I was coding away on a busy Thursday afternoon, and a mate of mine tapped my shoulder and was like ‘Oh long time no see’. He had recently got a job working for a Fintech company, and upon congratulating him he joked about how they demanded that he work long hours but simultaneously use Claude, ChatGPT and all of the AI slop as much as he could to get the work done. After our 10 minute conversation, I went back on Claude Code and prompted away.
This is a microcosm of what life is in 2026, you have employers imploring you to hone your skills and work as long as possible in a time where efficiency is at a premium. It genuinely makes no sense. The irony is actually really funny, because putting the hours in and working hard went hand in hand pre AI agents since you needed to learn deep concepts by yourself and then be able to produce output which matched the demands of your job. Now the job market is one big singular voice, in a scenario where every member of your team will produce exactly the same piece of work with the same narratorial voice, how is performance judged? Does corporate visibility matter more now since production is no longer at a premium? I felt this at the back end of last year when I was working on a business development team just using the AI to churn out email after email, I just felt so empty doing the same thing day after day and then being asked to do more which funnily enough just meant use the AI more.
In a world full of robotic prompters, you have to think to yourself; what on earth are the incentives?
Just this week, Professor Jiang has frauded his way into discussions with well known TV personalities due to his outlandish opinions on the end of the US and a litany of other topics which more recently centre around how ‘Bitcoin is a CIA operation’. In recent weeks, he has gone down this rabbit hole of saying things more and more beyond the spectrum of what’s considered ‘normal’ and the market has rewarded him for it. What does that tell you? That we’re in a market centred around attention specificity, so to keep that attention you almost have to go way beyond what’s considered normal to be relevant. With social media algorithms rewarding this type of behaviour, in particular Twitter (now X) which is usually a contest of who can be the biggest idiot on any given day displays what incentives the market is currently rewarding.
We’re currently living Orwell’s nightmare, where lies (idiocy) are rewarded and become half-truths and truths, and the truth is just considered boring so cast away. Trump has fundamentally changed this worldview, because he’s taken full advantage of this attention specificity by churning out headline after headline where he doesn’t let the lies or truths rest on people’s minds for longer than a few hours. Giving people a dopamine surge to those around the world, seeing what he’s going to come out with next. Just look at this Middle Eastern war for example. Iranian leaders understood pretty quickly that this war was fought on social media and the orderbooks and not exactly with boots on the ground. So a Trump headline would marinate for a few hours and then Iranian leaders would come out with their own. And so the news cycle became the battlefield, the algorithm became the general, and attention became the only currency that actually mattered. A missile strike and a presidential tweet carry the same weight in the feed, separated only by the speed at which you scroll past them. The world’s most consequential geopolitical theatre reduced to a content calendar, where world leaders A/B test their messaging and the comment section doubles as foreign policy discourse. Orwell warned us about the Ministry of Truth. He didn’t anticipate that we’d make the lies so entertaining we’d pay a subscription to see them first.