The Present Indicative, 14 October 2025
My Current Mood: Creating Something from Nothing
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1
For a scroll written at the end of the first-century AD, The Book of John sure does feel very prescient in this Age of Information. Welcome to The Present Indicative: a newsletter on the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business. My name is Alex Effgen. As this is the first newsletter, I am obligated to introduce what I am standing up and why I am standing it.
If Content Is King…
The value of words comes from our investment in their selection, the meaning that we give them, and the answers they deliver to our questions–the relief to our need. Like currency built on public trust and government stability, words can be inflated and devalued. They can oversaturate a market. They can be deemed confederate.
And yet still we have business to transact, products that need to be sold, services that need to be rendered. All of these require trust. And what we trust must deliver on those promises.
…And the Medium Is the Message…
US currency states, “In God We Trust.” And by the transitive property we must also trust in the words on that currency, but how do they get delivered? Like payments we no longer need to print it and distribute by hand. Both payments and words can reach every corner of the globe in less than a second, and are easy to counterfeit if not delivered by secure channels. Our words are worthless if they lack structure and source. Who sold us this bill of goods?
…Then I Am the Joker…
I am a writer, a teacher, an artist, an editor, and above all else, a thinking humanist. When presented an opportunity to create I want to tell a story–sometimes in plain clothes and other times decorated but always from my educated perspective and for your benefit to establish trust and provide value.
…And This Is My Punchline
In languages, the indicative mood is a verb form to ask questions and provide answers. It is used to create declarative statements of fact, not emotion. I shall use this newsletter–The Present Indicative–to explore topics that are relevant to the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business. The Indicators. I shall share interesting stories that come from reliable sources, and hope to earn your trust.
I shall also produce additional narratives in a 5-episode podcast series delivered every other week for the rest of 2025 titled The Future Indicative. Can I deliver all of these products with consistent regularity and standards? The joke may be on me. But rest assured we at the newly established Indicate Marketing are here to show what great narratives accomplish for your industry, and maybe do it with a sense of humor.
In Other News…
I am excited to share that our first episode of The Future Indicative next Tuesday will be on the topic of Origin. You’ll get into my origin, the origins of the company that shaped me into the entrepreneur writing this, and the founder of that company, Matthew Josefowicz. When I asked him to share the last interesting thing he read, he said:
An article that really spoke to me lately was in Harvard Business Review about the impact of AI workslop on organizations. The basic premise of the article was that people are generating content for internal reports or internal communications using AI and they are therefore able to generate content very quickly and very easily and hit emails back quickly and produce reports quickly and all those kinds of things.
But what’s really getting lost is the focus on the reader. People are excited about how easy it is to generate content and that ease of generation is actually coming at the expense of generating meaning in the mind of the reader. And so the article was research by some business professors about the additional cognitive load that receiving poor communication—and especially AI generated, what they call “workslop” communication—the additional cognitive load that it puts on the reader. Where the reader then has to think, Am I missing something? What did this person really mean? Is this just because the AI missed it or does the person not know what’s happening? There’s a whole additional layer of cognitive overload that’s being created in organizations.
So the generation of content may become more efficient, but the consumption of content is actually becoming less efficient. And in every organization, leaders depend on receiving clear information from a wide range of people so that they can digest it and use it to make decisions. That’s the purpose of all of these internal reports and emails and those kinds of things. Generally they are designed to educate and inform and persuade people who are organizationally above you.
And so what’s happening is people lower down in the organization are reducing their workload by using AI. And by doing that, they’re creating additional workload for the smaller number of people at the higher ends of the organization whose cognitive resources are actually more spare, which is why they have a whole team below them anyway. I just thought that was really fascinating and an interesting encapsulation of something that I knew intuitively to be true or suspected intuitively to be true, but now there’s some research behind it. And hopefully that will move forward the conversation in terms of exactly what roles we’re assigning to AI and what organizational impacts those have.
Thanks, Matt! A few other resources from that episode to include:
See, Solve, Scale, by Danny Warshay
“An Essay on Criticism,” by Alexander Pope
Enjoy!
Alex Effgen