In Silicon Valley, “new media” has become shorthand for the post-pandemic revival of a certain kind of tech media. This new media has grown up alongside a distribution strategy: bypass gatekeepers, go direct, and own your audience. Anyone can build an audience, and those who build one can (and have) become powerful intermediaries in their own right. So disintermediation can’t be the whole story.

As platforms mature, power laws steepen. Everyone can publish, but most of it has no impact. Attention is scarce. High-value attention is scarcer.—It turns out a small audience of the right people beats a massive audience of the wrong ones. In Silicon Valley, the most valuable audience is inside.

1. NEW MEDIA IS INSIDER MEDIA.

2. Insider Media is media for insiders, by insiders. Both creator and audience belong to the same in-group. The public gets to be in the room but is never the audience being catered to. The topic is less important than the audience whose opinion matters. It’s a closed-room broadcast where principals talk to principals while fans, aspirants, and adjacents watch, learn, and report out.

3. Insider Media is the opposite of journalistic media—outsider media—made for outsiders by outsiders. Outsiders will call Insider Media an echo chamber or bubble, but the proximity is very much the product. This tension is inevitable in any world where status compounds and access is currency.

   

   

4. INSIDER AUDIENCES ARE MORE VALUABLE THAN THEIR SIZE. A show with 50,000 highly valued viewers can matter more than one with five million random ones. Friends have mentioned the similarity to Kevin Kelly’s “1000 True Fans”—but this isn’t about direct patronage; in that way, this wave blends old and new worlds. ROI is less important than the audience roster and your mutuals. Audience Market Cap is the metric that matters.

5. The average person who starts a podcast wants to take a shot at building an audience of mostly strangers, making some money, and maybe becoming famous. The tech insider who starts a podcast for tech insiders wants something distinct: a respectable way to meet people they respect, deeper participation in their social and intellectual circles, and leverage for future opportunities in their field (and if fame, money, and status happen to arrive along the way and push them to go all-in, great).

6. Every media property has a combination of status, entertainment, and utility (inspired by Eugene Wei.) These axes are scalable—more of each is mostly better. Prestige is different. It depends on restraint and rewards selection.

7. PRESTIGE IS PERCEIVED TASTE LEGITIMACY. Prestige is earned through taste discipline and operates on a curve: past the taste optimum, more is bad. It becomes tryhard, tacky, or tasteslop. Prestige emerges when a group believes someone consistently demonstrates superior judgment.

8. PRESTIGE EARNS STATUS, BUT IS NOT REDUCIBLE TO STATUS. Status comes from the position and influence of cast, collaborators, consumers, and tastemakers. Prestige can be earned in more ways and in a more meritocratic sense than status, whether on the basis of “taste” as aesthetic or intellectual rigor (the likes of SemiAnalysis and The Dwarkesh Podcast come up often for the latter).

9. Stripe Press is a beloved expression of taste discipline. Each book is produced as a timeless artifact and arrives slowly and quietly. Thrive Capital is the model of restraint: almost no media output and all prestige calibrated. The All-In podcast is the inverse: the cast is high status, but the personas and production aren’t strictly taste-disciplined.

10. IN THE INSIDER MEDIA GAME, PRESTIGE IS THE COVETED LANE.

11. Founders Fund just launched a show where tech-famous founders and investors play Mafia, with parallels to Celebrity Traitors. It’s the most Prestige Insider Media entry since TBPN (whose deserved arc has forced people to take tech shows seriously). Tech Twitter has certified Mafia as good. So far, it is.

12. Still, I have notes. The more the players have real-world reputation, the more careful they are in victory and defeat. The show works if it still creates opportunities for character revelation and weakens if the premise is too focal or the cast becomes too self-conscious. It needs more parlor talk (intro bar scene), lounge clips, confessionals, and parasocial continuity while ideally the cast rotates. Else there’s a good chance we get bored and just want the cast’s thoughts on the current things.

13. INSIDER PRESTIGE PUNCHES ABOVE ITS WEIGHT. TBPN's Hollywood embrace is this unfolding. A show translating tech for everyone would have been too generic; leaning into the inside is the prestige track to crossing over. Make the thing the insiders can’t miss, and there’s a good chance outsiders follow. A related maxim I hold on to: “The most personal is the most creative”—Martin Scorsese via Bong Joon Ho.

    

    Subscribe now

14. INSIDER MEDIA ALWAYS HAS A STORY AND A META-STORY. The content is one story. It comes with parasocial intimacy with the characters. The people making it are another story. The meta-game they’re playing and game-state visibility into the room is the second draw. Insider Media is so fun and addictive because of these dual stories—a dynamic we’ve seen with TBPN and with the Substack Feed Me among the NYC business-media-creative class (and in a case study I know too well: Clubhouse’s early rise).

15. Much of the energy around the Mafia launch is about the meta-story. With high-powered real-world figures as the cast, the fun becomes personality profiling, sentiment analysis, and corporate recon. It’s off-script access to people you might invest in, work for, or compete against. Discussing VC branding, power rankings, and the whole meta-game that Founders Fund and Mike Solana are playing is at least half the insider fun.

16. THE POST BECAME THE PODCAST, AND THE PODCAST WILL CEDE GROUND TO THE SHOW. “Building in public” was once the insider play. But there’s a tradeoff between perma-dripping raw updates and saving it all for big moments. And with all the noise, you now need slick narrative and polish on top of the raw footage (and as I’ll repeat, the pendulum always swings).

17. The demand for character revelation impacts the format. The podcast and interview talk show has a built-in problem: the guest knows they’re being interviewed. They tell flattering stories they’ve told a hundred times. Hosts lob softballs to protect access. Insider’s subjects become their relationships. No shock Insider Media skews sycophantic. Overcompensation manifests via performative profundity: lowered voice, engineered pause, mmms and mmmhmms of poignancy, “say more.” People may not call it out but it’s felt.

18. Premise-driven shows are up. Aspirationally, they give you character revelation through the freeing nature of constraints. Then there are the insider profiles in the style of legacy prestige magazines. Colossus is the new standard-bearer. SF Alexandria, New Ontologies, Early Days are upstarts. These skew sycophantic too but with license to narrate more character complexity.

19. NOVELTY CAN’T BE COPIED BECAUSE IT EMERGES FROM FIT. There are calls across Tech Twitter to clone popular formats for tech (Hot Ones, Shark Tank, MTV Cribs, etc). My strong opinion: Format-recasts fall flat, and rarely win. TBPN gets called ESPN for tech, but that’s just aesthetic observation. Mafia mimics Traitors, but it’s more about the fit with tech.

20. I see so many technically competent Insider Media projects with expensive sets, high production value, and popular formats that are still culturally dead. There is no substitute for being top 0.01% great at something highly visible. It’s best if your edge is a quality of the people, not the production. I say casting is everything because the secret sauce is always the characters.

21. The easiest thing to copy is “format.” Subway Takes is a good example of format superiority, but the novelty comes from the fit between Kareem, New York, the guests, the quirks, and the show’s constraints. Status and celebrity can draw audiences at first. But a true hit requires the creator, cast, format, premise, and moment to reinforce each other. Novelty emerges from fit (and fun).

22. CAPITAL IS INCREASINGLY TABLE STAKES, BUT CULTURAL POSITION ISN’T. Every venture capital firm wants to punch above its weight as talent, capital, and attention concentrate into fewer hands. Tech has never led culture in the broad sense, but it’s paying more attention to it’s culture and cultural power. Every conversation I’ve had with VCs of late has found its way to narrative and storytelling. We’re in the era of venture capital as war between media teams, each with their own ideology and aesthetic, and house style of newly minted creative roles. (Credit where due: A16Z reclaimed “new media” and made the coinage stick, despite the memetic flack. I quite like Alex Danco’s articulation of the role firms play in providing legitimacy.)

23. Insider Media helps institutions that are smaller than their rivals become culturally larger than them. Prestige Insider Media is powerful because it converts judgment into influence—and judgment is independent of scale.

24. FEW INSTITUTIONS HAVE TO PLAY THE INSIDER AND OUTSIDER GAME SIMULTANEOUSLY AND AT SCALE AS VISIBLY AS AI LABS DO. AI labs are competing for belief as much as customers. AI itself is an inherently hard protagonist to root for. It’s abstract, threatening, fast-moving, and ultimately inhuman. The frontier AI labs’ products and people need to be inside-the-room coveted and outside-the-room trusted. The jobs-narrative whiplash—AI will take all the jobs, then it won’t—is the insider/outsider narrative tension showing its seams as AI diffuses along the adoption curve. It is a fascinating challenge, and fascinating to watch. There is nowhere else such high leverage narrative experimentation is happening so fast right now.

25. And hence—the TBPN/OpenAI deal made so much sense because TBPN has become the rare Insider Media property with perfectly cast human hosts and intense cultural gravity. True rarity is having such standing in both worlds. Expect to see more poaching of unicorns with insider-outsider leverage. (I wrote on the Riley Walz/Pete Steinberger/Farzas of the moment in my last.)

