Rooted in the world of Silicon Valley, but really a meditation on the moment. A theory of culture, taste, prestige, of TBPN, Mafia, Feed Me, & why a small audience of the right people can be more valuable than a massive audience of the wrong ones.In Silicon Valley, “new media” has become shorthand for the post-pandemic revival of a certain kind of tech media (not the McLuhan lineage original new media). This new media has grown up alongside a distribution strategy: bypass gatekeepers, go direct, and own your audience. Anyone can build an audience and those who build one can (and have) become powerful intermediaries in their own right. So disintermediation is one story, but not the entire thing.As platforms mature, power laws steepen. Sure everyone can publish now, but most of it has no impact. Attention is scarce, but high-value attention is scarcer. It turns out a small audience of the right people beats a massive audience of the wrong ones. In Silicon Valley, the most valuable audience is inside.NEW MEDIA IS INSIDER MEDIA.Insider Media is media for insiders, by insiders. Both creator and audience belong to the same in-group. The public gets to be in the room but is never the audience being catered to. The topic is less important than the audience whose opinion matters. It’s a closed-room broadcast where principals talk to principals while fans, aspirants, and adjacents watch, learn, and report out.Insider Media is the opposite of journalistic media—outsider media—made for outsiders by outsiders. Outsiders will call Insider Media an echo chamber or bubble, but the proximity is very much the product. This tension is inevitable in any world where status compounds and access is currency. (Note, insiders making media for outsiders is the oldest flavor of commercial media—traditional marketing, even if via modern channels.)INSIDER AUDIENCES ARE MORE VALUABLE THAN THEIR SIZE. A show with 50,000 highly valued viewers may matter more than one with five million random ones.