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We're going down the rabbit hole together again in this week's second Breakdown essay episode. Be sure to listen to part 1 first here.
Greek mythology meets the Hunger Games. Borrowed wings, borrowed fire, borrowed trust. 🔥🪽
Connect & Subscribe
Greek mythology meets the Hunger Games. Borrowed wings, borrowed fire, borrowed trust. 🔥🪽
Connect & Subscribe
Creators and Guests
What is Making Sense of Martech?
Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.
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Hi everyone! Last week's essay was about OpenAI. This one is about the rest of us.
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the platform's audiences. The reasons we trusted the people in that room to begin with. Same weekend, different myth. Here we go. Icarus met his maker. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has the globe and the internet frankly talking Greek mythology again.
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Flight. Hubris. Gods punishing mortals for reaching too high. It turns out the myths don't require us securing a nearly impossible 70 millimeter Imax ticket to find a current event to attach themselves to. I've already covered the core story
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the OpenAI influence retrieve that boondoggle itself into oblivion the beekeeping, the $500 billion Ohio data center deal, quietly finalizing the background.
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we work parallels. Nobody really wanted to say out loud. And if you read or listen to Touch Grass, you already have those receipts.
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but I haven't covered is it fate or its arena? We didn't. Figuratively enter the Hunger Games this year.
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We literally did.
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And the creators visited the capital first. Go off. Every creator in attendance deserves criticism.
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respectfully. Only that much. And no more. But
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as deeper conversation underneath the criticism, and it's the one no one's actually having. Who do we outsource? Our knowledge, our perceptions, our opinions to, and why do we trust them?
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I looked into the public bios and LinkedIn profiles of a handful of creators who attended based on what they've posted about their own backgrounds. Very few have documented practitioner history or qualifications in the space that they were positioned to teach.
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That's worth sitting with. These creators have amassed enormous followings across TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, text threads, you name it.
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scale, audience and depth of expertise are not the same metric, and platforms have spent a decade training us to treat them as if they were.
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The discourse itself gets dodged in a specific way worth dating out loud.
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Legitimate criticism gets recast as an attack and then deflect it
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as something else entirely.
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I watched one creator respond to a comment, reading roughly that she sold her morals for the trip. Nothing about identity, nothing about who she is as a critique of the choice she made, her onscreen caption
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reacting to it.
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My comments are so homophobic.
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The comment was about complicity. The caption was but a slur nobody views. That's a classic Davo metric in miniature form.
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Deny the substance. Attack the critics character. Reverse. Who's the victim?
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It's a tidy way to avoid answering the actual question about complicity by making the answer look like the problem. Instead.
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The echo chamber of narrow truth.
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What's fascinating is how little traction this debate has gotten on LinkedIn, specifically TikTok, Instagram threads, and Reddit. I've carried the conversation. LinkedIn has stayed almost entirely quiet.
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what does the average LinkedIn user have to lose by staying quiet? Plenty, it turns out. Scroll the platform and you'll find no shortage of posts about incredible AI productivity gains, often because a board in mandating
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adoption,
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not because those games are real
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Token costs are up. Humans are still, in most cases, cheaper,
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and the public record backs up what LinkedIn wants out loud. A March 2026 NBC news poll found only 26% of American voters view AI favorably less popular than Ice, less popular, and Trump less popular than the Republican Party.
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Gallup found 79% of Americans now believe I will produce the US jobs over the next decade,
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Up from 73% just a year earlier. And among adults 18 to 29, the share who believe AI does more harm than good jump from 36% to 47% in a single year, which is the largest increase of any age group measured.
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And lastly,
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44% of Americans say they strongly oppose data centers being built near them.
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And even among people who actively use these tools, 76 per say, they trust AI generated output only rarely or sometimes.
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Naming any of that out loud on a platform built on a professional reputation is a much risk for moves than posting on anonymous account.
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Correspondents needed
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I'd ask every influencer in attendance at every creator considering a future company hosted event to bring a more discerning line next time. Being invited into the room where it happens feels wonderful, but every created moment is exactly that great.
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bots rarely discusses how much of what gets shown at these events is a placeholder demo.
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Demo data meta features dummy content dressed up for the room. I've sat through a lot of conferences and events like this.
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The sessions rarely teach me anything. The hallway conversations don't do better. That's not a knock on the format. Craft varies. Audiences are broad. But if you catch me at a conference or one of these events, I'm usually not in the primary session.
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If you catch me on the panel, you'll always notice there's a tiny takeaway by the end,
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place. Everyone in that room needs to prove to a boss or LinkedIn audience that they learned something.
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The truths that actually matter rarely change, and the data doesn't lie. What buries them is a sea of sameness and shine, and everyone's swimming through to be seen.
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I learned the most of these events from who's in the room, not what's on the agenda. The curation of attendees teaches me more than the content ever does. A real truth teller in that room needn't be hostile.
