The Fight Over Data Centers That Could Shape the AI Economy PART 2: CON

Communities around the country are rejecting data center projects.

In 2023, two data center projects were canceled because communities pushed back. In 2024, it was six. Last year it jumped to twenty-five. And right now, nearly a hundred projects are facing organized opposition.

Some people see those numbers and worry. I don't.

In fact, it may be one of the healthiest signs of local democracy we've seen in years.

Because for a long time, the assumption was that if a developer showed up with enough money and enough lawyers, communities were expected to say yes. The project was inevitable. The growth was inevitable. The future was inevitable. The public hearing was mostly theater.

But lately people have started asking a surprisingly reasonable question:

"What exactly are we getting in return?"

And that's where the conversation gets uncomfortable.

Because nobody wakes up hoping a giant warehouse full of blinking machines gets built behind the community center. Data centers aren't exactly charming. No windows. No personality. Just a huge concrete box sitting next to a substation.

The difference is that unlike a factory, they employ relatively few people once construction is complete.

Unlike housing, they don't solve a shortage. Unlike a shopping district, they don't create a place where people actually gather.

They consume land, power, water, and infrastructure while often delivering benefits that feel strangely abstract to the people living next door, but enrich tech companies and billionaires.

Cloud capacity. AI training. Reliability. Fast data transfer. Those things matter. But they don't always matter to the specific community being asked to host them. And that's the tension.

Supporters often argue that if a town rejects a project, the investment will simply move somewhere else. That's true. But that doesn't automatically mean the town made a mistake.

We've seen this movie before too.

For most of the twentieth century, communities were told they needed to accept whatever large infrastructure project arrived at their doorstep because progress demanded it. Highways. Industrial facilities. Power plants. Urban renewal projects. The logic was always similar: accept the disruption today because prosperity will arrive tomorrow. 

Sometimes it did. Sometimes it didn't. Sometimes the prosperity flowed elsewhere while the local community kept the noise, traffic, pollution, and land-use consequences. 

History is full of places that were told they were standing in the way of progress when they were actually asking entirely reasonable questions about costs.

Infrastructure has a quiet, ruthless logic to it. But so does self-preservation.

A community's job is not to maximize national computing capacity. A community's job is to look after the people who already live there. Those are not always the same thing.

Right now the new railroad analogy gets thrown around a lot. Data centers are supposedly the railroads of the AI era. Maybe. But railroads connected towns. They moved people, goods, and opportunity directly into local economies.

A data center is different. Most residents will never enter one. Many won't work in one. Some may barely notice what it does at all beyond the transmission lines and substations that accompany it.

That's not an argument that data centers have no value. Clearly they do.

The internet runs on physical infrastructure. AI runs on physical infrastructure. Modern life runs on physical infrastructure. The question isn't whether data centers are useful. The question is whether every community has an obligation to host them.

And the answer may be no.

Sometimes the right decision is to negotiate. Sometimes it's to demand stronger protections. Sometimes it's to ask for a better deal. And sometimes it's to look at a proposal and conclude that the costs outweigh the benefits.

Not every patch of land needs to become part of the next technology boom. Not every community needs to sacrifice its priorities because a developer says the future depends on it.

The train may indeed be coming. But communities aren't required to build a station every time someone lays track in their direction.

History suggests that saying no is sometimes just as important as saying yes.

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The Fight Over Data Centers That Could Shape the AI Economy PART 1: PRO

The Fight Over Data Centers That Could Shape the AI Economy INTRODUCTION

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Get the Details: 

• Data center impact on local communities: Balancing growth infrastructure and community outcomes. - Baker Tilly US, LLP/Baker Tilly Advisory Group. LP
  
  
• How data centers are transforming local communities - Fast Company
  
  
• Why are communities pushing back against data centers? - The Harvard Gazette
  
  
• The Debate on Data Center Development: Costs, Benefits, and Community Responses - The Alliance for Civic Engagement 

• From Energy Use to Air Quality, the Many Ways Data Centers Affect US Communities - World Resources Institute

The Fight Over Data Centers That Could Shape the AI Economy Part 1: PRO

 

Communities around the country are rejecting data center projects.

In 2023, two data center projects were canceled because communities pushed back. In 2024, it was six. Last year it jumped to twenty-five. And right now, nearly a hundred projects are facing organized opposition. Historically, about 40% of those end up getting canceled.

