Reclaiming Sovereignty

Shortcuts have undermined media sustainability.

POD 157: The Case For Reclaiming Sovereignty

Out Friday AM. Listen.

Brian: Alex had a hard drop and couldn’t join us, and Anonymous Banker is on a karaoke tour of Tokyo. Troy called in from vacation for a conversation around what he called my “naive” framework of sovereignty. Troy does the word-choice quibble and reframed this to mean agency… then proceeded to undermine mine by handing me newsletter duties at the last minute.

My take: Piece by piece, publishers have sacrificed all kinds of sovereign rights in distribution and monetization. This was always viewed as simply a tradeoff. But it has left a very low-agency industry that is so far downstream from the tech power centers that a learned helplessness has set in.

Even most creators are one algorithm tweak away. That’s why the Platonic ideal of media might be Ben Thompson. He writes his Stratechery newsletter from Taiwan (note: he has now moved back to the US) has lots of influence, complete freedom and the security of recurring revenue.

Topics we discussed: London phone thefts, Peter Kafka making me look good, Ben Smith and journalists working for the guild, Ed Zitron and the lonely provocateur, why ad rights matter, distribution vs production economic functions, the original sin of programmatic, Troy’s MediaOS gambit, sovereignty vs agency, the learned helplessness of media, subscription revenue as freedom, Talking Points Memo as a blog survivor, my mom predicting the housing crisis, AI vs the ad tech industrial complex, the agentic ad buying push, Joe Marchese saying the quiet part out loud about attribution, ad tech’s financialization of attention, the Pope warns against usury and extractive anti-human systems, the unmourned death of retargeting, Tim Armstrong’s napkin grand plan at the Astor Place Starbucks, Troy telling me to quit Adweek, AI as the ultimate intermediary, the SKU-level merger of ads and commerce, OpenAI’s trying to be Google before Google can kill it, the trillion-dollar compute race, Europeans cool to ChatGPT, the illusion of AI productivity, AI comes after the junior bankers, AB’s high rent, the risk of confidence collapse, Vox’s plausible formula, PE Guys in LA, the burden of tech and org debt, the case for small and lean, the rise of the creator sovereigns, OpenAI‘s go big or go home strategy, my dinner with a biotech executive, why I trust Andrej Karpathy more than Sam Altman, confidence as currency, Troy’s “just be rich” rule, Mark Ruffalo and perfect actors, Slow Horses and overacting Gary Oldman, Canadian accents and Secret Canadians, Australian actors impersonating Americans, making a business decision about “wooder,” the Toronto Blue Jays and the F-word’s quiet but profound normalization.

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