I'm a technology entrepreneur. I build Sola, an AI-native travel company, and I run marketing for other businesses. This is where I think in public: researched, cited essays on travel and place, and notes from inside the building itself. All my own work, my own opinion, written to be read.
The writers demanding publishers never use AI all have publishers. The viral posts say one prompt drinks a bottle of water; the actual paper said one bottle per 10 to 50 responses. The scientists behind the 'AI rots your brain' headlines say their study shows no such thing. Every argument against using AI is made by someone who already has the thing it replaces: an editor, a tutor, a doctor. Run the numbers on every front and the case for abstaining collapses into a luxury, and the bill lands on the people with the fewest alternatives.
The retouching, the cutdowns, the second round of headlines: those used to be a line item, and the line item was most of the invoice. Now a junior with the right tool does an afternoon of it before lunch. An agency still pricing those hours is charging for the part of the work that got automated, and the client can feel it. The fee that survives is attached to a different thing entirely, and it was always the harder thing to sell.
Paste your bio into a chat window, ask for a post in your voice, and you get prose that could belong to anyone selling anything. The reason is not that the model is weak. It is that you gave it nothing of yourself to work from. Getting your actual voice out of an AI is closer to training a new hire than writing a clever prompt, and the part nobody wants to hear is that it costs you real hours and stays your job to the end.
The retouching, the cutdowns, the second round of headlines: those used to be a line item, and the line item was most of the invoice. Now a junior with the right tool does an afternoon of it before lunch. An agency still pricing those hours is charging for the part of the work that got automated, and the client can feel it. The fee that survives is attached to a different thing entirely, and it was always the harder thing to sell.
Seth Godin called permission marketing 'the privilege (not the right)' of reaching people who actually want to hear from you. Most businesses treat the opt-in as the finish line, when it is only the start: you re-earn the right to a customer's attention at every touchpoint after the first, the reply, the checkout, the invoice, and you lose it the moment one of them stops feeling like you. The real work is making all of them feel like the same hand.
When a machine can write the post in nine seconds, output stops being the thing that costs you anything, and advice that was sane in 2015 quietly turns into the worst thing you can do. Three quarters of new web pages already carry AI content, and the volume keeps climbing while performance does not. The work that is left is the work the machine cannot do for you: knowing the few things actually worth making, and having the nerve to make only those.
When a machine can write the post in nine seconds, output stops being the thing that costs you anything, and advice that was sane in 2015 quietly turns into the worst thing you can do. Three quarters of new web pages already carry AI content, and the volume keeps climbing while performance does not. The work that is left is the work the machine cannot do for you: knowing the few things actually worth making, and having the nerve to make only those.
When conversion stalls, the reflex is to add: another plan tier, another testimonial, a second call-to-action. Usually the buyer already has reasons enough. What they lack is an easy way through the deciding itself, and the cost of that friction shows up everywhere from organ donation forms to a 23-field checkout. This is a piece about treating the choice as the product, doing the deciding work on the customer's behalf, and why a better option keeps losing to an easier one.
No one tattoos a spec sheet onto their arm. The thing a customer pays for is rarely the thing printed on the invoice, which means a brief that only describes the product has described the least persuasive part of the sale. When the work starts with the person the buyer is trying to become, the features stop being the pitch and start doing their quieter job as proof.
Paste your bio into a chat window, ask for a post in your voice, and you get prose that could belong to anyone selling anything. The reason is not that the model is weak. It is that you gave it nothing of yourself to work from. Getting your actual voice out of an AI is closer to training a new hire than writing a clever prompt, and the part nobody wants to hear is that it costs you real hours and stays your job to the end.
Familiarity does the selling before you make a single argument, and the psychology behind that is older and better-documented than most growth tactics. Here is why the same look on a flat Tuesday beats a clever campaign that resets you to zero every quarter.
A discount is the one lever you can pull this afternoon without admitting anything is wrong with what you sell, which is exactly why it gets pulled before anyone checks whether price was the problem. Usually it was not. The buyer was bracing for the work going wrong, and a lower number does nothing to that fear. The move that holds your margin is the one that takes the risk off their side of the table.
People can feel AI writing within a line or two now, and the moment they clock it, they trust it less. A Nuremberg study found that just labelling an ad as AI-made made people rate it less natural, less useful, and left them less willing to buy. The fix is not to hide the AI or swear it off, but to stop letting it sound like everyone's AI: train it on your own voice, your emails, your pitches, the way you actually talk, and keep your hand on the one thing it cannot do, deciding what is worth saying.
A discount is the one lever you can pull this afternoon without admitting anything is wrong with what you sell, which is exactly why it gets pulled before anyone checks whether price was the problem. Usually it was not. The buyer was bracing for the work going wrong, and a lower number does nothing to that fear. The move that holds your margin is the one that takes the risk off their side of the table.
Everyone thinks AI changed marketing by writing the copy. That is the least interesting thing it did. The real change is that being specific, a different page for every ad, a different message for every kind of buyer, went from something you rationed to something you can do by default. That quietly moved the whole job, from making things to deciding which things are worth making, and most of the industry has not caught up.
When people hear that one person runs the whole marketing side, they picture someone doing a little of everything, badly. The reality is the opposite: a set of tools wired into one machine that finds customers, builds what turns them into sales, runs the ads, and keeps track of what works, all held together by one person. Here is the machine, and why the hard part was never the tools.
Sola is a travel app built only for women who travel solo. One night last week a piece of software pretending to be one of those women opened the part of the app where they find each other, and reported, calmly, that it was confused: there was a man standing there. I had looked at that screen a hundred times and never seen him.
Most destinations cannot tell you the day they switched on. Cape Town can. For most of the apartheid era it ran a whites-only tourism economy, and from the mid-1980s an international boycott closed the door from outside. On 11 February 1990 the city stood in front of the world. Then the state and capital built the destination on purpose, on top of one of the most unequal cities on earth.
You can wire money home in seconds, ship a barrel of goods across an ocean, have groceries delivered to your mother in Lagos, each through an app built for nothing else. The one part of staying tied to home with no product behind it is the trip to be there yourself. This is an essay about why the most frequent trip in the world is served everywhere except in travel, and what gets built next.
The story everyone tells about Marrakech runs through a single Vogue photograph, Yves Saint Laurent, and a brief bohemian moment in the late 1960s. The story underneath runs through a French planning doctrine from 1912, a hotel built in 1923, and a Moroccan state that spent the 2000s turning that inheritance into thirteen million arrivals a year.
Booking.com's search form has four fields. Together they encode assumptions about who travels, why, where they begin, what they want to know, and which currency they think in. Most of the world's travellers fail the schema before they fail the search.
The story everyone tells about Bangkok runs through Anthony Bourdain, Lonely Planet, and Khao San Road. The story underneath runs through Thai government policy, three generations of Thai entrepreneurs, and a phase of Cold War American war spending almost nobody mentions.