Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why

Why does everyone feel overwhelmed by information? Why does it feel impossible to trust what passes through our streams? We tend to blame individual publications, specific platforms, or bad actors. The real answer has less to do with any single media entity and more with structural changes in the information ecosystem.

I started my “information” life typing copy on an ill-tempered Remington. As a teenage reporter, I saw newspapers being typeset, one letter at a time. It was a messy, slow, and laborious process. So I don’t carry romantic notions about the old days. I’ve been quick to embrace any technology that, in Stephen Covey’s words, helps me keep “the main thing the main thing.” The main thing is telling a thoroughly reported, well-written story.

The early 1990s Internet, followed by blogging at the turn of the century, and social media a decade later all helped me do that main thing. In the mid-2000s I embraced Dave Winer’s mantra of “sources going direct.” As far back as 2009, I outlined the coming changes in my essays “How Internet Content Distribution and Discovery Are Changing” and “Amplification and the Changing Role of Media.”

For the past decade and a half, the whole information ecosystem has become much larger, faster and noiser. It is hardly surprising that nothing works. And we feel a collective sense of overwhelming disappointment. 

So, why does nothing work?

Authority used to be the organizing principle of information, and thus the media. You earned attention by being right, by being first in discovery, or by being big enough to be the default. That world is gone. The new and current organizing principle of information is velocity.

What matters now is how fast something moves through the network: how quickly it is clicked, shared, quoted, replied to, remixed, and replaced. In a system tuned for speed, authority is ornamental. The network rewards motion first and judgment later, if ever. Perhaps that’s why you feel you can’t discern between truths, half-truths, and lies.

With so much coming at us all the time, it is difficult to give any single story or news event much weight. More content means already fragmented attention fractures even further. 

Greenland, Iran, Venezuela, Epstein Files, Dodgers. On and on.

Networks have always shaped how societies are organized. Roman roads didn’t just make travel easier; they mapped the reach of the state and the limits of power. Shipping routes determined where colonial empires flourished and where they faded. In the Victorian age, the railways didn’t just shorten journeys; they rearranged British society. 

They created commuting and leisure, turned market towns into suburbs, standardized national time, and collapsed the meaning of distance. They also reordered authority: timetables mattered as much as parliaments. What looks like cultural choice is often the echo of infrastructure. Today’s mobile, cloud-linked world is another Victorian moment. Networks compress time and space, then quietly train us to live at their speed.

That’s why we get all our information as memes. The meme has become the metastory, the layer where meaning is carried. You don’t need to read the thing; you just need the gist, compressed and passed along in a sentence, an image, or a joke. It has taken the role of the headline. The machine accelerates this dynamic. It demands constant material; stop feeding it and the whole structure shakes. The point of the internet now is mostly to hook attention and push it toward commerce, to keep the engine running. Anyone can get their cut.

Velocity has taken over. 

Algorithms on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter do not optimize for truth or depth. They optimize for motion. A piece that moves fast is considered “good.” A piece that hesitates disappears. There are almost no second chances online because the stream does not look back. People are not failing the platforms. People are behaving exactly as the platforms reward. We might think we are better, but we have the same rat-reward brain. 

We built machines that prize acceleration and then act puzzled that everything feels rushed and slightly manic. The networks of the past were slower and at a scale that was adaptable. I wrote about this years ago, and nothing since has disproved it. So when the author of “beliefs outrun facts” says nothing works, now you know why.

The fundamental network-level changes should give you a good idea of why we have a growing ambivalent relationship toward media as an organized information entity. I will get into technology media from startup perspective in a separate piece. For now, I will stick to the broader media ecosystem.

Let’s use YouTube technology reviews as a case study, because they are universally understandable. Take the launch of a new phone: when the embargo lifts, dozens of polished video reviews appear on YouTube. They run about 20 minutes, share similar thumbnails, and use the same mood lighting. The reviewers had access to the phones before everyone else, so they had time to prepare their reviews.

