Direction
Our long-term mission is to make a meaningful contribution towards the expansion of knowledge and understanding, motivated by a curiosity for deeper truths and hope for the future.
We aim to create media that informs, entertains, and inspires—content that makes you think and feel deeply.
I believe a meaningful path in life, that provides a sense of purpose, is doing things you believe contribute toward a more hopeful future.
How can we define such a future? It’s a world where human flourishing is maximised and suffering minimised; where the subjective experience of consciousness is as meaningful as possible for as many individuals as possible; where the sum of our collective conscious will dictates our direction—a free and open civilisation. To me, this is an exciting future.
By connecting our day-to-day actions with a higher purpose or mission like this, through the inevitable ups and downs of life, we can find grounded meaning and existential peace amidst life’s inevitable ups and downs.
Truth, Knowledge, and Understanding
Truth is fundamental to a hopeful future because it has utility—it serves as our north star. When we understand reality accurately, we can predict outcomes more effectively and navigate the world more wisely.
Information is raw data—facts and figures without inherent meaning.
Knowledge, is information refined into explanatory and predictive frameworks. It possesses causal power; it can bring about physical changes in the world.
Understanding arises from connecting and relating various insights, turning raw data into actionable, meaningful insights that effect change.
Knowledge is the ultimate resource. It isn’t finite like physical materials; instead, it expands indefinitely as we discover and correct errors. Knowledge allows us to transform scarce resources into abundant ones by unlocking their potential through understanding.
The quality of your decisions is directly related to the quality of your thoughts. The quality of your thoughts is directly related to the quality of your information. If information is polluted with distortions and falsehoods, our minds and lives drift astray.
The difference between wisdom and foolishness lies in how true your mental maps are to reality. Intelligence alone cannot make you wise—only a love of truth can.
Shared truths form the backbone of collective society, enabling collaboration and innovation at scale, and fostering the emergence of a complex, creative world.
Media
Media is not merely a technology for packaging information but a means to distil and convey knowledge—a way to turn insight, experience, and ideas into something shareable, accessible, and engaging.
At its best, media is an art of compression: transforming intricate webs of understanding into stories, images, and sounds that generate a change in perception. It facilitates the conversion of information into knowledge and, ultimately, understanding—that inspires change and action. A new lens to view the world.
By producing media content that informs, entertains, and inspires, we aim to help people understand themselves and the factors that shape our future. This may well be a higher-leverage activity than forcing actions into the world—to be the catalyst, the inspiration for others.
If successful, we have the potential to positively impact humanity and contribute towards a bright future. This is our unique contribution to an ever-evolving world.
The Present
Life has improved dramatically for almost everyone, everywhere, at an ever-accelerating rate. We exist in comparative peace. Many problems, of course, remain. But the foundations are secure and good: we have learned how to act and conduct ourselves both individually and socially so that true human flourishing is possible on a scale previously undreamed of.
Despite this progress, a crisis of meaning and purpose has emerged. We find ourselves inundated by a continual onslaught of ominous, demoralising messages, insisting that we confront severe and immediate emergencies associated with our social structures and industrial production.
The result? An increasingly compelled imposition of severe, involuntary limits to material abundance and growth. The fraying of our social fabric into a chaos of alienated polarisation. The extension of control by centralised organisations. The spread of demoralising and socially divisive doubt and hopelessness.
It’s evident that the information landscape is warped by powerful interests. There is an active war over information and truth—as there has always been.
The Possibility
It’s an exciting time for creators. We are experiencing a revolution in the media landscape. Technologies are aggressively converging to transform the conception, production, and distribution of media. The nature of media is changing in real-time.
We are entering a new age.
Media is decentralising and atomising. The costs of production and distribution are trending toward zero. We believe this new landscape offers immense opportunity.
By attracting smart, driven, creative, and curious thinkers—explorers, creatives, and content producers—and unifying them under a shared mission and purpose, we aim to create new and exciting original content.
Humanity does not automatically move forward, grow, advance and expand. The choices we make depend on the stories we tell ourselves. We want to contribute toward a positive vision for the future, to make that future a reality.
