey and BC and even the Lockhorns.

Back during my college years there was a store along Broadway, I think on the east side of the street between 111th and 112th called "International News." It was a clean, well-lighted place about the size of half a basketball court. It was stuffed to the gills with newspapers and magazines from around the world. Not just seventy-seven varieties of porn, but real periodicals of the type tweed-wearing professors from Columbia would publish in and save. International News had a liberal browsing policy and an attentive but not obstrusive staff. They kept things neat and orderly and didn't mind if you whiled away the hours consultin' with the flowers.

During my five years at Ally & Gargano where the creative department was of the old school, nearly all the writers and art directors were 40 to 50 year old men who would get in around 9, have a cuppa and go through the paper. This was, for the most part, considered an un-interruptible time, not just leisure. We were filling our heads with what was going on in the world. Happenings, trends, ideas that would make us richer, more-informed humans and would therefore make our work richer and better informed as well. The search for simple, timeless human truths is rarely revealed in a sensational blonde-vectored sound-blather.

One of the positive side-effects of reading with regularity a daily newspaper or a weekly news magazine is that you got to "know" the writers. You were familiar with their styles and you could collate of list of writers you admired and imitated. These were people you didn't like to miss, people you could learn from.

In those days, from the Times I never missed Anthony Lewis or Russell Baker on the op-ed page. From the sports page, Red Smith and Dave Anderson were musts. The Times had a guy called Phil Dougherty who wrote a five-times-a-week ad column that had more genuine advertising news in each column than the current advertising trade press reveals in a year.

I'm not sure this affinity for particular writers exists today. Sure people might tune into Rachel Maddow or schmucker carlson or someone else I can barely pick out of a lineup. But hearing the news--hearing writing of any sort from news to a podcast--is an inefficient way of getting information. Aloud, we can take in about 150 words per minute. Even a slow reader can read about double that--and skilled readers can often take in five to six times that number. Reading, of course, also allows you to skip over the boring parts, and go back and read again the things that strike you. You can likely get the idea of the Brothers Karamazov while ignoring most of the individual brothers.

As the written word has more and more disappeared, as more and more people consume spoken media and do less and less reading, a large part of me (and I have several large parts) thinks we a losing certain bits of our humanity.

The tools we have at our disposal often dictate the things we make and how we go through life. If Wilhelm Spätula hadn't invented his eponymous tool back in 1577, we probably today wouldn't have the pancake today. Form, as the Bauhaus argued, follows function. If a fine-point pen hadn't been developed and engraving technology, then William Hogarth or Albrecht Dürer might have wound up being short-order cooks, not fine artists. You can say the same about the Ashcan amerikkkan, John Sloan who brought life to life with mere pen and ink.

My point in all this might be inchoate and complicated. But as we've neglected and maybe abandoned the thought that is generated by long-form writing, we might be neglecting and abandoning the discipline and thoughtfulness that is often implicit in that writing. We might be forgetting how to think, how to store, how to separate important from trivial, even how to share.

Maybe we no longer know about the differences between a $35,000 car and a $90,000 car because explaining those differences often takes words, and words are often, today, undervalued. When it comes to something complex, like AI, there are dozens and dozens of companies offering different AI systems, I can't recall a single one (that I didn't work on) doing a consistently decent job explaining why this one is better than that one.

Call it arrogance but I believe if, for example, kamala harris ran ads like these, consistently and persistently she would have won. Instead,   we all lost. Badly. Tragically. Cataclysmically.

----

----

Without the means of explaining how or why or what for, it seems to me that we stop valuing that knowledge and even things that are innately differentiated become genericized. Like political candidates, in extremis, because in forgetting how we eventually forget it even matters.

We lost a lot--maybe we lost the Sapiens part of Homo Sapiens--when we went from the top ad here to the bottom ad. Not only did we lose a lot as a species, our clients' businesses lost a lot, as did the entire advertising industry.

