Some principles

- Every citizen a citizen journalist
- Every company a media company
- Media scales. So great journalists might become millionaires, or even billionaires. Don’t option the movies, make them yourself on your computer like @notch made Minecraft and sell it direct.

Put another way, there may be room for a YC for personal media corporations.

Nate Silver & Andrew Sorkin are like v1 of this. And Substack is like v2.

But perhaps there’s room for the “full stack writer” who goes from article to movie themselves, like the full stack developer.

Tech & media are actually fraternal twins.

- work with information for a living
- stare at screen all day
- monitor and write about trends
- network & collaborate in decentralized way
- many are ideologically motivated

There may be room for a new win/win relationship.

How to stay ethical & not clickbait?

Perhaps we change the metrics: measure sentiment, not clicks.

Fund personal media corps that are committed to an idea: faster COVID testing, self-driving cars to cut traffic fatalities, fusion to stop climate change. https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1281017754141593601

Or, more precisely, measure sentiment around a pre-agreed positive idea as the *primary* metric for an ethical media corporation. First dashboard you look at every day. Any clicks advance that cause.

Basically, fund media as explicit activism by technological progressives.

Any VC thesis for positive change via tech can be turned into a media company. Fund creators to produce amazing content on life extension, brain-machine interface, Mars, etc. And give an affiliate link, such that if their work inspires the next SpaceX they get a fair cut of it.

Values-constrained attention?

The reason people are skeptical of clicks or profit as primary metrics is that they're amoral. By putting values on your sleeve, by stating which keywords you're boosting & why, we can measure the success of technologically progressive activism.