Words, words, words: blog posts about nothing
Polonius asks what Hamlet is reading. The answer was an insult. It's now a content strategy.
You know the post. Five Ways AI Is Transforming Your Industry. The Future of Work Is Here. It has a stock photo of a robot hand, eight hundred words, and the nutritional content of air. Somebody's company published four of them this week. Nobody read them, including the company.
Why the genre existed
It's tempting to blame AI for these, but the genre predates the models. Content marketing was built on a signaling logic: writing was expensive, so a steady stream of competent posts was a receipt for having thinkers on staff. The post didn't need to say anything. Its existence was the message, the corporate equivalent of a firm handshake. SEO industrialized this, because the search engine, like the reader, mostly counted receipts.
AI didn't corrupt that system. It revealed it. When competent prose costs nothing, the receipt is forgeable, and everyone knows it's forgeable. A blog full of smooth, balanced, well-structured posts now proves exactly one thing: somebody has an API key. The signal didn't degrade. It inverted. Visible effortlessness reads as absence, the same way it does in email.
Writing was a receipt for thinking. The receipt is now forgeable.
What's left worth writing
Whatever can't be generated from the outside. Which turns out to be a short, clarifying list: positions you can be wrong about, numbers from your own work, models a reader can apply without hiring you, and the specific scar tissue of things you tried that failed. A model can imitate the prose of any of these. It can't supply the contents, because the contents are evidence, and evidence has to be gathered somewhere real before it can be written down.
The test I use, for my own posts as much as anyone's: could this change a competent reader's next decision? Not impress them, change a decision. A post that survives that test is about something even if it's ugly. A post that fails it is words, words, words, even if every sentence shines.
The bind, stated plainly
The uncomfortable part of writing this on a consultant's blog is that this post must pass its own test or join its targets, and that recursion is the actual point. Publishing is no longer evidence of anything. Only the contents are. Which means the bar for hitting publish went up at the exact moment the cost of hitting it went to zero, and most of the industry responded by lowering the bar and raising the volume.
The decision this post wants to change: before your company ships its next piece of content, ask what the reader walks away holding. If the honest answer is nothing, the kindest move available, to them and to your brand, is the one almost nobody takes. Don't publish. Silence is now a more credible signal than filler, because silence, at least, can't be generated.