Twitter shows a lower diversity of posts under Nikita, creating a super-pareto distribution of engagement (12 likes, 800 likes or 50 thousand likes, spin the wheel). Beyond algorithm design, there is a strong crowding effect across internet memes now, where exactly one topic takes over 90% of mindshare for 12-48 hours.
On longer timeframes, individual symbols or people crowd out the competition and accrue all mindshare. How many pieces of content have you seen about Sydney Sweeney? Ok how about the second most viral actress?
This manifested in an easy American Eagle trade this year: a viral Sydney Sweeney meme is worth 100 times more than a, say, Margot Robbie partnership, in terms of mindshare. The orders of magnitude separating first place from third have expanded aggressively.
The internet, which increasingly creates reality, speaks now like a 4 note song. Staccato. Michael Burry. Michael Burry. Big Short. Michael Burry. Trump is viral again today. Trump is viral again today. It's not x it's y. Trump is viral again today.
Incentive structures create an equilibrium where exactly one signal at a time is surfaced by any feed of content:
- A poster or corporation, optimizing for engagement, should use the most universal symbol to boost relatability and exposure.
- A content sorting algorithm should surface things which are being posted about a lot, which the users are sharing with friends, and pick the most viral piece of content
- A user should share the biggest meme of the day with friends, to relate to them.
Similarly, LLM's creat a singular voice for the internet due to static weights, and to optimize retention across users. When most writing and video are computer generated, all content will have the same rhythm and style. Taken to the limit, there are no personalized AI content feeds; everyone is watching the same broadcast like a megachurch service.
We sit in rapture at the feet of a universal pastor, and press x to spin the wheel on the next touchdown, or the next election (politics is sports now; prediction markets, short form video, and twitter hyperstit this). This is the easy reality to imagine. It's next in the logical sequence of steps. The Matrix has no back button.
However I do find it more interesting to imagine alternative endings. Perhaps there are unstable fixed points in our drain circle toward Skinner boxes. Wars, unstable distributions of wealth, and populism often cause fast step changes in societal trajectory.
One concrete example: I believe less now in the inevitably of hyper gambling than I used to. I spent 5 years betting for a living and investing in casinos, but all of a sudden it feels… consensus and wrong? There may be large-scale stigmatization of gambling behavior, or a decrease in risk taking after more violence, or less economic surplus to pour into these behaviors. A good piece of writing this week was "Short Degeneracy" which offers other explanations.
If my intuition were to manifest, what might people be doing instead of spinning screen slot machines on candy crush and robinhood while streaming from the Great Feed? Perhaps they would be "data pigs". Perhaps they would be toiling manual labor in a video game. Perhaps they would be walking outdoors, taking off the Oura ring, and pausing for a moment in the sunshine on the way to the factory.
Footnote:
Not just AEO: All my best trades this year, and I believe underexploited edge in today's memetic financial markets, is growth investing in some narrative that will become "the one note of the internet" that day. There have been many available trades along pareto virality thinking (i.e. once deepseek went viral past a certain threshold, it was guaranteed to 10x in virality again, free put options trade. Saylor "green dot" virality this Sunday was guaranteed to accelerate Monday, BTC puts trade)