We do not believe humanity is teetering on the brink of apocalyptic disaster. We do not believe we are beings primarily motivated by lust for power and desire to dominate. We do not regard ourselves or fellow citizens as destructive forces, living in an alien relationship to the pristine and pure natural world.
The nature of human life is rapidly changing, as it always has. This poses fundamental psychological challenges.
How do we find meaning and purpose?
How do we construct our minds?
What are our shared stories about the future?
These are problems unlikely to be solved by miracle products or services. These are problems with informational solutions—problems we aspire to help humanity solve. We want to provide individuals with information that helps them navigate their lives, fostering meaningful and worthwhile existences.
Dissolving delusions embedded within the information landscape empowers clearer collective sight. Mass confusion calls for discernment, not domination. The solution lies not in imposing order but in inspiring epiphanies that organically unravel distortions to uncover the inherent truths and interconnectedness of reality.
By transparently exposing our own search for truth, our shared journeys can spark collective insights, empowering people to solve problems and restoring society’s wisdom from the bottom up.
Opportunity
We envision a harmonisation of technology, storytelling, psychology, and design to dissolve assumptions, unlock realisations, and broaden perspectives. Our goal is to innovate both the nature of content and the manner in which we produce it, so we can seed cascading epiphanies that ripple through digital social networks and resonate in the real world.
Knowledge and information are expanding exponentially, but time and attention remain limited. The value lies not in merely generating content but in developing processes and methodologies to compress, package, and communicate information in clear, substantive, and engaging ways. We aim to create content that is understandable, interesting, informative, and palatable to the widest possible audience. We strive for the most efficient, least lossy information compression possible, with the best signal-to-noise ratio.
Progress is infinite—there’s no limit to how much we can improve the human condition. This stands in contrast to pessimistic views that assume fixed limits to growth or resources. As long as we keep creating knowledge and correcting errors, our capacity to solve problems grows infinitely.
Technology is driving the cost of media to zero and will decentralise and atomise content producers. However, we believe there is still a place for teams of exceptional media producers to come together to create new, exciting, and valuable content that would be impossible to create alone.
By rallying like minds under this vision, the potential for change magnifies. We can contribute to an information landscape that clarifies reality’s contours. From improved shared knowledge can emerge enlightened choices unfettered by illusion, bringing our interdependent civilisation into deeper harmony with ourselves and each other—a world nourished by wisdom.
If our philosophy and values lead to content that people find valuable, it will propagate. The internet has made distribution highly efficient; we have no excuse.
How We Can Achieve This
We believe we are in the early innings of the age of information and imagination.
We’re at the beginning of a revolution far bigger than just a change in media. Methods of communication and information distribution have already changed beyond recognition with the internet—and this is just the beginning.
What information products are, how they’re made, and how they’re consumed will fundamentally change.
There’s ample room for improvement. With emerging technologies converging, there’s massive potential for innovation, especially at scale. If we can build a scaled, technologically iterative, process-driven information innovation lab, and if we work diligently, I believe we can emerge as a leader in this space over the next decade and make a meaningful improvement to the information landscape.
Current media companies are becoming irrelevant. What they make and how they make it is antiquated. We won’t look to them for inspiration; they are a regression and will not be competition. They lack the structure to compete. However, with a clear mission to pursue, we can’t afford to rest on our laurels. We will continuously push to maximise our impact within given constraints (time, resources, knowledge, technology), which will naturally lead us to find opportunities that others do not, constantly innovating what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. The more we do that, the more we further our mission.
Technological transformations are redefining what is and will be possible in the media landscape. We want to lead this redefinition to improve the information landscape. We believe media content—information at scale—will undergo a fundamental transformation. Media products will no longer be discrete, single-use products. They will be generated in real-time using tools like Unreal Engine and AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Runway Gen-3. They will improve over time and adapt to the viewer, perhaps responding in real-time.