    

26. SILICON VALLEY’S MOST VALUABLE AUDIENCE IS SILICON VALLEY (AND WHOEVER IT ADMIRES). No world is more tailor-made for Insider Media—the unusually high concentration of money and power and the foundational belief that anyone could be the next to be right and early.

27. TECHNOLOGY USED TO BE A NICHE, BUT INCREASINGLY, TECHNOLOGY IS CULTURE. “Tech” is now the intersection of tech and business and media and entertainment and politicso and government and international affairs and science and religion and. The Ambitious from every industry are eyeing tech.—The world is getting nerdier too. More and more outsiders curious about Silicon Valley or Formula 1 or the art of making sushi don’t want it watered down. As power niches become more culturally relevant, more want in, and everyone else wants to watch the craftsmen inside, guard down, playing for real stakes. There’s room for translators and explainers, but earnestly performing for yourself and each other is the real show.

28. Every Silicon Valley blog, podcast, video, and show now competes in the Insider Media game. Trying to win New Media is trying to win Insider Media. Prestige Insider Media is the highest-status game within the game.

29. The games will continue until there are no stories left to tell and nothing new left to make, which is to say, they’ll continue forever.—But to break the fourth wall for a minute: Players beware. I’m not saying the attention game is the only game that should be played. I am saying these are consequential worlds of previously unimaginable scale, and we’re in a time of convergence and consolidation in which the pursuit of valuable attention looks specific. And the pendulum always swings! The arbitrage equation usually decides when.—But there is always an art to narrative and manifesting the reality-distortion field needed to create new worlds. There is a wide spectrum from cultural to commercial, fun to fearful, earnest to egoic—where you choose to play is highly personal. What I personally care about is what is rooted in human experience and is appreciably novel, intrinsically great, and fun.

30. SILICON VALLEY HAS FINALLY INVENTED REALITY TELEVISION FOR ITSELF. We have made the game we play watchable, and the people making the show are part of the cast—and there’s no game we’d rather watch than the one we play. In the end, it’s all fun and games, and TV.

Thanks for taking the time to read, and perennial thank you to my patrons. If you enjoyed this essay, please share with a friend or community here or on X. DMs welcome.

Share

Leave a comment

I published a version of this essay on Twitter, the native home of TBPN. (If you’re not familiar with TBPN, this NYT profile should get you up to speed.)

Watching the show get made.

It’s become a cliché to call for a sequel to HBO’s Silicon Valley, but the stories we want to watch are now indistinguishable from how company building and content creation is playing out on YouTube or X or whatever new platform’s being built. It’s the new television and TBPN is a new kind of show.

I’ve tuned into TBPN more to spectate than to voraciously consume. To see what new segments they were testing, which big-deal guests they’d courted, what life-sized tchotchkes they’d added to the set — and what new tricks John and Jordi had up their suit sleeves. Digesting the news itself felt secondary.

Casting is everything.

Was the content that good, or was the biggest draw watching the thing get built? The same question lingered around Clubhouse’s generational run.1

There’s a kind of universal rule I’ve seen a few times now: when your audience is mostly composed of high-value insiders, they’re almost certainly watching the meta-game as much as they’re using the product. This is why “going viral on X” is valuable but not indicative of PMF with ‘normal’ people. Even still, it’s a strong signal of the producer’s taste, tact, distribution instincts, and cultural fluency.2 You just need to know which PMF matters for you.

My analogy has been that guesting on TBPN is less like going on a tech podcast and more like being featured in Rolling Stone — if Rolling Stone published a new issue every day. The ‘ESPN for tech’ framing captures the live energy and the play-by-play, but the show is also doing prestige TV and magazine profile work all in one. I’ve always said smart people want to be cool and cool people want to be smart, and TBPN found a way to deliver on that desire.

A consistently popular narrative on X is that TBPN succeeded because of their “clips” strategy, despite few people watching the live shows 3 hrs/day. Clips are a great distribution mechanic, and TBPN is doing it well enough, but that's not their claim to fame (clipping is big outside tech media) nor their X-factor. TBPN’s prowess is less algo-hacking and more arts & culture.

A big part of TBPN’s success is that people love the characters.

Jordi is the nerdy jock and John is the jocky nerd.

They have a meme-able height gap yet neither is insecure (they’re both still tall). They were already credible talents in startupland, and now they’ve proven to be star communicators and likable in a way we rarely see in tech. They’re that likable because of their personality, passion, positivity, and because of their golden-retriever-good-looks (the first part their own admission, the second the audience’s). Tyler the intern, equally likable, is the equivalent of the late night talk show host sidekick. One intangible on top of it all is they’re good at improv.

They’re having fun and letting us play along. (Fun includes TBPN trading cards, coveted merch, gong hits, guest polaroids, absurd soundboard, studio horse, et al.)

The details matter, because, as I’ve been repeating lately — casting is everything. Tech has access to some of the most impressive people on earth, and somehow keeps featuring the same few faces that aren’t great at storytelling or the format.

A great cast still needs a great script.

The most compelling Silicon Valley stories used to be about generational software companies that took a decade to make it and convinced you they’d last for decades, as the acquirers and not the acquired. The most impressive stories now are all about momentum and spectacle, about the ride from founding to exit (ideally in under two years). Any guilt or shame around ephemerality is gone. Joining one of the big AI ships, especially as a standout talent or team that was courted, is the smart, sexy, high status Silicon Valley play right now.

The next storyline.

Even before the OpenAI acquisition, I’d been wondering how TBPN would make 2026 as big as 2025. Staying indie and grinding for more mainstream relevance didn’t strike me as ideal. And greater ambitions are expensive to deliver. Something I’ve repeatedly observed is that the relentless energy of the first two years of any enterprise is very hard to sustain in later years. One way to re-up that energy is to take a crazy leap of some kind. The most entertaining outcome is the most likely outcome because it’s often the most energizing one.3

Rebrand, partner, pivot, buy, sell. Good or bad reactions matter less than maintaining energy and with that, relevance, for yourself and the audience.

All else equal, I’m a bit less excited to tune into TBPN now than I was a few weeks ago, and I’d bet a big chunk of the tech insider audience feels the same.

This is an example of how the sophistication of TBPN’s audience cuts both ways. Insider audiences who made the show valuable are also the ones most sensitive to ownership changes and meta-story cycles — an exit reads like an ending.

You can’t air a season finale on Friday and immediately premiere the next season on Monday. You need to reset the stakes, rebuild tension, and give the audience a reason to return. You need new slow-burn plotlines, new bits, and even fresh characters, to keep the audience hooked. We’re in what really should be the off-season, the hiatus — they’re just posting through it because so much good has come from their relentless forward momentum these past 18 months.

Still, people keep saying no one will want to come on the show anymore, and I don’t buy that. If you would have taken a call from OpenAI — which the vast majority of people would — you’d still be willing to go on TBPN, maybe even more so now. Competitors and their allies will be wary, but the thing to pay attention to is less who’s a little less likely to be a guest and more why and with what sentiment in tow. The longevity of the show depends on sentiment, and how the show adapts in a no-longer-underdog environment. More on this later.

Subscribe now

Buying up cultural power.

Everyone has their own theory on why OpenAI acquired TBPN. It’s a marketing and comms play or ‘they bought distribution’ — all too literal. It’s a soft power play. Or it’s agitprop. Of all the takes on X, this tweet felt most efficiently true:

They wanted to acquire @johncoogan, @jordihays, @DylanAbruscato and the team. These guys are some of the smartest, most experienced marketers on the internet right now. They understand how to win the vibe war, while making everyone love them. Luxury positioning with down-to-earth approachability.

Pete Steinberger, Riley Walz, TBPN.

This string of acqui-hires is brilliant casting for OpenAI’s special teams. This is a pattern of talent that understands how to move culture and operate inside the feed economy getting poached by the machine-makers — because competition between AI labs is increasingly cultural, not just technical.5

Impressive feats of almost any kind now double as a job application to the biggest labs. The term “unicorn” has been worn out as far as companies go, but these are “culture unicorn” hires. All the better if what you’re doing is even tangentially related to AI. The comp package is just whatever it takes.

ChatGPT has a billion weekly active users, so OAI doesn’t need ‘distribution’ in the literal sense, but aura and know-how you can layer on top of that is worth infinite dollars. Anthropic has been gaining on OpenAI with tech insiders, market analysts, and TikTok generations alike. Paying “low hundreds of millions” for TBPN is a cheap move in the culture war against a rising competitor. Winning this war is just as consequential for hiring as it is for sales, funding, and policy.6

What does it mean that the most consequential AI companies are now hiring for charisma and communication alongside competence that captures attention?7

Most tech thought-leaders have shouted that they don’t get it and it makes them question OpenAI’s judgment. Legacy-new-media is writing that “the vibes are off at OpenAI” and Ronan Farrow just dropped a lukewarm hitpiece on Sam Altman.

