This isn’t just a guide for brand standards. This is a warning shot. These weren’t created to protect the brand; they exist to protect the idea of the brand from dying in a puddle of ChatGPT paste and recycled TED Talk sludge.
This company runs on honesty, velocity, originality, and the kind of creativity that makes our legal review department break out in hives. You will not phone it in. You will not write like a LinkedIn dopamine addict. You will not make us sound like a fintech onboarding manual.
Your keyboard is a weapon. Clean it.
Bullshit is the language of people who want to speak without saying anything. If there’s one single heuristic that should detonate in your head before you open your mouth or push a single pixel, it’s this:
No lukewarm metaphors. No recycled jargon. No interchangeable cybersecurity stock one-liners rearranged a hundred different ways. Safety is not a virtue if it kills meaning. Politeness is not a virtue if it buries truth.
Bullshit is when your paragraph gets a hernia from lifting too many buzzwords. It’s when safety becomes a straitjacket and personality gets smothered by a pillow of vague platitudes. Bullshit hides behind buzzwords, corporate pleasantries, and third-person detachment. It says nothing. It risks nothing.
You can be humorous. You can be direct. You can be controversial. You can even be obnoxious. But you cannot be boring.
Our tone is a reflection of who we are: sharp, sarcastic, and slightly suspicious of authority. We borrow from the hacker ethos: we value and respect skill, competence, ingenuity, and knowledge over formal education and status, with a high standard for what we produce. An anarchic cocktail of brains over pedigree, function over form, and a pathological allergy to mediocrity.
We don’t pander. We don’t preach. Depending on the payload and the target, our tone may oscillate between:
You can be humorous. You can be direct. You can be controversial. You can even be obnoxious. But you cannot be boring.
When XIVX pivoted into the CISOaaS space and the market research began, we weren't ready for what we were inundated with. Every site, one indistinguishable snooze-fest after another, polluted with the same “businessman in suit, holding a coffee mug, pointing at a screen” Shutterstock photos, mixed with web copy written by a chatbot raised on Zoloft and branded templates.
Corporate cybersecurity writing is 90% cowardice and 10% spellcheck. Every vCISO site reads like it was written by an intern trying to meet a word count before lunch.
“Secure your enterprise with confidence.”
“Future-proof your digital resilience.”
Ad-lib Mad Libs for the easily influenced and smooth-brained.
We write like the only thing keeping us alive is how hard we hit the next sentence, because the internet is already a landfill of corporate oatmeal and sleepy blog posts.
“Innovate Your Zero Trust Framework into an Empowered Fortress of Ironclad Defenses.”
Someone should check on the author. If their nose is bleeding, they might be having an aneurysm.
We write copy that lives in people’s heads and leaves a mark. Every sentence bleeds. Every word fights to stay. We build content like a recovery protocol: intentional, custom, human. Not a funnel. Not a flow. A resonant frequency.
If it doesn’t make our skin tingle, it doesn’t go live.
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