content as capital

What we’re seeing isn’t just a media trend. It’s a shift in the architecture of power. Attention → Speculation → Allocation. This is the new supply chain.

Traditional economic theory assumes information flows serve resource allocation. But increasingly, resource allocation serves attention flows. We've moved from an economy where attention supports... See more

The distinction Wark makes of the vectoralist class vs. the capitalist is its power not to actually own anything but to simply extract enormous profit from various flows of value.

The problem, in other words, isn't intermediation – it's power . The thing that distinguishes a useful intermediary from an enshittified bully is power . Intermediaries gain power when our governments stop enforcing competition law. This lets intermediaries buy each other up and corner markets. Once they've formed cozy cartels, they can capture... See more

I think the defining economic reality of the modern platform media world is that all the platforms realized that an infinite supply of teenage creators are cheaper to deal with than media companies or groups of media individuals or powerful creators. And I’m curious for your read on the number of YouTubers that you see retiring or taking a step... See more

Much of the pleasure of “generating content” — whether through a machine or by some other means, about oneself or about other things or about other things as a way to signify oneself — is in imagining that someone else might also want it. The content is not just for you to consume but to anchor shared experience, or at least allow us to imagine its... See more

The thing that makes “influencer” such an attractive option in those surveys is precisely this idea that it names the outcome rather than the actual work. We don’t actually have a good word for what it means to do that work. Partly this is because there are big differences between platforms (and within platforms, for that matter), and there is no... See more