This month we hosted our first ever Quiet Media Zine Club! The idea for this series is to take the writing from Quiet Media off the page and into the world to encourage conversation and connection around the ideas. We gathered in Regent’s park, and took us through her essay and practice, Learning to Notice. Thank you to those who came.

The next one excitingly!! you’re hearing here first: it will be a workshop hosted (online) on the 23rd of September with none other than and the wonderful , author of Say Less in the Inaugural Issue. It’s designed for anyone (show of hands) who feels the pressure of the algorithm... We’ll give you a handy framework to help you take back control, reminding you that you’re in the drivers seat of your own creation. Tickets and more info here. If you have purchased a physical copy of Quiet Media you get to come for free so message me for a code 💙

Now for the digest: each month I gather a handful of things I've read, watched and noticed through my Quiet Media lens - culture pointing toward how we pay attention and consume media. Take it with your morning coffee, or see it as some topics to bring up at your next dinner party.

As always thank you for your attention,

Charlotte

Quiet Media Monthly Digest - August 🌞

This month: Sézane matures the brand by doing less, Olivia Rodrigo does a 1000-person show for 25 dollars, the rising interest in more personalized tech, Sephora rolls out Quiet Hours for the over-stimulated, and the new role for brands as patrons 👇🏼

BRANDING

🧵 Sézane decides to slow it down
After 20 years of solid upward growth, Sézane is entering a new chapter. Rather than hitting the gas and accelerating further, founder Morgane Sézalory is choosing to slow things down. At a point where the brand is doing extremely well and continues to expand into new markets, she says she wants to “stop the growth”: fewer, more considered releases, better materials and more time spent developing what makes Sézane the brand that it is. Personally, I love that this is coming from a position of strength vs crisis. A successful brand claiming that more does not equal better and that growth can come from going deeper vs wider. As if I needed another reason to love this brand.. read more.

MUSIC

🎸 Olivia Rodrigo builds intimacy into her brand
Olivia Rodrigo is the latest artist pushing back against the increasingly commercialised concert experience in finding ways to make live music feel more accessible and affordable. This month in NYC, she announced a concert on the day of, with 1000 tickets only available at the venue for $25. In the music industry, this is called ‘underplay’ - when an artist plays a much smaller gig than they can handle (thank you for this fact). Many artists are looking to build more direct, intimate relationships with their audiences - from Lorde sharing new music with fans on WhatsApp to Charli XCX building a universe that feels like a conversation with her community. read more.

TECHNOLOGY

📸 It’s Nice That’s Good Screens report
Another great report by It’s Nice That, this one digs into the growing appetite for slower, more intentional tech, surveying audiences on what a healthier relationship with devices could look like and rounding up the designers, artists and studios building screenless, hackable alternatives to the mainstream. What caught my eye in particular was the company Modem. When they launched the studio in 2021, they announced they'd shut it down in 2030. It's a self-imposed expiry date, and according to the founders it's exactly what allows them to take risks. It's a useful provocation for brands as well as thinking more generally: permanence isn't the only measure of impact. Sometimes a shorter, sharper lifespan can encourage bigger swings. download the report.

RETAIL

🤖 Sephora globally rolls out Quiet Hours
Not quite news from August, but this has just come on my radar. Sephora is rolling out Quiet Hours globally. At designated times across its stores, they will dim the lights and the screens, lower the music, and leave customers alone. The initiative was built with input from neurodiversity advocates to offer a calmer shopping experience for customers who prefer reduced stimulation. You don’t need to be diagnosed to be exhausted by fluorescent lights and a music loop turned up to eleven - this is totally up my alley (and often the reason I’ll turn down a pub invite..) While ‘sensory marketing’ and more stimulus was the goal for a long time, the opposite may now be true. read more.

MARKETING

👑 Brands as patrons of culture
Vogue Business (, of course) published a great piece on brands reconsidering their role in cultural marketing. Perhaps it's time to give up the goal of "creating culture" and act as patrons instead. What that means is a shift away from using culture to sell stuff, and towards funding the people who shape it from the ground up. For a brand this is an entirely different mindset: it's long-term, less immediate, you're building trust and a real stake in a community or space. I admire the brand Nothing a lot (mentioned in the article) - they continue to move the needle on marketing under Charlie Smith. read more.

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading, see you in a month for the next Quiet Media monthly digest 📫

Quiet Media is a print-first publication founded on the simple belief that our attention is our most valuable resource, and it should be treated with care. Not anti-tech and not surrendered to it either. It explores what changes when we stop optimizing for speed and volume, and start designing for depth and meaning instead.

Physical copies of the Inaugural Issue are sold out, but digital copies are still available in limited numbers through Metalabel.

For complex beings with incomprehensible minds, we’re increasingly okay with being reduced to binaries. The pressure to declare, in conversation and in our online lives, has never felt more urgent.

If you hesitate - there’s an insult for that. Fence-sitter.

The fence-sitter is non committal. They’re too afraid of being wrong or being disliked so they end up standing for nothing. Spineless. Underneath all of this, we’ve decided, is a lack of courage.

What’s interesting though is that the word, in this definition, is described in its relation to others. It assumes there’s a debate happening, two sides to choose from, and the fence-sitter is too cowardly to pick either. It is an outward-facing posture about who you might offend, with the ultimate success metric being to avoid alienation.

But what if sitting on the fence had nothing to do with others at all and everything to do with yourself? What if it was actually one of the more inward-facing things you could do, giving yourself enough time, enough exposure to both fields, before you decide where you’d like to land? The person on the fence has the advantage of seeing both sides of the soil; in a world that’s constantly pressing us to have a take and pick a team - that strikes me as brave.

So while the world is losing its tolerance for the in-between, this piece is an invitation to stay in that grey, hovering, unresolved place a little longer than is comfortable. To sit with the questions before you jump.

Wired to decide

Craving certainty is very natural for our species. Social psychologist Arie Kruglanski spent decades studying what he called the “need for cognitive closure” - our desire for a definite answer on any given thing, and our discomfort when we can't find one. According to him, this need operates through two tendencies. The first is the “urgency tendency” and relates to our impulse to reach closure as fast as possible. And the second is the “permanence tendency” - our impulse to hold onto it for as long as we can. We “seize” and then we “freeze”, as he calls it. In other words, protecting what we already believe becomes more important than expanding our knowledge.

Historically too, conviction was a survival skill. In small communities, knowing which side someone was on was genuinely important. Ambivalence was suspicious, it held the threat that you might turn. So the distrust runs deep.

But what’s happening now is that we spend our days on platforms that algorithmically reward certainty. The clean take is the one that travels - getting shared in group chats, commented on, and referenced vehemently in conversation. As a creator, you’ve only got 3 seconds to “hook” after all - you better get to the point. The nuanced take asks more of you than scrolling is designed to give. The algorithm doesn’t know what to do with “it’s complicated” so it buries it. And so we've all, without really agreeing to it, inched towards optimizing for a version of ourselves that sounds most sure.

The performance of conviction

The World Uncertainty Index tracks mentions of uncertainty across political and economic reports in 71 countries. Earlier in 2026, it reached record highs surpassing even levels seen after the 2008 financial crisis and COVID in 2020.

Online though, you’d never guess. Scroll for three minutes and you'll find people who are very, very sure while you, on the other side of the screen, are not. They are sure about the right places to eat, where to stay, how to vote, what to buy. They'll tell you where to go on holiday and what to think about the news. They’ll tell you what all the “cool girls” are wearing this summer (which by the way you are also not.) The internet is very good at making you feel like everyone else has already figured it out.

Opinions these days are more than just formed thoughts, they’re identity signals. And the internet has a long memory. Which raises the stakes, because changing your mind stops being an intellectual update based on new information and instead becomes a threat to your self-presentation.

Being certain also gives you something valuable in society: legibility to others. Pick a side and people know what to do with you. They can categorize you and decide if you’re friend or foe. Jumping off to a side of the fence prematurely rarely has anything to do with how sure you actually are. It’s easier. It gives you somewhere to stand, a group to belong to, a way of being understood and accepted by the people around you. We’re performing conviction because the alternative, sitting openly in the not-yet-knowing, doesn’t really have a place in the conversation.

Take the discourse earlier this year about posting analogue hobbies online. The internet had thoughts. If you’re sharing pics from your film camera on Instagram, how offline are you really? Pick a side: are you digital or analogue, online or offline? But this is exactly the kind of false binary the fence exposes. Someone can love the slowness of a disposable camera and still want to post those pics on their Instagram. And that’s okay. We live deep in contradiction - we always have. Online is still fundamentally the infrastructure of how culture travels. It’s not a moral low ground.

Another recent example is the social media blanket ban for under-16s in the UK. The discourse split fast - ban it / don't, protect the kids / defend free access. It seems a blanket ban is easier than the harder, slower work of changing habits, building better tools for parents and children, holding social media companies genuinely accountable for what they've built. The ban is a clean headline.

And so we jump down. Usually faster than we should.

The view from the fence

What’s so good about the fence anyway? What can you actually see from up there? For a start, you can see both sides. You can gently take in a perspective without having to endorse it fully or sit with an argument without having to win it. You can let new information in your system without it threatening everything you’ve already decided. Psychologists call this intellectual humility. The rest of us might just call it keeping an open mind.

Arguably the most compelling view though, is the one that goes inward. The fence is one of the few places where you can ask yourself: why am I drawn to one side vs the other? What is it about the other that makes me uncomfortable? Is this opinion actually mine, or is it just the most obvious and accepted one - the one that comes with a clear label? Sometimes, once you’ve been up there long enough, you realize that neither is actually where you want to be. There’s a third position that emerges once you stop rushing to choose between the two on offer.

Social psychology also suggests that we do some of our best and original thinking when we’re sitting up there. Research linked to Kruglanski’s work found that people with a lower need for cognitive closure tend to be more creative - generating more original ideas more easily. So while the fence can bring discomfort and sensations of anxiety, it’s also breeding ground for discovery, creativity and change.

For that reason, it might be an ability worth nurturing - and one you can develop. A good exercise is finding out where you are on Kruglanski’s Need for Cognitive Closure Scale. There’s a free self-assessment tool here.

Once you have that you can put a few things in place to help you hone that skill. For me, some of the things I’m practicing lately are the following:

꩜ Read across the divide. Actively seek out perspectives you wouldn't normally encounter. Pick a topic you feel somewhat certain about and read it from the other side.

꩜ Let things settle. Put the phone down mid-scroll and give ideas time to digest before you decide what you think.

꩜ Sit with a question before you reach for an answer. Notice the discomfort of not immediately knowing. How long can you hold the open loop before the urgency tendency kicks in?

꩜ Notice performed certainty. In conversation with others and in your own head. Ask yourself: is this actually what I think, or is it just the easiest thing to say right now?

꩜ Consume and/or create something heavy. Seek out - or make - something that takes time and doesn't resolve in 30 seconds. The effort is the point.

The fence has good company

Finally, it turns out a lot of people are already up there.

Ground News was built in 2018 on the premise that where you get your news shapes what you think. Their platform now tracks over 50k sources, showing you the same story reported from the left, centre, and right simultaneously - and the bias baked into each. They also publish a weekly Blindspot report, covering stories that received almost no coverage from one side of the political spectrum. Rather than telling you what to think, they show you what you might be missing from inside your own information diet. A platform like this shows you the machinery. And once you see the machinery, the certainty gets a little harder to hold onto.

The Guardian has been doing something similar with Dining Across the Divide. In the weekly column, they invite two people with contrasting beliefs to have lunch and talk. They discuss topics they may disagree on, without the aim of getting to any conclusion or compromise, and in the process they discover their shared beliefs as well (thank you for sharing this great reference with me.)

Vox’s podcast The Gray Area with has been going at this for a while too. Sean takes a philosophy-minded look at culture, politics, ideas and his aim is to talk "without any concern about landing on the correct answers." The show's tagline is "resist certainty, embrace ambiguity.” In practice, the conversation naturally pulls toward one side or the other… staying in the grey is hard.

What all of these have in common is that they hold their audience in high regard. It’s a sort of generosity - an assumption that people can hold opposing ideas and sit with discomfort.

In my own experience, when Quiet Media launched in April, one of the most common questions I got was: “so is this about going offline?” My answer was usually some variation of “no, not quite - but in some ways yes.”

I wondered at first whether that made me sound non-committal. But that is the honest truth of this publication and continues to be. It lives in the tension. It doesn’t necessarily give you answers to resolve it. What I’ve come to realize is that the Quiet Media reader is quite okay with that too. They’re not rushing to conclusions. They’re not waiting to be told what to think. They’re curious and they’re paying attention.

This isn’t an argument for having no opinions. Sometimes the fence is the wrong place to be and ambivalence is just another word for looking away. The fence isn’t a permanent address.

But there’s a difference between conviction that’s been earned and conviction that’s been inherited. The former comes from sitting with something long enough and weighing alternatives, while other comes from jumping down fast because it gave you immediate legibility.

So what do you think? See you up there?

As always, thank you for your attention.
Charlotte

We are hosting some Quiet Media events this summer. The first is ‘Learning to Notice’ and will be on the 18th of August in London. Tickets are available now. Would love to see you there 💙

Quiet Media’s Inaugural Edition is fully sold out in print across all partners! Thank you all for your support. If you still want a chance to read it, you can get your digital copy from Metalabel. Edition two is in the works and I’ll be sharing more updates on that soon.

This past week Quiet Media got a lovely feature in People of Print - you can read it here.

We have a few events coming up in London and beyond over the next few weeks so stay tuned, would love to see some of you there!

Now for the digest: each month I gather a handful of things I've read, watched and noticed through my Quiet Media lens - culture pointing toward how we pay attention and consume media. Take it with your morning coffee, or see it as some topics to bring up at your next dinner party.

