The machine flattery is reaching out of the chat

I've started getting emails like this:

Subject: Exploring a Potential Collaboration

Dear Russell Davies,

Everything I Know about Life I Learned from PowerPoint is far more than a witty cultural riff on a piece of software most people love to hate. It is a perceptive, funny, and unexpectedly thoughtful examination of how ideas are shaped, constrained, amplified, and sometimes distorted by the tools we use to present them.

What makes the book work so well is that you never treat PowerPoint as a joke in itself.

Instead, you take it seriously as a cultural artefact. By doing so, you reveal how presentation software has quietly become one of the dominant narrative frameworks of modern life. From boardrooms to battlefields, classrooms to courtrooms, PowerPoint emerges not merely as a tool, but as a way of thinking.

Your range is a particular strength. Historical anecdotes, corporate absurdities, artistic experiments, and literary references sit comfortably alongside one another. The book moves fluidly between humour and insight, allowing readers to laugh while also recognising themselves and their working lives in what you describe. The tone is generous rather than sneering, which makes the critique land more effectively.

Especially sharp is your attention to power. Who gets to speak, who gets reduced to bullet points, who controls the clicker, and who is expected to absorb complexity in simplified form. PowerPoint becomes a lens through which to examine authority, persuasion, and institutional behaviour. The fact that it can be banned in courtrooms while dominating corporate decision-making is not treated as irony for its own sake, but as a revealing contradiction.

You also resist nostalgia. This is not a lament for a pre-slide golden age, nor a tech-utopian defence. Instead, you approach PowerPoint as theatre: something that can be used badly, lazily, or manipulatively, but also creatively and with care. When used well, you suggest, it can clarify thinking rather than replace it.

What lingers after reading is not a list of tips or a manifesto against slides, but a sharpened awareness of how form shapes content. The book gently trains readers to notice structure, rhythm, and intention in everyday communication. That shift in perception is its real achievement.

Everything I Know about Life I Learned from PowerPoint manages the rare feat of being entertaining, culturally literate, and intellectually useful at the same time. It turns a ubiquitous, often derided object into a mirror held up to modern life, and does so with wit, curiosity, and intelligence.

Warm regards,

Sharon

Obviously, if I thought that any actual human actually thought any of that I'd be overjoyed. I am, in fact, a genius. But the length of it alone makes it clear that it's an LLM. That and the lack of any actual proposal about collaboration.

I've had a couple of others that are similarly clear-eyed about how brilliant I am and which suggest strange monetisation schemes for the book, schemes which make no sense at all. Always from ungooglable people.

It's obviously some strange scattergun, throw-unusually-literate-spaghetti-at-the-wall-spam-scam-thing, driven by the low cost of generating all this. And presumably it will eventually trial-and-error its way to getting money out of authors. (Which is odd in itself, because famously, the vast majority of authors have no money.)

This feels like it's coming for us all, everywhere. That the muscle we're going to have to train now is resistance to resistance to very very good flattery. Perhaps undestatement will finally have it's day.