Perspective #01 The Theatre of Human Relevance

When relevance becomes performance, credibility turns into theatre — a quiet ritual that hides decline behind applause.

Everyone’s talking about AI — its promise, its brilliance, its disruption. Almost no one talks about what humans perform when relevance quietly expires — or how anxiety becomes a nocturnal stalker, tracing their thoughts long after work ends.

Technology didn’t replace people.
People replaced honesty with performance — to postpone the inevitable.

Every industry sensing its own redundancy creates a stage.

Consultants now sell “human-centred transformation.”
Recruiters promise “empathy at scale.”
Media houses market “journalism powered by human insight.”

Different vocabularies, same purpose: to keep the illusion alive that we are still essential.

But once the system’s operational core is commoditised, that theatre serves only narrative continuity.
It buys time. It keeps clients calm and employees believing they still matter, even while code quietly absorbs their function.

You can watch the play anywhere:
– Recruiting, where sourcing is fully automated and AI now conducts first-round interviews.
– Consulting, where reports still open with “deep human insight” while algorithms write the analysis.

Some could have built something new — honest, lean, relevant.
Because it was possible, they did.
We saw that.
Inventive. Fresh. Frickin’ magnificent.

But many still chose performance over creation — the safety of continuity over the risk of truth.

And when the curtain lifts, everyone sees it: the king is naked — and so are his subordinates.

Different words. Same illusion.
The bigger the bet, the bigger the lie.