As always thank you for your attention,

Charlotte

Quiet Media Monthly Digest - July 🏝️

This month: Charli’s anti-marketing tweet, the pushback against those Meta glasses, Polaroid’s summer campaign, the privilege of not using AI, and a case against the 24h news cycle👇🏼

MARKETING

🔮 Charli XCX “predicts” anti-marketing
Charli XCX tweeted this month that anti-marketing could be the next evolution of how artists and brands build relationships with their audiences. Moving away from broadcast and toward an approach that’s more up-close and personal. Unsurprisingly, I agree, as that’s what Quiet Media is all about. And plenty of brands are already circling this too - trading mainstream mass reach for influence in more passionate pockets of culture. But when Charli speaks the world listens - so this tweet might help push this idea further into the industry. The question is whether intimacy can ever really exist at scale? Can something designed to feel personal still feel personal when millions of people are experiencing it? What would that look like? I’m sitting on that one and would love to hear your thoughts too. tweet here.

MEDIA

📰 Johnny Harris says stop reading the news
Johnny Harris sat down on Subway Takes this month with an unpopular opinion for a journalist to hold: stop consuming the news. He says the 24-hour news cycle is built to make you feel scared, angry and overwhelmed - because that’s what keeps you watching. You might be up to date on what happened yesterday, but not actually informed. The crises and outrages of the day get all the airtime while the slower, more complicated truth about how the world actually works rarely does. He suggests to seek that out. Seek out better sources: journalists who help you understand how the world works, not just what’s on fire in it today. A really great lesson in media literacy. watch below.

BRANDS

📸 Polaroid’s analogue summer campaign
Now in its second year, Polaroid’s Analog Summer campaign is striking a chord with lines like “go jump in some water before the data centers drink it all up” and “dance like nobody is recording”. It’s super playful and it taps into a growing appetite for spending less time on our phones. What makes it work is as much the message as the messenger. Plenty of brands preach disconnecting while their business model is built on scrolling. And others have no real standing to speak on the topic at all, ie Pepsi telling you to log off?? Polaroid has been about experiencing life beyond the screen for decades, so the campaign feels like a natural and ownable space for them in comms. read more.

AI

🤖 Do we really trust AI to tell us what’s human?
Substack sparked debate this month after partnering with Pangram, an AI detection tool designed to flag AI written posts, after which the witch-hunt begins. The rollout quickly drew criticism as writers reported human-written pieces being labelled as AI generated. But beyond the flaws in the product, something I’ve been thinking about a lot is, who gets to write without AI? As a native English speaker, I recognize that privilege. For many writing in a second language, AI isn't a lazy shortcut but a translator, an editor, a confidence boost that makes participating in a global conversation possible. Treating any AI assistance as a mark against authenticity risks punishing exactly the people it should be helping. If something is written with AI does it automatically mean that it’s not original thinking? I don’t think so. There’s also something a little.. off about using AI to prove whether a piece is human. read more

TECH

🕶️ Surveillance is not so chic after all
The unease around Meta's smart glasses suggests a shift in how people are starting to respond to technology generally. Trust in Big Tech is shakier than ever and people are getting more tech and media literate - asking what data is collected, who owns it, who profits. Meta partnered with Kylie Jenner to co create a product, and Peggy Gou was DJing at the launch party - borrowed clout that was meant to soften the scrutiny but instead had the opposite effect. Historically, getting female audiences on board with new tech is crucial to mass adoption so these choices made sense from a brand strategy perspective. But while a celebrity face and a slick campaign can still move product, they don’t erase the deeper questions about privacy, power, trust. As we get more literate around the systems in our culture, brands will have to make sure they have their I’s dotted and T’s crossed. read more.

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading, see you in a month for the next Quiet Media monthly digest 📫

Quiet Media is a print-first publication founded on the simple belief that our attention is our most valuable resource, and it should be treated with care. Not anti-tech and not surrendered to it either. It explores what changes when we stop optimizing for speed and volume, and start designing for depth and meaning instead.

Physical copies of the Inaugural Issue are sold out, but digital copies are still available in limited numbers through Metalabel.

I’ve been to so many supper clubs in London where the evening is centered around the food, and you’re kind of left to your own devices when it comes to the connection part. You hope that you’re sitting next to someone who’s keen to chat, or who hasn’t brought their entire friend group with them, and you’re lucky you get somewhere a little more profound than the “where you from” and “where do you work” conversations.

I wanted the Quiet Media dinner to feel different - I wanted guests to feel like they’re really connecting and getting deep into conversations about their ideas. As an organiser it takes a little more work and facilitation to do that.

Pre dinner I asked the guests to send me a paragraph on what they’re thinking about, working on or excited about right now, so I could seat them next to an intentional neighbour and give them a personalised prompt to start from.

We had people working at universities, think tanks, working in urban planning, marketing, events. All there because the ethos of quiet media resonated with them. It felt almost like a gathering of a collective vs a dinner with strangers.

There will be more Quiet Media events coming this fall - both for those London based and otherwise - so stay tuned for those. Would love to have you.

As always thank you for your attention,
Charlotte

Inspired by the Financial Times weekend staple How to Spend It, this series reframes the idea of spending - not money, but attention. Each conversation features a “tastemaker of attention”: someone intentional about where their focus goes, from the habits they build to the tools they use and the constraints they choose. The recommendations range widely, but the premise is simple: attention is a currency, and how you spend it shapes everything.

This installment features the wonderful . We were introduced before the launch of Quiet Media (thank you ) and got on immediately like a house on fire. Lucia is a strategist and sociotechnical researcher whose advisory practice, Have A Nice Future, is focused on foresight and strategy for responsible media innovation. She is also the creator of Media Rehab - she talks about this a bit about below - which is a fantastic (for now free!) program that educates people on media nutrition.

Enjoy her take below.

1. What are you currently working on or thinking about?

I am currently rewiring the Media Rehab program for a fall cohort alongside experimenting with some additional workshop-style formats. Over 21 days participants take apart, scrutinize and rebuild their media diet in a way that serves them better (the definition of which they get to work out for themselves in the process). The best ideas for tweaks and additions come from previous participants, but there is also no shortage of media landscape developments that merit addressing.

One theme I am contemplating going deeper on is stress triggered by shopping-related media. A recent study suggests stress follows 3-4 seconds of initial joy derived from an abundance of options, only to be compounded by suspicion (is the shop or seller actually real? Is this the best price?) and the excessive materialism celebrated on social media more generally. So I am working out how to slot this into an existing experiment that gets participants to tune into their consumption-related feelings in real time.

A longer-term research project of mine seeks to explore how to translate ‘media nutrition’ into policy terms, complementing literacy and education initiatives. A renewed focus on the latter two is underway here in the UK - but as it is overwhelmingly focused on youth and school curricula, adults risk continuing to be underserved. Plus, the social discourse encouraging abstinence from their phones and social media as the path to salvation is simply insufficient. A ‘whole diet’ approach, underpinned by frameworks adapted from nutrition science, could offer adults an accessible mental model, structured guidance, and personalised actions.

2. What’s one thing you’ve stopped giving your attention to recently?

Controversial given where this will appear: about 150 Substacks. Pre-cull, the volume of my subscriptions had gotten out of control. Whenever I opened Substack, even with ample time set aside for reading, it gave me heart palpitations mixed with FOMO. More often than not, I would flee almost immediately - so I conducted a ‘factory reset’. I kept 15 subscriptions (which may rotate), strictly related to my research interests, based on the following criteria:

• Organic and scarce (vs synthetic and voluminous)

• Novel insights from primary research / firsthand experience

• Only place of contact (i.e. not doubling up on someone’s ideas on another platform)

Needless to say, I now need to hold myself to those rules when it comes to my own (rare) articles.

And I won’t be installing the Substack TV app.

3. What’s something - a tool, practice, or format - that’s helped you focus or create space for what matters to you?

I am obviously going to give you a highly biased answer to this question given Media Rehab was designed to do just that: create space for ‘what matters’ by helping people identify what that means to them on a personal level.

Throughout the last 2.5 years of being my own guinea pig, there is one particular technique from the program I enjoy coming back to when excess or mindless consumption creeps back in. It’s called the Baseline Audit and entails taking photos of everything you consume across any screen or format over three days, ahead of reflecting on the resulting snapshot of your diet in one vast grid. When I get participants to do their audits at the start of their rehab I ask them to avoid judging themselves when they bring this unfamiliar awareness to their consumption. But for short resets, self-judgement in real time is rather useful.

Like weeds, media that doesn’t serve us always has a way of finding its way through cracks, no matter how tidy we keep our gateways. I find these short, occasional audits prevent them from becoming a nuisance over time.

4. What do you want to give more attention to in the coming months?

Given it’s become exploited by luxury brands as status markers and performed for social currency, I am somewhat reluctant to respond to this one with ‘reading books’ - but here we are. Ever since I confined TikTok to 3x30 mins Friday to Sunday, capacity became available for leisure reading during the week again. Moreover, while my Substack rebellion was percolating, I decided to start displacing virtual essays with bound ones. Current rotation includes:

• Rebecca Solnit’s ‘No Straight Road Takes You There’

• Umberto Eco’s ‘Faith in Fakes’

• Doris Lessing’s ‘Prisons We Choose To Live Inside’

• Benjamin Labatut’s ‘When We Cease To Understand The World’

Technically, the last one isn’t a collection of essays, just essay-like - and it is stretching my curiosity beyond its comfort zone into pockets of science history I wouldn’t normally explore, courtesy of the author’s sublime style.

Fiction-wise, I am continuing my adventures in Deborah Levy’s back catalogue, contemplating another run at ‘Arborescence’ (by Rhett Davis, shoved into my hand by an enthusiastic stranger in a bookshop), and counting down to my friend Fauzia Musa’s debut novel, The Strangling Fig, which comes out in mid-August.

Finally, given that Media Rehab’s ethos is ‘realism, not asceticism’, it would be disingenuous to hide my desire to see the final Jackass installment - let alone how much I have been enjoying the (in part, retrograde) fan content surrounding the film’s release (in doses, naturally). I also respect that its creators opted for scarcity through occasional films instead of milking a format that would have easily translated to Youtube (and into an energy drinks brand extension). And that their core message continues to be friendship.

Media Rehab is now accepting participants for the fall cohort. You can sign up here.

How to Spend It* is also a segment published in the Quiet Media Inaugural Issue:

Each digest is a handful of things I consumed that month, shared in an easily digestible format. I'd love to hear your thoughts! Have you read something interesting or do you have a totally different take? Drop it in the comments, or hit reply if you're on email. Consider this your morning coffee reading, and something to bring up at your next dinner party.

As always thank you for your attention,

Charlotte

Quiet Media Monthly Digest - June 🌸

This month: a UK ban on social media for under 16s, a case for the “dumb house,” Nolan’s influencer-free promo strategy for The Odyssey, Phoebe Bridgers’ phone-free tour and Toy Story 5’s tablet villain 👇🏼

SOCIETY

🚫 It’s not as simple as banning all social media for U16s
This month, the UK government agreed a blanket ban on social media for under 16s. The direction of travel is clear (get kids off screens) but the destination? Not so much. Experts point out the obvious gaps: bans without supporting infrastructure tend to push teens toward less regulated corners of the internet, and the new age verification requirements open up their own privacy problems. And what happens the moment a teen crosses the 16 threshold, having never built any good media habits or judgment? It feels like what’s missing is some consequence architecture - a system for what comes after the ban, not just the ban itself. The more considered version of this policy might target specific features like the infinite scroll, live streaming, algorithmic surfacing, rather than banning platforms outright, and perhaps paired with investment in offline spaces for kids to go to instead. Finally, nowhere in the new legislation or in this new movement, are the companies themselves being held accountable. What’s needed isn’t necessarily a rigid content fence around children - it’s a reckoning with the business models that profit from our social lives in this way. The ban is just the easiest reaction to rising pressure. read more.

LIVING

🏡 In praise of the dumb house
In the race to make everything in the home smarter, from the light switches to the fridges, Jill Kargman’s WIRED essay writes a homage to the opposite - the dumb house. She celebrates the tactile and mundane things that make a house a home: the click of a lock or the turning of a faucet. Samsung’s new AI-powered ovens monitor the browning of your bread and send a notification when it’s ready. Kargman’s response: “But, like, I have eyes.” So much of what gets marketed as convenience and innovation is actually just outsourcing a small, ordinary competence we already had, and didn’t really cause much trouble in the first place. The paradox in the piece is that as AI creeps into every corner of the home, high-end clients and designers are stripping it back. Manual control becomes a marker of luxury. Who knew. read more.

CREATORS

🍿 Nolan's Odyssey skipping influencers
Everyone coming back from Cannes Lions this week is saying the same thing: creators are the center of marketing planning for the next year. Meanwhile, Hollywood is zagging. Studios have long worked with influencers to promote films - screening movies for them earlier than critics, hoping to sway the public regardless of what the acclaimed reviews say. That worked until it didn’t, like most things. What this led to, more and more, was a slew of empty-promise influencer content praising movies that were just... bad. Disclosure Day is a recent example I can attest to - tagged “Spielbergs best film in 20 years” by creators, a line that became a punchline once critic reviews came in. For Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey, Universal scrapped the influencer screening altogether. What was once a sure-fire way to prime audiences and set your movie up for success, has started looking more like a tripwire. Which makes the choice a little meta - because not working with creators sends its own message: this film is great, and we don’t need to pay a suite of influencers to tell you so. read more.

