A personal update

Strange Loop is where I think in public, not where I post life updates or office news. I’ve also made it more than a decade without LinkedIn and would prefer to keep the streak alive.

Still, one small breach of protocol.

This week I was appointed Global CEO of Allied Global Marketing, a nearly forty-year-old company spanning entertainment, gaming, sport and location-based experiences.

I’m not sharing this because titles are inherently interesting (they’re not). The job sits directly on top of the question I keep returning to here: what happens when the systems around culture stop protecting the thing itself?

I have always cared about culture first. It changes how people see themselves, each other and the world. There is a reason governments try to censor it, police it, domesticate it or turn it into propaganda. They understand what the market often forgets: culture moves people before policy does. Before people vote differently, they see differently. Before they see differently, they feel differently. Culture gets there first.

One of the great delusions of the present is that culture will keep renewing itself no matter what. That relevance is self-healing. That meaning can survive any amount of noise, sameness, optimisation and synthetic volume. As though you can flood the system with average and still trust the important things to rise.

I don’t believe that.

Culture is not self-sustaining. It has to be made, recognised, backed, protected and defended. Otherwise it gets stripped for parts. First into inventory. Then content. Then sludge.

We are now building machines that can produce infinite average at industrial scale. The question is whether anything human enough to matter can still hold its ground.

I care far more about culture than marketing as a profession, which is probably the only respectable reason to take this role. I care about what gets made, what gets said, and what shapes the way we live, think and love. Taste and timing are not decorative. I care whether the businesses closest to culture are helping move it forward, or simply strip-mining it while assuming it will grow back for free.

So yes, a personal update. But also, I suppose, a statement of intent.

Strange Loop will remain what it has always been for me: a personal place to think in public about systems, culture, attention, technology and the loops binding them together. But this felt worth sharing because those questions are less theoretical in my daily life now. They come with people, stakes, consequences and the responsibility to build something equal to the moment.

It feels very serious. It also feels very right.