Won't Get Fooled Again!

The kayfabe of marketing and communications is breaking. The audience is finally paying attention.

Hello friends. It’s Monday.

So, last week at UCF’s commencement, the graduating class spent a solid stretch booing the keynote speaker - a trustee who’d taken it upon herself to lecture them about how AI was going to transform their careers. The internet’s immediate diagnosis was that Gen Z is terrified of the future. Nope. That ain’t it.

These kids know. What happened is that they are rejecting the narrative that tells them they don’t matter. The institutional script says the entry-level worker is already obsolete, a mere placeholder until the software gets updated. The graduates didn’t boo because they’re afraid of the tech; they booed because they refuse to applaud their own erasure from the story.

I see that as a great sign. Because it’s just one more data point to start to see the refusal to “buy into the script” breaking out everywhere.

Meanwhile, here in Los Angeles, Spencer Pratt is polling second in the mayoral race at twenty-two percent. He recently had to formally deny that the campaign is just a front for a new reality series. It’s a beautifully meta moment: a guy who became famous for playing a fictional version of himself on a "reality" show is now begging us to believe his political career isn't a script.

Welcome to The Lens. Nobody is sticking to the teleprompter anymore, and the audience is noticing.

If it resonates with you - consider passing it along to a friend or colleague - or checking out my latest book Valuable Friction.

Zoom Lens: Kayfabe Is Breaking

Last week I was at my yearly retreat up in the mountains of Utah with about 30 of the smartest people I’ve ever known. I was invited fifteen years ago, presumably to satisfy some sort of cosmic diversity quota for ‘guy who’s winging it,’ yet here we are.

Anyway, as always the format was loose: no decks, no panels, nobody performing for a hashtag. And at some point on the second day, we started talking about something I just can’t stop thinking about.

The conversation had drifted, as conversations do, toward AI because of course it did. And someone - I’ll spare them the credit because Chatham House rules and all of that - said:

AI can’t not know.

That was it. That was the whole sentence. No PowerPoint slide. No follow-up case study. Just five syllables that have been rattling around in my head ever since.

AI suffers from a fatal flaw: it is incapable of not knowing. But as it turns out, the magic of working a problem out with another human being - really sweating it, not just “aligning on a cross-functional workstream” - is the shared ignorance. It’s two people wrestling with something neither has figured out. A stray thought lands wrong, triggers a different stray thought, and suddenly a real idea appears out of nowhere. You might not even leave with an answer to the problem you came in with, but you leave better. AI can give you a synthesis of the known universe in four seconds, but it will never understand the profound utility of a shared, confused shrug.

I bring this up now because once you see it, you see it everywhere. And the news this last week or so has been wall-to-wall with companies, agencies, and platforms desperately performing that they know. Performing it loudly. Performing it expensively. And we audiences - finally, mercifully - are starting to call the bluff.

Pro wrestling calls this Kayfabe. It’s the collective agreement between the performers and the audience to pretend the script is reality. The illusion is the entire point. When kayfabe breaks, the magic doesn't just fade; it dies a humiliating death. The illusion of a blood feud vanishes, leaving behind two sweaty people in neon tights who suddenly look less like gladiators and more like low-level contractors having a terrible day at the office.

Modern marketing and communication is running on kayfabe. Has been for a while.

Publicis just dropped $2.2 billion on LiveRamp and called it a transformation into “an agentic AI company.” That’s adorable in the same way bolting a Tesla badge onto a golf cart is electric vehicle transformation. What actually happened is a giant ad holding company bought a data company, which giant ad holding companies have been doing since the Bush administration - the first one. The lanyards are new. The trick is the same.

Then… also last week OpenAI launched something called the “OpenAI Deployment Company,” which proves that for all its trillions of parameters, ChatGPT still cannot beat a 1985 IBM executive at naming things. Anywho, it’s the classic Oracle, IBM, and Accenture playbook, but rebranded with enough military tech jargon to hide the fact that selling software is incredibly hard when nobody can explain what it actually does.

To solve this minor issue, OpenAI will now sell you the actual human beings who can explain it - tactically branded as "Forward Deployed Engineers." Because calling them "on-site implementation contractors" doesn't justify a four-billion-dollar valuation. Welcome back to 1998. Bring your Tamagotchi.

And speaking of Forward Deployed Engineers, we have to look at Palantir. Their leadership recently declared that SaaS is dead, which is a bold marketing narrative for a company whose entire valuation is built on… wait for it… selling SaaS. But the kayfabe really fractures when you read the actual quote, which translates to: “SaaS is dead, please buy our SaaS bundled with our consultants.”

Then… just now - Musk lost his case against Altman because the suit wasn't a legal argument - it was.. yup… kayfabe stunt. It’s season seven of Two Billionaires Who Used To Be Friends, a show currently streaming on Who Gives A Crap+. The spell broke in the courtroom, and suddenly we were just looking at two incredibly wealthy men trading insults on a script neither of them can remember anymore.

