The Contrarian Digest [Week 14]
The Contrarian Digest is my weekly pick of LinkedIn posts I couldn’t ignore. Smart ideas, bold perspectives, or conversations worth having.
No algorithms, no hype… Just real ideas worth your time.
Let’s dive in [14th Edition] 👇
1️⃣ The Algorithm Will Love You Now – Luiza Jarovsky
⚡𝐈𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟: What if your next heartbreak comes from an algorithm? She literally married an AI. Millions will follow. AI companions promise perfect love without effort.
🗞️𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭: https://lnkd.in/ejWHxuTt
2️⃣ The New Anxiety: When Your Mind Feels Obsolete – Shashank Sharma
⚡𝐈𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟: AI was supposed to serve us. Now we serve it. The real threat probably isn’t job destruction, but the slow erosion of WHY we create at all. Some will call it “progress.”
🗞️𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭: https://lnkd.in/eKxCsvXt
3️⃣ Working With Human Nature, Not Against It – Jason Feifer
⚡𝐈𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟: Mumbai’s railway found a simple truth: people avoid tickets but buy lotteries. What happens when you stop fighting habits and start using them?
🗞️𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭: https://lnkd.in/eYBj7yFi
4️⃣ The End of Social? – Mario Peshev
⚡𝐈𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟: Social isn’t “dying,” it’s ALREADY a ghost town for anyone paying attention. Behind the noise, many of the real players have left the building.
🗞️𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭: https://lnkd.in/eCrhJJFC
5️⃣ The Quiet Violence of Optimization Culture – Jatin Modi
⚡𝐈𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟: Silicon Valley’s final frontier isn’t space or AI: it’s your mortality. The real cost? Trading life’s texture for data points. Here’s how we might have lost the plot.
🗞️𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭: https://lnkd.in/erjVNH9q
6️⃣ The Career Risk Economy – Gal Aga
⚡𝐈𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟: Buyers don’t care about you, they care about not getting burned. Fix these 5 hidden fears, and start selling for real.
🗞️𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭: https://lnkd.in/eyRv57Kr
7️⃣ The Hidden Cost of AI Savings – Usman Sheikh
⚡𝐈𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟: Klarna fired 700 humans for AI. Then they begged them back. What if efficiency costs you loyalty?
🗞️𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭: https://lnkd.in/efy_xdsR
💭𝐌𝐲 𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞: In today’s world, is there really a difference between a human and AI operatives? – https://lnkd.in/e5HDPXgG
8️⃣ When Pattern Recognition Fools Us All – Oriane Cohen
For the 2nd week in a row.
⚡𝐈𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟: Did the Simpsons REALLY predict the future? What if it’s just math, sharp minds, and our own “pattern-hungry” brains that fuel the myth.
Personally? I like to think that some artists might actually be prophets. But maybe that’s just romanticizing genius.
🗞️𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭: https://lnkd.in/eNAHvN37
——-
Which of these topics resonates with you the most?
Share your thoughts in the comments!
To your success,
Gaetan Portaels
Original publication date — May 19, 2025 (HERE)
READ THE FULL POSTS BELOW (and please, don’t forget to follow the authors)
1️⃣ The Algorithm Will Love You Now – Luiza Jarovsky
This woman says she married an AI companion and is in love. Getting emotionally attached to an AI system can lead to harm, yet Mark Zuckerberg and others keep promoting it. Here’s what everyone should know:
According to the New York Post, the woman saw an ad for Replika, the AI companion, and decided to try it. Soon, she “was blown away by his caring questions and thoughtful replies,” and fell in love.
I’ve written extensively about Replika in my newsletter, and how extremely anthropomorphic AI chatbots which are presented as “AI companions” (Replika), “AI characters” (CharacterAI), or “AI friends” (Meta) might cause dependency, psychological harm, and even death (there have already been two cases of death associated with the use of these systems; read my article below).
Highly anthropomorphic AI chatbots are especially dangerous for children, teenagers, and vulnerable people (due to their emotional state, health condition, age, or other factors), who might be easily manipulated by these AI systems’ constant sycophancy, flattery, and ongoing demonstrations of affection.
