🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.
While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.
You can buy my book Permissionless here.
In summer 1999, a kid could whisper “I see dead people,” and every person in the room knew exactly what he meant. That is what a movie actually is. It’s not content; it’s never content. It’s actually closer to a coordination technology - a machine for getting millions of nervous systems to fire in sync.
In this video, I take on the “everyone will just prompt their own movies” prediction. The people making it understand the models, the costs, and the timelines. What they miss is a category error: they think culture is a product to be consumed, when it is actually a fire to be gathered around.
I call it the campfire law: the value of culture scales with the number of people who share it, not with how well it fits you.
What I Cover
Why “I see dead people” was a skeleton key that unlocked every classroom, dinner table, and bus ride in 1999, and why your perfect personalized AI movie in 2035 unlocks nothing
The campfire law: content is fuel, culture is a fire, and a fire exists to be gathered around
How TikTok, the most personalized media machine ever built, immediately got repurposed into a folk monoculture of shared sounds, jokes, and dances
The dream test: your subconscious already produces perfectly personalized entertainment every night, and “let me tell you about my dream” is the most boring sentence in the English language
Why references are the compression algorithm of human connection, and shared context is the reserve currency of every friendship and group chat
The software version of the same mistake: your prompted personal app has no tribe, no tutorials, no forum, and no fan club
Why restaurants, concerts, and sports should all be “dead” by the optimization logic, and why they are not
What history says happens when the cost of making culture collapses: cheap cameras gave us YouTube, cheap distribution gave us podcasts, cheap publishing gave us newsletters. More fires, not more isolation
My prediction: everyone will be able to prompt their own movies, and almost nobody will want to most of the time
Key Quotes
“A movie is not content. A movie is a coordination technology.”
“The film is the vehicle, the synchronization is the product, and you can’t synchronize with only yourself.”
“Content is fuel, culture is a fire, and a fire exists to be gathered around.”
“A reference is only worth something if the other person holds the file.”
“Being the sole user of a product is solitary confinement.”
“Humans don’t want infinite content. Humans want common ground.”
“The maker will change, but the gathering never will.”
The One Question That Survives Every Media Revolution
“Okay, what’s everyone watching?”
That question is not going anywhere. The future of media is not a billion people watching a billion private movies alone in the dark. It is the same thing it has always been: all of us around the same fire, arguing about the ending.
*If you liked this one, subscribe and drop a comment: what’s the one movie line that works as a skeleton key for you? *
Mine: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good…”