Slop and chaos: Welcome to 2026

Hi kids, welcome to 2026!

Venezuela’s most precious resource is now in the hands of a man who has six bankruptcies to his name, Greenland is on the brink of invasion, and Australia is about to go up in flames.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the key challenges climate tech marketers will face in 2026, and I’ve boiled it down to two things: slop and chaos.

AI slop was the the ‘word of the year’ for a number of dictionaries last year, to absolutely no one’s surprise. As AI content takes over the platforms where we conduct much of our online lives, it’s getting harder to tell what’s real, yes, but it’s also just getting harder to find anything interesting — anything that feels worth stopping to pay attention to.

I feel this anytime I’m online these days; the feeds are boring, the hot takes are eyeroll-worthy, even trying to pick a Netflix show is borderline impossible (and that’s even before AI infiltrates TV). This phenomenon of an endless buffet of uninspiring mush may be the defining digital trend of 2026 — that and video.

And maybe it’s just the algorithm at work, but the sheer volume of content I’m seeing around unplugging, getting offline, going analogue — something is definitely in the waters.

In the real world, 2026 is shaping up to be even more chaotic than 2025. I was going to summarise what’s going on and what we might expect in the year ahead, but it makes me tired just thinking about it, and you already know anyway. Notably, though, most of us will experience this chaos through our online platforms — just another reason for them to tune out, put a record on and pick up a book.

With our online platforms saturated with low-quality content, and our physical world more uncertain and stress-inducing than ever before, what’s a sustainability communicator to do? How can we show up on these platforms without contributing to the entropy? How can we stand out without adding the noise?

The work we do as sustainability communicators and climate tech marketers is more challenging and also more important than ever. In 2026, how can we do it well?

The first step on the agenda is to hold tightly to your own sanity. This is a task that feels increasingly difficult. Here’s Margaret Atwood on sanity.

A key element of sanity is the ability to see the bigger picture, to offer an alternative perspective on the conventional narrative. Differentiate yourself (as in, yourself, not your company) by focusing on better inputs — books, podcasts, real-world conversations — and not just digesting and regurgitating the same high-fructose-corn-syrup information as everyone else.

Timothy Snyder talks about ‘unpredictability’ as being one of the key forms of freedom, but he worries that algorithmic media is taking away our unpredictability, rewiring our tastes and preferences, pulling our emotional strings, turning us into predictably compliant automatons. Here’s his advice on retaining your unpredictability — advice I happen to quite like 😉

Unfortunately, in 2026, the sanest among us are the most alarmed. The most well-informed have the most to fear. If some element of sanity has to do with maintaining robust mental health, well — maybe part of the solution is tuning out altogether for a while. Maybe just, I don’t know, pick up a paintbrush or something. I’ve heard it’s good for you.

My partner is a software engineer who spends much of his time reviewing other people’s code. Sometimes I hear him groaning from his office. “Ugggghhh,” he’ll say. “It’s just AI all day.” The code being sent to him for review is mostly AI-generated these days, which wouldn’t be a problem in itself, but AI code, just like AI writing, has a special shitty quality to it. “There’s just so much of it,” he says. Yes, it’s technically correct, and it’ll make the thing work, but it makes the reviewer’s life hell, because what might be a hundred lines of code in the hands of a human inevitably becomes five hundred when made by a robot. The AI saves the coders time, and creates a wonderfully shitty experience for the reviewer.

This is exactly what’s going on with a lot of B2B content right now. Marketers are thrilled that they can generate reams of professional-sounding stuff at the touch of a button. They’re publishing more than ever, yet much of it is so bland to read, so unnecessarily long, and so devoid of words that actually mean anything, that no one is reading it all. (If anything, they’re feeding it into AI for a summary).

This state of affairs makes me want to tear my hair out. It is enshittification at every level and in every way; indeed, it may be the very end state of enshittification, although perhaps that’s optimistic.

The opposite of slop is originality, which, these days, is another way of saying humanity. What is humanity in the world of B2B content? I believe it starts with creation. Don’t sit at your desk and try to write something in a vacuum. The way that usually ends is summarising boring articles on the first page of Google, or just realising how hard writing is and asking ChatGPT for help. Don’t make content that way, it’s no fun. Go an talk to someone. Interview an expert. Reach out to another organization and partner up. Talk to a customer. Talk to your founder. Honestly, talk to anyone, but start the content creation process at the human level, not the Google Doc or chatbot level.

Even something as simple as a LinkedIn post can be made more human. Share photos of the office, take a quick video of your CEO talking about the year ahead, share a lighthearted GIF or meme. It might not be much, but it’s one way to make the digital world a little less cultivated and a little more real.

Involving humans in the creation of content is a first step; acknowledging the humans on the receiving end of the content is the next one. To acknowledge the human at the other end means to be judicious about what you allow to remain in the final draft. It also doesn’t mean going to the other extreme and pasting bland, effectively meaningless AI summaries. It means thinking about what you’d like to read. Would this interest you? Would you remember it after you walked away?

Meg and I truly believe there is room — in both the B2B world and the climate conversation — for lightheartedness. In fact, maybe it’s our job in 2026 to bring the good vibes. Yes, in an increasingly chaotic world, we need to be careful of not coming across as tone-deaf, but there are ways to bring levity and even humour into the conversation, and people crave it now more than ever. A dollop of optimism (the grounded kind, not the overhyped marketing kind) can go a long way in these times.

Even if your message is serious (risk management, disaster preparedness, rising emissions, you name it), there are ways to inject levity, to emphasise the upside. Even simply shifting the focus from problems to solutions, or from risks to practical action steps, can help.

For starters, there’s no telling whether they’re even real. At this point, how much do you trust the tech bros? But even if the numbers are real, online marketing metrics are a slippery slope. What the algorithm rewards is not necessarily the right thing for your brand, or more importantly, your audience. The more you succumb to the analytics trap, the more you will find yourself a) hating your job (more than likely using a machine to create meaningless content to fuel an algorithm), and b) allowing the almighty algorithm to dictate your brand voice, message, and relationship with your audience. We can’t avoid the platforms, but we can still choose how we show up on them.

It seems the theme of this newsletter comes down to humans over everything else. Platforms and formats and news cycles will come and go, but humans (for now, at least) are the one constant.

If you keep anything in mind when you’re doing your job this year, keep humans in mind (and I’m not talking about customer avatars — I’m talking about, for want of a better word, souls).

Yes, there is slop, and chaos, and a whole lot of worry out there.

But there are humans out there too.

📚 Book: Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-WilliamsI read so many great books over the break, so it was hard to pick just one to share here. I’d been seeing this book around on shelves all year and finally decided to give it a go, and let me tell you, I was enthralled. Wynn-Williams seems to be an unusually impressive writer and narrator, and the situations she finds herself in as Director of Public Policy at Facebook from 2011 to 2017 are storytelling gold. The up-close, behind-closed-doors interactions with Facebook heavyweights Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan are fascinating and hilarious; I laughed out loud, gasped, and visually cringed at multiple points.

📱App: Oblique Strategies SEOkay, wildcard, I know, I’ve never recommended an app before. I don’t plan to recommend many apps, actually, because I’m pretty anti-phone these days, but this particular app has been on my phone for years, ever since my early days working at a creative agency in Melbourne. It’s a weird one to describe, but basically, when you’re working on something and you need inspiration or a new way of thinking about something, you open it up, shake it, and it will give you a very (very) random prompt to get your brain thinking. It’s weird, but more often than not, it works.

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