The Message Became the Medium
A revisitation series ahead of Cannes Lions: Bonin Bough
Cannes Lions is less than a month away.
Which means the internet is about to gather again on the French Riviera pretending it understands where culture is going.
Every year the conversations change.
Social.
Mobile.
Creators.
Web3.
The metaverse.
AI.
Different buzzwords.
Same rosé.
Same sunburn.
Recently, I started revisiting a series of interviews I filmed almost exactly ten years ago called Shingerviews.
At the time they felt slightly chaotic.
Loose.
Experimental.
A little too early.
In hindsight, they may have been documenting something much more important:
The emotional signals of the modern internet before we had language for them.
The first one I revisited was with my dear friend Bonin Bough.
Back then neither of us were fathers.
Now we speak on the phone often.
And yes… we still text.
Which feels strangely appropriate considering the conversation we had that day.
Because while the industry was obsessing over feeds and followers, Bonin quietly said something that now feels prophetic:
“People talk about the Facebook feed. But the other four out of five minutes are spent in messaging.”
At the time, it sounded like media commentary.
Now it sounds like the blueprint for modern life.
Because while brands obsessed over public performance, humanity quietly migrated somewhere else entirely.
Private spaces.
Text threads.
DMs.
WhatsApp groups.
Voice notes.
Tiny blinking bubbles carrying emotional infrastructure across the planet.
The internet didn’t become more social.
It became more intimate.
And almost nobody noticed it happening in real time.
That’s the strange thing about technological revolutions.
The biggest ones rarely announce themselves dramatically.
They arrive disguised as convenience.
Messaging wasn’t sold to us as a cultural shift.
It was sold as utility.
Faster communication.
Cheaper communication.
Simpler communication.
But underneath that utility, something much deeper was happening.
Messaging changed:
how we parent
how we flirt
how we fight
how we mourn
how we organize
how we work
how we remember
how we disappear
The message became the medium.
I remember Bonin asking one simple question during that interview:
“What’s the last thing you look at before bed — your partner or your phone?”
At the time it felt provocative.
Today it feels almost quaint.
Because the phone is no longer just a device.
It’s become emotional architecture.
Our memory.
Our map.
Our diary.
Our workplace.
Our camera.
Our witness.
Our nervous system.
And maybe that’s why revisiting these conversations feels so emotional.
Not because the predictions were “right.”
But because we were unknowingly documenting the early behavioral shifts of a world that now feels completely normal.
That’s the funny thing about the future.
The moment it arrives, it stops looking futuristic.
It just becomes life.
Ten years ago messaging felt secondary to social media.
Now messaging is social media.
Slack became work.
WhatsApp became infrastructure.
Discord became community.
Voice notes replaced phone calls.
DMs became commerce.
The feed shaped attention.
Messaging shaped behavior.
And now, quietly, another migration is happening.
Not from desktop to mobile.
But from communication… to companionship.
Because AI is entering the chat.
Literally.
Not as software.
As presence.
That’s the part I think many people still underestimate.
We discuss AI mostly through the lens of productivity:
faster images,
better summaries,
automated workflows,
smarter search.
But historically, technology becomes transformational the moment it stops feeling like technology.
And starts feeling relational.
The smartphone didn’t win because it was powerful.
It won because it became personal.
Now AI is crossing that same threshold.
People are already:
confessing to it
grieving with it
brainstorming with it
arguing with it
depending on it
falling asleep talking to it
Which raises a much bigger question:
If messaging reshaped human behavior…
What happens when the thing on the other side of the message is no longer human?
That feels less like a software update.
And more like a species event.
Maybe that sounds dramatic.
But ten years ago, the idea that messaging would become the dominant layer of human interaction also sounded dramatic.
Now it’s invisible.
Normalized.
Embedded into the rhythm of modern existence.
That’s how the future tends to arrive.
Quietly first.
Then suddenly everywhere.
The impossible yesterday becomes infrastructure tomorrow.
And eventually…
we stop noticing it altogether.
Maybe that’s the real value of revisiting these old Shingerviews ahead of Cannes.
Not nostalgia.
Archaeology.
A reminder that behavior always reveals the future before language catches up to describe it.
The signal is rarely hidden.
We’re usually just too distracted by the noise.
Come walk with us:
So good!!!