This one's about the rest of us — the platforms, the audiences, the reasons we trusted the people in that room to begin with.

Same weekend, different myth.

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has the globe (and the internet) talking Greek mythology again: flight, hubris, gods punishing mortals for reaching too high. It turns out the myths don't require us to secure a nearly impossible 70mm IMAX ticket to attach themselves to a current event.¹

I've already covered the core story: the OpenAI influencer retreat that boondoggled itself into oblivion, the beekeeping, the $500 billion Ohio data center deal quietly finalizing in the background, the WeWork parallels nobody wanted to say out loud. If you read or listened to Touch Grass, you have the receipts. What I haven't covered is its fate, or its arena. We didn't figuratively enter the Hunger Games this year.² We literally did, and the creators visited the Capitol first. Go off, Effie!

Every creator in attendance deserves criticism. Respectfully, only that much, and no more. But there's a deeper conversation underneath the criticism, and it's the one nobody's actually having: who do we outsource our knowledge, our perceptions, our opinions to, and why?

I looked into the public bios and LinkedIn profiles of a handful of the creators who attended. Based on what they've posted about their own backgrounds, very few have a documented practitioner history or qualifications in the space they were positioned to teach. That's worth sitting with: these creators have amassed enormous followings across TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Threads. Scale of audience and depth of expertise are not the same metric, and platforms have spent a decade training us to treat them as if they were.

The discourse itself gets dodged in a specific way worth naming: legitimate criticism gets recast as an attack, and then deflected as something else entirely. I watched one creator respond to a comment reading, roughly, that she'd sold her morals for the trip, nothing about identity, nothing about who she is, just a critique of the choice she made. Her on-screen caption, reacting to it: "My comments are so homophobic." The comment was about complicity. The caption was about a slur nobody used. That's DARVO in miniature: deny the substance, attack the critic's character, reverse who's the victim. It's a tidy way to avoid answering an actual question about complicity by making the asker look like the problem instead.

What's fascinating is how little traction this debate has gotten on LinkedIn specifically. TikTok, Instagram, Threads, and Reddit have carried the conversation. LinkedIn has stayed almost entirely quiet.

What does the average LinkedIn user have to lose by staying quiet? Plenty, it turns out. Scroll the platform, and you'll find no shortage of posts about incredible AI productivity gains, often because a board is mandating adoption, not because the gains are real. Token costs are up. Humans are still, in most cases, cheaper. And the public record backs up what LinkedIn won't say out loud: a March 2026 NBC News poll found only 26% of American voters view AI favorably, less popular than ICE, less popular than Trump, less popular than the Republican Party.³ 

Gallup found 79% now believe AI will reduce U.S. jobs over the next decade, up from 73% just a year earlier, and among adults 18 to 29, the share who believe AI does more harm than good jumped from 36% to 47% in a single year, the largest increase of any age group measured.⁴ 44% say they strongly oppose the construction of data centers near them.⁵ And even among people actively using these tools, 76% say they trust AI-generated output only rarely or sometimes.⁶ Naming any of that out loud, on a platform built on professional reputation, is a much riskier move than posting about it on an anonymous account.

I'd ask every creator in attendance and every creator considering a future company-hosted event to bring a more discerning eye next time. Being invited into the room where it happens feels wonderful. But every curated moment is exactly that: curated. What's rarely discussed is how much of what’s shown at these events is placeholder demo data, beta features, and dummy content dressed up for the room.

I've sat through a lot of conferences. The sessions rarely teach me anything the hallway conversations don't do better. That's not a knock on the format! Craft varies; audiences are broad. But if you catch me at a conference, I'm usually not in a session. If you catch me on a panel, you'll notice there's always a tidy takeaway by the end, because everyone in that room needs to prove to a boss or a LinkedIn audience that they learned something. The truths that actually matter rarely change. The data doesn't lie. What buries them is the sea of sameness and shine everyone's swimming through to be seen.

I learn the most at these events from who's in the room, not what's on the agenda. The curation of attendees teaches me more than the content ever does.

A real truth-teller in that room needn't be hostile. Just present, with no financial stake in how the footage turned out. Someone whose job was to note when a demo looked further along than the product actually was, or to ask what "hands-on" meant when the sessions ran on beta features. News flash: this isn't cynicism. It's just refusing to be the only source of a story you're also the subject of.

I'm surprised by exactly none of it: no creator who attended shared anything beyond glossy, ambient content. That wasn't an accident. That was curation, expertly enforced by OpenAI's own team.

