👀Unpopular Opinion: Text Is Dead. We Now Trade In FACES

The internet’s most persistent lie is that quality writing will win.

That was true when information was scarce and the barrier to publishing was high. Today, information is infinite, and the barrier to writing is virtually nonexistent. AI commodified the written word faster than Bitcoin commodified money.

If your content can be generated in a 30-minute prompt, it is not a competitive asset. Writing has become a low-utility commodity. We are moving toward a trust-based economy, and the new currency is sight and sound.

Here’s why writing is not enough anymore, and why your next move needs a face.

1. The Trust Deficit: We Demand the Human Tether

Communication, at its core, is not about transferring information. it is about transferring responsibility. Every message is a small social contract between sender and receiver: I will say this, and you will remember who said it. Text once carried that burden well, when context was scarce and authorship was sacred. But in the new attention economy, where one anonymous paragraph blends into another, words without voice become unclaimed artifacts.

Accountability now demands presence. Poor communication has become the single largest invisible tax on modern work, costing companies an estimated $1.2 trillion annually in lost productivity, misalignment, and error correction. According to AxiosHQ and Project.co’s 2025 data, 86% of workplace failures stem from miscommunication, and teams that communicate effectively are 25% more productive. Yet most of those failures share the same root cause: words were exchanged, but no one was truly accountable for them.​

When you write something, it exists in the void. When you say it, visibly, audibly, undeniably, it binds you to the outcome. That’s why text has started to fail as the default medium of credibility. We are no longer reading for clarity; we are reading for ownership. We want to know who said it, not just what was said.

Because when communication loses its face, it also loses its cost, and therefore, its meaning.

The Shift in Accountability

Accountability used to flow through central institutions, the press release, the memo, and the internal report. Every official word was filtered through structure and signature.

Now, accountability is raw, immediate, and personal. It moved from the institutional white paper to the single tweet, the Loom message, the Telegram voice note. A founder’s unpolished, slightly frantic video carries more perceived truth than a formally approved blog post. Why? Because we want to see the conviction. We trust the trembling voice more than the polished grammar.

A face creates a tether that text cannot.

The Faceless Ceiling

Faceless writing can earn you early authority, but it hits a hard ceiling, the one labeled AI Commodification. Readers are developing what psychology might soon call a “faceless content bias.” After reading 10 flawless but hollow AI-generated posts, the brain starts tagging perfection as generic.

This is why the faceless ceiling is so dangerous. The only way to break through it is to reintroduce unreplicable human messiness. The moment your expression carries tone, breath, and imperfect urgency, your words stop being content; they become conviction.

2. Authenticity Trumps Polish: The Loom Advantage

We’re watching a cultural inversion in professional communication. The “cleaner” the content, the less we trust it.

Why does a rough, three-minute Loom outperform a $5,000 animated explainer video? Because of what each medium subconsciously communicates.

Animation = PR. It implies budget, approval cycles, and polish. Beautiful, but detached. It signals expenditure, not urgency.

Loom = Reality. A Loom is a live artifact, cursor movement, natural filler words, and raw excitement. It doesn’t sell; it signals presence.

Numbers prove the shift:

• Viewers retain 95% of a message when watching a video versus 10% when reading text.​

• Social media videos generate 1,200% more shares than text and images combined.​

• 91% of marketers now use video as a core marketing tool.​

• Short videos under one minute get 50% engagement, triple the rate of long-form content.​

We no longer crave the perfect product; we crave evidence of genuine process. A founder recording a spontaneous Loom builds more trust per second than a full corporate campaign. We are no longer trusting documents; we are trusting emotion.

3. The Final Frontier: Can AI Avatars Steal the Soul?

If faces are the answer, AI avatars seem like the next logical evolution, hyperreal digital clones that can deliver perfectly scripted videos in any language, any hour.

But they aren’t the solution; they are the test.

AI avatars solve the efficiency problem but fail the vulnerability test. They scale presence but kill risk. They can be perfect, but perfection is what triggers that faint “Uncanny Valley” discomfort, the subtle internal red flag whispering, something’s off.

Even as AI floods video creation, users subconsciously rank authenticity above fidelity. The future’s most expensive signal won’t be production quality; it will be believability.

4. The Human Test: From Script to Face

So what do you do in practice?

Treat your writing as the script. Treat your face as the brand. Scale your words with AI, but deliver conviction through your own voice. You don’t need to outwrite the machine; you need to out-feel it.

If you want to test this theory, post this exact essay as a Loom. No edits. Just one take. Your tone, your breath, your eyes.

That version will outperform this text by an order of magnitude, because people trust faces, not paragraphs.