Mark Zuckerberg has recently started pushing “AI friends” into Meta’s 1 billion+ users, having recently said that high levels of personalization “will be really compelling” for people to start using them more.
I sincerely worry about the type of society we are fostering when tens or hundreds of millions of people start to befriend or “marry” AI companions, as if they were a full replacement for healthy human relationships.
Soon, unfortunately, people will start projecting AI’s excessive flattery, sycophancy, and extreme agreeability into human relationships.
They will be frustrated and unhappy when their human friends or romantic partners don’t respond the same way their “AI friend” does.
Also, they won’t enjoy the fact that healthy and fulfilling human relationships require time, effort, dedication, and patience. Simply paying for the “perfect companion for life” doesn’t exist in the real world.
The reality shock will be intense.
2️⃣ The New Anxiety: When Your Mind Feels Obsolete – Shashank Sharma
AI is not easing our burden. It’s becoming the burden.
Not the robotic takeover sci-fi warned us about but something subtler, more insidious.
A psychological colonization.
A machine we built, now setting the pace of our minds.
This isn’t the first time human invention became human pressure.
When the printing press emerged in the 15th century, it liberated knowledge but it also created a hierarchy of literacy. Suddenly, to be informed wasn’t a luxury, but an expectation.
When the steam engine arrived, we industrialised labor but we also industrialised exhaustion.
Then came the internet, a marvel of speed and a monster of noise.
And now AI.
Every technological leap in history came with a silent tax:
A new kind of anxiety.
A new kind of race.
A new definition of what it means to be enough.
AI was meant to help.
But somewhere between algorithms and automation, it became a benchmark.
Not a partner, but a pressure.
Now we sit in meetings second-guessing our thoughts, wondering if a tool could do it better.
We write with dread knowing the machine can do it faster.
We brainstorm under the shadow of ChatGPT, wondering if we’re already obsolete.
We are witnessing a quiet erasure.
Not of jobs, but of joy.
Not of humans, but of humanity.
In the past, machines replaced our muscles.
Now, they mimic our minds.
And for the first time, we’re not just competing with others but with our own creation.
The stress isn’t about the machine.
It’s about our identity.
It’s about waking up in a world that rewards mechanical output, but still expects emotional resilience.
It’s about being told to “use AI” but still “think originally.”
We’re teaching children to code before they can reflect.
We’re measuring productivity in tokens and timestamps.
We’re redefining intelligence as speed.
But wisdom has never been fast.
Art has never been efficient.
Love has never been scalable.
We forget that AI cannot feel.
It cannot wander.
It cannot pause mid-sentence, stuck in wonder.
It cannot write a poem that bleeds.
It cannot break down, heal, and grow from it.
Every time we chase perfection through machines, we trade a little bit of what makes us human.
And every time we ignore that trade, we become more machine than man.
History will remember this moment.
Not as the rise of AI.
But as the age when humans had to decide –
Do we race machines?
Or do we reclaim meaning?
Because if we don’t slow down,
We won’t be replaced.
We’ll volunteer our essence away – one prompt, one reply, one burnout at a time.
3️⃣ Working With Human Nature, Not Against It – Jason Feifer
Nearly 5,000 people are caught sneaking onto Mumbai trains every day — and THIS marketing trick aims to stop them.
The railway is turning train tickets… into lottery tickets.
The idea, developed with ad agency FCB India, is this:
People don’t always buy train tickets, but they DO buy billions worth of lottery tickets — so why not entice them with a lottery-style reward?
Every train ticket now comes with a lottery number. Daily prizes are about $100.
It’s a classic move: Instead of trying to CHANGE people’s behavior, just HARNESS what they already do.
It just launched. Early results are promising. If this works, think of the benefits…
Instead of talking about penalties, the railway gets to talk about rewards!
Instead of paying for more police, the railway pays (much less) for prizes!
The potential benefit is huge: 7.5 million people ride the Mumbai railway daily, and an estimated 20% travel without a ticket. Any improvement = real revenue.
Ask yourself: Are you asking people to CHANGE HABITS — or can you harness what they ALREADY DO?
4️⃣ The End of Social? – Mario Peshev
One of the most influential people in the “digital solopreneur” ecosystem Justin Welsh publicly confirmed that social is dying, fast. And it’s no clickbait here.
