I remember the physical weight of a television remote in the late 1990s, clicking through a suddenly expanding universe of 24-hour cable news. It felt like stepping into a river that never stopped moving.
This morning, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) announced a new 24/7 “news channel” streaming on X, named “MTS” (Monitor the Situation). It joins networks like TBPN and a growing army of individual creators, all vying to fill the endless void of the present moment with non-stop commentary.
It feels like a significant shift in how we consume the present. But I suspect it’s actually just scaffolding.
In the lost-wax process of bronze casting, an artist sculpts a form in wax, builds a heavy ceramic mold around it, and then pours in molten metal. The heat is absolute. The wax melts away, completely consumed and replaced by the final, permanent structure. The wax was never the destination; it was merely holding the shape until the real material was ready.
Right now, human creators are the wax.
We are building the molds for the 24/7, always-on broadcast of the internet age. Human hosts are sitting in chairs, monitoring the situation, talking into the void, exhausting themselves to maintain the stream. They are doing the grueling, manual labor of defining what a continuous social-first news network looks and feels like.
But human endurance is fragile. We need sleep. We need silence. We eventually run out of words.
The artificial intelligence models currently learning to synthesize news, clone voices, and generate video are the molten bronze. Eventually, the human hosts of these endless streams will melt away. The channel will remain—a fully AI-driven entity that never blinks, never tires, and never needs a coffee break.
I’ve held on to failing investments for far too long, convinced that if I just put more energy into them, they would eventually stabilize and turn around. We often make this mistake. We mistake the transitional phase for the final destination. We think the current iteration of “monitoring the situation” with exhausted human pundits is the future of media.
It isn’t. It’s just the awkward teenage years of a medium waiting for its true native technology.
The human commentators are doing the necessary work of teaching the system what a 24-hour news network on a social platform requires. Once the lesson is learned, the teachers will no longer be needed. The future is only guaranteed for those who can afford to survive the present.
Is it ironic that TBPN was just acquired by OpenAI?
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