Dear all y’all,
AI doesn’t make any of our disciplines obsolete. It makes our ability to work across them more important.
Seeing meaning in complexity
Palomides, the outsider knight, holds the chivalric ideal from beyond the fellowship he can’t fully join—the proof meaning survives displacement.
Brands must be present enough to be received
Why most brand voice guidelines don’t work: the “not this” is a strawman nobody would pick. A real voice scale declines two good voices instead.
Keats, negative capability, and the work that disappears
Keats called it negative capability: the maker who disappears so the work can belong to everyone. A poet’s discipline, and a content strategists’.
Meaning and narrative
Organizations don’t create meaning — they receive it, unevenly. Narrative is the work of reconciling those differences honestly.
AEO and GEO aren’t a tactics problem. They’re a platform problem.
Everyone’s selling the same AEO and GEO checklist: schema, FAQs, entity claims. None of it works without a governed content model underneath. It’s the same lesson SEO tried to teach a decade ago.
The experience is the platform’s only job
The platform, the voice system, the content model, the governance structure—none of it is the point. The experience a person actually inhabits and remembers is the only reason any of it is worth building.
The governance problem isn’t new
CMOs are told their AI problem is really an operating model problem. Content strategists have argued this for twenty years. AI didn’t create the gap between governance and accountability—it just made ignoring it expensive.
The content strategist as maker
Most content strategy fails not because the analysis was wrong. It fails because no one in the room could hear what the content was actually saying.
We gave everything a new name and called it progress
The content field has been naming and renaming itself for two decades. Content strategist, content designer, UX writer, content marketer. Different titles, overlapping work, growing confusion. Here’s what the proliferation cost, and what coherence would actually look like.