POD 151: The Media Singularity
Out Friday AM. Listen.
In this episode, we dig into the collapse of old distinctions between news, entertainment, sports, gaming, and commerce into a single feed-driven system. We talk about how fandom now powers news, why comedians have turned into pundits, and how combat dynamics are incentivized by the feed. We also explore the blurring of media and politics, from Charlie Kirk’s rise as both activist and media brand to Sam Altman’s combative interview with Tucker Carlson. Along the way, we debate whether niche formats like link dumps and newsletters offer an antidote, and what happens to publishing economics as Google admits the open web is in decline.
PVA CONVERSATION
Troy: Maybe the singularity idea is a good frame for media now.
Spinal Tap has returned to theaters just in time. For those of you too young to remember, the movie was a genius send up of 70s/80s rock and roll excess, a pioneer of a new comedic form. A collection of real musicians come together to make a hilarious mockumentary about a fictional band and eventually tour and release records as a real band. Satire collapses into reality. The Office and the loosely connected, just released NBC spoof of a struggling fictional Midwestern newspaper (the Toledo Truth-Teller!), The Paper, only exist in Spinal Tap’s shadow.
The movie foreshadowed a world where truth and fiction blend in a media fueled simulation where it is increasingly difficult to separate story from fact. That is, until someone gets shot. And a new violent singularity is born with a bullet. Truth and lies ricochet outward from a singular murderous moment. Narratives compete for primacy. In present day America, finding one that we all can believe feels increasingly difficult.
Let’s move from that sad frame to one more existential. If we are approaching a singularity of sorts in media, you definitely feel it at moments like these. I had a thought this week that connects the shape of media to come with the Kurzweilian view that envisions a technological singularity where human and machine consciousness merge as one. Naturally, media would be at the center of this symbiosis.
We can clearly see a parallel phenomenon in media today: the collapse of traditional boundaries between content types, creators, and consumers into a singular, networked experience. This "media singularity" represents not just an evolution in how we create and consume content, but a fundamental rewiring of how information, entertainment, and human connection intersect.
Media Types are Irrelevant Now
Consider the current media landscape through the lens of traditional categories that roughly defined traditional media types, connecting live and immediate to storytelling, interactive and transactional:
LIVE > SPORT > NEWS > LIFESTYLE > ENTERTAINMENT > COMMUNITY > GAMING > COMMERCE
These once-distinct domains operated under different rules, served different audiences, and required different competencies. News prioritized reporting and timeliness; entertainment focused on storytelling and escapism; gaming emphasized interactivity and engagement. Commerce once stood apart. Community content, always distinct from the trust and authority of institutional media.
But examine most successful modern media brands, and these boundaries dissolve. The defining characteristics that once separated these categories are converging along a spectrum of opposing forces: reporting merges with storytelling, truth blends with point of view, passive consumption gives way to active participation.
Content and commerce become inseparable—every piece of media becomes a potential transaction, every transaction becomes content. Instagram is the front end for commerce. Professional and personal collide in a LinkedIn feed that feels like a real life episode of The Office. Politics is now indistinguishable from influencer media (David Sacks got the memo and has reprioritized his All In duties… Gavin Newsom did too) Journalists become brands and characters, Fox news doubles as tribal entertainment. On the other end, Hollywood quickly metabolizes real events into entertainment.
This shift becomes evident when comparing traditional text-based publishers like The New York Times with video-first brands like ESPN or CNN as they pivot to direct-to-consumer models. Both must now compete in the same feed-based ecosystem, where social media has trained audiences to expect rapid, visual, personality-driven content that blurs the line between information and entertainment.
New Media Physics
In this converged landscape, themes emerge across all content categories. Media brands seeking direct, long-term audience relationships increasingly adopt the characteristics of fandoms, building parasocial relationships and community identity around personalities and perspectives. Balanced reporting becomes overwhelmed by the need to fit within a tribal point of view. Everything demands the distribution edge afforded to a hard working piece of content.
The news peg becomes universal currency. Rage is the gas. Evergreen content needs a reason to exist in the moment. Media consumption becomes fundamentally interactive: we don't just consume, we respond, share, and repackage as part of our own identity performance. The audience becomes the medium.
Wrestling and debate explode as newly popularized media forms because they force participation—you must pick a side, create enemies, engage in conflict. Everyone becomes a pundit in their own feed, performing their identity through commentary and reaction. This isn't coincidental; it's the logical endpoint of a system optimized for engagement above all else.
The math driving this convergence is singular: engagement equals distribution equals survival. Find it at any cost.
