Reflections from Black Hat USA 2025 on Deception, Disinformation, and the Marketing That Chose Fiction Over Facts... 
As I was driving away from Las Vegas... pretty damn fast -- as you can see -- I couldn't shake a troubling feeling from Black Hat.
The Narrative Attack Paradox: When #Cybersecurity Lost the Ability to Detect Its Own Deception and the Humanity We Risk When Truth Becomes Optional
The paradox? An industry studying "narrative attacks"—AI-powered campaigns that flood information environments with personalized deception at scale—as external threats, while simultaneously being surrounded by their own #marketing language that had become indistinguishable from the very algorithmic content generation they were warning about.
When the canary in the coal mine—the cybersecurity industry that's supposed to detect digital deception—loses its ability to distinguish authentic capability from algorithmic fiction, what hope do other industries have?
We're living in a Borgesian nightmare where marketing descriptions of #AI capabilities have become more influential than actual AI capabilities.
The problem isn't just technological—it's epistemological. We've built machines that decide what questions we should ask and how we should evaluate the answers.
A direct challenge to marketing professionals: This is your wake-up call. Stop letting #algorithms craft your messages. The most respected brands choose honesty over hype, transparency over clever AI-optimized copy. When your audience can't distinguish between human insight and machine-generated claims, authentic communication becomes your only competitive advantage.
The canary may be struggling to breathe, but it's still singing. The question is whether we're still listening.
There's so much more to think about here—from Borges to McLuhan, from recursive information crises to what we risk when truth becomes optional.
Read the full analysis, or if you prefer, listen to the podcast version included in the newsletter.
Let's keep exploring what it means to be human in this Hybrid Analog Digital Society—especially when the stakes have never been higher.
