Nothing, Forever

The medium is the message

Marshall McLuhan wrote that the medium is the message. Nothing, Forever understood that by instinct, and it's still one of my favourite projects.

On November 30th 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. Within five days it had a million users. By the end of the month, 57 million. The AI people had long written about and dreaded was suddenly something you could talk to.

I was working at a SaaS company when Brian and Skylar came to us. They were about to launch Nothing, Forever on Twitch and wanted help with community. The pitch made sense straight away:

• The format worked. Lofi Girl had shown since 2017 that an always-on stream can hold a real audience.
• The twist was new. Put that format on a sitcom everyone knows, then let an AI run it, absurdity and all.

What wasn't obvious was how fast it would move.

Not trying to fool anyone

The scan lines and stilted dialogue were there so you could always tell it was AI.

It sat in the same tradition as Twitch Plays Pokémon, which in 2014 wired a chat box to a controller and turned it into a global event. The medium was the event. Nothing, Forever asked a different question: what happens when an AI writes and performs a sitcom forever, with nobody at the wheel?

The answer landed somewhere between so-bad-it's-good and something stranger. Then the audience wrote the rest:

• The microwave going off in the background became a running gag.
• The laugh track firing at the wrong moment sent chat into chaos.

From January 31st to February 6th 2023, the channel climbed to 198,000 followers, with concurrent viewers peaking around 11,000, making it the most watched content on Twitch that month.

What I did

My role was operational. When something needed to exist that didn't exist yet, I built it.

• A home for the audience. I set up 24/7 Twitch moderation and created the Discord server, which grew to 15,000 members during the viral window. It became the hub for live updates and, when things broke, incident comms.
• A game inside the show. My most popular idea was a Bingo card for Larry's recurring topics. It turned the show's repetitiveness into something to play along with.
• Merch, fast. Twitch payouts are slow and server costs don't wait. Within a day of the peak I had a team together and a Shopify store live with merch. From February 4th to 6th, 42,200 visitors placed 371 orders: $14,200 in revenue and $4,600 in profit. That covered infrastructure costs and bought the project some runway.
• Chat that changes the stream. I made character variants in Blender, like hats and other changes viewers could trigger with slash commands.

The ban

At 4am on February 6th, a failure in our content moderation system let the AI generate material that broke Twitch's terms. The stream was banned almost immediately. Within hours we were dealing with hate raids from 4chan and press enquiries from virtually every major publication covering tech.

I drafted the first public statement while the developers worked out exactly what had failed. Getting the story right under that pressure, fast and with half the facts, was its own discipline.

What it means now

In 2026, most AI in media is a production tool, smoothed into formats people already know. Shows like Fruits on Love Island are funny, but not very interesting as cultural objects.

Nothing, Forever went the other way. The AI was the point and the artifice was the content. That made it stranger, and more interesting: it was really asking whether the comfort of a sitcom survives without the people who make it.

We were early. Whether that was the right time is another question. But being that close to something new, in the weeks the world first saw what AI could do, is not something I'd trade.