You are not the media, because the media’s job is to mediate, which in this case means forming a usable and trustworthy connection between people and the world at large. Doing that for yourself is like being one’s own therapist; it just doesn’t work. And while your ability to see that world more directly through your phone certainly tweaks the old definition of our profession, it doesn’t undo it. If anything, between government-sponsored spin, social media engagement farming, and deep fakes, there’s an even greater need for people whose job it is to wake up every day and tell you the truth—and before it’s too late for you to do anything about it.

For 16 years, Tablet’s central feature has been our ability to observe the world clearly—a skill that gave us a spooky ability to see around corners, which was especially useful as legacy outlets proved uninterested in acknowledging, let alone interpreting, obvious realities that people could see with their own eyes. We then took advantage of the web’s new instruments of accessibility and speed to bring that foresight to as many people as possible.

But now the internet is dying, in large part because it creates audiences that are broad but shallow—a majority of which these days are bots, driven by AI. On internet platforms, you may indeed feel like the media, but you are mainly its food.

By liberating you from the responsibility of being your own media, we are freeing you up to be something much more important and, frankly, much more radical in this moment: human.

Alana Newhouse is the editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine.