> As PowerPoint became more and more pervasive, a meeting could only exist so long as a slide deck existed.

Good insight here. I've written about this dominance of visual record culture as a "Pics or it didn't happen" attitude that takes over business. It's corrosive and it tracks the decline of actual productive work as the overemphasis on process and perfomative work displaces it.

We've slipped into a culture of form over function, appearance over substance, narrative over reality... PowerPoint exemplifies this idolatry of representation - it's the thing we focus on while ignoring the talk by the person actually present. It's a way of intermediating and so avoiding engagement.

I also think that the current fetish for "capturing" everything as video to create "hybrid" working environment is inviting burnout. Besides, it is a weak form of information (non searchable, bulky, often of dubious quality). Digital information flows are not all information flows. Documents of record are not what actually happened. The map is not the territory.