Why saying it once was never the strategy.

Advertisers, love them or hate them, know their business with product placement and getting press. You want your client or product ever present in the cultural vocabulary or it/they will be forgotten as quickly as yesterday’s breakfast.

Entertainment and media companies understand this dynamic on a different layer. Look at Disney and Nintendo. People complain “why isn’t X making more media for adults.” Because you’re not the audience. You were never the audience short of being a vehicle to introduce your children to the brand via a nostalgia bridge.

There are always going to be new five year olds who haven’t experienced Mickey Mouse and haven’t played a Mario platform game, and those children eventually aren’t interested in Mom and Dad’s crusty old SNES from the cupboard. Their friends are playing the latest Mario Kart on the Switch 2. It’s bright, it’s kinetic, it’s coded to their sensibilities.

Sure, Nintendo makes games for adults, and they do it to keep that console in the house of the twenty-something so when they have kids, the entry point is ready and waiting for the next generation.

Disney plays the same long game in their own right. These companies aren’t repeating themselves. They’re re-presenting to an audience that doesn’t know the product exists yet, with a focused target window that, if they can capture it, wins them the entire household.

Every industry has a version of this. The message isn’t stale. The audience is new.

And tying it to this post. If you haven’t seen what I’ve written before, take a read. This is my re-presenting to an evergreen audience.

AI is the latest advancement in automation. The job losses, the industry shifts, the civil upheaval. None of this is new folks, but that also doesn’t make it fun or exciting to be the one replaced. I’ve been on both sides of this, trust me I feel your pain.

Humans like to make work easier and more efficient. Are there still people working in some of these industries? Sure but not at the scale of their peak when these jobs would have been a career choice. Let’s just go back say 150 years…

The steam-powered drill replaced human miners (and yes, John Henry beat it once, and it killed him)

The gas-powered tractor replaced significant human and animal labor

The moving assembly line and subsequent robotics replaced the skilled factory worker

Various waves of agricultural harvesting automations have reduced the use of manual field labor (from cotton to strawberries)

(Automatic) Computers replaced human “Computers” wiping out an entire career staffed primarily by women

ATMs have replaced bank tellers

Automatic telephone switchboards eliminated an entire career path

Spreadsheets replaced formal Bookkeepers and Accounting Clerks

Desktop publishing wiped out the prepress industry

Online hotel and travel reservation booking has replaced the travel agent

And for the average person on LinkedIn, this is probably more personal than previous waves of automation because it reaches into knowledge work, creative work, and professional identity in ways people didn’t expect. For the last 40 years we told people those careers were safe.

And unless you’ve been raging against tractors, ATMs, spreadsheets, online booking, desktop publishing, industrial robotics, and every other labor-saving tool with the same energy, then maybe this isn’t really a principled objection. That’s not consolation to you or those who came before you though, is it?

Do I have an answer? No. But sci-fi writers have been proposing them for decades: universal basic income, radical restructuring of how we think about work and value, decoupling survival from employment. The ideas aren’t new. We just refuse to take them seriously until the crisis is personal. And even then, we’d rather fight about whether the automation is fair than talk about what comes after it.