A world without subscriptions.
*Hi, my name is Daisy Alioto. I have worked with some of the most prestigious media companies in the world and I am currently the co-founder and CEO of Dirt Media.
In this paper I will argue that spontaneous payment systems are the future of subscriptions. Rather than subscribe to media at a set rate, users will curate their information diet through a fleet of autonomous AI agents trained on their taste and empowered to tip for it.*
The new desirable consumer will have high agentic capital, meaning that they are the most skilled at using AI to optimize their monthly entertainment spend. Attention will no longer be measured by inflated engagement metrics on social media, but in stablecoin transactions signed by both agents and the humans that deploy them. Programmable wallets will be the norm.
Welcome to the future, where paying attention means to pay.
But how did we get here? First, I will explain why the media industry is so broken from the perspective of someone who loves both magazines and technology. Then I will explain how a combination of AI and digital wallets can unlock new audiences and spend. Finally, I will argue why this is better for both the creator and the consumer. ⟢
CONDÉ NAST HAUNTOLOGY
It has been a summer for media nostalgia. Back in April, former Vanity Fair editor and Air Mail co-founder Graydon Carter released his memoir, When the Going Was Good. The press cycle around the book was an opportunity to reminisce about $166,000 per story rates and expensed town cars. The Condé Nast nostalgia flames were fanned again this month with the release of Empire of the Elite by Michael M. Grynbaum.
Do we miss the glamor? Oh yes. But Christian Lorentzen’s review of Grynbaum’s book gets at the real crux of this nostalgia: “The best editors I’ve known have always been talent spotters, the sort who prefer saying ‘yes’ to saying ‘no,’ even if their jobs require them to say the latter more often.”
Call it The Meaning Economy, friction, The Taste Economy, gatekeeping, curation as a service, Slow Media, or the value of attention. All of these frameworks are actually describing the same thing—the exchange value of media. What the magazine really represents is a system of value. A marketplace for real status, and by extension dollars, if you’re lucky.
This is the reason every tech cycle since the release of the personal computer seems to reinvent the concept of the magazine. You can stand onstage and gesture at a magnesium block or wave your arms up and down and cry “we are the media now” but at the end of the day you still need a slot. A slot to put your attention in, a slot to put your money in, a slot to put your dreams in, and out comes status.
That slot, sorry to say, is not the computer. Yes, “there is money in the computer,” as the old programming joke goes. But there’s only status in the magazine. Why is there money in the computer? Because there are magazines on there. All sorts!
Some of them live on Substack, which is officially a unicorn. Others are on YouTube, like Joshua Citarella’s Doom Scroll. Though I’ve argued elsewhere that solo creators are more like vessels for taste than containers, I don’t think that a “magazine” strictly has to be text. If a media brand can come to signify a distinct point of view, it has the makings to be a status distributor. Regardless of your opinion on traditional media, three things have become abundantly clear:
The magazine, preferred buzzwords aside, exists because of the fundamental nature of the digital media ecosystem. The first creator is always a human, the final curator is always a human. In between is a vast bazaar of supplies and demands. This bazaar is currently incredibly inefficient.
It is inefficient because the internet hasn’t solved paying for media. It solved media distribution, immediately and irrefutably, but the times when the internet seemed to be a sustainable source of income for media brands were an illusion propped up by cheap venture dollars. (If you want to know more about that, check out Eddie Huang’s documentary Vice is Broke.)