Media, Less Mediated

Prototyping a Human-Curated Global Music Discovery System

Happy Equinox, Subscribers!

I celebrated in Cheyenne, WY, where the precise moment of axial inversion co-occurred with civil twilight, meaning I could literally watch the sun rise into the autumn. It felt auspicious!

As mentioned in my vernal equinox post, the equinox serves as a symbol in that it is day where the light is distributed nearly evenly across the world’s population, and part of the mission of this substack is to drive toward a more egalitarian media environment. And as such, I spent this weekend finishing up a prototype I’d been developing during my 2021-23 sabbatical: Mic Check Media!

I built this to help myself explore music in a more holistic and human way. Algorithms have displaced curators, making media discovery literally inhuman. Informal social communities often cannot represent the broader media environment. Enter: a site the draws on voices across all continents and hemispheres, distilling their recommendations into a simple weekly playlist.

The name draws on a…