If I had to train writers today, or if anyone who is reading this cares anymore, I'd suggest they begin again to find writers they admire. Writers whose thought patterns and their ways of expressing those thoughts strike them as interesting. I'd urge anyone who wants to write to keep a list--in your head or written down--of people whose work they like and to make sure they read that person as often as they write.

One writer I like has the unlikely job of being the automotive writer for the Wall Street Journal. His name is Dan Neil and I've been reading him for about two dozen years. No one buys the Journal for auto reviews, so if that's your job, you have to find a way to do it with élan. Like Anne Wroe does over at The Economist.  

The Economist is a weekly and Ms. Wroe writes their obituaries. Usually when someone dies, she's scooped by all the major news outlets. Daily papers scoop weekly papers. So, in addition to being confined by the Economist's strictures to one page of text, Wroe needs to find ways of writing her obit that others haven't already written about.

This is Mr. Neil from Saturday's Wall Street Journal. His review of a car I would never for a moment consider buying, the "entry-level" $440,000 Ferrari. 

Neil says this about the coupe. 

It made me laugh, underscore and remember it. 

It prompted these thoughts.

That's what good writing can do.

I might also, one day, write for a client "douchiness per cubic foot."  Or "drowning in their own testosterone."

I read a lot.

I especially like writing I haven't read before.

Neil's January 1996 review of the Ford Expedition described a back-seat encounter with his girlfriend. 

Neil wrote this was "loving, consensual and--given the Expedition's dual airbags, side impact beams and standard four-wheel anti-lock brakes--safe sex."

These online ads for the Expedition miss the mark. Though I suppose "Cleverly designed with families in mind," comes closest.

Yu Mve 2 Fst.

 It seems everyone today sings from the same hymn and hyr books.

Everyone is blathering on about how fast this technology or that technology can do this or that.

They're not, they're never talking about how things can be done better. 

Instead they're talking about how things can be done faster.

We spend so much time talking about how fast we can do things that I believe in aggregate things that longer because of all the time we fiddle away talking about how fast we can do them.

Not too long ago, I was asked to work on a pitch for a giant holding company ad agency.

Our meetings sounded more like a track-practice than an ad agency.

The pitch was a marathon punctuated by a series of sprints. Along the way there were heavy lifts and of course the inevitable hurdles.

A friend of mine worked on the pitch, too. 

We IM-ed (it's instant, after all) when the whole thing was over. 

To re-write Yogi Berra, "It ain't over till you get paid."

We each had the prevailing sensation of underwhelmed-ness.

There were hundreds of pages of deck.

But not a single scintillating idea. 

Or even a simmering one.

It all reminded me of that old Peggy Lee song, writ by Lieber and Stoller, "Is That All There Is?"

I had the distinct feeling that my friend and I, if left alone for three days, could have come up with more and better work without subjecting ourselves to the throes of constant racing.

We could have had ideas. Thought them through. Penciled and pensived them. And could have do better work, more efficiently. As the Romans aphorismed, we could have Festina Lente. Made haste, slowly. And everybody, especially the agency and the client would have been better off for it.

Talking about how fast you can do something is an odd measurement. Usually, human calculus of time is off by about 25 to 50-percent. If you claim your commute takes an hour, it likely takes an hour-and-a-half. Likewise a flight to LA, a twenty-minute recipe, or the "just one more story" ten-minutes before bed-time. 

I read somewhere that in the 15th Century you could make better time on the Inca Trail from today's Lima to Machu Picchu than you can today. I think taking the train from New Haven to New York is slower today than it was a century ago. If I were smarter about physics, I could probably bring in some Einsteinian relativity here.

At my elbow right now as I write this is this book.

Which I bought having read this review in The Wall Street Journal.

Let me ask you something.

Can this really be a blog on advertising, can this really be a book review from The Year of Our Altman, 2026, if AI is not mentioned? 2700 years ago, the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Protagoras said, "Man (meaning humans) is the measure of all things." 

That belief is wholly abrogated and abnegated today, when in essence we hear and spout and link and post and proffer and pontificate "AI (and its accompanying hype) is the measure of all things."