A Singular Shape
Naturally, the convergence resolves in a feed — short-form, video-dominant, mixed-media content and personality led. Whether you're on X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snap, LinkedIn, YouTube, or emerging platforms, the experience is remarkably similar—a personalized stream of content mixing text, images, and video, curated by profiles and personalities, delivered through invisible algorithmic logic.
This feed-based consumption model is spreading beyond traditional social platforms. Substack wants you in their feed. OpenAI wants its own feed. Netflix dreams of their own twitch-based experience, complete with games and user-made content. Financial platforms like Robinhood are adopting feed-like interfaces, gamifying investment through social mechanics and rapid-fire content delivery.
And, the ad model for everything converges asymptotically to the transaction.
The Illusion of Niche
We are told that media is fragmenting, becoming more specialized, more niche. Substack newsletters for every microinterest, TikTok algorithms serving hyper-specific content, podcast feeds tailored to the most granular demographics. This appears to be the opposite of singularity—a splintering into countless specialized channels rather than convergence into unity.
This analysis misses the fundamental point: nichefication is not fragmentation of the system, but hyper-personalization within a single, unified delivery mechanism. Every niche newsletter, every specialized podcast, every micro-targeted video follows the same structural logic: personality-driven content, feed-based delivery, algorithmic distribution, engagement optimization. The content may vary wildly, but the container is identical
You Are the Network
Here lies the profound parallel to Kurzweil's vision: your media singularity is different from mine, yet we're all moving toward the same fundamental merger. Each individual's feed becomes a unique reflection of their interests, biases, and social connections, creating personalized reality tunnels that feel distinctly human while being entirely machine-mediated. The system appears diverse because it serves each person exactly what they want, but the underlying architecture is singular.
The media singularity is not just as a technological event, but as a merger between our biological selves and the network. Our media consumption becomes inseparable from our identity formation, our social connections, and our understanding of reality. The technology that delivers this experience becomes invisible, driven by unseeable algorithms and platform decisions that shape our worldview without our conscious awareness. We mistake personalization for choice, customization for freedom.
The Post-Distinction World
There is no longer a meaningful distinction between human preference and algorithmic curation, between authentic self-expression and platform-optimized content, between organic social connection and network-mediated relationships. The media we consume shapes us, and we shape the media through our engagement, creating a feedback loop where human and machine, creator and audience, content and context merge into a single, evolving system.
This media singularity represents both an unprecedented democratization of content creation and a concerning concentration of power in the platforms that mediate these experiences. As we navigate this new reality, the question isn't whether this convergence will continue—it's whether we can maintain our humanity within a system that increasingly makes no distinction between human and machine, between authentic expression and algorithmic optimization.
Even if it occasionally shatters in a flash of inevitable mortality.
ANONYMOUS BANKER
What Happened Yesterday
I knew Charlie before the world knew Charlie. I met him when he was 19 and we became friends. He had already connected himself to a few wealthy donors but had yet to build out the platform that everyone knows today. His alignment with Trump in 2016 and the changes in his messaging created distance between us; it was something I wasn’t comfortable with, so I disengaged.
The news yesterday was tragic because of two things: the impact on his family and the door that continues to open on how we engage in discourse in this country. The most disappointing display of where we are headed happened when our federally elected officials couldn’t remain silent for 60 seconds. The silence was meant to give space to a tragic event, not to idolize the individual.
When a group of people actively pause their lives, it’s to reflect on something. In this case, the people sitting in Washington, DC, should remember that we pay their salaries, and their goal is to ensure the continuity of this country. It’s not about passing more laws and shouting at each other.
We spend a lot of time debating and discussing the future of media, and I keep hoping to find positive spots where there’s better information, better debate, better engagement. Substack has this, and I hope they keep being successful. There are very few other places on the internet with real sources of truth and ideas. I’ve completely unplugged from reading the news – I learned of the Charlie situation from texts I got. The chaos in this world will continue, and I think the only way to stay sane is to have human discourse with the real sources of information, read books, and have genuine relationships with people (friends). Our ability to coexist with AI in the future requires us to be more human, not less. Otherwise, it will completely take over.
Take 60 seconds and think about the future you want. Being more human is easy; put your phone down and engage with the physical world around you. Our attention and who we give energy to are two highly controllable things that most people don’t control. Two tech platforms control double-digit percentages of our attention each day – this is scary. The algorithms are created and tuned by the platforms to increase engagement and extend the surface area for advertising – that’s it.
Unplugging is the only way to save humanity.