Editor’s note: No AI was hurt in the writing of this essay.

Hello friends, foes, and random people on the internet!

I’ve rewritten this intro multiple times over the last few months, on flights, trains, and in different places around the world. Suffice it to say, it’s taken a while…

In any case, I’m back in NYC for the spring after a productive, introspective, playful, and overall very wholesome winter in Europe and Asia. After way too many flights recently (as usual), I’m happy to be (mostly) anchored to one time zone for the next few months.

I must admit, it’s been a minute. As some of you keep reminding me, I’ve not written anything in a while…a long while.

The truth is that after 12+ months of what felt like an emotional colonoscopy, I was sort of tapped out. I had nothing more to say, nor did I feel like writing publicly. I just had the need to, similar to Johnnie Walker, keep walking.

So, walk I did — collecting stories, looking for clues, and building this new life brick by brick. Also, lots of flights, lots of parties, lots of fun and games. The circus was out in full force last year. 

We will get to all of that at some point. There is a lot to talk about. 

I don’t know if it’s just my acute sensitivity (born out of a healthy quarter-life crisis) or if everyone notices it, but I feel like A LOT is happening in the arena of life right now. It feels like we’ve gone up multiple gears, and planet Earth is spinning faster and faster.

I have this visceral sensation, deep in my bones, that life as we know it is fundamentally changing before our eyes. Culture, relationships, employment, and society as a whole are undergoing such rapid transformation, all at once, that we struggle to grasp the magnitude and meaning of it all. 

It’s like sitting in a bullet train, traveling 300 km/h, and looking out the window at another train traveling parallel to you — it seems like you are not moving, when in fact you are almost defying the laws of physics. Almost. 

Trust me, I’m aware I sound like an infomercial for a free Tony Robbins online course…and yet…

In November, I was in LA, sitting next to my mate in his Tesla, zooming through the city, chatting as the car drove fully autonomously. Not assistance, full-on self-driving. At one point, we passed a car (Waymo) on the highway that was also driving itself, without a person in the driver’s seat.

My parents grew up in the 60s-70s socialist Bulgaria with one TV channel (black and white), and now their son is telling them stories (and will soon show them) about self-driving cars. Never mind that, but even an adult in the developed world in 2015 (even 2019 in some cases) would be shocked if we teleported them to 2026.

We send big rockets to space weekly, and their engines land back down vertically on platforms (or are caught by chopsticks); we sit in cars that drive themselves; we talk to and even take advice from chatbots (seemingly) smarter than us; we carry supercomputers in our pockets and swipe for food, for entertainment, for sex, for connection, to make money…

We are really not that far off from The Jetsons…

And yet, while everything is seemingly a swipe away, and we are more connected and have more freedom than ever, many people are crushed by loneliness. 

In this new world of endless possibilities, access, and 24/7 connectivity, many of us have crafted (with the help of the machine) such uniquely specific identities with niche hobbies and interests that we sometimes struggle to find anything to connect over and align behind. Even TV shows and music have become increasingly difficult to enjoy collectively. 

Many social interactions have become a dick-measuring contest over niche playlists, unique fits, food spots, travel destinations, catchphrases, and after-party guest lists.

Let’s be honest, the only reason those god-awful Salomon shoes became a thing was that they were so funky and weird that, for a brief second, they made their owners cool and unique. Be honest and don’t lie to me…I’m looking at you.

And the funny thing is that all these “extra special” tastes of ours are really not that special…

The nirvana of ‘freedom’ and ‘individuality’ has, in many respects, become our prison, and the prison guard is our new digital god, or as I call it, the infinite curator: the AI that increasingly dominates our lives and thoughts.  

I’ve been following some of these themes since my media exec days back in the early 2020s (fuck me, that’s a long time ago), but lately things have been moving especially fast, and it’s time to talk about it. Having spent a wonderful time with many of you in person over the last 12+ months, I know you are thinking about some of this too.

It’s a huge topic, with many moving parts, which I will go over in this and upcoming posts.

Let’s dive in.

Months ago, I read an article examining whether we were witnessing the demise of art and culture, which came at the right moment for me. Apparently, Americans ranked the 2020s as the worst decade in a century for music, movies, fashion, TV, and sports. On top of that, in 2023, The New York Times Magazine called our era “the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the printing press.”

