Force for Change
Aemula Writer Spotlight - 5.1.25
Innovation, policy, and societal progress are all rooted in our collaborative ability to share and iterate on novel ideas. Historically, traditional media outlets controlled the channels of distribution, with editorial boards curating the flow of ideas by filtering and amplifying certain voices. Today, now that distribution has been commoditized via the internet, the majority of this process takes place on corporate social networks. However, this new system is characterized by a noisy attention economy where inflammatory or misleading content often outcompetes thoughtful expertise.
If we want to create a system that promotes real, quality news, we must first lower the barriers for knowledgeable people to share well-reasoned, thoughtful ideas. Yet, the incentive structures underlying most information-sharing platforms are currently misaligned. Creators optimize for algorithms that are tuned to maximize engagement to drive ad revenue. Writers who make a living on these platforms must lean into clickbait headlines and controversial opinions to ‘growth hack’ their way to virality and increase their earnings.
It is a difficult, full-time job to build an audience in such an environment, leaving many people to post without the intent of being compensated for their work. Since quality journalism takes time and resources, the most qualified independent voices are often deterred from sharing their thoughts for free. We are then left reading only the opinions of those passionate enough about fringe beliefs to work without pay, seeking to persuade others to adopt their point of view. This ecosystem is optimized to sell ads, not to spread the best ideas to the people most capable of acting on them to drive change.
Instead, independent writers should not be left to choose between building their own audience from scratch or working without receiving adequate compensation. With Aemula, we are cultivating an ecosystem with transparent, merit-based incentive structures that are open to everyone. Writers can publish directly to an existing network of paid subscribers, and their work is monetized at a rate similar to operating their own platform. This way, writers who have relevant expertise — but maybe not an existing audience of paid subscribers — can actually earn fair compensation for sharing their thoughts.
Once the correct incentives are in place, the core challenge then becomes separating signal from noise. We need to ensure that the most impactful ideas can directly reach the people that need them. Since Aemula is free of any ads or outside influence, our open-source algorithms can optimize for promoting high-quality journalism rather than farming attention for selling ads. We promote articles that are written by real people — not bots — who receive support from diverse ideological communities. Additionally, we provide the support and resources necessary for writers to produce their best work.
By creating an incentive-aligned, diverse network for the efficient distribution of high-quality information, we can begin to drive meaningful innovation through streamlined human collaboration. This week, we highlight writers who exemplify the ethos of leveraging their expertise to share new ideas to drive change. We encourage you to read their work and consider subscribing to them directly.
Urban Proxima
Written by Jeff Fong, a writer, technologist, and housing activist. He was an early stage employee at Lyft and later took on roles in both product and leadership at Postmates. A longtime contributor to Market Urbanism, his work has also been featured in publications like Caos Planejado and Progress and Poverty.
Jeff also serves as Board Chair at YIMBY Action, an activist organization pushing the controversial idea that houses are good and we should have more of them.
“What is Urban Proxima?
Urban Proxima is about the ways technology changes (or soon could change) urban life. If you’re an urbanist, technologist, developer, architect, policy wonk, activist, or any other character class that cares about cities, this is for you.
What Can I Expect?
Each newsletter, we’ll cover how new tech drives the evolution of our cities, the laws and regulations that influence urban growth, and the lives of real people as the future unfolds around us.”
The Mediator
Written by Doug Shapiro, an independent advisor and consultant, Senior Advisor at BCG, former Chief Strategy Officer at Turner (WarnerMedia), head of IR at Time Warner, and Institutional Investor ranked Wall Street media analyst, previously featured in our spotlight, “Velocity of Information”.
“Over the last 20 years, digitization and the internet caused the cost to distribute media to functionally move toward zero, lowering barriers to entry. This disruption ushered in the tectonic trends that dominate the media business today:
Stagnation of time spent;
Fragmentation of attention (owing both to a massive increase in content supply and the changing consumer definition of quality);
Disintermediation of traditional intermediaries as technology makes it easier for creatives and creators to reach consumers directly; and
Concentration of both power in a few platforms and attention in a few megahits due to the amplifying effects of the positive feedback loops online.
GenAI is now poised to cause the cost to create media to also plummet, which over the next decade could be as disruptive, if not more so.”
Maximum Progress
Written by Maxwell Tabarrok, a pre-doctoral researcher studying meta-science at Dartmouth writing about economics, science, philosophy, and progress, previously featured in our spotlight, “Progress”.
“This blog is all about one graph:
World GDP Over the Last Two Millennia. The Great Fact, The Hockey Stick, The Arc of Human History.
There are dozens of questions that arise from staring at this chart. Why did economic progress begin when and where it did? Is it slowing down? Can it speed up or even continue? How can we live in and understand a world where change is always getting faster?
Maximum Progress is a blog exploring these questions. To do that, we need to bring in mathematics, economics, history, science, philosophy, and culture.”
Are you writing on Substack? You can easily set up automatic cross-posting with Aemula to:
Instantly increase your earnings
Expand your audience
Verifiably own your work
Plus, you will have opportunities to access community resources and grants to support the content you want to create!
Cross-posting comes with no costs, no obligations, and you can stop at any time.
Just send a quick email writers@aemula.com to get started!
The Aemula platform is live at aemula.com! Claim your 1-month free trial today! All it takes is an email address and 30 seconds — learn more about creating an Aemula account here.
If you want to support any of the writers we spotlight in our Substack, we highly encourage you to subscribe to their individual publications. If you want to support independent journalism more broadly, we offer both paid and free subscriptions for you to stay informed!
All Substack subscription revenue is reinvested directly into the independent journalism community.
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