Zero Clicks #37: AI’s Funhouse Mirror

Welcome back to Zero Clicks where we explore the interplay of AI, media and commerce. Here’s your TL;DR for this week:

• The big picture: AI and the Abilene Paradox 

• Job posts: Vibe agentic growth performance marketers 

• The meme is the message: Scotty doesn’t know   

• One great read: An homage to the golden age of the internet 

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AI’s Funhouse Mirror

Since you read this newsletter, you are likely a good-looking, ambitious professional who works somewhere at the nexus of media, commerce and technology. In the year of our Lord 2025, that means that AI is wrapped around the consciousness of your professional world.

But what if you just aren't having it?

Let's say you've just done a keg stand on the AI Haterade and agree with every single word in Ed Zitron's 18,000-word tour de force "Case Against Generative AI." What the hell do you do? Outside of shorting NVIDIA in the public markets, how can you transform your righteous indignation into generational wealth?

Sure, there are myriad ways to hedge against a predicted AI downturn. First and foremost, you can keep doing the damn work and make sure that you don't let LLMs atrophy your cerebrum. You can try to align your career to technology that touches the physical world, say, starting an agency that specializes in marketing for HVAC magnates and commercial developers. Or perhaps most prudently, you could try to work for Google and Amazon, the two companies that are best poised to thrive in either an AI boom or bubble.

But can you position yourself to uniquely accelerate your career by betting on an AI bubble pop?

Said another way, is there an anti-AI Luddite arbitrage to exploit?

I don't think so. Frankly, if you work in technology and the industries that are downstream of it, I can't fathom any career bets you can make where your prospects will be demonstrably better if generative AI implodes. We're all riding the tide ushered in by a handful of powerful men. There's little nobility in swimming against the current. 

From an individual knowledge worker's point of view, doubling down on AI optimism and intellectual curiosity is still the ultimate asymmetric career bet. If the bulls are right, the spoils from the continued generative AI boom will be the most unequally distributed in the history of the industry. Trillions of dollars will land in the pockets of those who aligned their career paths closest to the AI zeitgeist. Already, a mid-level engineer at OpenAI has cashed out more in secondaries than a (non-founder) CTO would make on a mid-nine-figure SaaS acquisition.

But if the bubble pops in a blaze of glory and we get an AI nuclear winter, the ensuing pain will be unapologetically egalitarian. The pink slips will come to the hypebois and the cynics alike. 

Thus, if you're like most sane people and unsure, but cautiously open-minded about AI, it's just a lot better for your career prospects to default to AI optimism. 

In aggregate, this creates a fascinating funhouse-mirror effect that obfuscates the true sentiment behind what people actually believe. Technology professionals acting in their rational self-interest drone on about how AI is changing the world and suppress their cold takes, lest they seem like losers you don't want to hire. As a result, AI hype dominates the information ecosystem, countered only by the ultra-cynical doomer takes.

"The Majority AI View," as defined in this brilliant blog post by Anil Dash, barely exists in the public domain. What we get is AI's version of the Abilene Paradox, where nobody is willing to share their tempered, reasonable viewpoint on AI because they think it is at odds with their peers. No matter what you read, trust that most people haven't lost their damn minds.

While the loudest AI bulls and bears will continue to rack up Reddit upvotes, the long-term winning career profile will be professionals who default to a bullish curiosity about AI but can also keep skeptical ideas in mind. Childlike wonder at the power of LLMs and disdain for slop and hallucinated output are not mutually exclusive.

It is shocking how few people can truly handle the cognitive dissonance of competing viewpoints, especially when it comes to something as central as your professional identity. To win in the AI era, be one of them.

Director, Agentic Performance Marketing, Chewy
I’ve long felt that the best growth leaders effectively build systems to make themselves obsolete. This JD says the quiet part out loud. The post states that the gig is to “lead the evolution of Chewy’s lower-funnel marketing into an intelligent, agentic system powered by data, automation, and AI…balancing acquisition, retention and contribution margin.”

Agentic notwithstanding, you wouldn’t have seen terms like “contribution margin” in a marketing job listing two years ago. It’s a new world out there.

Vibe Growth Marketing Manager, Ramp
Ramp is on a generational run. The company is valued at $32B and continues to set the standard in B2B marketing, taking literally the most boring topic imaginable and making it downright riveting. In the last month, they’ve locked Kevin from the office in a box with a stack of expense reports and hired an economist who they…sent to a Russian bathhouse? 

So take it with the appropriate grain of salt when I say, it sounds like this JD is trying way too hard. The role seeks a marketer who is fluent in “Zapier/Make/Tray/N8N, GPT-4, Retool, Notion, Airtable, Python, Javascript, SQL, LangChain, Verce” to effectively write ad copy, build landing pages and segment audiences. You know, normal marketing stuff.

People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

Never change Scotty G, never change

Marilyn Haggerty, Whose Column on Olive Garden Went Viral, Dies at 99, Wall Street Journal

There’s often a nebulous sense that the modern web has is awash in enshittification, accompanied by a vague nostalgia for simpler, innocent times online. But what is the former vestige of the internet that we truly pine for, before the goon squad took it over?

For me, it’s Marilyn Hagerty’s earnest 2012 review of the Olive Garden coming to Grand Forks, a piece that will forever live in internet lore. She died in September at the age of 99 and in a twist of fate, her son is the obituary writer for the Wall Street Journal. His piece is a touching tribute to a “no-nonsense” woman who “during a simpler time online, broke through for all the right reasons.”