Happy Thursday friends,

It’s admittedly been a rough go this week, especially for those who spend any sort of reasonable time on social media - or any media, really (whatever is left of it).

I’m not going to write about those recent events (plenty of others will with much more eloquence than me) but unfortunately they are related to what many call the “attention economy” which - I think we can all agree - is poisoning our culture.

Allow me to explain.

That was then…

For those unfamiliar, I spent nearly 2 years of my mid-twenties in Italy. The majority of that time was in Florence and Tuscany. Florence - as many of you know - was the “Cradle of the Renaissance” and Europe’s guiding light out of the Dark Ages.

The most wealthy, influential, and subsequently famous family of this period was the Medici: merchants who accumulated extravagant wealth and projected their power and status by, most notably, becoming “patrons of the arts.”

There was something deeply aesthetic happening in Europe for periods both before and after the Renaissance, but the Medici personified the private funding of the arts and - to a more important extent - beauty, more so than anyone else.

Look no further than Michelangelo’s “David.”

You see, David took 4 years to complete. Frescos took decades. Cathedrals took centuries. Hell, the Sagrada Familia still isn’t done!

These time horizons illustrate mindsets, values, and motivations scarcely seen in our world today. The focus on aesthetic excellence, technical innovation, and humanistic themes required enormous sacrifice, dedication, upfront capital, and patience. Art was labor intensive. Scarcity bred value.

The result was undeniable. Philosophical, literary, scientific, artistic, and broader cultural breakthroughs left an indelible impact on the world. Patrons used their power to establish order and enrich society.

I’m not going to sit here and ignore that elements of these works were leveraged by their patrons as propaganda and to capture attention of the masses. But they, their subjects, and especially their enemies were not going to respect shoddy work. This was an arms race in beauty and cultural expansion. It demanded artistic depth, craft, and quality above all else. Only then, were byproducts like attention achieved. They really had to earn it.

This is now…

Today, I fear, we’ve traded marble for memes.

In our digital world, platforms and algorithms reward content for its “virality” rather than intrinsic beauty or quality. Attention is the goal - not the byproduct.

Not to mention, the speed with which we can create, consume, and move on from “content” is insane. It’s just dopamine hit after hit. Everything, all the time. The algo patronizes shock value, cheap tricks, and “trends” over any sort of defined aesthetic. Swipe up. Scroll on.

The cultural impact here is profound. We’ve traded democratized knowledge and elevated communities for democratized slop and elevated divisiveness. We’ve established chaos and eroded society. There is zero appreciation or respect for the process of creating or building something worthwhile…let alone any reward.

Beyond social media “native” content like memes and reels, the deterioration can be seen when cultural cornerstones are “optimized” for these very platforms:

Sports

Just this week, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver was asked about fans who can no longer afford to pay for multiple streaming packages, let alone attend games in-person. His response? “They can catch the highlights on social media.”

Pretty eye-opening when the de-facto leader of a beloved sport minimizes the beauty, details, and intricacies of the game to a couple alley-oops.

Entertainment

Labels and streaming services have decimated the music “industry.” Notice I’m tempted to refer to my favorite art form as a business. There’s no real appreciation for genuine artistic craft and creativity by the major power brokers. It’s dominated by virality, artificial impressions, and algorithms.

We’ve talked about the film industry before. Hollywood Studios used to be patrons of the arts. Now they only greenlight sequels or prequels.

Travel

Instagram has made likes feel better than living. We go places not to experience them, but for the photo op…applying filters both literally and figuratively.

Tech

This is a big one I haven’t really discussed in depth yet. But today’s startup/VC/tech world is dominated by founders or companies promoting their numbers over their impact.

These people never lead with how they’re contributing to society, it’s either “we just raised a $150 million Series B” or “we hit $2m ARR in 3 months.” They do this because the algo rewards it. It’s a quick hit designed to direct focus towards vanity numbers over societal impact.

There is hope…

All the power brokers and decision makers in these fields have unfortunately become “Patrons of Attention.”

Gone are the “Patrons of the Arts.”

Where impact was once measured in monuments; it’s now measured in metrics.

As a result, we’ve gotten more stuff and less soul.

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and I make it my goal to highlight them here every week.

I still believe things can and will improve because: a) that’s the point of living and b) i see more and more people discussing these themes on the timeline every week.

Eyeballs are the new oil, and that’s not going away. But there is - and will continue to be - a growing call to create, amplify, and enjoy human-proof experiences. The AI trend accelerates this. As it becomes easier and easier to create *anything,* the quality of human artisans will stand out even more.

Imagine firms that fund our brightest artists rather than “AI for…”.

Imagine media operations that prioritize craft over clicks.

Or, maybe the promise of blockchain carries the torch of bottom up patronage from patreon and gofundme, bypassing the gatekeepers of the top down model.

The building blocks are here, and we yearn for beauty and meaning. As Michelangelo famously said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it."

This Week’s Music

RP WEEKLY!!!