Is Giving a Shit the New Optimization?
The media industry is being rebuilt around individuals, trust, and community. Brian Morrissey of People vs. Algorithms has a front-row seat.
For more than a decade, Brian Morrissey built Digiday into one of the most recognized brands in digital media. He shaped how the industry talked about itself.
Then he walked away from it.
In 2020, he launched People vs. Algorithms, a newsletter and podcast exploring the reinvention of media, culture, and technology. No newsroom. No staff of 35, just a point of view intended for a curated audience, and a bet that the future of media belongs to individuals, not institutions.
He was right. And the implications go way beyond publishing.
Because if the people who built legacy media brands are saying the old playbook is dead, what does that mean for the brands still running it?
Let’s talk about it.
KB: You’ve said that the competitive set for attention has gone from a narrow group to literally everyone. Where does that leave brands trying to stand out?
BM: They need to stand for something, but they also need to at least give the appearance of being real. I was struck by that whole thing with CEOs eating their own food. The McDonald’s CEO looked like he’d never had a burger in his life. He was biting into that Big Arch and called it a “product.” Incredibly awkward.
But I think it resonated with people because it spoke to this enshittification that’s happening right now. We financialize everything in this society, and it leads to more money but worse products, worse experiences. People are already seeing this with AI where it’s about creating more stuff, not better stuff. And we’re told it’s just inevitable.
Throughout the media ecosystem, institutions are losing to individuals. A lot of that comes down to individuals being perceived as more real where a faceless brand is not.
KB: Everyone pointed at that McDonald’s moment and said, “This is what happens when it goes wrong. This is why we don’t put our CEO out there.” But his follower count grew 30% from that post. We have this perception that bad attention hurts the brand, but does visibility have to mean perfect image?
BM: I think it’s more about being approachable and being perceived as real. We’re surrounded by fake. Corporations have always created fake images—the food never looked in reality the way it appeared on TV. That’s why Hollywood had whole teams of people whose job was making food look great. Spray the burger, whatever.
But now you open up the Big Arch and you’re like, whoa, this is not real.
We live in a world where everything feels manufactured. A lot of encounters feel fake. AI is clearly going to make that worse, so being presented as real (or even just approachable) gives you leverage in the market.
KB: You built Digiday over a decade into a huge brand. Then you started from scratch on your own. Where did you see the brand equity actually living—in the Digiday masthead or in your name?
BM: I don’t know if I knew. What I saw in 2020 was that the pendulum was swinging from institutional brands to individual brands, and the business models were rewarding tighter relationships with the audience and making the audience more of a community.
Building Digiday was kind of artificial in some ways. You’re getting a collection of different individuals to all be going in the same direction and almost have similar points of view. That’s artificial, because everyone has different points of view. I just saw that as being less important because people were gravitating to individuals. And it’s easier to be consistent by just being yourself.
On the business model side, a lot of the business now is getting the right people in the room. You don’t need a newsroom of 35 people if you put yourself in the middle of the community and consistently provide value.
KB: Everyone says they’re “building community,” but what they usually mean is there’s a comment section. How do you actually do it?
BM: If you get people to take actions—particularly in real life—and if they want to connect with each other under your curation, that’s increasingly the test of a brand.
We did a mixer last night for media executives. About 60 people. We invited a very curated group, and they all came to a spot in Gramercy. People had a great time. Some had to wait outside for a bit, which wasn’t intentional, but scarcity is important.
Getting 60 of the right people to take action in media is incredibly valuable. Whereas before it would be like, “Oh, that got 60,000 page views.” Well, that’s not really valuable, to be honest.
Content serves a different purpose now. It’s there to build a habit, a connection, and credibility with a particular group of people that you can then get to take action. If you can get a group of like-minded people together, your commercial partners like that. The people themselves like that. They want to connect with each other. AI is not going to do that.
KB: Taking action these days can be as simple as how many people are saving a post, sending it to a friend. Even within social algorithms, they’re now prioritizing how valuable content is to specific communities versus a post about someone’s vacation that gets a ton of impressions but creates no value.
BM: We’re getting a little more honest that a lot of these impressions were bullshit. A lot of publishers right now are dealing with far less traffic from Google. They already dealt with far less from Facebook. But the reality is that traffic wasn’t very valuable. Very few of those people consumed more than one page or stayed longer than 15 to 20 seconds.
