Have you have ever gone online to post something, hesitated, and didn’t? Because you felt off?
I think you’re among friends. Public online spaces have always felt weird to me too. Stifling. Draining. Sordid. I’ve always felt I had to change myself in some way to fit in.
And alas, that feeling is endemic these days. Do you find the news and commercials too shrill? Yearn for realer conversations, and find that phone feeds only leave you adrenulated and nauseous? Do you also resist celebrity gossip because it seems chemically sweetened? Or refuse to click the fearful headlines because know they are bait? And as a result of all this polite refusal, feel a bit less connected?
Maybe it's not you. Maybe it's that behind nearly every one of these online spaces—social media, newspapers, TV, magazines—is an organization relentlessly trying to harvest your attention to sell to advertisers.
They are insatiable. They are omnipresent. And we only think this is normal because we have never not known their craven embrace.
But let’s step outside a moment, into the breeze.
What if something else were true? Sit in the tall grass of an idea with me: What if social media felt like a heartfelt invitation to show up to a crowd eager to know you? What if the news left you informed and nothing else? What if posting felt like a natural extension, and gave back to you in equal measure? What if it felt like your online spaces held you accountable to participation and reciprocated? What if it felt like these sites encouraged a nutritious informational diet? What if it felt like the right ideas consistently spread? What if these digital halls echoed with wisdom?
And what if—and this might sound crazy here—we measured them not in time spent but by how they propagated goodness in our lives? And by goodness we mean sometimes a challenge, a necessary difficulty, not sugary entertainment.
Eve and I believe that’s all achievable on two conditions: One, we must realize it’s all made up; that we get to choose, and we can choose differently. Like society did with cigarettes. And two, we must accelerate the process by looking to other industries that have overcome analogous forces. Like agriculture.
For the past 40 years, people have been working hard to combat today’s chemical-saturated, nutrient-extractive, ecologically devastating farming practices by asking, how did humanity survive the prior—*gestures wildly*—all of time? The story is simple: We’re a part of the ecology, not above it. If we over-extract, the ecosystem dies and then so do we. Over-extraction is our extinction.
If, however, you decide to farm in a way that prizes the long-term health of the ecosystem, you realize that it means nothing to harvest infinite corn this year if there’s no harvest next; for if the topsoil blows off and the desert encroaches, what are you left with? If you instead relent, and invite clover to grow amidst the corn, you create groundcover that captures more moisture, stops erosion, suppresses weeds, sustains a diversity of insect life, and gives grazing animals a high-protein snack.
Regeneratively farmed land supports more life, generates higher-nutrient-density life, and requires fewer synthetic interventions. It means relying more on natural forces to create equilibrium, and uprooting the mega-corporations and their short-term profit concerns from our soil. This works. The principles exist. We are simply asking, can we do the same to our media?
I know what you’re thinking: “But media isn’t food.” And actually, we think it is. We become what we consume in all ways. An affirming media environment can be the difference between a happy, functional human and a shooter. And an absence of healthful messages can cause sickness, depression, and loneliness, the last of which is linked to an early death. Consider the stresses on a heart wrenched this way and that daily by bogus culture war feints and strikes. Media can toxify. Media can nourish. We must consider what we, as a society, are daily consuming.
So. When I go to social media and hesitate to post, it’s because something feels off ... because I see a momentary flash of steel beams and realize that this is not a town square. I'm in a factory farm.
But could good media regenerate us?
Okay walk further with me, through the elephantine grass to a clearing. Tell me, when was the last time you were at your highest vibration? What lit you up? Made the world fall away and drew your fullest and most intense focus? And how long has it been since you could say that you felt that feeling often? Maybe this can be your invitation to get up and go outside literally and metaphorically and consider that feeling could be your baseline, if you chose it. That you could detach from this glassy simulacra and make something. When’s the last time you made something? I’ll tell you mine. I got a little kintsugi kit to repair a cup that we didn’t particularly need to fix, but which afforded me the opportunity to work with my hands. It took weeks; you have to let it air dry and re-sand and dance around the sticky residue of a toxic epoxy. In the end, I was too miserly with the gold dust (in this economy?) and now the veins are more rusty than gold. But it’s mine and I made it, and I look at it every day.
I guess I’m trying to say, what’s out there for you? What would be occupying your mind if the extractive message mill were not? Eve and I believe all humans are naturally creative and expressive and just like how animals’ ears and fins droop along with their spirits in captivity, we humans lose that lustre when awash in unwanted radio signals.
