Any attempt to reconstruct a system of free expression in today’s information system would be smart to address one of its core frictions: though “the media” is ostensibly charged with developing and caring for shared interests, it is persistently dominated by powerful individuals—a system of individualism—who prevent it from being a force for collective meaning-making and democratic self-governance. The personalities driving the current U.S. federal government and its media allies are obvious and egregious examples of embodied, personalized power. But they are not unique in kind, just particularly extreme elements of an entrenched system of celebrity power that makes free expression in public interests virtually impossible.

Today’s “Media Individualism Complex” has five powerful dimensions that feed each other: (1) celebrity influencers with personal brands and loyal audiences who use their embodiment to command attention; (2) billionaires owners and celebrity CEOs using media companies for economic gain, personal advancement, and political positioning; (3) critics, intellectuals, and branded academics invested in styles of commentary and critique that need and feed individual reputations; (4) media technologies like personalized platforms and chatbots that watch, aggregate, model, and feed individual actions; and (5) news coverage that purposefully blends media figures’ work and personae.

Distinct from media systems driven by a concern for public goods, collective action, and procedural accountability, the Media Individualism Complex has its own logics. It is shaped by embodied, personal interests and private wealth, and also thrives on and strategically invokes notions of benevolence, fame, shame, charisma, reputation, celebrity, propriety, exclusivity, courage, genius, and other individually possessed and performed forms of power. The Media Individualism Complex may periodically intersect with and even support public interest media (celebrities supporting causes, philanthropists endowing a newsroom, patrons funding a documentary, star academics advocating for social justice), but the complex is fundamentally at odds with public interests because its people, signals, norms, and ideals systematically and structurally traffic in individualism.

To be sure, this complex is not new; individuality and personality have always been at the heart of media systems, especially in the United States. The country’s media has long been dominated by celebrity influencers (Charles Coughlin, Walter Cronkite), owner-patrons (William Randolph Hearst, Walter Annenberg), branded critics (Walter Lippmann, Gore Vidal), individualism publications (People Magazine, TV Guide), and coverage that mixes biography, personae, and public interests (Woodward and Bernstein portrayals in “All the President’s Men,” and the embodied performative interview styles of brands like Barbara Walters, Kara Swisher, and Ezra Klein). Such individualism is not to be dismissed or derided. It has sometimes made laudable and powerful interventions into media systems—e.g., when Newton Minow delivered his “vast wasteland” speech, when Jon Stewart accused Tucker Carlson of “hurting America,” and when James Baldwin mixed memoir and critique to denounce Hollywood racism.

Today, this Media Individualism Complex plays out amongst:

• Celebrity Influencers. Media figures like Charlie Kirk, Joe Rogan, Hasan Piker, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and more regularly mix celebrity, personal politics, humor, and populism in ways that shape the Media Individualism Complex messages and styles. Sometimes canceled and even killed for such individualism, they show the power and precarity of starring in a system that prizes embodied, solipsistic analyses. And the rapid rise of hybrid influencer-journalist cultures means that social media stars with personal brands and followings increasingly drive news coverage. Much rides on what these individuals say, the risks they take, and how well they leverage funders, broadcasters, politicians, audiences, platforms, and attention economies.
• Billionaires & Funders. Wealth and power has also rapidly concentrated in a relatively small set of individuals who have become key actors in creating, funding, and running the Media Individualism Complex. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Patrick Soon-Shiong own and shape media and technology companies according to their personal values. CEOs like Disney’s Bob Iger (Disney owns ABC News) and Paramount’s David Ellison (Paramount owns CBS News) have been at the center of politically charged questions about how their media companies will reward, censor, or allow speech, and how such decisions weigh on their personal legacies and political influence. And wealthy and famous individuals like Dave Chappelle, Joan Kroc, Connie Ballmer, Eric Schmidt, Pierre Omidyar, and Craig Newmark all choose which parts of the media system to endow. And entire literary traditions focus on how media systems make and sustain such personalities.
• Critics & Intellectuals. Many critics have built careers on critiquing concentrations of power in ways that both need and feed the Media Individualism Complex. Celebrity intellectuals with publicists, agents, assistants, stylists, and named chairs maintain powerful personae through a system of columns, podcasts, TED talks, exhibitions, social media, magazine profiles, “genius” prizes, fellowships, lists curated by Forbes, Time Magazine, MIT Tech Review, and Business Insider, and with personal access to elite gatherings like Dialog, Bilderberg, and the World Economic Forum. While such individuals may use their celebrity to challenge media power in ways that strategically align with or are benevolent to public interests, their ability to do so requires a system that values and trades on individualism.
• Platforms & Designs. As much scholarship has documented, the algorithmic logics of social media platforms are often driven by analyses of how well content engages people as individuals—whether they are entertained or outraged, whether they scroll past or repeatedly view, whether they comment or share, whether they become habitual users. Platforms sense personal reactions, prompt individuals to act, and try to elicit embodied emotions that people are encouraged to represent and share with others. A dogged focus on individual engagement is crucial to ensuring that people repeatedly return to the Media Individualism Complex and pay attention to its speakers, funders, critics, and coverage. This automated individualism is especially pronounced in contemporary AI bots designed to be agreeable, confirm individuals’ impressions, and foster a kind of sycophantic intimacy.
• Persona Coverage. Even coverage by media organizations reinforces the power of media individualism, with publications regularly producing lifestyle profiles of celebrities, influencers, billionaires, and critics. The Guardian ponders the significance of a Mark Zuckerberg AI avatar, and the New York Times asks if Tim Cook was a stylish CEO, speculates on the influence a “MAGA Girlfriend” has on Google co-founder Sergey Brin, analyzes the Sam Altman-Elon Musk feud, and publishes a profile of CEOs asking whether CEOs should be profiled. The Wall Street Journal writes more than 800 words on how a sweater emblazoned with a CEO likeness shows how “leaders at companies from Nvidia to Palantir are now driving fashion, signaling a new era of the cult of the founder.” Vogue magazine devotes almost an entire issue to Jeff Bezos’s wedding. The Media Individualism Complex needs such figures to be personalities worthy of coverage, recursively reinforcing its own power and the power of those they cover by making audiences see celebrity as unquestionably, naturally newsworthy.