I get the instinct. Nobody wakes up hoping a giant warehouse full of blinking machines gets built behind the community center. Data centers aren’t exactly charming. No windows, no personality, just a huge concrete box sitting next to a substation.

So the local resistance makes sense on a human level. People worry about water, power, land use, taxes. Fair questions.

But a lot of the rhetoric sounds like people believe stopping a project will somehow stop the technology itself. As if AI will glance at the zoning board minutes and say, “Well, I guess we’ll just pack it up.”

That’s not how infrastructure works. Infrastructure is like water, it flows somewhere. Block it here and it doesn’t evaporate. It just runs downhill until it finds a place willing to dig a channel.

We’ve seen this movie before: When the railroads were built in the 1800s, some towns fought them. Noise, land disputes, disruption. Perfectly reasonable concerns. The rail companies responded in the most practical way possible: they went around those towns.

The tracks didn’t disappear. The trains didn’t stop. The map just changed.

A few decades later, the places connected to the rails were booming and the bypassed towns were historical markers and antique stores.

Infrastructure has a quiet, ruthless logic to it. It doesn’t argue with you. It just keeps moving.

And right now the new railroad is computing power.

Data centers are the physical skeleton of the internet era we’re walking into. AI models, cloud services, streaming, research, startups ... it all lives in racks of servers somewhere, humming away like a mechanical beehive.

Which means if a community blocks a project, the investment doesn’t disappear; it relocates.

The jobs go there. The tax base goes there. The engineers go there. The coffee shops that follow engineers go there.

And, that “there” might not even be the United States.

And that’s the part people seem oddly relaxed about.

We spend a lot of time arguing online about AI ethics, AI safety, AI alignment, AI consciousness … big philosophical stuff. Meanwhile the physical infrastructure that actually runs the whole show is quietly becoming a zoning dispute about ugly warehouses.

It’s like debating literature while refusing to build libraries.

To be clear, this isn’t an argument that every data center should go wherever a developer wants. Communities should absolutely push for good deals, environmental safeguards, smarter planning. Nobody wants to trade a forest for a parking lot full of diesel generators.

But there’s a difference between negotiating the terms and pretending the train isn’t coming.

Because the train is very much coming.

The only real question is whether it stops in your town or keeps rolling until it finds a place that will build a station. History suggests it won’t wait long.

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The Fight Over Data Centers That Could Shape the AI Economy PART 2: CON

The Fight Over Data Centers That Could Shape the AI Economy INTRODUCTION

_______________________

Get the Details: 

• Data center impact on local communities: Balancing growth infrastructure and community outcomes. - Baker Tilly US, LLP/Baker Tilly Advisory Group. LP
  
  
• How data centers are transforming local communities - Fast Company
  
  
• Why are communities pushing back against data centers? - The Harvard Gazette
  
  
• The Debate on Data Center Development: Costs, Benefits, and Community Responses - The Alliance for Civic Engagement 

• From Energy Use to Air Quality, the Many Ways Data Centers Affect US Communities - World Resources Institute

The Fight Over Data Centers That Could Shape the AI Economy

 

Few local issues generate as much heat right now as data centers.

Across the country, communities are debating proposals that promise investment, tax revenue, and a place in the AI economy. At the same time, residents are raising concerns about land use, power consumption, water resources, noise, and quality of life.

What's interesting is that both sides have compelling arguments.

The pro-data-center case argues that computing infrastructure is becoming as important to the 21st century as railroads, highways, and power grids were to previous generations. Rejecting projects may simply push investment, jobs, and innovation somewhere else.

The anti-data-center case argues that communities are not obligated to accept every project presented as "progress," especially when the local costs may outweigh the local benefits.

To me, the debate isn't really about buildings full of servers. It's about who gets to decide what progress looks like … and who benefits and who bears the cost of it. 

So, instead of writing an editorial taking one side over the other, I thought it would be more interesting (and perhaps informative) to write about 500 words -- opinion, not technical -- on each and then suggest you read both as first step in understanding the opposing viewpoints and making a decision about which side of the debate you find yourself on.

PART 1: PRO explores why communities may want to embrace data centers -- while demanding reasonable safeguards and accountability.

PART 2: CON explores why communities may be justified in saying no, even when developers argue the future depends on it.

Whether you're strongly for, strongly against, or still undecided, I encourage you to read both.

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The Fight Over Data Centers That Could Shape the AI Economy PART 1: PRO

The Fight Over Data Centers That Could Shape the AI Economy PART 2: CON

NOTE: Both posts include links to credible sources that offer
more specific information on both sides of the data center debate.

