Enshitification: Marketing, Brand Building And How To Avoid The Silicon Valley Cult │ Nick Richtsmeier

2025-12-04

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How do brands build trust when the internet has decayed into into AI-driven slop and tripe? The systems that once promised connection now work as mirrored cages, feeding your biases, hiding your real customer, and distorting the truth.Nick Richtsmeier, founder of CultureCraft and writer at Damns Given, argues that brands now live inside engineered distortions. Funnels collapse. Neutrality is impossible. And AI is being layered onto a system already built to extract rather than empower.In this conversation, Nick joins Mark and Jeremy to Think on Paper...

Nick Richtsmeier, founder of CultureCraft and writer at Damns Given, argues that brands now live inside engineered distortions. Funnels collapse. Neutrality is impossible. And AI is being layered onto a system already built to extract rather than empower.

In this conversation, Nick joins Mark and Jeremy to Think on Paper about:

Why brands operate inside algorithmic cages
How information distortion shapes every customer interaction
Why mass neutrality fails and perspective becomes strategy
How modern marketing hijacks curiosity
Why platforms hoard customer insight inside black boxes
How influencers stand in for trust
Why network-based growth outperforms funnels
Why analog tactics and patient capital are becoming competitive advantages

This episode tracks the widening distortion gap, the limits of AI-driven marketing, and the slow, analog tactics required to build something real inside an internet optimised for extraction.

If platforms are collapsing into noise, where does trust come from?

Please enjoy the show.

And remember: Stay curious. Be disruptive. Keep Thinking on Paper.

Cheers, Mark & Jeremy

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