UNDERTOW: where to start, depending on what you do
There are many essays. You only need three to start.
UNDERTOW names behaviors of the AI transition that are already happening and don’t have words yet. Nerve laundering was one. Tacit harvest was another. Each essay isolates one and gives it a name built to survive being repeated in a room you’re in and I’m not.
Three ways in below, three essays each. Any of them stands alone.
If you build the technology
Tacit Harvest (015) is the term for recording a skill its owner cannot explain, keeping it, and setting the owner aside. Most of the other essays sit on top of this transaction.
Laundered Presence (013). The robot hides a person to look autonomous. The office siren styles a person to look like a machine. Same wire, opposite ends.
Compliance Funeral (019). China switched off millions of AI companions in one week, by law, on schedule. Nothing died. There are widows. Read this one if you ship anything a person talks to.
If you run a creative business
Guessing at the Speed of Confidence (007). Taste is not the scarce thing. Duration is, and on a P&L it looks exactly like waste.
How to De-Risk Creativity (016) names nerve laundering, the process by which an organization arranges for nobody to have to have the idea. If one essay makes you uncomfortable in a meeting on Monday, it is this one.
Judgment Piecework (018). Thirty thousand professionals a week sell verdicts to AI platforms by the click. The rate is excellent right now.
Then The Zero-Deductible Organization (017) closes the triangle. 018 is the seller. 017 is the buyer. Same decision changing hands.
If you advise organizations
The Cosmotechnics Gap (003). China and the West are not adopting the same technology. A global brief written as though they are will be surprised three times.
The Provenance Premium (009). Luxury, bodies, and AI all went obsessive about proving they are real in the same eighteen months. This one states plainly what would prove it wrong, which is a habit I would like the rest to catch.
The Zero-Deductible Organization (017) is the term for a company that has insured its judgment down to no retained layer. Full coverage became purchasable for the first time. That is the problem, not the fix.
Every term the series has coined lives in The UNDERTOW Index. They are built to travel. I would rather hear one in a room I am not in than get credited for it.
I have watched a screen acquire a body three times. I drew the AOL Running Man in 1997, when the question was whether a person would trust a face made of pixels. I was the first creative director at Second Life, when the question was whether a person would live inside one. This is the third time, and it is the first one where the machine makes the calls. That is why I write these.
A sampling of my built work is at joroanlazaro.com.
There is also a personal essay running underneath the analysis, less often. The analysis names the machine. The essays prove a person wrote it.
One ask. If you are watching a behavior that does not have a name yet, tell me what it is. Message me here. That is where most of these start, and the ones that come from inside a company are better than anything I find in public.