The Human Medium is the Human Message

• The future of internet media is less, but better.  Time and attention are precious, finite resources. How we spend them determines the quality of our lives. We believe media practitioners have a responsibility to treat time and attention as sacred, refusing to churn out commoditized filler content or algorithmic bait, and instead only ask for

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This isn’t to say the digital won’t remain, or even that it won’t remain the primary medium. Rather, I think there are going to be more efforts to make the digital experience more human, to shift our relationships with it. Some say AI threatens this, I say it only reinforces it: nobody, really, likes AI, and our general distaste for it is going to ... See more

I see two divergent media futures emerging—each based on networks that serve very different groups.

In the first future, our networks serve the technologists who build them, the advertisers that pay for them, and the governments that control them. These networks compete for users in a war for attention by making systems that spit out superficially ... See more

Human curation might reemerge...

The internet is overflowing with content, making the search for specific topics (especially niche or less popular ones) a daunting task.

This challenge isn't new—it dates back decades. Initially, we turned to trusted human curators for guidance, with platforms like fark.com serving as go-to sources for discovering wo... See more

We’ve seen professional media platforms do this on a smaller scale (e.g. Netflix making originals, etc). But to do this at the scale of an open creation platform, such as TikTok or Instagram, platforms won’t be able to rely on humans. They’ll instead need to rely on machines to create AI-generated media, or as my friend Matt Hartman calls it, synth... See more

Technology is getting more advanced than ever, but people’s lives, paradoxically, don’t get any freer. Therefore, I believe the important role of human Curators is here to stay. If companies can integrate the Curator’s effect inside their app (like the example of Medium or Notion above), it’s likely they will enlarge their user base faster.

The merging of personalisation and generation represents the ultimate optimisation for media production. Everybody satisfied, all of the time.

But such a simplistic optimisation overlooks the broader implications – those that differentiate entertainment from culture. They inspire a cascade of questions, such as how is human culture changed if we los

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Curators filter signal from noise in an increasingly noisy world. As the barriers to being a creator decrease, the internet gets even noisier and the need for credible curators increases. Algorithms will continue to play a role in aggregation, indexing, and personalization. But the best curation requires a human touch. You’re more likely to have an... See more