MEDIA AND MACHINES.

The operating system of our era — and why every empire will be half-media, half-machine.

Every era gets the duality it deserves — war and peace, faith and reason, labor and capital. I've been circling this question: what’s ours?

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

What began as separate domains — machines mastering logic, media monopolizing attention — has 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

The revelation came with social networks — those first native superorganisms of the media-machine fusion. Facebook, YouTube, TikTok weren’t just social media, they were self-replicating loops where every post was both content and infrastructure — where the machine shaped the media that grew the machine.

Social networks recast the enti…