AI’s weakness lies in technology that predates the web.

AI is now the single most-cited reason for job cuts in the U.S. CFOs expect AI-driven cuts to be 9x higher this year, with 44% of all CFOs saying they’re planning layoffs.

9-to-5 jobs haven’t been safe for a while and people are finally noticing.

Independence is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s about survival.

For most of my career, the argument for going independent sounded like a lifestyle pitch. Start your LLC. Work from anywhere. Over-deliver for your clients. Walk your kid to school.

This is all true. But it treats independence as a lifestyle upgrade. It’s more than that. In the AI era, it’s foundational.

Independence can be the best financial and health decision a worker can make.

It’s time to realize that your greatest advantage right now is you. It’s your personality, your experience, and your ability to establish trust as an individual.

People will always trust and buy from people before faceless corporate brands.

Without real names, content is less trustworthy. Even the biggest content brands know this now.

If you aren’t independent, the trust you’ve built in your name is not under your control. This is destructive to your future earning potential and quality of life.

Before influencers, there were bloggers. Before bloggers, there were TV stars, rock stars, and movie stars. Call them whatever you want, but individuals have always been the drivers of engagement and trust.

AI isn’t going to help a corporation become as “authentic” as an actual person. It’s more likely to limit their differentiation and provide gaps for competitors to exploit.

Their best hope is to become collections of influencers and try to retain the best. But successful influencers have every incentive to go independent and make more money.

So, corporate brands may end up becoming collections of the least influential personalities in every industry. Good luck with that.

There’s a reason email has had the greatest ROI in online marketing for over 20 years. It’s at the nexus of trust.

• It’s an open format that predates the web by almost two decades.
• It’s the only ubiquitous and consistent means of communication online.
• It reveals AI as the ultimate compromise engine – predicting the average of every next word in a safe, bland mush. Big companies love safe content. Readers don’t.

Companies like Substack (and many others before them) have tried to wrap the email newsletter experience in a corporate brand experience, but this always fails in the long-term and traps their creators.

This is already happening at Substack as they add more obstacles every year for creators who want to improve the reader experience and own their own list. They push the narrative that the future of email newsletters doesn’t include email — but does include their app. That’s convenient.

I think independence has to include the rejection of disingenuous aggregators, ownership of your list, and ownership of the readers’ experience.

Readers have trusted you with their email addresses. Don’t hand over their entire experience to an untrustworthy third party.

The market has never been this ready to reward trust and independence.

The content that AI produces most efficiently is also the content that requires the most human-to-human trust to be effective. For the foreseeable future, this paradox will be the greatest weakness for cost-cutting organizations and the greatest strength for individuals.

Declare independence now. The market is likely to support you more than ever. Do it with an email newsletter, and the trust of a persistent audience will be the wind at your back for the rest of your career (and life).

— CJ

P.S. I highly recommend attending the annual Newsletter Conference in a few weeks. I’m not paid by them or an affiliate, but as a past attendee, I can guarantee you will learn career-altering lessons here from the smartest newsletter operators in the business.