Every doomed software cycle invents new language to disguise the same old act of moving words around and calling it leverage.
The latest scam is the prompt economy, a phrase that suggests civilization now runs on artisanal incantations typed into a chat box by people who still cannot find the billing tab.
If this is an economy, it is one in which every trader is frantically swapping synonyms for “circle back” while a venture fund publishes a chart about destiny.
The industry keeps pretending these exchanges represent a new class of intellectual property. In practice, most of the output is a heroic struggle to convert ordinary indecision into five differently toned versions of the same status update.
Consultancies have already responded the only way they know how: by creating maturity models. Somewhere right now, a partner is explaining that firms must progress from prompt-aware to prompt-native before they can fully unlock operational prose.
I refuse. If an entire market depends on giving middle managers a faster way to write “thanks for flagging,” then the polite term is not economy. It is stationery with venture backing.