words matter

The Bureau of Linguistical Reality

That’s what “The Great Resignation” did in 2021: it gave a label to the feeling of take this job and shove it , I’m exhausted , even though we now know that the vast majority of people who actually did resign (and not just feel like resigning) were mothers who couldn’t find childcare, service workers finding better jobs, and older workers retiring.

the online trend that links all of these disparate digi subcultures together: namecore, AKA the internet’s insatiable appetite for naming things.

“Language doesn’t just make things—it assembles, cobbles together, entire worlds and all the relations within.”

If you didn’t want to look closely at your own organizational practices, if you felt uncomfortable about what younger works were agitating for, if you feared changed or anything that usurped your understanding of “how business is done” — Quiet Quitting was the easy answer.

Language can contain an entire world, revealing its speakers’ history, values, or pathologies. It can also be obfuscating, diversionary, slippery. Chattiness, with its personality-driven appeals to familiarity, can conceal or elide false promises, banality, emptiness, controversy, and the context of its own existence

Our language choices change how we use our time and energy. For every word we use to describe where we want to go, there's another word that we're walking away from.

Start by releasing AI from the limiting mental model of “technology.” Start thinking of AI as talent, not tech.