Work Slop

In 1636, Dutch traders invented something elegant. Instead of buying tulip bulbs, you could buy windhandel.

Wind trade.

A formal, notarized contract promising future delivery of a tulip that might not yet exist. The contracts looked real. Official seals, signatures, witness marks.

They traded hands faster than bulbs could grow.

By February 1637, the market had filled with paper representing tulips that would never arrive. On February 24, the florists' guild converted every futures contract into an option. Buyers could walk away for a small fee.

The paper that looked like wealth became what it always was.

Paper.

Four centuries later, the paper changed format.

BetterUp and Stanford surveyed 1,150 workers and found 40% had received AI-generated content in the past month that looked professional but said nothing. The cost: $186 per employee per month in time spent processing documents that perform competence without containing it.

Bad work is easy to catch.

The problem is that professionally formatted emptiness is now free to produce. When a 30-slide deck costs five minutes instead of five weeks, the friction that once filtered quality disappears. What remains looks identical to real analysis.

Quality systems were built to catch failure. Not emptiness that passes every check.

Windhandel in a different century. Official-looking promises that collapse the moment someone asks what's underneath.

The expensive part of analysis was never the analysis. It was the scarcity that made you think before producing it.

Go deeper: Dashboard Blindness