Written by: Uncle Bu Dong Jing's Rust

Many people like the binary method or binary thinking. In our era, the real opposites worth discussing are no longer capital versus labor, online versus offline, or content versus product. Today, many changes are converging on a new dividing line: media versus machines.

In the past, people could generally separate the two. Machines were responsible for production, calculation, execution, and amplifying efficiency. Media was responsible for dissemination, narrative, attention, and social influence. One leaned towards factories, and the other leaned towards stages. One dealt with logic, the other shaped perception.

However, in today's AI era, this boundary is rapidly collapsing. Machines are beginning to produce media, which in turn shapes machines. The familiar companies we know are quietly transforming in this process.

This is a key step in understanding the AI era.

Every era invents its own companies.

During the age of the steam engine, companies resembled factories; whoever could scale production, lower costs, and establish discipline could dominate the market. In the age of mass media, companies began to resemble brands; whoever could capture television, advertising, and consumer mindset could turn products into symbols and attention into profits. In the internet era, companies increasingly became platforms; whoever could connect users, organize networks, and control distribution gateways was closer to the center of the era.

Looking back at business history, you will find an important rule: the appearance of a company often depends on what the core infrastructure of that era is and what the most powerful media environment is. This is why the railroad era shaped railroad companies, the television era shaped consumer brands, and the internet era shaped platform giants.

McLuhan had long warned that what media really shapes is "the scale and form of human connection and action."

Therefore, a company is never just a legal entity or a profit-making machine. It resembles a slice of its era. By observing a company's core capabilities, you can often discern the deepest power structures of that era.

This is why the real issues worth discussing today are no longer just which positions will be replaced or how much efficiency certain tools have improved. The significant change lies in the organizational form of companies themselves crossing a threshold.

The most successful and representative companies of the future will likely exhibit the same characteristic: half media, half machine; producing both products and reality.

AI is not replacing jobs; it is replacing the organization of companies.

Venture capital tycoons and tech company founders are all catching up; the worth of individuals in the AI era is rapidly increasing.

Why does a company have to grow in two directions?

Many people are not unfamiliar with "companies like machines." Since the industrial age, companies have carried a strong machine-like quality. Standardized processes, division of labor, hierarchical management, performance evaluations; all of these resemble a massive organizational machine. However, today's changes go deeper than the industrial era.

Because today's machines are no longer just assembly lines, ERP systems, or automation tools; they are starting to penetrate the cognitive, decision-making, and expressive levels. Models can write, read, observe, summarize, analyze, and assist in decision-making; more and more knowledge work is being broken down into callable, trainable, and replicable processes.

OpenAI mentioned in its 2025 Enterprise AI report that enterprise AI is moving from the experimental phase to "core infrastructure," and the intensity of enterprise usage is rapidly increasing. The report also stated that the message volume of ChatGPT yearly grew by 8 times, while organizational-level consumption of API reasoning tokens increased by 320 times. This signal is clear: AI's role in organizations is increasingly approaching foundational capabilities like electricity, databases, and cloud computing.

But the problem is, a company cannot just be a machine.

In this era, capabilities themselves are not automatically acknowledged by the world. Products are not automatically understood, technologies are not automatically trusted, and brands are not automatically remembered. If an organization lacks sustained abilities in expressing, explaining, narrating, and organizing attention, no matter how strong the technology is, it can be drowned out in noise.

Thus, companies are also forced to grow in another direction, which is media-oriented.

Here, "media-oriented" is no longer at the same level as traditional publicity, public relations, or advertising. It means companies start managing their public presence like media. They need to continuously voice, explain, shape personality, organize cognition, and maintain relationships with users, markets, developers, investors, and regulators. They increasingly resemble devices that continuously output meaning and emotions.

Consequently, the companies that are truly advancing today are often doing two things simultaneously: turning their internal operations into machines and external landscapes into media.

By 2026, why are the smartest money-makers in the world starting to heavily invest in self-media?

It has become clear: AI is not egalitarian; it is the final battle between capital and labor. The wealthier run faster.

This is not just a communication skill but a rewriting of the organizational ecology.

To understand this, it is also helpful to reread Neil Postman, a disciple of McLuhan.

