Thinking and Linking.
A few fast thoughts on the last few months and some stuff for you to check out as we hit the midyear point on the year.
I don’t know about all of you, but it’s been a pretty intense first half of the year over here. It feels trite to make a point of it, but I do think we’re all grappling with the effects of unabated tech and information acceleration. Especially those of us working in comms functions. And while each day brings amazing new developments and possibilities, the pervasive economic anxiety afflicting businesses for the last five years is being experienced on a much more personal level by those of us in the white collar professions. It’s a weird time all round. As are all periods of transition and transformation.
For me, work has very fortunately been the opposite of scarce over the past few months, which has kept me from the regular updates I started sharing with you guys earlier this year. But I have been continuing to keep track of what I’m reading and pulling some thoughts together to justify sending out this note has reinforced for me just how fast things are moving.
Below you can find a few observations and thoughts about what’s going on in comms generally, as well as a list of the articles and sources I most recommend from the past few months. If you want the good stuff, you can interact with the NotebookLM I compiled from 63 sources or listen to the audio summary specific to implications for comms here.
Recent shifts I think are interesting.
The degree to which conversations about AGI have gone mainstream since I last posted in March feels striking. Some of this must be attributable to validation of things like AI 2027 by folks like Kevin Roose, so much so that Sam Altman is now writing about the road to Superintelligence.
The political conversation about AI also seems like it’s maturing in encouraging ways. Hearings are multiplying across committees and questions and commentary from politicians (also see Pete, Barack) seem to be getting sharper and better informed. Governments around the world are leaning in more urgently (good on ya, NZ!) We’re still nowhere near where we need to be to have a constructive policy conversation about post labor economics, but perhaps conditions are improving.
I think the introduction of ‘Abundance’ as a simple and powerful new idea that could reforge coalitions has been exciting and speaks to how hungry people are for new ideas to carry us into the future.
At the same time, media hierarchy has continued to flatten. The Ezra Klein / Chris Hayes conversation about Mamdani’s mayoral primary win in New York is a great place to start (Hayes’ recent book on attention is also very good) and underscores the degree to which the more things change, the more the medium continues to be the message. The audiences and influence of “mainstream” media channels are being outstripped by alternatives and the lines between the old and new worlds are blurring accordingly. Ironically, all those publisher ‘pivots to video’ we made fun of for years might have been the right idea after all - just poorly timed, communicated, and executed?
What’s going on with comms?
It’s hard to shake the feeling that most of what has counted for comms in the past is NGMI in the future - or for much longer. This is not to take anything away from comms people. There are more of us, working harder, than ever before. The influx of journalists and social-natives has also helped make the industry much more dynamic and creative.
But for all the work being done, it still doesn’t feel like enough. As communications has become essential to how every part of business works, the usual playbooks are not only insufficient to our new responsibilities, they’re no longer effective for the old ones either. Organizations that are able to move fast and boldly enough define the terms of engagement for everyone else, but coherence is breaking down due to the pace and fragmentation of modern information flows. Many of us are getting by on instinct and common sense.
I think that’s a problem. It’s also in stark contrast to what we see in the world of AI where research papers, benchmarks, and communal competition create a continually expanding foundation for the massive technological progress we’re seeing. This kind of ongoing substance-based, evidence-backed dialog seems completely absent in the world of professional communications which at times feels like it runs entirely on vibes. ‘Attention is All You Need’ kicked off a revolution in AI. (Setting aside the fact that it’s as relevant to communications practitioners as it is to machine learning engineers) If there was an equivalent piece of thinking in the comms industry, would we even know?
Maybe research papers are too much to ask, but if nothing else we’d probably benefit from a more robust conversation about tech and tools. Many communicators today are relying principally on their creativity, contacts, and experimental use of LLMs to navigate this new environment. But I don’t think it will be possible to be effective in the world we’re going into without facility with completely new kinds of tools for monitoring and dissemination. It would be good to build a better consensus about what a default loadout should look like.