The review, which I'm pasting in its entirety below is short. It's just 381 words long. Which at an average reading speed of 250 wpm, should take you about one-hundred seconds. Less than two minutes.

Since I know you're pressed for time, rushing someplace, on a deadline or in the middle of a sprint, I've highlighted some bits for you:

A waterway splits the earth in Ginger Riley Munduwalawala’s painting “Nyamiyukanji, the River Country” (1997). Mottled green daubs represent grass; lounging amoebic growths stand in for rocks, perhaps mountain peaks. Above the fracas of color float three white clouds, from which raindrops hang like strings of beads dressing up a doorway.

Noticing every detail of a work of art, and of the world in front of us, is what Olivia Meehan urges us to do in “Slow Looking: The Art of Nature” (Thames & Hudson, 320 pages, $60). The author is far from the first to decry the “din of 21st-century life” or to worry that a digital deluge threatens to dull our senses, but she begins her book more pointedly, asking: “Have you considered your looking practice?”

Probably not, since for most of us looking isn’t so much a practice, a la prayer or meditation, but a necessity of life. The average time a museum visitor spends taking in an artwork matches the average social-media “swipe-away mark of 2-3 seconds,” Ms. Meehan laments. She has gathered nature-inspired artworks in “Slow Looking” to draw us in and get us to look for longer, though she dangles the rewards at a distance: “The beauty will not automatically reveal itself.”

The author promises discoveries as well as a fresh take on the familiar, including 19th-century paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Charles-François Daubigny, a violet Caspar David Friedrich moonscape and plenty of Georgia O’Keeffe. The volume isn’t meant to be read in a linear fashion, nor to be shut with finality when you turn the last page. It’s more like a museum: Aimlessness is welcome, lingering encouraged. Ms. Meehan guides us through a slow-looking exercise before releasing us into the curated wilds.

Some of the book’s best advice might seem laughably obvious. When looking at an artwork, “try not to take your phone out.” Museum labels may distract as much as they inform. But Ms. Meehan writes touchingly about the fruits of attention—surprise, imagination and wonder among them—which can be so difficult to find in “an ‘on-demand’ world.” And she reminds the reader: “There is no immediate need to share your reaction or response with others.” The looking is the point.

--

Years ago, I read a book about one of my favorite film directors, Preston Sturges. Sturges--in less than a decade--wrote and directed four movies on the American Film Institute's One-Hundred Funniest Movies of all time. Considering Sturges has been dead for 80 years, had his short heyday in the 1940s and lists of this sort are afflicted by grievous recency bias, four out of one-hundred is an incredible mark. Only Woody Allen with five movies has more. Not Mel Brooks, not Billy Wilder.

The tyranny of "do it fast," is worse than the imperative to sprint. What it really means is "do it my way." 

Sturges was not trusted, of course, by Paramount, his studio. Often producers would come by the set on day three  of shooting only to find Sturges had shot zero feet of film. They would be apoplectic. 

Sturges was instead rehearsing his cast.

On days four and five he would shoot tens or dozens of scenes. Catching up.

The studio said he was slow.

He was fast.

Today everyone wants not really speed, they just want it their way. They want to see where you are every eleven minutes, and eleven minutes after the original eleven minutes and eleven minutes after that. They want to see that pages in phantom deck are being filled, never considering what they're being filled with.

Somehow I write this blog every day.

And have for 17 and a half years.

91-percent of the time, I post within fifteen minutes of 7AM.

As Mussolini might have said, "I made the trains run like george."

I don't have project managers chasing me down.

I don't have thrice-daily check-ins.

I don't have tissue sessions.

And generally speaking, the quality of output is pretty high.

I'm not sure speed as such should be a barometer.

I think good should be.

Four selections. Random. Like life. (Ten-seconds' worth.)

Short Cuts.

When I was a young man and had hung up my baseball spikes for good, I replaced them with runners' shoes. It's easy to get fat and I was good at it. To allay the inevitability of adipose and to assuage my  competitive mien, I turned to long-distance running with my usual fury.

