Forget Cannes. The only award I’m interested in seeing which agency wins is most money spent on least real-world impact. The competition is fierce!

so pumped to finally have this thank you @joshuacitarella.bsky.social & Do Not Research for including me in this edition

Newer mediums like social media & AI have stripped content of experiential depth, flattening it into pure information. A meme, a TikTok or pod at 2x speed, a book made into a summary by LLM. In film or gaming, the content is the experience. Now, the experience is the feed itself.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS A VIDEO GAME

LESS ESSAYS ABOUT WORLDBUILDING MORE ACTUAL WORLDS BEING BUILT PLEASE AND THANK YOU

“Listen up buddy you’re just one clever portmanteau away from becoming a billionaire philosopher”

JOB SECURITY FROM AI FOR ME BUT NOT FOR THEE

on acorns, memory and identity

We are quick to wag our fingers at machines  But we forget the ghosts of our own design  Human behavior, cultural values, systems of power

Last year, someone on YouTube spent 600+ hours over 4 months on Unreal Engine to create a Legend Of Zelda short film in the style of Studio Ghibli. If that same person used AI tools to make the same short film in half the time, do you feel differently about it?

What technology makes easier to replicate and spread, will replicate and spread.

on magic and form via @tobyshorin.bsky.social

music hardware is a fashion accessory via @kleinkleinklein.bsky.social

on AI, chance & aleatoric music

on AI, mosaic and tapestry

People are saying everything feels like hypergambling now. I will add - social media feels like it has become a casino not for financial but for social capital. A game where people place bets with hot takes, where bigger risks could have bigger rewards, but the house always wins.

On the Internet, you can just say stuff

The ability to participate is not the ability to control

The vibe rn Everything is a staged, mediated pseudoreal spectacle, performed for status Participation is consumption The best story wins

Throughout history, people always call new unfamiliar tech “magic.” So it’s interesting to see builders like Google, Shopify, Canva refer to their own AI products as magic. But there’s something about military tech builders referring to itself as magic that hits different.

via @keikreutler.bsky.social

Are you feeling the pull to do it because you want to, or because everyone else is?

Magic is the perfect metaphor for our relationship with technology and media, and why it feels like we’re living through collective psychosis. Both can mystify, manipulate & distort reality, but awareness of a trick makes all the difference between experiencing wonder vs terror.

on cultural trends or whatever

A streaming service can be a collective of artists that contribute to an FTP and charge outsiders to access

I feel it in my bones that people are tired of the discourse and just want to make cool things

Rewatching the Severance S1 finale and looking forward to the day employees have to fight to remove contract clauses letting employers use AI clones of their image and voice in company marketing

it is an immense honor to have contributed this piece of poetry to the book

Introducing...Notes 📱🗒️ Notes is the first book collaboration between Dirt and Night Gallery. A tribute to the humble iPhone note, the collection features 100 phone notes from 100 creative contributors.

algo rewards inflammatory narratives content creator bends narratives for engagement over actual beliefs & experiences trend forecaster amplifies trending narratives brand copies & broadcasts narratives  mainstream adopts narratives algo learns from narratives repeat

Creative AI tools will supercharge identity play across mediums. The multi-hyphenate archetype is already here — AI will accelerate it. A music artist can play and grow confidence as a designer-director-coder, a visual artist can extend their world into sound, etc.

IN: Creative connection, legitimizing yourself, creative equity OUT: Creative isolation, waiting for gatekeepers, creative burnout

this whole enron thing is nathan for you but instead of television (comedy central), designed for the medium of social and the generation that doesn’t watch tv it is andy kaufman 2025

As the pendulum swings hard towards AI and synthetic media flooding the internet and social, the pendulum will swing equally as hard towards the physical, the tangible, the permanent

thanks @princessdaisy.bsky.social @dirt.bsky.social for shouting out “if you want to create a monocultural event, start a war”- this ep explores the topic around the election & luigi mangione also trevor talks about the return to magic in the context of AI & network spirituality all my fave things

I had some newsletter fun: "The New Rules of Media", 20 lessons for How Digital Media Works Now, with help from @deliacai.bsky.social @davidcho.bsky.social @nwquah.bsky.social // onethingnewsletter.substack.com/p/the-new-ru...

life round here

The content game feels over bloated. Friends w/ pods & Substacks seem exhausted, stuck on a treadmill chasing scale + qty, struggling to break through the algo & if they do, to be remembered. What’s lower scale higher touch more experiential media look like? Who’s doing it well?

Do you think Virgil Abloh was ever like, man I can’t make anything without a brief and an insight

“The Distraction Economy” - damn this hits

Regarding the AI discourse - it’s not humans vs machines. It’s humans vs humans in positions of power that decide to devalue other humans in the name of innovation.

on trend laundering

5 years ago yesterday I wrote an essay arguing that institutions were thinking about online media, insurgencies, & manipulation campaigns all wrong. Fighting the last war. The Digital Maginot line, I called it. It went viral then. Here it is on its anniversary. www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/11/28/t...

04. TikTok folk magic

03. On digital re-enchantment:

I don’t know who needs to hear it but a talent-based business is only as good as the right talent it attracts, hires and retains.

ridiculously excited to be a part of this with some of my favorite people @philwinkle.bsky.social @metalabel.bsky.social futurecommerce.metalabel.com/release-dbhf

Dear strategists, if you’re not an active participant in the culture, your frameworks won’t save you

getting the dirt on @dirt.bsky.social

Threads has arrived and I simply can’t wait for all the new and exciting parasocial relationships I’ll make on there!