If you spent your holidays scrolling LinkedIn, dodging “2025 reflections” and “2026 predictions,” I feel for you. There’s nothing quite like watching laid-off CMOs rebrand as futurists or junior strategists suddenly preaching about AI ethics from their parents’ guest room.

Meanwhile, the real news was way messier: TikTok ate the news industry, the Trump phone is still vaporware, ad jobs vanished faster than brand budgets, publishers threw their content into the AI woodchipper for a few bucks, and M&A deals trickled in like leftovers reheated in a corporate microwave.

What tied it all together? Pretending. TikTok pretending to be a credible newsroom. Trump pretending to launch a phone. Agencies pretending layoffs are “evolution.” Publishers pretending they’re not desperate. And all of us pretending that AI partnerships are anything but a polite way to hand over your intellectual property in exchange for exposure and maybe a Slack integration.

TikTok just unseated YouTube, Facebook, and Insta as Gen Z’s go-to for news, according to Pew. Nearly half of 18-to-29-year-olds are getting their daily dose of current events from creators in hoodies whispering under blankets. Legacy news orgs are trying to hang—yes, WaPo and CNN have TikToks—but it’s the DIY pundits who rule this algo-fueled circus. @UnderTheDeskNews has millions of followers. Charlie Kirk had 7 million before he exited stage right.

TikTok’s added “footnotes” and boasts about 130 markets worth of fact-checkers, but let’s not pretend this isn’t still a breeding ground for AI hallucinations, conspiracy cosplay, and geopolitical LARPing. Poland just asked the EU to look into AI-generated clips calling for a Polexit. What’s next—deepfake debates moderated by a dancing cat?

Trump’s gold-plated “T1” phone, promised to MAGA the mobile industry, still hasn’t shipped. It’s been delayed more times than his indictments, and now even customer service admits it might not show up before 2026. What do you get for your $499 pre-order and $100 down payment? A whole lot of nothing—and now, a website quietly selling marked-up used Samsungs and iPhones instead.

It was supposed to be “Made in America.” Then “Brought to Life in America.” Now it’s MIA in America. The Trump boys running the show haven’t updated shipping info since October, but they’re still taking money. It’s like Theranos with worse UX.

Adland lost 3,700 jobs in 2025 and is entering 2026 with a whole lot of “technical literacy is table stakes” energy. Translation? If you can’t talk to ChatGPT like it’s your intern, don’t bother showing up to the interview. Agencies are hiring AI-fluent engineers, automation freaks, and software nerds, while the Mad Men-era portfolio crowd gets ghosted harder than a junior creative after Cannes.

PMG, Chemistry, Kramer-Crasselt—everyone’s chasing early-career code monkeys who can teach AI to make banner ads less awful. If you still think “storytelling” is your superpower, you better teach it to a robot, fast.

In 2025, every tech giant from OpenAI to Amazon signed licensing deals with desperate publishers looking to monetize the content that’s been scraped and stripped for LLM fuel. Axios, NYT, The Guardian, Meta, Microsoft—they’re all in bed with the bots now. Some got cash, others got access to OpenAI’s toys. A few got a pat on the head and “attribution.”

Of course, not every publisher is playing nice. The New York Times, Penske, and the Chicago Tribune are in full lawsuit mode, accusing AI firms of creative theft. But most can’t afford to sue—they’re too busy trying to survive the next round of layoffs. Welcome to the future: your Pulitzer-winning prose is now training data for your chatbot competition.

The ad tech deal machine coughed back to life in 2025. T-Mobile scooped up Vistar Media and Blis, The Trade Desk grabbed Sincera, and Outbrain finished chewing on Teads. Publicis went shopping for dusty old data platforms like Lotame, and PMG bought Momentum Commerce, because apparently AI analytics are the new beachfront property.

