Zoe Scaman wrote something genuinely sharp last week. “The Six Loops” → a taxonomy of the stuck conversations we keep having about AI. And I just want to build on it.
Her loops are: Fear. Hype. Efficiency. Exceptionalism. Tactical. Minimising. Six scripts, endlessly performed, never going anywhere. She does an excellent job of highlighting the six people you’ll meet, and the frustrations you’ll encounter when you do.
Read it. She’s right. She’s very often right. And if I may be so bold, I’d like to expand on it a bit. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a bit.
I think the loops are mostly defense mechanisms.
Fear is fight-or-flight. Hype is manic denial.
Efficiency is displacement activity → “I’m being productive!” as a way of not asking productive about what.
Exceptionalism is narcissistic defense (one I take personal umbrage to).
Tactical obsession is intellectualisation.
Minimising is, well, minimising.
They’re not six different conversations about AI. They’re six different ways of coping with the same underlying anxiety: we don’t know what’s happening, and that’s freaking me out right now.
Which explains why logic doesn’t break the loops. You can’t argue someone out of a coping strategy. That’s not how humans work. (Ironic, given this is an industry that claims to understand human behaviour.)
But I don’t think that the loops aren’t just psychologically sticky. They’re structurally sticky. Every loop has a constituency inside organisations that benefits from it staying exactly where it is.
Fear justifies transformation budgets.
Hype justifies investment rounds.
Efficiency justifies headcount reduction.
Exceptionalism justifies protecting existing team structures.
Tactical content justifies training spend.
Minimising justifies doing nothing → which, for plenty of senior leaders, is the preferred outcome anyway.
Follow the money and you’ll find the loop.
The discourse doesn’t change because changing it would redistribute power, money, and accountability. It’s not a failure of imagination. It’s incentive alignment. The loops persist because they’re useful to someone → just not to the people stuck in them.
So what breaks them?
Not better arguments. Not a seventh framework. Not even Zoe’s “Terra Nova” → though I’m genuinely curious to see where she takes it.
What breaks a defense mechanism is creating conditions where people feel safe enough to stop defending. Where the anxiety gets processed rather than performed. Where you can sit with “I don’t know what this means for me” long enough to actually think about it, instead of reaching for whichever script makes the discomfort go away faster.
That’s not a deck. That’s a room. A small one. With someone who knows how to hold the tension without resolving it prematurely.
Which, funnily enough, is what good creative work has always required.
One last thought. There might be a seventh loop → the meta-loop. The one where you step above the discourse, identify everyone else’s patterns, and position yourself as the one mapping new territory. It has its own vocabulary (“reconfiguration”), its own conference circuit, its own breathlessness. You might see this a lot in education, or trend reports, or slightly drunk people after work.
I say this with genuine affection, because I’m probably performing it right now.
The trick is noticing when you’ve started. And stop.
So, goodbye.
//A 🐣