Father to @davybeach, husband to @lisaweisman. Media, AI & storytelling systems. Author of Engines of Change, host of Future Frames. He/Him.
Portland, OR
Joined February 2007
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Skydance owns Hollywood’s biggest library and still can’t say, title by title, what an AI company may do with it. Tim Wu’s master switch moved again. New Deep Cut: enginesofchange.ai/p/the-swi…
Someone got a Nikon Z6 III to sign an AI pug flying a jet as a real photo. Nikon invalidated every credential from that window. Most checkers kept saying they were fine, because they never asked.
enginesofchange.ai/p/split-d…
An animator can refuse to have her face or voice scanned, and her job can't depend on it. The same contract gives her no veto over the studio licensing her drawings for training. Consent follows the person and stops at the work. enginesofchange.ai/p/two-cen…
IBC 2026 visitors were down 6% while exhibitor counts held roughly flat. Fewer buyers, the same number of vendors, and every one of those buyers trying to manage fewer relationships. Which architecture wins matters less than who is left to buy one. open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
The 2026 WGA and SAG-AFTRA agreements both require notice when a company licenses covered work for AI training. Neither establishes a consent right. Neither sets a compensation floor. open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
Lucasfilm brought Thrawn back into canon and left the ysalamiri out. Same book, same standing after the 2014 reset, opposite outcomes: open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
When a newspaper dies, the cost shows up in the county's bond spreads, not on the paper's books. That is the shape of every automation decision. The dashboard can be right about everything it measures and still not know what the function was doing. enginesofchange.ai/p/the-oth…
Part III of Persistence: The Long Memory. The piece is about what organizations store versus what their people hold, and why every knowledge base on earth is quietly changing how executives think about headcount.open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
Part II of Persistence is live: The Drag. The TV industry certified three replacements for the ratings number it publicly distrusts. Funded them. Tested them.
The upfronts still run on Nielsen. The piece is about why. open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
New series, who dis?
Persistence: four parts on what survives in media when keeping things alive stops being automatic.
Part I opens with a true story: a studio's entire Italian library lived in one vendor's shop. Not a copy. The library. open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
Comcast, ITV, and Xbox all came apart in the same eight days. No court, no regulator, just pricing. New System Alert on the sort happening underneath (and why the AI IPO queue is the reason bundles stopped getting a pass). open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
AI didn't break your media workflow. It exposed what was already broken. Ep 010 of Future Frames on metadata debt — the layer everyone depends on and no one owns. open.substack.com/pub/future…
For decades, keeping media alive was automatic. The archive had a keeper, the standard had a body, the rights had an owner.
That's coming loose. In the gap between one order and the next, nothing survives by default. open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
We called the last group of men who did this "robber barons." The label did damage, because "robber" says the problem was greed. AT&T held the phone network 50 years. Leaded gas poisoned the soil for 40. Both ended. Final piece in the series: open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
A government directive took a frontier AI model offline worldwide in an afternoon.
The official reason for it changed three times. What didn't change was the thing it revealed: someone other than your vendor can reach the off-switch.
open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
Most AI governance talk asks if the rules are good. Wrong question. Ask who writes them and who answers to them.
Right now it's the same companies that own the infrastructure. They write, change, and enforce the rules from inside one building. enginesofchange.ai/p/the-adj…
Fox bought Roku. Disney is generating the whole ad now. EA turned its games into ad inventory. Same week, three screens, one move.
None of it was about content. The product isn't the show anymore. It's the audience, and the machine that sells it. open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
What we call Hollywood is a 1917 industrial template the US inherited from Europe. The creator economy is a return to what came before.
New piece co-written with @SethHallen of Hallstone Ventures. Free to read.
enginesofchange.ai/p/the-clu…
Anthropic shipped its newest model twice this week.
For requests aimed at building competing models, it degrades its own output and tells you nothing.
It's protecting market position.
open.substack.com/pub/abeach…
Every Deep Cut in Engines of Change ends with a cocktail. Not as decoration, more like a pairing. The essay carries the argument and the drink carries the aftertaste. 20 drinks. 20 arguments. One small attempt to make media infrastructure more drinkable.
enginesofchange.store/produc…