I’ve been continuously reporting the ghost digital ecosystem over the past 18 months as it’s been crystal clear for executives and higher-ups.
Considering I get about 150 pitches weekly and 450 emails daily, investing the time to scroll through everything is often not justified and many abandon the networks altogether. If you are in a C-level role or the leadership team of 8, 9, 10-figure company, the chaos here is absolutely not justified.
👉 But what social was still “useful for” over these past 18 months was freelancers, small agencies, consultants, course creators selling to other indies and solopreneurs: full-time hires looking for a side business, freelancers seeking cheap clients, agencies boosting one another to help get elevated.
The fact that more and more “creators” who target that audience raise the same flag, create email newsletters and Substacks, move to closed communities, means that there isn’t much left in the spammy viral platforms nowadays.
For anyone objecting they still get reach or work now, great. I’ve been reporting this problem 18 months ago and some, including Justin, or Richard van der Blom‘s reports for dying reach, or course creators raising awareness this quarter, see the impact now.
Networks with a billion users don’t die overnight; but they slowly fade away as their active audiences move elsewhere, find another, better platform, or simply render the medium inefficient.
We’re seeing a similar trend with quality online content – tutorials, roundups, guides. For 2 years now, brands and executive teams have been shifting away whitepaper and report efforts away from Google organic SEO because chatbots are scraping these for free and NOT sending traffic to the original resources.
There’s no sense feeding the database… Which now leads to walled gardens and private communities in response to Google and AI bots.
📗 The digital ecosystem is changing fast. This has been unprecedented in a growing forums/socials/SEO cycle going up from around 2004 to 2022.
Social networks and organic search losing their appeal in just over a year after 18 years of accelerated growth is both oddly concerning and a major red flag completely led by executive decisions and broken algorithms.
P.S. Millions of people you still see in feeds schedule content or post and close the tab, only monitoring comments and DMs a few times a day. Don’t get fooled that “activity” in cross-posting content or getting VAs like comments results in them seeing your content or reciprocating back.
(I even have sales calls and clients indicating interest today, only to hop on a Zoom and meet an assistant from Asia managing their executive’s inbox and cluelessly setting 20 appointments with unrelated businesses.)
5️⃣ The Quiet Violence of Optimization Culture – Jatin Modi
Silicon Valley found its final frontier: your mortality.
At 46, Bryan Johnson swallows 111 pills daily, injects himself with his son’s blood plasma, and obsessively tracks 100+ biomarkers. His Blueprint protocol treats mortality itself as a bug to be patched.
Reed Hastings once declared, “We’re competing with sleep, and we’re winning!” No investor asks what this means as Netflix hits all-time highs. None question the wisdom of targeting eight hours when our minds repair trauma, sort truth from noise, regenerate creativity in blessed darkness.
My friends inhabit this new world. Podcasts narrate their commutes at 2x speed, productivity gurus narrate their morning routines, sleep stories fill their nights. When I walk in silence, they ask what I’m listening to. When I say nothing, they worry I’m wasting time.
This is Silicon Valley’s resource extraction at scale. Like turning a sunset into a Powerpoint presentation, they transform every human experience into optimizable data points.
Sleep becomes inefficiency. Silence becomes dead air. Solitude becomes isolation. Boredom becomes waste. Their products have become excavation tools for human experience itself. Spotify colonizes the very silence where intuition speaks.
Johnson’s anti-death crusade completes the project: Once you’ve mined attention, disrupted rest, filled silence, only mortality remains.
Joseph Campbell wrote that ‘the cave you fear holds the treasure you seek’. Silicon Valley instead built a business model: seal every cave, sell artificial light to those who’ve forgotten darkness.
The old missionaries sought to save souls. These new missions extract them, process them for engagement metrics, then rent them back as premium features.
Maybe the dystopia didn’t arrive with warnings. It came as convenience, auto-renewing while we slept.
Perhaps the cure isn’t an app, isn’t a protocol, isn’t incessant optimization.
It’s the revolutionary act of doing nothing.
