Authority used to be the organizing principle of information, and thus the media. You earned attention by being right, by being first in discovery, or by being big enough to be the default. That world is gone. The new and current organizing principle of information is velocity.
What looks like cultural choice is often the echo of infrastructure.
The meme has become the metastory, the layer where meaning is carried. You don’t need to read the thing; you just need the gist, compressed and passed along in a sentence, an image, or a joke. It has taken the role of the headline. The machine accelerates this dynamic. It demands constant material; stop feeding it and the whole structure shakes. The point of the internet now is mostly to hook attention and push it toward commerce, to keep the engine running. Anyone can get their cut. We built machines that prize acceleration and then act puzzled that everything feels rushed and slightly manic. People do what the network rewards. Writers write for the feed. Photographers shoot for the scroll. Newsrooms frame stories as conflict because conflict travels faster than nuance. Even our emotional lives adapt to latency and refresh cycles. The design of the network becomes the choreography of daily life. The algorithm is the culture. It decides what gets amplified, who gets to make a living, and what counts as “success.” Decades ago the media sage Marshall McLuhan summed it up in his timeless phrase, “The medium is the message.” The medium, the technology or channel of communication, influences society and individuals more profoundly than the content, altering our senses and habits and, in turn, our perception, interaction, and culture. The only difference is that network is like a hydra, and data is the fuel that adds velocity, the new metric of perceived reality.— Read on om.co/2026/01/21/velocity-is-the-new-authority-heres-why/
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