From the temple to the garden

Participating in the birth of a new media system

Update 5/22/25: This essay inspired Hamish’s TED talk, This is What the Future of Media Looks Like. Check it out on YouTube.

We are living through the most significant media disruption since the printing press, and it explains everything from why you can’t stand your neighbor to our current political tumult.

Until recently, the best way for political figures to gain influence in developed democracies was to look good on television, speak in measured tones, and develop relationships with the people who controlled the media. We are still only just coming out of that era. It is an era that gave us leaders such as Ronald Reagan, Tony Blair, and Angela Merkel.

Today, we live in a more chaotic environment, where the narrative frenzy of social media has given rise to political movements that gain power through exploiting attention of any kind, positive or negative, from moral panics to fulminating podium-thumpers. We’ve gone from “Ask not what your country can do for you” to dunk tweets and death-by-emoji.

Our media systems don’t just convey information—they shape how we think and behave. Political culture responds accordingly. We’ve seen how this cultural interplay unfolded with the arrival of the printing press, which in the mid-1400s broke the literate elite’s monopoly on information and subverted the Catholic Church’s dominance. We saw it with the introduction of radio, which allowed political leaders, for the first time, to speak directly to citizens in their homes, placing new emphasis on emotional appeal. And we saw how television elevated image and personality above nuanced policy discussion.

None of these transitions was instant. Revolutions like this can take decades to fully unfold. What we’re experiencing today may be the most intense phase of a profound transformation that began years ago.

But, as we know from history, this is not a permanent state. The printing press’s arrival, for instance, caused massive economic and social turmoil, but it ultimately helped birth the Scientific Revolution. The internet may be on a similar path, with initial destruction followed by renewal. While this period of change is in many ways destabilizing, it can also ultimately help culture flourish.

Sacking the temple

For decades, we lived in a world dominated by traditional media, characterized by top-down control, centralized authority, and official opinion. It was a stable system, and, though it probably offered some false comforts, it communicated a sense of security in its predictability: the city newspaper over breakfast, radio news for the commute, the national TV broadcast before dinner. Cronkite, Rather, the New York Times, CNN, Oprah. This solidity, however, came with rigidity. Only a few perspectives were on offer, and it was hard for new voices to break in—they had to be let in by favor. The media’s institutional power went hand in hand with political institutional power. Collectively, this system amounted to something like a temple, with its own doctrines, rituals, and priesthood. (Good luck to the unbelievers.)

That system is falling apart now. It has been for a while, of course, but the entropy has reached an accelerated state. First, Craigslist laid waste to the classifieds business that had propped up many newspapers; then Google, Facebook, and YouTube won the ads business that almost all of the media depended on; and now the subscription streaming services—Netflix, Amazon Prime, Max—are taking out TV’s other knee. These are all irreversible trends. The temple will only crumble further; the priests will only get sicker. Their time is past.

Today, we live in the age of chaos media.

Traditional media’s rigid order has been replaced by mayhem. Conflict supersedes consideration. Speed overwhelms verification. This system is, in many senses, a marvel, with massive democratization potential. Anyone can have a voice, and your idea, if the winds blow just right, can reach billions of people in an instant. One of its great virtues is that it demands that everyone—even the powers that be—speak to each other directly, and others can talk back. Now the savviest politicians sit down for long interviews in nontraditional formats and show their thinking.

But just like in the old system, chaos media still concentrates economic power, with the majority of the rewards going to the platform owners. Of course, there are social effects too. We’re no longer tuning in for rituals and rites, but instead subjecting ourselves to a parade of loudmouths and lunatics, where common sense struggles to find a voice. We’ve gone from catechism to cacophony. Trump, Musk, Kardashian, Cuban, AOC, Hawk Tuah. We are now preeners, yellers, credulous fools, conspiracy theorists, and moralizers. Sometimes it’s fun!

Our political culture now mirrors chaos media culture. Opponents are not just to be argued against, but humiliated. Followers are asked not just to consider the benefits of a certain position, but to show fealty to a specific doctrine. Disfavored policies and institutions are recast as evil and immoral.

