Bravo Johnson

@bravojohnson

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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?

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They’re still chasing efficiency when the market is demanding depth, originality, and trust—things top down can’t manufacture. People aren’t tuning out because the content isn’t efficient enough. They’re tuning out because they’re saturated, skeptical, and seeking irl on screen—not just chill. The idea that you could use LLMs to brute-force attention in a market already overloaded is a misread of the problem. We’re not in a “scale faster” era anymore. We’re in a trust recession. And you can’t automate your way out of that.

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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.

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A Follow Friday suggestion for those who appreciate long reads, systems thinking, and high-caliber wordsmith arts: @bravojohnson. His blog, Music in Phase Space, generously rewards deep-reading time and critical thinking skills. Tip for the word nerds: keep your dictionary + thesaurus at the ready. You'll make good use of them while you read.

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And a gold watch…

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To be honest, I wouldn’t try to automate some grand visionary mechanism. I’d just go straight for the money. If someone accumulates a billion dollars, you tax them down to $100 million—full stop. They’re still wildly rich—$100 million is generational wealth—but they don’t get to just keep compounding forever while society destabilizes. That’s it. No drama, no revolution, no algorithmic utopia—just a hard cap on runaway wealth. Keep ambition alive, but kill the endless compounding that destabilizes society. It’s simple, effective, and fair enough to move things forward without the mess.

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When the noise-to-signal ratio gets that bad, you have to question whether the whole system is worth maintaining. If most of what gets amplified as "disruption" is just manufactured urgency and performance, then maybe the little signal that does emerge isn't worth wading through all that static

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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.

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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

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This is the crypto endgame in miniature: take a genuinely revolutionary technology - programmable money, uncensorable networks, user-owned data - and somehow end up recreating every pathology of the system you were supposed to replace. It's like inventing the printing press and using it exclusively to hand-copy Bibles. It's like the Internet went backwards through evolutionary time and decided that AOL had the right idea all along.

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But somehow, in the most connected age in human history, we've accepted digital apartheid as inevitable. Your iPhone can't talk to Android in any meaningful way. Your Facebook data can't migrate to anywhere useful. Your Kindle books live and die in Amazon's walled garden like digital mayflies. Meanwhile, the rest of the economy operates on actual market principles. Your credit card works everywhere. Your phone calls reach everyone. Your shipping containers fit on any truck, train, or boat on Earth. This isn't technological limitation - it's deliberate technological vandalism in service of rent extraction.

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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.

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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.”

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

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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.

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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”

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

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

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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.

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