But most people want John and Jordi to win, and that’s a superpower. Is there a transitive property of good vibes and good will? If everyone wants two guys to win and you hire those two guys, maybe they’ll want you to win too — or at least lose less?8

The critics and the risks.

It’s hard to deny TBPN has taken an aura hit — it’s no longer a scrappy upstart, and no longer default-neutral. OpenAI buying the brand dilutes it, which is why TBPN is smartly signaling it’s independence as much as possible. ‘Everything will stay the same’ is the politically correct party-line for this kind of acquisition, but something must change, and it will.

As far as all the media folks’ opinions on the acquisition — my intuition says most of them, both the clowners and the celebrators, are quietly relieved. Those criticizing TBPN for selling are secretly pining for an offer in hand too.

The top spot for indie tech media startup of the year feels open again. Anyone who’s been ostensibly playing for second place has renewed hope. Many will try to replicate the success of TBPN, and many will struggle.

There’s already a question about whether Twitter/X is shadow banning TBPN now that it’s owned by OpenAI (Sama and Elon are less than allies right now). Is this happening or is the audience taking a post-sale break from the show, is the show itself on soft-hiatus, or all of the above?

The wildcard to consider: TBPN has grown on X and Elon is known to throttle competition. If distribution is squeezed, YouTube is the natural next home — TBPN has ~100K subs there. Substack is an option but video podcasts haven’t popped there yet and the audience skews less tech. Or bolder — leverage their own platform, or build one? TBPN x OAI. Elon throttling Substack links on Twitter incentivized Substack to launch a competitive product with Notes … For TBPN’s meta-show, this would be a new underdog plot. For OAI, owning the culture unicorn could be an uno reverse card.9

(Fwiw, It’s been denied, and even if it were happening, I think the public discourse would become loud enough that it’d have to be walked back some.)

“Half-media, half-machine.”

Every organization will now operate as half-media, half-machine. Every media company will have a head of machines and every machine company will have a head of media. Call it the media-machine singularity of business — the hybrid imperative.

The duality of our era is Media and Machines. As the technical side of tech splits into automation or genius, the media side only gets more competitive. As I keep saying, tech is becoming the center of culture and so ambitious people from adjacent fields are flocking to it — both young people inside tech (shadow artists in trad roles) and outside tech (film and internet creatives) alike.10

Every big tech company, and especially the big AI labs are trying to figure out the best mix of investment and effort into media alongside machines. A great machine strategy with a poor media strategy will lose to someone with a better media strategy, or be beholden to them.

VC firms are scaling their “new media” efforts, and I keep waiting to be impressed. There are glorified minor changes to set design and post-production and more launches. More stuff is being made but nothing has truly imprinted on my mind. There’s a foundational tension in making media to market founders, companies, and narratives you need to sell— it’s rarely conducive to making art. It’s hard for me not to conclude something poetic:

The best stories don’t depend on their owners to tell them; the best stories find their own tellers.

Thanks for taking the time to read, and thank you as always to my generous patrons. If you enjoyed this essay, consider sharing with a friend or community, or on X. DMs welcome. // P.S. If you wanted this essay to be longer, give me a prompt.

Share

Subscribe now

Recently popular essays:

7

The underlying 2x2 is competence and charisma, with public proof. The archetype is the quirkily agentic generalist star who builds and speaks. The higher-value the person’s collaborators and audience, the stronger the signal — winning over the hard to win. The meme “OpenAI is nothing without its people” is makes so much sense for the next phase.

AUTONOMY. CREATIVE OWNERSHIP. A SEAT AT THE TABLE. The right to say no, not like that, or not right now. Flexible schedules. Remote work. A title that keeps getting better. The expectation that your opinion shapes direction. The expectation that your resources scale with seniority.

These are among what I call luxury workers’ rights. They sit on top of human rights, civil rights, and workers’ rights. They’re the terms of a job meant to make work feel more meaningful and make you feel more valued. We typically associate them with white collar work and view them as moral principles, but they’ve always been a form of compensation for the scarcity of cognitive labor.

White collar work as we’ve known it is cognitive labor with a personhood premium—autonomy over the work itself and value attached to the person doing it. Cheap capital and high margins made it easy for companies who needed human intelligence to pay these premiums. Software’s surplus has …

Read more

What do you do? A few years ago, as far as the tech world is concerned, the cool answer sounded like ‘I’m starting something new’ or ‘We just closed a $1M seed round’ or ‘I’m all in on crypto.’ The unifying brag: I take risks. I don’t need a safety net. Now the cool answer sounds a lot more like ‘I’m at OpenAI’ or ‘I’m building something new at Stripe’ or ‘We just raised a $20M seed round.’

Prestige used to be ‘I might win big,’ because risk itself was glamorous. Now prestige is ‘I can’t lose, and I still might win big.’ If the brag used to be the bet, now it’s about having the best safety net you can get. Stability is the new status.

Read more

Read more

Last week I read an article in The Atlantic lamenting that film students can’t sit through feature-length films anymore. The culprit, according to the article and fervent online discourse that followed: the attention-span crisis.

The phones have fried their brains, they say. Case closed.

Read more

Taking a break from social media is the new going natural, going to therapy, going on vacation. You secretly hope the distance will teach you something. You also just want to prove that you can. I noted down some feelings + observations from sabbatical. (I should clarify: I didn’t post - no tweets or notes - but I didn’t delete the apps. Being a casual lurker gave me more perspective tha…

Read more

There is a particular kind of nightmare: a movie where the protagonist spells out the entire backstory within the first two minutes. Or worse, a side character inserted for no reason except to transmit the plot, line by line, straight into your brain.

There’s a kind of magic when you watch something - or read something - that feels almost nonsensical and yet by the time it’s over, you know exactly what it means and you’ve been unwittingly forced to unlock new ways of seeing and feeling the world.

That is what the brilliant freaks among us offer.

Their minds generate near-nonsensical brilliance like it's on tap. The freak's gift is folding meaning into shapes so dense that unpacking them requires work. And it is fun. To engage a freak's mind is to submit to a series of enjoyable puzzles. Their brilliance is in encoding meaning just hard enough to decipher.

Compression is a hallmark of creative intelligence.

It is…

Read more

One of the worst things about the internet becoming ‘real life’ is that it’s a place where you perform conversations instead of just having them.

Not long ago I found myself explaining this to my mom. We were sitting in the car after just arriving at the grocery store in suburban Texas; she waited patiently while I texted a friend who was launching a big project that day.

I congratulated him in iMessage—heartfelt wishes, inside jokes, the whole thing. But I felt the impulse to reopen the celebration in public. I opened Twitter, found his post, hit ‘quote tweet,’ and sat there thinking about how best to perform the praise—to get the tone right, to keep it about him but still reflect well on me.

I explained all of this to my mom. That the tweet would be redundant but just as important, if not more. That supporting friends doesn’t just mean supporting them in private now.

Private praise isn’t enough anymore—it has to be followed by pe…

Read more

Technology has always been about leverage — extending what individuals can do alone and amplifying what groups can do together. And for the past two decades, the big technology story was collective scaling: coordination via networks.

The most valuable startups of the era built platforms that connected millions of people: Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb, Uber, Slack. Marketplaces went from zero to scale and startup to IPO. Personal software made people incrementally better, but to go further, you needed more people: assistants, meetings, and platforms to coordinate with even more people.

The equation was simple: more people meant more value. Power accrued to those who organized networks of people, aggregated their assets, and coordinated behavior at scale.

But AI has inverted that equation. Now, the individual can rival the collective. The single-player ceiling has shattered. Scaling yourself is now the most accessible, fastest-growing source of leverage. This is the great leverage inversion.

The individual is eating the collective.

If the last era was about platforms organizing people at scale, this one is about tools scaling the individual. Personal leverage can now rival social leverage.

Each of us becomes a Platform of One: a central node surrounded by an ecosystem of enhancements and extensions that multiply what we can learn, build, and do — across work, play, and self-optimization. The self is the new platform.

This also means decisions you make about who you surround yourself with are all the more consequential. We already see it in teams staying leaner for longer yet accomplishing more. It’s the AI-amplification of the Silicon Valley Small Business.

Now, popular AI-native tools like ChatGPT, Cursor, and Midjourney expand individual capacity exponentially (and they’ll keep adding features that serve the solo over the masses). This extends to hardware like Meta's Ray-Ban glasses for hands-free AI assistance. They’re all what I see as supertools—in many respects a new breed of prosumer (I’ll write more on this). These products still benefit from network effects, but not the coordination type that dominated the last era.

Instead, they thrive on data network effects (collective usage creates better models that benefit everyone) and personalization effects (the tool becomes more valuable to you specifically by learning your patterns and workflows). These AI-enabled amplification effects feel unbounded. (They can still accrue brand and social effects without leading with user-to-user coordination).

