Tech Messaging: Fluff, Guff & Same Old Word Soup

I analysed the website home page of 25 start-ups, 25 mid-sized tech firms, 25 enterprise software companies and 25 IT services firms to see how tech companies explain who they are, what they do and why they matter? What I found was that tech companies suffer from ‘sameness’. Is this a problem? And if so, should you do something about it in an era where AI slop is turning ‘sameness’ into commercial risk. I invite you to read my analysis and download the research report, access below.

^{CHITTER CHATTER}

Just a Company Bitch

It seems like wherever I turn, stories about working at Meta are getting worse. According to WIRED, this week “someone interrupted a livestreamed, employee-only presentation with an expletive-filled outburst about “being the company’s bitch.” The individual then asked the people leading the call to write to a specific Meta AI Executive and "tell him that he's a piece of shit." According to WIRED “it appears that executives and employees are struggling with Meta’s chaotic AI strategy. Current employees mention widespread dissatisfaction with the AI drudgework with one employee saying, “It’s literally the gulag. You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week.”

Hack Your Morale at Meta

Another WIRED scoop about Meta, this time focussing on Mark Zuckerberg’s tone-deaf leadership at village Meta. After recent mass layoffs leaving current staff shouldering heavier workloads, he concocted a hackathon as a way to bring his disgruntled people together. “In a post shared to Meta’s roughly 70,000 employees, Zuckerberg framed the hackathon as a way for staff to build camaraderie at a time of widespread internal unrest.” However, the downtrodden villagers were not amused with one employee saying, “I have no incentive to participate, let alone have the time to do so,” while another wrote, “I’m not sure that this company supports a hackathon culture anymore”, which drew more than 200 thumbs-up and heart reactions. Make that 201 thumbs up.

Not Good News

Tainted Memories of Succulent Mangos

My first visit to the Sunshine Coast at age 16, was a special memory I had tucked into the soft folds of nostalgia, longing for a more innocent time: summers of my youth spent strolling along spectacular, white-sandy beaches beneath an unfettered blue sky. In this memory, I’m accompanied by my father and his friend when, seemingly out of nowhere, a man approaches offering cold Mangos for sale, which he shows us inside his plastic bucket of ice. I had never eaten a mango. My father’s friend paid, and the Mango seller, using a small, sharp knife, deftly cut the Mango in half and then, as quickly as could be, sliced horizontal and vertical lines, leaving small cubes of delicious, juicy mango for me to consume, which I greedily did. Thus began my love affair with mangos.

But now, decades later, my love for mangos has died in the ditch. That’s because we now have a “new powerhouse acronym for tech stocks in the AI era: MANGO” representing Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google and OpenAI. “Proposed companies for MANGO fit the bill for 2026. Meta, Nvidia, and Google all rank among the top five companies by market capitalisation. Meanwhile, Anthropic and OpenAI are gearing up for their IPOs, which are expected to have valuations around $1 trillion each.” What about SpaceX everyone? It just completed the largest IPO in history, raising US$75 billion and pushing its market value beyond US$2 trillion in early trading. I think the new acronym is MANGOS, not MANGO. No longer a sweet fruit of delight but monster tech companies that might consume us all, bite by lascivious bite.

Rise of the Botsitters

“A new report from Glean’s Work AI Institute found that white-collar workers spend an average of 6.4 hours a week ‘botsitting AI - feeding it context, checking outputs, debugging mistakes, and cleaning up errors. Apparently, the burden appears to be taking a toll on employee morale. The report found that workers who spend an unusually large share of their AI time botsitting are 73% more likely to be actively looking for another job. More and more, AI feels like factory work drudgery. Babysitting real humans was never boring from my experience, mostly fun, often funny, a bit challenging, also surprising and educational. I loved babysitting as a teenager, but botsitting sounds tedious to the nth degree.

