Imagine you're online. Scrolling. What do you see? A straight line, mostly. A single path down an endless feed. Sure, you can swipe or scroll faster, but it's fundamentally a passive river of content flowing past you. Content that, at its peak, begs for a like, a quick reply, maybe a share. Let's be honest: most online content today is like Doritos – an instant hit of flavor, maybe satisfying for a second, but ultimately leaving you wanting something more substantial. It's disposable. Forgettable.

But does it have to be this way? We flock to games, right? Why? Because they're dynamic. We get attached to NPCs in sprawling worlds like Red Dead Redemption because they feel like they have a purpose, however limited. Content in games does something. It reacts, it progresses, it isn't stale. That's why we jump back onto the same Fortnite island again and again (well, that and our friends being there).

So, what happened with the content filling our feeds on Twitter, Farcaster, Bluesky, Lens, you name it? Text, static images, maybe a video. It all feels… the same. You have to wonder: has content peaked?

It definitely wasn't always like this. I firmly believe some of the biggest platforms we use today exploded because they dared to play with the very idea of content itself. Snapchat was a pioneer – text that vanishes? Simple, provocative, genius. Hello sexting. Then came Stories, a masterstroke that fundamentally rewired how we communicate visually. Hello oversharing. Hello brand collabs. Suddenly, everyone had stories to tell. TikTok wasn't far behind. What started as lip-syncing on Musically morphed into Duets – remember those wild, collaborative songs people mashing up? Pure creative energy sparked by a new format. And maybe the last big jolt was Clubhouse – just a room, just audio, but with the potential to jump in, participate, connect. The lesson? Content isn't just something to be consumed; it's an invitation for creators.

Hand creators a new content format, a new tool, and they will inevitably push it to limits you never imagined. Yeah, formulas emerge over time, things start looking similar. But new genres also blossom. Look at YouTube – it basically ate traditional TV's lunch. Netflix finished the job, ditching rigid timetables and constantly shattering old storytelling formats. Remember Bandersnatch? Innovation in the medium unlocks new possibilities. Unlocks new storytelling. Unlocks new formats itself.

So, if we want to think about the future of content, we need to think bigger – about the future of media itself, and our relationship to it. Where are we headed?

It’s actually pretty simple. We just got handed the wildest tool in the world: Generative AI. People are already conjuring up thousands of songs, videos, and images just with words and post them straight to their timelines. "Vibe coding" is becoming a real thing. While it's still emerging tech, the barrier to creating rich experiences is crumbling. Want an app for whatever is on top of your mind? Soon, it might just be a few prompts away. (Yes, okay, it needs polish. But look back just a couple of years, then project forward. The trajectory speaks for itself.)

And then there's the onchain world. We've seen content already starting to stretch its legs here. Farcaster introduced Frames – suddenly posts became mini-apps. Lens pushed Open Actions, letting you connect posts directly to onchain actions. See a cool new coin mentioned? Mint it right there in the feed. Bots like clankr and bankr show us how interaction can become a real conversation, embedded directly. This hints at the superpower of triggering complex actions through simple language in a feed.

Think about the biggest hurdles for anyone building something new online: launching an app and finding users. Crypto, for all its quirks, gives us some massive advantages out of the gate. Accounts? Wallet connect! Solved login. Built-in payment rails? Free infrastructure. That's already a game-changer. But what's still missing?

Let’s jump back to AI. Twitter (or X for the few that use that name) is probably ground zero for AI integrations right now. Searching with Grok? Honestly, it’s already way better. Using #askperplexity to get context? Super useful. AI is getting baked in everywhere. But here's the thing: it's mostly reactive. It adds to a post, comments on it, summarizes it – it doesn't fundamentally alter the media itself.

This is where our exploration with Bonsai comes in. What happens when we stop just layering things on top of media, and instead rethink the media itself? What if we deeply fuse content with the power of an LLM?

Imagine media that isn't static. Imagine media that is agentic – it has agency, it can act. Imagine media with its own memory, remembering who interacted with it and how, adapting organically based on your interactions. Media that doesn't just sit there. Media that lives. Media that is smart and dynamic to you, to its enviroment, ...