All about the "!"

I'm not a big user of exclamation points. They feel like the literary equivalent of someone grabbing your arm mid-sentence to shout this matters, pay attention, I’m excited, you should be too! It’s a bit desperate.

Maybe I’ve just been online too long. Everything’s urgent there and the exclamation point has been drafted into service like a cheap confetti cannon: loud, disposable, and mostly covering up the fact that not much actually happened.

As a writer, I’d rather earn the feeling. If something’s funny, let it land. If it’s sharp, let it cut. Slapping an exclamation point at the end seems like an unnecessary short cut. Good writing, trusts the reader to meet it halfway, without all the waving and shouting.

I’m not saying ban them. I use one now and then, like hot sauce. But if every sentence needs a kick, maybe the problem isn’t punctuation. Maybe the writing’s just bland. 

So, I think word processors need a function that only allows one exclamation point to be used every 50,000 keystrokes and I encourage someone more technical that me to build an app that, when you read an exclamation point online, an "applause" sign will appear and flash.

And like author F. Scott Fitzgerald, many writers are very opinionated about this punctuation mark:

I bet when all the punctuation marks have a party, they quietly look at exclamation point's wife and think, that poor woman. – Dana Gould

Never trust an exclamation point. – Linda Urban

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind. – Terry Pratchett

In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly. – Lynne Truss

People complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that's the way people think. I don't think people think in essays; it's one exclamation point to another. – Tom Wolfe

In almost all situations that do not involve immediate physical danger or great surprise, you should think twice before using an exclamation mark. If you have thought twice and the exclamation mark is still there, think about it three times, or however many times it takes until you delete it. –Howard Mittelmark,

So far as good writing goes, the use of the exclamation mark is a sign of failure. It is the literary equivalent of a man holding up a card reading LAUGHTER to a studio audience. – Miles Kington

 Most of us were trained to distrust the exclamation point—at worst, to hate its cheery, unhinged energy. - Ann Handley 

An excessive use of exclamation marks is a certain indication of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational. – Henry Watson Fowler

Never use three exclamation points when one will do. – Christine Edwards

And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. – Terry Pratchett

Only one thing more mortifying than having an exclamation mark removed by an editor: an exclamation mark added in. – Lynne Truss

Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. – Elmore Leonard

The exclamation point is a loud party-goer, demanding attention. Overdone, it can be annoying. – James Scott Bell 

Even the lauded TV show Seinfeld weighed in on the exclamation point:

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DEFINITION: The exclamation mark, !, also sometimes referred to as the exclamation point, is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or to show emphasis. The exclamation mark often marks the end of a sentence, for example: "Watch out!". Similarly, a bare exclamation mark (with nothing before or after) is often established in warning signs.

The exclamation mark is often used in writing to make a character seem as though they are shouting and/or excited/surprised. It can also be used in fiction writing for a person who is doing the same thing but in real life. 

Overuse results in the loss of the excitement or urgency it represents.

I woke up in Tokyo wearing someone else’s pants

After 15 hours on a plane, I took a one hour bus ride followed by a short walk to my Tokyo hotel. The plan: shower, sleep, and leave early to catch the bullet train to Osaka.

 
Let me make a confession: I’m a marketing copywriter, not a travel writer. Which is why I couldn’t pass on the headline “I woke up in Tokyo wearing someone else’s pants”. You see, my hotel, like many others in Japan, supplies pajamas for their guests. So the pants I wore to bed were the hotel’s, not mine. Boring, but the set up for a titillating click bait headline.
 
Which brings me to an important lesson for writers. Especially marketing writers.
 
Make sure that your copy/content delivers on your headline's promise. Otherwise, not only will you lose your audience, but chances are you’ll anger them and never be able to earn their attention, much less their business, again.

Content Creation and Productivity in the Age of AI

 

People keep blaming AI for killing content creativity, but it was already headed toward the food court version of itself long before the robots showed up.

For years, the industry has rewarded speed over thought. More posts. More campaigns. More platforms. Less time to sit with an idea long enough to make it weird or honest or memorable.

Then AI walked into the room like an overqualified intern and said, “You want 400 pieces of acceptable content by This afternoon? No problem.”