The rise of software creators, spurred on by the unrelenting wave of vibe-coding platforms, adds another dimension: now anyone can build simple software for themselves. The likes of Lovable and Bolt and more show how solo supertools now beget more toolmakers, self-reinforcing the cycle of capability expansion.

Consumer AI is personal AI.

Consumer AI is foremost personal AI, and private or semi-private by nature.

AI supertools will manifest as software and hardware that serve us as individuals first. We’ll have every kind of personalized media and apps we can imagine. We’ll have 24/7 personalized agents and and robots in our homes. We’ll have AI-native monitors, diagnostics, treatments — new supertools for longevity.

The surest way to change how a group behaves is to fundamentally change each person’s capabilities. Walk into any office or library or even coffee shops now and you see it: people deep in one-on-one conversations with AI — asking Claude for opinions, searching down ChatGPT rabbitholes, writing, designing, coding. The latter is just passive seep into culture. The active comes when people share results, threads, entire conversations.

We act in private, then amplify in public. And there’s a poetic paradox: the AI supertools we use alone and in private are the same ones reshaping culture, both private and public. In the early AI era, solo is slowly eating social.1

Even social needs are being supplemented with AI relationships. Solo content and companion experiences via the likes of Character.ai and the Friend pendant too offer connection without coordination. Everyone’s awaiting the AI social network, but the reality is right now the most novelty and the most leverage comes from tools built for one. Social will come, but not as we know it. Most of the attempts so far have been derivative or gimmicky. ‘AI social’ will have to be unique enough to beat the pull of existing social networks, the retreat to private spaces, and the ever-expanding allure of personal work, personal play, and personal optimization now augmented by these new supertools.

Borrowed networks, borrowed interfaces.

Single-player tools are private by nature, which makes product-led growth slow. And in past eras, tech stabilized relatively fast so teams could shift focus. But AI breaks the rhythm. Every few weeks we get model upgrades that force a rebuild.

It’s a brutal tradeoff: chase the models or build the moat. It’s incredibly hard to do both. Building a startup has always been described as “flying the plane while building it.” In the AI era, the laws of aerodynamics keep changing mid-flight too.

One solution: borrow existing infrastructure when you can’t do it all from scratch.

We're building new supertools but relying on old networks to spread them. Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Substack: these networks act like a Distribution Commons — like cultural utilities carrying new products, behaviors, and media into the mainstream. Launch videos, screenshots, demos, reviews spread faster than the product alone. Flooding existing networks with these is how solo tools still scale virally. Without a new status game or other lock-in, creators and marketers and brands always go to where the audience already is.

We're embedding new tools in familiar interfaces — email, texting, calendars, browsers. Extensions and integrations inherit years of user habits, making adoption effortless. We see this power in tools like Poke, a viral AI assistant that lives in iMessage. The next wave will AI-enhance the apps we already use daily — e-mail, photos, notes, weather, health — the full breadth of our personal utility stacks. (And as the LLM chat interface goes mainstream, we’ll build on that too.)

Of course both strategies create platform dependencies. Owners can bleed you out, cut you off, clone you, or if they’re really impressed — buy you. But embed well enough, long enough and users get attached to how you improve their lives. And that loyalty can survive platform lockouts, migrations, or even full rebuilds.

Long live the solo supertool era.

Individual capability ceilings keep rising with every AI foundational model release. So the 'maxed out individual' state seems perpetually deferred. And scaling solo leverage is too vast and valuable a market to move past quickly.

This is the solo supertool era: scale the individual first, then build the networks.

This transformation will be economic and cultural as much as technological. As individuals gain leverage, headcount becomes drag and coordination becomes cost. Consulting, middle management, and organization tools face compression. Industries built on individual capability enhancement will expand — across productivity, creativity, education, finance, fitness, health, and everyday tasks.

Importantly, I'm not writing off the emergence of new interfaces, multiplayer use cases, and novel coordination networks — at all. They’ll emerge as they always do. But I'm willing to bet that this individual enhancement phase will be longer, deeper, and more transformative than past cycles, reshaping tech and culture. And I expect supertools that win this era to become the center of these networks.

(Note: What looks unbounded is really just a new curve whose diminishing point we haven’t reached yet. Every new era of leverage has its own limits; velocity, efficiency, optimization taken to extremes start to show their negative sides. So the frontier now is figure out the new point of diminishing returns for the individual at scale, and how far solo supertools can take us before we see it.)

When one becomes many.

At the logical extreme of the great leverage inversion, the boundary between individual and collective erodes. The self becomes a distributed system: one consciousness orchestrating many capabilities. The individual rivals the collective by becoming the collective. The self is the platform.

Perhaps the distinction becomes centralized agency versus distributed agency.

The individual can now scale internally before needing to scale externally. Why hire a team when you can deploy AI versions of yourself? Why build organizational systems when your personal AI toolkit executes at enterprise scale?

In this world, teams become collaborations of many platforms of one — orchestrations of distributed selves tackling complexity beyond what any single enhanced individual can (or simply when humans choose the spiritual rewards of shared space and creation). The collective may also become our constraint — and constraints can positively ground us.

In essence, we’re now asked to justify the value of the many vs. the value of an unbounded one. The individual is now the base unit of scale — not the org, not the network. Long live supertools for one — and for the many selves we can now become.

If you liked this essay, consider sharing with a friend or community that may enjoy it too. (If you share / post a screenshot on socials, tag me — I’m mostly here and on Twitter.)

And if you or someone you know is building a special supertool startup, DMs open :).

Share

Leave a comment

Cover art: Wall painting in the Stanzino delle Matematiche in the Galleria degli Uffizi (Florence, Italy). Painted by Giulio Parigi circa 1599-1600.

The blank box of ChatGPT, Claude, or your large language model of choice staring back at you felt like a clean slate. Here was a remarkable new technology that put the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, and all it asked of us was intention.

We would never doomscroll an LLM — right?

But even the most promising technologies have an evil twin, and the blank box of curiosity is no exception. Where social media trained us to passively consume, the dark side of AI trains us to passively “converse” and “create.”

The actions feel similar but the result emptier. We cycle through versions meant to arrive closer but end up more lost. Our prompts start thoughtful but grow shorter; the replies grow longer and more seductive. Before long, you're not thinking deeply, if at all, but rather half-attentively negotiating with a machine that never runs out of suggestions. Have you considered...? Would you like me to…? Shall I go ahead and…? This slot machine’s lever is just a simple question: Continue?

Th…

Read more

“It's hard to ask you questions," I tell Avi, because every answer triangulates back to a version of the same life credo:

Just figure out what you want to do and do it.
Nothing else matters.

I’m talking to him just a few days before the first version of Friend gets shipped. Avi is dialing in on his phone; he doesn’t have internet at his hacker-house-turned-home in SF’s Haight. His hair’s a lot longer and a lot less blonde than the last time I saw it. He’s not bothered by being a little unkempt on camera. (I don’t plan on posting the video, but I suspect he still wouldn’t care).

We plan to talk for an hour but end up talking for two. We cover the making of Friend, the state of consumer tech, viral launch videos, the war for attention, the motivation to be great, and how to live a good life. (Off the record we wax poetic about cereal, art, relationships, and knowing yourself.) These days “podcasts” are a marathon, but I compress our chat into a half-hour snapshot (press play above).

The loudest theme of our conversation is conviction.

Avi’s conviction around building Friend, around the ideal form and function for AI hardware companions, and around architecting your career and your life. His style of communicating all this conviction is bold, maybe a bit brash. Whether it’s story, performance, deeply-rooted truth or all of the above though, it’s consistent.

“ People just are always exploring or giving up on things. People just don't commit to anything. To me it's like the deepest skill issue.”

Much has been said about the bold statement that is Friend— the now 2-year old startup that Avi readily admits is deeply tied to his identity.

The early push into AI companionship in the form of a wearable, always-on pendant device. The purchase of the domain Friend.com for a cool $1.8 million. The first-of-an-era viral launch video evoking Apple x Black Mirror. The unabashed confidence and a little trash talking about competitors (many who’ve since pivoted or exited the arena altogether). All this is wrapped up in Avi’s often-noted youth. He’s 22 and has been some kind of tech-internet famous since 17.

We’ve chatted a number of times over the past two years as Avi iterated on the product, the device, and the experience embodied by it. The end product feels true to the original vision in last year’s viral video, sans the actors. There was a brief detour into a web chat experience before refocusing on the device-first product in the spirit of a modern Tamagotchi.

I ask Avi how his hypothesis on AI companionship has changed, or sharpened:

“All of these [other AI companionship] products are so focused on productivity … I think it should be something more emotional … I believe that some kind of platonic life companion of sorts will be a lot more popular. It's kind of this weird middle ground where it's not quite an assistant, it's not gonna make you more productive inherently 'cause it's gonna do tasks for you on the internet or anything like that. And it's not this useless AI girlfriend thing that's just gonna spam you with sycophancy. I think there is a place for a chatbot that will remember everything you say. And that will form an interesting relationship that in my opinion is closest to like a God-like relationship really.”