My first reaction reading this was — WTF are you guys talking about?! Surely I can’t be the only one feeling more creatively stimulated than ever…

As a society, we have more diversity in our lives than ever before, consume more content (audio and video) than ever before, travel more than ever before, send rockets to space every other day, ride in self-driving cars, and interact with chatbots more than with our best friends…and yet, you want to tell me that culture is dying and our society lacks innovation?!

Something doesn’t add up…

To begin with, it’s worth asking — what exactly is “culture” and who decides what the culture is?

Culture…I’ve always found that word rather fluffy and so open-ended to the point of lacking any meaning. Sort of like what an ex used to say to me: “We don’t see the world the same way.” (I still don’t know what that means…)

So I did ask the bot to define culture for me:

A-ha!

The more I reflected on this, the clearer it became that these things don’t just fall from the sky like the Ten Commandments. They need a loudspeaker to transmit to the world.

To understand culture and how and why it’s evolving, we first need to understand its transmission mechanism – media.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy that feels decades ago, I was an aspiring media exec in New York, building a new media empire focused on investing and financial markets.

In my spare time, aside from figuring my shit out and chasing girls around the city, I found joy in analysing how Netflix accounted for the billions of dollars they spent on content and how that drove their subscriber metrics.

That might be the nerdiest thing I've ever said out loud…

What I'm trying to say is: media was (and still is) a professional and intellectual kink. In many respects, the history and evolution of media is the history and evolution of commerce, culture, and society as a whole.

And the best analogy I can think of to summarize 2 millennia of media evolution is this…

In 2,000 years, we've gone from Jesus Christ traveling city to city, verbally sharing the gospel, to the Pope blasting tweets into the digital ether to millions of people who follow him or have expressed a strong enough intent to catch the attention of the infinite curator.

In other words, we’ve gone from word of mouth to algorithmic segmentation of niche audiences (on a global scale).

But how did we get here?!

I often hear people blame smartphones for our predicament. And sure, they didn't help. But smartphones are merely a step change in a trend that's been going on for seven centuries, since the introduction of the Gutenberg press.

Before Gutenberg, all knowledge was communal, synchronous, and limited by geography. If you wanted to learn something, you had to be in the room with someone who knew it. Culture was regional, traveled slowly, and mutated with every retelling. 

Books existed but were hand-copied and rare, kept in a few libraries reserved for scholars and the affluent. So, just like today, libraries were places where most people wouldn’t go. Some things don't change…

Then, and it does pain me to say these words, Gutenberg changed everything.

One Bible became millions of Bibles.

Ideas could suddenly travel faster than people. Martin Luther distributed pamphlets and triggered the Reformation, which was basically "content going viral" 500 years before social media.

In 1450, one book for all. In 2026, a good friend is building a company that creates unique AI-generated books for each kid.

Fast forward a few centuries, and radio arrived in the 1920s and did something no medium had done before: it synchronized culture nationally. Families gathering around a single device in the living room. For the first time, millions of people heard the same thing at the same moment.

Television took that idea and added pictures. Everyone heard and saw the same thing at the same time – the ultimate immersive mass medium.

Content was created for the masses, designed to attract the widest possible audience at 8 pm, so networks could charge P&G and Coke the most for advertising. Nudity and profanity were a ‘no-go,’ because anything that put off even a fraction of the audience was less valuable to these mass market advertisers. 

Back then, just as now, the content was shaped by the business model, not the other way around.

Broadcasting was born.

In 1977, there were 3 broadcast channels in the US, and a mini-series called Roots aired on one of them (ABC). Over 8 consecutive nights, roughly half of America (100+ million people) watched parts of the series, turning it into one of the greatest cultural events in the country.

Ironically, Roots contained levels of violence and nudity that were virtually unheard of on TV at the time. Network execs were terrified, while audiences couldn't get enough. 

In 1985, Live Aid was broadcast to ~1.9 billion people globally. Nearly 40% of the world watched the same concert at the same time. My old boss, who saw it live at Wembley, still talks about it.

