Episode notes
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
Cover art: Clare Topic – Copyright 2026 – All rights reserved.
Editor: Alex Topic
Music: composed and produced by Michael Topic