If you ever needed an example of the increasing importance of personal brands in the AI era, I’ve got a whopper. 

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed something that construction professionals and jewelry makers on Etsy have in common: they’re always looking out for better ways to sort and store their small parts. This seems to be a universal struggle for anyone who makes or repairs things — whether it’s their job or hobby.

You would think this is a solved problem by now. It’s just a plastic box with plastic boxes inside of it. You can go into a big box store and find small parts organizers for as low as $5 on sale. 

If you want one that’s made from materials that won’t eat away at your parts over time, you may pay around $20. 

If you want one that will survive years of working under harsh conditions at outdoor job sites, you’ll pay $50 to $70.

But if you want the Adam Savage signature model box, it’ll cost you $120 plus shipping — if it’s in stock.

Often, it’s out of stock and eBay sellers list it for around $200. It sells out fast at both prices. This is why you are limited to 10 boxes when ordering at Adam’s website. He’s trying to discourage resellers.

Adam has spent decades cultivating an audience. These days he makes YouTube videos in his personal workshop, where he makes stuff — anything he feels like at the moment. His videos are not flashy. He speaks openly and honestly about life, career, hobbies, failures, successes, and parenting.

This has built so much trust with his audience over the years, that he can command up to $200 for a plastic box.

This is extraordinary when you consider the needs of 90% of his audience could likely be met by a $5-$20 box from a big corporate brand, without limitations on order size and without added shipping charges.

This is why personal brands are not only a real thing, they are the realest thing right now.

People pay for a narrative. People pay based on trust and relationships. 

The biggest companies on Earth are trying desperately to automate this kind of trust into existence right now, under faceless brands. How do you think that’s going to turn out?

I’m kinda proud of the stars we’ve been bringing to our salon series here at Indiana University since 2021. And there are none I’m more excited to welcome than Helen Nissenbaum, who will be here on Tuesday to speak both in person and on Zoom. The title of her talk is “Why Obfuscation is (still) Needed (more than ever).”

Helen is the North Star of personal privacy—a role she earned by changing how the whole field understands what privacy is: specifically, that it’s not about secrecy or control, but about appropriate information flows. This was detailed in her landmark book, Privacy in Context, : Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, and backed by her work on practical tools such as the Adnauseum browser extension.

Her day job is as Professor of Information Science and the founding director of the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech. Visit that page to get a small sense of her range of involvements and influences.

Helen has been an influence on my own privacy work, most notably with MyTerms. If privacy matters even a fraction as much to you as it does to me, come or tune in to her talk, and be prepared with questions.

That’s next Tuesday at 4 pm Eastern. You can register and join the crowd here.

Or click on this to put it on your calendar:

David Weinberger once said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people.” It’s the future now, and he was right, or close enough. Because today we live in a world where the power to publish and distribute no longer belongs just to institutions, but to everybody. Me included. Here are some stats for this very blog:

At its peak, this blog had dozens of thousands of visitors daily. But that was in the ’00s, when blogging was a small pond, and I was a large fish in it. That was also when big newspapers and broadcast networks were still mountain ranges on the media landscape. Now those mountains have worn down to hills amidst fresh volcanoes: stars new and old, gushing out “content” on podcasts, social media, YouTube, and the rest. They’re the ones with readers, viewers, followers, and subscribers in the dozens of millions.

While that’s interesting, the media landscape has widened exponentially as millions of consumers have also become producers. In sum, their flow is immense: far larger than what we get from the old hills and the new volcanoes. Let’s call it the allstream.

It’s not “the media” anymore. It’s too different. Let’s explore how.

First, “the media” is a modern label, dating from the 1940s. Here’s Google’s Ngram Viewer, which charts mentions in books.

As a topic, “the media” hockey-sticked when Marshall McLuhan made “media theory” a thing in the 1960s:

Meanwhile, the expression “major media” seems to have come and gone—

—while “mainstream media” is hot shit:

Why has “mainstream media” gone up while “major media” has gone down?

Politics. Writers and talkers on the right and the left both have lots to say about “the mainstream media.” It seems (at least to me) that talkers on both political wings think the old mainstream media—big newspapers, TV networks, broadcast giants, news wires—are still mountains. Or, to follow the stream metaphor, rivers.

But those old rivers were self-limiting. They controlled the production and the flow. That’s what made them main. It’s also what made them costly. Printing presses were expensive. Broadcast licenses were scarce. Regulations ruled. Editors and producers were gatekeepers because there were gates to keep.

Then came the Internet, followed by the Web, blogging, podcasting, cheap digital photography and video, and all the other means by which anybody with a keyboard, microphone, phone, or just an idea could put something into the world. The threshold for expression has fallen to trivial.