Or when’s the last time you sat with your thoughts? How quick do you reach for your phone?
Really. Picture it. No, I’m not giving up. See what sense is dawning upon you? Imagine the snug slap of wet sand. The eventide aroma of orange blossom. The desert air as the last rays lift. Dragonflies. Musty book pages and the crack of a burning log. Clinking. Laughter. An evening too full to later talk about.
The path to daily feeling like that, Eve and I hypothesize, is in applying the principles that regenerated agriculture to regenerating our media. To inviting natural rhythms back in; to deflecting the cacophony of extractive signals and once again hearing cicadas.
So, let’s talk about those principles.
The following principles are a composite that we’ve drawn from many sources, including the originators of the term “regenerative agriculture,” at the Rodale Institute. Even back in the 1980s, they foretold a connection between ecological and psychic wellbeing.
Can you see any analogies to media?
Principles for regenerative agriculture
- Consider the ecology—Measure everything in relation to the overall system’s long-term health.
- Invite biodiversity—A diversity of plants can sustain one another; in complexity, there is stability.
- Maintain soil health—Let a nutrient-rich substrate form, from which all else grows.
- Don’t over-extract—When you take too much, it destabilizes the system. Let it replenish.
- Let habitats form—The creatures should be able to modify their environment to make a life.
- Intervene in natural ways—Chemicals create dependence. Look to nature for fixes.
- Ensure community benefit—Consider your neighbors upstream, downstream, and of the future.
- Allow a surplus—Healthy systems accrue a surplus to reinvest, grow, and resist shocks.
- Harmony with natural cycles—Work with what’s there, when it’s there.
As Eve says, our media should mirror our living planet. So with that, let me share our work-in-progress manifesto for regenerative media. We’d love your comments.
The regenerative media manifesto
Version 1, September 22, 2026
Regenerative media is a form of mass communication that has a net-positive psychological effect on participants; where they are more likely than not to leave feeling satiated, replenished, accountable, and creative.
The “regeneration” effect is a cycle that invites participants to interact at their own leisure, which rewards well-intentioned participation, and which creates continuously more psychological nourishment for others in the network. Like traditional, extractive media, regenerative media forms a network. Unlike traditional media, it rewards information that’s true, wise, and enjoyable, without creating patterns of abuse.
A regenerative media platform operates like an ecology, with natural cycles, rhythms, and balance. It has systems that naturally repel pests and restore healthy debate.
Regenerative media is mass communication, not a closed, private chat room, because an ecology needs a certain mass and diversity of purposes to sustain a whole, balancing system.
The net effect of regenerative media is that participants are more likely to feel restored by interacting with it; and any habit they form around its use is a catalyst to personal growth and community benefit.
This manifesto is based on what we know today and as our understanding evolves, so too will this document.
Why regenerative media?
All things become known to us only in their opposites, and society today suffers from an overproduction of extractive media. Most media today is made for profit. It seeks to extract the maximum mindshare and emotion from us and sell it to advertisers. That has contributed to making humanity more depressed, anxious, and exhausted than we ought to be.
This is a choice, and we can choose otherwise. Nature offers a metaphor: The agricultural industry over-industrialized to a point where it made us sick, and regenerative agricultural fixed it: When we understand the ecology, we can create self-sustaining systems that both nourish us and grow healthier with our participation. We believe we can achieve this in mass media by applying regenerative principles.
Regenerative media principles
- Consider the media ecology—Think first about the overall system’s long-term health.
- Invite ideodiversity—Ensure the forum is free of toxic echo chambers.
- Maintain healthy discourse—Create dynamics that reward mutual understanding.
- Sustainable business models—Make it so what’s profitable is long-term community benefit.
- Prefer what’s natural—Ask, "How nature has solved this?" Apply synthetics only when net-positive.
- Ensure community benefit—Submit to judgement from affected communities.
- Encourage surplus mindshare—Let people govern their time, free of dark patterns.
- Sustainable balance—Create interfaces that encourage healthy consumption and repel pests.
- Harmony with natural processes—Let the interface reflect the natural world.
- Philosophical stewardship—Appoint disinterested stewards, give mechanisms to remove them.
If you are interested in seeing this propagate across the media landscape and lead to a revitalization of participation, public engagement, and information, we are interested in hearing from you.
One action you can take: Send this to someone and start a conversation about what a post-extraction media could look like.
