Sometime around 1730, an unknown master — an architect, painter or decorator — was confronted with something that would seem utterly mundane to us today: an empty wall.
Not entirely empty. The space was framed by pilasters, windows and cornices. But for the Rococo aesthetic, this structural presence was not enough. Ornaments began to appear on the plaster, followed by more ornaments around them, while the spaces in between filled with leaves, garlands, plaster cherubs and lavish gilding. The architecture gradually disappeared beneath the weight of its own decoration.
In art history, this impulse is known as horror vacui — the fear of empty space. It was not invented by the Rococo: it can be found in early medieval illuminated manuscripts, Hindu temple sculpture and the ornamental traditions of Islamic art. But Rococo represents perhaps its most flamboyant expression, in which it becomes almost impossible to distinguish structure from decoration.
In contemporary communications, we have developed our own version of the same syndrome. Only instead of gilding walls and ceilings, we gild texts. We add another sentence, another bullet point, another hashtag, emoji, key benefit and mandatory CTA. We create presentations without a single empty slide because it looks like a missed opportunity. We issue press releases about routine events with headlines that make it sound as if electricity has just been discovered.
This is not a lack of professionalism, but a cultural neurosis in which we have collectively become unable to tolerate silence.
Noise as a Benchmark
In communications, the fear of empty space rarely acknowledges its true nature. It is easier to disguise it behind the language of efficiency: We need to be active. We need to have a presence. We need to maintain engagement. We need to post regularly.
On paper, this sounds reasonable. But over time, frequency has displaced meaning, presence has become an end in itself, and the content production line keeps churning because the absence of content triggers anxiety.
Take LinkedIn, for example. There are days when you can read dozens of variations on the same ideas: the world is changing fast, leadership is no longer what it used to be, AI is transforming everything, authenticity matters, people are our greatest asset. All of it is true. But after the fifth version of the same thought, it stops being enlightening and becomes a cliché.
This is where artificial intelligence enters the picture. AI did not create horror vacui, because the fear of empty space is far older than any technology. What AI has done is remove the physical friction that once stood in the way of indulging it.
Previously, to publish 1,000 words, we had to endure the discomfort of the blank page: sketch out the idea, find the right phrases, decide whether the concept was worth pursuing in the first place. Today, we can generate 1,000 words in seconds, followed by another 1,000 in versions that are “more provocative,” “more human” or contain “more storytelling.” The market is oversaturated. Words have been devalued.
And this leads to a paradox: the amount of information in the system keeps increasing, but entropy increases along with it. The more content we produce, the more noise we add to the signal. And the noisier the environment becomes, the more expensive our attention becomes — the last truly scarce resource of the digital age.
A machine can churn out words on autopilot, but it cannot give us a reason to say them. The difference is enormous, because communication has never been a question of volume, but of selection — which words actually carry weight in a particular context. And this is where the real temptation of generative AI lies: not that it will start thinking for us, but that it offers us the perfect excuse never to stop talking.
間 (Ma)
At the opposite end of this aesthetic universe lies a Japanese concept with no exact translation: Ma (間).
The word refers to a pause, an interval, a gap. But Ma is not empty space waiting to be filled. It is the architecture between objects that allows them to exist as distinct forms. The pause between two notes. The distance between two buildings. The silence between a question and an answer. The white space around a drawing. In this aesthetic, emptiness is not an absence, but a fully meaningful element of the composition.
Western art relies on it, too. In Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, the artist leaves a black background — removing the interior, the context and the social status in order to create space for the viewer’s imagination. In literature, Kafka feels no need to offer a comforting answer, Beckett turns pauses into structural elements, and Pessoa writes in the spaces between what is said and what remains unsaid. The same applies to cinema — from the first thirty dialogue-free minutes of WALL-E, through silence as existential pressure in A Quiet Place, to the contemplative rhythm of Perfect Days. Miles Davis put it with surgical precision: Don’t play what’s there. Play what’s not there.
When an author consciously stops filling every gap, they turn the audience into a co-author. This is Roland Barthes’s “writing degree zero” — a strategy of absence that transforms the reader from a passive recipient of raw data into an active maker of meaning.
Editorial Discipline
In practice, we talk about minimalism, white space and concise communication. But beneath the aesthetics lies something else entirely: trust.
Leaving empty space in a design requires trust in the designer. Leaving empty space in a text requires trust in the reader. Leaving empty space in a communication strategy requires trust in your own position. Because it means having the courage to say “No”: I’m not going to post today. I’m not going to react to this media opportunity. I’m not going to issue a second press release because the first one received no coverage. I’m not going to explain something the audience is perfectly capable of understanding on its own.
This is not silence. It is selectivity.
We are entering an era in which the ability to generate content is finally losing its status as a competitive advantage and becoming basic technical infrastructure. As AI makes production instantaneous and cheap, real value is moving further up the chain — towards strategy, judgment, context and editing. Towards understanding clearly which of all the things that could be done should not be done.
This is why editorial discipline needs a new protocol. It might look something like this:
1. The One-Third Operation: Write the text. Read it and cut exactly one third. Do not replace words or search for more attractive synonyms — simply remove what is unnecessary. If the core message remains intact, you have cut away nothing but the Rococo gilding.
2. The Three-Sentence Test: Reduce the entire concept to three sentences. Not the three most beautiful ones, but the three without which the structure collapses.
3. The Editorial Filter: Before publishing, ask yourself the uncomfortable question: If this doesn’t go out today, what will our audience actually lose?
4. Legitimizing “No”: Accept that the answer “Nothing” is not a failure of strategy, but evidence that the strategy is working in the brand’s favor.
Coda: The Luxury of Silence
Horror vacui is an intriguing concept not because Rococo was unsuccessful art. Quite the opposite: it was extraordinarily skillful and technically demanding. What is more interesting is the impulse behind it — our tendency to add when we are not entirely sure that what we already have is enough. One more ornament. One more word. One more slide. One more explanation. One more post.
AI has simply made this impulse easier than ever.
That is precisely why one of the most important skills in the age of generative models is the ability to move in the opposite direction. Not how to generate volume, but how to filter it. Not how to fill every pause, but how to control its duration. Not to say everything, but to say enough — and stop.
In a world where informational noise multiplies within seconds, editorial courage is beginning to look like the ultimate form of luxury. The luxury of leaving the white space white. Of not explaining the metaphor. Of allowing one sentence to carry its full weight instead of following it with five more, just to be safe.
In The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa writes: “Concision is the luxury of thought.” In the age of AI, this sounds almost like a manifesto. Because when words become practically infinite, the most valuable word may be the one we had the wisdom not to say.
Ma is not absence. It is the space in which meaning can finally breathe.