One reason was that RSS—really simple syndication—made distribution simple for everyone. Nobody had to ask permission from a publisher, a platform, or a network. It gave individuals the power to speak and flow into the allstream.

Every creator wants to be valued and followed by at least a few people—especially the right people—rather than by large populations. We each have our own public. (At least for this moment, reader, you’re in mine.)

In place of the mainstream, we now have wide slopes of braided rivers:

In the allstream, everybody can publish, distribution is easy, and the number of flows exceeds anyone’s ability to count or follow them all. Their variety is also extreme: blogs, podcasts, newsletters, YouTube channels, TikTok feeds, posts in Mastodon, BlueSky, Threads, X, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Flickr and Smugmug photos. Substack essays. Discord chats. Group texts. Private forums. Comment sections. Local news outlets (many written and published by just one person). Transcripts. Some are public. Some are semi-public. Some are private. Some are generated by AI or by humans with AI assistance. The scale of each is small by old media standards. But the aggregate is far more immense than what we call “the media” ever were.

In The Redstream Media, I described how partisan flows of news and opinion had already turned the mainstream into a sidestream. But it’s not just happening with politics. Expertise streams around institutions. Communities stream around beats. Hobbyists stream around trade publications. Local knowledge streams around outside authorities. People with cameras, microphones, and keyboards stream around organizations that have long monopolized distribution.

Of course, much of the allstream is noisy, false, manipulative, repetitive, trivial, and thick with propaganda, junk, spam, AI slop, outrage bait, and viral bullshit. It can produce confusion faster than clarity. But the old mainstream had propaganda, junk, exclusions, class filters, geographic biases, advertiser pressures, and institutional blind spots.

But scarcity was the media’s main feature. To see, hear, or read it, you needed a TV, a radio, a subscription, or a newsstand. Through those spincters, the few spoke to the many while the many lacked the means to speak back, or out. Now they have the means. All of them can stream too.

When I look at how far my readership has fallen from the heights it enjoyed in the golden age of blogging (and at Linux Journal in its peak years), I’m glad to have the readers I’ve got. The same goes for my photo collections here and here on Flickr. For two decades, those got ten to fifteen thousand views a day. Now they get a few hundred. I’m fine with that too, because the totality of all the flow on the Net is beyond measure, and growing.

The allstream is everywhere, and no longer only (1.0) or mostly (2.0) on the Web. It has spread across too many places for an old-fashioned search to encompass. As Gemini tells me, Google would rather be your “helpful assistant” than your librarian.

And that’s your new sphincter.

Big AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot, Claude, Perplexity, et. al.) stands between you and the allstream and says, “I’ll handle this.” So the sphincter moves from the point of publication to the point of retrieval. (My assistant, ChatGPT, gave me that quote and the sentence that followed. Everything else in this essay is mine.)

When we (David Weinberger, Chris Locke, Rick Levine, and I) wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, we saw lowering the threshold of public expression as a plus for civilization. We published Cluetrain in March 1999, 27 years ago. Here is the “one clue” (from Chris Locke) that precedes the 95 theses that followed:

And dammit, we are still seats, eyeballs, end users, and consumers. Our reach still fails to exceed the grasp of the surveillance fecosystem. And none of big tech (or big anything) is dealing with it.

But we are more numerous than ever. Our tail is long and wide. What if we get real power? We didn’t have it in 1999. We four Cluetrain authors thought we did. But Web 2.0 came along, and we got all the personal agency the platforms allowed.

And we are still there. All of us can produce video, but if we want it seen, we’ll need to use YouTube, which has a monthly reach of 2.7 billion people. It’s a wide gate, but Google keeps it.

Can we ever get the high degrees of personal and collective agency we saw coming when we wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto?

I think we can, if online service providers agree to our terms, instead of us to theirs. That’s why we created MyTerms, and why I’ve written so much about it. (And I won’t stop.) The case we need to make is that an intention economy built on customer agency will be richer, wider, deeper, and larger than what we have here and now, in the final stage of the old industrial age.

Once we have the agency, we will need new and better forms of economic signaling and money flow than we have so far. Everyone who publishes anything should have a piece of the allstream action (whatever that might mean). MyTerms will tee that up as well.

I’ll leave you with a question: What will happen when the landscape across which the allstream flows is a worldwide commons of self-empowered customers?

If you have an answer for that, you can also inform the future of Customer Commons, which we created in 2013 to make good on what I promised in The Intention Economy in 2012. Both pushed forward the body of ideas we started assembling with ProjectVRM in 2006, but actually began forming with the Internet in the 1970s and ’80s, and the Web, Linux, and open source in the ’90s.

Everything takes time. Let’s make a better future happen sooner rather than later.