My first book is almost here!

The problem is not using AI. It is using AI as a substitute for the kind of thinking that cannot be automated: the judgment about what a brand sounds like, what it believes, and why any of that should matter to anyone.

The search panic of 2026 is not about AI, or zero-click, or schema markup. The lever was never as connected to the dashboard as everyone assumed. 2026 is just when people noticed.

The customers who love your brand are not just commercially valuable. They are the most precise source of insight into what your brand actually is, and what tension it named before anyone else did.

Eco's 1964 dichotomy between apocalyptics and integrators maps onto the AI debate with uncomfortable precision. But there is a third position he did not name, and it is the one that actually matters.

The future of the market isn't about who offers more. It's about who helps consumers filter the world. But building that filter genuinely, structurally, not just rhetorically, is exactly what most brands are not set up to do.

The line between cultural appropriation and exchange is not aesthetic — it is structural. It is drawn by who benefits, who is credited, and whether the relationship was built or merely assumed.