Happy Friday Storytellers,
I spent last week doing something new: Attending a keynote speaking retreat. Ever since my new book Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age came out, I’ve been invited to speak at a lot of conferences and internal corporate summits about how to unleash your storytelling superpowers and build deeper human connection. It’s been a ton of fun telling stories to live audiences, and I realized it was time to up my game.
We brutally workshopped each other’s talks all day, and I had a breakthrough on some new material I can’t wait to showcase at my favorite conference: Content Marketing World. It’s a mecca for business storytellers, and I’m going to be leading a session on how to develop breakthrough storytelling IP. I’ll also be hosting a meetup for Storytelling Edge subscribers, if enough of you come. Please come! The agenda is incredible, with a new integrated creative summit with LIONS. Register here to get $200 off with Code Lazer200 and snag a spot before my session is full.
This week’s newsletter is brought to you by Content Marketing World.
5 Ideas I can’t stop thinking about
Have you heard of the Unicontext, the new theory of everything?
What about Friction-maxxing? Or The Inauthenticity Tax?
If the answer is No but you’re mildly intrigued, then you’re in the right place.
I’m a junkie for new, interesting ideas, and so is my Art of the Zag co-host Shane Snow. So for this week’s episode of Art of the Zag, Shane and I decided to bring our typical happy-hour conversation to the masses and explore the five most interesting ideas of 2026 so far—at least to us. (Props to Derek Thompson for the concept inspiration.)
Download this week’s episode (and subscribe on your pod platform of choice!) to get the full analysis. And for those who prefer to read, keep scrolling—I’ve broken down all five concepts just below the YouTube video. Enjoy and drop the ideas you’ve been nerding out about in the comments.
1. Friction-maxxing
Fifteen years ago, I realized for the first time that tech moguls have a truly bizarre understanding of humanity.
In 2011, Mark Zuckerberg introduced “friction-less sharing” on Facebook, which remains one of the most batshit crazy features of the past decade. Suddenly, Facebook would automatically share EVERYTHING you read and listened to on your Facebook feed. (“Joe read 27 signs you might have ADHD on Buzzfeed when he was supposed to be working!”) Zuck called it “real-time serendipity in a friction-less experience.” Users called it creepy and violating. Privacy groups demanded an FTC violation. I still remember the horror when I realized that Facebook had revealed that I’d just listened to Taio Cruz’s Dynamite 37 straight times on repeat.
It was a sign of the prevailing instinct of Silicon Valley over the past two decades: Every innovation must make our lives as easy and “friction-less” as possible. But as Kathryn Jezer-Morton wrote in The Cut earlier this year, it’s reached a tipping point of escapism:
Tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself as inconvenient and something to be continuously escaping from, into digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands: Reading is boring; talking is awkward; moving is tiring; leaving the house is daunting. Thinking is hard. Interacting with strangers is scary. Risking an unexpected reaction from someone isn’t worth it. Speaking at all — overrated. These are all frictions that we can now eliminate, easily, and we do.
Jezer-Morton prescribed an antidote to our frictionless hellscape—“friction-maxxing,” A process of building up tolerance to inconvenience by deliberately avoiding the siren song of technological ease.
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Six months later, Shane argues in our episode, we’re seeing signs that friction-maxxing is picking up steam. Spotify puts every song at your fingertips, but vinyl sales are up. Nearly half the kids in the UK say they wish the internet were never invented. And then there’s AI.
Friction-maxxing shows up most readily in the public’s pushback to AI. It’s one thing for an AI algorithm to decide which show we watch next; it’s another thing for a generative AI model to do our thinking and make our art for us. Generative AI is Zuckerberg’s perverse vision of “real-time serendipity in a frictionless experience” brought to its ultimate, most dystopian form.
As Shane argues on this week’s episode, people are pushing back against AI writing and art because the struggle and friction of the creative process is what makes it interesting in the first place. And even AI power users are beginning to worry about how AI is eroding their skills.
After all, it’s hard to ignore the evidence: A new paper in Nature found that AI is degrading the skills of engineers and physicians. A new study from MIT and Oxford found that using AI for “just 10-15 minutes of AI interaction can result in significant impairments in independent performance and persistence — capacities that are foundational to lifelong learning.”
Another study found that AI makes people confidently wrong, while MIT discovered that overreliance on AI literally shuts off parts of the brain. I could go on for another 1,000 words and list 30 more reputable papers. It’s no wonder that AI now has a lower approval rating than ICE.
