The Middleware of Posting Online:
Posting is serious business, and if you consider Mr. Beast not as the final boss but the first final boss, you can see how posting is only going to become more and more valuable. Then consider things like artificial intelligence and the phenomenon described as slop.
Think about your favorite poster. The handful of posters that make you think different, reveal interesting new threads to pull, or bring a sense of brevity to your day-to-day that you would sorely miss. Could they be automated to the point of slop? Probably not. Meaning their value will not remain stagnant. With some outperformed by automation and others never in competition with it.
Whom I'm speaking to in this essay are the latter: the software and/or media creatives who have unique visions and the will to see them through. The millennials and zoomers who did not get swept up in the system and, thanks to the internet, have developed into just the kind of demographic needed in the coming economic era.
My current framework is calling this demographic "posters." Simply derived from the first principles of data availability in that you either are posting data or calling data, and a software or media creative is posting. Posting so much that it changes their lives and potentially others.
We do not truly know the positive externalities of posting. It is still a relatively new concept within the relatively new concept of creator economy. The behavior less so, but the network effects certainly.
And as a poster myself, I feel relatively comfortable in saying that media repositories are not very much aligned with the divergence of a seemingly illogical creative mind. Even the best media caches, Pinterest, X, Instagram, have become eroded with overzealous advertising models. They still work phenomenally for posting data, but they are not very good at the steps leading up to the post.
To me and to other creatives I know, this is a seemingly insignificant axis that leads to what I believe will be significant product divergence.
I do not believe we are in the time where legacy social platforms are out-competed. Instead, I believe that a middleware layer, thanks to agentic coding and a dramatic price decrease in computational resources, is now open for engagement with the very necessary software and media creative demographics entering the economy.