Let me say that again…

Half of America – same show, same time. 40% of the world – same concert, same time.

Peak broadcasting.

But audiences were salivating for more than just politically correct family programming. Around that time, cable TV emerged, and everything started to crack

There is a saying in media that the only way to make money is bundling and unbundling.

Cable unbundled network television into niche offerings like HBO, AMC, and MTV, where niche audiences could be hyper-engaged with more diverse and explicit content. We started shifting from "broadcasting" to "narrowcasting," i.e., from dad jokes in bars to sex, drugs, and violence. 

Cheers, Friends, and Seinfeld consistently drew tens of millions of viewers per episode on network TV. The Sopranos and Sex and the City, some of the best shows ever produced, dominated the conversation among the cool in metropolitan cities, but ultimately averaged less than 10 million viewers per episode.

MTV specifically changed how music was consumed. It turned an audio medium into a visual one. A complete revolution at the time. And it was still one-to-many, still scheduled, still broadcast (but the audience was much narrower). 

More channels meant more choice, and more choice meant the beginning of the end for monoculture.

Bundle → Unbundle.

Then the internet blew the doors off entirely.

The barrier to finding content, or creating it yourself and distributing it to the world, went down massively: forums, blogs, early social media, YouTube, MP3s, and pirated music. The gatekeepers were still around (Harvey Weinstein did his best ‘work’ in those days), but quietly, the revolution had started.

More TV channels. More TV shows. More magazines and newspapers. More music. More user-generated content. More niches.  

The wheel kept spinning. And each rotation fragmented the audience a little more. Yet, the fragments were still large enough to hold millions of people. You could have your niche and still share a world with everyone else.

Let me remind you what this felt like (specifics might differ, but I'm sure you feel me)…

In the early 2000s, I hated Coldplay. Genuinely couldn't stand them. But I had to listen to them because they were always on. That's what broadcasting meant. I didn't choose Coldplay; they chose me. 

I remember exactly where I was in the spring of 2004, reading in a Bulgarian newspaper about the peak euphoria in the days before the series finale of Friends.

Then there was The OC. Everyone watched it in middle school in Sofia. We all talked about it and dreamt about that California life. We basically moved from childhood to teenage years with The OC. As I moved abroad, I'd meet people my age from all over the world (including Newport Beach!), who'd done the exact same thing.

Euphoria could have been the Gen Z version of the show they grew up with. But how can you relate and commit emotionally to a show whose 2nd season comes out almost 3 years later, and 3rd season another 4 years after that?! If you started watching in early high school, season 3 comes out when you are halfway through university…

Two weeks ago, I was in Oaxaca with one of my best friends, and we heard street musicians playing Imogen Heap's "Hallelujah" on a corner. We looked at each other and immediately started talking about the Season 3 finale of The OC, when Marissa dies (spoiler alert), and the song plays in the background in the final scene.

Twenty fucking years later. That is culture! 

(Fun fact: some of my oldest and best friends still call me Johnny, because of that show and the hair I had at the time…RIP my hairline)

Star Wars premieres. Harry Potter books. The midnight premiere of The Dark Knight in summer 2012 with many friends, before leaving for the Bulgarian seaside with my girlfriend early the next morning.

I remember it all. It’s tattooed in my memory…

And then, in 2012, everything started to change. We didn’t know it at the time, but in hindsight, the fuse was lit.

Before 2012, there was always a human between us and the content: a radio host, a newspaper editor, a TV producer, or just our own choices of who to follow online.

After 2012, an invisible curator slowly took over. 

At that time, smartphones were becoming prevalent in the developed world. Suddenly, everyone had a screen in their pocket, with a direct line to an increasingly endless stream of content.  

Facebook and YouTube started using machine learning to classify, understand, and recommend content. Instead of us finding what to watch, slowly but surely, the machine started nudging us. 

Other platforms followed… 

In 2013, Netflix aired House of Cards, its first original series, on the back of a machine learning bet, proving that a tech company could compete with Hollywood. Spotify launched Discover Weekly in 2015. TikTok's For You page (2016 in China, 2018 globally) perfected the model.

Each one was a variation on the same shift: the curator stopped being a person and became a machine.

And the machine optimizes for one thing: engagement.