Is this an idea made in a lab to appeal to book-loving, college-educated writers like me and Shane? Absolutely. And there’s little evidence that people are adopting “friction-maxxing” on a large scale. But there are signs Silicon Valley has pushed our frictionless future too far, and people are responding. As Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway recently said on Pivot, there’s a good chance we’ll look back at this era of technology the same way we look at the chain-smoking and binge-drinking in Mad Men. An age in which we were out of control, behaving with little regard for health.
2. The Unicontext
I can’t stop thinking about the Unicontext.
Two weeks ago, Agnes Callard, a philosopher and professor at the University of Chicago, joined Derek Thompson on his podcast Plain English to explain her new theory of everything. It explains why everyone is so negative online, why we’re so fucking depressed comparing ourselves to each other, and why culture is tinted with this disorienting filter of sameness.
It also captured why it’s so hard to be a writer and media figure right now.
Collard explains that for most of human history, contexts were local and multiple:
If you wanted to know how you should act, you would look around. Am I in a field? Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar? You would immediately get guidance by looking both at your physical environment and the people around you and how they were acting. The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all the time, irrespective of context.
The Unicontext has emerged, in large part, because we’re always online. It feels like we’re in one universal room, and so we have to be the same person in every context.
The Unicontext brings dozens of fascinating implications—I’d highly recommend listening to Thompson’s interview with Callard—but the most interesting effects to me are how it impacts our media environment:
The attention wars
On social media, we’re in a constant competition for attention in this one “room” with people all around the world. And the reason that negativity wins out is that things that are BAD are more universally understandable than things that are good. Thompson gives the brilliant example of chicken enchiladas:
Take food. If I think chicken enchiladas are really delicious, that might be interesting to my wife or my neighbor in the context of our home. But the fact that I think chicken enchiladas are delicious is incredibly boring for posting on Twitter, a place that cuts across contexts. It’s more interesting for me to say white Americans who eat chicken enchiladas are racist against Mexican culture, because the concept of racism clicks into a global norm of badness.
So when people go online, when it’s suddenly one to a million, there is an inclination to make those posts negative.
This has a huge subconscious impact on writers. In the pre-algorithmic social media era, we’d write for specific audiences in specific contexts: readers of a specific newspaper or magazine, newsletter subscribers, the audience in a comedy club. But now, we’re always performing for a global audience of strangers in the giant room of the Unicontext, and that subtly pushes us to go negative. That’s even true on Substack, where I have 33K direct subscribers; I’m writing for them, but subconsciously, I’m also hoping to reach new audiences via Substack’s algorithm. Does this impact what I choose to write about? Not consciously, but it’s almost certainly influencing me below the surface.
Identity > Context
According to Callard, the Unicontext also makes identity more important than character. Character is really context dependent—it shows up differently in different circumstances. I might get angry at something, but that anger is context dependent. If you hit my kid out of nowhere, and I get angry, it doesn’t mean I’m an asshole. In that context, I’m just being a good and natural parent. You need to see someone in a variety of contexts to truly understand their character.
Identity, however, is much less context-dependent, and thus easier to understand in the Unicontext. Is this why we’ve leaned so hard into identity politics in the social media era on both the left and right? It’s one of the most interesting explanations I’ve heard. It also explains why I make so many jokes about being a neurotic Jew from New York. Everyone who’s seen a Billy Crystal movie gets it.
Authenticity in the Unicontext
In a pre-social media world, we had the freedom to be different versions of ourselves in different contexts. You act differently when you’re out dancing with your friends, at dinner with your partner’s family, at the office, or performing in a comedy club.
But in the large room of the Unicontext, all those contexts collide. Even if you’re living in the real world and not online, there are internet-connected cameras everywhere, including hidden ones in those creepy Meta glasses.
This is particularly tricky if you’re a writer or media personality. What I post on Instagram and Substack is going to be seen by both my best friends and my in-laws. That’s not that hard of a line to navigate, but what about the companies that hire me for keynote speaking, and may do a sweep of my social channels—TikTok and all—looking for controversial material? That creates an incentive structure to play it safe. Don’t speak out about the atrocities of the administration; don’t criticize big tech because they might want to hire you to speak.
