by

Or: What PowerPoint Can Teach You About Civilizational Decay

Salvete.

Call me Cassandra. Not the original - she could see the future. My curse is worse: I can see the past, recognize the pattern, show you the data... and watch you walk into the same trap anyway.

Welcome to Cassandra 2.0.

Everyone is delivering their AI forecasts for 2026. I'm not playing that game. Not because I lack opinions, but because the forecasts are missing the point. AI is the amplifier. The root cause is something older, quieter, and far more uncomfortable to discuss.

2026 will be the year the separation becomes visible.

Those who maintain their Cognitive Sovereignty - the capacity to think, learn, and adapt independently - versus those who have outsourced it entirely.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Let me show you what I mean with something everyone knows.

The PowerPoint Parable

PowerPoint shipped in 1987. Nearly four decades of iteration. It is, objectively, an extraordinarily capable piece of software. Animations, master slides, vector graphics, embedded media, conditional formatting, version control integration - the feature list is vast.

Here's what I've observed across more organizations than I care to count: almost nobody knows how to use it.

I don't mean "create a slide." I mean actually use it. Consistent formatting. Master slide discipline. Template governance. Version control that doesn't involve filenames like FINAL_v3_REALLY_FINAL_JohnsEdits.pptx.

Even branding departments - the people responsible for visual consistency - routinely produce decks that violate their own guidelines. Marketing teams copy-paste from old presentations, accumulating formatting entropy with each generation. Executives get decks where the same chart appears in three different visual styles because someone aggregated from four different sources.

This isn't a PowerPoint problem. PowerPoint works fine.

This is a capability decay problem.

The skill to use the tool properly existed once. Then it quietly eroded. Not through dramatic failure - through gradual neglect. Nobody decided to stop maintaining PowerPoint literacy. It just... happened. Other fires were more urgent. The quarterly results needed shipping. The reorg consumed all oxygen. And slowly, imperceptibly, the organizational muscle atrophied.

Enter Canva. Enter Gamma.

Suddenly, beautiful slides are easy again! AI-powered templates. Drag-and-drop simplicity. Your intern can produce something that looks professional in twenty minutes.

Problem solved?

No. Problem masked.

What actually happened: The organization found a workaround for a capability it no longer possesses. The underlying gap didn't close - it just became invisible. The patient didn't heal; they got a prosthetic and stopped noticing the missing limb.

And here's the part nobody wants to discuss: the prosthetic becomes load-bearing.

Once you've outsourced the capability to Canva, you're dependent on Canva. Your organizational knowledge of "how to make professional visual communication" now lives in a SaaS subscription, not in your people. If Canva changes, you adapt to Canva. If Canva's AI makes certain choices, those become your choices. You've traded a skill deficit for a dependency.

This is not a PowerPoint story. This is the story.

The Twelve Waves

"But this time is different!"

Is it? Let me show you something.

I've been in this industry long enough to have personal scars from multiple cycles. Here's what I've watched happen, roughly one wave per career chapter:

MAINFRAME
  • 1960
  • Centralize everything
  • Data processing departments born, massive investments
PC
  • 1982
  • Desktop revolution
  • Productivity explosion promised, partially delivered
CLIENT/SERVER
  • 1992
  • Distributed freedom
  • Architecture transformations, some worked
Waves 3-12

🚧 work-in-progress 🏗️
ERP, Dot-Com, Web2.0, Cloud, Big Data, IoT/Indutry 4.0, Blockchain, RPA, LLM/GenAI

Each wave follows the same arc:

  1. Legitimate breakthrough by practitioners who understand the technology
  2. Goldrush begins as the business press catches on
  3. Enterprise mandates cascade from boards who read about it in Forbes
  4. Spectacular failures emerge (18-36 months after Phase 3)
  5. Quiet retreat (never called "failure" - "strategic reprioritization")
  6. Zombie existence (the technology finds its appropriate niche, much smaller than promised)

And here's what's accelerating:

  • Frequency: 1960-1980 = one wave per decade → 2020-2025 = multiple waves per year
  • Amplitude: 1960s disasters = millions lost → 2020s disasters = trillions in play
  • Complexity: Single waves → multiple simultaneous waves → compound failure modes
  • Recovery time: Decades → years → months → what recovery?

The pattern doesn't change. Only the scale.

The Cassandra Curse

Here's where I'm supposed to sell you something. "Buy my framework and escape the pattern!"

I won't insult your intelligence.

You're going to do it anyway.

Your CEO read about AI in Forbes. Your board asked "What's our AI strategy?" McKinsey sent a deck. Your competitors announced their "AI transformation." The pressure is structural, not informational.

So you'll hire consultants. Create frameworks. Mandate adoption. Measure "AI maturity scores." Establish a Center of Excellence. Build governance committees.

This is Phase 3 behavior. Historically, Phase 4 arrives 18-36 months later.

When did your company mandate AI adoption? Do the math.

In 2-3 years, you'll quietly sunset the AI CoE. Reassign the platform team. Stop mentioning the "transformation" in earnings calls. Move on to whatever Wave 13 turns out to be.

Just like the last eleven times.

The curse isn't that Cassandra wasn't believed.

The curse is that she was right.

The Separation

So why am I writing this, if the pattern is inevitable?

Because the pattern is inevitable for organizations. Not for individuals.

You can maintain your Cognitive Sovereignty even inside an organization that's losing its mind. You can use AI to genuinely extend your capabilities while your colleagues use it to avoid developing theirs. You can be the person who actually understands what the AI is doing, why it's doing it, and when it's confidently wrong.

The separation that becomes visible in 2026 won't be between companies. It will be between people.

Those who kept reading. Kept learning. Kept questioning. Kept the cognitive metabolism running even when the organization stopped feeding it.

And those who let the muscle atrophy because the prosthetics were so comfortable.

Same tools available to everyone.

Opposite trajectories.

Which one are you on?

More on the maintenance problem - and what to actually do about it - in coming posts. The thermodynamics go deeper than PowerPoint. Meanwhile: I fix what others have complicated. These days, I use AI to do it faster. Not because AI replaces thinking, but because I still do the thinking.