But don’t get it twisted—this isn’t some frothy boom. It’s more like a yard sale with better decks. Everyone’s bargain hunting, trying to stitch together identity graphs, CTV footholds, and retail media scraps before Google eats the rest of the internet. The only surprise? Trump Media’s merging with a nuclear energy company. Because, sure. Why not.

To cap off the year, TikTok agreed to spin off its U.S. arm into something called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC (yes, really). Oracle, Silver Lake, and a Gulf-state investor are buying nearly half. ByteDance keeps a chunk. National security theater gets a new act.

Will it satisfy regulators? Will it actually change anything? Probably not. But hey, at least the LLC name rolls off the tongue like a steel pipe.

Stay Bold. Stay Curious. Know More Than You Did Yesterday.

This is what happens when you confuse community with comments and call it innovation.

TikTok didn’t democratize news. It atomized it, chopped it into emotionally charged scraps, and fed it to an algorithm that worships watch time. News now arrives stripped of friction, context, and adult supervision. Swipe. React. Perform identity. Repeat. Verification is optional. Accountability is nostalgic. What matters is whether it felt true for six seconds while your thumb hovered.

That isn’t connection. It’s conditioning.

TikTok’s feed rewards provocation over precision. The ranking system doesn’t ask whether something is right. It asks whether you stayed. That single design choice turns journalism into a carnival mirror. Outrage beats accuracy. Simplicity beats complexity. Confidence beats doubt.

Creators follow incentives because humans follow gravity. Hot takes outrun corrections. Parasocial intimacy outperforms sourcing. “We don’t know yet” dies quietly in the corner while certainty, even fake certainty, prints engagement. This isn’t bad actors. It’s bad architecture.

Thirty to sixty seconds is not a format. It’s an amputation.

Sources disappear. Methodology evaporates. Counterarguments never make the cut. What’s left is a drip-feed of fragments that feel coherent only because the algorithm keeps reinforcing the same emotional register. News becomes vibes, not a checkable narrative. Christmas lights with no wiring diagram.

Then there’s the algorithm-as-editor problem. The front page is personalized, opaque, and constantly mutating. No shared hierarchy of importance. No public editor. No explanation. Everyone lives in their own newsroom run by a black box. You don’t argue over facts anymore because you don’t even agree on what happened.

That’s not pluralism. That’s fragmentation with a soundtrack.

Add AI and the situation curdles. Coordinated synthetic narratives slide in frictionlessly. AI-generated political videos, fake personas engineered to look relatable, attractive, and ideologically aligned, bypass skepticism and go straight for identity. Persuasion becomes invisible. You don’t debate it. You absorb it.

By the time anyone slaps a warning label on it, the content has already sprinted across the feed and moved on.

Fact-checking partnerships and crowd-sourced notes are bolt-ons, duct-taped to a system still tuned for virality. Scale always beats scrutiny. Context always arrives late. Crowd notes are slow, gameable, and partisan. We’ve already watched this movie.

The most misleading content travels farthest, fastest, and first.

Habit formation matters. When a huge share of young adults get news from TikTok, the default answer to “what’s going on in the world?” becomes an entertainment app designed to keep you scrolling, not informed.

Legacy outlets can post all the vertical video they want. They’re still competing in the same slot as conspiracy role-play and AI hallucinations, under the same incentive structure. Perform or disappear.

Real community requires shared reality, mutual obligation, and a willingness to be corrected. TikTok offers frictionless belonging without responsibility. It feels communal the way a chant feels communal. Loud. Energizing. Over quickly. Nobody leaves wiser.

Ignorance here isn’t a side effect.
It’s the business model.

Calling that community is how you end up mistaking a slot machine for a public square, then acting shocked when everyone walks away poorer, louder, and absolutely convinced they won.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.

Behind the paywall is the part everyone actually cares about: the receipts, the whispered-over-latte power plays, the charts that make CMOs sweat, and the stuff PR teams wish you’d stop noticing. If the free feed is the trailer, ADOTAT+ is the director’s cut where the knives come out and the plot twists finally make sense.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.