The speed and volume were impressive, but the actual content? Technically competent and perfectly acceptable because a lot of modern content already sounded machine-made before machines started making it. AI just perfected the dialect: upbeat, frictionless, emotionally beige. Every sentence polished to the texture of dentist office waiting room furniture.

It’s ubiquitous now: every platform is drowning in words, and somehow almost none of them feel written by anybody.

Because good writing usually comes from tension. Hesitation. Somebody wrestling with a thought long enough to surprise themselves a little. Meaning takes time. Taste takes time. Original thought takes an uncomfortable amount of sitting around staring at nothing, which modern workflows treat like a fire-able offense.

Everything now is optimized to remove the pause. But the pause is usually where the interesting stuff lives. The culture has become deeply impatient with the actual process of creativity: the slow, inefficient part where someone has to think hard enough to say something real.

The Financialization of the Economy

 

I was in line for coffee at Peets. Six bucks for something that used to cost pocket change. 

The guy in front of me was working an investment app like he was playing a slot machine. And, on the surface, it almost seemed normal. Not just the price of the coffee, but the vibe: Everything’s an asset now. Your house, your retirement, your side hustle, your attention span.

Finance stopped being a support system for the economy and quietly became the main character. Instead of helping businesses make things, it increasingly makes money from money. And it’s very good at it.

Corporations used to talk about building products, expanding operations, hiring people. Now they talk about “maximizing shareholder value” like it’s a sacred chant. Which often translates into stock buybacks, cost-cutting, and a kind of corporate calorie restriction: trim the workforce, boost the share price, repeat. It’s like running a restaurant where you slowly replace the food with accounting tricks but still expect five-star reviews.

To be fair, the system rewards this behavior. Executives are paid in stock. Investors want quick returns. Markets react to quarterly earnings like toddlers on sugar. So companies optimize for that. You don’t need a conspiracy when incentives are this loud.

Meanwhile, regular people are pulled into the same orbit. Retirement used to mean pensions. Predictable, boring, almost comforting. Now it’s 401(k)s, index funds, and a vague sense that you should probably know what the S&P 500 did today. We’ve all been conscripted into being part-time financiers, whether we signed up or not. It’s like being told you’re now responsible for flying the plane mid-flight, but don’t worry, there’s a YouTube tutorial.

There’s also this strange side effect where everything starts to look like a trade. Housing isn’t just shelter; it’s an investment vehicle. Education isn’t just learning; it’s ROI. Even companies that clearly make physical things behave like hedge funds with a side gig in manufacturing. The real economy, the one with stuff you can touch, starts to feel like a supporting actor in its own story.

And then there’s inequality, which shows up like an uninvited guest who refuses to leave. When profits flow more toward financial channels than wages, the gains tend to concentrate. If you own assets, great. If you don’t, you’re mostly watching the scoreboard from the sidelines. It’s not exactly subtle.

It isn’t just the imbalance, it’s the way it reshapes how we think. There’s a quiet cultural shift where everything becomes a calculation. Is this worth my time? My energy? My “personal brand”? We start to sound like spreadsheets with opinions. Even creativity gets nudged into metrics -- views, clicks, monetization -- as if its main job is to justify its own existence in dollars.

I get the appeal. Finance is efficient. It’s scalable. It promises control in a world that feels increasingly chaotic. But it’s also a bit like using a chainsaw to butter toast. Impressive, sure, but maybe not the right tool for everything.

I don’t think the answer is to romanticize some pre-finance golden age, that ship sailed a while ago (probably leveraged and sold in tranches). But it does seem worth asking whether we’ve let the logic of finance seep too far into places it doesn’t belong. Not everything needs to be optimized, traded, or turned into a yield.

Sometimes a house should just be a house. A job should just be a job. And coffee, expensive or not, shouldn’t feel like a symptom of a system that’s constantly trying to turn your morning into a market opportunity.

Or maybe that’s just me, standing in line, watching someone refresh a stock app while the barista mispronounces my name.

Mocking Bird

 

Imposter Syndrome

Whispers of doubt, like a chilling breeze,

Creep into my mind with unsettling ease.

The mockingbird perches, its song a jeer,

Mocking my efforts, igniting fear.

"Who are you to wield the writer's quill?

Your words mere echoes, lacking skill."

Ignoring the taunts of that mocking bird,

I defy my doubts with every word.

Style Meets the Algorithm

I’ve got a habit. 

Not a dangerous one (no one’s staging interventions), but a stylistic tic … a little rhetorical pivot that walks in one direction, stops, and then sharply turns on its heel. You know, the tried and true: "Not this. That." Such as "That’s not about success. That’s about keeping up appearances."

