Welcome to the In-Between

What these three series were building toward, and where it goes next.

For the past few months, this newsletter has been following a single shift in how media works. It’s come out in three runs, spread across months, and if you picked it up somewhere in the middle, or read the pieces far enough apart, they probably looked like three separate arguments about three separate things. They aren’t. They’re one story, still unfolding, and I want to draw the line through it before we go any further, because where the line goes next is the part that matters.

The first run looked at meaning. Media used to arrive with enough context for a person to know what it was, where it came from, who could use it, and what could be done with it. That’s coming undone right now. The platforms, editing tools, and AI systems that move media, strip that context out at every step, and everyone downstream rebuilds it by hand, over and over, just to keep working. The Inheritance Shift traced that quiet, expensive rebuilding, and why it stops holding up once the machines are the ones d…