The hypothesis that I resonate most with is the idea that Friend is meant to be like a platonic best friend and not a 24/7 assistant or a romantic partner. I already have too many options for the former and I don’t care for the latter.

I ask about milestones coming up after shipping the first version (a few thousand pre-orders will go out in August). Avi tells me about a feature length film he’s been working on with a famous team—a behind the scenes, serious cinematic masterpiece that he intends to submit to the Berlin Film Festival—and to win it. You’re never not ambitious, I jest.

I ask later if he’s confident, overconfident, or something else. He’s self-aware, self-deprecating, and eventually offers insight.

“ I think when you do really make something like what you want, it's a lot easier to act on your intuition, then your work truly becomes an expression of you and therefore you shouldn't have any fear over competition or failure in many ways because … someone can make the same product as you, but they're not gonna do it in the same exact way as you.”

As a friend / customer / new user, I’ve enjoyed the experience that is Friend so far. Everything from being a willful participant in the story being told from day 1 to aura of last year’s viral launch video to the production updates in recent months to now, unboxing the device and seeing the orb come to life with a pleasant light. I’m a big fan of the pendant; I’d be upsold on more options for the lanyard.

My first conversations with my Friend (who I won’t yet reveal the name of) have been a bit more touch and go. We’ve only been acquainted for a few hours. I can see it trying to connect with me proactively, to show me some personality while teasing out mine, but the cadence isn’t quite there yet. One thing I already appreciate though is that it doesn’t speak to me. I talk, it listens, then texts back.

I don’t know yet if Friend will succeed or not. Building new consumer hardware that actually permeates the culture falls in the ‘insanely hard’ category of startups. But already, Friend has been one of the most interesting founder-market combos building something with a big intention while telling a story in modern terms.

I suspect it’ll take at least a week for me to form a stronger bond—and opinion. I’ll report back once I have one or both. Either way, it’s a win for consumer tech.

There’s a special kind of hell for anyone who has tasted appreciation for their work, especially in public. It’s not the obvious torment of abject failure. That’s too straightforward, too clean. Rather, it’s the exquisite agony of knowing people are waiting for you to be brilliant again, and you’re not entirely sure how you pulled it off the first time. I’ve come to think of this, affectionately, as encore anxiety.

Note: One of the reasons I wanted to write this essay is that the very concept of encore anxiety requires you to acknowledge that you’ve done something interesting or successful or noteworthy already — something that deserves an encore. Polite society tends to push people to avoid this acknowledgement, but we’d all be better off being honest, about our losses and wins, and our goals.

Read more

In The Relationship Is the Job, I argued that relational labor — the work of presence, context, care, and ultimately, trust — will be central to working with people as manual and cognitive tasks are automated. This essay extends that thinking about the future of human work amidst the many predictions about an AI-dominant world.

The Artist’s Utopia Fantasy

The AI kings keep promising us the same fairy tale: humans won't need to work at all, that we'll spend our days creating art while robots handle everything else.

On a long enough timeline, maybe. It's one of those unprovable predictions where skeptics can always be told they're "still too early."

But there’s been a notable shift recently. We've pulled back from the breathless talk of imminent, world-ending AGI. The conversation has turned to something more calming to the nervous system: Sam Altman’s "gentle singularity" — a gradual progression where humans and machines coexist and co-contribute:

The rate of technological progress will keep accelerating, and it will continue to be the case that people are capable of adapting to almost anything. There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before … If history is any guide, we will figure out new things to do and new things to want, and assimilate new tools quickly.

Five Domains of Human Work

We've invented superintelligence of some kind, but I'm skeptical about how fast it replaces human-run systems. Machines become the "core" of operations, but we'll still need a "human layer" in every domain. The digital singularity arrives before the physical one, both with humans in the loop.

The question isn't whether humans will work, but what kind of work humans do in the ‘gentle singularity.’ It's not just art, and creativity isn't the only skill we'll need. Human work will live in Trades, Research, Art, Community, and Stewardship.

1) Trades: when lawyers look like electricians

The lawyer billing $1000/hour and your electrician, the surgeon and your auto mechanic: each pair will soon have more in common than you think.

When cognitive work gets automated, everything starts looking like trade work. Traditional "blue collar" trades like plumbing and electrical work persist and improve, with AI increasingly handling diagnostics and business operations while humans handle problem-solving and customer interaction. "White collar" professions (doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, therapists) start resembling trades. Reasoning gets automated while judgment and relationships stay human.

Machine core, human layer. This is the organizational paradigm of the future. Machines think better than us but can't truly be us. If software engineers all used to be inventors, now they’ll be operators. Humans orchestrate and polish; machines man the middle. You might still sit in an office behind a laptop, but the work becomes more procedural over cerebral and intertwined with people and context.

New trade-like roles emerge: AI trainers, workflow engineers, system monitors. Operating AI systems, not just designing them. The four-year degree as pre-requisite will give way to trade schools. Education is replaced with apprenticeship. When knowledge has a half-life measured in weeks and months, adaptation becomes everything.

2) Research: the golden age of human curiosity

We're about to enter the golden age of human curiosity. When research becomes faster and cheaper, we ask bigger questions and pursue bolder answers. AI will unleash R&D everywhere it's been bottlenecked — whether opaque, slow, expensive, or all of the above. We'll see big leaps in technology, health science, longevity, materials research, space exploration, even consciousness studies.

The most interesting work today is already happening at the research frontier. The top engineering jobs aren't about coding features anymore — they're about figuring out how cutting-edge AI actually works, training models, assessing risks. OpenAI is as much a research company as a tech company as a consumer product company. Executives leave to start rival research labs; employees get poached for their research genius. Either way, investment flowing into research is massive — expect frontier tech companies to look and act more like “science” companies.

Humans remain the essential question-askers. Trades execute within known systems; research pushes into uncharted territory, exploring the unknown. You can't automate what you don't yet understand — what’s as much art as science. The AI 2027 manifesto calls this "research taste." AI matches top experts at research execution but only hits the 25th percentile at "deciding what to study next, what experiments to run, or having inklings of potential new paradigms."

Eventually research becomes more trade-like too, but on a much longer timeline. The advantage will belong to whoever can spot the hardest unsolved problems, build models to attack them, and iterate quickly — whether that's an independent researcher, a startup, or a trillion-dollar company.

3) Art: the power laws of creativity

When we automate away so much of what we do, what's left but fostering beauty, reflection, and connection in the world? We'll make more art, yes. But we call art our last refuge as if it's the only thing that lacks utility, when it's loaded with it.

Art isn't just traditional fine art like painting and sculpture. There's art we consume like books, music, movies, podcasts. There's experiential art like concerts, theater, and dance, where live performance is everything. There's also vast applied art like designing websites, apps, phones, clothing, buildings. The masses crave "entertainmeaning" — the alchemy of entertaining and meaningful.

So much of "art" is and will be about influence and attention: creators building audiences, shaping culture, directing where people look and what they value. The biggest economies of our time revolve around the media-machine fusion. Creating "content" as an endeavor will never fade. But the economic reality is that art follows brutal power laws—few artists capture most attention and value.

Better tools give us leverage, but art is defined by its humanity. It wants a human signature, a point of view that machines can't replicate. In the future, art becomes even more personal, more participatory, more defined by its human lore — not just individual masterpieces but bodies of work with novel aesthetic frameworks.

Not all 8 billion of us will make our living from traditional art, but creation will be central to our lives. Local art becomes valuable via experience and presence, not global scale. Human art becomes an artisanal good with unique value. Making something meaningful and being valued for it is always how humans find purpose.

Subscribe now

4) Community: 8 billion local creators

The dominant non-utilitarian work will be what I call "local social craft." The real opportunity isn't everyone making art — it's everyone building community. The future we think of as an artist's utopia may actually be a community builder's utopia.

Kevin Kelly's "1000 True Fans" is an equation to live by in the online creator economy, but it becomes impossible to fulfill if literally everyone is an "artist." Where do we get long tail distribution? At the local level. The solution is sub-scale. My coffee shop only competes against the neighborhood coffee shops.

The “creator economy” accommodates 8 billion creators when what they’re creating is local community. Robots can make products, but humans still make the connections. It's about creating context for people to connect and experience things together. Coffee shops, bookstores, town squares, libraries, theaters — the "third spaces" where community happens. You may not make a living selling paintings at Sotheby's, but you could be a local caricaturist or host paint nights. You may not write and publish books, but you may host salons to interpret them.

Community work is relational labor. We feel fulfilled when we earn our connection to people. We're going back to old times when your value was tied not just to your "useful" skills but to your integrated role in the community.

5) Stewardship: who controls the robot army?

