๐ก You also want to influence people.
Hey Reader,
โLast week I wrote about an episode of NPR's TED Radio Hour that sent me down a rabbit hole about algorithms, originality, and why everyone needs to stop Eeyoreing about how terrible the internet has become.
My conclusion was basically: make something else.
If algorithms learn from what we make (and AI is extraordinarily good at reproducing what already exists) sitting on the sidelines complaining about everybody else's mediocre content isn't exactly helping.
I thought I was done yelling.
Narrator: She was, in fact, not done yelling.
Because then I watched Hasan Minhaj interview The Atlantic writer Charlie Warzel, and they wandered straight into something I've been thinking about from a completely different direction.
Influence.
Specifically, how many people I meet in supposedly Serious Professional Circlesโข who desperately want to make an impact with their ideas... but would rather chew off their own arm than be called an influencer.
Which is hilarious.
You don't want to be an influencer. You just want people to hire you because of your ideas, invite you onto their podcast, buy your book, attend your keynote, quote you in an article, or repeat something you said to somebody else three weeks later. ๐
Maybe you'd like a TED Talk. Oh, my Boo. You also want to influence people... you just want a red circle instead of a ring light. And I think we need to get over ourselves about that.
The librarian would like a word. ๐๐ปโโ๏ธ
In his conversation with Minhaj, Warzel talks about something Nilay Patel at The Verge has called "Google Zero"... the possibility of search traffic to websites approaching zero as search engines stop sending us out onto the web and increasingly just give us the answer.
I have a slightly different reaction to this than most people because I went to library school.
We spent an enormous amount of time talking about information overwhelm. The internet had created this astonishing abundance of information, and one of the big questions was how the hell humans were supposed to find what they actually needed inside all of it.
So now the librarian in me looks at the first page of Google... where Gemini increasingly synthesizes information from multiple sources into an answer... and part of me thinks:
Holy shit. They solved it.
Not perfectly. Before you come at me with your Eeyore pitchforks, I said not perfectly! ๐ But the interface problem we've been talking about for decades? Ask a question and get the information you need instead of digging through 47 webpages? That's pretty fucking useful.
For everyone screaming about AI hallucinations, I need you to remember something: bad information is not new. This kind of anger at the inanimate object is driving me nuts. Not that the anger isn't justified. It's just not productive because this shit is c o m p l i c a t e d.
We knew this in library school too. Sources could be wrong, biased, outdated, manipulated, poorly researched, commercially motivated, or written by someone extraordinarily confident about something they absolutely did not understand. If you're in denial about how old you are and want me to bring you back to our age group... the bad information has been around a very, very long time.
That's why we learned to check our sources. AI doesn't magically absolve you of information literacy any more than Google's top ten blue links did. The technology changed. Your responsibility to evaluate what you're reading did not.
But there is a new problem hiding underneath all of this: Eventually the machines start eating their own homework.
Warzel points out that Google is only useful because humans have spent decades making things for it to find. Journalists reporting things, researchers publishing things, weirdos writing extraordinarily specific blog posts, experts explaining things. Since forever ago, people documented, argued, experimented, and created.
Humans participated.
If fewer humans make original material while more of the internet fills with synthetic material generated from everything that came before it, eventually you get what Warzel describes as large language model "inbreeding": computers synthesizing something another computer synthesized from something another computer synthesized.
The photocopy of the photocopy of the photocopy.
Which raises a much more interesting question than "is AI ruining the internet?"
What happens if humans stop actively participating in the creation of culture?
And THIS is why I have very little patience left for the weird snobbery around influencers.
Sorry. You're an influencer.
There are shitty influencers. (Of course there are.) There are also shitty journalists, shitty professors, shitty authors, and shitty CEOs with podcasts in front of $8,000 cameras explaining leadership while their employees update LinkedIn on company time.
The problem isn't influence. The problem is what you're influencing people toward.
Are you making people smarter, more curious, or more capable? Are you introducing an idea that didn't exist in their world yesterday? Are you documenting something worth knowing, challenging an assumption, or adding actual lived experience to a conversation increasingly populated by statistical approximations of lived experience?
Or are you manufacturing attention because attention can be converted into money?
Those are different things. And pretending the distinction is "thought leader versus influencer" lets a whole lot of supposedly serious people off the hook. If you publish ideas because you hope they affect another human being, congratulations. You're trying to influence them. ๐
๐ผ Welcome. We have ring lights.
Your ideas don't enter the culture telepathically.
This is the part of the AI conversation that genuinely excites me. Because if machines become spectacularly good at synthesizing what's already known, the interesting question isn't whether AI can produce more content. It becomes: what do you know that isn't in the machine yet?
What happened to you? What have your clients taught you? What have you changed your mind about? What are you noticing that nobody else seems willing to say? What did you try that failed spectacularly? What can you contribute because you've spent twenty years doing something instead of twenty minutes researching it?
That's source material. And we need it. We have always needed it.