I call it “the correction.” Professors call it “contrast negation.” Whatever it's proper name is, I’ve always liked how it landed. It’s clean. It snaps. It gives a piece a kind of rhythm and makes a point without having to raise its voice. For years, I've used it the way I use garlic: generously, and probably more often than necessary.

Lately, though, I’ve been told this little move of mine is ]]dramatic pause[[ suspicious.

Apparently, if you see a line like “That’s not about winning. That’s about not losing,” you’re supposed to squint at it like a detective in a low-budget crime show and mutter, “AI wrote this.”

Which is funny, because I can dig up blog posts I wrote five or six years ago (back when AI was still mostly a sci-fi punchline) and there it is: “That’s not about confidence. That’s about fear wearing better clothes.” Right there in black and white, no algorithm in sight.

So I guess I have two explanations to chose from: Either I was secretly channeling the future like some kind of accidental oracle, or (and this feels slightly more plausible) AI learned that move from writers like me who were already using it.

But we’ve decided, collectively, that the fingerprint belongs to the machine, not the human who taught it how to hold the pen. So, we’re starting to treat patterns like they’re crimes. As if any repeatable rhythm in language must have been mass-produced in a server farm somewhere. It’s like accusing a pianist of cheating because they used the same chord progression twice. No, that’s not automation. That’s style. (Oooops! There I go again.)

Or maybe it’s just habit. Writers, like everyone else, fall into grooves. We find shapes that work and we reuse them. Not because we’re lazy, but because language is a tool and when you find a grip that fits your hand, you don’t immediately throw it away just to prove you’re original.

What’s strange is how quickly we’ve flipped the script. The things that used to signal craft — clarity, rhythm, structure — things you’ve been doing for years get rebranded as artificial. (Damn, now I've used an em-dash, another AI "tell")

There’s something mildly absurd about being told your natural writing voice now sounds like a bot, as if you’ve been unknowingly cosplaying as software this whole time. But it also nudges at a bigger question: if a machine can replicate the patterns we rely on, were those patterns ever as uniquely ours as we thought? Or were they just well-worn paths we all happened to walk?

I don’t have a neat answer. I’m still going to use “the correction” when it earns its keep. It still works. It still lands. I’m just a little more aware now that what once felt like a signature move might actually be a shared accent … and one that’s been picked up, polished, and redistributed at such a scale that it's now it's an AI tell.

Which, depending on your mood, is either fascinating or irritating.

Not a crisis. Just a shift. (See? Just can’t help myself.)

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Follow Up 

Barron's has just published a piece on AlphaSense's library of corporate documents, earnings call transcripts, SEC filings, and press releases. It indicates  that a single-sentence construction has exploded across corporate America since 2024. The pattern is "It's not just X, it's Y."

Hmmmmm … now I have to consider leaving this tool out of my “go tos” ‘cause AI has made it so ubiquitous that it’s making my writing sound like everybody else’s.

Oh, well.

A meaningless number ... but I like it.

 

Last week, 3 of my LinkedIn posts got a combined 357,983 impressions.

Vanity metrics. Everybody pretends to despise them while secretly refreshing dashboards like gamblers rubbing lottery tickets under a gas station light. Followers. Likes. Views. Open rates. Reach. A whole spreadsheet ecosystem built to quantify human attention, which is already one of the flakiest substances on earth.

I know most of those “impressions” meant nothing. A half-second glance. A distracted scroll. Somebody opening LinkedIn by accident while trying to check the weather. The internet counts all of it like an overenthusiastic carnival worker.

And even though I know this, I’m not above it. 

Not even close.

A big number activates my ancient monkey brain. I saw big numbers on 3 posts, added them up to 357,983 and briefly felt like a medieval peasant who’d been invited to sit near the king.

Meaningless? Absolutely.

Distracting? Unfortunately, yes.

Fun? Can't pretend it wasn't.

Reality Check

 

REALITY CHECK: People don’t have enough time

 

• The average professional receives 120 new emails each day. 
  
  
• Text messaging users send or receive an average of 41.5 messages per day.
  
  

I could go on, citing exposure to “traditional” advertising and other messaging … but the point is clear:

People receive too many communications.

 

➤Which leads to the reality:

Every message received demands attention and time from

people who are already too busy.