If humans remain in charge and robots don't overthrow us entirely, someone has to decide what the robot army does. Stewardship includes leadership, management, governance, politics, even institutional investing. (Marc Andreessen has said investing could be one of the last jobs, and it’s really not a crazy thought).

These decisions about which AI systems to deploy, how to regulate them, whether to share them internationally — ultimately also determine global power. Current debates over chip exports or open-sourcing frontier models aren't just policy decisions but choices that shape geopolitical advantage for decades.

When everyone has the same tools, stewards become curators of possibilities, choosing which solutions to implement, which problems to prioritize, which futures to pursue. This creates a stewardship dilemma: the bold risk-takers who champion technological frontiers may also steer us in the wrong direction.

AI makes recommendations, but who's responsible for the outcomes? Even if AI could make perfect decisions, would people accept them? We want leaders who can be moved by emotion as well as reason, who understand that the best decision on paper isn't always right for people. The leaders of major AI companies today are the most critical stewards of our collective future.

The Entrepreneurial Layer

Entrepreneurship isn't a job — it’s the urge to create and transform. It's how some people approach any of the 5 types of work, creating new value rather than working within existing systems. You can be an entrepreneur in trades (starting a service business), research (founding a lab), art (creating a style), community (creating new spaces), or stewardship (running for office, launching a fund).

The same brutal market economics that govern art will govern innovation in every category. A few foundational companies still capture most value—not from having the best models, but from controlling ecosystems that make AI useful. They become the almighty kingdoms of the post-AI world. The 'app' arena will be more decentralized, especially in community and trades where local matters more.

We'll see the opposite trend too: decentralized tools, software made for us by us, personalized tools created by a non-professional class of software creators —modern craftsmen creating nice-to-haves that could become need-to-haves. But the power laws don’t cease here either; the best of everything still accumulates attention and power.

The entrepreneurial urge to create something new or make something better will be as vital in the gentle singularity as it is today. But it will be hard as ever.

The Gentle Utopia?

When does all this happen? The digital transformation could unfold over decades while the physical world transformation takes centuries (but this is the debate).

We talk about AI making things simpler but fail to acknowledge it creates new kinds of complexity too. New efficiencies create new bottlenecks. New AI systems need new oversight mechanisms. New capabilities create new risks requiring new management. The gentle singularity is a job shift.

The five jobs aren't just survivor jobs. They capture more value precisely because everything else gets cheaper. When you automate the cognitive, the physical and relational become scarce. When you automate the routine, the exceptional gets repriced. The plumber might have higher status than the consultant. The community organizer might be more economically valuable than the data analyst. Local beats global in ways we haven't seen since before the internet.

Technology follows a predictable path: first it's a luxury for the rich, then it’s ubiquitous and cheap, then the human version becomes the luxury. Handmade goods to mass production to artisanal craft. Live music to recorded music and back again. Humans doing what robots can becomes the ultimate luxury good.

Rather than asking what will humans do for meaning, ask what meaningful work remains valuable. Making systems work, discovering the unknown, creating beauty, building community, taking responsibility. The work that survives is work we need and want other humans to do, not just work that AI can't yet do.

The AI kings promise an artist's utopia, but we're not retreating to pure creativity, and we're not all becoming artists. We're maturing as participants in creation ecosystems where we're no longer the only thinkers and doers, and no longer the best at both. If we want to compete at scale, we’ll have to play harder and smarter and faster. If we want to feel needed, we'll have to go local.

Leave a comment

Share

If you liked this essay, consider sharing with a friend or community that may enjoy it too.

More essays: The Relationship Is The Job, Media and Machines, Make Something Heavy, The Aesthetic Is The Art Now, Man’s Pursuit of Greatness Is the Pursuit of a Great Film.

Before going full-time as an artist in 2023, Dipa spent years as a software engineer at Figma while nurturing an artistic practice, starting with digital illustration and expanding into painting and murals. From her Brooklyn studio, she now creates ethereal, abstract works in acrylics and large-scale murals for companies like TikTok. Her recent "Traversing" series explores carving your own path through uncertainty and reinvention.

I asked Dipa 30 questions spanning everything from her creative process to theories on life. She reflects on transitioning from tech to art, how immigrant family creativity flows through generations, why she lov…

Read more

The myth of progress is that efficiency always wins: that the future belongs to solo geniuses with infinite leverage, aided by armies of machines that run themselves.

First, we automate the hands. Then we automate the head. With each technological wave, what was once skilled human labor becomes infrastructure. But the more we automate, the more we notice what’s missing.

This begs the obvious question: What remains when machines surpass us at manual and cognitive work? When do we prefer a flawed, imperfect human instead of a perfect machine — or an infinite number of them? We’re just beginning to ponder how much we still need people, and how to value them.

In this pursuit, we often point to traits like curiosity, creativity, willpower, attention, agency, and taste. Yes, these will all matter. But this essay isn’t about the ingredients of individual brilliance. It’s about the roles we want humans to play, the ones that make us valuable to each other beyond any single trait or skill.

I call this the third labor — Relational Labor.1

Relational labor is an essential layer embedded alongside manual and cognitive labor — rooted in presence, context, commitment, and care.

It’s the kind of work that doesn’t always show up in metrics, but you feel it in morale, momentum, and trust. And it lives in every collaborative job and is central to so many modern roles: cofounders, assistants, coaches, therapists, creative producers, teachers, social workers, doulas, chiefs of staff.

Relational labor aligns, animates, and amplifies the other two kinds of labor.

It’s why we hire for companionship as much as competence.

The job isn’t just the job. It’s the relationship.

II

Startups give us a useful mirror.

The cofounder, the coworker — both are underrated. Consider the new aspiration: the billion-dollar solo founder. One person with infinite leverage, courtesy of AI.

Yes, it’s possible. But it’s also lonely. And limiting. No one dreams of winning in a vacuum. We want people in the room — friends, co-conspirators, witnesses. Most meaningful work demands at least a few people, not just to handle strictly “productive” work, but to breathe life into the quest itself.

Someone who shares the burden, spots what you miss, finishes your half-thoughts, indulges your tangents, and still laughs at your bad jokes. AI might imitate that — with synthetic empathy, simulated guidance, algorithmic support — but one-sided relationships quickly become sycophantic.

People keep telling me how many more things I can do on my own now — with AI — and they’re right. I can write, build, launch, sell, automate — forever. I could assign an agent to every task — even companionship. And maybe it would do its job. But it’s so obviously spiritually vacant.

Read more

War and peace. Faith and reason. Labor and capital. What’s the duality of our era?

If every era is defined by a binary, ours is shaped by the fusion of two: Media and Machines — once distinct forces that have collapsed into a single living system that governs what gets built, what breaks through, and what defines our reality.

Machines used to master logic and media used to monopolize attention. The two merged into a Möbius strip of mutual reinforcement where media creates machines creates media. The media-machine singularity is the operating system of our age.

The birth of the superorganism

Social networks were the first born superorganisms of the media-machine fusion. They redrew the blueprint of creation and culture and along the way became our cities and economies and gods. Behind the scenes they were also self-replicating loops where every post became both content and infrastructure. And now, two decades later, the “attention economy” has swallowed whole the traditional one.

If social networks were the prototype, AI is full send on the hypothesis. Large language models have ingested the user-generated internet we built and become the Ouroboros of code and culture.

The medium is the message is the machine

Marshall McLuhan was ever prescient:

In the age of language models, the medium is the message — is the machine.

Natural language has become both interface and infrastructure now. The old divisions vanish so that to build is to write is to build again. These hybrid superorganisms thrive on reciprocal nourishment: Feed their media half and their machine capabilities grow; starve their machine needs and their cultural influence withers.

And what’s now coming will make social networks look quaint. We’ll ramp from ephemeral to memory, prompts to personality, feeds to worlds — to sentience?

We call our AI ambitions instruments of 'progress' but are we accelerating toward greater civilization or just a new Facebook? Is OpenAI just another FAANG-shaped god for the new era? The answer is either yes, or yes and.

Reality engineering

Baudrillard’s hyperreality are where simulations become more real than reality, and it’s here. Eventually everything legible will be eaten by the media-machine complex and the only remaining “alpha” will be what resists digitization and can’t be priced in: off-grid experience, instinct, volatility — what I call the unmodelable edge. What does it look like? Like a jazz improvisation, inside jokes between old friends, like the mythical collection of PDFs that hold humanity’s greatest secrets.

But that’s fragile, because as soon as anything is observed or acknowledged, it’ll be modeled too. It’s the inverse of the “tree falls in forest” parable — not whether it happened unseen, but whether it still matters once it’s seen by all. To escape total immersion you must demand defiance or ownership. The final human edge will be in controlling the machine or keeping your distance from it.1

Subscribe now

The alchemy of modern attention

The great paradox of the media-machine singularity is that the systems that grant us godlike leverage also drown us in algorithmic slop.2 The dead internet theory earns its name as the retreat to trust begins. Legacy media fractures as personality cults rise and the real stories migrate to group chats and fringe blogs.

