Democratised Storytelling - Origins of a New Idea
Democratised Storytelling - The Background
In every age, humanity has searched for ways to share its stories: firelight and painted walls, the printed page, and now pixels and photons stitched into moving images. Michael Topic returns as your guide through ideas you may not have encountered, starting with a simple one: observation matters. Watch people at their craft and you begin to notice the small, invisible frictions that make work harder than it needs to be. That noticing is where empathy takes root, not as sentiment but as a searchlight for pain points hidden in every workflow. Removing even a grain of sand from the gears is what drives real innovation, and it scales until whole systems move more freely. Three cosmic interludes frame the journey. Dark matter shapes galaxies unseen, just as invisible obstacles bend the path of every story. Stars are born in collapse, much as innovation ignites when the tools finally catch up with the need. And the universe has been recording itself for billions of years, in the same way that every new medium archives what humanity dreamed possible. Along the way, the episode returns to the turn of the millennium, when Moore's Law put once-corporate computing power within reach of a personal credit card, while freelance editors lived with uncertainty and "Hollywood Accounting" declared million-dollar hits unprofitable. It traces the rise of stereophotogrammetry, computer vision and volumetric capture, and looks toward free-viewpoint television, where audiences step inside the scene. Creation has been democratised, but distribution remains tightly held, and real-time creation has always been just out of reach. Building on the software fabric introduced in episode one, Michael explains how millions of idle devices, working in concert, could supply the shared processing power and storage to close that gap, and become a collaborative, creator-direct-to-audience distribution system owned by everybody. The dream of empowering storytellers everywhere is no longer an "if" but a "when," and that "when" could be soon. Original blog posts were posted on: pm4p.net Direct link to the second post in the series: https://medium.com/product-management-for-the-people/a-fever-dream-of-democratised-storytelling-episode-2-3bad25afc94e The e-book of the series is available at: Gumroad.com Direct link: https://tropicalgroup.gumroad.com/l/cqmjcu?autocomplete=true&layout=discover&recommended_by=search&_gl=1*1wf314y*_ga*ODgxMjc2NDEzLjE3MzEzMjQxNDk.*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3OTA2ODU2ODQkbzEyJGcwJHQxNzkwNjg1Njg1JGo1OSRsMCRoMA.. Cover art: Clare Topic – Copyright 2026 – All rights reserved. Editor: Alex Topic Music: composed and produced by Michael Topic Buy me a Ko-fi
A generation ago, a fever dream took hold: a vision of tools for storytellers, built to liberate creators rather than constrain them, and to free their work from the gatekeepers who have long controlled public expression. In this opening episode, Michael Topic, a product manager and engineer with decades of experience building things people love, tells the story he has wrestled with for twenty-five years. What began as a way to pay freelance creatives more fairly grew into a blueprint for a parallel economy, one that rewards lasting value, discourages speculation and exploitation, and fosters innovation. It is a sketch for billionaire-proofing the Internet. The story starts in 1990s Hollywood, where film was cut with razor blades and tape, and where non-linear editing first gave editors the power to undo, experiment and change their minds. Michael and his collaborator Patrick Gregston saw a small step toward democratisation. But while cameras, YouTube and TikTok put the means of production in everyone's hands, distribution stayed in the hands of the few. That gap inspired NeoPixSys, a company born of fever and possibility, and a reminder of Carl Sagan's warning that making an apple pie from scratch means first inventing the universe. Along the way, Michael borrows from Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth, treating this podcast as his way of scratching his name into the rocks for the next explorer to find. It's a story about power, ownership and who gets to tell stories. And it ends with a glimpse of the product itself: software that turns every device into a node in a distributed fabric of computation, where the machine is the cloud and the people are the power. Original blog posts were posted on: pm4p.net Direct link to the first post in the series: pm4p.net/a-fever-dream-of-democratised-storytelling-episode-1-413b69bcfc98 The e-book of the series is available at: Gumroad.com Direct link: https://tropicalgroup.gumroad.com/l/cqmjcu?autocomplete=true&layout=discover&recommended_by=search&_gl=1*1wf314y*_ga*ODgxMjc2NDEzLjE3MzEzMjQxNDk.*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3OTA2ODU2ODQkbzEyJGcwJHQxNzkwNjg1Njg1JGo1OSRsMCRoMA.. Cover art: Clare Topic – Copyright 2026 – All rights reserved. Editor: Alex Topic Music: composed and produced by Michael Topic Buy me a Ko-fi
A generation ago, Michael Topic dreamed of tools that would let anyone share their story without gatekeepers. He wanted creators paid fairly. He stumbled on a blueprint for billionaire-proofing the Internet. Some call that dangerous. He calls it emancipation. Join him for the story of a vision that still burns. Original blog posts were posted on: pm4p.net Direct link to the first post in the series: pm4p.net/a-fever-dream-of-democratised-storytelling-episode-1-413b69bcfc98 The e-book of the series is available at: Gumroad.com Direct link: https://tropicalgroup.gumroad.com/l/cqmjcu?autocomplete=true&layout=discover&recommended_by=search&_gl=1*1wf314y*_ga*ODgxMjc2NDEzLjE3MzEzMjQxNDk.*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3OTA2ODU2ODQkbzEyJGcwJHQxNzkwNjg1Njg1JGo1OSRsMCRoMA.. Cover art: Clare Topic – Copyright 2026 – All rights reserved. Editor: Alex Topic Music: composed and produced by Michael Topic Buy me a Ko-fi