Greetings from LHC HQ, where we like to think we’ve perfected the art of a successful Times Square IPO rollout:
- Marquee billboard design √
- Stoked clients √
- Turtlenecks √+
Now on to the #content:
The Future is Friction
Film camera sales are booming. Vinyl records are getting scooped up at breakneck speed, and not just as novelties from Urban Outfitters. Is 2026 the year of friction-maxxing?
Kathryn Jezer-Morton writes in New York Magazine that doing things the old-fashioned, slightly inconvenient way should come back in style ASAP. For the last decade-plus, tech companies have tried to eliminate every piece of friction in our lives; from instant food delivery to location sharing and AI agents texting our friends back, there’s an imminent risk of living a “digitally padded” existence that effectively turns us into toddlers.
“We’re foie gras ducks being force-fed escapism,” she argues. “Generative AI raises an urgent question: who are we when we forfeit the friction of thinking?”
Luckily, there are still ways to combat the creep of optimization (take a walk to the grocery store, fire up Google instead of ChatGPT). But maybe the easiest is to embrace the type of physical goods that force you to think just a little bit more about what you’re consuming, why you like it, and who actually made it.
Need some help getting started? The Lighthouse Mixtape is a limited-run cassette made to represent our taste and our company. It’s also a way to reject the built-for-scale optimization of a great many products released today. You have to put the cassette in another machine, and you have to flip it over to hear both sides. There’s no algorithm or infinite auto-play, but there is a cool sleeve design and excellent liner notes.
This is Your Brain on SEO
What’s digital is real, and what’s real is digital. This revelation came to us while strolling down 2nd Avenue past the acclaimed take-out spot Thai Food Near Me.
How else has the rise of a search-based society thrown life out of whack? SEO changed both how content gets distributed and why it gets created in the first place. Oftentimes, it can feel like the incentive shifted from “is this good?” to “will this rank?”
Things get strange when real-world curiosity meets made-for-search content. With findability as the top incentive, the results are recipes buried under a 2,000-word history of pasta and keyword density so relentless you start to feel insane. Optimization, in some sense of the word.
This is the state of affairs, for now at least. But the next era is upon us in the form of GEO, also known as Generative Engine Optimization — the practice of making your content valuable to an AI that decides what counts as the authoritative answer.
SEO rewards volume and keyword density, while GEO is said to reward clarity and being cited by the right sources. Here’s what Jesse Brukman, VP of Strategy and leading analyst of AI derangement, has to say:
Today, the signals of good SEO sync with the signals for good GEO. Do one well, and you’re probably doing the other fine. But that’s no comfort to marketing leads getting Slacks from their VPs, directors, and C-suite to the tune of “I asked Claude where to get [product] and the robot didn’t say [our business] is a good place for get [product]! Why???”
While AI as the world’s shiny new thing has certainly outlasted Web3 and similar “Add this to our prospectus to gain 20% in our market cap overnight”-style innovations, it still exists in the Wild West of concrete strategy.
If anyone is advising you other than to be patient and follow SEO best practices, they’re selling snake oil. (Comment “Snake Oil” to get my foolproof AI prompt one-sheet.)
Going Goblin Mode
Speaking of friction, has anyone else been getting seriously stymied when they ask ChatGPT about goblins?
In recent months, OpenAI has sought to do some real-time training on GPT after it appeared to have a strange obsession with goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, and pigeons. Instead of tapering things back, they took the nuclear option. Henceforth, any mentions of spooky creatures were ignored.
If you’ve got model fatigue or are fed up with spooky searches just not working, there’s another option. British Technologist Simon Willison created talkie: a vintage model trained on language from 1930. The premise is pretty simple; toss in the same queries you might ask today’s chatbots and get a response uncontaminated by modern thought and language conventions.
You just might get some decent ad copy out of it, too.
The Latest and Greatest from LHC HQ
- Our friends at Amazon officially launched Amazon Supply Chain Services (ASCS). We’re proud to support the design and content that helped bring it to life; read about it here.
- What can selling weed in college and being bad at having a boss teach you about running a successful creative agency? Spend 5 minutes with LHC Co-Founder Sam Slaughter and find out.