While all of this was happening, Game of Thrones, which had premiered in 2011, was becoming the last show we would watch together.

Remember the old days before the iPhone and unlimited 5G…?

The work week was predominantly for work or school (and related activities). Commutes were spent quietly, in conversation, or listening to music. The remaining waking hours were for watching TV, reading, listening to music, gaming, maxing out texting plans on the old Nokia, chatting online, or obsessing over a crush.

Weekends: rally the troops (or kids) to go to the cinema, walk aimlessly around the mall (or smoke weed in the park behind it), more TV, more music, some work. Simple.

Everyone had their thing. I played lots of online poker, listened to music, soaked up American culture through TV shows, and hung out with friends (often behind the mall…).

When not at home, we were out in the world, meeting people, running errands, hanging out, drinking, and being largely undistracted. 

Life happened mostly offline. Media and the internet played a supporting role rather than following us everywhere.

The point is simpler than cheap nostalgia: media largely used to be a go-to experience in dedicated places (the living room, the cinema, the mall, the bed, the desk in your room/office) at specific times of the day/week. 

That boundary eroded throughout the 2010s, and, since the pandemic, the last remaining walls between our work, social life, entertainment, and identity have completely collapsed.

Work, dating, markets, gaming, sports gambling, news, music, social media, group chats, shopping, porn, politics…ping, ping, ping, ping.

All on the same screen. All competing for the same sliver of attention.

If you think about it, we live fully online now, and, every now and then, we just so happen to unplug from the matrix and do shit IRL.

From the PR girl in the West Village (whose parents subsidize her rent), to the 9-year-old girl in a small Filipino village, to the junior mezcalero in rural Oaxaca: I met them all, everyone has a phone, everyone has data, everyone is scrolling…

The wheel of fragmentation keeps spinning. The infinite curator is firmly in control.

We used to flip through TV channels in seconds; now we swipe through Reels, TikToks, and dating apps like our lives depend on it. Different medium, same behaviour.

But here's the thing…swiping through 200 channels felt endless, but very often (in dead times) there was nothing to watch, and we ended up back where we started, same boring garbage, so we stopped and moved on with our lives. Well…let’s be honest, we did another full lap through all channels, just in case, and then dropped it.

That’s simply not the case on the phone. There’s an endless choice of engaging niche content to satisfy all of our healthy and unhealthy kinks. Pick your own adventure. 

The media theorist Joshua Meyrowitz wrote a book in 1985 called No Sense of Place. The title refers to both geographic location and social position, and he argued that electronic media destroyed both.

Television let us see places we'd never visit and people we'd never meet, collapsing geographic boundaries. But it also collapsed social ones: kids saw how adults behaved behind closed doors, regular people watched politicians sweat under questioning, and the mystique of authority started to evaporate.

The combo of smartphones plus infinite content without gatekeepers completed both dislocations. Now we swipe through parties and wars happening on the other side of the world and feel like we're participating.

Media (in its many forms) used to have a place. Now it is the place. It's everywhere, and we are living in it. There is no geography, no hierarchy, no context. Just content, served endlessly, optimized to keep us in the ‘zone’.

Everything. Everywhere. All at once.

To paraphrase Cooper’s iconic line from Interstellar:

YouTube, IG, and TikTok are the new TV.
Twitter is the new newspaper. 
Podcasts are the new talk shows.
Netflix, HBO, and Apple TV+ are the new cinema. 

Production values across formats are higher than ever. Content is more intimate and niche. Everything is on demand and on the go.

And yet, the bar from walking out of a movie theatre is much higher than changing the content on your TV or scrolling to the next Reel.

You watch Succession six months after everyone else, and nobody cares, because by then the internet has moved on to seventeen other things. Or worse, you find an obscure show deep in a catalogue, it changes your life, and you have no one to discuss it with, because no one around you has seen it.

So yeah…the business model changed, and content formats evolved and expanded. But the shared experience died.

White Lotus, Succession, and the Barbie/Oppenheimer summer of 2023 were a glimmer of hope, but ultimately, they were an exception to the rule and mere blips in the secular trend at play.

