Now, the hum is what usually gives it away before the flicker does. I’m balanced on a ladder that has definitely seen better days-maybe 13 years ago, judging by the rust on the bolts-and my hands are deep inside the housing of a vintage ‘Open’ sign. It’s 103 degrees in the shade, and I can smell the ozone. People think neon is about the light, but it’s actually about the seal. If the vacuum isn’t perfect, the gas gets lazy. It stops dancing. It just sits there, looking like a muddy bruise against the glass. I’m Riley M., and I spend 53 hours a week fixing things that people tried to make ‘brighter’ by pumping in too much voltage. They think more power means more visibility. They’re always wrong. It just burns the electrodes.

The Cognitive Labor of Laziness

We’ve reached this weird cultural inflection point where leaders think that dumping the contents of their cranium into a public forum is the same thing as building trust. It isn’t. Trust isn’t built by showing me the raw data; it’s built by showing me you know what the data means. When I’m copy-pasted into 203 emails a day, the sender isn’t being open. They’re being lazy. They’re offloading the cognitive labor of relevance onto me. They’re saying, ‘Here, you filter this.’ And because I have a finite amount of focus-roughly 43 minutes of deep work before my brain starts looking for a distraction-I end up muting everything. The radical transparency becomes a radical silence.

I told him that if you make it too bright, nobody can read the letters. It just becomes a glowing white blob. He didn’t listen. Three weeks later, he called me back because the neighbors were complaining about the glare and his customers couldn’t tell if the sign said ‘DRUGS’ or ‘DOGS.’ We had to dim it down 73 percent just to make it legible. Context is the dimmer switch of the information age. Without it, we’re all just squinting at the sun.

There is a profound difference between being informed and being inundated. True transparency is a curated act. It requires the courage to say, ‘This matters, and that doesn’t.’ Most people are terrified of making that call. They’re scared they’ll leave out the one detail that someone might use to blame them later. So they include everything. They Cc the world. They invite 23 people to a meeting that only needs 3. It’s defensive communication disguised as openness. It’s a shield, not a window.

The Value of the Filter

Take the electronics market, for instance. If you want a new phone, you don’t want a spreadsheet of every single component manufactured in Shenzhen this year. You want to know which one won’t die when you’re halfway through a hike or which one takes a decent photo of your cat in low light. You need someone to have already done the 103 hours of research so you don’t have to. You need a filter. That’s why I appreciate the way Bomba.md handles their selection. They don’t just dump 3000 identical-looking black rectangles in front of you and say ‘good luck.’ They curate. They provide the clarity that allows you to make a choice without needing a PhD in transistor density. They understand that the value isn’t in the quantity of the noise, but in the quality of the signal.

I’ve started a new habit. When someone adds me to a thread I shouldn’t be in, I don’t just mute it anymore. I leave. It makes people uncomfortable. They think I’m being rude or that I’m ‘opting out’ of the culture. But I’m actually protecting the culture. If I’m in a channel, I want my presence to mean something. If I’m everywhere, I’m nowhere. There’s a 73 percent chance that the person who added me didn’t even think about why they did it. They just clicked ‘Add All.’ It’s a mindless reflex, like checking your phone at a red light.

The Trade-Off: Updates vs. Results

I remember a specific night in the shop. I was working on a sign for a dive bar-big, complicated thing with a moving martini glass. I had about 23 different connections to solder, and the client kept calling me every 13 minutes to ask for ‘updates.’ He wanted to know the temperature of the solder. He wanted to know which brand of flux I was using. I finally had to tell him, ‘Look, you can have the updates, or you can have the sign. You can’t have both.’ He got quiet for a second, then hung up. Three hours later, the martini glass was splashing in beautiful, rhythmic pink neon. He didn’t need the transparency. He needed the result.

When we talk about transparency in a company, we should be talking about visibility of purpose, not visibility of process. I don’t need to see the sausage being made if I trust the butcher. And if I don’t trust the butcher, seeing the sausage being made is just going to make me a vegetarian. Micromanagement is the shadow side of transparency. It’s what happens when you give people too many data points and not enough direction. They start looking at the 233 small things because they don’t have a clear view of the one big thing.

The Final Cut

People ask me if I ever get tired of the flickering. I tell them the flickering only happens when you’re trying to hold onto something that’s already gone. When the vacuum is lost, the light struggles. It’s trying to exist in a space that’s too crowded with air. Sometimes, the best thing you can do for a sign-or a team, or a brain-is to pump out all the extra stuff. Clear out the atmosphere. Make room for the glow.