The Presentist, 2026

Some thoughts about where we are, today.

As I said a year ago, I’m not a futurist. I’m a presentist. So rather than worrying about tomorrow, let’s talk about what we can see happening today.

To get the obvious out of the way: In 2026, the ad industry is at an inflection point. Holding companies are merging, some of them are imploding, all of them are fundamentally shifting their business model (or adopting an approach of managed decline). Are you becoming a tech company, becoming an AI enabled efficiency machine, or becoming a SAAS platform? No one is sure what the right move is, but I’ll caution people to remember two things. 1) the ad industry is fine, advertising is supporting many of the most influential companies on earth, and 2) there’s a world outside of holding companies… they’ve only existed for 64 years. People have been advertising since ancient Egypt, at least. From a Lindy’s Law perspective, I’m not worried about advertising having a future, and you shouldn’t be either. Worry about how you’re going to navigate the chaos that’s happening while we all figure out what that future looks like.

Traditional media is evolving at gunpoint.

People don’t read anymore. That’s not a criticism, it’s an observation. People rarely seem to watch TV with their full attention, movie theatres have as many cobwebs as patrons, and radio is becoming less relevant as podcasts, streaming audio and in-car technology continue to improve. At the same time, big tentpole content like sports, awards shows, late night, and news, is moving to other channels and formats, or is under siege economically. The consensus is that Stephen Colbert is probably going to be a podcaster relatively soon, and will make bank doing it. I’ll probably watch him more, to be honest. Either Netflix is going to own Warner Bros, HBO, and a world class IP library, or Paramount (with Oracle money) will. None of the old media is going to fully disappear, but right now we’re getting a front row seat for the world figuring out that traditional media has hit the point of managed decline. Radio did this already, going from the entertainment centrepiece of the home, to something encountered while driving, or in doctors offices. The amount of YouTube I consume on my TV is a big sign (to me, at least) that this transition is already underway. Sure, I’m probably a leading indicator vs gen pop, but I’m also a 40-something dad. If I’m doing something, it’s likely not cutting edge.

Social media is dying. (The counterpoints you’re thinking about were never actually social media.)

This might be wishful thinking, but in a world where countries are banning under 16s on social platforms, where more schools are banning phone use, and where people generally feel like the promise of social media has failed, I don’t think it is. I know that there are bright spots and moments of influence, but I believe none of those are traditional “social media”. YouTube is a streaming platform with a low barrier to entry, so is TikTok. They’re more of a competitor to Netflix than they are Facebook, if we’re being honest. Discord and WhatsApp are community platforms, sure, but they’re primarily about closed conversation with in-groups, not about broadcasting your life or thoughts as a means of identity creation. I was there when social media started to go mainstream, and I believed it was going to change everything. It did, but not for the better. The decline is here, most of these channels are only ads & influencers (both of which are things I like, but don’t want to consume in isolation), and how they evolve is going to say a lot about how we communicate. From the vantage point of today, the most impactful thing social media accomplished was breaking the funding model for most previous forms of media, and creating a corpus of content that helped train Large Language Models. So, it may have actually been worth it.

We’re going to have a series of AI panics that make the social media panic look quaint.

I remember the (many) social media panics that pre-dated the current one focused on children. TBH, if someone wanted to take social media down, they should have started with protecting children earlier and louder, but the success of this current backlash is inversely proportional to the future prospects of social media, as referenced above. Fear about the negative impact of social media is a big, big deal right now. Fear of AI’s impact is making it look like a tempest in a teapot. We are already seeing serious backlash to not only AI job loss, but also: AI cognitive impacts, AI educational impacts, AI use by parents, AI use by children, AI use by professionals, how to litigate AI usage in situations where things go wrong, and how to credit AI vs AI users when things go right, and more. Each of these will be debated like holy war, with about as much evidence and possibly more passion. Because, AI breaks the model most of us have for how the world works, for how computers work, and for what makes us special and useful in a cold, vast and uncaring universe. The best model for a truly mainstream response to higher level understanding of our current AI models is probably somewhere between finding out your dog can talk, and finding out aliens exist. A recent survey showed 45% of people think AI is looking up the right answers in a massive database. Fundamentally not understanding something, combined with massive change related to that thing, is a recipe for fear. You can already see it if you look.

AI is changing things, but not as fast as you think.

That said, AI isn’t going to change everything today. It’ll probably change things slower than you’re assuming. It’s exciting but imperfect, and governments, companies, and people are generally slow to make massive changes in support of something exciting but imperfect. Right now we’re moving at a medium pace in terms of actual AI adoption and impact, despite constant press releases about AI-related layoffs, because moving away from a human-based working model is actually really really hard for legacy systems or organizations of all types, and comes with a lot of potential costs. For all the fear of AI in higher education, a few really boring analog changes would likely blunt the impact; I wrote essays about English literature for 4 years, in exam rooms and classrooms, by hand, in blue pen. If more work is done in person and by hand, more of it will be done by people. For all the massive AI disruption, the best use cases I’ve seen professionally aren’t about eliminating jobs so much as taking things that were previously unwieldy or too expensive, and making them affordable and manageable. Some people are putting this technology on par with fire. I see it more as on par with the internet. It changed EVERYTHING eventually, but it happened somewhat gradually, as a person who experienced the roll out of broadband, the popularization of laptops, the first smartphones, and the launch of social media, between puberty and finishing university. Looking at it from today, this feels a lot like that. We’re very likely overestimating the amount of change in one year, and underestimating the amount of change in ten.

The geopolitical map is being rewritten.

A year ago I talked about 2025 as a time of Political Inversion, and, well, yeah. I didn’t expect the wholesale dismantling of the post-war global order, but that’s where we’ve ended up. In Canada we’re completely rethinking our level of trust in our global alliances, and much of Europe seems to be doing the same. I woke up recently to news of increased military action around Taiwan, there are (still) multiple wars happening around the world, and what was once settled politics in most of the west is now very much up for debate, and a potential wedge issue. This means uncertainty is going to infect everything until we hit a more stable point, but the grand problem is that a dog doesn’t need to bite you twice, for you to develop a life-long fear of dogs. Policy and behavioural shifts from the USA, China, Russia and others are already reshaping how people see the world, and those impacts are going to be around for a generation, regardless of upcoming elections. Whatever the next stable period after this time looks like, it won’t be the same one I knew growing up. Which means today is a great time to do some introspection, and think about what parts of your theory for how the world, and people, work, are artifacts of a specific global dynamic and belief system, and which are inherent truths. Start today, because sticking to old mental models in times of change is almost always a recipe for mistakes.

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This sounds both more and less grim than last year, but I’m actually really optimistic about our current moment. A bunch of things are breaking, but maybe they needed to. Maybe this is the crack the lets the light in. There’s a tremendous opportunity in times of change, both to make something new, and to understand yourselves better. The only enlightening context, is one that changes.

Happy New Year. Thanks for reading.