I missed last week.
Not because I put my brain down.
But because I put my phone down.
I wanted to be present.
To be deliberate.
To be more thoughtful with the people I was with, not the pixels I was flipping through.
Forgive me for the lateness of this one.
Sometimes the best inspiration comes from silence.
From Philosophy to Execution
We’ve crossed the line where ideas lived only in decks and manifestos.
We’re in the age where dreams materialize in seconds.
Tools have caught up to imagination or maybe they’re catching us off guard.
Every conversation, every experiment, every what if becomes a why not almost instantly.
The big platforms — the same 18 gravity wells that hold the world’s attention, now have the mandate to experiment for us. They’ve turned the feed into a laboratory.
But that experimentation is designed to hold, not to liberate.
And yet… something else is stirring beneath the noise.
A Familiar Feeling
Lately, I’ve felt a pulse that’s deeply familiar.
Like the late 1990s.
Before the algorithms.
When the web was weird, joyous, messy, human.
Back then, experimentation was the default setting.
We celebrated the fast fail.
We didn’t optimize for performance; we improvised for possibility.
It wasn’t about scale. It was about the soundtrack of the new internet — the genres we were inventing in real time.
The internet then was expensive, clunky, and slow.
Building anything felt like crawling through wet cement.
That’s why words like agility, speed, and delivery became gospel.
We designed for velocity because velocity was rare.
We optimized for efficiency because inefficiency was our daily reality.
But those constraints forced creativity to be inventive, weird, and wonderfully human.
Back then, experimentation wasn’t a strategy deck.
It was the only way to move forward.
The Subtle Shift
Now, the internet hums at the speed of thought.
But the design challenge isn’t speed anymore.
This moment is not about interfaces, it’s about interaction.
It’s less about user experience and more about user perception.
The difference is subtle.
But it’s everything.
We’re not chasing clicks. We’re cultivating trust.
Because with trust comes permission.
With permission comes experimentation.
And with experimentation, the kind born of intimacy, not interruption — we can actually create something useful.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Just because something is used more doesn’t make it useful.
Today, in whispers, it’s happening again.
Quiet. Intimate. Already scaled, but not shouting.
The Subtle Web isn’t loud.
It doesn’t scream innovation.
It hums.
The Grand Promises Faded
Web3 roared in like a rock opera and left like elevator music.
AI burst onto the stage like a headliner, but what’s interesting isn’t the spectacle. It’s the afterparty.
The beauty of this next phase of the internet is its subtlety.
It’s less about the mass moment and more about the micro connection.
Our job as brand builders is no longer just to populate the feed —
It’s to populate the fabric of this new digital space with intimacy.
The Illusion of Attention
The attention economy has always been the battlefield.
But what if attention isn’t the prize anymore?
With the launch of new platforms creating hyperreal, synthetic human executions at scale, we’re entering a new kind of theatre. One where distraction is infinite, engagement is performative, and intimacy is rare.
Synthetic moments may captivate.
But they will never connect.
True connection will belong to the subtle.
The deliberate.
The brave few who choose craft over automation.
That’s harder.
That’s more deliberate.
That’s where the value is.
A Street-Level Reminder
This week, walking through New York,
I saw ads for Friend AI necklace graffitied, defaced, made human.
I saw campaigns from Claude and ChatGPT, featuring real people, shot by real creatives, with the kind of production scale and cultural craft usually reserved for fashion houses and soft drinks.
These are AI companies.
And they’re using human ingenuity to make their stories land.
That’s not a contradiction.
That’s permission.
By all means use AI as a partner in the process.
But trust human imagination to deliver the punchline.
The connection.
The thing that sticks.
The Return of the Playground
I’ve been having conversations lately that sound like they did 20 years ago.
Not about “efficiency” or “scale,”
but about what’s possible.
The tools are better.
The playground is bigger.
And the sandbox is once again open to the weird, the intimate, the human.
This new internet isn’t waiting for permission.
It’s already here.
Quietly.
Such a positive and provocative commentary on AI -