Welcome to the ntv newsletter – Edition 1:

As a reminder, you’ll receive this newsletter once or twice a month. I’m trying to answer questions like “how is technology shaping the media industry?,” “what does internet-native media truly look like?,” and “how does the internet, AI, crypto, etc. change the way we do business?”

Big questions! And lots of ways to try to answer them. Each edition will have some analysis, some commentary, and maybe the occasional essay. This is not meant to be a place for “media news,” nor am I curating links. We’re analyzing the present so that we can predict what might happen, and be better equipped to build the world we want to see.

Reminder: this newsletter is designed for active subscribers. Replying by email, writing response essays on your own blog, dropping takes in the group chat – all encouraged. I’ll be pruning the email list every month or so to make sure only those who are getting the most value out of these dispatches stay subscribed.

With that said, let’s dive in…

The Future of Media: 7 Predictions

The nature of media is fundamentally changing. Never before has it been so easy to create and distribute art and information instantly and globally. This newsletter will be covering a lot of different trends, but here are 7 predictions to get our conversations started:

1. The lines between publication, platform, and device will blur. It will become more clear that all technologies are media technologies.

2. We're on the cusp of a revival of tech ethics, and media will lead the way.

3. Creators and artists will have a Return to Craft.

4. Open Source Software and AI Models will necessitate community-led brand moats.

5. Successful indie creators and publications will close the gap between practice and critique.

6. Social media will increasingly be about "making the group chat public," bringing light to the dark forest in search of serendipity.

7. An acceleration of the revival of offline media is inevitable, a status game powered by local distribution and closed networks.

1: The lines between publisher, platform, and device will blur. This will unlock custom, experiential media for communities.

For Marshall McLuhan, “media” and “technology” were more or less synonymous terms.

One way to summarize the last 50 years of media history is to analyze the changing power dynamics between between publications, platforms, and devices. The magazine era gave way to digital publications which gave way to social media. Television gave way to the internet, which enabled a slew of new devices for media consumption. Or better yet: consider vinyls to CDs to mp3s to streaming, and how each format led to changes in not only how we consume music, but where we consume it, what we use to consume it, and the type of music that gets created.

Regardless of the path you choose, a consistent trait of recent media history has been a marked distinction between publisher, platform, and device. Those distinctions are now rapidly deteriorating.

The parallel rise of indie hardware, crypto networks, and AI-generated content will lead to media that is not only unique to a particular publication, but unique to a particular community. We will see media formats that live on specific devices and are connected and monetized through onchain networks. We’ll also see see content that is trained on community interactions with AR/VR media to create live, custom experiences.

However these futures manifest, it’s clear that community is the new platform, and technologies will be shaped around unique, people-driven experiences.

Consider Campus Complex, a private, local educational network experiment that "turned a disconnected group of private offices and studios into a traversable network of learning environments for three builders, artists, and researchers." This unique integration of geographic place, custom apps, and live programming created a unique, community-driven media experience.

Now imagine bringing custom hardware into the mix. Part of the team responsible for the experimental program is also building USB Club, a file-sharing network powered by physical USBs. The intersection of these ideas unlocks massive design space and offers a peak into what the future of media could look like.

The distinctions between publisher, platform, and device will make way to integrated, community-led, experiential media. Digital media evolved as software became easier to build. As AI makes software even easier to build and the barriers to hardware experimentation continue to fall, the “media businesses” of the future will look more like community worldbuilding projects.

2: We're on the cusp of a revival of tech ethics, and media will lead the way.

At some point in the last decade, discussions of ethics and morality in tech ecosystems became deeply unpopular – and not for a lack of necessity.

What replaced it was a deeply uncritical, naive optimism. As the world became less religious and more polarized, a love of technology became one of the only remaining thread holding the fabric of society together.

