Twenty years ago, Wired covered a story about Bob, a developer who paid someone in India $12,000 a year to do his job. He worked 90 minutes a day and considered replicating the scheme. That was outsourcing labour. What we’re doing now is different.
We’re outsourcing taste
Not admin. Not the boring bits. The parts that make you good at your job. The decisions, the judgement, the thing that separates adequate from excellent. We’ve built an infrastructure of shortcuts so comprehensive that struggling has become optional.
ChatGPT writes the email. The template handles the design. The app summarises the book. Why think when you can delegate it to something faster? Why read when you can get the gist? Why develop an opinion when the Large Language Model (LLM) can draft one?
BlinkList and Headway exist to help you finish books without reading them. The premise is efficiency. The result is outsourcing the point of reading in the first place. We’ve automated ourselves out of the transformative bit.
Marketing Follows the Pattern
Marketing was competitive because it required taste. You had to know what good looked like before you could make it. That took time. Now the industry runs on templates, done-for-you campaigns, automated creative, curated captions, and AI-generated personas. A thousand brands using the same colour palettes, the same tone of voice, the same DFY (Done For You) shortcuts.
WYSIWYG and drag-and-drop felt revolutionary when they arrived. Now we have shortcuts stacked on shortcuts. One-click websites. Automated digital campaigns. Design libraries so extensive you never have to make a decision. The barrier to entry is gone.
Which sounds democratic until you realise the barrier was also the filter. Marketing became a lower-paid career because it was creative and fun. First-world work. Now everyone’s a creator and nobody’s learning the craft because you don’t have to. Roles that used to be sought after are handed out to people who’ve never fought for an idea, a strapline, a small win.You used to earn your stripes. Now you pick a template and call it a brand.
The Tradesman Problem
You hire someone to fix your boiler. Middle-aged bloke walks in, pokes around for 20 minutes, fixes it. You feel robbed because it looked easy. What you didn’t see was the 20 years of mistakes that taught him how to diagnose the problem in 20 minutes.
Craft looks effortless when you’re good at it. That’s the con. People see the output and think the input doesn’t matter. They see a campaign that works and assume the tool did it. They don’t see the late nights, the fucked spreadsheet rows, the writer’s block, the last-minute fixes removing one line of code. The struggles that built the instinct.
Marketing without struggle produces marketers without judgment. You can’t shortcut taste. You can’t automate your way to knowing what works. The tool doesn’t know. The tool does what you tell it. If you don’t know what good looks like, the tool won’t either.
What Scares Me
Bots don’t scare me. Tools don’t scare me. Marketers who treat this career like a job scare me. The ones who’ve never had to fight for anything. No writer’s block. No fear of failure. No conquering the anxiety of screwing up and moving on. They follow the bot, the walkthrough, the done-for-you process, and produce work that’s technically correct and creatively dead.
Passionless work at scale. That’s what happens when you remove the struggle.
The tools work when they’re in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing. Someone who’s earned the instinct to know when the tool’s suggestion is wrong. Someone who understands that the tool amplifies craft, it doesn’t replace it. Force multiplier. But only if there’s force to multiply.
The Combination Wins
In Real Steel, the robot Atom doesn’t win because it’s smarter than the other robots. It wins because Hugh Jackman’s shadow boxing gives it an unpredictable edge. Human input makes the machine better. The man and the tool together is the winning combination.
But that only works if the man knows how to box.
You can’t give tools to someone who’s never learned the fundamentals and expect excellence. You get competent mediocrity. A world where every brand looks the same because everyone’s using the same shortcuts. Marketing homogenised down to templates and automations. The tools won’t make the campaign. The marketer will. But only if they’ve done the work to become one.