Chris Best

I definitely think we're in a time of profound change in media.

And my model of this is it's sort of a technologically driven change.

You know, the internet came along and smashed a lot of the existing business models for media and culture and created these massive new networks that are fantastically profitable businesses without necessarily replacing kind of the economic engine that sustained a lot of this stuff.

And anytime you have a, you know, in history, if you have a major sort of revolution in media or information technology, whether it's the internet or the television or the printing press, you often get kind of a period of unrest or a period of destabilization or a time of cultural churn as we sort of adapt to the new reality.

And I think we're in one of those times now.

what happens when you wire the whole world together into one internet and layering onto it.

Now you can, what happens when anybody can make all kinds of media with AI, when anybody, it's sort of like a,

were in the period of destabilization caused by technological change.

This is why I wanted to start Substack.

And in fact, I wasn't setting out to start a company when we started.

I was setting out to write an essay.

I was actually on sabbatical, taking some time off after my last company.

And I was writing this essay trying to outline my frustrations with the media economy on the internet along these lines.

And I felt at the time that it was already happening.

I felt I could look at

I would talk to people in 2017 and say, you know, I think Facebook and Twitter are driving us crazy.

And people would kind of go, ha, ha, ha, ha.

Yeah, maybe that's right.

But it didn't feel very serious.

And, you know, I'd say I think people are going to be willing to connect directly and subscribe to the voices they trust.