Though charm, charisma, and celebrity can be leveraged for ill effects, individuals can also harness them for good. They can use their individuality to call for changes that they think will make the media systems better serve public interests. To be clear, I do not decry all forms of media individualism but it is incredibly dangerous for media systems to not ask why certain individuals are so powerful, how individualism has become such a powerful media ideology, and what happens to media systems when reformers must repeatedly fit public interests into individualized, private interests, benevolences, and largess of those who populate, make, fund, and police the Media Individualism Complex.

What might be done? There are a few ways forward.

First, individuals may retain their personal power, but use it to work against the very forces that gave it to them, the forces that sustain the Media Individualism Complex. They could see themselves as embodiments of failed policies and systems and work to make themselves the last exemplars of such failure. Second, individuals could ‘quit’ their positions as powerful media individuals and find ways to ‘donate’ their personal power to collective causes, divesting from positions of individual privilege in ways that reassign individualized power to publics. Third, individuals might organize collectives that pool their personal power into collective instruments of influence that they direct through shared governance and collective action. They would create new forms of power that were fundamentally anti-individual. Fourth, individuals may simply become more honest and transparent about having and using private power, neither giving it up nor reassigning such embodied privilege, but being explicit about why they think they should have and use it.

Fifth, powerful individuals may better articulate how their personal power rests upon people or forces that are largely invisible but that are nonetheless essential to creating and sustaining their seemingly independent power. They might call attention to—and make themselves responsible to—the apparatuses and infrastructures that make them seem special and singular. Sixth, though it seems to me like an ethical race-to-the-bottom, some people may adopt a “ridicule as praxis” approach that personally shames, demeans, or otherwise demotes powerful media individuals, centering and calling attention to their personal absurdities. Seventh, media organizations could use their coverage to critique the fundamentally unacceptable idea that some individuals should have more or less media power, highlighting individualism as dangerous and antithetical to public interests, not an idiosyncratic or quirky curiosity designed to entertain. Finally, academics could follow in the footsteps of scholars who have studied charm, charisma, celebrity, and mogul power to develop precise and critical accounts of how media individualism works and shapes media power, and how billionaire media figures might be countered.

If media systems are to ensure free expression they should challenge increasingly personalized concentrations of wealth, status, and technological control. Concentrated power needs people to think that media systems dominated by individuals are inevitable. They are not; things could be otherwise. At best, powerful people are benevolent individuals who can be convinced to invest their private power in public interests; at worst, these are self-interested personalities who see their power as a natural, meritocratic reward that entitles them to impose their own ideas of media on those who struggle to tell and listen to stories without simply being clients of the interests of wealthy and powerful individuals.

Finally, holding a mirror to ourselves and those close to us, we should also see how critics, reformers, and those who have suffered the ills of a broken media system often take up individualism as a tool of progress. They understandably think that their own benevolent applications of individualism—serving personal theories of structural change and social justice—are ways out of the brokenness. They see their ‘correct’ application of individualism as a form of resistance. They know how precarious their individual power is, and they know the private compromises that they have had to make to retain it. They may choose to invest in and celebrate the very forces of individualism that they know work against the long term, collective, public projects that they know emerge from and sustain a robust media system. Such compromises are understandable but dangerous because they ultimately sustain the Media Individualism Complex. It is paradoxical, but the most courageous thing that a powerful member of the Media Individualism Complex might do is actively work against the forces that sustain their power, and that make their courage relatively safe and easy.