Bravo Johnson

@bravojohnson

160 Following

1031 Followers

Bravo Johnson pfp

We're still operating under the assumption that the bottleneck is production capacity rather than audience trust. But we've moved from an attention economy to a credibility economy. The scarcity isn't eyeballs anymore; it's genuine engagement and trust. The real question becomes: what does a higher per-unit quality look like?

0 reply

0 recast

6 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

The deeper issue: LLMs were conceived in the ZIRP era, designed for an economy of cheap capital and captive audiences – conditions now gone, especially in media. Companies spent that easy money flooding us with algorithmic slop, mistaking cheap capital for a license to brute-force culture. Now capital is expensive and audiences have left. Better execution won't fix this. The core problem was architected assuming infinite runway and tolerant audiences. The entire system is fundamentally flawed for today's reality. The irony is perfect: execs are not being replaced because AI is superior, but because the conditions that sustained them—ZIRP economics and a docile audience—have collapsed. AI isn’t the threat. The end of cheap capital is. And AI can’t fix that. The real problem isn’t cost—it’s quality and retention.

1 reply

2 recasts

8 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

Heuristic would be treating great men as noise in the system rather than signal. What we call "greatness" might actually be interference patterns—ego-driven disruption that creates turbulence but not necessarily progress. The subsidized personalities that generate heat but not necessarily light.

1 reply

1 recast

8 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

The 'great men’ are often chaotic forces who create unnecessary friction. We should automate their disruptive functions so we can evolve calmly toward true emergent intelligence without their drama. They’re obviously slowing us down with their pathos, and we need to clear the stage for something actually great to emerge

1 reply

0 recast

1 reaction

Bravo Johnson pfp

We're living through the great technological regression of the early 21st century. While the rest of civilization spent two centuries figuring out that interoperability is the engine of prosperity, Big Tech decided to cosplay as medieval barons. This is *precisely* backwards. The entire project of modernity - from standardized shipping containers to telephone networks to the electromagnetic spectrum itself - has been about creating universal protocols that let anyone talk to anyone, ship anything anywhere, plug into any socket. We figured out decades ago that artificial incompatibility is just economic vandalism dressed up as competitive advantage.

3 replies

3 recasts

18 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

Would you do unto others before they do unto you… for a million dollars?” “Well, maybe, yeah.” “Would you do it for a dollar?” “What kind of person do you think I am?” “Oh, we’ve already open-sourced your conscience. Now we’re just A/B testing price elasticity.”

0 reply

0 recast

5 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

Automate unto others before they automate you…and invoice them too.

0 reply

0 recast

1 reaction

Bravo Johnson pfp

Until then how about we pivot to creating ASMR unboxing videos of your codebase—Launching a Substack for your API documentation is the new 'musicians should play more live shows' — because if you can’t monetize your actual product, just grift retrospectives about why it failed, dressed up as 'thought leadership.'" Bonus nihilism: NFT your pivot deck. Your Series A pitch is now a limited-edition audiovisual experience. VIP tickets include a 1:1 Zoom where you cringe about CAC ratios. This the music industry’s here’s out $75 hoodie that costs $5 yo print. Our runway is 3 months but our Substack about our runway being 3 months just hit 1000 paid subs" - the content-ification of collapse is complete.

0 reply

0 recast

4 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

The next thing cannot be built by optimists. It needs yo built by defectors—at the very least: those who code trapdoors and those, who replace “user retention” with “user slippage”

0 reply

0 recast

2 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

Taste is the accumulation of thousands of micro-intuitions regarding position

0 reply

0 recast

3 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

It’s not doom in one dinosaur asteroid event but more like slow desertification

0 reply

0 recast

2 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

The value proposition with tech is that it was supposed to be free, or close to free. So, I understand the need to increase revenue, but I think that's probably going to break the social contract in the long run. The deal was, I barely had to pay for music, and I didn't have to pay for social. So it was okay to destroy whole sectors of the economy to do that, same with the press. But now, you want me to start paying for experiences that often feel degraded compared to what came before. The challenge is that many users, especially younger ones, have no memory of paying directly for these services. The moment you add friction , it’s like throwing sand at gear. It's probably not going to work.

0 reply

1 recast

6 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

You could say the current tech trend is all about “growing up in public.” But like Disney kid actors, most startups don’t actually do much growing up. They’re overly polished, brand-conscious, and obsessed with charisma over substance. They appeal to a narrow, self-referential crowd—mostly other tech people, investors, or startup tourists. To everyone else, they come off as obnoxious. The problem is that tech has adopted the same culture of adoration you see with Disney stars: a worship of precociousness, cuteness pretending to be maturity, and hype in place of depth. Everything gets over-produced, over-promoted, and carefully managed to seem “relatable,” but ends up feeling disconnected from reality.

1 reply

0 recast

3 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

Revenge of the writer

0 reply

0 recast

2 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

Any showrunner, TV writer, film writer, knows when they're cut a corner. And then it's just the amount of corners that you can get away with. The minimum viable amount of corners cut that you can get away. The remarkable thing about Andor is that Gilroy finds a way to go around each and every corner and find a solution — he reroutes the architecture of the show to solve every problem the long way, the hard way, and the right way. What Andor proves, maybe accidentally, is when audiences recalibrate their expectations and they will— it raises the floor. Suddenly, the algorithmic slop starts to feel like noise. You tune it out. With Zirp it made sense (in a cynical way) to flood the zone with disposable content and hope something stuck. But now, with capital more expensive and audience burnout the bar has risen. Slop doesn’t just underperform artistically — it’s starting to look like a bad investment. Gilroy didn’t just make great TV; he quietly exposed the rot of the current ROI

2 replies

1 recast

3 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

Today’s “creators” often romanticize rejection as if it automatically equals innovation, drawing a flattering parallel to the Impressionists, without earning it. That’s a kind of mythologized “struggle cosplay” — they imagine themselves as rebels, but often they’re not rebelling against anything substantive, and they’re certainly not bringing in new technique, ontology, or even deep formal inquiry. Just vibes.

1 reply

1 recast

2 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

Doing this now, probably because of early Andor withdrawal symptoms onset. I think Furst has got better with time. The early novels felt like he had the right moves, but they were slightly 1990s coloured, but the new stuff seems old and bitter, the heroism more incidental which is thoroughly enjoyable.

1 reply

0 recast

2 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

Real decentralization doesn’t scale the was boomers and millennials clutch their pearls. Both Boomers and Millennials have mythologized decentralization in their own ways - Boomers through their counterculture-turned-corporate idealism that promised liberation through technology but delivered concentrated power, and Millennials through blockchain evangelism and platform cooperativism that often recreates the very power structures they claim to dismantle. The uncomfortable truth is that true decentralization resists the efficiency, growth metrics, and scalability that our economic systems demand. It's messy, inefficient, contextual, and inherently limited by human social capacity - qualities antithetical to the venture capital model and quarterly growth expectations.

1 reply

0 recast

3 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

Gen X stays off the radar—and off the hook. Being ignored is a superpower; it’s how you keep agency without pressure or noise. The trade in is relevance for freedom

1 reply

0 recast

3 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp

Boomers resist the natural progression of aging, Millennials resist the end of zirp. Botox and YOLO interest rates are the equivalent of student loans for the soul

0 reply

0 recast

1 reaction