Oh and, because it’s 2026 and we simply have to look at the global stage: Donald Trump just went to China and allegedly negotiated the creation of a “Board of Trade” and a “Board of Investment.” These are two beautiful pieces of important-sounding furniture that exist solely so people can brag about sitting on them. It’s peak international kayfabe.

Then, finally, came the week’s key punchline: Vulture spent six thousand words proving that the algorithmic "curator" accounts we treat as organic culture-makers are entirely fake. The illusion of the hyper-tasteful digital crate-digger has officially shattered. It’s just a legacy clipping PR agency operation wearing a fake Taylor Swift concert t-shirt and selling twenty-five-dollar tote bags.

But here is what I’m finally realizing: The audience isn’t agreeing to pretend anymore. They are starting to see the seams in the costumes. The strategic advantage in 2026 won’t be louder certainty, bigger acquisitions, or freshly rebranded consulting arms. It’ll be the willingness to step out of character - to look a client or a market in the eye and say, “I don’t know yet, let’s figure it out” - and then actually do that messy work in public.

Which is, conveniently, the one thing AI structurally cannot do.

The machine cannot not know. Which means human beings still have something to sell that an algorithm cannot, even in principle, replicate. We can sit in a room together - two people who don’t have the answer yet - and discover something neither of us could have found alone.

Call it a moat. Call it a differentiator. Call it whatever your next pitch deck demands. But really, it’s just the work - the thing we used to know how to do before our corporate performance got so fucking polished.

Maybe it’s time we finally broke kayfabe.

WIDE ANGLE LENS

1. OnlyFans Is the New Cubicle

When prestige TV starts using OnlyFans as a plot-level recession indicator - see Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Euphoria, and a growing list - the “creator economy” mythology has been ratified as a cultural joke. Turns out “anyone can monetize their passion” was technically true, if you defined passion… uh…. generously and monetize very specifically.

2. Stop Producing Campaigns. Start Orchestrating Content.

I wrote a piece for CMI last week arguing that most marketing teams aren’t actually operating — they’re performing operations. They run campaigns when they should be running a shared editorial backbone. Different muscle, different math, different org chart. If your “content strategy” looks like a Gantt chart with deliverables stapled to it, have a look….

3. The Feed Has Always Been Fake

Vulture spent six thousand words confirming what we all kind of suspected: the “viral” songs, memes, influencer beats and celebrity drama filling your feed are mostly the product of stealth clipping campaigns - agencies paying creators a buck per thousand views to seed content into the algorithm. Which makes it cheaper than every ad format ever invented. That’s right - your “what’s trending” report was a media plan.

LENS FLARE

What I’m reading right now

📖 Dare to Think Differently — Gerald Zaltman

Picked this one up because Different by Youngme Moon is one of my all-time favorites and Zaltman runs in the same HBS marketing lineage - he’s the guy who wrote How Customers Think. The timing turned out uncanny: one of Zaltman’s six “thinker toys” for highly effective executives is literally called befriending ignorance. In a week when this newsletter is about AI’s structural inability to not know, his book is the human counterpoint.

📊 Gartner: The “Enablement Illusion”

Gartner just dropped a survey saying 50% of enterprises without a people-centric AI strategy will lose their top AI talent by 2027. The phrase they coined for what’s going wrong is too perfect: the enablement illusion. Leaders are confusing access and adoption metrics for actual transformation. Translation: a Copilot license for every employee is just Clippy that can generate blog posts.

LENS CAP

First…before we wrap… a new thing for you…. The 4K contrast: Where’s kayfabe ending for you? What are you seeing out there… Pull it into frame in the Substack chat - or just reply… I’ll pull the good stuff into next week’s edition.

Here’s the thing about kayfabe breaking that nobody wants to admit out loud: it’s a relief.

For a long time - my entire career, anyway - we’ve all been doing some version of the same performance. Acting like we knew. Acting like the slide deck was real. Acting like the strategy was going to survive first contact with the third quarter. Nodding along in meetings where the only honest sentence anyone in the room could have said was I have no fucking idea why we’re doing this.

The thing AI cannot do - that one beautifully structural inability to not know - turns out to be the permission slip we’ve all been quietly waiting for. If the machine has the knowing covered, we’re free to do the other thing. The confused shrug. The “wait, hold on.” The question nobody else in the room had thought to ask. The wrestling-something-out-with-another-human that used to be the whole reason we got into this work, before someone decided “knowing” was a deliverable.

So yes - the audience is breaking character. The graduates are booing. The voters are picking reality stars. The Vulture exposés are stacking up. Every week brings another holding company performing a transformation it doesn’t actually understand.

That’s not the end of the show. It’s the start of doing the work in front of people.

Welcome to the part where it gets interesting.

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