The next stop for Subway Takes

Now, Mr. Burback goes months between posts. The videos tend to be either sprawling, deeply researched video essays — about the state of late-night television, ghost kitchens or the Apple Vision Pro — or strange travelogues, taking him on road trips to every Rainforest Cafe or Margaritaville in the country.

His viewers have responded, with his ghost ... See more

“Genre, medium, and format are secondary concerns and, in some instances, they seem to disappear entirely.” One piece of intellectual property inspires a feeding frenzy of podcast, documentary, and miniseries offshoots. Single episodes of streaming-service TV can run as long as a movie. Visual artists’ paintings appear on social media alongside the... See more

One is this idea that Quibi thought it was designing something for commuters, but went ahead with its launch plans even as everyone stopped commuting. That deserves a sympathetic sigh, but that’s reality now. The only path forward is to iterate toward what will work, which is more of a content and distribution problem than a messaging problem.

Something else happens in a world of superabundance, and an attention economy. Because you can’t find what you want, you start to dig yourself into very specific niches, and join sub-groups. Everyone atomizes into millions of groups connected by very specific interests. In more benign ways, it can be great – you find your fellow travelers, and I ca... See more

Substack also seems to understand something that few other technology platforms have understood: that the atomic unit of media isn’t an article, nor a media brand, but instead is the creator themselves.