Media isn’t a monolith. It isn’t a machine. It’s a living thing. Complex, adaptive, messy, self-regulating, and sometimes self-destructive. It moves like weather, not like clockwork. And that’s the first mistake a lot of people make—assuming you can control it.

You don’t control a living system. You influence it. You nudge it. You listen to it breathe and then move with it, not against it.

Media evolves. Not because someone at the top decides to flip a switch, but because millions of micro-decisions accumulate into cultural tides. A hashtag mutates. A meme jumps platforms. A comment section catches fire and suddenly a movement has a mouthpiece. It isn’t strategy; it’s emergence. A flock of birds turns midair and nobody is in charge.

And when media becomes complex adaptive, old playbooks collapse. Legacy outlets that used to set the agenda find themselves chasing it instead. Editors used to decide what mattered. Now they’re reacting to what the swarm has already deemed important. Feedback loops, not editorial meetings, drive momentum. We’ve gone from cathedral to bazaar to swarm.

This makes it harder to fake it. Manufactured consensus crumbles faster. Astroturf gets trampled under real grassroots. Not always, not everywhere, but more than before. And it’s why influence isn’t about broadcasting louder. It’s about seeding nodes, listening for uptake, adjusting in real time. Like a mycelial network, not a megaphone.

If you treat media like a machine, you end up trying to fix it with wrenches. But if it’s a garden, you learn to prune, to compost, to wait out the seasons. You plant ideas knowing they might not sprout for years. You cultivate curiosity. You stop assuming causality and start watching for patterns. It’s not about hacking the algorithm. It’s about feeding the soil.

Maybe the question isn’t "How do we win the narrative?" Maybe it’s "How do we make the soil richer so better stories can grow?"

But you didn’t hear that from me.

You felt it.

The system told you. And you adjusted. Like everything else that survives.