MUSIC

🎤 Phoebe Bridgers bans phones at her shows
Phoebe Bridgers has announced her next tour and every arena will be phone-free. Fans lock their devices in Yondr pouches for the duration of the show, something she’d been testing at some pop-up gigs in the spring. Her songwriting is famously personal, unguarded in a way that doesn’t really ask to being filmed from a thousand angles and clipped into 10 digestible seconds for someone’s IG story. A phone-free arena is sort of an extension of what makes her her - it’s creating the conditions for intimacy. What’s been interesting to observe was the reaction to the announcement. It’s definitely not a win in everyone’s books, and that’s fine. But there’s something in how uncomfortable this idea makes people. We’re so deep in the habit of recording and narrating our own experience back in real time that breaking it even for two hours registers as a loss and is due a public complaint. read more.

CINEMA

🪀 The new villain in Toy Story 5 is a tablet
I went to see Toy Story 5 last week with low expectations, but it proved me so wrong. For the first time, a Toy Story film doesn’t orbit Woody and Buzz. It’s Jessie’s movie, centered on her relationship with her kid Bonnie, and it’s done without clichés and with real heart. The new threat to the toys is Lilypad, a tablet that arrives with her own ideas about what’s best for Bonnie. Bonnie is struggling to make friends, and Lilypad is a gift meant to ease her into social spaces, the device positioned as helping. The verdict on tech ends up more nuanced than “screens bad, toys good” with the film proposing that digital can be a bridge, but the destination still has to be IRL. No spoilers beyond this. It’s definitely interesting to see a major studio franchise have a take on the “kids and their devices” conversation. go watch it in a cinema near you!

Thank you for reading and see you in July for the next Quiet Media monthly digest 📫

Quiet Media is a print-first publication founded on the simple belief that our attention is our most valuable resource, and it should be treated with care. Not anti-tech and not surrendered to it either. It explores what changes when we stop optimizing for speed and volume, and start designing for depth and meaning instead.

Since launching Quiet Media at the start of April, I’ve had so many conversations with friends and strangers about the making of the thing. It seems like a lot of people have ideas and cravings about making something tactile - and to my surprise and pleasure, making that something a print object is on a lot of minds right now. The hard part is knowing where and how to start. So I thought I’d walk through my process: a little guide for anyone considering a (maga)zine project.

Making a print object is not the most straightforward thing in the world. It requires time, dedication, the right collaborators, and a particular kind of follow through. But it is very doable - I know, because I did it, and this is not something I do. All my work lives on screens, in decks and presentations. I don’t have any sort of production background, no design training, no publishing experience, no press contacts. What I’ve learned is that you learn. Not knowing the full picture at the start was actually an advantage. I’ll get into that.

This is the piece I wish I had been able to read before starting.

And, a little bonus at the end! I’ve compiled some useful links - things I’ve used or stumbled across and saved along the way. Many are UK-specific but you can easily translate to your country.

1. Where to Start

Finding your idea

Last year I was writing 300 words a week for an internal agency newsletter. Every week I’d pick something in culture that had genuinely caught my eye and write a short take on it. I wasn’t building towards anything. I was just noticing things, and practising the muscle of writing them down.

After a few weeks I noticed that I was gravitating towards the same type of idea over and over again, in different clothing. Brands creating interesting IRL moments. Fashion shows that didn’t allow pictures. Music venues banning phones. Platforms losing their grip on active attention. Brands starting literary clubs. The rise of the expert influencer. It was the beginning of a shift away from the fracking of eyeballs, towards something slower and more considered. That pattern became Quiet Media 👇🏼

Once I decided to do it, didn’t tell people at the start. I kept my cards close to my chest - I’m not a natural build-in-public person. Not even my partner really knew. I needed to feel internally aligned before sharing anything. This way I was able to stay more connected to it and more personally accountable. It’s so easy to have an idea and let it pass you by. Finding what works for you in that delicate incubation phase and making it through is the first victory.

Figure out why you want to do it

For me, print was the antithesis of almost everything I was used to doing. I love my job - but I wanted to make something I could hold in my hands, something that would last beyond a campaign window and wouldn’t disappear into a feed or at best a saved folder gathering digital dust. I also wanted the format to be consistent with the contents. A publication about slowness and attention probably shouldn’t feel rushed. So I didn’t rush it - for myself or the contributors.

I hadn’t given much thought to the state of print before I started. But once I got into the scene I experienced how alive it is. There’s a whole ecosystem of independent publishers, small print runs, beautifully made objects that people are actively looking for. Print is the real counter-signal to digital saturation and the appetite for it is only growing. Which means there’s probably more room for your thing than you think.

2. How to Start

Finding Your Collaborators

There are two types of collaborator you’ll need for a project like this: the contributors - the thinkers, writers, and creatives whose work will fill the pages, and the makers - the designers, printers and craftspeople who will turn that digital file into a physical object. I hadn’t thought about either category clearly at the start but here’s how both came together for me.

Contributors

Start with people whose work you’re already consuming and feeling genuinely connected to. For me, Matilda’s Broken Growth and Caitlin’s Nouvôt were big influences here on Substack and I knew I wanted them involved - I’m lucky they said yes! I’d done a course with Andrew McLuhan a few years ago, and reached out about writing a foreword. I’d been in an on-and-off email thread with Joe Hollier from the Light Phone for years, exploring potential collaboration, and this was the right moment. My friend Marko had just stepped away from a decade of high-intensity commercial work to start something new, and had a lot to say about slowness with his now.calma project. This project gave me a reason to rally all these great people together. Make a list of the people you'd love to involve and reach out to them. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

The initial pitch I sent at the start was vague compared to what it ended up looking like - but it was enough. You don't need perfect framing before you reach out. A rough idea and honesty about the moving parts is enough. As I mentioned in my Notes from Below Ground below 👇🏼 the frame for this project sharpened the closer I got to the end.

It was only once people had committed and we had timelines that I fully understood what I was making. These people were counting on me. I had to make the thing now.

A note on payment too: none of my contributors were paid for this first edition. That’s something I want to change for the next issue - and something worth thinking about from the start.

Makers

Unlike with contributors, I was starting from zero here. I started by reaching out to people who’d made zines or magazines who I’d found on Instagram or Substack - most are happy to have a chat and share their process.

My editorial designer Jake and I worked in the same office as but never really interacted much. I’d noticed on Instagram that he’d worked on some print projects and I reached out for advice. I told him about my vision and he got excited and wanted to help bring it to life. We spoke about cover design, he mocked up a few articles and we refined from there to get the basics right. He then introduced me to Meara, who continued the editorial design, and to Kyle in Portland who did the embossing. For illustration and type, I called my cousin Tobi, whose greeting cards and illustration style I’d been following for years. I loved the idea of making something with family.

For printing, I’d found websites offering large cheap runs - but when Jake introduced me to riso printing and I was immediately sold. I spoke to a few riso printers in London and landed on Cecilie Press: her ethos, her small independent studio, and I loved the idea of working with another woman on this. I visited her studio a few times to watch the process. For someone who is never close to production, it made me appreciate all the love that goes into this kind of object.

Most collaborators came through a somewhat warm connection vs a cold outreach. The people who are right for your project might already be in your orbit - you just need to give them a reason to say yes. And when choosing, pick people who are genuinely passionate, not just available. That energy carries through into the work.

3. The Million-Decisions Middle

You have your idea, you have your contributors, you have a rough sense of what you’re making - and the countless more small decisions you hadn’t anticipated emerge.

The responsibility of an editor

I worked with each contributor individually: talking through their ideas, sometimes reshaping their thinking into a new format, trying to get the best out of them. If I was writing on behalf of a contributor or in conversation with them - as with the Q&A and the Field Guide - I sent them the final piece to approve before submitting into design.

Don’t be afraid to take executive decisions. If a section is too long or the piece is stronger without something, you can say so. That’s your job! Remember though, you chose your contributors for their voice. Try not to edit that out.

Once you’ve got all the pieces, then begins the curation. How do you want the reader to travel through the pages? I laid out what I had in Miro (I am a visual thinker) and after a bit of playing around, found a flow tonally and rhythmically that felt good. Trust your instincts here.

Registering the object and the IP

My dad suggested early on that I register the IP and apply for an ISSN number. I kept brushing it off - this isn't an official thing, it's just a side project. But the further along I got, the more it had stopped feeling makeshift. So I did both, and neither was particularly difficult. An ISSN is an eight-digit code for serial publications like magazines, journals, newspapers, and applying is straightforward through the British Library. You fill out a form and send them a copy once it's finished so it can be stored in the official record. Registering the trademark cost a little, but I'm glad I did it because it felt like the moment I took this project seriously.

Paper samples

Then there was paper stock for the pocket. We needed something that could hold the weight of the zine itself and feel sturdy enough. Ordering samples from Fedrigoni, cutting mock pocket dimensions with an x-acto knife, holding different weights. The last time I’d done such a thing was school probably. We ended up sourcing an equivalent from a US supplier in the end - Fedrigoni is made in Italy, and shipping to Portland for embossing and back to the UK felt a little excessive.

How many do I print?

This is a personal choice, but think about distribution before you decide. Is this for friends and family? How niche is your topic? Where do you want it to sell? I went with 300 copies and wish I’d done 500. Two months in and I’m sold out - which I know is the good problem to have, but it’s over too quickly. I also have nothing left to submit to zine fairs, which is something I want to be better prepared for next time. If you believe in the thing, back yourself a little more than feels comfortable.

Concept document

While the makers were busy, I turned to the shops that might want to stock the zine. I had the idea of making a concept document: the story of the project, why it felt relevant now, the design philosophy, who made it, who it's for. Framing the project for the outside world was, unexpectedly, one of the harder creative tasks? I spend my days working on communications for big global brands - and somehow writing a concept document for my own project took me far too long. Writing a short paragraph on something I'd spent nine months building felt almost impossible. But it was a useful exercise. Once you've settled on the language around it, you can talk about the project with confidence - to shops, to strangers, to anyone who asks.

Timeline

I had initially planned to launch before Christmas. Let me save you from this: November and December are not the time. Everyone is busy, distracted, winding down. We ended up sending the file to the printer in mid-January instead, it took two weeks for everything to be printed and hand-finished - and we finally ended up launching in April. Every timeline shift turned out to be a gift. Because honestly, who wants to leave the house to go anywhere in January in London?

Pricing

Pricing felt like one of the harder calls… there’s no formula and in the end it came down to gut feel and research. I bought a bunch of independent mags, looked at what they charged and what I thought they were genuinely worth as a reader. That gave me a realistic starting point. Riso printing costs more than a standard print run. Then there are envelopes, stickers, event costs. It adds up. I wasn’t looking to make a fortune, but I did want the revenue from this edition to fund the next one. This first issue was made possible through savings, the support of a friend at Fragment NYC and a creative bursary through my company W+K London. That’s not a model I can rely on forever. So my advice is to do you research but don’t undervalue your object!! You’re putting a lot of love and care into this and the people who seek out independent print are willing to pay a fair price.

4. Bringing it to the World

Launching something is not for the weak. Your project goes from being your thing - intimate and private - to something that other people suddenly have opinions on and experiences with. It’s a threshold moment and I’ve learned that crossing it takes nerve, which I wrote about here 👇🏼

That said, what happens on the other side is truly worth it. Quiet Media is now out in the world, going to places I couldn't have imagined when I was ordering paper samples. Every time a stranger messages to say they picked it up in a shop, I light up. My thing. Someone walked past a shelf, decided it was worth their attention and their hard-earned cash, and took it home.

Getting it into shops

After emailing probably multiple shops and hearing absolutely nothing back from anyone (not kidding) I tried a different approach. I walked in. I dropped off a copy at two mag shops in London where I genuinely saw Quiet Media belonging: Mag Culture and Shreeji Newsagents. They both loved it and wanted to stock it. The joy in that moment is hard to describe - it validated the project beyond just a thing I had made for myself. They started with a few copies and increased their orders as they continued to sell out. Go in person, bring the object, build a relationship. No response doesn’t automatically mean no!

Metalabel

It was also a goal of mine to be on Metalabel. There's an application process - projects are personally vetted, it's not just a case of creating a profile. To me, Metalabel was an important cultural signal. I didn't expect it to be my biggest sales touchpoint, but I wanted the object to reach a specific type of audience: people who think deeply, who care about independent projects and alternative ways of doing things. Unlike the IRL stores, I get to have a more personal relationship with the people buying there as I ship every order myself.

Distribution & PR

To start distributing, I sent copies to a handful of people whose work I genuinely admire: writers, artists, thinkers I’d gotten a lot from over the years, with no strings attached. No ask, no pitch. I asked them for their address and I sent them a gift.

I didn’t do much formal PR and next time I’d make a plan before launch. I emailed People of Print, Dezeen, Creative Review, and a handful of journalists writing on this topic, and got ghosted more times than I’d like to admit. But I contacted Fernando at The Stack (Monocle Radio), sent a copy to the offices, and he invited me in for an interview which was pretty cool and the best possible outcome. You can listen here!

Now go make the thing

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably already thinking about it. So here’s my closing thought: just start. You will not have the full picture at the beginning - I certainly didn’t - and that’s okay. The picture fills in as you move through it. I didn’t expect to make anything beyond a one-off. Now I’m already planning the second. And the third.

It’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve done. There’s something about holding a thing you made: a real, physical thing that didn’t exist before you decided to make it!! that nothing on a screen has ever quite did for me.

If you have questions I’m genuinely happy to answer them. Drop them in the comments or find me here. Now go make your thing!

As always, thank you for your attention.

