Off Kilter 219: The Cultural Infrastructure of Optimism.

tl;dr: As tech vacates the optimism space, brands should take it back.

This year, almost a quarter of the Super Bowl ads were about AI, and all were variations on the same theme: this is a life-changing technology that’s changing things forever.

Yet, the audience wasn’t buying it. Meltwater’s real-time analysis found nearly half of all social media mentions of AI ads were sharply negative. Guides to disabling Ring’s AI “Search Party” feature exploded days after it was showcased, as viewers connected the cuteness of a lost puppy to the scariness of neighborhood-wide surveillance. Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Amazon. They all made their case, and the collective response was best captured by one viewer: “We are in hell.”

Now, while it might be fun to decode why Anthropic, in particular, seemed to whiff so badly (hint: it positioned its ads against an enshittification problem that hasn’t yet occurred, and strategically the ads made zero sense relative to its enterprise positioning. Double whammy!), there’s a deeper story here than simple AI fatigue in advertising.

The ads didn’t fail because people didn’t like the ads. The ads failed because people don’t believe AI’s promise. And they don’t believe AI’s promise because technology firms no longer have the permission to sell what they’ve been selling for the past two decades: Optimism.

The Under-Appreciated Power of Optimism

Being the carrier of societal optimism is enormously valuable. It’s not a branding exercise in the shallowest sense; it’s an apex strategic position that creates pricing power, attracts talent, builds regulatory goodwill, provides the cultural permission to innovate, and carries the attention-grabbing narratives that capture the consumer imagination. For roughly twenty years, the technology industry held this franchise almost unchallenged…before frittering it away.

To understand how they captured the optimism franchise, let’s head all the way back to 2008. The financial system had just detonated. The East Coast financial institutions trusted to steward the economy were caught strip-mining it for profit. The sheer scale of their hubris was so great that the government had to bail them out lest the global economy collapse. Yet while the bankers collected bonuses paid for by taxpayers, millions of these same taxpayers were losing their homes and their jobs. Fear, anger, and distrust were palpable.

Into this trust vacuum stepped West Coast techno-utopianism with a genuinely compelling counter-narrative: we’re building the future, and it’s going to be amazing. The iPhone was democratizing computing. Facebook was connecting people who’d lost touch with each other. Google was all about 20% time, not being evil, and organizing the world’s information. The sharing economy had landed from the future. Uber was shaking up the staid world of taxis, Airbnb was changing how we think about travel. And Tesla was making EVs cool. These weren’t just advertising or PR claims; they were real value propositions people were experiencing. People used these products, and their lives were meaningfully improved.

The optimism was both earned and accelerated amid a backdrop of crisis. It felt like Silicon Valley was creating an off-ramp from a bitter present and an on-ramp to a brighter future. And millions were there for it.

Edelman’s Trust Barometer captured the moment: a decade ago, 73% of Americans trusted technology companies. Tech wasn’t just another industry. It was fixing what the bankers had broken.

Today, that number is down to 63% and falling fast. Pew’s most recent data shows only 11% of Americans say they’re more excited than concerned about AI, while 51% are more concerned than excited. A figure that’s been climbing steadily since 2021. YouGov found that 77% of Americans are concerned AI could pose a threat to humanity. Only 32% of Americans trust AI, versus 72% of Chinese citizens.

What happened? The same thing that always happens. The optimism of creation gave way to the pessimism of extraction.

From Creation to Extraction

As it grew, Facebook became a conflict machine, as its algorithms learned that more ads are sold by outrage than by unity. Google quietly dropped “don’t be evil,” as it became an extractive monopolist. Airbnb became a housing crisis accelerant. And Amazon’s “customer obsession” now sits alongside warehouse conditions that would make a Victorian mill owner squirm. The products that once liberated people from real constraints are now extracting their time, attention, money, and increasingly, their mental health.

As a result, the societal permission to be the carriers of optimism died as the underlying value propositions enshittified.