A similar story with the World Cup and the Olympics. Too infrequent to anchor a culture, and lately most of the engagement actually happens with short clips and memes from the events, not actually watching the real thing. Remember the Turkish Olympic shooter? I only remember the memes...

Speaking of, now we just DM Reels, TikToks, and memes to each other in the moment. Instagram's own data shows that sharing to DMs has overtaken likes as the primary engagement action on the platform. 

I know it’s very popular to say that social media died with the move away from the social graph, but I’d argue that media broadly is A LOT more social now that we DM each other everything.

The shared moment got replaced by a group chat. Fifty million people watching the same episode at 8 pm and discussing it the next day is a fundamentally different social phenomenon than me shipping a tight niche meme to the boys at midnight while lying in bed.

One creates culture. The other creates inside jokes (excellent and ephemeral).

To illustrate what happens when you miss all of this, you couldn't do better than Quibi.

In 2018, Jeffrey Katzenberg (of Disney and DreamWorks fame) and Meg Whitman (former CEO of eBay and HP) raised $1.75 billion to launch a mobile streaming app.

This was a very American thing at the time, so some might be wondering, wtf is he talking about?! I was there, building in the fringes, so allow me to elaborate.

Hollywood-quality content, A-list talent (Spielberg, Chrissy Teigen, Liam Hemsworth), episodes designed for the small screen in 10-minute bites. Premium content for people on the go, delivered in quick bites, hence Qui-bi…

Super simple pitch ready for podcasts and short talk show segments.

It took 2 years to build, launched in April 2020, and was dead by December. Six months.

Three things killed it, and each one highlights how the new landscape actually works:

No social sharing. You couldn't screenshot, clip, or share anything from the app. The IP was protected like it was 2005 network television. Oh, how well I know that refrain: "protect the content." Meanwhile, TikTok was growing at warp speed precisely because everything on it was designed to be ripped, remixed, and reshared. Quibi built a dictatorship. TikTok built a playground.

No community. No comments, no social layer, no way for an audience to form around the content. It was pure consumption, and Netflix already did that way better.

Wrong assumptions. The thesis was that people wanted premium short-form content on their phones. Which, sure, they did. But they already had it. It was called TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and it was free, social, and algorithmically tailored to each individual user.

Quibi was asking people to pay $5 a month for something they were already getting for free, minus everything that made those free platforms compelling. It was a beautiful app delivering a product for a world that no longer existed.

Now, I must admit, I didn’t see all these flaws at the time, as we were way too busy pitching content to Quibi, trying to get a slice of that sweet California money.

Funnily, the macro thesis proved dead on. Instead of mindlessly switching context between Reels, many viewers craved storylines that thread across snippets. But Quibi’s execution sank the ship…

Enter the micro-drama: short 90-second vertical videos, packaged in seasons of 50-100+ (i.e., a few regular 30-minute episodes, sliced up). 

The main difference? Cheap app, budget production, much shorter slices of content stitched together, social, shareable. Tens of billions in revenue over the last few years and growing like crazy in the developing world. Taxi drivers in Manila and Mexico City love them, and recently I spent a long time passively consuming them on the back seats of a few too many rides.

40 years ago, the media critic Neil Postman argued in his book ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’ that television, as a medium, was structurally incapable of facilitating serious public discourse. The format itself was the problem. Everything had to be entertaining, visually stimulating, and emotionally accessible, or nobody would watch. 

His big provocation was that Aldous Huxley, not George Orwell, got it right about the future. We wouldn't be oppressed into submission by governments banning books and suppressing truth (Orwell’s famous argument). We'd be amused into submission by an endless supply of entertainment that made serious thought feel boring.

He published that in 1985. Before the internet. Before social media. Before the algorithm.

All this has massive implications, and we’re experiencing it in real time. 

The algorithm is ideologically agnostic but structurally extremist. It doesn't pick sides. It picks heat. Whether it’s politics, sports, music, financial analysis, or anything else, measured content gets average engagement. Or, to use the technical term, nobody gives a fuck.

A measured politician explaining policy trade-offs gets zero distribution. A YouTube finance guru screaming about a "financial collapse" gets millions of impressions. A song that doesn’t hook you in the first 10 seconds is not worth it (hence music producers now employing virality experts). 

