It's June 14th. Welcome back, diving into Entanglement with shorter Weekend reads.
Welcome.
In physics, the three-body problem is about how three objects under gravity interact, leading to unpredictable behaviour. Each object influence the others, creating feedback loops that can’t be solved with simple math.
Brand relationships operate the same way now.
Body One: The human. Shifting modes, juggling identities, beingat different moments.
Body Two: The brand. Building relationships, create meaning, delivering value. Operating with legacy assumptions about how humans make decisions and form attachments.
Body Three: Our interfaces. The algorithmic system that mediates the interaction. The feed that decides what you see. The agent that filters your options. The recommendation engine that shapes your desire. The AI assistant that makes decisions on behalf of you.
These three bodies don’t operate independently. They entangle.
Our behaviour trains the algorithm. The algorithm shapes what we experience. The brand responds to signals from both. We internalise what the system amplifies. The brand adapts to what the algorithm rewards. The algorithm learns from how the brain works. This cycle keeps repeating, and no one is fully in control.
This is Entanglement. Today’s operating system for the modern consumer.
And the infrastructure of most modern commercial AI.
It’s too early.
Our conceptual framework for intelligence and AI doesn’t exist yet. It’s too early.
Imagine trying to explain oxidation to someone from the 1300s. Tell them ‘rapid molecular bonding with oxygen’ would sound like nonsense to them. The ideas just don’t make sense in their time.
It’s the same with machine intelligence. We can name the components, we can describe the steps. We can trace what happens at each layer of the processing stack. But emergent behaviour, the thing that happens when you combine forty-plus cognitive capabilities in ways we didn’t fully plan for, that’s still largely beyond us.
We’re like medieval alchemists who have heard the secrets of chemistry.
Even if we had the right answer, it might be useless because we don’t yet have the concepts to understand it. So, like always, we build things and see what happens.
But the problem is that much of this building is happening through commercial systems that watch what happens and focus on taking as much value as possible.
Anthropic’s Fable 5 Takedown: How a Three-Day “Ban” Supercharged Its IPO Story
Five days ago, Anthropic was selling a future where its frontier models would grow more powerful, more valuable, and more carefully governed than anyone else’s.
Now those same models have been yanked offline under a US national security order and marched straight into the risk column their IPO story pretended to pre-empt.
The timing is exquisite: float a narrative about exponential, borderline‑dangerous capability, then get a government takedown that retrofits your marketing copy into “regulatory validation” of just how special your product supposedly is.
Seen through an IPO lens, this isn’t just about safety but about pricing scarcity.
Mythos Preview, Project Glasswing, and now a three‑day Fable 5 launch followed by an export‑control freeze all reinforce the same message to the key audience, their investors: these models are not normal software, they are strategic assets that attract both customers and governments.
The cynical read writes itself: the more the public is kept from stress‑testing the claims, the easier it is to sell the prospectus story that this is not merely useful technology, but something so “dangerous and powerful” it has to be managed like a weapon.
Starbucks Sold Its AI on a 99% Accuracy Number. Nine Months Later, 11,000 Stores Are Counting Milk by Hand
The work was handed back to the employee it was supposed to free up wrong numbers, so the system didn't replace the task. It added a second one on top of it. A tool that needs a human to verify every output doesn't deliver efficiency. It delivers two jobs.
This isn’t an AI failure. It’s a context failure dressed up as a capability claim. When you operationalise lab-grade intelligence in messy, human environments, you often expose the gap between algorithmic certainty and lived reality.
The real lesson isn’t inaccurate AI; it’s identity drift, where the brand promise is shaped by metrics that collapse the moment they meet the edge cases of human experience.
LinkedIn makes follower count almost irrelevant.
Follower count used to be the proxy for influence on LinkedIn. Now it might be the most misleading number on the platform.
If reach is driven by how the algorithm interprets your relevance, and no longer by the size of your audience, then most of what you’ve been taught about “building a presence” is outdated. You’re not growing an audience anymore; you’re training a system to recognise and distribute its version of you.
So here’s a question:
Are you, as either a corporate brand or individual brand, actually building authority, or are you just accumulating followers in a system that no longer cares much about them
?
You can get a copy of the latest research data here.
I’m not anti-progress. I think AI’s potential in science, medicine, space and - yes - decreasing our work and expanding our time, makes the progress story deeply important.
Without the belief that improvement is possible, we cannot function or develop, individually or collectively.
But we need clarity on what we consider progress, and why.
What’s being gained, what’s being lost, and are we happy with these trade-offs?
Are ever-increasing efficiency and comfort really our highest goods as humans?
And, if our answer is yes, what if we can no longer compete, and begin to view ourselves or some parts of the population as resource-draining, dated, slow and ineffective entities that *should* go extinct?
Of course, the real question is who benefits from the current trajectory?
In a recent interview, one of these beneficiaries, Peter Thiel the co-founder of Palantir, was asked whether he wants the human race to endure, and he hesitated. He hesitated for a very, very, long time.
I’m Michael Cooper, and I think about entanglement - our fluid identities, using personal agents, AI, living with Intelligent Interfaces, participating in culture - and their impact on our behaviours, choice making, empowerment, and brand engagement.
If you like this newsletter and want more:
My private work, where I share original thinking with brands, strategists, and futurists, with provocative conversations.
My LinkedIn, where I post my ideas.
I speak at conferences or in-house company events, or enterprise teams, and when I’m allowed to ‘think aloud’ about my ideas to audiences curious about the entanglement of our humanity, culture, strategy, tech, brands and the future.
Ready for more?
Thanks for reading,
Michael