Redundancies

Late last year I started thinking about things that once were useful and are no longer so.

This chain of thought was set into motion when my son secured a copywriting internship at an ad agency, an internship that I am confident will be the last of its kind now that sophisticated generative AI models are being widely deployed. As a sometime copywriter myself I believe in the power of words to inform, entertain and educate but I am under no illusions that given a choice between the human touch and the bottom line, agencies and their clients will choose people power.

This is not a post about AI destroying everything real and human in its path and it's not a post about the death of copywriting or advertising agency models. But yes, my role at an advertising agency was eliminated back in 2016 when it became apparent that I was costing the agency money rather than bringing in revenue through my hourly billings. I was a luxury, rather than a necessity. I had ceased to be useful.

I know what redundancy feels like.

So I suppose that I was feeling a little melancholic when I started thinking about redundancy, sadly contemplating my past and worrying about my son's future. And I think this is unavoidable because things that are redundant do not evoke a warm, fuzzy nostalgia - there is no feeling of wistful affection for things that have become irrelevant or unnecessary.

And as winter dragged on and the dark nights of the soul grew longer I started to think about other things - the people, the objects, the concepts - that had outlived their usefulness and had now lost their value. The relationships, the behaviours, the beliefs that we once held close and true but had over time and through circumstance become meaningless.

So the notes that I'm tagging #redundancies are not wistful sepia-toned reminiscences, but records of loss. Snapshots of the things we've discarded as we live and change and grow, like the abandoned skin of a moulting snake. These redundancies were once important to us - I want to try and commemorate them and remember why.