Stepping back further for a minute, here are some of the bigger picture shifts I think are shaping the future of communications, or maybe it’s better to say ‘information management’ - many of which are spurred by the sources below - that I’d welcome people’s feedback on:
The shift from managing media to managing reputation systems. As communicators, many of us are still principally incentivized to focus on managing coverage - and its prestige or volume. As important as coverage is to stakeholders (and it is extremely important), this feels like an increasingly downstream and incomplete approach. Traditional media relations are still critical (although I’d expect a move to place more emphasis on publishers who have signed licensing deals with LLM companies over time) but with the ephemerality of today’s news cycles and the shear volume of information, it’s no longer enough. Reputation and relevance seem increasingly driven by invisible reinforcement networks: group chats, LLM outputs, memetic shorthands, and endorsements or citations from trusted sources. Shaping reputation effectively requires influencing the idea terrain as a whole, which makes it necessary to get a handle on how ideas are spreading across the entire information ecosystem that matters to your audience, not just managing news cycle to news cycle.
Culture strategy. As part of this shift, brands are becoming even more complex and amorphous than combinations of experience design, media, and messaging. Culture is becoming a principal carrier for strategy, which requires us to think much deeper about the culture and subcultures we maintain, enable, and align with. Credibility comes from creating and infiltrating cultural infrastructure - the worlds that reinforce shared perspectives and evolve worldviews implicitly.
Private Relations > Public Relations. Maybe the best thing I read in the last few months was a tweet (which I’m struggling to find) that went something like “If you’re in public relations, switch to private relations.” Managing reputation increasingly requires grappling with the performative nature of much of what is written or posted publicly. What’s shared in private forums is often much more revealing and influential. And while we’ve always been conscious of the need for stakeholder management, comms today requires thinking seriously about how to get upstream and shape what’s being thought through in private before it becomes part of the public record. Real thought leadership is now built in semi-private chats and forums, upstream of public platforms, and in comms practices that inform agents through ambient messaging and AEO. Who are your advocates in these ecosystems and how are you feeding them material for propagation?
Comms as infrastructure. As AI gives us more and more tools to handle idea generation and distribution, the future of communications feels like it will be much more about creating the infrastructure to shape what people believe and do. And this will require much more integration between people working in communications and the people building and designing platforms for audiences - starting with the people building and designing the platforms for your own customers and users. It’s hard to underscore the extent to which information and reputation have become critical to every part of business over the last few years - and yet comms practitioners are often completely disconnected from user communications and user relationship management (not to mention media and advertising). One of the next big steps for our industry will be bridging this information design gap to ensure that as all businesses become products, communications is effectively integrated into every part of how they work.
Some of the key things I’d love to hear from other communicators about:
What tools or systems are you using to track idea and narrative flow across platforms and information ecosystems?
To what extent are you using traditional or synthetic opinion research to measure opinion and reputation?
How are you thinking about building culture into your brand and communications initiatives?
How are you thinking about propagating information across private audiences and not just in public?
How are you operationalizing comms to machines as a primary audience?
Sources and Links
Below are links to some things I’ve found provocative, engaging, and that I’m thinking about over the summer.
David Shapiro’s Comprehensive guide to Post-Labor Economics
Sam Altman’s Gentle Singularity
Defender’s pitch for open cultural engineering, Open Research Institute, Human Memome Project and Xiq’s Nooscope
Richard Ngo’s twist on political quadrants based on coordination networks
Sriram Krishnan’s Group Chats Rule the World
Future of Life interview with Anders Sandberg: What Happens After Superintelligence?
Pallavi Aiyar’s Make Way for the AI-Raj
Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine’s The Intelligence Curse
Zhengdong Wang: Superhuman AI in a Normal Age
Center for Future Generations: Advanced AI: Possible Futures
Venkatesh Rao’s Low Roads to High Places
Benjamin Bratton’s Philosophy of Planetary Computation and Sara Imari Walker’s Informational Theory of Life
Andrej Karpathy: Software is Changing (Again)
Dwarkesh Patel on automated firms
Mechanize’s Dwarkesh interview
HBR: The $100 Trillion Question: What Happens When AI Replaces Every Job?
Carmen Van Kerckhove: You are not your job. And soon you won’t have one.
80,000 Hours’ interview with Hugh White on geopolitics
Peter Leyden on The End of Our World as We Know It
AI Policy Perspectives: AI and the Retraining Challenge
Work & Co’s Principles over Process
James Taylor Foreman: The Disenchantment of the Modern World is a Myth
In the Network of the Conclave (accurately predicting the next pope)
Stepfanie Tyler: Taste is the New Intelligence