Same as it ever was
Traffic is a random gift. Affinity is earned. Give generously, earn permission, then capture value without getting cynical.
Sean Taylor Notes Index
A discovery index for 95 public notes published at notes.seantaylor.work. This page points crawlers, answer engines and curious humans toward the canonical notes archive without duplicating the articles.
- attention and distribution 48
- product strategy 37
- culture and creativity 37
- AI and agents 36
- playful media 34
- meme 1
- pugc 1
- punk playthings 1
Signal Versus Slop
AI can make 1,000 things. The advantage belongs to organisations that can learn from them.
Liquid Assets
World Cup hydration breaks manufacture six minutes of captive advertising inventory in every match. $300K × 832 in-game commercials = $249.6M!
Mythos and Marshmallows
AI adoption is becoming a marshmallow test for companies. Eat now or protect future leverage? There is no clean answer, just a sliding door.
The Algorithmic Land of Toys
Om Malik reads Pinocchio as a map of ambient deception. The feed is the Land of Toys.
User Generated Culturematics
Denisha Kuhlor, The Time is Now For Artists to Launch their Own APIs: Every day the competition for consumer attention becomes more difficult. The increase in attention deficit has directly correlated with a...
YouTube is the carousel
The late, great Steve Albini, inadvertently describing YouTube: There are active online communities for every kind of music and its subcultures. Whether you’re into Dusty’s Deep Cut reggae, minimal electroni...
Slop Making Sense
Ben Thompson on Sharp Tech: People in Silicon Valley are obsessed with productivity.
Culturematic collateral
Ben Thompson, in YouTubers Win the Box Office, Goodbye Gatekeepers, The YouTube Bar, writing about two of the hottest movies this week Backrooms by Kane Parsons and Obsession by Curry Barker being directed b...
Patronage as problem solving
Ben Thompson, discussing The Acquired podcast and its innovative business model: I go back to Daring Fireball back in the day, and say: 'Hey, the guy who invented feed ads was John [Gruber].'
Anticipatory Experiences
Ben Thompson discussing his experience with Meta Ray Ban Display: AI is absolutely the killer feature for these glasses, although the current experience is lacking. Not only is it still based on Llama, but i...
Blue Dot Fever
What happens when "consumer tolerance for rising ticket prices has become untenable"?
Rage Against The Machine
Brian Roemmele talking about The Ghost in the Machine: How Player Pianos Sparked Protests, and What They Reveal About Our AI Future: The rage against the machine advertisement, 1930.
Et tu, ustwo?
A quite incredible interview with Ustwo Games CEO Maria Sayans Speaking to Game Developer at London Games Fest a few months after the company said it would be pivoting away from mobile because the platform n...
Stop Making Sense
Peter Flint discussing how functional AGI is already here: Something has changed. We are calling it “functional AGI.”
Crash
Joost van Dreunen on how the Romeros take that the current games industry crash is 'crashier' than the 1980s crash: Their read on the industry's emotional temperature is correct. The worry is real, the layof...
The declining commodities market
Owen Mahoney: writing about Hippie Snobs: The dirty secret about differentiation, like all innovation, is that it is extremely uncomfortable. We humans are creatures of evolution. Until very recently, going...
Garbage In, Garbage Out
Jonathan Libov: Odd thought: There's never been less of a monoculture and yet everything feels far more homogenous
The world is a museum of passion projects
John Collison: As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requ...
20 Project Management Lessons
Scott Berkun's 20 Project Management lessons of all time: 1. Everything is a project. Every activity or goal in life can be framed as one. If you master how projects work you can master your life. 2. The thr...
Tasteless
Eric Seufert writing about distribution and the human attention premium: I've seen it claimed that "taste" will be the determinant of success in an era of mass produced AI content because it will allow for q...
I learnt that from John
This is such a thoughtful, insightful and humble 1996 interview with Steve Jobs about Pixar. It's great to be reminded of some core principles: Invest in people then ideas. A leader's job: create the conditi...
Taste Test
Gordon Ramsay speaking on the High Performance podcast: I have a different technique with young chefs today I teach them how to taste first before I teach them how to cook because they don't understand how i...
Distribution, content, attention...in that order
Ben Thompson, discussing Netflix and the Hollywood End Game: Warner Bros. started with distribution. Just after the turn of the century, Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner bought a second hand projector and...
The drama of the unfolding conversation
A wonderful Conversations with Tyler with Dan Wang, with the most prescient observation on the future of media saved for the end:
Superlative adulations rewiring cultural expectations
The brilliant W. David Marx observing that Our Geniuses Define Our Times: "Fastball down the middle" is a pretty good metaphor for a Taylor Swift song. The fastball is the most common pitch, which goes exact...
Atomic Economics
Sangeet Paul Choudary on designing an AI first economies, the dangers of being locked into legacy atomic units of value and how building around fundamentals different atomic units of value unlock new sources...
The Taylor Swift Data Fallacy
The Entertainment Strategy Guy: The Taylor Swift Data Fallacy : When the most popular celebrity, creator or piece of IP in one genre or medium switches to a new genre or medium, and then their work succeeds....