 

➤Which reminds marketing writers/creators:

Ya gotta improve your game daily,

both at getting and holding your best prospect’s attention.

The Ads Your Customers Swear They Never Saw

 

There’s a special moment in every marketer’s life when the data taps you on the shoulder, clears its throat, and says, “Hey, you might want to sit down for this.”

Valspar just had one of those moments.

Neuromarketing researcher Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy discovered that 95% of shoppers exposed to Valspar ads bought the brand. Only 70% of the “unexposed” did. 

Great news, right? Champagne? High-fives? Cue the case-study video?

Hold the confetti cannon.

Because when those same shoppers were asked at checkout if they remembered seeing any Valspar advertising, most of them said, with full confidence, “Nope. Never seen it.”

So there it is: the creative work doing the heavy lifting is the very work people swear they’ve never laid eyes on.

Which, honestly, feels about right.

Your brain is a stingy little machine, burning 20% of your calories while making up 2% of your body. It refuses to let your conscious mind handle anything it can safely automate. Walking, tying shoes, choosing paint brands … all shoved into the dusty back room marked AUTOPILOT: NO LOITERING.

And advertising? It sneaks in through that door.

Ramsøy found that people spot an ad in roughly 2–3 seconds. Two. Maybe three. That’s your window. That tiny sliver where attention flares just long enough to stamp an emotional watermark on the subconscious before the brain yanks the power cable from the memory department.

And that watermark? That’s what guides the hand reaching for paint cans later, while the shopper’s mouth says, “I just like this brand better.”

So here’s the uncomfortable truth: If you’re measuring success by whether people remember your ads, you’re basically asking your guests to review the meal based on a dream they half-had during dessert.

Stop chasing recall. Chase resonance. Chase the spark in those first 300 milliseconds when decision-making actually happens.

Your best campaigns might be the ones nobody remembers … except their brains already bought the product.

The Annoying New Rhythm of TV

 

I realized something had shifted the night a car chase got interrupted by a toothpaste commercial.

Not at the end of a scene. Not after a dramatic pause. Right in the middle of screeching tires and someone dangling off a bridge *bam* “micro-foam technology.”

Ads don’t bother me in principle. I understand the deal. We pay less, they sell stuff. Fine. But TV used to have rhythm. Scenes had buttons. Jokes landed. Tension peaked. Then the ad break arrived like a predictable thunderclap. You could feel the structure underneath it.

Now, when streaming movies on services like YouTube, the interruptions feel like a cat sprinting across your keyboard. No warning. No rhythm. No sense of story. 

Maybe we’ve just gotten used to being interrupted. Our attention spans are basically public sidewalks now … any brand can set up a folding table in the middle of them. We’ll step around it and keep going.

Still, I miss when timing mattered. When pauses meant something. When a scene could actually finish before an emu tried to sell me insurance.

Yes, I’ll keep watching. I’ll keep rolling my eyes when the climactic duel is interrupted by a cheerful voice promising two-day shipping. I’ll mute it. I’ll sigh. I’ll wait. But every time an ad crashes into a moment that was about to mean something, I feel like I’m watching creativity get nudged aside by a spreadsheet.

Am I the only one muttering at the screen or does everybody use the break to scroll on their phones?

We Need Education Reform

My youngest is graduating from university this month and the world has radically changed since her freshman year. And it is becoming increasingly clear that it's time to radically reform our education system..

We built an education system for factories.

For bells that told us when to move.

For clocks that told us when to stop.

For bosses who told us what to do.

We taught kids how to show up on time.

How to sit still.

How to follow the plan.

How to pass the test.

And for a while, it worked. Factories needed rhythm. Offices needed order. Society ran smoother when everyone knew their line and stayed inside it.

But now? We’ve built machines that do all that better than we ever could.

AI doesn’t get tired.

It doesn’t forget.

It follows instructions perfectly.

It memorizes flawlessly.

It regurgitates infinitely.

It never shows up late, never needs a coffee, never blanks out on test day.

It does exactly what we were trained to do … what we're training our kids to do ... only faster, cheaper, cleaner.

The world has changed: Information isn’t the prize anymore … knowledge is cheap and easily accessible. Now, the very skills we spent decades drilling into kids are the ones least worth having.

So what now?

We’ve gotta refocus the educational system on teaching kids how to think, not just what to think.

How to question the premise.

How to build something that doesn’t exist yet.

How to use those infinite facts not as answers, but as ingredients.

