How a 75-year-old plea for time inspires us in building a new place to share stories.
For the past five years, we've been building creative tools to help people share their best stories with video. And we absolutely love that work. But over those years, there's been this growing sense of discomfort—a feeling that something is deeply off about the platforms we were building for. Subwave grew out of that frustration.
The platforms we publish on have become slot machines, engineered to keep you pulling the lever. The companies behind them often hide behind a very narrow, very absolutist definition of freedom of speech to shield themselves from any responsibility for what happens on our watch. And we just kept thinking: it doesn't have to be this way.
Then I came across a lecture from 1950 by Canadian economist Harold Innes, titled "A Plea for Time". Reading it felt like history just repeats itself. It was a real aha moment for what we’re observing in media today.
His argument was simple but devastating. Every civilization has two forces pulling at it: space—the drive to reach more people, faster and wider—and time—the drive to say something that lasts, something with depth. The healthiest civilizations found a balance between the two. But that balance almost never holds, because every new medium tips the scale.
The printing press killed oral traditions. Radio rewarded spectacle. Newspapers chased sensation to sell ads. The pattern is always the same: a new medium shows up, it collapses everything into the immediate, and we lose the long view.
We're now living in the most extreme version of that imbalance in space and time in human history.
We've seen this up close at Detail. Every day people use our tools to create amazing stories with video. We've watched the exciting evolution of video podcasts over the past five years. We see teachers, journalists, small business owners sharing something real and personal every day.
But then they hit the platform, and the platform tells them to cut it to 15 seconds. The algorithm buries it because it doesn't trigger enough outrage. Or you spend years growing an audience and risk losing it overnight to a small change in the algorithm. The places where you're building your community change in moderation and algorithms, turning them from great spaces into hostile environments.
People using Detail have to adapt their story to the rules of the platform instead of the other way around. And that's what frustrates me most—the missed opportunity. We have all this amazing technology, but we use it to reduce great stories to 30 seconds or to replace creators with generated content, instead of elevating their authenticity, instead of celebrating the people who actually put in the work.
There's a big conversation now about how to fix this. Often that conversation is about regulation, the stick. And although I believe that's really important, the answer is not just the stick. You can't walk media evolution backwards. The mechanics that drive these platforms, like selling ads, hoarding data, refusing responsibility, won't change through regulation alone.
Video became the dominant medium of the decade. We need to build something better.
Here's the thing: every platform started with a creative spark. A unique little hack. A small creative outlet for people who had a story to share. Vine was just six seconds of weird joy. Instagram was a filter on your lunch. TikTok was lip syncing in your bedroom. That spark is real and it matters.
That's what we're looking for in Subwave as well. We want to create a place where everyone can share their best stories. And we think there's so much more to explore in how we do that. In the shapes and forms of your content. Meeting your audience halfway and finding the best ways to share your story with people in different formats that they actually enjoy. Something more fluid than just a set article or a 30-second clip.
And we believe we can do that in a way that doesn't primarily reward sensation or outrage, that doesn't hide behind a minimal take on freedom of speech. We will not create room or promote racism, discrimination, hate speech, or targeted abuse under the guise of freedom of expression. We're proudly governed by European laws, and we want to learn from a decade of social media, from the researchers, the organizations, and the people who've studied what these platforms actually do to us.
“Without vision, the people perish.”
We're still very early, super early, and we have a lot to learn. But we're very excited about the opportunity to reimagine media. Not alone, but together with you, with journalists, teachers, storytellers, and people like you. With other new platforms and open source protocols and organizations who share our values. With people who actually want to build a new space for civilized discourse.
Innes ended his lecture with a line from Proverbs: "Without vision, the people perish."
Seventy-five years later, I think the vision is clearer than ever: not going backwards, not just regulating what exists, but building the future that we want to see, together.
That's what we're doing at Subwave. Time for nuance.
And this is just the start. Let's build.