The most valuable skill in the next version of the internet won't be content creation. It'll be participation. Having experiences, making observations, developing opinions, talking to other humans, making media, publishing ideas, changing your mind, and adding something to the collective record instead of perpetually rearranging what's already there.
There's something almost spiritual about that. Human beings have always made meaning together. We tell stories, record what happened, argue, teach, make art, and pass knowledge from one person to the next, inevitably adding something of ourselves along the way.
That's how culture is created and AI didn't invent that system. It learned from it. Now we're deciding whether we're going to maintain our participation while the new systems keep growing.
I love using my voice. I love helping other people find theirs. I love watching somebody realize they don't have to conform to whatever template they've been handed for what authority is supposed to sound like. That's why I care about media.
It's not because everybody needs to become internet famous or because your business will collapse if you don't start dancing on TikTok by Thursday. It is because your participation matters.
Your ideas don't enter the culture telepathically. Just like your expertise doesn't help anybody while it's sitting inside your skull. And opting out because you don't want to be associated with those influencers doesn't make you intellectually superior to the attention economy. It just means somebody else gets to influence the conversation. Maybe somebody less thoughtful. Maybe somebody less ethical. Maybe somebody with absolutely terrible ideas and phenomenal lighting.
So call yourself a creator. An expert. A consultant. A thought leader. A person who occasionally gets possessed by an idea and needs to yell about it on the internet. I don't care.
Just... Participate.
Make something original. Put your experience into the record. Influence people toward something worth influencing them toward.
The machines have plenty of material from the past. What they don't have yet is what you're going to say next.
๐ซ Check out what happening in the studio, below... โคต๏ธ
๐ This Is What a Climate Pledge Looks Like
As part of Sasquatch Media Grounds' B Corp certification process, I took a climate pledge for the studio. And just last week, the UN Environment Programme released a report saying we're now likely to cross 1.5ยฐC of global warming within the next few years... but how far we overshoot it, how long we stay there, and whether we can bring temperatures back down still depends on what we do now.
Which is a pretty good reminder that a climate pledge shouldn't just be something pretty I signed for a certification. It should change how I run my entire business.
So here's one small way that's going to show up at SMG: closer to the holidays, I'll be hosting an e-waste and used media equipment drive. If you've got discarded podcast or video gear collecting dust (i.e. microphones, cameras, lights, stands, cables, whatever) you'll be able to bring it to the studio, or ship it to me for a better future, instead of tossing it.
Usable equipment will get a second life in the SMG Lending Library launching in early 2027, where creators can borrow equipment instead of every single person buying, storing, maintaining, and eventually disposing of their own pile of tech toys. Anything we can't reuse will be routed toward responsible e-waste recycling.
And here's a little preview for my Dojo people: Dojo members will get unlimited access to the lending library. So if you've been considering joining and you'd rather experiment with microphones, cameras, lights, and assorted creator toys without personally funding a tiny Best Buy in your closet... this is going to be an awesome perk.
More details on the drive are coming as we get closer to the holidays. For now, I wanted you to see what I'm thinking about when I say I'm building a climate-conscious production studio.
The pledge is the promise. The interesting part is what we build because of it.
โก๏ธ Get a head start and join The Creator Economy Dojo now.โ
๐๏ธ Gossip from the creator trenches...
๐ซง Enshittification was just the beginning...
Cory Doctorow is someone I've trusted since graduate school, so I was delighted when the rest of the internet finally latched onto his term "enshittification." Lately, he's been making the rounds talking about the AI bubble, where all of this is headed, and what happens when it pops. I can't explain his argument nearly as well as he does... so I'm not going to try.
โIt's gonna get worse before it gets better โโ
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๐งฟ Ignorance is getting expensive
Someone made a malicious fake Claude skill, packaged it up to look useful, advertised it online, and people installed it. Congratulations... hacker's dream scenario unlocked. THIS is why I keep telling you that you need to understand how this shit works, even if you never become a technical person. Rogue software, shady AI tools, garbage courses... different scam, same vulnerability.
โDon't be a dum dum โโ
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๐ค Some of your haters are robots
Ever wondered what a bot farm actually looks like? Because there I was, engaging in my regularly scheduled chronically online behavior when I found a fantastic example. Thousands of phones, fake accounts, manufactured engagement... the physical infrastructure behind some of the "people" you encounter online. Please remember this the next time @PatriotWolf69420 wants to fight you in the comments.
โYou need to see this... โโ
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Something For Sale
I released a 90-minute Astrology and Tarot forecast covering July through December 2026 for $47. The second half of this year has a lot going on energetically and I had an absolute blast recording this. Several of you grabbed it immediately which tells me we are onto something here. This is my first experiment in bringing readings back in a sustainable way and it will not be available forever.
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Something For Free
You Don't Have a Production Problem. You have an architecture problem. My free white paper breaks down what creator studios actually sell, what most creators actually need, and why those two things are rarely the same. Includes a self-audit to find out if you are ready to launch or ready to build. ๐ Download the white paper for FREE.
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