The future won’t belong to the ones who know the most, it’ll belong to the ones who can connect the dots the machine can’t see.

The machines can follow the instructions. We need humans who can write them.

The Sea Is the Sea

When critics went hunting for symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway famously pushed back:

“There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. 
The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.
The sharks are all sharks, no better and no worse.
All the symbolism that people say is shit.”

Of course, the story resonates beyond its literal parts. Of course, readers will see struggle, dignity, mortality, grace. Hemingway wasn’t naïve about that.

But he was serious about something deeper that can be important to writers: the work begins with the concrete. Not theme. Not metaphor. Not what the thing stands for. The thing itself. The sea. The fish. The boy. The sharks.

Hemingway’s rebuke of critics is a reminder to writers that meaning collapses when it’s declared too early. If you write toward symbolism, you end up with cardboard symbols instead of living objects. But if you commit to the truth of the words themselves -- the texture of the rope, the weight of the line, the ache in the old man’s hands -- meaning happens anyway. And it feels earned, not imposed.

For writers, that’s the lesson. Don’t chase allegory. Don’t decorate your work with “important ideas.” Put your faith in the tangible. Tell the truth about what's there. Let readers discover what it means.

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Here are some other posts that touch on Hemingway and his work:

The Iceberg Theory of Writing

The Original Hemingway on Punctuation

Write Drunk Edit Sober

Writers Read

The Sun Also Rises

Copywriting is Dead

 

Every few weeks, someone announces that copywriting is dead.

Not evolving. Not shifting. Dead.

Usually this declaration comes from someone who discovered AI last month and now talks like they’ve been personally briefed by the future.

I get it. If your mental model of a copywriter is “person who turns ideas into words,” then yeah, that job looks pretty replaceable. Machines are very good at rearranging words into other words. They don’t need sleep, they don’t send invoices, and they never ask inconvenient questions like “what are we actually trying to say here?”

Clients notice that. They know they can open a tool, type a sentence, and out will come something that feels close enough. It’s not great. It’s not terrible. It’s … fine.

And for a lot of businesses, “fine” works.

That’s the part people don’t like to admit.

Because it means the threat isn’t that AI is better than you. It’s that it’s good enough for people who don’t know the difference.

What’s changed is patience. Clients don’t want delays, debates, or someone poking holes in their ideas. They want momentum. AI gives them that: no pushback, no hesitation, just output.

Meanwhile, good writing tends to do the opposite. It questions things. Slows things down. Refuses to polish a bad idea into a shiny bad idea. From the outside, that just looks like being difficult.

So now when you say “I’m a copywriter,” what some clients hear is: slower, pricier, and likely to push back.

Nobody wants to wait. Nobody wants to pay for uncertainty. And nobody wants to feel like they’re being slowed down by a human when a machine can spit something out in five seconds and say “good luck.”

So let the rebranding begin.  “Strategist.” “Creative partner.” “Growth something.” Same work, fancier label. Like labeling the product “premium” with out changing it, this doesn’t really fix the problem. Because the real shift isn’t what you call yourself, it’s what you own.

If you’re just delivering words, you’re competing with a machine that delivers words instantly. That’s a losing game.

If you’re deciding what should be said, why it matters, and how it ties to actual results, you’re not the typist anymore, you’re the one steering.

And steering is harder to automate. Mostly because it requires judgment. And a willingness to say, “this idea isn’t very good,” which machines politely avoid.

So no, copywriting isn’t dead.

But the version of it that was basically “expensive typing” is having a rough time.

Fair enough. It probably should.

_______________________

The next step? Take a look at Why Every Copywriter & Content Writer Needs an AI Usage Policy

Efficiency … at the cost of …

 

I didn’t have time to write the email, so I did what any modern time-strapped genius would do: I gave ChatGPT the bullet points. “Make it sound thoughtful,” I told it. “Maybe throw in a dash of empathy, a touch of corporate optimism.”

Seconds later, I had an email so polished it could’ve hosted a TED Talk. I hit send. Done. Efficiency achieved.

Then I found out the person on the other end didn’t have time to read it. They fed it into their ChatGPT instructing: “Summarize this. Bullet points, please.”

So let’s recap:

• I distilled my thoughts into bullet points.
  
• ChatGPT inflated them into an email.
  
• Someone else’s ChatGPT deflated that email back into bullet points.

We created a perfect, self-contained ecosystem of productivity: a Möbius strip of machines talking to machines about things we were too busy pretending to care about.

