WASHINGTON — In an encouraging sign that the public still expects reality to maintain at least a part-time administrative staff, citizens around the world expressed outrage this week after discovering that official documents, corporate strategy, color forecasting, billionaire denials, and artificial intelligence deployment had all become absurd at roughly the same time.
The concern began after reports of glaring errors in official paperwork prompted public anger, with observers noting that government documents have traditionally been expected to contain only the smaller, more dignified mistakes that slowly ruin a person’s life over 18 to 24 months. According to Chosun Ilbo, the errors were absurd enough to spark outrage, crossing the crucial threshold at which citizens stop assuming incompetence is deliberate policy and begin wondering whether anyone has looked at the paper.
This newspaper takes the firm editorial position that absurdity in official documents is unacceptable unless it has first been approved by a committee, formatted into a PDF, and uploaded to a portal that is down for maintenance.
Still, the paperwork controversy was only one component of a broader civilizational audit. In the private sector, reports that SpaceX and xAI may be merging into what Gizmodo described as a very silly-sounding conglomerate have forced Americans to confront the possibility that the future of space exploration and machine intelligence may be governed by a corporate structure named with the same restraint as a vape flavor.
It is important not to dismiss such developments merely because they sound like a child trying to remember which company owns the moon. Many of the most important institutions in modern life now have names that would have been rejected by a 1998 snowboard company for being too unserious. The key question is not whether a SpaceX-xAI combination sounds silly. The key question is whether it will achieve sufficient scale to make its silliness systemically important.
Meanwhile, the culture industry contributed its annual act of chromatic self-government when The Atlantic noted that the Color of the Year has become an exercise in absurdity. This, too, is a serious matter. For decades, Americans have depended on color authorities to inform them which shade best captures the grief, optimism, supply-chain anxiety, and premium appliance finishes of the coming fiscal year. Without this guidance, consumers may be forced to experience beige without a press release.
The week’s absurdity was rounded out by Bill Gates denying claims in an Epstein-related email as “absolutely absurd and completely false,” and by thousands of CEOs reportedly admitting that AI has had no impact on employment or productivity, reviving an old economic paradox in which transformative technology transforms everything except the numbers everyone was promised it would transform.
Here, at least, business leaders deserve some sympathy. It is difficult to produce measurable productivity gains while also attending conferences about productivity gains, reorganizing teams around productivity gains, publishing internal memos about productivity gains, and asking employees to use a chatbot to summarize the productivity-gain memo they were too busy to read.
The AI paradox should not be mistaken for failure. In many companies, AI has already achieved its most important function: allowing executives to say “AI” during earnings calls in a tone suggesting they have personally wrestled the future into a spreadsheet. Whether the tool has improved output is secondary to whether it has enabled a slide titled “Operational Transformation Roadmap” to exist.
The public is right to be alarmed. Absurdity is no longer confined to the margins, where it once lived comfortably among zoning boards, brand consultants, and airport sandwiches. It has entered the official record, the corporate merger pipeline, the palette, the denial statement, and the productivity forecast.
The solution is not to eliminate absurdity. That would be impossible and, given current staffing levels, unrealistic. The solution is to restore standards. Official errors should be absurd only in ways that are legible. Corporate combinations should be silly only after clearing antitrust review. Colors should not be declared unless they can survive contact with a couch. Billionaires should deny only the claims that have been properly calendared. And AI should be judged not by whether it changes the economy, but by whether it can finally explain why the document says your middle name is “NULL.”
