It took me almost two weeks to notice. On June 27, my 100th Rebel Yell was published on 10 Minutes Hotel.
One hundred!
The funny thing is, I didn’t even realize it. I simply did what I’ve been doing every week for the past two years: sat down, poured myself a Guinness, wrote another column, and moved on. Only later did I realize I’d hit number one hundred.
So I went back and reread them all.
And that’s when things got interesting.
Ideas evolve. Some grow stronger. Some age badly. Others make me wonder, “How the hell did I not see something so obvious?”
Out of curiosity, I analyzed all one hundred columns. Once I stripped away articles, conjunctions, and all the linguistic background noise, what remained was a surprisingly consistent vocabulary.
I expected “AI” to be at the top of the list. It would have made sense. And it would have confirmed what many readers probably assume: that this column is about technology.
Turns out, it isn’t.
The words that appear most often are “world,” “human,” “work,” and “time.”
That surprised me, because it forced me to reread a year’s worth of columns through an entirely different lens.
The most interesting discovery was that artificial intelligence is almost never the real subject of these pieces. It’s the narrative device. The MacGuffin. It’s what sets the story in motion, but the story is always about something else.
Whenever I’ve written about Claude, AI agents, robots, or OpenAI, I’ve inevitably ended up writing about autonomy, hierarchies, professional identity, the dignity of work, and what it means to work in hospitality in a world that, to borrow from Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, is increasingly “post” without ever really having been anything in the first place.
And I find it wonderfully ironic that it took an algorithm to point this out to me.
Looking back at these hundred Rebel Yells, I realized that almost all of them revolve around a single question:
“What does it mean to be human in a world that isn’t?”
And that question gave me another idea.
I’d like to translate these Rebel Yells and turn them into a book. Not simply a collection of articles, but a single narrative. A thread connecting all these ideas, showing not only how they have evolved over time, but how I have changed along with them.
It’s an idea my friend Mark Fancourt and I have been discussing for quite some time.
Because, looking back, perhaps I haven’t written one hundred different Rebel Yells.
Perhaps I’ve been writing the same story all along.
Just one week at a time.
Here’s to the next hundred,
SIMONE PUORTO
