The only way we can reliably feel (if not wholly know) that something is human made is if we see it coming out of a human body, ideally one that we know physically exists. Smith calls his company Semafor’s conference and talk-hosting business “live journalism.”

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

“Immediacy rules art as well as economics, politics as much as intimacy,” Kornbluh wrote. Immediacy has an “insistence that mediation recede,” in other words, that things are as direct as possible. When I think about which forms of cultural are most valuable in this particular moment, they are often about unmediated experience, live-ness. It’s the... See more

Brands are turning back to IRL experiences. ABM thinks we’re in the early stages of a return to real-world moments. Not mass events, but the kinds of physical experiences that actually stick with people. That could be a smart creator dinner, a useful activation at a festival, or just something that connects to a moment in people’s lives.

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

I don’t think it’s just about TV. The media industry’s flight to audio, video, livestream, conference is about a larger movement toward real-time, highly textured, human person-driven interaction

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.

We’re in the wider era of Live Culture, in which we desperately want to know, to be reassured, that what’s in front of us is real

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