Mark Braddock: This Time It’s Different, Again

By Mark Braddock, Co-Founder & Creative Strategy Director, Block Branding.

Generation X. You may remember us — though statistically, you probably don’t. We’re the blurry one. The transitional generation. The buffer. Sandwiched between the Boomers who broke the system and the Millennials who branded their trauma. We didn’t get a cultural moment. Or a crisis with a curated playlist. We got dial-up, fax machines, and a front-row seat to the total rewiring of work.

And now, we’re getting it again.

Because AI’s here. Or more precisely: AE — Artificial Enhancement. Not a tool, not a trend, but a foundational shift. The kind that rewrites job descriptions, rearranges value chains, and turns entire sectors into historical footnotes.

Ah, not to get too Yogi Berra about it, but déjà vu is making another comeback.

Because make no mistake — this is big. As big as the digitisation of work. As big as the web. As big as the moment we stopped thinking and started pressing Send. But if you think it’s unprecedented, you haven’t been paying attention. Or you weren’t there the first time everything changed.

We were.

We remember when “going digital” meant watching half the office quietly become irrelevant. When the typesetter vanished, the guy making your Cromalin proofs stopped calling with colour corrections, and the paste-up artist finally put down their scalpel. When some guy fixed the tracking on the boardroom VCR for the third time that week, right before their job was quietly absorbed by a help desk portal.

And then came the new wave: the front-end developer who used words like responsive without irony; the SEO specialist who promised visibility through some sort of Google-related black metadata magic; the social media manager who created the schedule that posted your brand’s soul — one snippet at a time — into the void; and the content strategist who claimed their PowerPoints as prophecy. More recently, we’ve added the meme consultant and the prompt engineer, which is either peak evolution or a cry for help, depending on your perspective.

We adjusted. Repeatedly. Without ceremony, LinkedIn posts, or TED Talks. Because we had to. We didn’t call it resilience. We just did it.

We entered the workforce before email. Before Google. Before burnout. When the cloud was still something in the sky. We wrote things by hand, then on IBM golf-ball typewriters, then in WordPerfect, then Word, then Google Docs — with five colleagues editing the same sentence until life itself lost meaning. We trained our managers, parents and children to use Outlook. We explained what a hyperlink was. And we lived through every single bullshit Canva-ed slide that claimed to predict the future of work.

So forgive us if we raise an eyebrow (or append an eye-roll emoji, at the very least) at today’s AI evangelists — the breathless futurists (futurists — what a quaint retro concept) with their Medium posts, LinkedIn proclamations and certainty. Anyone in 1995 claiming to know what jobs would exist in 2025 was either a liar or an idiot. The same applies now. No one knows what’s coming. But some of us remember what it felt like when everything started coming at once.

This time will be different. That’s the point. AE doesn’t sit in a department — it seeps through everything. It doesn’t just speed things up. It changes the shape of the work itself. The systems, the decisions, the roles, the value.

And that’s why Gen X matters. Not because we’re brilliant. But because we remember the before. We remember when work had mass. When you could feel a deadline in your back. We remember what was lost the last time everything changed — and what was worth saving.

We’re not here to lead the charge. We’re here to spot the rerun. To recognise when your big idea is just Windows 95 in a new hoodie. When your disruption already had a go in beta and crashed after three updates. If we raise an eyebrow, it’s not contempt — it’s recognition. We’ve seen this season before. Different cast. Same plot.

Just don’t expect applause. We’re not clapping. We’re not handing out participation certificates.

Because this time?
Yes — it’s different.
Again.