What Warhol and Meeker Teach us: The Medium is still the message

Going through Mary Meeker’s latest 340-page AI report, one thought kept resurfacing - it's not merely about the rich content, but about how it is delivered - and why.

The Medium is the Message, as Marshall McLuhan once said. And Warhol visually paraphrased. This report? It’s the embodiment of that.

The takeaways themselves are familiar and widely cited since the release: TLDR: AI is rewriting every playbook, data center construction is surging, hockey sticks everywhere, Nvidia dominates every layer, training data is still exploding, and inference costs are collapsing.

But what stuck with me wasn’t just the content - it was the format. Or lack thereof. No catchy slide design. No visual flow. Just wall-to-wall center-aligned text, paragraph after paragraph, across hundreds of pages. It reads less like a traditional report and more like raw input data.
Accidental? No, cannot be.

In a world where most readers will feed this PDF into ChatGPT, NotebookLM, or another LLM interface, the intended reader audience has shifted. The assumed processor isn’t human - it’s machine.

And that makes the medium the real message.

Because in this new era, the edge doesn’t go to the loudest voice or the sleekest design.

It goes to whoever controls the cleanest, highest-quality proprietary data. That's the real value. And Meeker's position as tech's Nostradamus will prevail, with even bigger reach and citation, and a multitude of access models and AI agents digesting the data.

Mary Meeker isn’t just reporting on AI's dominance.
She’s adapting to its logic - in Warhol-esque style.

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Illustration: ChatGPT (inspired by Warhol's work - realizing, gladly, that his original mastery cannot easily be assimilated)