Everyone’s a Platform. No One’s in Control.

Stephen Colbert is out at CBS.
Substack just raised another $100 million.
Ben Thompson mapped how AI removed the final creative bottleneck.

Different headlines—but they all point to the same pattern.

Control is breaking where it used to live: in institutions, in formats, in scale.
What’s replacing it is something messier, more personal, more ambient—and much harder to own.

We’re not watching the media change.
We’re watching it dissolve.

The End of the Shared Stage

Stephen Colbert isn’t leaving because he failed. He’s leaving because the format failed.

Late night wasn’t just entertainment. It was a checkpoint. A way to close the day with a shared frame of reference.

That made sense when attention was scarce—and still centralized.

But that world’s been gone for a while. The audience didn’t vanish. It dispersed. Across platforms, across creators, across everything.

The structure collapsed. We’re just watching the lag.

Substack and the New Proximity

Brian Morrissey recently compared Substack to OnlyFans—not for shock value, but for structure.

Both platforms work by tightening the loop between creator and audience. Not algorithms—relationships.

It’s an apt comparison. And one that speaks to a deeper shift: from publishing to infrastructure. From content to connection.

Some platforms are still chasing reach. Others are quietly optimizing for trust, proximity, and shared identity.

Substack, for all its flaws, is building something more durable than distribution. It’s helping creators build context.

The Final Bottleneck Breaks

Ben Thompson recently mapped how each wave of media innovation removed a bottleneck:

• The printing press removed the duplication constraint.

• The internet removed the distribution constraint.

• AI is removing the creation constraint.

So what’s left?

It’s not about content volume anymore. It’s about the systems—visible and invisible—that shape how we find, follow, and believe.

We’re not watching disruption anymore. We’re watching reassembly.

Control Isn’t Moving. It’s Melting.

The headlines change. The pattern doesn’t.

Control isn’t moving to new hands. It’s dissolving entirely.

What comes next won’t look like what it replaced—and no one fully controls what’s taking shape.

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This is the central thesis of No One Planned This, out this fall.
It’s about how control broke in media—and what’s beginning to emerge in its place.