For many media brands, the creator economy presents a conundrum — what is the role of brand when audiences increasingly value the intimacy of a direct connection to a human creator?

Something sinister happened over the past algorithmically driven decade: brands took a sharp turn toward efficiency and benefits mindshare, often focusing on a laundry list of functional and emotional whoop-de-doos.

It’s this paint-inside-the-lines mentality that stokes irrelevancy and meaninglessness. And the whole point of a brand is to create an... See more

We are moving from an era of centralized, bureaucratic value creation firms to an era of decentralized, permissionless value creation networks. As organizational models change, so too will the intangible cultural artifacts created by these new institutional forms. Brands, narratives, memes—we now choose our own headless gods.