This media flux is more than just the swing of a pendulum. It’s the beginning of ecosystem change. We are moving away from the era of centralized institutions to a time of massively distributed voices. So far, it has been messy as hell. But not all chaos—presuming it doesn’t last forever—is bad. Indeed, chaos is often a necessary stage of evolution.

It is possible to view the current upheaval as a moment of transition. What we’re seeing now could well be the emergence of a new media organism that hasn’t yet found its order.

If you look closely enough, you can see some green shoots of hope emerging from the temple’s ruins.

Growth of a garden

The democratization of media is a revolution that the internet has so far only half realized. Yes, now everyone gets to have a voice, but the economic gains still accrue mostly to the powerful at the top. If you publish a perfect post on Instagram and it influences the thinking of millions of people, the financial benefits that it generates go disproportionately to Mark Zuckerberg. When you publish a groundbreaking video on YouTube, that platform ultimately determines who gets to see it and how much money it can bring you.

In this sense, the media today is like electricity in the early 20th century. Thomas Edison demonstrated the first practical incandescent light bulb in 1879, but it wasn’t until the 1920s that electricity started becoming common in people’s homes. It took the advent of the electric grid for the electric revolution to fully take hold. Today’s media equivalent of the electric grid is economic autonomy for independent voices. Until now, the power (ahem) has not been well distributed.

Economic autonomy gives independent voices freedom. It means they don’t have to be answerable to someone else’s agenda to pay their bills, and they can be less vulnerable to the inconstant winds of chaos media. It lets them focus on doing their best possible work and gives them more energy to serve their communities. It allows for a new order to emerge, separate from the interests of the central authorities, with wealth distributed among the many and not the few.

A distributed system that gives economic autonomy to independent voices resembles a garden more than a temple. Handled with the right care, it can bring order to social media’s bedlam.

In a media garden, where biodiversity flourishes, there can be more winners and better coverage of a vast multitude of niches. In such a system, everyone has a role in shaping the culture they live in. Creators can thrive on the support of their followers, who can simultaneously help the work spread.

While some worry that such a system will lead to more echo chambers, we believe the opposite could also be true. By networking diverse communities together, this garden-like system makes it easy to move freely and be exposed to new ways of thinking in a more moderate environment, removed from the quick-twitch subcultures of chaos media.

Unlike chaos media, this distributed system can be rooted in trust, since the rewards flow to those who respect relationships rather than gaming algorithms. This relationship-centric model is apparent in YouTube, where people show up for their favorite shows and creators (Don’t forget to like and subscribe). But even there, the relationships are mediated and controlled by advertisers and the platform itself. Direct subscriptions foster a deeper connection and stronger sense of trust. For publishers to thrive in this incentive structure, they must deeply serve their audiences.

This system gives rise to new media personalities such as Caroline Chambers, who turned a spurned book proposal into a thriving community, What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking, which in turn scored her a deal for a new book that became a New York Times bestseller. And it gives more power to independent interviewers such as Dwarkesh Patel, who hosts deep discussions with prominent thinkers in science, tech, and culture, fueled by a mix of direct payments and ads. New gatekeepers will emerge under this model, but unlike in the old systems, audiences will choose for themselves which communities improve their online lives. It’s a more organic ecosystem, where trust forms the root system connecting diverse communities, allowing us to think together rather than shout each other down.

The chaos of our current media moment cannot last, but no one knows exactly what the new landscape will look like when it stabilizes. That’s precisely why your choices today matter so much. Every subscription, every share, every minute of your attention is a vote for the culture you want to see flourish. You can choose to invest in a system that values deep relationships over the flimsy validation that chaos media offers. You can reclaim your attention from the doomscroll feeds and pour it like water onto the seedlings of a better future. These actions aren’t just about getting better content or contributing to a healthier media economy—they cultivate a richer, more thoughtful culture capable of addressing the complex challenges of our time. It’s a culture worth subscribing to.