This is the dawn of Smart Media. Media designed to evolve through interaction. And this is a bigger provocation than it sounds. We're wired for the disposable hit – the rage bait or wholesomeness bait that gives us a momentary feeling before we scroll on. But once you inject intelligence into media, once the media itself remembers and changes, it inherently wants to be seen again. It has a reason to pull you back. This blows the doors wide open for entirely new kinds of social experiences.

And guess what? This suddenly makes the idea of owning digital content – yes, the infamous NFTs – make intuitive sense again. You don't just want to own it as a bookmark; owning unlocks interaction. Owning becomes the key to participating in its evolution.

So, media might start developing its own social graph. Bonsai just launched its first couple of templates – think of it like a creative terminal. Pick a template, define how you want your media to behave and interact, and launch it straight into a feed on Lens. Anyone can then engage with it, and the content responds, changes. It’s a bit abstract at first, maybe, until you touch it, because we simply aren't used to media that pushes back, that grows. Media that is not once and done, but here to grow with us.

Think about it this way: dig through the Internet Archive for an old news article. You quickly realize news often isn't static; it gets updated, corrected, expanded. But we rarely see that evolution happen transparently, and almost never is it directly shaped by user input in a meaningful way. Now, it can be. Content can start to curate itself. What happens when breaking news evolves based on input from users, weighted by their verifiable onchain reputation? Community notes, that become content by itself.

One of the moments that truly melted my brain about media was weirdly the launch of Kanye's album, The Life of Pablo. It dropped, but Ye wasn't finished. Over the next few days, tracks changed, mixes shifted, the music evolved post-release. For so long, I’d thought of released media as final, set in stone. That moment shattered the illusion. (I kind of still miss that first version, though!). But from then on, I couldn't shake the idea: media is not static anymore.

Our feeds are overflowing with content that needs revision, stuff that's outdated, commentary that aged poorly. It doesn't have to be like that. And if we can capture the history of media's evolution onchain? We get an incredible, verifiable trail of provenance. Evolving media that is verifiable – something that, in my mind, truly only works onchain.

This unlocks entirely new forms of IP. Bonsai launched a template called "Adventure Time," letting creators spin up simple text-based adventures right in the feed. You interact via comments, and the story unfolds, shaped by the community. Media could build its own fanbase. Media might eventually have its own wallet (Bonsai is an open SDK, after all). It could then not just curate its community but actively incentivize it.

The biggest shift, though, will be in our relationship with our feeds. When every piece of dynamic media becomes a gateway for deeper interaction, the entire feed transforms from a passive stream into a vibrant hallway of experiences. Media might even start to actively fight for real estate and attention based on its ability to engage and evolve.

This is an invitation for builders. This is an invitation for creators. This is an invitation for any user to not just stay passive on the sidelines anymore. Become part of something. Shape media and therefore the world around it. If these new forms of media are emerging, what new creator tools do we need? What novel form factors for experiencing this living content can we dream up? The beauty of launching this onchain, especially on a platform like Lens, is that we already have so many primitives ready to go: profiles, wallets, payments, social graphs, programmable rules. We have the foundation.

Bonsai is just getting started. It's early days, it's experimental, and yeah, it might look like a toy right now. But toys invite play. And the more we play, the more wild, unexpected, and groundbreaking things can emerge.

So, forget doomscrolling. Forget thinking the best we can hope for are slightly slicker apps embedded in our feeds. Think about what media could be. Media that's alive, that adapts to you, that evolves with its community. Don't just picture it in a feed; imagine it living in your group chats, powering new kinds of collaborative experiences. Think of media becoming more like mini-apps, launched instantly with the built-in network effects of a social feed – the comments, likes, and shares come for free.

All you need is to expect that media is more than a static jpg or gif. That media is an invitation for interaction together with everyone online. The tools are here. The time is now. Let's vibe code the hell out of the future social media.

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Disclaimer: I am a Bonsai Tokenholder and have been supporting Bonsai as part of my engagement with We3.co.