Alt MBA: Atari Edition
Nolan Bushnell on Atari, 50 Years Later: HTG : So let’s go the opposite way now. What did you do “wrong” at Atari that people could learn from today?
Meme machines
Sam Lessin writing in his weekly newsletter (2025 09 20):
Advice on advice
An excellent short essay on advice from Michael Karnjanaprakorn: Don't ask for advice if you're really just looking for permission. The only advice worth seeking is the kind that might actually change your m...
Anecdotal aphorisms
Ian Leslie: The experience led Bezos to coin an aphorism: "When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right."
The Diderot Effect
The brilliant Ian Leslie on the Diderot Effect and the problem of high ideological consistency: There are only a few ready made identities to choose from, and their internal consistency is fiercely enforced...
Gimme friction, baby
In a world where everything is free and nothing is valued, what if friction is your feature?
Authenticity is a Con: Rolling Stones Edition
The Rest Is History: 558: The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1), 21 Apr 2025: And for me, Andrew Lou Goldham's genius as a manager is having started out thinking I will make them like the...
Self-care slop
Alex Danco at this thought provoking best on Dialectic: Self care is a real sort of hedonistic treadmill. Ultimately, I think self care is a kind of slop. It doesn't feel like it at the time. It feels like,...
✱ Understanding (post-industrial) playful media
Grant McCracken, writing in Culturematic, offers a deceptively simple insight: Reality TV still has producers, directors, and writers, but they matter much less. Their job is to manage the start conditions,...
Super-position personalities
Dominic Cummings: And of course many politicians develop weird super position personalities, where they sort of know and sort of lie to themselves such than an impartial observer can rarely conclude either ‘...
Triggers for tradeoffs
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions. There are only trade offs.
✱ Unintended consequences and the antifragile imagination
D.A Wallach discussing drug development: So you have to think about delivering to the right place. You have to think about the drug actually working when it gets there. You have to be cognizant of all the ot...
But is it art?
Andy Warhol: You know it's art, when the check clears
User Generated Convenience
Mark Zuckerberg discussing the black box: I mean, obviously, it’ll always be the case that they can come with a suggestion or here’s the creative that they want, especially if they really want to dial it in....
✱ The Quiet Contempt of Cupertino
Apple is famous for delighting customers and infamous for squeezing suppliers. But when developers are both, Apple picks the wrong side.
Imitation → mutation → innovation
Miles Davis: First you imitate, then you innovate.
Create contexts that compound
Kevin Kelly: A steady stream of human attention and thought is applied to inventing new tools, devising new amusements, and creating new wants. But no matter how small and inconsequential, each innovation is...
Feel flows
Chris Pedregal discussing building Granola.ai: My personal approach, you can boil down most great product thinking and design to a very simple question, which is when you use a product, when you look at it,...
Old man doesn't yell at clouds
So much timeless advice from Steven Soderbergh, it's refreshing to see someone so experienced continue to be reflective an curious. Or, in his own words, "I feel like the cockroach of the industry, like ther...
The Simplifier
Paul Stansik on simplifiers and complicators: Most good strategy is about overcoming obstacles. And the quicker you point the obstacle out, the clearer the path around it becomes.
Satisficer's Regret
Eric Seufert : “Black box” ad optimization and satisficer’s regret
(P)UGC in the AI Era
Peter Kooman discussing AI Horseless Carriages: I noticed something interesting the other day: I enjoy using AI to build software more than I enjoy using most AI applications — software built with AI. When I...
Speculation is imagination with action
Jacob Horne : Speculation is imagination with action.
The Gen X(box) problem
Roger Mitchell, discussing the dangers of sport trying to be something for everyone rather than optimising itself for a specific sub culture and their needs and wants: I think rather than this neither fish n...
Free or expensive: why not both?
Stewart Brand : Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine too cheap to meter. It wan...
How does it feel?
Karen X Cheng : Opening Instagram doesn’t make me feel good anymore. I’ve lost control over my feed. Instagram used to be a place where I could get inspired by the artists I chose to follow. I decided what I...
The meme is the message
Jacob Horne speaking with Jackson Dahl on Episode 09 of Dialectic: <p Jacob:</p What is a meme?
Don’t solve problems; seek opportunities
Kevin Kelly : "Don’t solve problems; pursue opportunities."
Authenticity is a con
John Gruber : On <a href "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v RxlopbcfXpQ" this clip from his show this weekend</a , Maher reports on the dinner. What it was like. What <em Trump</em was like. Turns out, in priv...
Tanpin Kanri
Bloomberg Business Week , Japan Perfected 7 Eleven. Why Can’t the US Get It Right ?: In Japan, which is much smaller, the chain relies on a robust supplier network, where inventory and food preparation take...
China is the AWS of manufacturing
Ben Thompson : China is the AWS of manufacturing. You go there and it scales up, scales down, is flexible, can do whatever you want. It turns out that’s really valuable. And that’s what makes this whole syst...
