Colors in the noise
Colors in the noise
... the history of events that tipped the scale
It is 2027. In hindsight, it seems inevitable.
With 100s of promptware startups, millions of hobbyists creating and publishing images, music, essays, models, mini-stories with generative AI, the deluge of content became nearly impenetrable noise by 2024.
It required another shock to the system to find that the noise was colored.
And humans were at the center of it all.
In response to the deluge, audiences, teachers, curators and advertisers needed a new way to cut a path through the thicket to find the work that resonated most.
And so, the behavior of audiences shifted. Subtly at first, and with fervor in due course. Doom-scrolling single platforms became a ghost of the past, replaced by treasure hunting.
Curation trumps creation!
During the hunt, strings of text sparked memories of sound. Images reminded the viewers of character traits, and hallucinations became inspirations for poetry. And so the voracious consumption of all the digital goods shifted the day-to-day routine of those lost in the wild of the browser. They collected their findings into unique and peculiar looking concoctions. And every new connection from one artifact to another meant a further insight into their soul. 2025 was the year when digital version of pack-rat behavior became commonplace …
… and, ultimately, it harbored the most valuable insights and delivered the shock to the system no one saw coming.
Mural, which had been facing stiff competition a year into the generative AI avalanche, spotted this trend early enough, and bet big time on multi-media canvases. The company made large, in-browser canvases free to use, forever, but sneakily changed the Terms Of Service so they could mine the connections. Using insights from users’ mass curation efforts, they found in coherence across media.
The patterns users created produced graphs of remarkable effectiveness, clearly indicating new ways in which they liked to process information, and what they craved in life.
And so the color project was born. And it became a phenomenon with staying power.
Mural classified the graphs and found true novelty for communities the world over. What is more, they realized that the most successful graph clusters pointed back to talented users of all creative technologies.
And all of this meant: super-clusters of artists would become visible as dots on the color spectrum.
Mural had discovered the new super app.
Riding high on its success with ‘colors’, VCs stampeded towards the new buzz. In a stunning move, Mural chose not to exploit this information to scale eyeballs on their platform, but rather went deep into web3 by offering an open-source algorithm that linked the graphs of the super-cluster together into coherent and testable IP.
And that bet paid off. Within the emotional bounds of a color, communities started to form that re-segmented the noise of the internet into open and beautiful gardens of Eden, were users could find and enjoy content that - again - felt deeply meaningful.
And so, web2 hold-overs fell behind. Mid-size platforms eager to demonstrate value of generative AI battled a losing war trying to sign these talented creator communities for exclusivity.
But the power imbalance had shifted to the other side. For good.
