a larger movement toward real-time, highly textured, human person-driven interaction

This urge might be semi-subconscious, a drift toward the real-time (or the appearance of such) and a slow dismissal of the pre-made. Livestreamed video is hard to fake, and a live interview is, on some baseline level, authentic. The spoken language of a three-hour podcast episode is messy, meandering, and often internally inconsistent, but it has... See more

These things are the opposite of scalable and replicable. Live culture is finite. It exists in the moment and then it’s gone, except perhaps for the artifacts of digital content it leaves behind, spun off into TikTok, relied on to advertise what already happened and convey the aura of realness, building hype for next time. (Substack held a reading... See more