The book 1.0

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the 'content' of any medium is always another medium.” In the case of neural media, the content is all of network media. This is quite literally the case with large language models and image generators trained on massive corpuses of text and imagery scraped from the web.

Changing attitudes toward social media created another breakthrough for the 1,000 True Fans model. In 2008, few people seemed interested in venturing beyond the social-media ecosystem, because this was where much of the excitement about the Internet was concentrated. As I learned from personal experience, to have expressed skepticism about these... See more

Creator platforms algorithmically incentivize us to create at the pace Wall Street and the market demand. This is why we’re pushed to create more and more. Not because our audiences are asking for it. Not because the world needs more of what we have to say. Because we as artists, the platforms, and their investors desire, to varying degrees,... See more

Is it clear to you when a trend forecast is coming from amateurs versus the professionals?

ES: I mean, no. I think an amateur and a professional have kind of an equal chance at hitting the nail on the head. True flashes of cultural insight happen where you’re lucky enough to just put the right words against the cultural phenomenon at the right... See more

The co-opting of “community” into a sales strategy is insidious, not only because it reduces likeminded groups of people to consumer demographics, but because, in an era when we’re all encouraged to cultivate our own “personal brands,” it also reduces each of us to a salesperson , seeking out likeminded people in order to sell them things , whether... See more

Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we’re still using roads and living in towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago.

Digital networks have become the dominant cultural logic, profoundly transforming not only culture but also the economy, public sphere, and even people’s subjectivity. In contrast to digital culture, network culture makes information less the outcome of discrete processing units and more of the result of the networked relations between them, of... See more

If we want to choose how we are interpellated by neural media, that is, if we want to shape ourselves and our subjectivity through the apparatuses of neural media, now is the time to work. Doing so will require that we embrace the unique characteristics of neural media through literacy and experimentation, with a critical sense and a clear... See more

Simply put, we don’t know what is important until many years later.