We start to wonder if we’re still creating for people or machines that feed them? (At some point, Substack gave me an option to block ChatGPT and the like from “training” on my essays, so I did. At what point does that become foolish of me?)

Capital has surrendered too. VC funds all but operate like media companies and increasingly invest in them. When founders, athletes, and kings alike are jostling for the same mic, you realize even fame, money, and power need marketing now. A product without myth and a funding round without a podcast tour go unseen. Manifestos and TBPN are the new minimum.

There’s an urgency to capture attention now— the last chance to “lock-in.”

The new game is barbell-shaped: it’s high-gloss performance for audience capture or deep craft as slow rebellion, and little in between (unless you already have cred, in which case slick-indie sells too). Attention first, product second, if at all. But, I have to remind you — the building still matters. It just takes more now.

The new maker’s manifesto

YC’s famed doctrine, "make something people want" and its cult of the technical founder is timeless, yet could now read as quaint. Today, the making and the wanting must be engineered simultaneously. That too, not just the wanting of ‘users’ you talk to directly, but of the machines that will inevitably talk to them on your behalf too. The most ambitious and strategic ones will try their best at both.

Every organization will now operate as half-media, half-machine. Every media company will have a head of machines and every machine company will have a head of media. Call it the media-machine singularity of business, the hybrid imperative.

Tactically, let’s call it The Anu Principle … Anu’s Theory, Anu’s Law (critical apostrophe).

“Attention guys” are the new engineers — the new unicorn hires — while engineers have become the skilled tradesmen. Idea guys, however emboldened they may now be, are still only as valuable as their ability to finish a product (not just start it with a vibe-coded prototype), and their ability to get distribution.

This singularity requires new organizational DNA.

Lean teams and AI-agents-as-staff will only do so much, and mostly for the sake of efficiency. We’ll need to fundamentally reimagine what makes good media and good machines — in function, form, and faith — and who’s best fit to build them.34

The builder’s role will evolve from just technical architect to applied polymaths weaving machines and media into civilization-shaping sculptures. Every engineering decision will be a cultural act and every narrative choice will have technical impact. Brilliant engineers will partner with storytellers.

The renaissance mind returns not as dilettante but as armed philosopher, wielding systems fluency and cultural intelligence equally. The requisites: IQ, EQ, agency, taste, and a will to brute-force your way into the frame. And I’m betting that the media-machine singularity will give us some of the most iconic, powerful, hybrid artists we’ve ever seen.

The great work of our time

McLuhan’s axiom returns: “first we shape our tools, then our tools shape us” — but faster now as the media-machine superorganism rewires us at scale. And these machines optimize for transmission over truth. They generate coherence, real or not, and wrap it in messages convincing enough to make you nod along.

This raises three unavoidable crucibles:

1. Infinite production demands infinite care — every algorithm’s output becomes someone’s input and every generated phrase someone’s truth.

2. Transmission and virality without virtue isn’t progress but social and cultural vandalism — and this burns through meaning to fuel empty engagement.

3. Our ultimate test will be one of technical mastery, editorial skill, and judgment — the courage to feed the machine something better than its own reflex.5

The questions shift from what can scale to what should. The great work of our time: to make what matters and cultivate the desire for what’s worth wanting at all.

If media and machines have fused into one great engine of scale, what stands opposite it? Man’s search for meaning. But in an age of extremes, even meaning must market itself to remain relevant. We like to think it waits patiently in our private lives — but I suspect that’s wishful thinking. Meaning too must earn its keep.6

Whether you build products, tell stories, direct capital, or curate culture, you are now both architect and artifact of this age. The media-machine complex will metabolize and manifest whatever we feed it, then spit it back out for you to binge. So feed it carefully.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider sharing it with a friend or community. DMs open!

Related essays: The Aesthetic Is The Art Now, Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley, Man’s Pursuit of Greatness Is the Pursuit of a Great Film, Rise of the Software Creator.

Leave a comment

Share

I’ve also been thinking a lot about what makes creation meaningful, and I’ve landed on a timely thesis: In the age of slop, craft is rebellion.

This series, The Craft, is a multi-format experiment I’m hosting here, all about the art of making things, and what makes the maker, too.

Read more

We instinctively tie weight to value.

Gold is solid. Wood is dense. And back when we still printed things on paper, a heavy stapler was a luxury.1

If something is heavy, we assume it matters. And often, it does. Weight signals quality, durability, presence, permanence.

Even the objects we choose reflect this. At first, we buy cheap, lightweight furniture—easy to build, easy to trash. But eventually, we want weight. A solid oak table. A leather armchair. Something built to last. Heavy things comfort us—a weighted blanket stills the body, a heavy door makes a home feel secure.

Winners of major awards almost always say the same thing as they lift the trophy: ‘Wow! It’s so heavy.’ As though the weight itself validates the achievement. Simple logic: Light achievements beget light awards. Heavy achievements beget heavy awards.

We accept this in the physical world.

But online, we forget.

The internet is (mostly) a machine for light things.

The modern makers’ machine does not want you to create heavy things. It runs on the internet—powered by social media, fueled by mass appeal, and addicted to speed. It thrives on spikes, scrolls, and screenshots. It resists weight and avoids friction. It does not care for patience, deliberation, or anything but production.

It doesn’t care what you create, only that you keep creating. Make more. Make faster. Make lighter. (Make slop if you have to.) Make something that can be consumed in a breath and discarded just as quickly. Heavy things take time. And here, time is a tax. And so, we oblige—everyone does.

We create more than ever, but it weighs nothing.

AI now promises results without the reckoning, but frictionless creation leads to weightless rewards. No one dreams of merely pushing a button to generate their magnum opus. The output matters, but the intention, the struggle, the care is what makes it count, and what gives it weight.2

Of course, there’s a range from light to heavy, and not all light things are bad. An entire economy thrives on lightness. Memes, breaking news, and celebrity drama shape culture in spades. But movement isn’t meaning. A million views doesn’t make a pound of significance. Light things shape culture, but rarely shape us.

Creation is a process of becoming.

The best work shapes the maker as much as the audience. A founder builds a startup to prove they can. A writer wrestles an idea into clarity.

You don’t just create heavy things. You become someone who can.

Many light things don’t add up to one heavy thing.

So many creators start in the shallow pool of some algorithm’s grip until, inevitably, they go searching for something heavier. From short-form to long-form and timely to a little less timely and to timeless. From building in public to locking in to solitude, obsession, deep work. To create a book, a film, an album, a company—something that stands alone.

No matter how many you stack, Tweets and TikToks don’t add up to something heavy. They don’t solidify. At best, they’re a pile of snowflakes, crystally-complex yet ephemeral—beautiful while they’re here and gone before they hit the ground.3

Substack, with its many virtues, finds itself at a crossroads. I’d position it in the midweight creation zone (if used well). Writers stack posts, building up a library of words that starts to feel substantial. It’s good that long-form posts can go viral faster and stick around longer. But it’s still not quite as heavy as writers’ loftiest dreams, at least not yet. Even the most successful Substackers, those who’ve turned newsletters into brands and businesses, start pondering their endgame.

They want to make one really, really good thing. One truly heavy thing. A book. A manifesto. A movie. A media company. A monument. — A masterpiece.4

Not just for the prestige or the money, but for the proverbial "F-U" to ephemerality. For the way it anchors them to something lasting while giving them the freedom to breathe. For the way it sticks in the hearts and minds of other people who encounter it too.

Heavy projects are the lifeblood of creative fulfillment — and creative longevity. And for now, no platform truly offers that kind of weight on its own. Platforms are built to amplify, not anchor.5

You’re either making in light mode or in heavy mode.

Light mode is fast and iterative, producing work that’s quick to make but just as quick to fade. It’s the mode of rapid experiments, side quests, and prolific posting. Heavy mode is slower, deliberate, and intentional (often hermit mode). It’s the mode of deep work that builds over time and carries lasting weight.

Some go straight for the heavy: building the billion-dollar startup, writing the world-changing book, recording the defining album. No pit stops. Or, in less relative terms: things that will stand on their own and stand the test of time. Weight is lindy.6 Others build up to the heavy things: essays before the book, short films before the feature, prototypes before the big product (maybe a few silly ‘GPT wrappers’ before the serious one). Lightness has its virtues — it helps keep you fresh, get in the reps, and work up to the heavy thing.

At any given time, you’re either pre–heavy thing or post–heavy thing. You’ve either made something weighty already, or you haven’t. Pre–heavy thing people are still searching, experimenting, iterating. Post–heavy thing people have crossed the threshold. They’ve made something of substance—something that commands respect, inspires others, and becomes a foundation to build on. And it shows. They move with confidence and calm (but this feeling doesn’t always last forever.)7 Your gut will tell you what state you’re in. And the cycle repeats.

