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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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Finally an area where I can comment with experience: crappy marketing.

So you found Malwarebytes latest article to be worthless. I'm sure this contrasts with your long familiarity with their classic blog, and you were previously an avid reader of thrillers like ChromeLoader targets Chrome Browser users with malicious ISO files, no?

First thing: each of the companies mentioned are an order of magnitude different in size, so it's pretty difficult to compare how much each one might spend. Malwarebytes is listed at 500-1000, Cloudflare at 1000-5000, and Lenovo at 10000+. But if you wanted to put out a meaningful blog every workday then you would only need a team of 3-4 permanent writers. Malwarebytes (hereafter MB) manages a bit more than that but with AI now I doubt it's much more than that. Such a team might have a single Head of Content or another Marketing Manager that would approve, and a company like Cloudflare might have a technical review step (but probably not MB), but I'd be shocked if they had anything more than that to get something published.

It's fundamentally different from a journalist outfit like Ars. Their writing is the product, so putting out AI really does drive down value. For every other business, who cares? When was the last time you ever went to an e commerce or other business blog willingly? Probably because {SEO}, you googled and it was the first link, and you swiftly exited. The only difference between now and 5 years ago is that now it is literally zero effort, whereas before it did take a modicum of time. It's not something that will show up in productivity statistics though, since it has never really been clear that this kind of stuff actually has any purpose. Companies, from Lenovo downwards, go through the motions on this. Some people must be reading, because even the smallest company blog can still eke out a few hundred readers, but I've never met anyone that does pay attention.

I don't think there's any feedback either. MB will continue pushing this stuff out until the end. AGI or something else will appear quite suddenly - to them - and wipe this kind of stuff off the map.