If real substance had been the actual goal — as opposed to organic-flavored marketing, because nothing about a sponsored trip is organic or unsponsored — that substance could have come from creators willing to bring viewpoints, real questions, a critical lens.

The goal was never criticism for its own sake. The goal is objectivity. Without it, we're all just subject to someone else's subjectivity, precalculated down to the last curated detail.

I don't say any of this from outside the room. I get invited to some version of these events too. I've said yes before, and I'll probably say yes again. The point was never that taking the invitation makes you compromised. It's that walking out with nothing but glossy footage, an abundance of ambient, aesthetic content, and no questions on the record is a choice, not a condition of attending, and it's worth admitting that distinction applies to me just as it does to anyone else in this piece.

Were the hard questions asked? Ecological cost. AI sentiment. Employment. What happens to entry-level work? I'm not asking creators to become investigative journalists overnight. But blind faith, in an environment this saturated with propaganda, leads directly to diminished agency for the creator and for the audience who trust them.

And it's not just the creators who didn't ask. Nobody with a microphone and Altman in the room has put the question to him directly, yet: was Summer Camp worth the backlash? His own comments at BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit earlier this year, stating that AI isn't popular right now and that data centers are getting blamed for price hikes, read like an accidental confession, offered up unprompted because nobody cornered him into answering it. Thank you, Captain Obvious; now it's time for the far more overt observations to come to light.

The FTC has clear guidance requiring disclosure for sponsored content, influencer or otherwise, and it's worth knowing if you don't already. Guidelines existing and guidelines getting enforced are two very different sentences; except in this case, they're not entirely separate.

The FTC increased influencer-marketing enforcement by 40% in 2025 through a dedicated initiative called Operation AI Comply, producing more than a dozen enforcement actions specifically targeting AI-related deceptive marketing, with penalties now running up to $53,088 per violation, and each individual non-compliant post counts as its own violation, not the campaign as a whole.⁷ The infrastructure to enforce this exists and is actively used elsewhere. Nobody's confirmed whether it's being applied here.

This all comes down to media literacy. I took a media literacy course in high school, and it permanently changed how I understand the world. Shout out to our teacher, Wass! Everything we see, hear, and experience arrives through a medium, and per Marshall McLuhan,⁸ the medium is the message.

Neil Postman picked up that same thread twenty years later and pointed it specifically at television: Amusing Ourselves to Death argued that TV didn't just change what Americans watched; it changed what counted as serious. Politics, religion, education — all of it got reshaped around entertainment's logic, because that's the only logic the format rewards. Postman's fear wasn't Orwell's boot on the neck. It was Aldous Huxley's: we wouldn't need to be controlled if we could simply be amused into not noticing.

Postman didn't arrive at this cold. He first laid out the argument on a panel at the 1984 Frankfurt Book Fair, fittingly, a panel convened to discuss Orwell's 1984 itself, the year having just arrived without delivering the surveillance state everyone had braced for. Orwell's Party had its own version of this demand: 

The insistence that citizens distrust their own perception in favor of the state's version of events. Postman's point was that America hadn't dodged that fate so much as found a softer way to arrive at the same place. Nobody needed to command us to reject our eyes and ears. We'd happily do it ourselves, for entertainment, one channel change at a time.

There's a version of this that's less about perception and more about incentive. Once entertainment becomes the dominant logic, morality stops being a fixed question and starts being a financial one: not "is this right," but "does this convert?" A retreat that photographs well outperforms a workshop that teaches well, not because anyone sat down and decided ethics don't matter, but because the format only rewards the version of the story that performs. Amorality, in this frame, isn't a decision. It's what happens when nobody has to make one; when the incentive structure quietly answers the question of right and wrong before anyone gets around to asking it.

TV was one-directional and slow. Postman published his book in 1985, two years before the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, the rule that had required broadcasters to present balanced coverage of controversial issues, in 1987. The infrastructure for what came next was already built. We'll get there.

That repeal is widely credited with opening the floodgates not for social media, which was still two decades away, but for partisan talk radio: Rush Limbaugh and the format that followed him. Social media didn't inherit that deregulation directly. It inherited something more structural: an audience already trained to consume opinion as entertainment, primed for whatever came next.

Social platforms, even a 'professional network' of a billion people, are now algorithmic, infinite, and optimized in real time for whatever performs, enrages, or engages, which is almost never nuance. And don't forget the original intent was never friendship: it's about data and gathering more data from us. The creator of infinite scrolling, Aza Raskin, has said doom scrolling wouldn't exist without his invention and estimates it wastes roughly half a million human lifetimes of collective attention every month. He later co-founded the Center for Humane Technology to push back against the exact mechanism he built.⁹

Summer Camp wasn't really about information delivery. It was built for this exact medium: an aesthetic, a vertical video, something engineered to be felt and shared before it was ever going to be analyzed. 

That's the whole trick, and it's not a new one! We're now just running on a faster feed than Postman ever had to reckon with.

At WeWork, we were told we weren't selling office space. We were selling a lifestyle. Both were technically true. Name another coworking company with a social following built almost entirely on impeccably designed space — I'll wait. Artists, photographers, taste makers, and taste-curators were hired specifically to project a glossy exterior over what was, internally, chaos.

WeWork actually ran Summer Camp as an annual members' retreat, concerts, the works. The branding of OpenAI's event echoed, intentionally or not. Priya Parker's The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters argues that the single most important decision behind any event, whatever its size, is a clear intention and specific purpose, chosen before the guest list or the venue. 

WeWork's Summer Camp had one, even if I wouldn't defend the company today: fun. The uncomplicated pleasure of being reckless together for a weekend, the kind most of us lose access to once we leave childhood behind. Whatever else was wrong with it, nobody was pretending it was a workshop. OpenAI borrowed the name and the imagery without borrowing the honesty. Its Summer Camp wasn't a retreat that happened to generate marketing value. It was marketing, wearing a retreat's clothes: a very different kind of gathering, built around a different purpose, whether or not anyone said so out loud.

Nothing captures that gap better than WeWork's S1 filing: a legally mandated financial disclosure that opens not with numbers, but with a mission statement: "We are a community company committed to maximum global impact. Our mission is to elevate the world's consciousness.”¹⁰ The company invented its own metric, "Community Adjusted EBITDA," which excluded not just interest and taxes but marketing, general administrative costs, and development expenses, arriving, unsurprisingly, at a much rosier number than reality supported. Three classes of stock gave Neumann outsized voting control regardless of what public shareholders thought. The filing disclosed a history of losses with no stated timeline to profitability.¹¹ 

This is what it looks like when a company is legally required to tell the truth and chooses to bury it under vibes instead. Of course, it's now infamous. The IPO collapsed six weeks after the filing became public.¹² I am so grateful I had left at the end of 2018 and sold my shares during the previous tender offer. Thank you, Masa, for a little bit of coin before it all fell apart. 

The vibes didn't survive contact with the balance sheet. Neither will anyone else's, eventually.

Am I making the case that everyone in the professional world could use a liberal arts education? Increasingly, yes. The number of blinders on display suggests we could all use the practice of questioning the frame instead of just admiring what's inside it.

If this event had been open to the public via a pop-up or a conference, with a media preview for these "influencers," the perspective likely would have landed far differently.

But that's not nearly as attractive or as easy to package into a content calendar.

Beekeeping and candlelit dinners photograph better than a workshop, physical or virtual. The creators didn't design the trip, but how it got presented, with the aesthetic doing the talking instead of the substance, is part of the same pattern and trap the brand set up. It's a reminder that the aesthetic a brand chooses to wrap education in is itself a message, whether the company means to send it or not.

The deeper issue is who gets chosen for "creator strategy" in the first place. Reach and aesthetic get you Summer Camp. Practitioner depth gets you something closer to a masterclass. Companies keep picking the former because it photographs better, not because it teaches better. It would be a genuinely interesting case study to see a brand invest the same budget in the latter and measure the difference.

None of this requires burning the system down. It requires the people inside it — creators, audiences, marketers, myself included — to stop mistaking a curated room for an honest one. That's a smaller ask than it sounds like, and a much harder one to actually do.

Every story needs an ending it earns. This one's been waiting since the title.

Icarus and Daedalus weren't just father and son. They were prisoners. Locked in a labyrinth Daedalus himself had designed, on Minos's orders. The wings weren't a hobby. They were the only way out of a structure their own maker had built, and even in flight, Icarus was still bound by his father's rules, still tethered to a structure someone else controlled.

Daedalus gave him the one warning that came with the escape: not too high, not too low. Too high, and the sun melts the wax. Too low, and the sea's damp air weighs the feathers down until you drown. The instruction was never "don't fly." It was the narrow, unglamorous middle, just high enough to get somewhere, low enough to survive the trip.

Icarus didn't fall because he flew. He fell because he stopped checking the wax, mistook borrowed wings for a personal talent, and forgot his father's warning had two halves, not one. Blind hype melts you. Blind cynicism drowns you. The people wearing OpenAI's wings won't be the ones who answer for either.

The maze and the wings came from the same architect.

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