Neil Postman, an American media theorist and cultural critic, author of "Amusing Ourselves to Death," spent a long time studying media ecology at New York University. He made one extremely important judgment: technological change is not additive but ecological.

What he means is that when a new technology enters society, it does not simply add a tool to the existing world but alters the entire environment. The printing press changed the order of knowledge, television changed public discourse, and computers will also reorganize social life.

This judgment, applied to today's context, seems almost tailor-made for AI.

Many people think a company simply has an AI assistant now, a set of model interfaces, and a few automated processes. But what is actually happening is that AI is redefining what types of people are more valuable, what types of work can be more easily absorbed by systems, what types of expressions can diffuse more easily, and what kinds of organizations can attract capital and talent. The change is not limited to a specific department; it penetrates the entire company and rewrites the whole ecology.

Because of this, today when discussing AI, we cannot focus only on tools; we must discuss media. Media determines how people engage with the world, how they understand it, and how they are organized by it.

McLuhan's statement "the medium is the message" has always emphasized that the focus is never on the content itself, but on how the media form reshapes human perception and social structure. McLuhan’s official materials clarify that the importance of media lies in its ability to "shape and control the scale and form of human connection and action."

In the AI era, this judgment becomes even more direct. Natural language has become both the interactive interface and the infrastructure. It may seem like you are asking a question, but you are actually orchestrating a system of capabilities. It may seem like you are writing, but you are actually engaging in a new construction.

This creates another recursive loop: media creates machines, and machines, in turn, create media.

This almost perfectly depicts many new companies. The models ingest text, images, code, videos, and language accumulated over decades, which is the digitized media world; they output new text, images, videos, sounds, and interactions, which are new media. They absorb culture while regenerating culture.

Thus, the core competition for future companies will not just be about products but will increasingly become a competition of narrative systems and intelligent systems coupling.

The retirement age of 65 is gradually becoming an illusion; 35 and 85 are becoming the new normal.

Why do 64% of people get stuck on the fourth level of the six-tier ladder of contemporary wealth?

The strongest companies have already begun to show this new species characteristic.

If you want to find a case that best illustrates this change, one example suffices: OpenAI, very typical.

OpenAI has strong machine attributes. It relies on model training, computational infrastructure, systems engineering, APIs, enterprise access, and continuous iterative product capability. OpenAI disclosed in its 2025 Enterprise AI report that enterprise use is rapidly deepening; AI is moving from a side tool to the core workflow.

OpenAI's recent corporate updates continue to emphasize that enterprise adoption is accelerating across industries. In other words, it is no longer just a research laboratory but an industrial system that outputs machine capabilities at scale.

At the same time, OpenAI also has strong media attributes. It doesn’t just release models; it continuously publishes explanations about the future. It doesn’t just deliver tools; it shapes the public's imagination of AI. Every launch, every product update, demonstration video, and executive statement quickly enters the media, social platforms, corporate conference rooms, and everyday discussions of ordinary people. While it outputs capabilities, it is also outputting a cognitive framework about the future.

This is precisely the embryo of a "new species company." It is increasingly like infrastructure internally and like a media network externally. It is building smart factories while also constructing public imagination.

Changes in Silicon Valley venture capital indicate that even capital has begun to realize media is on the rise.

Interestingly, this change is not only happening in AI companies; even the top capital institutions in Silicon Valley are proactively adjusting themselves.

Andreessen Horowitz, or A16Z as it is commonly known, has been systematically strengthening its content and media capabilities in recent years. It has long engaged in podcasts, newsletters, columns, and research content.

By November 2025, A16Z officially launched the a16z New Media team and wrote a clear objective in an official article: to help founders with brand strategy, storytelling, and public narrative, establishing a comprehensive new media support system around writing, video, podcasts, social media, research, events, and communities; on the same day, they also launched the a16z New Media Fellowship aimed at operators, creators, and storytelling talent.

What’s even more noteworthy is that in a February 2026 official podcast episode, A16Z articulated this logic very candidly. Co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz discussed how the media landscape is changing, why individuals are now more important than company brands, why speed is crucial in the new media environment, and why A16Z is building a "new media strategy" as a foundational capability.

This is very telling. Even capital has recognized that media capability is no longer just an embellishment; it is becoming a part of organizational competitiveness.