Again, the business model shapes the content, not the other way around.

And over time, the audience recalibrates. When every message, thumbnail, and caption has been optimized for intensity, our baseline shifts. The calm voice starts to sound evasive and boring. "It's complicated" starts to sound like someone's hiding something. 

We need something bold and brave right in this second to make us feel something, goddamnit... 

We didn't choose outrage, and contrary to popular belief, I don’t believe the algorithm shoved outrage down our throats. It’s just that with so much content everywhere, all at the same time, normal doesn’t stand out; extreme does.

And then we got hooked on it….

But there is one other toxic digital sedative we really crave for…it has 4 letters: FOMO. The modern heroin, enabled and amplified by technology. 

No matter what you achieve, no matter how good your weekend is, no matter where you travel, social media will show you what you're missing. 

Burning Man is a one-week small experiment of the exact point.

As I keep reminding friends who join for the first time, with so many camps and art cars, there’s always something happening. There are always parties and events you don’t know about, and even if you were aware of everything, most of the time, things overlap, and you cannot be in 3 places at the same time.

You have to commit to your path, with your people, and enjoy the ride. Chasing highs around the desert is one sure way of ruining your week, followed closely by watching all the content on IG afterwards.

Zooming out, this takes us back full circle to that question from the intro: Something doesn't add up?

People ranked the 2020s as the worst decade for culture, music, movies, fashion, TV, and sports. And yet we consume more content than ever before. More hours, more platforms, more formats. 

How can both be true?

They're both true because we’ve reached the point of cultural hyper-fragmentation. And while there is still hope, fragmentation at a sufficient scale is indistinguishable from death if the definition of culture depends on shared experiences.

The content isn’t the problem. There are still exceptional movies, TV shows, and music being produced.

But content, in its many forms, used to bring us together in our small and large communities, united around shared beliefs and experiences (i.e., culture).

The issue is that nowadays, content and its benevolent master, the infinite curator, are progressively segmenting us into ever-smaller niches, which effectively dissolves the glue of a shared reality. 

In most cases, that TV show has less value if you have no one to discuss it with, just as that Birkin bag doesn’t bring any clout if no one sees you carrying it.

20 years ago, I had to reluctantly listen to Coldplay when they were on. Last year (2025), Taylor Swift released a new album, racked up billions of listens, and to this day, I have not heard a single second. Not a melody, not a verse, not in New York, not in Manila.

Take HBO's upcoming Harry Potter series. The biggest IP in children's literature and arguably the most universally beloved fictional universe of the last 30+ years. The teaser pulled less than 10 million views in a week. And no, this has nothing to do with the “creative” casting…

A random influencer lip-syncing to a trending melody beats the reach of the biggest franchise reboot in television.

When I was a kid, I struggled to sit still and read books. Yet, I devoured each Harry Potter book in a weekend. Completely locked in, without internet or TV. Just me in the Hogwarts metaverse, because there was little else competing for my attention. And more importantly, because everyone I knew was reading the same thing. 

Reading the book was the ticket to being part of the culture.

Sadly, I don't think that can happen anymore.

We’re becoming culturally atomized. We may be consuming more content than ever, but we have fewer reference points than before. On the surface, we seem connected, but we’re experiencing different worlds, leaving us isolated in our own perfectly curated, digital silos.

Stretched to the extreme, we will be 8 billion people, 100% unique, living in 8 billion digital worlds with a population of 1.

It’s like the movie Materialists, where Dakota Johnson plays a matchmaker in New York, and all her clients, having built great careers and strong individualities in the city, come to her with elaborate lists of criteria for their dream partners. 

Folding an A4 sheet of paper in half 42 times gets you to the Moon. Applying 42 distinct filters to a database of 8 billion people gets you 0 matches.

The prison has been built, perfectly tailored to our specific preferences. But unlike Hotel California, we can check out and get the fuck out. 

There is still hope. For some of us, at least.

In fact, I think the revolution has quietly begun…

We'll get to that plus a lot more next time. Pinky promise it won’t be in another 12+ months…

Spring is upon us, friends, and it’s time to get after it. Ping me if you are in NYC.

As we continue… ✌

G