Enshitification of the Internet: Trust, Funnels and Brands in the AI Age │ Nick Richtsmeier

About this episode

How do brands build trust when the internet has decayed into into AI-driven slop and tripe? The systems that once promised connection now work as mirrored cages, feeding your biases, hiding your real customer, and distorting the truth.

Nick Richtsmeier, founder of CultureCraft and writer at Damns Given, argues that brands now live inside engineered distortions. Funnels collapse. Neutrality is impossible. And AI is being layered onto a system already built to extract rather than empower.

In this conversation, Nick joins Mark and Jeremy to Think on Paper about:

• Why brands operate inside algorithmic cages

• How information distortion shapes every customer interaction

• Why mass neutrality fails and perspective becomes strategy

• How modern marketing hijacks curiosity

• Why platforms hoard customer insight inside black boxes

• How influencers stand in for trust

• Why network-based growth outperforms funnels

• Why analog tactics and patient capital are becoming competitive advantages
  

  
  

This episode tracks the widening distortion gap, the limits of AI-driven marketing, and the slow, analog tactics required to build something real inside an internet optimised for extraction.

If platforms are collapsing into noise, where does trust come from?

Please enjoy the show.

And remember: Stay curious. Be disruptive. Keep Thinking on Paper.

Cheers, Mark & Jeremy

PS: Please subscribe. It’s the best way you can help other curious minds find our channel.

--

Be our internet friend:

• ⁠Listen to every podcast⁠

• Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠

• Follow us on ⁠X⁠

• Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠

• Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠

• Read our ⁠Substack⁠

• Email: hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz

Watch On YouTube

--

Timestamps

(00:00) Trailer

(01:00) Disruptors & Curious Minds

(02:00) Mark Has A Trust Issue

(02:42) What Is Trust?

(07:14) How Deep-Tech Brands Build Trust?

(09:38) Steve Jobs And Selling A Feeling

(10:00) The Cult Of Silicon Valley

(10:35) Was the Internet Ever Not Shit? 

(15:05) What Is The “Distortion Gap”?

(20:11) Reducing Your Digital Marketing Spend

(21:45) Analog Marketing

(23:40) Why the Marketing Funnel Never Really Existed

(25:08) VCs, Capital And The Comfort Zone Of Risk

(27:04) Analog vs Digital: What Actually Creates Meaningful Connection

(28:40) How the TikTok Generation Uses the Internet Differently

(32:40) Your Curiosity Is Being Hi-Jacked

(35:22) What Are Load-Bearing Inefficiencies?

(40:47) The Importance Of Resilience in a World Of Entropy

(42:29) What Do We Want Humans To Be?