Media Goonstate
Systems are destiny.
POD 165: Media Goonstate
This week, we wrap up the year with our picks for the biggest narratives, deal guys, hustlers and tech oligarchs.
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Troy: Gooning felt like an appropriate analogy for media's end state.
As I thought about PvA’s Media Person and Media Company of the Year, I kept coming back to the indisputable reality: media people always exist downstream of systems built by nerds. Little did we realize when Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee invented the TCP/IP and the web in the 80s and 90s that this single innovation of interconnected digital documents would completely upend the media world. We’ve been searching for a stable new equilibrium ever since. The next wave will bring us closer to media “goonstate.”
What even is Gooning?
Brian, your friend Daniel wrote one of the most memorable pieces of the year on the topic for Harper’s. Per Daniel: “The gooner goons to reach the ‘goonstate’: a supposed zone of total ego death or bliss that some liken to advanced meditation, the attainment of which compels them to masturbate for hours, or even days, at a time.” Gooners read less as outliers than as metaphoric condition: life reduced to loops of stimulation in a system with no natural stopping point. Read it. It’s weird.
Seems a little hyperbolic, but it's a useful description of the Matrix condition technology is ushering us toward. Gooning is the internet at its extreme: screen addiction, parasocial obsession, overstimulation—the end state of a society tethered to screens, connected through the internet, and increasingly intermediated by AI.
The point isn’t gooning. The point is this: the systems matter way more than the people. The people that architect our media and communication systems define our media destiny.
This year, media embarked on another painful struggle, bigger than the last. AI changes the physics of the industry: it collapses the cost of creation; it shifts distribution from “search: to “synthesis”; and it breaks the monetization model of the open web (content for traffic) that has sustained us for 20 years. We're moving from mass media to infinite micro-media, all orchestrated by hungry algorithms.
That system, obviously, is AI. Lots of people—Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei are the architects, but Sam Altman is the catalytic face of this systemic shift. Surely he deserves the honor of PvA’s Media Person of the Year.
What’s more, going full goonstate has got to mean a fully financialized future. What’s the point of total immersion if there isn’t money on the line?
Strikes me that Polymarket, the real-time prediction marketplace, is an important new force that will shape the future of media in radical ways. In a world of deteriorating trust, Polymarket turns “What is true?” into “What do people believe will happen?” Narrative shifts to probabilities. Opinions are priced. Authority comes from the aggregation of financially incentivized stakeholders.
In a year where institutional trust collapsed further, Polymarket felt more honest and deterministic than the news. That’s why they should be our Media Company of the Year.
Fun episode. Sorry about the gooning thing.
Here’s a recap of our picks…
Media Person of the Year
Sam Altman: He didn’t create content; he popularized a new interface that collapsed creation, distribution, discovery, and monetization into a single prompt-driven system.
Media Brand / Company of the Year
Polymarket: By turning narratives into probabilities and opinions into prices, Polymarket reframed media from storytelling to expectation-setting in a low-trust world.
Tech Overlord of the Year
Neal Mohan (YouTube CEO): Without spectacle or self-mythology, Mohan oversaw YouTube’s transformation into the dominant TV platform across streaming, broadcast, and cable.
Innovation of the Year
Large-scale AI auto-dubbing on YouTube: YouTube quietly erased language barriers at global scale, turning creators into international broadcasters overnight with a single product switch.
Deal Guy of the Year
Ari Emanuel: He read the public markets correctly, took Endeavor private, doubled down on live events, and financially engineered his way to durable power.
Hustler of the Year
Shane Gillis: After being canceled by the system, he rebuilt leverage independently and returned stronger, proving audience ownership beats institutional approval.
Word of the Year
Slop: A blunt, dismissive term that captures the flood of low-effort, AI-generated content now saturating feeds.
Narrative of the Year
The Battle for Human Sovereignty: As institutions weakened and systems consolidated power, the defining struggle became how individuals reclaim agency over work, speech, and identity.
Product of the Year
Waymo: A rare AI product that delivers an undeniable holy shit moment, materially improving daily life rather than automating workflows. This thing is gonna change cities.
Thanks for tuning in this year. Have a wonderful holiday. xo.