Charlotte

Useful links

Admin
Register ISSN (UK)
Register Trademark (UK)

Printers
Cecilie Press (riso we worked with)
PageMasters (riso)
Druk (riso)
Mixam (cheap for high quantities)

Paper
Fedrigoni Papers (they also have a free mock up department, which helped give us ideas for the construction of the pocket)

Stickers & Stamps
Zee (we used them for custom embossed stickers)
Sticker app
Custom stamps (used them for custom stamps)

Distribution & PR
Metalabel (International)
MagCulture (London)
Shreeji Newsagents (London)
People of Print, Creative Review, Dezeen (for coverage)
The Stack (Monocle Radio)

Venues
Agdon House (where we launched!)
Twilight Contemporary (where we almost launched)

Fairs
Glue
PageMasters
MagCulture Fair

“You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.”

- Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)

In an attempt to read more fiction, particularly fantasy, I've just finished reading The Sorcerer of Pyongyang, which I loved, and started A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin, who has been described to me on multiple occasions as one of the best world builders of all time. I've been thinking a lot about the above quote. It has stuck in my brain especially over the last few weeks as we've been seeing more and more of the cumulative impact of the technologies we've built and adopted over the years.

When it comes to technology, we have become very good at celebrating the candle and basking in the light. The candle is the big shiny launch, the breakthrough innovation, the app that completely changes things. We turn the person striking the match into a hero. Sometimes a god.

We are far less practiced at asking who will live in the dark. The phrase “unintended consequences” has become a kind of reflex, a way of naming the darkness once it has already arrived, and one we have heard with increasing frequency from those who’ve been part of the origin stories of the biggest platforms of our time. But this is bigger than Big Tech and stretches far wider.

At what point does calling something an “unintended consequence” become a way of being hands-off the impact once it emerges?

Before the match is struck, there are questions worth asking: what will this change, and for whom? This essay explores what happens when we start thinking about the intended consequences.

The Unintended - or Ignored - Consequences

The phrase unintended consequences suggests surprise. An outcome you didn’t and couldn’t have predicted, an unfortunate side effect. But in the context of our daily technology, many of the systems shaping our lives today don’t really feel surprising. They feel like a logical culmination of what was built and played out at scale. We’ve mistaken inevitability for accident.

In retrospect, it’s not a surprise to think about how the like button could result in a confidence crisis in teenagers. Or how an endless pull-to-refresh feature would keep millions of people compulsively glued to their phones. These outcomes were the natural extension of features designed to keep people engaged, applied to human psychology at scale. The surprise wasn’t quite that it happened, but what is surprising is the language that’s used to defend against it when it does. “Unintended.”

In 2013, Nir Eyal published Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products1, a manual for engineering exactly the kind of compulsive behaviour that would later be claimed with shame by the people who'd overseen its mass rollout. It became a Wall Street Journal bestseller. "The book everyone in Silicon Valley is talking about" read one review. It was taught at Stanford. The four steps to ‘manufacturing desire’ - packaged as best practice and handed to the best product teams across the industry.

In 2017 Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, described the platform’s design as “a social-validation feedback loop… exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” Adding, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” 2

Around the same time, Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former VP of user growth, told a room of Stanford students he felt “tremendous guilt” for what they had built. “I think in the back recesses of our minds, we kind of knew.”3 They kind of knew.

It’s worth noticing something about the timing of these moments of acknowledgment. Parker left Facebook in 2005. Palihapitiya left in 2011. Jony Ive - the designer behind the iPhone and iPod - has just last year spoken openly4 about the weight of what those products became, and left Apple in 2019. In each case the reckoning came years, sometimes decades, after their departures. There seems to be a minimum safe distance required before the conscience can speak freely. Which raises a question about the conditions inside while the products were being built: what does it mean when you can only really see the shadow once you’ve stepped out of the light?

But here is where I want to widen the lens. Because this isn’t exclusively a story about Big Tech. It’s a story about what happens when anyone builds something and releases it into the world without asking what it might become. That applies to a platform with a billion users, absolutely. But it also applies to a brand launching a new product. A creator building an audience. A coder shipping their first feature. Anyone putting something out into the world that other people will absorb, adopt and be changed by over time - in ways small and large.

The question of intended consequences isn’t reserved for the Zuckerbergs of the world. It belongs to all of us.

The Intended Consequences

Just last week, a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and Google to pay 4 million dollars to a young woman who said she became addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a child. Zuckerberg himself testified. There are thousands more lawsuits pending in the same litigation. One of the lawyers involved said: “This was not an accident. This was not a coincidence. This was a foreseeable consequence of the deliberate design decisions that Meta made.”

It’d be easy to dismiss this as just another headline but if you stop and really think for a moment, this is an important stake in the ground. The consequences that were dismissed as unintended for a decade are now being examined by juries, with real verdicts. It is late. Ten years late. But it is also a really good sign. It sends a clear signal to the next generation of builders… the shadow has a long memory.

So then, what about the intended consequences?

We can’t predict the future. Nobody is asking for a crystal ball. The point isn’t that every consequence should have been foreseen - that’s impossible, and holding anyone to that standard would freeze progress entirely. But we can be more deliberate about the kinds of consequences we are willing to stand behind. And there are a few places to start.

Asking the Shadow Question

one of the sharpest strategic minds working with major brands, tech and government today, has introduced the idea of consequence architecture - the practice of mapping, before you fully commit to building anything, three questions:

Who benefits if this succeeds?
Who pays the cost?
And who has no voice in the decision?

In her own practice Zoe maps this before she fully commits to any project - literally writing it down, sometimes during the initial client call, sometimes immediately after. Does this reinforce or challenge existing harmful patterns? That mapping, she writes, changes what she says in kickoff meetings, what she's willing to sign, and what she delivers. It has opened doors for her to do work she actually wants to be doing with clients who want those harder conversations, on projects that might actually shift something.

It’s not just the question of will this work? But what will this do?

Essentially, a new feature is not just a new feature. It is a new behavior, a new social norm, a new way people might relate to themselves and each other. It deserves to be treated as that before it ships - not ten years after. And this question should be asked throughout. Every time something goes out into the world and affects millions of people. Not just at the launch moment where everyone is watching.

The features that caused the most harm were added incrementally, through updates and through optimisation, and decisions that nobody asked the shadow question about.

The Importance of Role Models

I’ve found it personally very helpful and inspiring to have a few people and businesses in mind who are building in a way that feels true to them, and good for the world. In fact, that's what I have built Quiet Media around. The contributors in the zine are truly one of a kind builders, all in their own way, who are thinking deeply about the impact of their work.

As featured in Quiet Media, we have the example of the Light Phone - a minimalist mobile phone designed, in the words of its founders Joe Hollier, to be used as little as possible. They met at a Google incubator in 2014, surrounded by apps and growth metrics and engagement funnels, and decided the last thing the world needed was another one of those. “A phone that wants to do less?” They were laughed at by investors. For them every feature decision starts from the same place: does this respect the user and enrich their experience, or does it exploit them? They’ve been standing behind that for 10+ years, and are building a great product.

Another great example I came across at the start of this year is and how she is building Sublime. For those who don’t know Sublime, it’s a tool for saving, connecting and discovering ideas online. It doesn’t have a feed designed to keep you scrolling. It is, by design, a tool you open with purpose and close when you're done. It's also built around a principle that cuts directly against Silicon Valley's founding logic. Sari isn't building Sublime to sell it. She's building it to exist - choosing slower, more durable growth over the metrics-chasing and the exit strategies that define most of the industry. She’s championing “the transition from the attention economy to the intention economy.” I recommend listening to her reflection here.

So we know the capacity is there. The same understanding of human psychology that was used to engineer compulsion could just as easily be used to engineer curiosity, generosity, creativity, connection beyond the screen. The tools were never neutral, but they are also not fixed. If they could be designed for our distraction, they can be designed for our expansion too. Some people are proving that and it’s important to study them.

Ask Yourself

Consequence architecture isn’t only for product teams at tech companies. Its applicable to anyone putting something out into the world that other people will absorb, adopt, and possibly, in the best of cases be shaped by.

So here is the exercise: what future is your work actively building? What does it do - and what does it do to people? What behaviour does it encourage, what norms does it reinforce, and what version of the world does it inch towards every time someone engages with it?

I’ve been sitting with this question for Quiet Media, both the print zine and this place on Substack. My answer has to do with slowness, depth and the return to an internal life. I want us to read something and really sit with it vs screenshot it, save it, and never return again. I want us to feel settled enough in ourselves to see something served up by the algorithm and reject it. To know our own mind. To hold our opinions, but hold them gently.

I want a world where people are curious - about each other, about themselves, about the world at large.

With print at the heart of what Quiet Media is, I want the act of reading to feel different to the act of consuming as we know it today. I believe in media that is tactile, curated, put together with care - where the experience of holding it is part of the entire point.

I want to support independent makers, writers and artists who are building with intention, outside the rules of the attention economy - and give them the chance to see their work alongside likeminded people, all part of shaping a collective future.

These are some of my intended consequences. I’ve started asking the question and I’ll continue to as it all evolves here.

Le Guin’s wizard Ged isn’t told to stop making light, rather he’s taught to account for the shadow before he strikes the match. In Le Guin’s world as well as in ours, light and shadow are companions. To hold one is to hold both.

Thank you for your attention,
Charlotte

Hello all,

Happy Wednesday. A slightly surreal update: Quiet Media is now stocked in Selfridges. For a small, independent project like this one, going from idea → object → retail floor at one of the most iconic department stores in the world isn’t exactly the natural order of things! Which makes it all the more special.

Huge credit to the team at MagCulture (and Selfridges of course), who’ve spent the past six months bringing this partnership to life. A beaaauutiful 🤌🏼✨ pop-up space, and with it an incredibly generous platform, opening the door for independent titles like Quiet Media to be discovered by entirely new audiences. If you’re in London, I invite you to go and see it in person. Pick up a magazine and support print because as we’ve established, it’s back.

Below, another great guest joins How To Spend It* as our latest tastemaker of attention. I started this series to explore how reclaiming our attention actually shows up - more often in the small habits and routines we build every day. Hopefully it offers something useful as you think about your own.

Finally, at the bottom of this letter I’ve rounded up five links worth your attention this week. Enjoy.

As always thank you,
Charlotte

Inspired by the Financial Times weekend staple How to Spend It, this series reframes the idea of spending - not money, but attention. Each conversation features a “tastemaker of attention”: someone intentional about where their focus goes, from the habits they build to the tools they use and the constraints they choose. The recommendations range widely, but the premise is simple: attention is a currency, and how you spend it shapes everything.

Following our first edition with Andrew McLuhan, our next guest is Kristoffer Tjalve. Kristoffer is a thoughtful maker, writer and doer - I discovered him through one of his projects, the Internet Phone Book, and reached out to collaborate for the Inaugural Issue of Quiet Media. The result is a beautifully crafted double page spread, fully customised for the publication by Kristoffer and his team. Enjoy his take below.

1. What are you currently working on or thinking about?

I’m getting my driver’s license at 38. It’s fun, scary, easy, and hard at the same time. The other week, I took the theory test in the suburbs of Athens, Greece. Imagine a cubicle room like those 80s and 90s office designs with too bright ceiling light and before the open floor plan. That’s where we were doing our theory test, sitting in red rolling desk chairs in front of a desktop with WindowsXP. When I say ‘we,’ I refer to myself and the cohort of 20 teenagers who follow the norm and get their licenses as soon as legally possible.

Why am I two decades late? I used to say that I was happy with my bicycle and public transport, so I didn’t need a car. Later, I claimed I was waiting for self-driving cars. It’s possible that both are true, or that it is a childhood-inflicted trauma from the weekly trips between my separated mom and dad: the car was not independence, it was an obligatory and unpleasant transition between very different worlds.

Nevertheless, I’m thinking a lot about my metaphorical transition from backseat driver to taking the steering wheel, and I wonder if it is coincidental that I’m shifting seats at the same time as my mom is in her final stage of a chronic disease, and while my son is starting elementary school.

2. What’s one thing you’ve stopped giving your attention to recently?

Can I name a few? I have four rules for my newsletter:

1. Don’t write about what I dislike.

2. Don’t include mainstream commentary.

3. Don’t analyze.

4. Don’t use the following words: urgent, important, hope, fear, future, tech, startup, social media, and artificial intelligence.

These rules of what not to do have cultivated my idiosyncratic interests and introduced me to all these incredible people who experiment with the web as a medium and material, many of whom I now consider close friends.

3. What’s something - a tool, practice, or format - that’s helped you focus or create space for what matters?

I’ve started to make more phone calls. Not voice notes, not video calls, just a phone call. A back-and-forth with someone who knows you is grounding and uplifting. Maybe you’ll make a plan to meet. Maybe you’ll share what’s been on your mind without a statistical confirmation from a language model (from ‘yes, you are right’, to ‘have you thought about what you are running away from?’). Either way, you’ll likely feel better - and so will your friend.

4. What do you want to give more attention to in the coming months?

I moved to Greece with my family when life invited us to explore another path than the one we thought was ahead of us. It was supposed to be a temporary stay: three months, a palate cleanser of sorts.

The morning after we arrived, I immediately felt at peace. It was mid-November, and the late-autumn sun was warm and kind. We ate breakfast at the nearest café, and our calendar was empty. It was freeing to be completely detached from social obligations. That’s three years ago.

Now our life is fully established in Greece: we have moved all our belongings, gotten our residency permits, opened bank accounts and businesses, our son is in Greek school, and our weekends are full of birthdays, dinners, and social activities. Yet, I hardly speak any Greek. It’s time for me to learn the language to immerse myself in the surrounding landscape.

The Internet Phone Book is now taking submissions for their much anticipated second book! You can submit your website here.