A venture capital firm should traditionally focus on fundraising, investing in projects, managing post-investment, and exits. But today, it is increasingly serious about transforming itself into a semi-media organization. The logic behind this is not complicated.

In today’s technological world, capital, products, talent, influence, and narratives are increasingly intertwined. Whoever can stabilize the creation of attention will more easily attract talent; whoever can define the field will more easily define valuations; whoever can organize online cognition will more easily organize offline resources.

Thus, today it is difficult for companies to win solely by "doing well"; they must also make themselves visible, understood, remembered, and desired. Media capability is entering the core of the company from its periphery.

What is the most valuable asset today? Wall Street has thrown analysts into the Strait of Hormuz directly.

The collapse of the middle layer: two thousand years of management history end in an AI cycle.

When a company both produces products and produces reality.

To understand the AI era, we need to pay attention to a new change: today, many organizations are no longer just designing products, platforms, and services; they are designing cognitive environments.

Once a company possesses media attributes, it influences not only market choices but also how people understand a problem, how they name a trend, and how they perceive a technology. It is not just selling things; it will also shape the "reality" in the eyes of the outside world.

Every engineering decision is a cultural act, and every narrative choice has technological consequences. In today’s context, this statement could describe many companies.

How models are trained, how products are designed, how interfaces are opened, how content is distributed, how founders communicate, and how launch events are presented may seem like engineering, operations, marketing, or public relations issues at the surface, but they all jointly shape a new social reality.

Therefore, future competition among companies might increasingly resemble this kind of competition: who can better translate machine capabilities into social reality.

The so-called social reality includes whether users are willing to adopt, whether developers are willing to integrate, whether capital is willing to invest, whether regulators are willing to accept, whether talent is willing to join, and whether ordinary people are willing to believe it will change the future. Technology is certainly important, but whether technology can enter society ultimately has to go through this layer of media filtering.

Because of this, many companies today are beginning to resemble "systems with their own personalities." They have a technological hub and a public voice; they have internal automation and external narratives; they are organizations and also interfaces; they produce products and also produce expectations.

The internet we know is being ended by AI, along with the underlying logic for making money online.

For ordinary people, the real change is in the survival logic of work.

At this point, the issue cannot just remain at the company level.

Because once a company becomes "half media, half machine," the career paths of ordinary people will also change. Many people used to believe that as long as they did their work well, their value would eventually be recognized.

Today, this path is narrowing. Of course, you still need to be able to do your job, but that is no longer enough. You must also be able to explain your value, connect your abilities to the system, and be understood, trusted, and called upon in an increasingly complex information environment.

The differentiation of many future positions may not mainly occur over "whether one can use AI." A deeper differentiation will happen along another line.

Some people will become system attachments, scheduled by processes, compressed by models, and driven by metrics, with work increasingly resembling the maintenance of a giant machine; while others will become interface-type talents, who can both understand the system and organize narratives; who can cooperate with machines and communicate with people; who can produce capabilities and also let the world know why this matters.

The latter will become increasingly valuable.

Because in such an era, knowledge itself is becoming cheaper, and the systems that summon knowledge are becoming more prevalent. What is truly scarce is the ability to judge, translate, integrate, organize, and impart meaning.

Whether you can clarify complex systems, turn data into shareable stories, and establish credibility in the noise will become the new professional moat.

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In conclusion, what is genuinely contested is the operating system of the new era.

The integration of media and machines is becoming the operating system of this era.

Many people still regard AI as a technological revolution, but from a larger scale, it resembles an environmental revolution. It is rewriting not just a couple of industries or types of work; it is rewriting how companies exist, how people work, and how reality is organized.

Future companies will not just be more efficient companies but companies that are better at shaping environments.

Internally, they will more closely resemble machines, pursuing callability, reproducibility, and scalability. Externally, they will more closely resemble media, pursuing shareability, explainability, and relatability. They build infrastructure while also constructing cognitive frameworks. They organize actions and feelings alike. They compete for markets and for the languages of the era.

Therefore, the change most worthy of vigilance today is not necessarily about who AI has replaced, but that an increasing number of organizations are beginning to control two things simultaneously: one is capability, and the other is perception. They influence how you do your work and how you see the world.

When companies begin to be both like media and like machines, the history of commerce has indeed turned to the next page. The next question is just who can first comprehend this page. 【Understand】

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