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Just present. With no financial stake in how the footage turned out. Someone whose job was to know when a demo looked further album the product actually was, or to ask what hands on meant
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When the sessions ran on beta features. Newsflash this is not cynicism,
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It's just refusing to be the only source of a story. You're also the subject of
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influencer shared nothing and everything. I'm surprised by exactly none of it. No creator who attended shared anything beyond glossy ambient content.
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This isn't an accident. That was curation expertly enforced. I don't mean
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if real substance had been the actual goal, as opposed to organic flavored marketing, because nothing about a sponsorship is organic
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or unsponsored.
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That substance could have come from creators willing to bring viewpoint, real questions, a critical lens. The goal was never
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criticism for its own sake.
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The goal is objectivity.
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Without it, we're all just subject to someone else's subjectivity. Pre-Calculated down to the last curated detail.
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I see any of this from outside of the room. I get invited to these events and I've said yes before, and I'll probably say you have to get
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the point was never
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that taking the invitation makes you compromised. It's walking out with nothing but glossy footage. An abundance of ambient esthetic content and no questions on the record is a choice, not a condition of attending.
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And it's worth admitting that distinction applies to me as well as anyone else in this piece.
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So
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where
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were the hard questions to ask? Ecological cost AI sentiment. Employment? What happens? Entry level work? I'm not asking creators to become investigative journalists overnight, but buying faith in an environment that is saturated with propaganda leads directly to subdued agency for the creator and the audience, trusting them.
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And it's not just the creators who didn't ask. Nobody with a microphone and Altman in the room has put the question to him directly. Yeah. Was summer camp worth the backlash? His own comments that I mentioned previously in Touch Grass
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at Black Rock's Infrastructure Summit earlier
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this year, saying that AI isn't popular right now and data centers are getting blamed for the price hikes.
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Reads like an accidental confession offered up unprompted because nobody's cornered him into answering it on purpose.
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Thank you, Captain Obvious.
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Now it's time for far more overt observations to come to light.
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The FTC has clear guidance regarding disclosure for sponsored content, influencer or otherwise. And it's worth knowing if you don't already.
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Guidelines existing and guidelines getting into force are two very different tendencies. Except in this case, they're not entirely separate.
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the FTC increased influencer marketing enforcement by 40%
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in 2025
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through a dedicated app initiative called operation I comply, reducing more than a dozen enforcement actions
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specifically targeting AI related deceptive marketing.
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With penalties now running up to $53,000 per violation
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and each
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individual non-compliant post count as its own violation,
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not
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campaign as a whole.
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The infrastructure to enforce this exists, and it's actively being used elsewhere.
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Nobody has confirmed yet whether it's
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applied here.
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One trick pony.
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This all comes down to media literacy.
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I took media literacy course in high school and it permanently changed how I understand the world. Shout out to our teacher of Los.
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Everything we see here an experience arrives through a medium and per Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. Neil Postman picked up that same thread 20 years later and
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pointed it at television, specifically in the book Amusing Ourselves Today, which argued that TV didn't just change what Americans wanted, change what counted as serious politics, religion, education.
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All of it got reshaped around entertainment's logic, because that's the only logic. The format rewards persons fear. Wasn't Orwell's fruit on the neck, it was Huxley's.
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We wouldn't need to be controlled if we could simply be amused into not noticing.
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Host. And in the drive to this cold, he first laid out an argument on the book panel at the 1984 Frankfurt Book Fair.
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Fittingly, it was a panel convened to discuss Orwell's 1984 itself, the year having just arrived without delivering the surveillance everyone had braced for. Orwell's party had it all a version of this, and the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
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It was their final, most essential command.
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The insistence
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that citizens disrupt their own perception in favor of the state's version of events
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Husband point was that America didn't dodge that fate so much as found a softer way to arrive at the same place. Nobody needed to command us to reject our ears and eyes. We'd happily do it for ourselves, for entertainment, one title at a time. There's a version of this that is less about perception and more about incentive. Once entertainment becomes the dominant logic, morality stops being a fixed question and starts being a financial one, not is this right?
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Or does this convert a retreat that photographs well, outperforms a workshop that teaches well, not because anyone sat down and decided the ethics don't matter, but because the format only rewards the version of the story that performs
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a morality in this frame is a decision.
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It's when nobody has to make one, when the incentive structure quietly answers the question of right and wrong before anyone gets around to asking it.
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TV was one directional and slow. Postman published his book in 1985, two years before the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, the rule that had required broadcasters to present ballots. Coverage of controversial issues. In 1987,
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the infrastructure for what came next was already built, and we'll get there.
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That repeal is widely credited with opening the floodgates not for social media, which was still two decades away, but for Partizan talk radio.
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Rush Limbaugh, in the form of that followed him. Social media didn't inherit that. Deregulation directly inherited something more structural, an audience already trained to consume a premium as entertainment primed for whatever came next. Social platforms, even a professional network of a billion people, are now algorithmic, infinite optimize in real time for whatever performs and rages or engages, which is almost never nuance.
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And don't forget, the original intent was not friendship. It's data and gathering more data from us.
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The creator of the Infinite Scroll, Asia Raskin has said Doomscrolling wouldn't exist. That isn't mentioned. And it estimates roughly half a million of human lifetimes of collective attention every month.
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He later co-founded the center for Humane Technology to push back against the exact mechanism he built.
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Summer camp wasn't
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really information delivery.
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It was built for this exact medium an esthetic, a vertical video, something engineered to be felt and shared before was ever going to be analyzed.
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That's the whole trick, and it's really not a new one.
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we're not is running on a faster feed, and postman ever had to reckon with
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we wrote the playbook at, we were told we weren't selling office space. We were selling a lifestyle, a community. Both were technically true.
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name another co-working company with a social following
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built almost entirely on an impeccably designed space. I'll wait
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at home to the friends who.
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Artists, photographers, tastemakers, taste curators were hired specifically to project a glossy exterior over what was entirely chaos.
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We work actually ran summer camp as an annual members retreat. Concerts. The works, and the branding of OpenAI's event echoed, intentionally or not,
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Priya Parker's The Art of Gathering
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argues the single most important decision behind any events, whatever its size, is a clear and specific purpose chosen before the guest list or the venue.
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We work summer camp had one.
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Even if I wouldn't defend the company today,
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it was fun.
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the uncomplicated pleasure of being reckless together for a weekend. The kind most of us lose access to once we leave childhood behind. Whatever else was wrong with it, nobody was pretending
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it was a workshop
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open. I filed the name and the imagery without borrowing the honesty.
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its summer camp wasn't a retreat that happened to generate marketing value. It was marketing. Buying a retreats, clothes, a very different kind of gathering built up around a different purpose.
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I don't know anyone to so out loud,
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Nothing captures that gap better than we works. S-1 filing
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a legally mandated financial disclosure that opens not with numbers, but with a mission statement.
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we are a community company committed to maximum global impact. Our mission is to elevate the world's consciousness.
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The company invented its own metric to mean the adjusted EBITDA, which excluded not just interest and taxes, but marketing, general administrative costs and development expenses, arriving, unsurprisingly, at a much rosier number than reality supported
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three classes of stock gave Newman outsize voting control, regardless of what public shareholders thought.
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The filing disclosed a history of losses with no stated timeline to profitability.
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This is what it looks like when a company is legally required to tell the truth
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and chooses to bury it under fives instead.
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Of course, it's now infamous. The IPO collapsed six weeks after the filing became public. I'm so grateful I left at the end of 2018 and sold my shares during the previous tender offer.
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Thank you masa, for a little bit of coin before it fell apart.
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The vibes didn't survive contact with the balance sheet. Neither will anyone else's. Eventually,
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and I'm making the case that everyone in the professional world
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could use.
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Am I making the case that everyone in the professional world can use a liberal arts education?
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increasingly? Yes.
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The number of blinders on display suggest we could all use the practice of questioning the frame instead of admiring what's inside it.
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If this event had been open to the public via a pop up or a conference with a media preview for those quote unquote influencers, the perspective likely would have landed very differently. But that's not nearly as attractive or as easy to package into a content calendar.
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Beekeeping and candlelit dinners. Photograph better going to workshop physical or virtual? The creators didn't design the trip, but how I got presented with the esthetic, doing the talking instead of the substance
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It's part of the same pattern and trap.
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The brand set up.
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It's a reminder
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that the esthetic a brand chooses to wrap education in is itself a message,
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whether the company means to send it or not.
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A deeper issue is who gets chosen for the creator strategy in the first place.
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Reach an esthetic, get you some arcane practitioner depth, gets you closer, something closer to a master class.
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Somebody you see picking the former because it photographs better, not because it teaches better
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It would be a genuinely interesting case study to see a brand invest the same budget in the latter and measure the difference.
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And none of this requires this burning the system down. It requires the people inside it creators, audiences, marketers, myself included, to stop mistaking, traded a room for an honest one
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that's a smaller ask than it sounds like, and a much harder one to actually do.
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May the odds ever be in our favor.
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Every story needs an ending. It earns. This one has been waiting since the title
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Icarus and Daedalus weren't just father and son. They were also prisoners, locked in a labyrinth. Data lists
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himself had designed
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and minuses. Orders. The wings weren't a hobby. They were the only way out of a structure. Their own maker had built.
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And even in flight,
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Icarus was still bound by his father's rules, still tethered
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to a structure someone else controlled.
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Daedalus gave him the one warning that came with the escape. Not too high, not too low to high in the sun melts the wax too low.
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And the sea's damp air weighs the feathers down until you drown. Instruction was never. Don't fly. It was the narrow, unglamorous middle, just high enough to get somewhere low enough to survive the trip.
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Icarus didn't fall because he flew. He fell because he stopped checking the wax and mistook borrowed wings for personal talent
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and forgot his father's warning.
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Had two halves, not one.
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Blind hype melts you. Blind cynicism drowns you. The people wearing open air. His wings won't be the ones who answer for either.
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The maze in the wings came from the same architect.
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Thanks for tuning in to the making sense of my time. See you next time. A special thank you to Chrissy Murtaugh, who added this episode, and an extra special thank you to Jenna Carter for believing this passion project meets business.
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The curious