THE STATIC - Issue 23

Hey You, Welcome! Here’s your weekly dose roasting tech spin, bluster and puffery. Laugh at the cringe, unjam your message.

This week in:

• Tech Waffle Torture - ERP: Eternal Recurring Pain

• Shallow Values - Belonging: We’ve got you, until we don’t want you

• Savage Takedowns - AI romantic companions but we’re still lonely

• Corporate Contagions - Eye-twitch syndrome unmasks the jargon hex

• LinkedIn Templates - A leader weaponises Emotional Intelligence

• Not Good News - WiseTech woes continue while tech stocks plunge

• WTF is Catastrophic Forgetting? Oh nothing, just a minor disaster

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

ERP: Enterprise Regret Platform

Discover. Empower. Optimise. Repeat.

Our ERP solution brings every process, every person, every problem into one cohesive whole. Designed to help you grow, scale, and compete, it delivers real-time insights into everything you didn’t know was broken until you tried to fix it.

Built with advanced technologies, our comprehensive suite of tools will help you streamline company activities by giving everyone new tasks to manage.

From finance to supply chain to whatever we call HR now, you’ll enjoy unmatched industry specificity and smarter decisions (once you locate them in the admin console).

As you adapt and grow, your ERP will evolve right beside you, requiring another costly implementation, several consultants named Trevor, and a go-live date that’s mostly symbolic.

In short, your ERP helps your business thrive in the digital economy by quantifying inefficiency, automating frustration, and producing reports that confirm you still need more modules to fix the problems it created.

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

 Belonging

🤗 The Belonging Mantra
“Together We Evolve – right up until your role doesn’t.”

🤗 Belonging at Work
“Where we expect you in the office five days a week – until your redundancy, then please leave swiftly and never darken our doorstep again.”

🤗 Belonging in Action
“Rolling out a new campaign about inclusion, the same week we reduced headcount.”

Savage Takedowns – Spectator sport or heed the lesson

AI Romantic Companions: Loneliness as a Service
Apps like Replika and Nomi promised connection without complication – digital partners who never argued, aged, or asked for space. Now, millions of users are paying subscriptions to be told they’re ‘special’ by code that mines their data for intimacy. When the companies tweak algorithms or censor sexual content, users grieve like it’s a breakup.

Heed the Lesson
When technology starts selling companionship, it’s not progress – it’s insanity. The tech industry isn’t curing loneliness; it’s productising it. Maybe instead of teaching machines to fake affection, we should be teaching humans how to tolerate each other again.

Corporate Contagions – A field guide to the behaviourial disorders infecting the tech industry

Buzzword Eye Twitch Syndrome

Symptoms: Involuntary spasms triggered by terms like ‘synergy,’ ‘circle back,’ ‘value add,’ or ‘hard stop.’ May escalate when exposed to ‘quick wins’ or ‘low-hanging fruit.’

Causes: Chronic contact with PowerPoint decks and leaders who confuse ‘alignment’ with ‘agreement.’

Treatment: Apply eye drops twice daily and avoid contact with people who have been infected with jargon rabies. If symptoms persist, start hopping on one leg and recite “Get thee behind me, Gobbledygook” ten times as HR burns sage to ward off buzzword spirits.

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

Template 23: The ‘Emotionally Intelligent Leader’ Post

Proud to be recognised as a leader who leads with empathy, vulnerability, and a deep commitment to looking like I have both.💧

It’s not about control; it’s about embracing my inner bully with compassion – and then softly enforcing alignment.🌿

I believe in listening deeply, pausing meaningfully, and then doing whatever I was going to do anyway – but gentler.

Grateful to my incredible team for letting me grow through their feedback, which I graciously skimmed.

If you, too, believe emotional intelligence is just power with better bedside manner, hit ❤️ and comment “INSPIRED.”

#EmpathyInAction #ConsciousLeadership #LeadWithFeels

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.

Not Good News – Tech’s weekly highlight reel of hubris, hypocrisy and cringe

WiseTech: Shiny PowerPoint, But Governance Sucks
Here we go again, spotlighting WiseTech - with founder, Richard White, now being sued by former Kyckr executive Sharon Glover for alleged “misleading and deceptive conduct connected to equity grants and unfair dismissal claims.” The Richard White saga continues unabated – from sexual-favours scandal to possible insider trading as this former titan of tech continues his freefall to rock bottom. His former employee, Glover, claims she was mistreated after refusing to produce “shiny” presentations” about Kyckr’s performance, insisting instead that the company’s mounting technical debt be addressed. Her dismissal letter cited ‘performance issues’ – which, she alleges, was really a reprisal for refusing to compromise governance standards.

My Take
When ‘tell it like it is’ becomes a firing offence, you know the rot runs deep in the empire of tech.

AI Hype: $800bn Market Wipeout
Tech stocks just had their worst week since April after an $800 billion AI sell-off erased chunks of market value from Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, and Meta. The ‘AI revolution’ narrative that inflated valuations to near-mythic levels has finally hit something inconvenient: reality. Analysts call it a “correction.” Others might call it a hangover.

My Take
This was inevitable. In October, former Meta executive Nick Clegg warned that the AI bubble – fuelled by “crazy” valuations – could be headed for a correction. It now seems to be happening. What goes up must come down… let’s just hope it’s not with too much of a thud.

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

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