A lot of popular authors operate this way, only posting pop-sci platitudes that sound straight from the gaping mouth of ChatGPT. But that approach is antithetical to what people crave from the writers and thinkers they follow in 2026: authenticity. People want to feel like they’re getting the real you, all the time. Otherwise, it cheapens the parasocial relationship. This is the secret of writers like Thompson, Scott Galloway, Taylor Lorenz, and Kara Swisher; love them or hate them, they are consistently themselves. If you want to grow an audience in 2026, I think the only real choice is to figure out how to be yourself all the time across every channel, and if someone doesn’t want to work with you, well then, good riddance.
Lucky for me, I’ve never known how to be anything else but my mildly unhinged self, and all I can do is ride it out and hope that I gain more than I lose.
Speaking of authenticity, let’s get to the third big idea we discussed…
3. The Inauthenticity Tax
The war against AI Slop is heating up. First, Substack introduced a partnership with Pangram last week to increase transparency on the platform and fight against what CEO Chris Best calls “Claudefishing,” that unnerving feeling when you start reading something that you thought came from a human but then quickly realize AI wrote it. Then, yesterday, LinkedIn introduced a “This seems like AI Slop” button to flag low-quality content on the site in the most shocking social media move of the summer.
Both platforms were reacting to complaints and concerns from users. But WHY do people dislike AI-generated content so much? A large-scale study of 27,000 people provides a hint: AI-generated content delivers a kind of Inauthenticity Tax.
It found that when people know a piece of content was created by AI, they perceive the writer as inauthentic and rate it negatively. The researchers found a strong correlation between negative ratings and ratings of inauthenticity, suggesting that our dislike of AI-generated communication is something of a social survival feature. Communicating with AI deprives us of the ability to infer someone’s true meaning via voice and tone. We don’t just judge people by what they say, but by how they say it.
4. The Return of the Experience Economy
Almost every month, my friends and I go to a dance party thrown by two of our favorite DJs. It’s not particularly easy to attend. The event isn’t publicly listed; you have to be referred in. You don’t know the location; it’s revealed a few hours before the party. Each party has a theme, and everyone comes in costume. When you arrive, they place a sticker on your phone’s camera, and phones are explicitly banned on the dance floor.
It’s a place where three of the big ideas in our episode intersect:
This party is a high-friction activity. I need to put in effort just to get a ticket. I don’t just need to turn off Netflix and leave my house; I need to plan a creative costume days ahead of time.
It’s a blissful time when I can escape from the Unicontext. No one is on the Internet. Everyone is present and dancing. It’s like we’re in 2005 again.
It’s part of the return of the Experience Economy.
On the episode, Shane argues that as digital content becomes more abundant, live experiences and events are becoming comparatively scarcer, and that—combined with a move to friction-maxxing—is creating a boom in people investing in real-life experiences. The evidence:
Broadway is racking in record ticket sales.
The World Cup broke attendance and ticket price records.
Consumer spending on experiences is expected to hit $2.1 trillion this year.
Gen Z is flocking to the movies, leading to surprise hits like Backroom and Obsession and contributing to the massive box office success of The Odyssey and Toy Story 5. Box office receipts are up nearly 10% compared to last year.
5. SaaS is F’d
Two weeks ago, IBM’s stock fell over 25% in one day after a relatively mild earnings miss, which IBM CEO Arvind Krishna attributed to customers shifting spending from software to hardware and memory to secure the supply of servers and memory before the AI boom drives up the cost of chips and most hardware to even more astronomical levels.
It was just the latest bad day in a very bad year for the software industry. As Morningstar reports, “the S&P 500’s software industry group is down 18% so far this year, reflecting concerns about disruption risk brought about by artificial intelligence.” In our episode, Shane predicts in our episode, that’s only going to get worse as AI’s coding prowess drives down the cost and difficulty of building your own tools.
Case in point: He recently vibe-coded a platform to manage the investors in his films and theatre productions, allowing him to cancel an $8,000 software subscription.
This is the idea we disagreed on the most: While I think that AI is going to drive down the cost of software, I’m skeptical that most enterprise companies are going to start building their own software suddenly. Building compliant, enterprise software is tough, and most large companies are designed to buy, not build, their tech tools. And entrepreneurs like Shane who are willing to sit down and vibe-code their own software are relatively rare (although they’re disproportionately loud on LinkedIn and X).
If you’re here and just read 2,500 words on these ideas, that probably means you’d enjoy the whole damn podcast. There’s so much great banter!
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“Friction- maxxing” - I love it!
Great post.
You're my first paid Substack subscription; love your newsletter, man. Even when I miss a few, coming back to it feels like coming home. Excellent piece as always!