social media in 2026 and beyond

Perhaps being pointedly low-key on Instagram speaks to a different kind of hustle: the effort to escape the allure of the screen and build clout in physical spaces. Keeping your follower count down is its own kind of discipline.

Much of today’s commentary now looks less like real cultural analysis and more like white collar fan fiction and conspiracy theories about what’s happening “backstage.”

The newsroom is shorthand, not dogma. It describes a structural shift, not a single blueprint. Some brands are moving toward writers’ room models, borrowing from television and entertainment rather than journalism. These teams build serialized arcs, recurring formats, and narrative continuity across weeks or months. Instead of reacting to every... See more

Protein This connects to something Protein has been thinking about recently. A report on chaos versus control uncovers how brands are splitting between hyper-controlled, tightly managed identities and others that openly embrace chaos. It made me think about what you’ve said before about discordianism – chaos not as a breakdown of reality, but as a... See more

1. Original thinking begins at the origin.

As we imagine the future, it’s worth returning to the past—honoring the masters and elders, drawing from ancient philosophy and Indigenous wisdom, practicing age-old rituals, and seeing artificial intelligence as ancestral intelligence.

5. Optimization diminishes our humanity.

Our myopic obsession with efficiency and the optimize-everything (including our self) mindset forces us into consistent, productive, linear beings when in fact we are human because we are not. We need businesses to design for non-linear, non-binary, inconsistent, incoherent selves.