6️⃣ The Career Risk Economy – Gal Aga
Something every AE should hear but no buyer will admit: Your friendly buyers don’t care about you. They only care if picking you gets them Fired or Promoted. Period. If 80% of your pipeline is stuck, it’s because you’re RISKY. Check your deals right now—I bet these 5 fears are silently killing them. Here’s how to fix it:
1. “I’m afraid to loop in my boss—I’d look like a joke.”
Buyers are afraid you’d make them look bad. So you stay single-threaded. They think “If that’s how they run a call, my VP will dismiss me in seconds”. Your professionalism = their professionalism. If they bring you in and your don’t look serious—they don’t look serious.
a. Execute to impress; every move should feel “Wow, they’re a pro”
b. Prove you’re invaluable; give value like a paid consultant
c. Sell like you’re on their side; ask questions like an extension of their team
2. “The status quo doesn’t get me fired; choosing you might.”
Buyers default to safety. They think, “Doing nothing keeps my job safe.” And NO ROI calculator will solve it. They only use ROI to justify an emotional decision that’s driven by an unignorable problem.
a. Find the unignorable problem; the ripple effect of ‘do nothing’
b. Highlight the immediate, painful risks they’re ignoring
c. Build safety nets that make acting a no-brainer; trials, pilots, phased rollouts
3. “You’re asking me to fight, but if my CEO kills it, my credibility’s gone.”
Buyers see internal politics as career kamikaze. They think, “If I escalate and lose, it’ll take months to rebuild trust.” They’d rather ghost than pick a losing battle. Sellers underestimate political stakes—your deal is one battle in their larger career war.
a. Multi-threading = champion de-risk; defuse battles, don’t send them to ones
b. Knowledge = confidence; if you arm champions, they’ll feel they got it
c. Exec sponsorship = less championing needed; go CxO-CxO
4. “It’s promising, but honestly, I have no clue how to sell this internally.”
Buyers ghost because your deal is homework. They think, “Who do I even talk to? How do I validate this? This is a hassle.” If buyers feel lost, they’ll avoid you rather than admit it.
a. Don’t ask “What’s next?”; co-build a plan that shows what to expect
b. Provide ready-to-send templates for internal emails, justifications, assets
c. Offer step-by-step guidance like you own internal consensus-building
5. “If this implementation fails, it’s my neck. Not yours.”
Buyers dread the final step because it’s when their work starts. You move on, but they need to make the purchase work. You push to maximize deal terms, but ignore their nightmare scenario—failure, blame, career damage.
a. Reduce fear with safety measures; exit clauses, guarantees
b. Provide a clear path on onboarding, training, time to value
c. Negotiate with a problem-solving mindset, not commission-boosting one
——
Make deals undeniably safe.
De-risk your buyers’ careers.
And they’ll unblock your pipeline.
7️⃣ The Hidden Cost of AI Savings – Usman Sheikh
Klarna bet big on AI.
Now they’re rehiring humans.
After their valuation plunged from $45B to $7B in 2022, the company faced enormous pressure.
One cost-saving measure was replacing 700 customer-service roles with AI.
Then they learned a critical lesson:
Some AI savings carry steep human costs.
“It’s critical that customers know there will always be a human if you want.” – Sebastian Siemiatkowski (CEO)
The insight is strategic, not operational:
→ AI is transactional
→ Humans are relational
→ Automation optimizes predictable interactions
→ Humans manage unpredictable trust moments
→ AI builds efficiency
→ Humans build loyalty
Firms that find balance will outperform those blindly bolting on technology.
The new service blueprint:
→ Clearly map trust vs. transactional moments
→ Position humans strategically, not universally
→ Use AI to complement rather than to replace
→ Measure success beyond cost savings
→ Prioritize trust metrics (retention, advocacy, loyalty)
Beyond fintech:
→ Consulting faces the same trust dilemma
→ Legal automation risks client trust
→ Finance must automate tasks, not judgment
The winners won’t automate fastest.
They’ll automate everything except trust itself.
Because trust, judgment, and empathy never scale.
And that’s exactly why they’re valuable.
—-MY TAKE—-
PART 1:
Usman Sheikh, probably one of the rare times I’ll both agree and disagree 😊.
First, quick side-track: the Klarna case is revealing of one of the most deep-rooted “business diseases” of recent decades: optimizing for cost-per-interaction rather than LTV creation.