Recently, this has manifested as effective accelerationism, or "e/acc": a belief in unrestricted technological progress (especially driven by AI) as a solution to universal human problems like poverty, war, and climate change. Proponents of e/acc label their opponents as "doomers" and "decels," creating an "us vs. them" mentality that is rampant throughout the tech ecosystem (some might call this a cult!).

Paradigm-shifting technologies like AI, crypto, etc. require deeply critical ethical discussions. We can no longer be so naive as to think that technology will self-regulate, especially networked technologies at these scales. But even today, there is very little discussion of meaningful alternatives to the accelerationist worldview.

As companies and brands look to differentiate in the market, it will become increasingly important to stake out a worldview and ethical framework for users and ecosystem participants. To be clear, this is not a traditional “corporate social responsibility” argument. This is not a plea to big companies to do the right thing. As old business models get disrupted and even the production of novel software and hardware itself becomes commoditized, the economics of many businesses will fail to make sense without some semblance of ethical framework. When the tech is a given, it’s the worldview that gets people to cough up their money.

Organizations like Optimism (with Ethereum L2s) have already began running this playbook: open source technology whose differentiator is the governance and values embedded throughout the ecosystem, rather than the technology itself.

Failure to develop and communicate a worldview could be the death of your company. Technology will take a backseat to media in communicating that worldview and rallying your believers.

3: Creators and artists will make a Return to Craft.

The Age of Average is reaching its peak.

Design aesthetics have become uniform, architecture is dominated by a bland, homogeneous style, and digital content is increasingly becoming shorter, more dramatic, and less substantive. To stand out in the Age of Average, individuals and organizations will need to Return to Craft: a revival of work that is meaningful, human, and resists scale.

This will mean an even larger premium on taste, the internet's most rare and valuable resource. It'll also mean an acceptance from media consumers that we can never be on top of everything, so we should craft our own diets to contain things that increase our knowledge (not just information), contentment, and humanity.

We're seeing this manifest already through limited book runs, websites-as-art, a return to IRL experiences, and more.

Core to this discussion is a distinction between content and art. Some believe this distinction to be snobbish or imaginary. Others believe that the inability to make this distinction is evidence of the detrimental impacts of neoliberalism on culture.

To me, the fact that it is a discussion at all means that we're in agreement that something is missing from the cultural landscape. Something has been lost.

A Return to Craft means a return to quality, to taste, to literature, to experiences. It's a few steps away from volume content. It's about earning attention instead of stealing it. It's about creating things that exist within the context of a community or a scene.

4. Open Source Software and AI Models will necessitate community-led brand moats.

The first real test of open source business models and brand moats was crypto. OSS obviously has an extremely rich history, but never before had it been forced to grow in a hyper-financialized, adversarial environment at the speed of markets. Crypto is obviously also a unique environment, but the lessons stand tall.

First, we must understand that community is media.

Brands are built by strong communities that are curating, remixing, and participating in the narrative and image of the brand.

This brings us to our second point: brands need to be memetic. To understand “memetic theory” in the context of brands, we should be reading none other than LGHT. His essays, art, and experiments all circle around the power of memes and memetic icons. In his view, Nike’s Swoosh is a memetic icon, as is “Just Do It” – these are components of the brand that can be remixed and hold decades of meaning and weight.

Even more important, though, is the open nature of memetic brands. He points to examples like Nouns and Zora which have built brands around memetic icons (the glasses and “zorb”, respectively) and maintained a policy of open IP to encourage remixing and spread.

The result is a massively collaborative brand-building process – a Headless Brand – that builds loyalty through participating and value through collective worldbuilding.

Finally, brands are built on survival. From Taleb:

The longer a brand survives, the more likely it is to survive. Open source software is resilient and long-lasting, but its maintenance and development is only as strong as its brand. If the brand loses steam, development likely loses steam as well.

Many of these ideas are still nascent, but their effectiveness is clear. The brand playbook will continue to evolve and be implemented outside of these niche spaces and groups.

