Culture x Capital: The Media Landscape in Three Maps
Is this the internet we were promised?
The first serious social media site for non-humans has us thinking about the media landscape in general, and the various recent attempts to make sense of it (as well as eulogize what was).
“Old” “East Coast” media (more on these labels in a bit)
...have been around so long, and have such vertical control, that they can’t change direction... [T]hey cast such a shadow that it’s difficult for other publications to show up in the same space. (Notes on the Media Landscape)
Yet in that shadow, a million counter-institutions bloom, from the “New Right-Wing Tech Intelligentsia” to A16Z’s “full-stack coordination engine for technological and political reality itself” — to say nothing of the myriad podcasts, newsletters, platforms, and other emergent players. It’s no surprise that much of the action is Bay Area-coded: “media has always been technology.”
If twentieth-century media was centralized and institutional, twenty-first century media is networked and permissionless. The maps are attempts to chart that transition. Each is asking the same question: where does authority live now?
The first map, from TBPN, attempts (perhaps with tongue in cheek) a vibes-first, implicitly West Coast vs. East Coast taxonomy that’s not so secretly about power over format. But, as Sean Monahan points out, it conflates mediums and elides ownership. Still, there is a “there there”:
Newspapers and television framed our perception of reality in the twentieth century. Social media competes to frame that reality in the twenty-first. Social media and traditional media are competitors. It comes as no surprise Silicon Valley sees its business competitors as biased against it.
Monahan’s own map in response, implicitly arguing against tired labels like “Old” and “New,” attempts to reclassify the landscape along two axes: legacy vs. “challenger” (his name for tech-valence media, and he’s pretty good at naming stuff — he gave us “vibe shift”), and centralized gatekeepers vs. decentralized personalities and networks.
The map says: power in media is shifting, fragmenting authority even as a few new hubs try to centralize it again.
Mozilla’s Post-Naive Internet Era map is based on the idea that the free and open internet ideal has curdled into a technofeudal reality, and that instead of trying to fix the whole web, a “post‑naive generation” is quietly building small, structurally different “miniverses” designed around specific communities’ values, ownership, and needs. They see digital media infrastructure as cultural infrastructure — ways to reshape how culture is created, distributed, and monetized — rather than just growth engines.
Back for a moment to “media has always been technology”: as one provocative next layer, Daisy Alioto wonders if The Future of Media is a Bank. What people really miss, she says, is the magazine (“I don't think that a ‘magazine’ strictly has to be text”) as a slot you put money and attention into and get status back out. Digital media broke not because of distribution but because the internet never truly solved paying for media. If the maps diagnose a shift in authority, Alioto is diagnosing a shift in incentives.
She argues for “spontaneous payment systems” — normalized tipping and micropayments that feel more like Venmo, OnlyFans, or TikTok gifts. As the internet fills with slop, she sees micropayments as a better proxy for attention, where paying for media itself becomes a source of status—visible, social proof of taste and allegiance.
“At last, your attention is worth something to the media you love most,” she says. Is this the promise of the early Internet — the weird, bottoms-up, thousand-fans open frontier — finally made possible with today’s technology, or merely one piece of a larger realignment? We’ll be watching closely.
Got an open tab we should see? Reply with the link and why it matters. Header image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.
the Alioto take is the most interesting thread here. Micropayments as status signals rather than just transactions. that's basically what crypto tipping was supposed to be but never nailed the UX for
Earned my sub here - I appreciate the visuals - but I thing you could be more clear with them. Help people understand at a glance.