^SUBTEXT

The Waffle: “We’re transforming our company to make sure it will always be the best place for talented people to have the greatest impact. People tell us that they appreciate the ability to take greater ownership and execute their vision with less bureaucracy and management to navigate.” — Mark Zuckerberg, internal Meta memo, 20 May 2026.

Translation:
‘Transforming our company’: We fired thousands of people, but ‘transforming’ sounds less brutal.
‘The best place for talented people’: Except for the talented people we just escorted out.
‘Have the greatest impact’: Do the work of several departed colleagues.
‘People tell us’: We found 2 people who agree with us.
‘Greater ownership’: Congratulations. The understaffing problem is now yours.
‘Less bureaucracy and management’: Fewer managers. More work. Please enjoy the freedom.

A leadership disorder in which executives become convinced their company is paradise on earth while employees experience something closer to the ninth circle of hell. Symptoms: describing mass layoffs as ‘transformation’, understaffing as ‘empowerment’ and mandatory hackathons as ‘camaraderie’. Side effects: collapsing morale, anonymous staff leaks and villagers brandishing plastic knives. Cure: leave your ivory tower and ask an employee how things are going. Then listen.

SEV1s: short for Severity 1 incidents: The most serious technical failures. Now occasionally brought to you by AI-generated code.

^{THE SHALLOW END}

Big Brother is Watching You Watch Soccer

Living in Australia, I’ve watched the World Cup live at 3am inside a pub or when the clock struck midnight at home on a large screen projector I once borrowed from work to host a World Cup party. Fun. With the 2026 FIFA World Cup now on, and “more than 5 million fans expected to attend across 16 venues in the United States, Canada and Mexico”, it seems the US government has deployed invasive surveillance technologies under the guise of heightened terrorism concerns. “Security is often used as an excuse for agendas that have nothing to do with security at all,” a senior policy analyst tells WIRED.

Dear Dr Comms
I’m a disgruntled tech employee working in the AI division of a large, multibillion-dollar tech company. Nobody knows what’s going on, the work is bone-crushingly tedious, the hours are long and my boss is an idiot. Recently, during a team call attended by 50 people, I swore and called him “a useless, spineless, no-good piece of dung hanging off a sheep’s bum”. My camera was off and I used tech to disguise my voice, but I’m still worried the boss might discover it was me. How do I avoid capture and possible evacuation from the building? Yours, The Anonymous Dung Slinger

Dear Dung Slinger
Someone’s due for a surprise performance review! Let’s see how the specialists can help:

📦 Logistics and Inventory Specialist:
“Immediately hide inside a large cardboard box labelled ‘Legacy Infrastructure’. Nobody has opened one of those since 2019. Arrange for yourself to be shipped to a warehouse in Tasmania until the investigation blows over.”

🩹 Plastic Surgeon:
“A new face is unnecessary. Simply give yourself the standard tech-executive makeover: black skivvy, expensive trainers, dead eyes and a permanent expression suggesting everyone else has misunderstood the strategy.”

🧪 Lab Technician:
“Contaminate the evidence by collecting voice samples from all 50 attendees and splicing the words together. By Monday, everyone will appear to have called the boss dunghead. Punishment avoided.

Improving AI Productivity

^{BIN THIS…}

‘Unlocking’ has now been done to death. Adding ‘autonomous intelligence’ just gives the corpse a robot costume.

If you like fluff that sounds important, copy and paste, I don’t mind, and neither will 100 tech companies also using the same phrase.

Tech Messaging: Fluff, Guff & Same Old Word Soup

I analysed the website home page of 25 start-ups, 25 mid-sized tech firms, 25 enterprise software companies and 25 IT services firms to see how tech companies explain who they are, what they do and why they matter? What I found was that tech companies suffer from ‘sameness’. Is this a problem? And if so, should you do something about it in an era where AI slop is turning ‘sameness’ into commercial risk. I invite you to read my analysis and download the research report, access below.

Know someone who lives for this kind of nonsense? Forward this email to them and help me spread the dysfunction.

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