Selected Essays
Five of them. The rest are on Medium.
Fifty Shades started as Twilight fan fiction and a fan-made Bridgerton musical won a Grammy. The audience is already writing; the only open question is whether the studios host it or keep pretending it isn't happening. I argued co-creation would end up bigger than any headset. Still think so.
Written at the top of the NFT market. The metaverse had a generation raised in 3D spaces behind it; the blockchain had a database decision behind it, AWS versus Azure, and nobody lines up around the block for a database. Held up.
Squid Game became a hit because it was already a hit: Netflix put a Top 10 on a homepage a hundred million people open every day and told them what they were missing. Manufactured monoculture, two years before I understood it was the whole story.
Written six weeks into lockdown, when the culture's first answer to "what happens when we can't be together" was Fortnite. The answer was wrong in the way everyone's was. The question is the book.
A history of television in a thousand words, ending on a prediction: the internet was swinging us back to the local cultures of the 1800s, minus the geography. That was the first half of the argument. The second half — people heading back out the door to find each other — is the book.
Outlook, 2016–2026
IPG Media Lab's annual forecast, eleven consecutive editions. Four trends a year, each one an argument about where attention was going next.
The frictionless economy has a ceiling. Why the pendulum is swinging back toward the slow, the deliberate, and the in-person — and why a drugstore that keeps the mouthwash in jail has already lost.
Written for a year everyone expected to be loud. When people stop trusting institutions they don't stop needing shelter; they build it — re-sorted social platforms, personality-driven news, an AI that fits each of us with a private haven. Comfortable. Also the exact opposite of a crowd.
Generative AI brings the cost of making content to zero, and the rational response to infinite supply is the return of the monoculture: the events everyone shows up for. The book's argument, two years before the book.
Gramsci's line about the old world dying and the new one struggling to be born, applied to the year the Meta–Google duopoly cracked and ChatGPT showed up. The monsters were the crypto salesmen. And also all of us, going goblin mode for the last scraps of attention.
The only reliable forecast for the decade was disorder, so this one is about planning for it. It's also where I argued that following a billionaire is a different brand of authoritarianism with a capitalist tint, and that presence — knowing who else is here right now — would matter more than any single metaverse.
The pandemic pulled five years of digital adoption forward, and the report asked which of it would stick. One call I'd make harder today: the offline experience gets more premium as the digital version becomes a loss leader for the tour. Dua Lipa's livestream mostly sold the tour.
Published a month before lockdown, on which company would own the platform after the phone. Wrong about the timing of nearly everything, right about the shape: algorithmic culture, ambient computing, and a rising anxiety about all of it. The last forecast from the old world.
The platforms that aggregated everyone's attention turned out to be the easiest things on earth to abuse, and 2019 was when the bill came due. The trend I'd underline now: media haves and have-nots, where the people who can pay get the ad-free version and everyone else gets the feed. The K-shaped experience economy, in embryo.
The internet's first act was over: four platforms had stopped being an industry and started being the economy. All culture is digital culture, the report said. True then, true now, and exactly the condition the book argues we've started pushing back against.
Also from the Lab: The State of Streaming Television: The Shift in Business Models That Will Define the Future of TV(IPG Media Lab & MAGNA Global, December 2019). Published a month after Disney+ launched, on why streaming would upend Hollywood's business models and not just its delivery. The abundance it predicted arrived on schedule. What it didn't predict is the book. Kindle · Apple Books
Floor 9, 2017–2025
The Lab's podcast on technology and culture — 178 episodes, which I co-created, produced, and hosted. Adweek's Best Thought Leadership Podcast of 2020.
Three episodes. The rest are available wherever you listen to podcasts.
Two UM executives — the global chief strategy officer and the global chief product officer — on what happens to a business when the thing it sells can be generated for free. We were talking about brands. The book asks the same question about culture.
Six months after Facebook renamed their company, a check-in with UM's global chief media officer on whether any of it was working. Joshua and I spent an hour being politely unconvinced. The polite part hasn't aged as well as the unconvinced part.
Month three of no concerts, with Live Nation's head of brand strategy, on drive-in shows, Instagram livestreams, and whether any of it counted as a show. The question underneath that episode is the question underneath the book.