Introducing AVOLA Extended.
For us at AVOLA, this felt like a necessary next step. As we continue our work, we’ve found that a lot of the conversations we’re having around culture, creativity, and the internet simply don’t fit into text posts or even short-form content. Certain conversations need more space, more context, and more time to actually unfold.
That’s really what AVOLA Extended is about. Our work isn’t changing, it’s evolving and expanding into a place where we can sit down with creators, thinkers, and people shaping the digital world, and actually get into the details of how and why things are the way they are. We’re interested in longer conversations, deeper thinking, and documenting the people and ideas shaping the internet as it exists right now.
For our first episode, we wanted to start with someone who has spent years doing exactly that.
Dan Olson is a Calgary-born filmmaker and video essayist, best known for his work on Folding Ideas, a YouTube channel with over 1 million subscribers and more than 100 million total views. His long-form documentaries on internet culture, media, and online communities have become some of the most widely discussed video essays on the platform.
His videos don’t just comment on internet culture, they break it down, examine it, and often challenge the way people think about it entirely. That’s exactly why he made sense as the first conversation for AVOLA Extended. We weren’t just looking for someone with insight into the internet, but someone who actively interrogates it, someone who understands both the creative process and the systems creators operate within.
Journalist Carter Blatz sat down with Olson to talk about internet culture, how he got into film and video editing, and how creators can think beyond YouTube when building a sustainable presence online.
