Read the full transcript of Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie’s talk titled “This Is What the Future of Media Looks Like”, recorded at TED2025 on April 9, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
Introduction: A Media Revolution
HAMISH MCKENZIE: We’re living through the most significant media disruption since the printing press. It’s a transformation that explains everything from political polarization to why algorithms now do the jobs of editors, and it’s creating a hell of a mess. But I secretly think that we’re on our way to something greater than we’ve ever seen in human history. This is a massive deal, of course, because media systems don’t just convey information. They shape how we think and how we behave. They shape our culture.
I’ve spent my career navigating these shifts. As one of the founders of Substack, I helped writers and creators make money directly from their audiences. Before Substack, I was a lead writer for Tesla. I wrote a book about the electric car revolution, and I covered media startups as a reporter. So I’ve witnessed firsthand how media systems evolve and how they collapse.
The arrival of the internet promised to democratize media, but so far I think it has broken more than it’s fixed. Social media has given everyone a voice, but it has still concentrated power in the hands of a few. But I see a new system starting to flourish, and I call it the garden.
By the way, there’s an illustrator at Substack, her name is Juro Chen, and she did all the artwork for this talk, and I just want to make sure she gets credit. Juro is amazing, and this slide in particular gives me so much hope.
Anyway, this garden includes a new generation of media platforms that give more power to creators and consumers.
It’s coming from places like Patreon, Twitch, Supercast, and then the company I started with Chris Best and Gerard Seffy, Substack. It’s an ecosystem that gives economic autonomy to independent voices, and it fosters direct relationships that are built on trust, instead of just putting everyone at the mercy of algorithms that maximize engagement and advertising revenue.
From Temple to Chaos: The Evolution of Media
For decades, we all lived in a media world that was kind of like a temple. It was top-down, centralized, and controlled by gatekeepers. We had the city newspaper over breakfast, radio for the morning commutes, TV news just before dinner, and it was a relatively stable system, but it was also rigid. It could represent only a few perspectives, and new voices had to be let in by favour.
The internet companies came along, and they sat at this temple. Craigslist took the classifieds, Google and Facebook captured the ad markets, streaming services are dismantling television, and now with the rise of social networks, we’re in the age of chaos media, where anyone can have a voice, but the power still flows primarily to the platforms.
We’ve gone from catechism to cacophony, and our political culture mirrors this chaos. Opponents are to be humiliated. Followers are expected to show fealty to specific doctrines. And attention of any kind, whether it’s positive or negative, wins the day. So we’ve gone from, ask not what your country can do for you, to what you can do for your country, to dunk tweets and goading salutes. Not going to do one of those.
But when you look closely, it is possible to see something new emerging. And when I look closely, I see the green shoots of a garden.
The Garden Model: A New Media Ecosystem
This garden, to put it in somewhat inorganic terms, is a distributed system of independent voices who enjoy economic autonomy, unlike Instagram or TikTok, where the power mostly goes to Mark Zuckerberg or the Chinese Communist Party. The garden model connects creators directly with their communities.
We’ve seen in history how revolutions like this can take quite a long time to fully unfold. Thomas Edison demonstrated the first practical lightbulb in 1879, but it wasn’t until the 1920s when electricity started to become common in people’s homes. The missing piece was the electric grid. And if we look today at our current media revolution, we can see that the missing piece has been a different kind of power, economic power.
Economic autonomy gives creators freedom. Instead of answering to bosses or an advertiser or an algorithm, they can focus on deeply serving their communities. Instead of chasing virality, they can spend all their energy on doing their best work. And in this way, the garden can bring a sense of order to social media’s bedlam, distributing the power among the many instead of the few.
Let’s take a look at some examples of how the garden is already starting to flourish.
Take Crystal Ball and Saga and Jetty, they’re the hosts of a non-partisan news show called Breaking Point. It used to be produced by The Hill and it had the name Rising, but then Crystal, who’s from the left, Saga, who’s from the right, decided to go independent. They moved it to Supercast and YouTube and then to Rumble. Now they make more money from subscriptions and cover a broader range of political viewpoints for an audience of more than a million viewers.
Take Caroline Chambers. When publishers spurned her proposal for a cookbook deal, she took matters into her own hands. She set up a Substack, because she’s a genius, she called it What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking, and she grew a community there to about half a million people that are all based around practical, accessible recipes. So when she did eventually publish that cookbook, it became an instant New York Times bestseller, not because a publisher anointed her, but because of the genuine relationships she had cultivated with her readers.
Consider Matt Yglesias. In 2020, Matt left Vox, the company he co-founded, to start a newsletter, which he called Slow Boring. Matt had been a blogger since the early 2000s, he went on and wrote for The Atlantic, then he started Vox during the social media boom, but it’s with Slow Boring that he’s found true independence. Today he writes about what he wants to write for an audience of more than 200,000 subscribers and he makes more than a million dollars a year.
What these creators share in common is independence from traditional gatekeepers and aggregators. They succeed by cultivating trust, not by gaming algorithms or knowing the right people. So when you subscribe to Breaking Point, or you support Caroline’s Substack, you’re not just paying for content, you’re entering into a relationship. The creator knows you’re there, they value your support, and they can often engage with you directly in ways that just weren’t possible in the old systems.
The Power of Ownership and Sustainability
This garden is about ownership and sustainability and resilience. When the creators own their relationships with their audiences directly, no platform or algorithm can suddenly cut them off from their community. That sense of ownership translates into a sustainable income that doesn’t depend on algorithmic whims or viral trends, and the whole system is more resilient because it’s not vulnerable to a single point of failure. If TikTok or Facebook change their policies overnight, the independent creator can continue to live off the value of their relationships with subscribers.
This shift has profound implications. In the garden, the media can become less about capturing attention and more about nurturing relationships. There can be more space for nuance and complexity in a world that increasingly resists boasts. And in the garden, biodiversity can flourish. There can be many more winners, there can be much better coverage of a vast multitude of niches, and everyone can play a role in shaping the culture they live in.
Building a Better Media Future
Of course, there are going to be some people who will say, well, this is all just going to lead to more echo chambers, but I think the opposite can be true, because when you network cultural connections, people can move freely between communities and be exposed to new ways of thinking in more moderate environments.
The chaos of our current media moment cannot last, but then no one’s quite sure what the new landscape’s going to ultimately bring. And that’s why our choices today matter so much. Every subscription, every share, and every minute of our attention is a vote for the culture we want to flourish.
And now we can invest in a system that values deep relationships. We can reclaim our attention from the doomscroll seeds and pour it, like water, onto the seedlings of a better future. And when we do this, it’s not just about getting better content. It’s about cultivating a richer and more thoughtful culture, a culture that can face up to the complex challenges of our time, a culture worth subscribing to.
