 Dear Reader, If you live in Ontario, you may have heard me on the radio this week speaking about the current Canada Post strike. I also got the chance on Thursday to speak to a CBC journalist about the importance of letter writing. I love writing letters because it's one of the simplest ways to get started with the analog lifestyle. No fancy equipment required: a pen, a piece of paper, an envelope and a postage stamp. It's affordable and quick. It's a chance for me to sit down and reflect. Like writing a diary, but better, because it involves a connection to someone I care about. Writing letters: one of the simplest ways to get started with the analog lifestyle But another reason I'm really passionate about letter writing is because writing letters in 2024 reminds us that we have a choice. Beyond the two extremes of "everything written by AI, delivered by robots, selected by the algorithm" & "paper letters delivered by horse-drawn carriage, 19th-century-style", the choices we have lie somewhere in the middle, in the grey zone. As with almost all things, it’s the dose that makes the poison.  What kind of buzzwords annoy you? Yesterday, I read a fascinating article in the Globe & Mail. It talked about the future of language and writing when/if AI-generated writing has become the norm. Here is a snippet from Michael Harris' article: "Passing around prefabricated blocks of text is efficient, to be sure, but it also makes a mockery of the word “communication” […]. Real communication (which is to say, real connection) requires labour; it requires us to think, to search inside of ourselves, to reveal". [emphasis in the original] Even before the advent of AI, I've always had a visceral reaction of disgust to language that seems like it's parroted over and over without thinking. Sometimes the words annoy me so much that I just want to make a list and analyze them: - Smart Chat Experience
- Auto-scale infrastructure to zero to cut cloud costs
- AI-created funnel structure
- Government UI overlays
- Hyper-personalized, frictionless customer journeys
- Seamless multi-cloud integration
- Generative AI-powered tools that turbocharge agents
- Dynamic creative optimization
- Patented intent prediction
- Customer journey orchestration
(none of these are made up) Maybe I have an unhealthy fascination with the ugly, because I'm seemingly drawn to the language I can't stand, in awe of how truly awful it is. What kind of language rubs you the wrong way? What buzzwords can't you stand? For me, that would be language that's vague and lazy. Language that feels excessive, that somehow has gotten out of hand. Excessive like 100 years of rampant growth of branches and bushes, completely covering a castle with a princess inside, like in the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty. A thick overgrowth you need to cut down first to figure out: what is this actually trying to say? Language that may be hiding something.  When I started working on Young W, I decided to make posters as a playful way to process the ridiculousness of the buzzwords I despised. There are two posters so far, but I have plans for several more. I've called them "Progress Story" because they show a version of the so-called "progress" society is making. This one here is Progress Story #20. It's not quite poetry and not quite art. But nevertheless a type of creative outlet for my frustration with the language of the 2020s. How to read Progress Story The instructions to read the poster go as follows: Read the words in any direction you wish, either from left to right, right to left, up-down, down-up or diagonally, always combining two adjacent words together, for example: Market Mind, Mind Interface, Interface Crowd, Crowd… and so on. The words have been carefully chosen to make a reading in multiple directions possible. Progress Story #20 is a type of diptych comprised of two parts: one shows the bullshit words coming down in rapid succession, like in the video game Tetris - you are trying to stack them up until it's game over. The other part (pictured above) presents a reading of the featured words in a particular sequence. This is just one text that can emerge from the words in Progress Story #20; feel free to create your own version from the words in the tiles. Toying with language that annoys me Yes, it's a word soup. Yes, it's totally ridiculous. It's what I love about it. Because who says we can't poke fun at the things that irritate us? I like art and writing that plays with the thing we are up against. Toying with it to make obvious what's revolting about it. Progress Story #20 should serve as a warning. A reminder that we have choice over the words we use, how we connect with each other and how we communicate. How we should perhaps pay closer attention to language before it's game over. | 