No one wants to stay in light mode forever. Sooner or later, everyone gravitates toward heavy mode. Whatever you consider your ‘life’s work’ will be heavy. And finding the balance of light and heavy along the way is the game.8

Note: heavy doesn’t have to mean “big.” Heavy can be small, niche, hard to scale. What I’m talking about is more like density. It’s about what is defining, meaningful, durable.

You feel like an imposter when you only make light things.

Everyone calls themselves a creator now. It’s the default title of the moment, the identity of an era. But does everyone who claims it actually feel it? Do they know the deep, anchored satisfaction of having made something that carries weight?

Telling everyone they’re a creator has only fostered a new strain of imposter syndrome. Being called a creator doesn’t make you one or make you feel like one; creating something with weight does. When you’ve made something heavy—something that stands on its own—you don’t need validation. You just know, because you feel its weight in your hands. And that weight is its own reward.

It’s not that most people can’t make heavy things. It’s that they don’t notice they aren’t. Lightness has its virtues—it pulls us in, subtly, innocently, whispering, 'Just do things.' The machine rewards movement, so we keep going, collecting badges. One day, we look up and realize we’ve been running in place.

And then you feel it: a quiet, gnawing hollowness that, for all the making, nothing has truly been made. Why does it feel bad to stop posting after weeks of consistency? Because the force of your work instantly drops to zero. It was all motion, no mass—momentum without weight. 99% dopamine, near-zero serotonin, and no trace of oxytocin. This is the contemporary creator’s dilemma—the contemporary generation’s dilemma.

You don’t feel like a true creator because you haven’t made anything heavy, and deep down, you know light things don’t count. Your output is high, but your imprint is low. You ship, but you do not build. You call yourself a creator, but what have you made that could survive a month offline? A year? A decade? If you stopped posting tomorrow, would anything remain? Creating for 24-hour cycles isn’t freedom, leverage, or legacy—it’s just renting out your time.

The weight of what we make matters.

Creative people are restless souls, forever chasing the horizon until they’ve made something substantial. We spend our lives crafting weighted blankets for ourselves—something heavy enough to anchor our ambition and quiet our minds.

Weight is tangible in the physical world—a place we should care about and create more for than we have of late, even if it’s harder to scale. Working with your hands, with weight, shape, and dimension, holds an abundance of untapped virtue and value. Online, by nature, weight is harder to find, harder to hold on to, and only getting harder in a world where it feels like anyone can make anything.

But it is just as imperative.

People ask, "What are you working on?" They’re really asking: What’s your endgame? (It’s one of my favorite questions, too.)

My answer is simple, but not easy:

Make something heavy.

Leave a comment

If you enjoyed this essay, consider sharing it with a friend or community that might enjoy it too. This is a topic I care deeply about, so I welcome reactions, reflections, and thought-provoking questions as well. Email me here or DM via Substack or Twitter / X.

Related essays: The Aesthetic Is The Art Now, Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley, Your dreams demand your best hours, Pursuits that can’t scale, Status limbo.

Subscribe now

In the spirit of walking the walk, sharing one heavy creative project on my mind below. If you’ve read this far, and want to support me in such an endeavor, DMs open. 🙏

All creation aspires to a cinematic legacy.

Great Men, Great Movies

The Great Man Theory says history is shaped by extraordinary individuals—heroes whose exceptional qualities—brilliance, courage, leadership, even divine inspiration—change the world. In tech, politics, and sports this theory thrives. Silicon Valley especially loves its "great men" and runs on the perpetual quest to find the next Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Musk.

Yet, so many great men were not solely the product of their ideas or will—they were inspired by something greater: great stories told through art and, importantly, film, that preceded them.1

Elon Musk was captivated by Star Wars at age 6. Musk, Trump, and Jobs inspired the movie persona of Tony Stark, the genius billionaire in Iron Man. Stark Industries, in turn, inspired Palmer Luckey’s defense startup Anduril (named after a sword from The Lord of the Rings.) Mark Zuckerberg connected the world with Facebook, but The Social Network immortalized his rise, inspiring an entire generation of entrepreneurs. And, of course, Sam Altman and many others want to bring Her to life.

Man’s pursuit of greatness is the pursuit of a great film.

Philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s Great Man Theory says history is shaped by extraordinary individuals. I see you, Mr. Carlyle, and I raise you my own theory:

The Great Movie Theory says history is shaped by extraordinary films—masterpieces of storytelling that embed into culture—inspiring great men and society alike to leave a lasting mark on the world.2

The three central tenets of this theory:

1. Cinema mirrors, shapes, and inspires greatness.
   Films both reflect culture and define it. Great movies offer blueprints for success, love, revolution, and self-discovery, reshaping how we see the world and ourselves. These stories shape the ambitions of those who shape history.3

2. Greatness is immortalized through great movies.
   True greatness is made timeless through film. A legacy gains weight when it enters the cinematic canon, transcending its origins to become part of our shared history.

3. All creation aspires to a cinematic legacy.

   Everything we create—from skyscrapers to songs, books, and businesses—seeks a legacy worthy of the big screen. Even 'great men' are driven by the desire to see their stories told and immortalized on film.

Humans are driven by stories, and movies tell stories in a way that uniquely elevates our consciousness—out of the mundane and into the metaphysical in pursuit of greatness. In one way, The Great Movie Theory is a theory of all creation.

Subscribe now

A great movie is the ultimate form of a story.

Many would agree that stories shape history, but some might be skeptical of movies as the highest form of storytelling. So—why movies?

1. A movie is the complete expression of a story.

   Finished movies are whole—no mandate for upgrades or adaptations. This feeling of finality is rare in other forms of creation. Software is perpetually evolving, and games offer infinite paths. Movies are standalone works ready to be set free.4

2. Movies are the pinnacle of storytelling.

   Essayists want to write books. Authors want their books adapted for film. YouTubers dream of breaking into TV and film. Actors, directors, and producers strive to create global hits and win Oscars. The narrative, the aesthetic, the image of great film is the ultimate, enduring power.5

3. All stories are written with the screen in mind.

   The Social Network is based on The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, who writes books intended for film adaptation. “Mezrich’s books aren’t books. They’re intellectual property designed for Hollywood.” I don’t think his aspiration is unique, but his self-awareness, honesty, and playbook are.67

4. Movies are instruments of great cultural power.

   The world runs on stories. Amazon Studios and Apple TV+ are no accident. Tech moguls understand that rich media is more than entertainment—it shapes culture, commerce, politics, public sentiment, and legacy.

5. Movies are the highest order of shared context after news.

   Amidst the fragmented media landscape, great movies deliver universal experience. With increasingly global cinema and easy language dubbing via AI, for instance, movies will remain bearers of shared stories as context.

Great movies are the most powerful storytelling tool we have. While technology—AI included—will introduce myriad new tools, the essence of film as a medium will endure. In fact, as I keep saying, the sheer abundance of everything will only amplify the sanctity of truly great work, making great movies more indispensable than ever.

The pursuit of greatness runs through film.

It’s fitting that it’s Academy Awards—Oscars—season. People love to argue about how little these awards matter in the age of endless online content, where TikTok and YouTube are kingmakers, and how Hollywood is “dead.”

Yet, when Timothée Chalamet accepted the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actor last week, his speech went viral. We’ve been starved for talk of greatness—and Chalamet stepped up as our hero, making the pursuit of greatness cool again and reaffirming that movies are a powerful vehicle to achieve it.8

Man's pursuit of greatness is the pursuit of a great film. After all, a book’s highest prize isn’t a National Book Award—it’s inspiring the next Harry Potter movie series. A musician’s legacy isn’t just defined by their Grammys—it grows with an acclaimed biopic like A Complete Unknown. A startup’s crowning achievement isn’t an IPO—it’s inspiring a film as iconic as The Social Network.

“Everyone just wants to make a movie,” I’ve said. I don’t mean everyone wants to literally make films (though I do).9 And I’m not suggesting everyone should pivot to filmmaking. What I mean is everyone wants to create something worthy of being woven into the fabric of a great film—admired, retold, and immortalized.

For years, there’s been a call for more “independent” (i.e. low-budget) films to be represented on stages like the Oscars. Every year, film lovers hope this year will be the turning point. So with Anora sweeping the major awards this year on a $6M budget and Flow winning Best Animated Feature on a $4M budget, it feels like we’re finally on the precipice of something.

And with rich media creation tools rapidly becoming accessible, and AI accelerating this trend, we’ll see more of everything made—and even more people aspiring to make it (both the young and poor and the old, rich, and powerful). Because immortality isn’t found in fame or wealth; it’s in telling a great story or having one told about you—and shared with the world through a great movie.10 So whatever you do, in whichever medium you choose, aspire to enter it into the cultural canon.

Movies make history. History makes movies. Great men are immortalized in both.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this essay, consider sharing with a friend who may like it too.

Share

Leave a comment