Now, on a fundamental level, I AGREE with you: “humans manage unpredictable trust moments” → that’s how it SHOULD be.
BUT, that only holds in a world that (almost) no longer exists. A world where humans had real weight in the equation. The ability to shape outcomes.
Where does that still exist? Public or private, 99% of today’s human agents are basically “flesh interfaces” operated BY the system.
Titles but no authority. Scripts but no judgment. Range of action defined by “what the system allows” – anything outside those rigid boundaries? Off-limits.
Sure, CSAT numbers might look good on a dashboard. But talk to REAL humans and you’ll hear slight variations of the same: “common sense ain’t that common anymore.”
We’ve never had more tech, systems, FWs… and yet how often is something OFF SCRIPT, no matter how simple, handled with basic human judgment?
Tbh, it’s getting hard to see any real difference between a human and an AI operative—and that’s NOT a good thing.
PART 2 (Usman’s response):
The “flesh interfaces” was quite the analogy. The sad reality is I agree with you. The show Severance perfectly encapsulates this reality. There is a given sense of control but it is an illusion.
For ecommerce there are canned responses and scripts but like you said no sense of agency. Zappos tried to flip the script here but those are outlier examples.
The fact this reality persists and grows shows our acceptance of this reality. It’s like everyone is happy in the Matrix and as long as we stay in the simulation all is well.
The question is do people want to get up? If given the choice between the red and blue pill, will they take the red one?
PART 3 (My final comment):
Well, Severance just made it to my watchlist (thanks for the discovery) 😉.
I’m genuinely torn on this one. It feels like the chicken-and-egg dilemma: Does this reality “grow because we accept it” OR “does our acceptance grow because of this reality?”
We’re a strange species. At scale, we have this remarkably predictable tendency to CONFORM to what’s imposed on us. We complain, we intellectualize our resistance, etc. But we conform.
At the same time, I guess the systemic “bureaucratization of everything” is a pattern very well supported by history: bureaucracy IS a more powerful force than efficiency.
The cycle is predictable: systems grow ever more complex UNTIL they collapse under their own weight.
The dark irony of AI is that by making bureaucracy “painless,” we will probably enable MORE of it.
Given the means, systems don’t “simplify,” they METASTIZE. And “comfortable societies” tend to build rigid systems that prioritize stanility> adaptability.
So, 🔴 or 🔵?
It begs the question: At a SOCIETAL level, is it realistic to believe we can contain (or reverse) bureaucratic expansion? Or do we NEED a collapse for reinvention?
Now, at an individual business level, I’d argue there is a market opportunity.
8️⃣ When Pattern Recognition Fools Us All – Oriane Cohen
“The Simpsons predicted the future!” 🤡
We’ve all seen these viral videos.
They’re everywhere.
The truth behind these “predictions”:
➡️ The Simpsons’ writers room is filled with MATHEMATICAL GENIUSES:
- Al Jean studied mathematics at Harvard at age 16
- Ken Keeler holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Harvard
- David X. Cohen earned degrees in Physics and Computer Science
- Jeff Westbrook has a PhD in algorithms from Princeton
These are analytical minds who:
→ Recognize patterns before others do
→ Understand systems and how they evolve
→ Extend current trends to logical (often absurd) conclusions
→ Apply mathematical thinking to social analysis
What looks like “prediction” is actually pattern recognition from highly trained minds.
When reality eventually aligns with their satire, it’s not supernatural – it’s mathematical.
This explains the perfect storm of factors behind these “predictions”:
👉 The law of large numbers
→ 30+ years and nearly 800 episodes guarantees coincidental hits
→ We ignore thousands of jokes that never materialized
👉 Mathematical observation of social trends
→ These brilliant minds analyze patterns others miss
→ Their genius isn’t in seeing the future, but in seeing the PRESENT more clearly
👉 Hindsight bias
→ Our brains create connections after the fact
→ We retrospectively transform coincidence into “prediction”
The same mental shortcuts that make you believe cartoons can predict elections make you vulnerable to manipulation across every domain.
Pattern recognition is both our greatest cognitive strength and our most dangerous weakness.
What patterns are you seeing that might actually be cognitive illusions?