This was always kind of a mirage. These brands were never as big as they claimed. All those companies claiming an audience of 200 million—they didn’t have that. And that’s why when these brands went into their death throes, people mourned for a few minutes on X and then went on with their lives. They didn’t have strong connections to anyone because they were chasing algorithms, looking at the same dashboards as everyone else, and making the same posts in response.
KB: LinkedIn is where I live professionally, and everyone’s complaining their reach is down. But the algorithm has been optimized for value over impressions, so the old “here’s me at x event” doesn’t get the same vanity metrics it used to. It’s looking for pattern recognition across topics that add value. Or so it says. add value.
BM: If I see another person who goes to a conference and posts a selfie in front of a sign, I’m like, man, I hope this is effective, because I would be so depressed holding that camera to take that photo. Are you doing this because your marketing person read some white paper about what the LinkedIn algorithm prioritizes? Photos not videos, one sentence then another paragraph so people click “more”?
Maybe I think about these things too deeply, but I look at that and I’m like—you’re fake.
When everyone is doing the same thing, I don’t understand how you gain any leverage by doing the same thing as everyone else.
KB: I think people don’t know what to post, so they default to the trade show booth. They skip the hard part—forming a POV by having inputs. People don’t value inputs anymore, they’re just trying to produce more. So they have nothing new to say.
BM: Algorithms are really good at giving you points of view. Spotify determines what music you listen to. YouTube determines what video you watch next. Netflix tells you what to watch. TikTok—you just open the app and it goes and goes and goes. I think that’s created a ton of learned helplessness when it comes to actually having what people are calling “taste.” I’d call it sensibility…or just an opinion on things you’re actually into.
My hope is that we’ve reached the point of perfect optimization where the only optimization that makes sense is to not optimize.
I run a lot—well, I used to—and when I was competitive about races, it was always training plans and numbers. But every now and again, you need to run without a watch just to remind yourself that you enjoy it.
AI is going to be amazing at optimization. It’ll do it better than everyone. So when the tools are available to everyone and your Claude instance is running through a million thumbnails while you sleep, figuring out the best “surprised face” for your YouTube thumbnail—well, at some point every single video will have the same freaking thumbnail. It has to lose its effectiveness.
KB: So…giving a shit is the new optimization for 2026.
BM: I think a lot of optimization has been driven by this growth-hacker personality type. And I think it’s a replacement for personality, actually. Being good at internet growth tactics is not a personality. I’m sorry to say.
KB: You’ve watched legacy media brands trying to reinvent under huge pressure. What separates the ones that evolve from the ones that hollow out and die?
BM: If there’s one characteristic, it’s not being nostalgic for the past. I worked for a magazine in perpetual crisis. We’d have meetings and the first question was always, “What about the magazine?” I’m thinking, what about us having a job? What does our audience actually want?
I also have this theory: just about everybody has one playbook. Most people have no playbooks. But even successful entrepreneurs—they’re good at one thing. They keep iterating on that one thing. You know what they do because it’s what they always do.
KB: So now that the old media playbook is broken—we’re not just sending out a press release to the wire and hoping for the best—what should brands actually do?
BM: It’s actually an exciting time in some ways. Brands are increasingly their own media companies. Every single company will have a media arm in some way. The old way of putting out a press release probably isn’t going to make it—although you’ll put it out anyway because it’ll get sucked up by AI engines.
But I would assume that most brands will screw this up. That’s where my money is. Everyone fights the last war. “We gotta create content, so let’s do SEO-optimized blog posts. Let’s turn this blog post into a podcast that nobody listens to.” Probably not the way.
It’s more about sharing real expertise versus hard sales content. And as AI and agents become more embedded in the economy, trust is going to become way more important.
When things happen in the background, people lose trust. I covered online advertising almost from its inception, and it always struggled with privacy because too many things were taking place behind the scenes. It’s like a restaurant taking your credit card away to run it. Where did they go? Why has it been 15 minutes?
Trust will be the thing.
✌️ Kara
Brian Morrissey is the co-host of People vs. Algorithms and the author of The Rebooting. You should subscribe to both.
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