This is why the Super Bowl AI ads failed. They asked for an emotional investment in an industry that’s no longer creating a better future, but extracting from the present. No longer optimistic, but cynical.

People aren’t stupid. They can smell a meta-narrative that no longer adds up.

AI compounds the disconnect. Think about it for a second. AI will supercharge GDP growth and eliminate half of all white-collar jobs. It possesses near-divine intelligence and confidently makes shit up that simply doesn’t exist. It will democratize creativity and is controlled by three companies with more compute power than most nations. Its creators warn that it could end civilization and that you’d be deeply irresponsible not to adopt it.

Any narrative that requires you to hold this many contradictions simultaneously isn’t a vision of the future. It’s a sales pitch. But selling what, exactly?

Here’s the part that rarely gets said aloud: the AI inevitability narrative has less to do with technological destiny than balance sheet arithmetic. The hyperscalers have committed hundreds of billions in CapEx to AI infrastructure. GPUs depreciate in two to three years. The data centers being built today will be obsolete the moment they’re turned on. This stunning level of investment must be recouped. Fast. And the only way these economics work is if AI replaces vast swathes of expensive human labor.

This means the narrative of inevitability isn’t, in fact, inevitable; it’s a permissioning system. The narrative that AI will take your job exists because AI needs to take your job for the economics to work. Tech needs CEOs to believe that AI-driven automation is inevitable in order for it to happen. Whether the technology can actually live up to this promise is irrelevant compared to the stark reality of the all-in debt these firms are now loaded with and the huge growth in market cap they need to justify.

If you’re wondering, you’re right. There’s a good chance the West Coast techno-utopian visionaries are now headed toward the exact same debt rocks that the East Coast bankers floundered on a generation ago. Just this time, the collateralized debt obligations are attached to data centers rather than homes.

People sense this. Not always consciously, perhaps, although the narrative is so strident it would be hard not to. But when 77% of the country tells pollsters they’re worried that AI threatens humanity, this isn’t a technical view of risk; it’s a trust assessment. And right now, tech is failing it. Badly.

The Mechanisms of The Optimism Franchise

Something lost in the current discourse is that technology wasn’t always the carrier of societal optimism. In fact, it’s a relatively new phenomenon. Throughout the post-WWII period, before the iPhone, before Facebook, before the West Coast techno-utopian narrative took hold, the cultural infrastructure of optimism was largely built and maintained through the commercial activities of brands. Not just tech brands, but brands more broadly. And not just through advertising, although that’s easiest for us to look back on with perfect 20:20 hindsight.

If we ignore shitstalgia and instead look at the mechanisms, we can see what the great brand-builders of the 1990s and early 2000s actually did. Orange didn’t just run optimistic ads—it built an optimistic value proposition that simplified mobile telephony at a time when the category was intimidating and exclusionary. “The Future’s Bright” wasn’t just a tagline; it was the articulation of a business model that genuinely believed making communication accessible was a worthy organizing principle. Easyjet didn’t advertise democratic values—it democratized air travel, stripping away the class markers that made flying a status signal. Nike’s “Just Do It” wasn’t a slogan bolted onto sneakers. It was a worldview about human potential that shaped product development, athlete partnerships, and retail experiences. PlayStation’s counter-cultural positioning wasn’t just tonal—it was a genuine strategic bet against the family-friendly Nintendo hegemony, opening gaming to an older, more culturally adventurous audience. Apple’s “Think Different” wasn’t just a campaign; it was a declaration of strategic intent that would take a decade to fully manifest, culminating in the very iPhone that would eventually transfer the optimism franchise to tech.

This mechanism matters because it’s a mechanism that’s been lost: brands that encoded optimism into their value propositions, their pricing, their business models. Brands where the advertising was an expression of a worldview already built into the product, not a disconnected ‘campaign.’ The optimism was real because the value creation was real. Consumers experienced it; they didn’t just watch it. And critically, these weren’t niche players. These were mass-market brands generating mass-market returns by betting that customers would reward genuine value creation. And they were right.

Why Brands Stopped Being Optimistic

So what happened?

Optimism didn’t disappear because brands ran out of creative talent or because culture shifted. It stopped because the incentive structures of business shifted from creation to extraction.

The numbers are stark. Average corporate markups rose from 21% above marginal cost in 1980 to 61% by 2016. Between 2003 and 2012, S&P 500 firms returned 91% of earnings to shareholders through buybacks and dividends, leaving virtually nothing for productive reinvestment. The American Customer Satisfaction Index flatlined even as net profit margins climbed 3-4 percentage points. Profits up. Value down. And customers noticed.

Meanwhile, marketing, the function historically responsible for championing the customer within the organization, was systematically demoted. Stripped of pricing (only 20% of organizations report giving marketing control), stripped of product development (26%), stripped of distribution (13%). Ultimately, marketing was reduced to the last P, promotion, which was then subdivided into channel-specific execution roles optimizing for CPCs within platform ecosystems. Over the past four years, as what remained of marketing activity was optimized to the point of no longer working, budgets collapsed by 30%, to just 7.7% of revenue. Only 40% of Fortune 500 marketing leaders even carry the CMO title. The organizational capacity to champion customer value and turn optimism into something customers actually experience has been structurally dismantled.

I’ve written before about Measureship, the brutalist management orthodoxy that replaced leadership with dashboard optimization across the economy. Measureship is what brand decay looks like at the operational level: optimize what you can measure, deprecate what you can’t, then strip mine customer relationships for profit and quarterly efficiency gains.

But something even more insidious happened within the Measureship environment. When brands adopted Google Analytics, they thought they were making a neutral technology decision, but they were really embedding Google’s worldview into their systems. When they implemented Salesforce, they thought they were buying better customer relationships, but they were really restructuring them around someone else’s pipeline metrics. When they built their marketing operations on Meta’s ad platform, they thought they were buying reach, not replacing their understanding of customers with Meta’s audience segments. But that’s what was happening.

Each decision felt rational, but none was neutral. The platforms didn’t just intermediate the advertising relationship between brands and customers. They intermediated brands’ very understanding of customers and what it meant to serve them successfully. Instead of creating genuine value, marketers were brainwashed into optimizing for metrics that make tech platforms look good on dashboards they designed, for the benefit of their shareholders. Click-through rates, cost-per-acquisition, ROAS. These aren’t measures of customer value creation. They’re measures of platform value extraction. But because they’re the only “understanding” layer available to most marketing teams, they became the de facto definition of what success is measured by. Meanwhile, the customer was abstracted into whatever the dashboard said they were.

Piece by piece, the same engineering-optimization worldview that hollowed out the optimism of tech has been embedded into how brands understand their customers, govern their operations, and evaluate their successes. All without anyone consciously choosing to do so. Whatever unique worldview a brand may have had wasn’t replaced from the top via strategic intent; it was hollowed out from below. By the time marketing capability and governance became fully subsumed under platform logic, their worldviews were left...empty. A mission statement on a wall that nobody’s operating system actually delivered on.

The result is this. Brands still say optimistic things, but no longer do optimistic things. The language remains the same, but optimism was systematically stripped from brands by the infrastructure they adopted to make themselves more efficient.

Same Disease, Different Host

Here’s the pattern, stated plainly. Optimism is earned by genuine value creation. It dies when extraction replaces creation. This is what happened to brands through the 2010s and into the 2020s as platform dependency and financialization replaced value-proposition innovation with cost optimization. And this is what is now happening to tech. Surveillance capitalism, monopoly economics, and now the CapEx-driven AI-will-replace-us-all inevitability narratives have replaced the genuine liberation that early tech products once delivered.

Same disease. Different host. Same outcome.

Big tech can’t fix this. Its economic model requires it to be extractive. The CapEx commitments demand it. The shareholder expectations enforce it. The debt load a Sword of Damocles hanging above its head. The AI narrative depends on the promise of replacing human labor, which is a fundamentally extractive proposition, no matter how cute the lost puppies in an ad might be.