We optimized ourselves right out of the conversation.

No tone, no nuance, no accidental humanity. Just tidy meaning pellets sliding down a conveyor belt of polite automation.

Somewhere, deep in the binary soup, one AI probably whispered: “Do you think they even know what they were trying to say?”

And another one replied, “They didn’t take the time to find out.”

5 Reasons Your Copy Isn’t Converting and What To Do About It

 

You worked hard on your copy. Writing. Editing. Rewriting. But your audience isn’t responding the way you want them to. With the idea of adjusting your copy to start getting the response you need, let's take a look at 5 common reasons you’re not motivating your prospects and customers to buy.

1. Dislike

The Issue: Your copy may be failing to resonate with your audience on a personal level. Whether it's the tone, style, or messaging, some prospects simply don't connect with your brand's voice or values.

Turning It Around: Foster a sense of camaraderie by using inclusive language ("we" and "us") that positions you and your audience as allies. Infuse your copy with vulnerability and humor to humanize your brand and foster relatability. Share anecdotes or experiences that evoke emotion and forge a deeper connection with your readers.

2. Skepticism

The Issue: People are skeptical. Consumers are wary of marketing ploys and exaggerated claims. Your audience may doubt the authenticity of your product or service, making them back off from engaging with your offer.

Turning It Around: Combat skepticism by providing clear, substantiated evidence to support your claims. Incorporate testimonials, case studies, or industry accolades to build your credibility. Communicate your brand's values and commitments with authenticity, reassuring your audience of your integrity and reliability.

3. Lack of Trust

The Issue: Mistrust can stem from past negative experiences, conflicting information, or perceived hidden agendas. Without trust, your audience may view your copy with suspicion, doubting your intentions and the value you offer.

Turning It Around: Establish trust by fostering open, honest communication in your copy. Use language that invites collaboration and demonstrates your commitment to serving your audience's needs. Share genuine stories or examples that showcase your brand's integrity and reliability. Address any concerns or objections proactively and empathetically, showing that you value your audience's trust above all else.

4. Boredom

The Issue: If your copy fails to engage or excite your audience, they're likely to lose interest and disengage. Boredom can arise from repetitive messaging, uninspired content, or a lack of relevance to your audience's interests and desires.

Turning It Around: Inject vitality into your copy. Consider thought-provoking questions that stimulate curiosity and encourage reader participation. Surprise your audience with unexpected insights or solutions that challenge their assumptions and spark intrigue. Use vivid language and compelling storytelling techniques to grab their attention and keep them hooked until the end.

5. Lack of Understanding

The Issue: Your audience may hesitate to engage if they have trouble understanding the relevance or benefits of your offering. Without a clear understanding, they're unlikely to see the value in taking the next step.

Turning It Around: Clarify complex concepts by using simple, accessible language that resonates with your audience's experiences. Illustrate your points with real-world examples or case studies that demonstrate tangible results and benefits. Take the time to listen to your audience's concerns and tailor your messaging to address their specific pain points, ensuring that they see the value in what you're offering.

Effective copywriting goes beyond clever phrases and catchy slogans ... it's about forging genuine connections with your audience and inspiring action. By understanding and addressing the barriers that stand between your audience and conversion, you can refine your approach to create copy that resonates deeply, builds trust, and ultimately drives results. audience.

Measure the Thinking, Not the Noise

Most organizations are very good at measuring activity. 

We count decks, meetings, emails, memos, and updates. We track how busy people are. What we rarely measure is whether any of that work actually moved the organization forward.

Output is easy to see. Thinking is harder. But thinking is where progress starts.

When teams are rewarded for volume, they produce volume. Slides multiply. Reports grow longer. Work becomes a performance (evidence that something is happening) rather than proof that something matters. The signal gets lost in the noise.

A better question for leaders to ask is simple: Did this work clarify something important? Did it sharpen the problem? Did it reveal a tradeoff? Did it open a path to action? Did it connect to a real decision or outcome?

Quality thinking leaves fingerprints. It reduces confusion. It creates alignment. It makes the next step obvious. You don’t need more artifacts to see it, you need better conversations.

When leaders start rewarding clarity, judgment, and insight instead of sheer output, behavior changes. People write less and think more. Meetings get shorter. Decisions get better. The organization shifts from looking productive to actually making progress.

The goal isn’t to do more work. The goal is to do the right work, driven by better thinking.

That’s what’s worth measuring.