There is a species that thrives in every conference hall between Zurich and Lisbon. It has no natural predators except a budget. You will know it by its plumage — an unstructured blazer over a technical t‑shirt — and by its call, which carries clean across a hotel lobby: «we need to be where the puck is going».

Meet the Digital Darwinist. It believes, sincerely, that it is the fittest. It is in fact merely the fastest to repeat.

Habitat and diet

The Digital Darwinist feeds exclusively on slide decks it has not read and podcasts it has listened to at 1.8×. It requires no nutrition from outcomes. Its metabolism runs on the phrase «this changes everything», which it can digest roughly every eighteen months.

Observed migration patterns

2017 — Blockchain. «We’re putting the supply chain on the blockchain.» Nobody in the supply chain was asked. A spreadsheet, it turned out, was already immutable enough for people who did not want to change it.

2021 — NFTs. A loyalty programme, except you can lose it in a hack and your customers first have to learn what a seed phrase is. Six‑figure budget, four‑figure audience, one‑figure reason.

2022 — The metaverse. An empty showroom in a world with nobody in it, which is at least an honest metaphor.

2024 — Agents. «It books its own meetings.» So does an intern, and the intern will tell you when the meeting is pointless.

Each time the same sequence: a genuinely interesting technology, a two‑week window of honest curiosity, then the arrival of the Darwinists, who graze the topic down to the stalk and move on — leaving behind a pilot project, a press release, and a colleague who now maintains it for four years.

Mating calls

«It’s still early.» Said in year seven.
«You just don’t get it.» The universal response to any question about cost.
«We’re not building a product, we’re building an ecosystem.» There is no product.
«Fail fast.» Said exclusively by people who have never had to explain the failure to whoever paid for it.

Natural predators

Three, and they are efficient. A budget holder who asks what this replaces. A user who wanted something else entirely. And a procurement officer — the closest thing our industry has to an apex predator, and a great deal more respectable than its reputation suggests.

Now the uncomfortable part

I like new technology. I have built things with most of the items on that list, and I have worn the unstructured blazer more than once. The problem was never the technology. It was that there was no direction of travel — only travel.

Louis Sullivan wrote the famous line in 1896, and it is worth quoting properly, because the short version has been beaten flat: «…that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.» He was describing something alive. Modernism turned it into a rule about shoeboxes. Our industry skipped it altogether and went with form follows funding.

Steve Jobs said the other half of it to the New York Times in 2003: «Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.» Everybody quotes this while shipping its opposite. What made him both unbearable and right was not taste. It was subtraction — most of the work was saying no, and saying no is the part nobody puts on a conference badge.

The actual point

Energy is not a strategy. A technology is stored potential and nothing more: enormous, indifferent, and perfectly happy to be wasted. What makes it useful is direction, and direction is a human decision that somebody has to be willing to defend in a room full of people who would rather talk about the tool.

So, plainly: just because something is technically possible does not mean it is worth doing. That is not conservatism, and it is not a brake. It is the entire job. «Can we?» was never the interesting question — we can, we almost always can, and the demo will look fantastic on a Thursday. The question is what this replaces, for whom, and what happens on the day everyone stops paying attention to it.

The Digital Darwinists will be fine, incidentally. They will be in the room when the next thing arrives, wearing the same blazer, explaining that it’s still early. Survival of the loudest is a real mechanism. It just has nothing whatsoever to do with fitness.

Sources: Louis H. Sullivan, The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered, Lippincott’s Magazine (1896) · Steve Jobs in Rob Walker, The Guts of a New Machine, The New York Times Magazine (2003). No Darwinists were harmed; several were quoted.