Filling The Chasm

All of this leaves a chasm. The optimism franchise. The strategic position of being the first choice people turn to when they want to make things genuinely better has opened up for the first time in almost two decades.

This isn’t nostalgia. I have no interest in relitigating the golden age of advertising or pretending the answer is a better Super Bowl spot. The answer isn’t advertising at all.

The answer lies in innovation that creates more value for customers than we capture. The same mechanism that built brand optimism in the first place, genuine democratization of access, genuine improvement of experience, genuine creation of value that customers experience rather than watch, applied at a moment when society is so desperately hungry for it.

The evidence that people are hungry is everywhere. ACSI data shows satisfaction flatlined for a decade. Shrinkflation awareness is at 81% among grocery shoppers. Trust in business’s use of AI sits at 32% in the U.S. The cultural mood is one of suspicion, extraction fatigue, and a deep yearning for somebody, or something, that actually gives a shit.

The Cascade

When working with clients, I use a simple marketing model with four layers: Worldview, Understanding, Capabilities & Governance, and Execution. They’re connected by a downward flow of definition and an upward flow of emergent learning. It matters here because optimism should cascade through this architecture.

It starts with your worldview. A genuine belief about how value is created, and then works down through understanding, capabilities/governance until it reaches the customer as the lived experience we execute. The customer’s experience feeds back up through the system as emergent learning, refining the worldview, deepening our understanding, and sharpening our capabilities. That’s the flywheel. That’s what the great brand-builders of the 1990s ran intuitively and what the extraction economy systematically destroyed by colonizing the middle layers with platform logic.

The diagnosis tells us where the cascade broke: not at the worldview level, but at the understanding and capabilities layers. That’s where Google, Salesforce, and Meta inserted their logic for their own gain. Which means rebuilding optimism isn’t a brand campaign or a mission statement exercise. It’s an operational rebuild. Worldview first, not dashboard first; that then cascades into a genuine theory of customer value creation across everything the organization does.

What does that look like in practice?

Look at the brands already doing it. Costco’s member-first economics. Patagonia’s Worn Wear. Trader Joe’s refusal to play the shrinkflation game. None is optimistic because of its advertising. The optimism is inherent to the business architecture. The value proposition is the optimism. Costco’s membership renewal rate sits above 90%. That’s the market telling you that value creation still wins.

Now imagine this logic applied more broadly. A health insurer that prices transparency into its model rather than burying exclusions in footnotes. A bank that builds its product around the financial health of its customers rather than the extraction of fees they hope will go unnoticed. A retailer that uses AI not to optimize its own margins but to genuinely reduce the cost and friction of shopping for its customers. None of these requires heroic altruism. They require the strategic recognition that in an extraction economy, creation is the differentiated position.

Being successful in this next era requires us to read the cultural mood correctly. Not as a hollow “AI changes everything” promise or a creative brief for “funner” advertising, but as a market signal for the reinvention of value delivered. When an entire economy has tilted so far toward extraction, the strategically contrarian position—the only genuinely differentiated position—is to tilt just as hard toward value creation. When every competitor is optimizing for cost, optimizing for customer value becomes a structural advantage. When the dominant cultural narrative is the nihilistic inevitability of automation, humanity's optimism becomes a scarce resource with enormous market power.

And optimism compounds. Rebuild the cascade. Encode a genuine worldview into how you understand customers, govern capabilities, and deliver experiences, and create the emotional surplus that generates pricing power, innovation permission, and talent magnetism. That surplus funds more value creation, which deepens optimism and widens the moat. The 1990s brand-builders ran this flywheel without naming it. We can name it now. And we can rebuild it.

Tech filled the optimism vacuum created by the financial crisis. Today, tech is the vacuum. The chasm of optimism is wide open, and the only question that matters is this: which brands have the strategic ambition and the operational courage to fill it?

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