THE STATIC

Roasting tech spin, bluster and puffery. Laugh at the cringe, unjam your message.

Each week, same sections, fresh hell in a four-minute read.

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Tech Waffle Torture Explained - We tell you what corporate speak really means. You’re welcome.

Original Fluff
Generative AI is revolutionising content creation, enabling teams to produce high-quality, personalised outputs at speed and scale, enhancing creativity, reducing time-to-market, and unlocking new possibilities across the enterprise.

Translated:
Now your marketing team can generate 800 words of nothing in 30 seconds
‘High-quality’ = sounds human, if the human is sleep-deprived
‘Personalised’ = your name in a template
‘Creativity’ = autocomplete with buzzwords
New possibilities = more content, less meaning.

Meaningfully Shallow Values – You get them as short and sweet ugly truths

Teamwork. Makes the Dream Work.
"We spun up a working group. Ten meetings, zero outcomes and one Trello board no one updated."

Collaboration. In Action.
"Everyone added their ideas to the whiteboard. Then we picked the original one from the boss."

Creativity. Unleashed.
"We held a hackathon. Nothing we built worked but the photos were amazing."

Savage Takedowns – Spectator sport or heed the lesson

Juicero: The $400 Wifi-Enabled Juice Press
Juicero raised $120 million to disrupt... juice. It sold a sleek, internet-connected press for proprietary fruit bags. Then someone squeezed the bag by hand, faster than the $400 machine could manage. Investors flipped. The startup shut down, and its self-proclaimed wellness visionary, Doug Evans vanished into the graveyard of ridiculous tech flops. But not really, he sprang up again in 2020 touting a book about thriving on sprouts, sigh.

Why it still matters:
If your product adds complexity to a task cavemen nailed, you’re not innovating, you’re packaging idiocy in startup gloss.

Pop Culture Cringe – Out of touch comms worth your time

When Retro Cool Tastes like Stale Biscuits: On March 28, 2025, Will Smith released his first album in two decades. Hoping to blend nostalgia with modern flair, the single, ‘Pretty Girls’ landed awkwardly. Lyrics like “I like pretty girls. I love pretty girls” felt painfully dated, and retro visuals couldn’t save it. The internet rolled its eyes, and the album flopped in major markets. Source.

In B2B tech, this is the story of Internet Explorer, once a giant, now a relic, replaced by Edge after failing to keep up with what users actually needed. Leaning on legacy without meaningful progress leaves even big names behind.

Lesson? Nostalgia might get a click but only relevance keeps people coming back. Whether you’re dropping a track or shipping software, yesterday’s glory won’t save you if today’s reality has moved on.

LinkedIn Popularity Templates – Syrupy, self-congratulatory. Surprisingly effective.

Template 2: The ‘Redundancy Awakening’ Post

Yesterday, I was told my role had been made redundant.
Not easy news but maybe… necessary.
Sometimes the universe unchooses you, so you finally choose yourself. After years of building someone else’s dream, I’m finally ready to build my own. Consulting, coaching, caring and sharing. Delivering clarity so deep, you’ll need goggles. Here’s to new chapters and the gift of being set free.

#NextChapter #SequelNobodyAskedFor #SameOldChaos #HitSnooze

Copy & paste anytime.

Got some naval gazing or philosophical musing you’d like to turn into a syrupy LinkedIn post? Reply to this email with your request and I’ll do my best.

Dear Dr Comms – When spin fails, we call in the real professionals to fix our stuff-ups

Dear Dr Comms

We launched an AI-powered chatbot on our website to ‘improve customer experience,’ mostly because our CEO saw it at a conference and said, “We need one of those.” Turns out it gave wildly wrong answers, escalated almost nothing, and once told a customer to “try unplugging your computer, or your expectations.” Now, complaints are piling up, the media’s circling, and the CEO is telling everyone the chatbot was my idea. Help! Sinking Fast in Customer Support.

Dear Sinking Fast,

If your chatbot’s main skill is insulting customers at scale, you’re toast! But here’s how the professionals would fix it: 

🧯Paramedic:
"Stabilise the patient before making speeches - code-speak for: disable the bot. Acknowledge the harm. Reassure people that a human, not a hallucinating algorithm, is now in charge."

🧪Pharmacist:
"Check the ingredients. Was it trained on junk data? Does it understand escalation? Mis-labelled intelligence is dangerous. Adjust the dosage before re-releasing it to the public."

📚Historian:
"Learn from failure or repeat it with better branding. Document what happened from multiple perspectives. Don’t bury the past under PR spin. If you want trust tomorrow, show you've understood yesterday."

Got a problem you wouldn’t trust the Comms Dr to fix? Reply to this email, I’ll loop in real experts. 

What The Fluff (WTF)?! – Decoding tech, something that linguists, philosophers, and your boss refuse to do

Layer 8 Insights – Fortnightly deep dives that explore the human error in tech.