In the old days, before the current phase of content abundance, folks like Walt Mossberg, Ed Baig, David Pogue, and Steven Levy were often the first to get Apple products for review. Sure, these folks had big platforms, but that head startgave them a lot of clout, which meant many non-Apple companies offered them early access to their products. I never felt cheated or misled by their reviews, though I did notice what they omitted after using the product for a few months.

These days, things are markedly different. For YouTubers, access is the currency of survival. Access, of course, means suggested talking points. Again, nothing new. What’s different is that every reviewer knows that if they paint outside the lines, they’ll lose access. If you don’t have the review out when the embargo lifts, it doesn’t matter if you have a better review; no one is going to notice.

The system rewards whoever speaks first, not whoever lives with it long enough to understand it. The “review” at launch outperforms the review written two months later by orders of magnitude. The second, longer, more in-depth, more honest review might as well not exist. It’s not that people are less honest by nature. It’s that the structure pays a premium for compliance and levies a tax on independence. The result is a soft capture where creators don’t have to be told what to say. The incentives do the talking.

We built systems that reward acceleration, then act surprised when everything feels rushed, shallow, and slightly manic. People do what the network rewards. Writers write for the feed. Photographers shoot for the scroll. Newsrooms frame stories as conflict because conflict travels faster than nuance. Even our emotional lives adapt to latency and refresh cycles. The design of the network becomes the choreography of daily life.

In older networks, the constraints were physical. The number of train lines limited where cities could grow. The number of printing presses limited how many voices could speak. In our case, the constraint is temporal: how fast something can be produced, clicked, shared, and replaced. When velocity becomes the scarcest resource, everything orients around it. This is why it’s wrong to think of “the algorithm” as some quirky technical layer that can be toggled on and off or worked around. The algorithm is the culture. It decides what gets amplified, who gets to make a living, and what counts as “success.”

Once velocity is the prize, quality becomes risky. Thoughtfulness takes time. Reporting takes time. Living with a product or an idea takes time. Yet the window for relevance keeps shrinking, and the penalty for lateness is erasure. We get a culture optimized for first takes, not best takes. The network doesn’t ask if something is correct or durable, only if it moves. If it moves, the system will find a way to monetize it.

The algorithm doesn’t care whether something is true; it cares whether it moves. Day-one content becomes advertising wearing the mask of criticism.

All of this folds back into a larger point. When attention is fragmented and speed becomes the dominant value, media rearranges itself around that reality. Not because anyone wakes up wanting to mislead people, but because the context makes some paths survivable and others impossible.

The YouTube algorithm is the real enforcer because it rewards velocity. Get into the algorithmic slip stream and you get the numbers and make money. So it is no surprise that most day-one reviews are, well, anything but. This goes back to my original premise that when velocity becomes the defining metric, authority is displaced.

You don’t need to be right; you need to be first in the feed. Generalize this beyond YouTube tech reviews and you see the same pattern everywhere. I’m flabbergasted by how much good journalism goes unnoticed every day. We didn’t just put journalism, entertainment, politics, and private lives on networks. We let the networks rewrite what those things are forand how they work.

None of what I am saying is new. Decades ago the media sage Marshall McLuhan summed it up in his timeless phrase, “The medium is the message.” The medium, the technology or channel of communication, influences society and individuals more profoundly than the content, altering our senses and habits and, in turn, our perception, interaction, and culture. The only difference is that network is like a hydra, and data is the fuel that adds velocity, the new metric of perceived reality.

The cost of all this isn’t abstract. It’s the review that took three months, and no one will read it. It’s the investigation that requires patience. It’s the work of understanding before passing judgment. All of it still exists, still gets made. It just doesn’t travel. In a system where only what travels matters, we’ve made expertise indistinguishable from noise.

The cost of all this isn’t abstract. It’s the review that took three months but no one will read. It’s the investigation that required patience. It’s the work of understanding something before declaring judgment. All of it still exists, still gets made. It just doesn’t travel. And in a system where only what travels matters, we’ve made expertise indistinguishable from noise.

In the age of AI, will any of this matter when our idea of information will be entirely different?

January 21, 2026. San Francisco

Photo Courtesy of Yousef Hussain via Unsplash