If you zoom out, the media evolution of the last two decades looks like time-lapse footage of a city being rebuilt on the same land every ten years.

Each new layer doesn’t replace the old—it compresses, condenses, and reinterprets it for a new medium.

Top Layer

Top layer is where production cost is high and starts disruption in the traditional industry, when corporate brands and politicians start flocking in. This always starts with bottom layer. Once it becomes standardized and the audience matures, it'll move up to this layer.

Bottom Layer

The bottom is where new technology enable amature culture to experiment for fun. That's where youth culture emerges. That layer is when new entrants should explore for discoverability.

Let’s take the tour.

🕹 1995 – 2005 | The Digital Awakening

Top layer: Pixar. The Matrix. The peak of “digital cinema.” Creative energy was concentrated in the few who had render farms and budgets. Hollywood was the internet’s cathedral.

Bottom layer: the primordial web.

GeoCities, Flash, GIFs, 4chan, DeviantArt—the chaotic bazaar. Laptops became affordable, broadband arrived, and the U.S. (plus Japan’s early Docomo web) birthed the first user-generated visual culture.

It was still typed. Text was the medium; images were seasoning.

🎥 2005 – 2015 | The Age of the Handheld Creator

Top: Hollywood perfected digital filmmaking. The production cost skyrocketed with digital production outsourced from Hollywood to places like Toronto and Mumbai. Examples are Iron Man. Avengers. CGI confidence.

Bottom: a camera in every hand.

Digital cameras and YouTube democratized production.

The new creative class was one person and a lens—monologues, eye contact, shaky authenticity.

Podcasts emerged as the thinking person’s medium and intellecutal intimacy, while Twitter condensed attention into 140 characters.

This decade was about finding a voice—literal and textual.

🌐 2015 – 2025 | The Platform Decade

Top: Distribution went global. Netflix funded small studios from Tokyo anime studios to Mexican film producers. YouTube channels became studios of 50 employees with 10 million subscribers. X (aka Twitter) replaced press releases; governments announced policy in 280 characters. Advertising budgets followed attention, and influencers replaced anchors.

Bottom: short-form video broke up YouTube—TikTok, (YouTube Shorts emerged as a response)—optimized the dopamine cycle: 15–60 seconds, fast cuts, music, emotion. Emoji became business language; even politicians spoke in pictograms.

The world learned to perform itself.

🔮 2025 – 2035 | The Synthetic Renaissance

The next decade will look less like social media and more like synthetic media infrastructure.

Creation scales from human hours to compute cycles.

1. The New “Top”

YouTube → Cinema 2.0.
Top creators will run 30-person studios producing 60- to 90-minute films—1/10 the cost and time of Hollywood, using Veo and Sora. It'll reduce the production cost of feature film from 3000 teams (as it was for Avatar) to 300, radically improving time-t0-market speed.

TikTok → Condensed Knowledge.

4-minute explainers will replace 20-minute YouTube tutorials, reviews, and lectures. Expect charts, captions, and charisma. TikTok becomes the new search engine for practical education.

AI Hosts.

ChatGPT-class models will replace “industry blogs” and guest podcasts. AIs will debate each other: “Claude said this; GPT rebutted that.”

AI-Podcast Fusion.

Human guests are slow and expensive. Expect podcasters leasing AI versions of guests—or guests pre-recording data and letting their AI speak.

Discovery Platforms.

Just like the early App Store, AI platforms will temporarily offer organic reach.

Then they’ll close the gates and monetize discovery.

Corporate Video Evolution.

LinkedIn professionals will start, TikTok-style—professional, but cinematic. Jump cuts, emotion, acting, dressing up, heavy captions, not talking heads.

Product Demos.

Gone: 10-minute Loom walkthroughs. In: 15- to 60-second branded micro-trailers with jump cut similar to TikTok. Showing app/SaaS UI will offer zero value. What  becomes is lifestyle advertising like Apple's famous commercial from 1984.

On-chain Identity.

Fifteen years after blockchain’s birth, a real “Facebook moment” for identity will arrive—finally linking reputation to cryptographic reality, slowly replacing Linkedin/Facebook accounts for Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha.

2. The New “Bottom”

AI-First Video.

Symbolic, 5-15 seconds, laptop-generated—an art-niche more than mass culture.

AI Art → Emoji 2.0.

Auto-generated emotion bursts integrated into chat and text box at OS level.

AR/VR ↔ TikTok.

For youth creativity and amatuer culture, TkTok is already outdated. Young creators will be here. Filming emotional moment is time consuming and non effective. Just show the face with giant AI-made tear.

Expressive overlays—crying filters, comic exaggeration—become the new memes.

Micro Action Camera → Instagram.

Filming with phones will feel primitive; Meta Glass will be the one capturing the spontaneity of ordinary life particularly centered on sports/actions oriented (no more food photos plsss).

Personal Blogs → LLM Nodes.

Long-form essays written with AI won’t live for readership but for indexability.

You’ll write so LLMs can quote you, not humans.

Corporate Blogs: Dead.

Template content farms lose to AI summarization.

IG Stories: Dormant.

The “look-at-my-lunch” era is over. Stories will be dominated by brands with high quailty images to communicate with their existing followers just like Substack for X influencers. A new, friends-only short-video format will fill that private-life gap.

For the nowness diary format, it'll be videos which no such platform exists yet. We'll need to add AI to auto edit the crappy videos you take for fun and engaging (photo filter made amatuer photos look professional => Instagram took off). Video filming for amature is still too hard (holding hands steady, filming mulitple shots, etc).

⚰️ Obituaries

Talking-head authenticity videos.

Outdated. Audiences want motion, emotion, density, and editing. No value in showing your face.

Five-minute product walkthroughs.

It'll be two tiers. The top of the funnel makreitng tier will be done by fun heavily edited video with little UI display, which is later directed to interactive, AI-guided interactive onboarding demo.

SEO-driven long-form corporate blogs.

Outranked by LLMs trained on their content. There's no place for non-edge professional content. The information density is just too low.

Casual selfies.

Replaced by cinematic self-portraits and AR-attached storytelling on top of the real life.

🧭 The Pattern Behind the Noise

Every ten years, format compresses and distribution expands.

1995 → text to image.
2005 → video democratized.
2015 → social optimized.
2025 → creation synthesized.

The next medium isn’t a new camera or app.

It’s the automation of performance—turning creative instincts into programmable assets.

We’re entering an era where anyone can run a studio—but only the few will design emotions at scale.