Imagine content generated in real-time at zero marginal cost, improving over time and adapting to the viewer—not just a demographic, but the specific individual. An explainer that changes according to whom it’s explaining to—both in content and delivery. Are people more open-minded to information presented by someone like them? Do certain analogies and added context resonate more with different individuals? Do people already understand something that can be leveraged to bootstrap understanding elsewhere?
Knowledge enables adaptability. By getting closer to the truth, we make better decisions and create better technologies. False beliefs hinder progress because they lead to errors that eventually collapse under scrutiny.
We can create media products that improve over time, responding to new information or the rapidly changing world. New ideas will emerge on ways to design content. While there may be losses from the reduction in live-action production, we stand to gain so much more.
We believe there’s room for new media companies to emerge. We believe that what a media company is will radically shift. Most core competencies of current established media organisations (even those calling themselves new media companies) will become irrelevant.
Our Plan
Initially, we will produce an increasing quantity and quality of authentic, story-driven video content for brands. Our commercial content production serves as an R&D lab for us to consciously and deliberately iterate and improve the way we design content, as well as the processes and skills we use to drive the design and execution—all while generating revenue. This is the reduction to practice of our initial product—advertising content.
Our client work delivers a fundamental good, reducing the cost barrier to entry for high-level storytelling and communication. Small businesses and startups can compete with big brands, focusing on the value they deliver. We help them tell their story, convey their value.
To execute this plan effectively, we are guided by a set of enabling principles that define our culture and approach. We foster an environment of transparency, unusually high trust, and ownership, where rigorous thinking and a bias toward action drive our decision-making. Our commitment to continuous improvement and aggressive optimism fuels our pursuit of innovation. By aligning our team under these principles, we aim to create a high-performing and ethical company culture that empowers us to build products and content that truly make a difference.
By leveraging our expertise in marketing, storytelling, psychology, and design, we apply these skills across various domains to help our clients achieve their goals. This includes creating impactful marketing campaigns, engaging content, and assisting startups in crafting compelling narratives to communicate their value to investors, customers, and partners.
This approach not only enhances our clients’ success but also allows us to refine our own processes and methodologies. Over time, our branded content will begin to resemble original content. This is us refining our design process—creating content that is both engaging and effective, while genuinely serving audiences with value. We aim to foster positive-sum relationships between brands and their audiences.
By continuously innovating our core production processes, thinking from the ground up, and employing existing and emerging technologies, we plan to make significant improvements to the quality, speed, and cost of our work. This will create cost savings for our clients, making our offerings more compelling, and help us generate robust free cash flow.
With this free cash flow and our enhanced content production capabilities, we will shift our primary focus towards original content creation. This is where the business shifts into a different gear.
Our ability to distil complex insights and make them understandable and impactful is invaluable. We must sharpen our skills as explainers, storytellers, translators, and guides to compress ideas with elegance, substance, and wit.
Conclusion
In summary, here is the first phase of our Master Plan:
Build a world-class content production and marketing service.
Use that foundation to create exceptional original content.
Develop into a media company producing exceptional original content at scale.
I have woven together many ideas I have learned from others; any truth contained can be attributed to the fortune afforded to me, and any errors are my own.
We believe that by pursuing this mission, we can make a meaningful contribution towards a more hopeful future—a future where knowledge, understanding, and wisdom are expanded and shared widely.
About Rogue Divisions
Rogue Divisions empowers brands and startups by merging cutting-edge storytelling with innovative strategies to amplify narratives and drive meaningful engagement. Specialising in impactful content marketing and innovative, marketing-driven capital raising strategies, we deliver media that not only captivates audiences but also fosters understanding and inspires action. Leveraging our expertise in marketing, psychology, and design, we provide a comprehensive, hassle-free service. Our technology-driven approach ensures not just quality content but measurable results, helping you achieve your goals—whether it’s brand elevation, audience growth, or capital raising. We are redefining the future of media production—offering a simple, cost-effective solution that scales with your ambitions.
Contact
Sage Dillon
Founder & Creative Director
sage@roguedivisions.com
General Enquires
contact@roguedivisions.com
0800 009 6613