How to Spend It* is also a unique segment published in the Quiet Media Inaugural Issue, see below:

Five links worth your attention this week 💭

☎️ As Kristoffer suggests making more phone calls, parents are reintroducing landlines for their kids. While there is some getting used to, kids are actually loving it. The article also suggests some steps on how to introduce technology to children. As a millennial / Gen Z cusper, I’ve admittedly never had a phone cord to twirl, but all for bringing them back.

🍐 A great round up from of the best of Milan Design week, brands are leaning back into craft. Having a presence here frames a brand as a makers and craftspeople, not just advertisers. Clearly a different audience, but it’s interesting to see it in contrast with the activations at Coachella recently. This feels luxurious, and considered - a smart move among all the AI slop.

🧑🏻‍🌾 Success isn’t a ladder, it’s a garden. on how growing a business is like tending to a garden. It's a beautiful, soft metaphor - one of the most original when thinking about growth. It shifts the focus away towards conditions, time and individual goals. She’ll soon be sharing a self-directed resource for us all to use..

🌍 The Tiny Tourist by It’s Nice That responds to algorithm-induced overtourism and badly behaved tourists. It’s a reminder of how to travel with more care and intention to the world around you.

🐊 The most incredible first brand design identity for the Brazilian Amazon. Feast your eyes. It’s a reminder that the most powerful brand worlds don’t need to reach too far.. Start with what exists and what you inherently embody and stand for.

Last week, we officially launched Quiet Media in London. The event sold out, twice (!!) after I had added extra tickets, and 80 people gathered in a room to talk about media, culture and the future of attention.

It is a strange feeling, launching something into the world. I expected to leave the night feeling excited, energized, proud. All these people had shown up for an idea that had lived inside my head for so long. There were delicious drinks, old friends, new faces, family helping me set up. And friends who surprised me by coming in from abroad. But, to my surprise, I felt none of those things. I went numb, felt empty and depleted. Even into the next morning and for a few days that followed.

I had crossed a threshold. Up until that moment, Quiet Media had existed for the most part in private: in my Notes app, in late-night voice notes to my designer Meara, here on Substack and in conversations with a few close friends and collaborators. Now it's out in the world. Other people have held it, read it, attended. And on that note - thank you. To everyone who came. To everyone who has bought, shared or written to me about the zine. And to the new subscribers who have joined here over the past week: I’m so glad you’re here. I don’t take it lightly.

But there is a strange grief that comes with making something. Part of you has to let go of the private, perfect version that existed in your mind. And in its place, you have to accept the real version with all its finiteness and imperfections. I needed to remind myself that the real thing is always better because it is real.

Has anybody else felt something like that?

Slowly, I’m coming back to myself though. And it felt like the right moment to take you on a guided flip through Quiet Media: the inaugural edition. A look inside at why I made it, who helped bring it to life, whose voices are featured, and what lives on its pages. Of course, there is no replacement to reading the real thing. You can get your copy at Shreeji News or MagCulture in London or here on Metalabel. If you don’t have your copy just yet, my aim is to have you running to get one after this 😎

Why Quiet Media exists

At the launch, it was quite surreal to be talking to a group of people (through a mic no less) about Quiet Media, because it started as a very personal project. Over the past year I found myself thinking more and more about the way we live - how quickly everything moves, how much we are expected to consume, react to and keep up with. In my industry we have this phrase that we use as a badge of honour: moving at the speed of culture - the idea that you want to be ahead of your competition, first to market, quick to move and to react. As though fast always equals better. For a while that was really exciting. Innovation, pilots and beta tests with new platform features and functionalities. But last year that story of speed started resonating less and less with me, and I could feel others starting to question it too.

So I began collecting the exceptions: the people, brands, products and ideas moving in different strides forward. The brands that were connecting more deeply with people by doing things that were completely unscalable like including hand-written thank yous to orders. Or tech founders who were building products with long-term consequences in mind, and shipping intentionally. And writers and thinkers helping us navigate this liminal moment with optimism, not just reporting the world as it is, but imagining what it can become and encouraging us all to work towards that.

As I took a step back and looked at the constellation of stories emerging, I felt inspired and hopeful again. I felt this jolt of energy and had a drive to create. I knew this was something I wanted to share - not just the stories but also that feeling, if I could.

The contributors in this first issue are those exceptions. They’re all very different - in background, geography and discipline - but they share a certain orientation toward a more thoughtful future. Spend a little time with the zine and I think you’ll start to feel it too: the future looking pretty good. So although the format is ‘old-school’ and analogue (who said print was dead?), Quiet Media is a project about what’s next. If right now we’re defined by speed, volume and AI-slop, what’s next is a future where we respect attention, serve with intention and connect with people with care.

Every detail of this issue was designed to reflect that ethos, from the risograph printing to the embossed pocket, to the small imperfections that come with a hand-finish. Those details matter because they remind us that someone made this!!

And before we get into it, a brief thank you. To Chantelle Tiagi and Agdon House in Clerkenwell for hosting the inaugural launch. To Tish from Picoso for serving the most delicious drinks. To Wieden+Kennedy London and Fragment NYC for their support, to every contributor and maker for helping us hold this idea in our hands. To MagCulture and Shreeji Newsagents for believing in print, and in this print project in particular. And to all of you, for your support.

So, what’s in this issue?

Foreword - Andrew McLuhan

opens with an observation: as speed increases, depth decreases. Using his grandfather's "laws of media" as a lens, he traces how we came to equate faster with better, and what we've lost along the way. It's a generous and textured piece of writing - which feels exactly right as a way in.

Inside the Slop Machine - Michael Goldstein

Michael confesses he enjoys doomscrolling. From there he pulls back the curtain on the clipping industry: the anonymous army of editors chopping content into algorithmically optimized morsels, rewarded for outrage over insight. It's a look at the machinery behind your feed.

The Bed Was Never Meant for This - Rebekah Guilar

starts in bed - literally, writing from it. Her piece introduces the bed as a site of rest, dreaming, intimacy and growth, and asks what happens when we colonize that space with our phones. One of the most personal pieces in the zine.

Say Less - Caitlin Mayance

writes a bracingly practical takedown of the content creation treadmill, and makes a strategic case for restraint. It ends with a three-step framework for brands brave enough to give it a try.

Waving into the Void - Aaron Powers

When’s the last time you felt profoundly invisible? Aaron opens with that question and answers it with a story about being ignored at an amusement park - then takes us through what happens when businesses stop seeing the people they’re supposed to serve.

What Game Are You Playing Anyway? - Matilda Lucy

Taking the distinction between finite and infinite games, applies it to brand building. In her experience, the industry has been playing the wrong game - chasing short-term metrics - when the opportunity is in building something that lasts. A genuinely optimistic reframe of what growth can look like.

The Rise of Ambient Tech - Charlotte Rubesa

For this one, I looked at the designers and founders who helped build the attention economy and are now reckoning with their creation. Spiegel's AR glasses and Ive's screenless device are signals of a shift toward technology that sits in the background of your life, not the center of it. The question is whether we'll trust the same people again to build something different.

My Rebellion Against the Rush - Marko Roth

Marko’s contribution is poetic, written in fragments - almost like a film treatment of his own story. He takes us through chapters of his career from travel videos with friends to high-budget TV commercials and lands with his next one: analog film and slowness as a practice.

On Building Tech That Asks Less Of Us - Q&A with Joe Hollier

I had a chat with Joe, co-founder of the Light Phone, to talk about what it actually means to build technology designed to be used as little as possible. We cover starting a company that most people thought was absurd, about who's actually using the Light Phone and why, and about how you measure success when growth at all costs isn't the goal.

Welcome To the Post Naive Internet Era - Severin Matusek

Severin introduced the post-naive internet era last summer - the moment after the open web dream collapsed under the weight of platforms, extraction and algorithmic engagement. In this issue we map a Quiet Media version of his framework: the smaller digital environments emerging in its place, built around specific communities and values > scale. Interactive and in print for the first time.

A Field Guide to Soft Power - Andrew Roth

This piece was inspired by a quote I came across from Andrew before we spoke: “the host is the new influencer.” We expanded on that idea together, exploring what soft power looks like in culture today - and mapping the archetypes who are already shaping rooms, tastes and communities around them.

Learning to Notice - Melissa Eshaghbeigi

For as long as I’ve known her, has captured these spontaneous moments of connection between people in public. For this issue, I asked her to expand on why she does it. It’s a meditation on presence, intimacy and what it means to really see people in an era where we are more visible than ever.

A Directory for a Quieter Calmer Internet - Internet Phone Book

I’m so honored to have connected with a project I deeply admire. The Internet Phone Book curated a bespoke directory of the quieter web for Quiet Media. A reminder that the internet is still full of fascinating corners, if you know where to look.

First Principles, Principles First - Andrew McLuhan

Andrew closes with a more urgent point. As a new wave of devices arrives promising to fix the problems created by the last ones, he asks whether we've actually learned anything. He suggests that before we buy in again, we need to get clear on our values. A call for principles thinking in design as well as in consumer decision-making.

How to Spend It* - Various Contributors

How to Spend It* (*it = your attention) closes the issue. A catalogue of small, specific recommendations of products, rituals, practices - from thinkers, makers and friends. Personal suggestions for reclaiming the one currency more valuable than money. This is the series that I kicked off here on Substack too:

Made with Care

If you can’t tell, it’s been made with a lot of love and care. I could not have done this without this incredible team of makers.

Charlotte Rubesa - Creator & Editor
Jake Buckley - Editorial Design
Meara Withe - Editorial & Digital Design
Tobi Meuwissen - Illustration & Type
Maria Midttun - Riso Printing
Kyle Miller - Embossing

Online, you can get your copy here to support Quiet Media, and perhaps share with someone who is thinking deeply about this stuff too 💙 All proceeds go back into making issue 002.. There are some ideas brewing for that, so keep your eyes peeled 💭💭💭

Since it was published at the end of January this year, I’ve found myself returning again and again to an essay by Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian. It takes me on an emotional odyssey each time: a sadness for the state of the world as it is, grieving of the world as it was, fear of what might happen if we sit still, followed finally by an energising sense of possibility - and a stirring desire to jump into action. I suppose that is the feeling when a piece of writing, or anything really, moves you.

Her argument is simple: technology has not only given us new tools, it has reorganised the conditions of our attention. What we focus on, how long we stay with something, what feels tolerable or intolerable - these are not purely personal traits or flaws.

For as long as I can remember we have talked about attention as if it were something we are individually failing at. As if depth were slipping away because we became distracted, lazy, less disciplined. But that misses the mark. The environment itself has been redesigned in ways that make depth harder to sustain. The surge of interest this year in analogue rituals and digital detoxes can be understood as an attempt to reclaim some of what was lost. But if we’re not careful, we’re simply swinging from one extreme to another.

This essay is an attempt to think through what was taken, why we were okay with it, and what it might look like to take some of it back. Attention is beginning to function less like a resource to be managed and more like a creative discipline to be practiced that requires experimentation, boundaries, and new ways of moving through media-saturated environments.

__

What was lost

When we talk about attention, we often equate it to “time”. Screen time. Time spent scrolling. “3 seconds” to grab attention. Time wasted online.

But what has eroded gradually over the past two decades is far more than just hours in a day. We’ve begun to shave off the texture of our lives. The ability to stay with something long enough for it to sink in. The tolerance for ambiguity, the grey areas. As so eloquently put in her piece on the reactive essay killing originality, a lot of our thinking and opinions are responses to others thinking and opinions.

So what exactly have we been trading away, often without realising, as attention became the currency of the digital age?

Depth is one of the first casualties. And let me reassure you, it’s not because we suddenly became incapable of concentration. The environments we now move through make sustained focus more and more difficult to practice. Many of us can relate to the example of picking up our phone to do something specific, but then getting lost and completely forgetting what we initially wanted to do. Depth isn’t missing because people are lazy. It is structurally disfavoured. We are living in systems designed to fragment attention into smaller and smaller units, each optimised for engagement, measurement and speed. Over time all this feels normal. We adapt as we humans do. We learn to skim not just articles but conversations, relationships, even our own thoughts.

Alongside depth, boredom has also been shoved out of everyday life. The small pockets of time that once gave our minds room to process - waiting in line for coffee, sitting on the train - are now cues to increase screen time. The reflex to reach for our phone has become so ingrained and stillness feels violently uncomfortable. But boredom is never just empty time. It is the precondition for imagination. For the process of composting input and ideas into something more coherent. Blaise Pascal famously put it best: All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. More on boredom later.

Uninterrupted time with our own thoughts has become increasingly rare... When every still moment becomes an opening for external input, the boundary between inner and outer life begins to blur. We’re less able to differentiate where our own voice begins and the noise of the world ends.

And finally, our relationship to effort. The environments we now move through are designed to minimise friction, making things faster, smoother, more seamless. As Rebecca Solnit says in her essay:

“They have told us that to go out into the world, to interact with others, is perilous, unpleasant, inefficient, a waste of time, and that time is something we should hoard rather than spend.”

Over time all of this recalibrates what we expect from creative work too. If everything else is becoming instant and optimised, the slow, uncertain labour of thinking something through or starting from scratch can begin to feel inefficient and not worth doing. We are not as a species simply becoming lazy - wherever we look we are told that effort as something to avoid. None of this happened overnight. It was not the result of a single invention or decision or adoption of a certain technology. Or a change in our biology for that matter. It has been the cumulative effect over years of incentives, interfaces and stories.

What was taken then was not only attention in terms of time, but along with it went the conditions that once allowed attention to mature into our unique interpretations.

At the time these shifts didn’t feel like losses. Quite the opposite actually, they felt like shiny upgrades. Faster communication! Endless information at our fingertips! Access to anything we might want! The systems shaping our attention were largely invisible so adapting to them seemed natural, empowering even. The world was our oyster: there was a promise of possibility.