5. Successful indie creators and publications will close the gap between practice and analysis.

The old wave of journalism is dying, and it's not for the reasons most people seem to think. AI-generated content, social media algorithms, misinformation... these are all problems, but they're all downstream of something bigger.

The internet has not only fundamentally changed media business models, but it has changed the mediums themselves. While folks yearn for a time when magazines and newspapers were sustainable businesses, entirely new forms of media are not only being created, but have already been widely adopted.

Last year, I wrote Luxury Media, an essay outlining a new economic model for internet-native media:

Traditional business models no longer work in the internet age because they’re dependent on monetizing access to content (production) or selling ad space (distribution). The business of internet-native media shouldn’t be primarily concerned with either of those things. In this new age, people pay to support a worldview – not just to talk about it, but to manifest it.

There will always be space for non-profit news publications, but for-profit publications can no longer get away with not taking a stand. Instead, they must close the gap between practice and analysis.

Publications and communities like Not Boring, Monocle, Nouns, and Dirt are great examples of "luxury media" – they preach, and then they practice or invest in what they preach. This creates an experience worth paying for, and content becomes a "luxury good" for their communities.

6. Social media will increasingly be about "making the group chat public," bringing light to the dark forest in search of serendipity.

Social media has lost its authenticity. We're lost in a slew of business owners trying to build personal brands and sell their products, creators trying to promote their newest content, and political analysts sparking as much polarization as possible.

Maybe it was always this way. But it certainly feels like the "social" in social media has moved to other spaces: private communities, group chats, etc.

But moving those conversations to the "dark forest" of the internet isn't just bad for content consumers – it's bad for the producers too. Private conversations don’t benefit from the magic of online serendipity. No more blog posts that lead to lifelong friendships or off-the-cuff threads that lead to job offers.

It's also clear that the best content is meaningfully contextualized – that is, you're not screaming out into the void, but speaking to a particular scene, group, or even an individual.

I remember reading blog posts from Aaron Z. Lewis and Toby Shorin years ago where they were just publicly writing letters to each other. Some creators have put their own spin on that style. It just seems more fun, and retains lots of the value of a group chat while accessing the serendipity of the internet.

What goes around comes back around. The move from public social media to private social networks will likely loop back with a renewed focus on smaller scenes.

7. An acceleration of the revival of offline media is inevitable, a status game powered by local distribution and closed networks. 

The death of physical media has been greatly exaggerated.

Sure, running a traditional monthly/quarterly magazine with a bunch of full-timers on the masthead is a hard, often unprofitable business... but that doesn't mean people don't want physical media.

Our first prediction was about how the lines between types of media are blurring, but that's happening in parallel with a ton of local (as in geography and as in network) print media being purchased.

Just look at:

• Field Report, an offline-only magazine created by a company that helps brands create their own print media. The offline-only nature fosters exclusivity and status for its target community.

• Zora Zine Print Issue 001, a high-quality print edition of Zora’s digital magazine, distributed alongside custom hardware.

• KITH’s Loyalty Program, which offers exclusive clothing items strictly to members who reach certain “levels” within their program.

• Craig Mod, who uses his online blog and membership program to fund the creation of his books (which are primarily purchased by that online community).

• Monocle, the publication which has famously avoided any semblance of a social media presence and whose main publications are print magazines and books.

Each of these brands are successful because of their focus on high-quality physical media delivered to a “local” audience. That locality can be an interest group (in the case of Craig Mod or Monocle) or geographic, but are increasingly running the playbook of “distributed geography, local network.” As a result, some of these publications are able to be very lean and focused while still making a profit due to their "luxury” nature.

Physical media speaks to the value of true ownership, something that you can hold and show off in the real world that represents our increasingly online interests.

That’s all for our first edition. Each of these sections probably deserves (and will receive) their own deep dives at some point.

If you’re working on any of these futures, if any of these ideas speak to you, or if you disagree with any prediction, please feel free to reply to this email or start a conversation on Twitter (X?). Let’s chat.

All the best,

Jihad