Calcified complexity
Ben Thompson : the current economic system, flawed though we may now recognize it to be, is a complex system, built up over decades; one ought to be very wary in remaking complex systems in a top down manner...
Jobs of the future
“...men of speculation, whose trade it is not to do anything, but to observe everything; and who, upon that account, are often capable of combining together the powers of the most distant and dissimilar obje...
(P)UGC
John Carmack gets it: I think you are misunderstanding what this tech demo actually is, but I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and...
Triggers for experiences
Brian Eno : Stop thinking about art works as objects and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. What makes a work of art good for you is not something that s already inside it but something t...
Cultural collide-o-scope
Ian Leslie : The creators of Adolescence have taken those concerns and, with considerable skill, distilled them into a fissile isotope packed with explosive cultural energy.
Culture and collateral
David Golding : Our industry will split into two types of company, which will set out to create two very different things. The first will work to create culture through campaigns that generate fame, talk abi...
Strong opinions, loosely held
John Maynard Keynes : When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?
The aestehticising vice
Paul Seabright : In the Languedoc there is a vineyard that teaches us an important lesson about textbook learning and its application to the world. In the early Seventies it was bought by a wealthy couple, w...
The art of attention
Brian Eno : Attention is what creates value. Artworks are made as well by how people interact with them – and therefore by what quality of interaction they can inspire. So how do we assess an artist who we s...
Worldbuilding and antifragility
Alex Danco : The main idea here was: the more complex or valuable is whatever you’re trying to [accomplish], the more important it is for you to build a world around that idea, where other people can walk in...
Any way you want it, that's the way you need it
Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech \(06 March 2025\): Any industry defined by its medium makes no sense on the internet….I try to do this on my own small scale with Stratechery…you can listen to it as a podcast or you...
The McLuhan is the Message
Régis Debray on Marshall McLuhan: I would qualify him more as a poet than a historian, a master of intellectual collage rather than a systematic analyst.
✱ Credibility & Complacency
John Gruber on the Apple Intelligence shambles and the undeniable fact that Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino : <p In broad strokes, there are four stages of “doneness” or “realness” to features...
Three is a magic number
Marty Cagan on A Vision for Product Teams : So if I’m right, over the next 3 10 years we’ll continue to see the average product team drop from something like 8 people (6 engineers, a product manager and a pr...
Finite and Infinite Boundaries
James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: "Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries."
Ads as attention levers
Viewers say they hate ads, but they choose the cheaper ad tier. For Netflix, ads are becoming levers for reach, frequency and attention.
Authenticity is a Con: Synthetic Social Signals
Clipping does not fake popularity so much as manufacture the early signals that make popularity possible.
Bad Jokes Told Well
A bad joke told well can beat a good joke told badly. The same is true of music, games and playful experiences: context is part of the work.
Bad Santa Runs An Oil Company
Taylor Sheridan's pitch for Landman is familiar but fresh. No deck, no lore, no market map. You can see it straight away.
Bullets before cannonballs
title: Bullets before cannonballs link: bullets before cannonballs meta description: How Adidas and Nike’s World Cup campaigns show why modern brand building is less bullets versus cannonballs than bullets b...
Loops of Fury
How clipping turns songs, scenes and memes into feedback loops where discovery comes unbundled from the thing being discovered.
Losing My Edge
Cannes Lions used to be where agencies and marketers traded cultural capital. Now its about losing its edge to creators.
Monsters and Mirrors
AI models are not monsters, just reflections of the people, data and institutions that shape them.
No Console For Old Men
Grey gamers are growing, but the opportunity is not nostalgia hardware. It is short-session, long-arc amusements for lapsed players who still understand games.
Oxygen For Ideas
Ideas do not get better in private. They need usage, audience and oxygen.
Personality Drives Distribution
meta_description: Performance creates credibility. Personality converts it into cultural collateral.
Pop Slop and Parasocial Playthings
Parasocial feeds create demand for people-shaped amusements. Some of it is slop, but empty calories still compete for appetite.
Pretending on Purpose
Meccha Chameleon works because it is less about hiding well than giving players a reason to be funny, silly and creative together.
The Accidental Slop Machine
Tweetie made refreshing the feed feel alive. Pull-to-refresh did not invent slop, but it gave the feed a handle to pull.
The Constant Gardener
AI knowledge work is starting to look less like making and more like gardening: creating the conditions where good things can grow.
The Pheromone System
AI can make 1,000 things. The advantage belongs to organisations that can learn from them.
The Right to Disappoint You
Bob Dylan’s liberalism was not abstract politics. It was self-invention under pressure: the right to disappoint people who think they own your previous self.
The Scarce Thing Is Not Output
As production gets cheaper, making more stuff stops being the interesting bit. The scarce thing is the container people want to keep returning to.
Unintended Ozempic Consequences
GLP-1 drugs suppress appetite. But they may also make consumers more discerning.
Wheels of Fortune
Are Anthropic and OpenAI building flywheels or hamster wheels?
Wheels of Fortune
Are Anthropic and OpenAI building flywheels or hamster wheels?