For about ten years, from my early 20s to my early 30s, I raced on weekends. Anything from five-miles to a full-marathon, and I rarely clipped a number to my tattered singlet without hoping to set a personal best and finish in the top ten-percent.

I'd never finish higher than that. Those that can and do usually have bird-like frames--their bones are more like straws than mine which are like tree trunks, or Greek columns or some order of elephantine. But finishing 99th out of a thousand entrants was for me a reasonable aspiration.

A.E. Housman wrote, in part:

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

I might have writ:

The time you slogged the ten k race

Your belly slapped you in your face;

Your thighs they chafed and bled from friction,

You a runner? That's science fiction.

Nevertheless, I worked hard to knock down what for me was fast--six-minute miles or so over the course of a 10K. I joined a less-than-egalitarian track club, I befriended someone who ran track at Princeton and he coached me, and I trained and caffeined and dieted to the point of visible, if not rippling, abdominal muscles.

Racing in Central Park involves handling some pretty serious hills and some pretty sharp turns. The race course was usually marked out with cones and the understanding was that you stay within the cones, lest you cut the course.

I must say, I never really understood course cutting. It wasn't the difference between getting a medal or not, or winning or losing, or winning some prize money. It was, at my strata, the difference between finishing 99th or 101st. If cheating got you your best time, can you in your head really count it when you know you cut-corners to get there? 

Does a personal best mean anything when you did your worst to get it?

Somehow it seems today that cutting corners and getting places purportedly faster is the key motivating force for just about every business and every agency.

It's clear at this near-popping-point of the AI bubble that AI can write even faster than I. It's also clear that the things that make creativity special, interesting, remarkable and original cannot--almost tautologically--be derived by AI.

The turns of a phrase that makes a bit of writing magnificent and memorable cannot be engineered algorithmically. They can only be derived humanly.

"Nobody handles Handel like you handle Handel."                                                                --Preston Sturges

“Once in camp I put a log on a fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went first toward the center where the fire was; then turned back and ran toward the end. When there were enough on the end they fell off into the fire. Some got out, their bodies burnt and flattened, and went off not knowing where they were going. But most of them went toward the fire and then back toward the end and swarmed on the cool end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants.” ― Ernest Hemingway 

“Any man who will not resist a pun will never lie up-pun me." --Eve Babitz

“There is no God and we are his prophets."   --Cormac McCarthy 

“A faithful atheist who died at eighty-five, resolved that he was headed neither for heaven nor hell, and who, when his sneezes elicited a reflexive “God bless you,” replied, “No thank you.” --Sam Roberts

The quotations above were written without AI and couldn't be written by AI. Ever.

AI is Orwellian. 

Meanwhile there are thousands, maybe millions, maybe billions of people and clients proclaiming AI the equal if not the better than humans--and allowing AI to do their writing for them.

The point, to me is clear.

Things that are worth doing take time.

A road race. Some copy. A 71-page deck. Ideas.

You can cheat and have them go faster.

But this is simple.

It's not as good.

AI can't do what people can do.

Only time and work and doing it again can.

Only running every inch of the course.

Or thinking through every exigency.

Most race results though look ok.

Ok enough, I guess, if you squint.

It seems to me it's like my sketch above. 

It's cutting corners.

It's cheating.

It's robbing humanity of humanity to get someplace nominally faster. 

Just like smiling photos throughout linked in proclaiming someone chief creative officer of the year and her agency agency of the year while they've lost 75-85-percent of their revenue, clients, people and market value is cheating.

There's a right way to become agency of the year. It's serving clients. It's doing smart, real, effective work. It's treating people well. 

Or, you can pay for play it.

Most of what you see today is ginned up untruths. 

(And truth is what we're after.)

This is sleight of hand.

And a slight on humanity.

In a word, it's cheating.

--

Somehow, I think what Katy Jurado says to Lloyd Bridges is all that needs to be said.