By the time you finish this paragraph, the feed has refreshed itself several times. A handful of new headlines have surfaced. Most will disappear before the hour ends, including for the people who posted them. Scroll for ten minutes and try to recount what you consumed. Speed fills the space where substance used to sit.

From Authority to Velocity

Om Malik recently offers a structural explanation. He argues that the information ecosystem once organised itself around authority. Attention accrued to people who proved reliable over time. Today the organising principle 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.”

“Networks compress time and space, then quietly train us to live at their speed.”

This is a systems argument. Platforms designed incentives that privilege acceleration. Writers, reviewers, and newsrooms adjusted because distribution depends on compliance with those incentives. The algorithm functions as culture. It sets the terms of visibility and shapes behaviour. The algorithm also has owners; it reflects decisions.

The YouTube Review Cycle

Malik points to YouTube tech reviews. When an embargo lifts, dozens of videos publish within minutes. Production quality aligns. Talking points converge. Conclusions cluster. The reviewer who spends months living with a device publishes later and rarely reaches the same audience.

“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.”

Designed Incentives, Predictable Outcomes

The pattern extends beyond tech.

“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.”

The outcome follows the incentive structure. Culture optimises for first takes.

Authority driven media carried its own distortions. Gatekeeping concentrated power and limited access. Malik does not argue for restoration. The loss concerns tempo. A slower cycle allowed ideas to face scrutiny before replacement. Today replacement often arrives first.