The Shrinking Megaphone
The age of broadcast is over. What replaced it is not chaos but a more exacting discipline: the ability to make ideas self-propagating within the groups that matter.
The decline of class and religion left people more tribal, not less
Modern society promised liberation from the group. It delivered, instead, a proliferation of them — each smaller, more intense, and harder to escape than what came before.
Attention is the new oil — how does social media platforms really works?
The Real Economy Runs on Attention.
When the message replaces the meaning
Media was built to inform. It was then rebuilt to perform. The distance between the two is where public understanding goes to die.
The Sincerity Industry
For a decade, brands competed to demonstrate their values. Then the internet made verification cheap, trust expensive and sincerity indistinguishable from its imitation. The market has not yet found a solution. It has, however, found a way to charge for the problem.
You Are What You Buy. Apparently.
Sociology has spent a century explaining how consumer objects carry social meaning. The market spent the same century charging a premium for it. Both projects continue, largely undisturbed.
The Sociology of Desire
Consumers insist they are choosing products. Sociologists, neuroscientists and a century of market data suggest otherwise. What people are really choosing is a place in the social order.
The Acceleration of Forgetting
The democratisation of culture was supposed to be its liberation. What it produced instead was its dispersal — and a quietly different kind of poverty.