4 min read

The New Information Machine

The End of the Attention/Narrative Machine

In my years in media industry, I’ve witnessed a few seismic shifts in the media industry, moving from print to digital and from centralized publishers to individual influencers

The death of “traditional” media isn’t just another industry disruption - it’s a fundamental shift in how humans consume and process information. I’ve watched this transformation from the inside: from managing a 120-person print editorial team to leading a lean three-person digital outfit at Taiwan’s largest new media company just after 3 years. In 2017, I witnessed perhaps the most visceral example of this change when I helped Condé Nast China restructure, resulting in a 75%+ reduction in staff across print and digital, even they had a record high revenue growth.

But what we’re seeing now goes beyond the familiar print-to-digital narrative. We’re entering an era where the very nature of storytelling is being reimagined by AI.

In the post-print era, the traditional media companies built what I call “attention/narrative machines” - systems designed to maximize engagement at any cost. These machines work by exploiting our cognitive biases, serving us increasingly extreme content to keep us clicking and scrolling. The result? A media landscape that prioritizes sensation over substance, outrage over understanding.

This model was powerful but fundamentally flawed. Like many first-generation technologies, it optimized for what was easily measurable (clicks, views, time on page) rather than what actually mattered (understanding, insight, truth). The attention/narrative machine gave us what we wanted, not what we needed.

The Rise of the Proactive Information Machine?

AI presents an opportunity to build something fundamentally different: proactive information machines.

These systems don’t just aggregate or amplify content - they reshape how information is constructed and understood.

What makes the proactive information machines different? Three key principles:

The AI companies shouldn’t retrofit AI into existing old media structures- it’s to fundamentally reimagine how information flows through society. Companies like Perplexity seem to understand this, using current conflicts over data access not as battles to be won, but as experiments to understand the true value and velocity of information loops in their products.

Because, IMO, the current attempts at OpenAI-publisher collaboration are def doomed to fail. Why:

A New Data Loop?

Companies like Perplexity and OpenAI should just focus on developing a world where people are empowered to make their own choices based on the information they receive. It’s just a matter of time before Google matches their’s feature-set just like OpenAI has done with ChatGPT Search. OpenAI has the model advantage while Google has the search data advantage. Perplexity has neither.

The winners in this new landscape won’t be those who build the best information machines. They’ll be the ones who fundamentally reshape how humans interact with information itself - to create new kinds of data loops involving user input.

This is where the new proactive information machines will truly make a difference, not just in how we consume content but in how we interact, create and understand it.

A voice HAI demo by Ben South: