How to kill a thought in 10 slides |
“PowerPoint is first about itself, and then presenter convenience. Last are audience and content, which is, after all, why the meeting is being held.”
Edward Tufte
Almost every month, a flock of tech optimists announces that PowerPoint has finally died. According to them, Artificial Intelligence (AI) now performs research in seconds, assembles compelling prose, and produces professional presentations before you take your second sip of coffee. It sounds impressive- until you realize that AI uses PowerPoint as its coffin. The software is alive and well, simply embalmed in machine-generated charm.
What we actually get is the same old content: a familiar bullet-point mentality, a fresh supply of fragmented thought, and a forest of chartjunk, only now multiplied by algorithms. If this is the funeral of PowerPoint, then the deceased is giving the eulogy. AI merely accelerates a long-standing intellectual illness: PowerPoint poisoning, now in high-resolution.
Take Sir Ken Robinson’s legendary TED talk, “Do schools kill creativity?”, the most-watched talk in TED’s history. He used no slides at all. He simply walked to the center of the stage (limping because of childhood poliomyelitis), remained anchored there, spoke with clarity, wit and warmth, and commanded the room with ideas rather than animations.
Sir Ken Robninson’s TED talk “Do schools kill creativity?”
Many of TED’s biggest successes follow the same principle. Jill Bolte Taylor uses only a handful of images to deepen her message. Amy Cuddy leans mostly on her presence and narrative, again showing only photographs or videos to amplify the message. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie dispenses with slides entirely, relying instead on the power of storytelling alone. These speakers draw tens of millions of viewers not because of slick animations or gradient backgrounds, but because they engage their audiences as human beings. They prioritize clarity and connection over decorative visual noise, something the average slide deck seems designed to prevent.
PowerPoint did not introduce the habit of condensing ideas into rectangular frames. Before the modern slide empire emerged, organizations relied on transparencies, acetates, and 35-mm carousels. Even then, critics complained that information was being flattened into static rectangles, turning conversations into lifeless monologues. Engineers and military officers were among the first to warn that real thinking was evaporating under the glare of projectors. Pedagogy journals recorded objections that slideware encouraged rote lecturing and reduced student engagement, and as a result turned teaching into “projected notes.”
When PowerPoint 1.0 arrived in 1987, this early discomfort hardened into alarm. Despite these early warnings, organizations embraced the software without hesitation and PowerPoint became the default language of organizational communication. Suddenly doing work meant making slides. Meetings began revolving around the deck, and a subtle belief took hold: if something wasn’t on a slide, perhaps it wasn’t quite real or ready to discuss. Pedagogy deteriorated further as instructors embraced projection technology as a substitute for teaching, reducing entire courses to lists masquerading as lectures.
PowerPoint conquered the workplace through a combination of bundling,........