I'm Kennyatta. I photograph, strategize, and publish stories through a cultural context.
This is my publishing platform about the power of cultural storytelling with a studio and framework for people building with people in mind. Suppose you believe your brand, work, idea, or your audience deserves more than algorithmic relevance, or you're building something that should compound over time rather than evaporate with ever-shrinking trend cycles. In that case, you're in the right place.
038 Cosmos and the Quiet Rebellion Against the Feed
DOC 01—29-26
Curiosity: What would it look like if we didn’t need to perform for the algorithm? Category: Essay
“It took me 30 years to figure out that the difference between good and great isn’t talent. It’s caring more than feels reasonable.”- Andy McCune, CEO of Cosmos
Inspiration as Far as the Eye Can See
We’ve all experienced the fatigue that sets in after you’ve spent enough time on the current slate of popular social platforms. It’s not just boredom. It’s the feeling that your attention has been gently strip-mined, your ideas dulled, and while you were entertained, whatever curiosity you felt was rerouted toward something more profitable than meaningful.
The initial promise was connection and inspiration, but quickly, the reality became extraction. Platforms extract attention. Advertisers extract conversions. Algorithms extract behavioral data. Creators extract reach from audiences. Instead of helping us discover what we love as they advertised, they’ve become machines designed to discover what keeps us scrolling and use that information against us. They reward volume over discernment and performance over reflection; everything is optimized to move faster than your taste can mature.
Cosmos feels like it was built by people who noticed this and simply refused to participate. It isn’t loud. It doesn’t beg you for engagement. It doesn’t behave like it’s terrified you’ll leave if it doesn’t dazzle you with a new euphoria-inducing piece of content every few seconds. It operates at a slower frequency, more like a personal archive for your mind and less like a public stage for you to be the jester for others. You don’t “post” on Cosmos in the way you do elsewhere. You collect elements in your cluster of ideas and inspirations. You get to trace lines between ideas that would otherwise vanish into the churn of billions of posts, and instead of asking what you want to see next, it’s almost like it asks, “What do you want to keep?”
That’s a different question and a harder one to answer. But I like that.
Most legacy platforms are built to monetize your worst impulses. They learn what triggers you, what distracts you, what enrages you, and what nudges you toward clicking, buying, reacting, and exploiting that for their own ends. But only addiction and isolation can be found waiting at the bottom of the barrel of a system designed to extract value from your attention. Cosmos is different in the sense that it treats inspiration like something fragile and worth preserving, contextualizing, and crediting. Instead of flattening references into a vacuum of aesthetic noise, it holds onto where things came from, who made them, and why they might matter.
That emphasis on provenance feels radical now only because we’ve been indoctrinated to accept an internet economy that treats everything as remixable “content”; Cosmos insists that ideas have lineage and that creative work deserves attribution. This is where the company’s AI infusion plays a contributing role rather than an intrusive one. It will do its best to source, contextually, the origins of images so that cultural artifacts aren’t stripped of context for the sake of frictionless sharing.
It’s a quiet ethical stance, but an important one to simply behave as if creators are not
disposable.
There’s also something subtly defiant about how the platform handles taste. Where most algorithms try to shape your preferences and push you toward what performs well or what converts, Cosmos doesn’t try to override your taste. It lets you reveal it over time, and as you collect, patterns naturally emerge, and your sensibility becomes visible as a record of attention.
This is an odd business decision in an era obsessed with growth curves and engagement metrics, yet Cosmos recently raised significant funding and rolled out product updates designed to expand discovery and social features without changing its underlying philosophy. Rather than leaning fully into algorithmic amplification, it continues to foreground human curation, attribution, and deliberate exploration.
What keeps me intrigued is the amazing tension there: scale versus taste. Extraction versus stewardship. Growth versus meaning. Most companies resolve that tension in favor of revenue and wild growth, Cosmos hasn’t, at least not yet, and that’s exciting. The suggestion that creativity is not an endless scroll of interchangeable images, but a conversation carried across time, and that not everything should be optimized for maximum reach, is a powerful one.
If we look at the influencer economy born from the old social media model, it has largely been built on audience size. However, today reach is becoming commoditized; algorithms inflate it, paid distribution amplifies it, bots distort it, and virality is becoming cheaper to manufacture with a lowering return in value (and an increasing cost to brand integrity).
By contrast, taste and affinity are difficult to artificially manufacture. Cosmos effectively turns curatorial exercise into a measurable signal that can enable a brand to identify artists, creators, and cultural tastemakers based on sensibility, coherence, and how well they articulate their interests.
That opens a new strategic lane:
Partnerships rooted in affinity alignment, and not just blind reach
Campaigns built around cultural fit, not just performance optimization
Brand positioning driven by taste adjacency, not trend chasing from behind
It’s undeniable how much taste and authenticity have become competitive moats.
To call a spade a spade, Cosmos doesn’t try to entertain you into submission. It doesn’t flood you with content until your sense of judgment erodes and you just accept whatever is in front of you. Cosmos is not for everyone. Which is amazing.
We need more platforms not trying to cater to the whims of the entire human population. Cosmos is not ideal for people who want instant validation, viral reach, or endless stimulation. It’s better suited to people who enjoy sitting with ideas, letting taste develop, and who enjoy building a personal archive that reflects who they are or even aspire to be.
Whether this model survives the gravitational pull of growth remains an open question. Platforms with ideals often discover that ideals are expensive to maintain. But for now, Cosmos stands as a rare counterexample: a place where inspiration isn’t mined, monetized, and discarded, but collected, credited, and allowed to mature.
For creators who feel exhausted by the endless demand to produce, perform, and optimize, Cosmos offers something almost subversive: a slower way of paying attention. And while legacy platforms are building to extract everything from you, choosing what to pay attention to is one of the last real acts of creative control.
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