No one asked us to consciously agree to trade depth for speed (if they had we probably wouldn’t have done it). We simply recalibrated our expectations and adjusted our habits to fit the environment that started to morph around us. Only now, as the side effects accumulate, and we finally have the language - and the data - to describe them are we beginning to question what that adjustment has cost us.

Three Keys to a new Creative Discipline

So what now? It feels as though we are standing at the beginning of a new creative chapter in how we think and make. Quiet Media began as a way to gather the voices of founders, thinkers and creators - people already experimenting with better alternatives. In many ways, reclaiming our attention is becoming the defining creative act of this moment.

This idea shouldn’t feel intimidating, anarchic or out of reach. ‘Reclaiming attention’ is not about mastering productivity or giving up our tech. It’s about the development of a discipline around how we engage and what we focus on. Over time, we each start to figure out our own practices and rituals that work and stick for us - ways of moving through media-saturated environments while preserving our creative ambitions.

🗝️ Key 1: Boundaries.

Reintroducing boundaries around technology use is one of the most dramatic ways to begin restoring a sense of proportion. For much of the early internet era, going online required a conscious shift in setting and active attention. We literally entered specific spaces to connect - shared family computers, office desks, school labs. “Logging on” had a beginning and an end.

Today those spatial cues have dissolved. The internet travels in our pocket with us, making disconnection feel less like a choice and more like a loss of network.

Behavioural research increasingly suggests that this constant proximity changes not only how often we use our devices, but how deeply we are able to focus even when we are not actively engaging with them. Studies have shown that the mere presence of a smartphone within reach can reduce available cognitive capacity1. Over time this reshapes our baseline expectations.

Restoring boundaries in a healthy and creative way (remember this is a creative practice), for most, does not mean rejecting technology altogether. It means reintroducing a little structure to signal when we are “on” and when we are “off”. Charging your phone outside the bedroom and getting an alarm clock, disabling notifications, turning our phone to greyscale, or setting clearer windows for social media (ie. 30mins in the morning & 30mins at night). What I’m trying more these days is resisting the reflex to reach for my phone in the in-between moments: waiting for a friend to arrive to lunch, waiting in line for coffee. None of these are dramatic interventions. But they gradually allow this technology to return to its rightful role: a tool we pull out of the backpack when needed, rather than the air we unconsciously breathe.

🗝️ Key 2: Balance.

Restoring a healthier balance between consumption and creation is becoming an essential discipline for anyone trying to navigate contemporary media environments. Culture continues to travel online, giving us access to ideas, learning and communities - allowing inspiration to move faster and further than ever before. This constant current of discovery is not in itself the problem, in many ways it is one of the gifts of our time.

The challenge is when input becomes constant and unprocessed. With continuous input, the brain has fewer opportunities to consolidate what it encounters into deeper memory or insight2. It’s very easy to move from genuinely engaging with culture to simply scrolling past it - spending 4h on TikTok or Reels consuming content that feels stimulating in the moment, but that leaves you unable to recall any detail once you put the phone down. We’re mentally on, reacting, liking, saving, but rarely pausing long enough for anything to properly internalize. This can create the feeling of being busy and connected without feeling creatively nourished.

The shift here is to let inspiration move beyond the screen. Take it offline. Creativity tends to work at a slower metabolic rate: we take things in, but we also need time and space for them to settle. Taking something IRL that we’ve seen URL - cooking the recipe, using the writing prompt, watching the film, trying that outfit combo (exposing my algorithm here) - allows digital discovery to translate into actual real life and we begin to tilt the scales. Consumption stops being a one-way stream and becomes part of a slower exchange. In making/doing something, however imperfect or small, we start to feel a little more in charge of how culture moves through us.

🗝️ Key 3: Boredom.

Finally, getting more comfortable with boredom is the final creative key in restoring reflection and imagination. Our phone can feel like a small shield against the awkwardness of doing nothing. But these in-between moments are also where our minds wander freely, observations surface and impressions take shape. There’s really interesting research exploring boredom and its role in creative and emotional life. Studies link periods of idle attention to processes of mental incubation where ideas begin to form in the background without conscious effort3. When we constantly override these moments with stimulation, we lose access to this slower, more associative mode of thinking. Ultimately, by protecting these pockets of empty time we are not doing less - we are actually giving our brain the chance to do some of its more generative work.

We shouldn’t see boundaries, balance and boredom as restrictions on creative life: they are the keys that allow us to access it more fully. They help us shift from passively reacting to the world around us to engaging with it more deliberately. Reclaiming attention is less about withdrawing from contemporary culture than about learning how to participate in it with more intention - deciding not only what and how we consume, but what we create in response.

More and more it feels like the way we spend our attention isn’t just a personal question but something many of us are trying to figure out together. For this reason, I’ve started a new series, How to Spend It*, exploring the practices of “tastemakers of attention” - people who are actively practicing ways to stay focused, imaginative and creatively alive in an always-on environment. If you’re curious to see how others are experimenting with this in their daily lives, you can read the first of the series here:

Thank you for your attention,
Charlotte

Quiet Media is launching on the 2nd of April in Clerkenwell, London. Tickets are live now via Eventbrite, and every ticket includes a copy of the zine to take home with you.

This all started as an idea, then a conversation, a folder of written docs, then a digital working file, to now an artifact I can hold in my hands. And soon you can too. That progression still kind of floors me??

Quiet Media is for anyone who feels like they can’t keep up right now - who wakes up and reaches for their phone before they’ve even decided that’s what they want to do. It’s for people who are curious about a more conscious way of being in the world, and who have that suspicion that change doesn’t come from grand intentions to change the world but from small dents in your immediate circle. The contributors in this issue share that orientation. I have a feeling the readers will too. It’s for brands too, who want to approach their audience with care and consideration, who want to build their brand with intention but don’t know where to look beyond the current algorithmic rulebook.

I’ve sometimes felt like a round peg in a square hole - working in an industry I questioned, at times. Making this zine introduced me to people who have asked the same questions long before I did - and have already started doing something about it. I believe that these voices only get louder as a collective.

__

And boy, do we have some really great things planned for the event! Here’s what you can expect.

You can meet and hear from some of the contributors.

Some BTS - what does it take to make something like this?!

Meet and mingle with likeminded people.

A reading nook, where you can flip through the pages.

Time to reflect on where your own attention is going.

Sip on some drinks generously provided by Picoso.

Nibbles by my good friend Natalia who is cooking up something really great for you.

Soak up the beautiful space that is Agdon House - the widows (swoon).

A copy of the inaugural issue to take home with you.

And more?! This is a new creative canvas for me. I went into this assuming the content would be the biggest lift. Reaching out to contributors, shaping the ideas, building the editorial arc. But as a strategist, getting people excited to bring their creativity to something is what I do. What I knew nothing about was production, event logistics, stock planning, distribution. The learning curve was (is?) steep but, genuinely, one of the most fulfilling things I’ve done.

__

Beyond the event, the zine will be available on Metalabel and in two London magazine shops (eep!) more on that very soon. And if you know anyone who might want to stock a few copies, please send them my way.

Thank you for being here. Your encouragement is a real part of why any of this exists. This is just the beginning and look forward to continue to explore this further.

Thank you for your attention,

Charlotte

As I’ve been building Quiet Media, I wanted to create an equally considered list of recommendations, but this time focused on another form of currency we have at our disposal: our attention. Hence the asterisk: a gentle reframing of what “It” refers to.

We’re constantly told our attention spans are shrinking - down to what, two seconds now? (I can’t keep up.) That ‘our generation’ can’t hold a deep thought, can’t read more than two sentences, only respond to ‘catchy’ thumbnails. There’s an entire industry built around engineering the perfect YouTube thumbnail and as a result, over time, everything looks the same. We’re participating in a race with no finish line.

But what if the problem isn’t our attention spans but the system designed to fragment them? Quiet Media is built on the belief that we have more agency than we think. And like money our cognitive bandwidth is limited, which means it’s worth managing intentionally. Right?

So what are you saving it from?
What are you placing it into so it compounds over time?
What boundaries protect it?
What rituals strengthen it?

Introducing How to Spend It* - a series of conversations with what we’re calling ‘tastemakers of attention’. Each instalment features a friend, collaborator, maker, deliberate about where their attention goes. We’ll look at the habits they’ve built, the tools they rely on, the constraints they’ve chosen. It could be the printed page helping them concentrate on what matters without the distraction of endless open tabs. An app that deepens their passions rather than flattens them. The recommendations will go far and wide, but the premise stays the same: attention is currency, and how you spend it changes everything.

Thank you for your attention,

Charlotte

__

To begin we have a very special guest: . Andrew and I met during a six-week course he ran with - an immersive series of teachings and long, generous conversations around his grandfather’s work. These conversations were definitely an early seed of Quiet Media. Andrew is a poet and the founder of the McLuhan Institute in Ontario, where he preserves and continues that legacy. Enjoy his unique take below.

1. What are you currently working on or thinking about?

I was part of a spiritual retreat recently that drove home what we all know - that our time is severely limited. It makes it near criminal to waste any. I've started considering more closely what's of equal value to my time on this Earth. I only have so much time in a day for myself, my work, my family, my community (-ies). Each is important to wellbeing. It's an ecosystem, and a healthy ecosystem requires ecology to achieve and/or maintain balance. Sometimes you have to prioritize one over the other but just know that you're doing it at a cost. You can regain balance or equilibrium, but you can't get back time.

2. What’s one thing you’ve stopped giving your attention to recently?

Long, unfocused meetings. I’ve cut them down wherever possible - reducing both the number and their length. Where I used to schedule an hour, I now schedule 30 minutes. It forces an economy and focus which is beneficial for everyone.

3. What’s something - a tool, practice, or format - that’s helped you focus or create space for what matters?

Handwriting is a beautiful thing.

Writing a letter is both a soothing practice, expressive art in both form and content, and a way to connect with people you care about. In times gone by it was common to have personal stationary. Quality paper with your name and maybe ‘from the desk of...’ on it. Coloured paper, even scented. Fountain pens with a variety of inks. Letter writing can be a ritual which brings as much joy to the writer as the receiver. I have found that writing by hand forces a focus that typing does not. The constraints of time and materials make you take more care in thought and composition as they are less forgiving.

Being honest, I used to write at least one letter a week, but have fallen out of the habit because of the time it takes. Like everyone, it seems I have less time than ever. I do however still send mail, I’ve just found a way to speed it up a bit while also retaining some of the pleasure and benefits of it. I have a letterhead template and type a letter in a typewriter font (I like Courier), and after I print it I will add a sentence or two by hand, and sign. It’s still an improvement on an email or text, and I still take the time to hand-write a letter or two a month.

4. What do you want to give more attention to in the coming months?

Having spent the last ten years working on ‘the medium is the message’ I’m turning my attention to sharing what I’ve found, what I’ve learned. I don’t want to give too much away on that but one form that I will take is a physical book which is necessarily static, another component is web-based and evolving as well as involving. With the help of artists around the world we will help each other understand that the medium is the message, and why. There’s no time to waste.

__

How to Spend It* is also a unique segment published in the Quiet Media zine, launching soon in a limited run of 300 copies. Enter your email below👇🏼 to be notified when they’re available.

Subscribe now

I came across this beautiful series of drawings of plants and their roots (on Sublime, where else these days). Each drawing shows what’s visible at the surface alongside the comprehensive root system beneath it. Above ground the plant is contained, modest even. In some cases recognisable - even if I couldn’t name it, it’s something I’ve seen before. Beneath the soil the roots are sprawling, almost excessive in comparison to the plant they support. Does that little tulip really need that much going on underneath?

__

In the next few weeks I’m launching Quiet Media, my first ever print project. I went to my printer today to pick up the boxes of final bound copies - everything from cutting to assembling to binding she has done by hand. This week we’ll be assembling the embossed cover that arrived from Portland. It’s going to be a bit of a job, but we’re in the home stretch now.

While we’re very close to the surface, that plant isn’t visible just yet.

What I do have, in sprawling abundance, is the root system. More than ten months of inspiration, learning, conversations and small decisions that sit beneath the surface of making this thing.

Let’s start with the long list of the root system.

__

The Quiet Media Root System - a (non exhaustive) list

• the signals that inspired Quiet Media in 2025 - I’ve called this my hunter gatherer phase

• the conversations that made the project feel urgent

• the different shapes the project took - from substack to print quite quickly

• the ever evolving ethos: first about brands, then opening it up

• the contributors who said yes, and changed the shape of the project

• the would-be contributors, had they replied

• ideas that felt right, then didn’t anymore

• the frame of the idea that constantly changed

• the conversations with friends and collaborators that made me think bigger about what this is and can be

• working with contributors to get the best out of them and their thinking

• curating the pieces in a logical order

• creating sections for the zine, then removing them

• registering a trademark

• registering an ISSN number

• working with the right people to make the thing

• getting my head around production: choosing paper, ordering samples

• exploring cover options with my designers, imagining the physical shape of it

• embossing in Portland, almost not embossing in Portland, then thankfully embossing in Portland

• moving the launch beyond when I had initially imagined it (3x..)

• the persistence of staying with it over all this time

I won’t unpack all of these here. For now, I want to pull on three roots - one from the beginning, one from somewhere in the middle, and one closer to the end of the process - that might be useful if you’re thinking about starting a zine or a related project and (like me) figuring it out as you go.

__

Root 1: The Hunter-Gatherer phase

Part of my day job is breaking down complex things into digestible, bite-sized pieces. So naturally I did the same for myself at the start of it all. I branded the first phase of Quiet Media the hunter-gatherer phase.

This was about exploration: asking big questions, gathering inspiration and references. I read a lot on the media landscape and on attention theory. I turned to the scholars: I went back to my notes from Understanding Media, the media literacy course I took with and at the end of 2024. I also watched the hot-takes: whatever the ‘status symbol’ of the week was. I spoke to contributors, would-be contributors, with each conversation revealing more threads to pull. I saved things in folders, in notes, in Notion, in Miro! I was all over the place honestly. I will be much more organised for Edition Two…

A very important part of the hunter-gatherer phase, I learned, is knowing when to stop.

Root 2: The Ever Evolving Ethos

From there, I had a lot of material. I’d gathered so many great references of brands who are working in this way, or at least starting to. I imagined talking to Rimowa, about how they balance heritage with innovation. Including Polaroid as their incredible campaign came out last year. Or Nuuly, after I learned about the thoughtfulness of their community play.

But fairly quickly that frame started to open up.. I realised the origins of this shift weren’t with brands at all. Brands, for the most part, are responding to something that’s already happening in culture. They’re riding a wave that’s been building for a while.

So the ethos widened. Quiet Media became less about brands and more about people. About our attention in our current media landscape - how it’s shaped, how we spend it, where it goes. A way of offering a glimpse behind the curtain, both of the systems that trade attention and the people trying, failing, and trying again to find balance within them.

Importantly, I wanted it to remain optimistic and future-forward - not nostalgic or anti-tech. This is a zine about innovation after all.

Root 3: Framing the Idea

After about nine months of work, it was time to define it. I had a working description that I’d shared with contributors early on, but the project kept shifting - taking on new names and descriptors - right up until all the contributions were in. By then my designer was laying everything out in InDesign, and my next task was to create a “concept document” to send to independent magazine shops and other stores that might want to stock a few copies.

The role of this document was simple in theory: introduce the project to a complete stranger. What it is, why it feels relevant right now, the design philosophy, the team behind it, and a few practical details. This is stuff… I obviously know, right? The slide on ‘Welcome to Quiet Media’ took me three days. It felt too final to land on anything. I kept rewriting the same paragraph, frustrated by how inadequate it felt each time. How can I possibly describe a project like this, with all its motivations, contradictions and nuances, in a few short lines without flattening it? It felt like an impossible task, and I’m still not convinced I got it right. In any case, the deck went out.

__

Quiet Media will soon exist as a physical object that can be held, bought, photographed and I couldn’t be more excited or proud. But it also exists, in much greater abundance, as the sprawling root system that had to grow beneath it first.

Thank you for your attention.

Charlotte

For the past decade, we’ve been a culture obsessed with optimisation. Platforms chasing growth at all costs. Brands trying to hack the algorithm, seed the meme. Creative people pushed to shrink their creative canvas to suit the platform. What started as a mindset in tech - move fast and break things - gradually became a universally adopted cultural operating system.

That system now feels strained. And the response has swung to the opposite extreme: headlines declaring 2026 the year of “going analog”, of rejecting the internet altogether. We always seem uncomfortable sitting in the liminal space - one defined by balance and boundaries.

The internet and social media are not the same thing. Social media, in itself, isn’t inherently evil - though it’s fair to say it’s becoming hard to defend. A few weeks ago, I went to a talk at Marc Jacobs’ Bookmarc in London where Tom Sachs, in conversation with Tom Dixon, put it simply: “In every tool, there is a hammer.” The problem isn’t the tool; it’s how, and how relentlessly, we’re encouraged to use it.

For me, and for many others I suppose, underneath the sweeping statements, social media where I discover ideas, people, and work that expand my own thinking and inspire my own projects. Without that input, much of my creative output simply wouldn’t exist.

But let’s zoom out, it’s clear the system itself is out of balance.

We’ve normalised terms like “bed rotting” “slop” and “brain rot” - neatly naming our behaviours in ways that reassure us it’s not just us. In practice, we no longer see most of our friends’ posts. We’re constantly served ads for things we don’t need. And on the other side, businesses are increasingly convinced this is the only way to reach people - that growth requires total surrender to the feed. We’re told our attention spans are shrinking, that we can’t hold long thoughts. But this isn’t because we’re lazy or incapable; it’s because sustained attention is structurally disfavoured.

Quiet Media begins from the belief that this isn’t the only way things can work. Alternative modes of operating are emerging - led by people who are questioning what success looks like when it’s no longer defined by reach, frequency, or algorithmic approval. People experimenting with different relationships to input and output, consumption and creation. Sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing - but where the attempt itself becomes the success metric.

So, officially, this is an introduction. Let’s start with a definition (or three).

quiet media /ˈkwaɪət ˈmiːdiə/ noun

1. An ethos of creation and consumption that prioritizes depth over speed and consideration over reaction; the practice of making and engaging with creative work - ideas, stories, artefacts - that earns attention rather than demands it, grounded in craft and intention.

2. Media formats that respect attention: Substack, long reads, apps that allow you to dive into your passions, podcasts - content designed to invite rather than interrupt, characterized by absence of constant notifications, infinite scroll, or artificial urgency.

3. A print publication examining and redefining these concepts through physical artefact; a zine that embodies the philosophy it explores.

On that last definition - Quiet Media as a zine, an artefact - I’ll be launching it in the coming weeks. It’s a project that’s been in the works for the past ten months, and it’s finally coming together. I can’t wait for you to see it.

Now on Substack, this space will act as a digital cousin to the print edition. I’ll be sharing the making of the zine, starting a new series spotlighting “tastemakers of attention,” and publishing writing that will feed into future editions - all rooted in a simple belief: that our attention is our most valuable resource, and it should be treated with care. There is so much in this space to explore and I invite you to think with me.

Thank you for your attention.

Charlotte

Everyone seems to agree that the solution to digital overload is to go offline. Log off, girl. Disappear for a while. Touch grass. While well-intentioned, this advice misunderstands the problem. The problem isn’t that the internet exists, or that we spend too much time on it. It’s that we’ve allowed one system to absorb too many roles at once. The internet has become where we discover ideas, maintain relationships, do our work, avoid boredom, seek validation - all in one sitting. Everything blurs together and nothing really lands.

The ‘Computer Room’

The internet used to live somewhere.

In our house, we had the Computer Room. Essentially my mom’s desk with an Apple Macintosh computer. ‘Going online’ meant physically going to that room and sitting down in the office chair. It also meant taking turns. Having an older sister built in a timer whether claimed or implied. I knew when my time was up because someone else needed the computer - unless we were both hunched over it playing NeoPets together.

On my turn, I’d check my email (though I still don’t know how many times a 9-year-old really needs to check their inbox). The messages I was getting were from my grandparents, or chain emails warning that if I didn’t forward them to ten people, something bad would happen.

When you stood up and left the room, the online world stayed behind. It didn’t follow you to the kitchen. It didn’t sit in your pocket. It didn’t fill every empty moment. You were just bored, and it never occurred to you to return to the Computer Room to fill that void.

The Expansion Problem

The internet didn’t become this beast overnight. It expanded slowly and then all at once until it became the place where everything happened. The same system now handled discovery, communication, work, entertainment, validation, boredom, even rest. Things that once lived in different physical spaces and mental places now share the same surface. A message notification interrupts a thought. Inspiration sits directly alongside distraction. There’s no transition time anymore, no sense of context shifting. Everything competes simultaneously for attention.

This is perhaps where the modern version of that scary chain email shows up. It doesn’t threaten you with bad luck if you ignore it. It just suggests you’ll miss out. Save this. Screenshot that. You’ll want this later. The pressure is less explicit now, but it’s constant.

We’re overstimulated, yes, but we’re also disoriented. We’ve been swept off our feet by the web - by how quickly it expanded, how much it could do. Its role kept growing, and we never paused to define its boundaries. We need to ground ourselves again. That doesn’t require going offline and touching grass. It just requires us to be clear about why we’re here in the first place.

It’s interesting to look at early articles on the web (NYT has an incredible archive) because this wasn’t entirely a surprise. As early as 1995, the belief was that the internet might “deliver us community with a vengeance — and we may find we don’t want it.”

What the Internet is Great At

For all its excesses, the internet is still very good at one thing in particular: discovery. It exposes us to ideas we wouldn’t otherwise encounter. People we wouldn’t meet. References we didn’t know to look for. We can learn something new in minutes, follow a thread of curiosity into a deep rabbit hole and stumble onto work that changes how we see our own.

The problem was never curiosity. If anything, we’re more curious than ever - about how other people live, what they make, how things work, what’s out there. What’s changed is what happens after that initial exploratory phase. So much of what we find online is designed to stay in circulation rather than move somewhere else. We bookmark articles we never actually get to reading. Save recipes we'll get to at some point. Screenshot ideas we swear we’ll come back to, then keep scrolling. The internet excels at generating input, but is not one bit concerned with what that input becomes.

Isn’t the point of discovery is that it becomes the beginning of something? A song you’ve never heard before that broadens your taste in music. A city you visit reshapes how you imagine living. An idea about work-life balance that reorders your priorities. So many of the things that have moved culture forward began with exposure, not necessarily with clear intention. ‘Stumbling upon’ something used to felt kismet. Like you were meant to find that thing, and it was meant to leave its mark. Discovery is only really worthwhile when it goes somewhere - when what we find online changes how we think, choose and act. At its most romantic, discovery alters your trajectory.

The Input-Output Gap

But for all that possibility, so much of what we discover never really gets the chance to change us. We take things in faster than we can metabolise them. Articles, references, ideas, recommendations - input has become entirely frictionless. We no longer need to go to the library, the museum, or even the Computer Room. Meanwhile, output still asks for time, space and commitment.

So much of what we encounter could alter our trajectory if it met us with enough space to land. The problem isnt our lack of receptiveness - it’s the interruption. One thought or idea is quickly followed by another, suddenly different in tone or topic.

When discovery doesn’t lead anywhere, it loses its potential for expansion. It passes through us without leaving much behind. And over time, that changes how we relate not just to the internet, but to our own ideas. How seriously we take them, how far we’re willing to follow the threads of our curiosity.

One Job at a Time

The Computer Room worked because it was specific and imposed limits. We don’t have that built-in room anymore*, but maybe we can still apply the principle. What if we gave the internet one job at a time? Some people are building this kind of specificity already. Substack in the morning with a fresh coffee. Pinterest opened to find visual references for a project, then closed. Phone left out of the bedroom (!)

This isn’t about going offline. It’s about giving the internet clearer moments and clearer limits, so what we find there has a chance to take shape in our lives. Let’s bring back the Computer Room. Now as a practice.

*if you actually do have a computer room I would like to know.

__

Thank you for reading! I will be launching Quiet Media, a print zine, in early 2026 that explores how our attention is shaped by the systems around us - and what becomes possible when we choose to design for depth. Enter your email below to be kept up to date on the launch.

This year I started hosting CONNECT-ING YOU, an intimate seasonal dinner where I bring eight people together from different corners of my life based on the projects they’re building or the passions they’re exploring. No one around the table knows each other – and that’s an important rule. Because in a city like London, where we’re constantly changing and shedding versions of ourselves, our long-time circles don’t always feel like the safest place to try on who we’re becoming. And when you’re new to a city like this, the idea of finding “your people” feels incredibly overwhelming. I know it did for me.

I’m very conscious this is not a universal experience, but to me there is nothing more exhilarating than meeting someone entirely new. The connection starts with a blank canvas, with everything still to learn. Each question and answer adds a new stroke, a bit more colour, slowly revealing not just who they are but also the picture of your story together. Because of that obsession, I’m also constantly thinking how great people from different corners of my life (and often London) would get on and how much they would have to talk about. Hosting these dinners has been a way to putting that instinct into practice, and selfishly for myself to connect or reconnect with people I like and want to see more of.

Last time, a friend was leaving so I walked him to the door and handed him a goodie bag (yes, this is also part of the night). He thanked me and said, “Charlotte, this was an incredible night… and entirely not scalable.” I laughed and the line lingered as he left. He’s not wrong.

A lot goes into these nights for me.

I start by putting the call out on Instagram, replying to everyone with the date, the concept, and a set of questions. I save all their answers in a doc and begin matching –looking for connection points between people, sometimes obvious, often not.

X and W could talk for hours about playwriting.
Y and Z are both navigating a change in identity after a career switch.
But wait – X and Y actually know each other, so only one can come this time.
And if Y doesn’t come, then Z loses their match…

This is the math happening in my head.

Then comes the physicality of it all: I set the table seasonally, arrange the gift bags, cook dinner. And when people arrive, the dance of facilitation begins. I seat each duo together, create prompt cards to ease them in, and gently guide the conversation throughout the night so everyone feels able to share.

So yes – this is hard to scale.

But is scaling always the point?

My generation grew up inside the religion of growth-at-all-costs. Bigger is better. Scale or bust. It’s the pressure behind why so many of us chase side hustles instead of hobbies – the belief that anything we do must be worth doing, and “worth doing” apparently means it should make money or become famous.

But fame isn’t a measure of creative value. And it isn’t sustainable. It feeds the ego for a moment, but it doesn’t build confidence or craft. The latter come through consistency – doing something because you enjoy it, because it sharpens you, because it gives enough back for you to keep returning to it.

His comment made me rethink what success even is – for these dinners, but also in my life and work. I do think it’s an important exercise because how we define success shapes what we chase, what we build and how we show up for it.

I’ve defined success for CONNECT-ING YOU quite simply. It’s when two people meet at my table and choose to meet again. When someone leaves feeling creatively nourished. When someone says something out loud they hadn’t admitted to themselves yet. When someone feels just a little more confident stepping into the version of themselves that’s still taking shape.

It’s not that I don’t want this to scale, or don’t think it can. When I imagine it now, I see it more as a salon – twenty / fifty+ people – still meticulously paired, gathered in a bar or a studio. I’d love for it to grow into that. Ambition is healthy. And seeing possibility in your ideas is the point - whether or not those possibilities ever fully materialise.

But before it slips out of my grip, I want to hold it close and shape it with intention. I want to understand its edges. Each night is different because this is an idea that is anchored in people and in the alchemy of group dynamics, which means it will always shape-shift depending on who ends up in that room. I am in the process of learning what makes it good, what’s unnecessary and what deserves refining.

The more I thought about that question, the more I thought about the point of all this. Not everything needs to scale to be important. Not everything needs to be optimised to have value. What would it look like if we did more things just because we wanted to? Often, if we simply do the thing, it’s already a success. It’s further than most ever get.

From Scrolls to Pages

In a culture where our phones serve up endless stimulation - feeds to scroll, videos that autoplay, the ping of notifications - it feels almost radical that the quietest, gentlest medium of all is booming again: the book. Waterstones, the UK’s largest bookseller, has just announced it’s opening 10 (!) new stores after a boom in sales.

Yes, TikTok has played a part, consistently turning novels into bestsellers overnight. But what’s unfolding goes deeper. Reading has always been a solitary act but lately it’s picking up a surprising social life. Young people are joining book clubs, swapping recommendations, and treating their bookshelves as shrines of taste and self-expression.

And maybe that’s the appeal. Turning a page is a long way away from swiping a feed. One slows you down, gives you space to imagine; the other keeps you twitching for the next hit. In a culture that already feels so noisy, books are invitations to slow down - maybe that’s exactly why they’re booming?

The Solitary Act Becomes Social

For most of history reading has been something you did alone - curled up in bed, on the train or sitting in the corner of a cafe. But lately the act of reading is slipping into the collective.

Book clubs are booming. Silent Book Club has spread to more than 50 countries, where people gather in cafes, parks and museums for the simple pleasure of reading side by side. Maybe that’s what we’re after: we’re outsourcing a bit of accountability, asking others to validate the simple act of sitting still with a book. In cities from Jaipur to Washington, groups are turning books into catalysts for connection - conversations spiralling into friendships, therapy-like exchanges and even love stories.

Bookstores are leaning in too. They’re reshaping themselves as cultural hubs. Author events, coffee corners, curated shelves designed for lingering - they’re becoming places not only to buy books but to hang out and belong. A personal favourite is BookBar in London, where the wine list is as carefully chosen as the titles.

What was once private is becoming social. The book is no longer just an object to consume; it’s a reason to gather, a way of showing what matters to you and connecting with others who share that passion.

The TikTok Effect - and Beyond.

So where does this all come from? TikTok often gets the credit for this revival, and it definitely deserves some of that. BookTok has become publishing’s most powerful discovery engine, where a single viral video can explode a novel (even one that’s been around for over a decade) into the mainstream.

But discovery is only the beginning. What’s really interesting is how books are moving beyond the feed into lived culture. A title might travel through TikTok but the impact multiplies when it becomes the reason people meet up, form clubs or curate shelves as personal shrines of identity.

Owning and displaying books has become its own form of self-expression however subtler than what happens in the feed. Some arrange shelves by colour, others collect beautiful editions. In the same way vinyl signals taste, books are being reclaimed as objects that say something about who you are.

There’s also a taste of resistance here. Choosing to read is choosing not to scroll, not to answer every ping. It’s a small rebellion against the endless churn of slop. Gen Z seems especially drawn to that balance - not rejecting digital life entirely, but reclaiming how to use digital - as just a tool.

The Bigger Shift at Play

All of this is bigger than books though. It’s a cultural reset. The resurgence of reading is just one signal of where attention is moving: away from constant stimulation and toward spaces that feel more intentional and meaningful.

Print is one signal - not only books, but also the quiet rise of magazines and zines. Chanel’s Arts & Culture magazine treats print as cultural capital, while smaller independents like Apartamento or The Gentlewoman show there’s an appetite for objects that last over content that disappears into an Instagram folder.

But the pattern shows up elsewhere. Vinyl is booming, film photography is back in style, as are tactile pastimes like pottery, knitting and sourdough. People are swapping their screen time for analog pleasure. We’re also seeing a rise in active and creative getaways - wellness escapes combining movement, art and reflection as a way to connect with likeminded people.

For brands, the opportunity isn’t to shout louder or even to ‘BuILd a CoMmuNiTy’, but to act more like hosts. To create or align with these rituals of slow attention. Not just things to buy, but places and moments to belong to. People are welcoming to brands if they’re able to help facilitate and elevate these experiences.

Final Thoughts

In a culture overflowing with swipes and scrolls, the simple act of reading feels almost radical. It slows you down, demands presence, and opens space for imagination. But the real story isn’t just about books. It’s about what they represent: a hunger for softer, slower, more human rhythms of connection. From book clubs to bookstores, zines to vinyl, people are piecing together rituals that make them feel grounded and present.

Maybe that’s the lesson worth carrying forward. The future of culture, and the brands that want to be part of it, won’t be written in the noise of our feeds. It will be shaped in the quiet, intentional spaces where people are able to sit still and connect with their imagination. And right now, nothing captures that better than the humble page.

The rise of Ambient Tech

Recently, two leading voices from different corners of tech offered a glimpse of where things might be headed in next generation hardware. Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel said he believes AR glasses will become more popular than the Apple Watch by the end of the decade, calling the watch “just a phone accessory.” His prediction positions Gen Alpha, growing up with filters and lenses, as the first AR-native generation: while Gen Z was mobile-native, Gen Alpha may be looking at a future that’s layered, augmented and built for interaction beyond a screen.

Snap’s Spectacles have quietly made it to their fifth iteration and the company is treating them as infrastructure - hardware that brings a little Snap magic to every day life.

Meanwhile, Apple’s former head of design Jony Ive - now at Open AI - said he’s working on what he calls “the third great device”, after the laptop and the smartphone after admitting he’s partially responsible for these ‘unintended consequences’ phone interfaces have brought us. In partnership with Sam Altman, any further details on what this device may be like are still under wraps, the ambition is to create a new category of consumer hardware altogether.

A new interface that promises a new paradigm.

What’s interesting is that both are talking less about apps and more about objects. Physical tools that don’t just sit in your hand but blend into your life. And both point to the same shift - away from attention-hungry screens towards more ambient technology: tools that surround our lives but don’t require us to pull them out of our pocket and hunch over them.

What came first: the design or the cultural shift?

Of course, design influences culture and culture influences design. This new hot tech topic reflects the growing discomfort and acknowledgement of the impact of smartphones, particularly on young people. Jonathan Haidt’s recent research has drawn direct links between increased screen time and rising rates of anxiety, depression and loneliness in teens. And it’s having real results! Countries are changing their laws: England has introduced phone bans in some schools, and Australia is rolling out a nationwide policy to remove devices from classrooms.

There’s also the lingering truth that many tech leaders - Jobs, Gates, Spiegel - have famously limited their own children’s access to the devices and services they helped create (this is not new). It’s possible we’re now seeing an attempt to design a different kind of future. One that’s quieter, more integrated, and maybe even more humane. One that we might actually encourage our children to use.

So who gets to design the future?

The smartphone won’t disappear overnight of course. But I think there are reasons to be hopeful about what comes next - if we take the opportunity to learn from the past, and do things differently. In recent years, we’ve seen what happens when one company dominates an entire category: Amazon has ‘won’ e-commerce, META owns attention and pretty much no one was held accountable as products were shipped faster than their consequences could be understood.

Now again, we have a chance to design more deliberately. To resist the idea that a single company should define the next device and instead, build systems that prioritise human wellbeing over profit.

The next era of tech should be one we actually want to live in.

Hinge is leaning into Gen Z’s reluctance to date, but growing appetite for reading about romance.

As part of its new “No Ordinary Love” campaign, the app has launched a weekly Substack series written by emerging literary voices, featuring real stories from couples who met on Hinge. Each piece unpacks the raw, hopeful, and often messy reality of modern dating, from both people’s perspectives and are actually quite beautiful so I recommend having a read.

Hinge’s decision to go all in on Substack feels like a deliberate strategy and one with heart. Hinge hasn’t posted on social media since 2020. It’s a rejection of algorithm-chasing main, in favour of slow storytelling, built for people who want to read. Brands are finding engaged, niche audiences here (hi!) - we go deep. And in an ad landscape where ‘reach’ doesn’t hold the value and status it once did, depth is becoming a more meaningful metric. Personally, I wouldn’t mind if more brands flipped the script and the pendulum swung the other way. If we all went deep, at least we’d find out who our real fans are - and engagement might actually mean something again.

Clearly inspired by #BookTok and the quiet resurgence of IRL book clubs and offline clubs, the anthology will also be printed as a limited-edition hardcover and distributed to clubs in NYC and London, inviting people to gather around the trials and tribulations of early-stage romance.

What do an international blackout and a beer campaign have in common?

Both offer a glimpse of what happens when we go offline for a bit. On April 28th, a power outage swept across Spain and Portugal, shutting down the majority of both countries. Flights were grounded. ATMs froze. Mobile data disappeared. For a few hours, modern life (work, plans, algorithms..) just stopped.

What followed was nostalgically human: people stepped outside and actually… engaged with each other? The video evidence that later surfaced gave us the receipts - strangers kicking footballs down the street, neighbours sharing beers before their fridges warmed, groups gathering to barbecue or getting off the trains for a dance break.

Two days later (coincidentally?) Heineken launched their latest global campaign, “Social off Socials”, featuring Joe Jonas as he navigates a dystopian and satirical reality for those people of ‘influence’ of what life might look like if the likes, follows and feeds all disappeared, leaving social media suddenly quiet.

Both created scenarios where people had to disengage from digital life - whether by accident or by design. And in both cases, the result wasn’t isolation - it was connection. And it was pretty hopeful?

Everything, everywhere, all the time.

The average person is exposed to somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 ads a day. Average screen time has now risen to equate 88 days of your life.

And we know the drill. 52% of adults say they feel overwhelmed by social media. Among Gen Z, 62% report feeling digitally exhausted by constant online interaction. The noise is always on yet somehow never enough.

Jonathan Haidt has been one of the sharpest critics of this new reality. In his book, The Anxious Generation, he argues that social media deserves the same treatment as cigarettes and gambling: age restrictions, warning labels and real safeguarding. As adults we have the agency to choose our vices. But for young people still developing the neural architecture that shapes how we think and relate to the world, we’ve allowed an addictive system to wire itself in, completely unregulated.

Trump has a point: everything is computer. What started as a tool has become a treadmill. The platforms that promised connection now leave us confused, overstimulated and somehow alone. And still, we keep showing up. We can’t help it. Because not showing up feels like we might be left behind.

So what does it take to cut through? My take on this may be counterintuitive. I don’t think the secret is in more content but actually in less.

Going ghost mode

In a world where attention is currency, choosing silence feels like bad business. However, that’s exactly what some of the most interesting brands, artists, and creators are doing. Some of the smartest moves in culture right now aren’t about flooding the feed but disappearing from it. And in doing that, they’re turning absence into value.

Today, being unreachable or offline signals control, privilege and wellness. Digital detox retreats, dumb & light phones, phone lockbox dinners, screen-free activities with strangers - people are spending their money and time to opt out.

More recently, Lorde bypassed the traditional music promo playbook to release What Was That, borrowing a page from the Charli XCX school of intimacy. She shared a phone number (above), a 3 min voice note, added fans to a private community, and used it to invite them to a surprise pop-up performance in Washington Square Park. Similarly, part of Heineken’s campaign included the release of Joe Jonas’ new single, performed live at a free, phone-free concert.

While this approach is gaining traction in music, we’ve seen it work for brands too. Back in 2021, Bottega Veneta boldly deleted its entire social media presence and redirected its energy into more intentional forms of engagement: creating a beautiful photo series on fatherhood, launching seasonal (and incredible!) fanzines and recently partnering with Yu Xiuhua, one of China’s most-read poets to create an interactive installation with a powerful message (below). With no socials of their own, they still dominate social discourse by doing things of meaning.

In a world built for speed and saturation, stepping back is starting to look like a power move. And what might have been seen as a risk - to leave people out - is now an intentional strategy.

So how might we design for quiet? 5 places to start

This isn’t about rejecting technology at all. That’s not the world we live in. Here's a few reframes that may help us build and distribute creative work with more intention.

1. Reframe what value means and looks like. Move from constant output, likes and follows to considered impact. From mass reach to meaningful resonance. Not everything has to go viral. The new value lives in what lingers, not what flashes.

2. Design for offline connection - on purpose. What if, instead of being everything, everywhere, all the time, we chose to be somewhere, for someone, with intention? Think smaller, slower, deeper. Intimacy scales in unexpected ways.

3. Let online be the invitation, not the entire experience. Think of social as a map to the moment - not the moment itself.

4. Not everyone needs to see it. Strategic exclusion is powerful. Whether it’s a hidden show, a limited drop, or a single message to a tight community. Reach ≠ relevance, and relevance requires intention.

5. Make space for the moment to breathe. We’re conditioned to fill every gap, every silence, every scroll. But space is part of the experience. Be absent by design.

So yes, maybe it was just a strange coincidence that a blackout and a beer campaign landed in the same week. But taken together - and held up against everything else we’re seeing- they point to something simple and surprisingly forward-thinking: life offline isn’t a throwback. It’s what’s next.

___

Thank you to all those who have inspired my thinking on the topic and giving me the nudge to properly start this substack:

• s thinking and writing on quiet influence

• and her musings on Bottega

• with her offline club

• and her Huck magazine piece

• The work from the incredible team at Light Phone

• s writing on boredom

• on why your phone makes you less sexy