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Agents Between Writers and Readers Will Change Content Forever
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This was a heck of a take to come across while procrastinating on an essay for the @every newsletter. It’s not news to me though, nor am I in fear for my job: we’ve been talking since at least Q1 about reinventing how our work reaches readers, and I don’t think Dan is prophesying the death of written communication the way half the replies seem to. That said, putting an agent between writer and reader *will* change how many people experience "content," and I think it's worth thinking about what…
Dan Shipper@danshipper12h ago
a big take I've been noodling on and I’m ready to call: the newsletter is dead @every's core business is a newsletter with 120k+ subscribers so I don't say this lightly. persistent agents mean i dont look at my inbox with dots (GrokBots, Muse, etc) I almost never look at my inbox. if I do it's for a specific thing I need to reply to. i think in a year I'll be doing all of my email this way - fully filtered by my dot / something like it. this is not new: it's a continuation of the trend of having a “newsletter” folder in Gmail, but 10x more filtered. what it means It doesn’t mean people won't read newsletters, but it does mean that getting a person’s email is no longer the guarantee that you have a relationship with them that it used to. luckily, with persistent agents (and AI coding more generally) there is an entirely new playing field to build relationships with readers. instead of fighting to get an email address, publishers and creators will need to make sure we're installed in our reader's agent harness of choice, so that they get directly notified when we do something new. we're already starting to experiment with this @every with our MCP and the frontier alerts we send users of our slack agent (https://every.to/agent) it's also more affordable than ever for publishers and creators to build their own platform ecosystem: you can have your own website, app etc. and you can use AI to publish 100x more high-quality stuff to your community—so we may see a world where many creators themselves are running their own little empires that have their own apps, feeds etc. to be clear: It'll take a while before this actually happens, but the idea of getting someone's email creating a direct relationship with them is over. here's a set of predictions I made 3 years ago about AI and media that panned out pretty well: https://every.to/chain-of-thought/we-re-building-ai-into-our-media-business?utm_cta_source=danshipper_main_ai_is_transforming_media_forever_here_s_howdispatches_from_the_frontier_of_technology_and_the_writte_1