Everyone is crazy now

The new abnormal.

This is not a precise theory, but man, what do we do even if the outline is true?

—

First: The basic mechanics of social media are well understood at this point. People like attention; saying controversial, extreme, or emotionally seductive things attracts a lot more attention than nuance and subtlety; people who say controversial, extreme, and emotionally seductive things get attention and sometimes become famous. Though these patterns have surely existed forever—people starting saying “if it bleeds, it leads” in the 1890s—social media is a nuclear amplification of these physics:

1. The competition is now global. To get attention as a teenager in 2000, you had to be a class clown: Make jokes, do hijinx, be edgier than the few hundred other kids in your school. Now, you have to compete with the entire world. Whatever stunt you pull, everyone already saw something far more deranged on their phones this morning. The machinations of social media make us want to say something crazy; the reach of social media makes the bar for what qualifies as crazy very high.

2. If people do notice you, the scale of attention is incomprehensible. Attention used to mean that your high school thinks you are popular, and you might get elected to be the homecoming queen. Now, it means that four million teenagers religiously obsess over your outfits and you have a clothing line at Aeropostale.

3. People get addicted to—and then, often, eaten by—the attention. They contort themselves into whatever character keeps them in the spotlight, and sometimes lose themselves in the process. They hunt a second encore; a third encore; a perpetual encore; a permanent high; “I can't stop, and I can't run, and I can't choose; like heroin, I'll always come back to you.” They live in their notifications, looking for something in a place where it can’t be found. From Chris Hayes, in the New Yorker:

   The Star seeks recognition from the Fan, but the Fan is a stranger, who cannot be known by the Star. Because the Star cannot recognize the Fan, the Fan’s recognition of the Star doesn’t satisfy the core existential desire. There is no way to bridge the inherent asymmetry of the relationship, short of actual friendship and correspondence, but that, of course, cannot be undertaken at the same scale. And so the Star seeks recognition and gets, instead, attention.

   …

   We are conditioned to care about kin, to take life’s meaning from the relationships with those we know and love. But the psychological experience of fame, like a virus invading a cell, takes all of the mechanisms for human relations and puts them to work seeking more fame. In fact, this fundamental paradox—the pursuit through fame of a thing that fame cannot provide—is more or less the story of Donald Trump’s life: wanting recognition, instead getting attention, and then becoming addicted to attention itself, because he can’t quite understand the difference, even though deep in his psyche there’s a howling vortex that fame can never fill.
   
   

   This is why famous people as a rule are obsessed with what people say about them and stew and rage and rant about it. I can tell you that a thousand kind words from strangers will bounce off you, while a single harsh criticism will linger. And, if you pay attention, you’ll find all kinds of people—but particularly, quite often, famous people—having public fits on social media, at any time of the day or night. You might find Kevin Durant, one of the greatest basketball players on the planet, possibly in the history of the game—a multimillionaire who is better at the thing he does than almost any other person will ever be at anything—in the D.M.s of some twentysomething fan who’s talking trash about his free-agency decisions. Not just once—routinely! And he’s not the only one at all.

Becoming famous on social media often requires a certain amount of performative madness.¹ Staying famous requires escalating that madness. And even if you arrive there through more balanced means, the blistering heat of social media can drive you into the madness.

Of course, these are fairly boring points to make. There are already movies and TV shows and documentaries about all of them.

—

Second: The value of attention is also well understood. Or, at least it was. Through the early days of social media, attention was often framed as useful because it could be converted into money and power. You could sell your audience to advertisers, or pressure the powerful with your armies of fans. But there was a sense of separation between pop star and politician, or the celebrity and the chief executive. Though the raucous noise from the kids’ table might influence the conversation at the adult table, the two—the cultural stars and the managerial class—were different things. Twitter, the saying went, was not real life.

The lines are blurring. As Kyla Scanton recently said, “Traditional economic substrates are land, labor, capital—bedrock inputs to make stuff. But now, the foundational input is attention.” Elections are won and lost on vibes. Markets rise and fall based on what’s trending on the internet, through no mechanic other than attention itself:

The core ideas of a memecoin are that (1) it has a name that associates it with some other underlying thing and (2) its trading price has something to do with the underlying thing, not because of some arbitrage mechanism but because of the name. The price of Dogecoin goes up when people are thinking more about Doge, etc.

It’s a fascinating discovery because it opens the door to financialization of all sorts of things that don’t normally have any prices at all. Home values are one thing — there are complicated questions of liquidity and aggregation — but memecoins are not limited to conventional assets. Memecoins could reflect the song of the summer, the popularity of an actor, the viability of American democracy. Not in a prediction-market sort of way — not in a way that resolves based on some external fact — but just, like, within the world of the memecoin. If the democracy coin is up then democracy is up, and vice versa, and stop asking so many questions.

Attention is no longer a bridge to power; it is the power. And influencers are no longer adjacent to the powerful; they are the powerful. This is partly because people look to influencers for leadership—there is an 8,000 word Wikipedia page about the political influence of Taylor Swift—and partly because influencing is now how you join the managerial class. The 2024 presidential campaign was fought by meme; influencers are running major government agencies; influencers are running for Congress; founders start companies by first becoming influencers; even Silicon Valley titans like Elon Musk and Sam Altman are as much influencer as executive:

One thing about A.I. as a technology is that the leading figures of it are big influencers on social media. Sam Altman is probably the most masterful of the C.E.O.s, alongside Elon Musk, at driving attention wherever they want it to go.

It is tempting to say that all of this is a distraction. That social media is bluster, and the real alpha comes from consistently doing the mundane: Talking to customers, connecting with voters. That you win elections by focusing on kitchen table issues; that you build businesses by keeping your head down and making something people want.

Are you sure? “[Tesla] was itself a meme, one about a car company, but also sustainability, and most of all, about Elon Musk himself. Issuing more stock was not diluting existing shareholders; it was extending the opportunity to propagate the TSLA meme to that many more people.”

Are you sure? “Sydney Sweeney Fuels ‘Meme Stock’ Euphoria For American Eagle Outfitters, Retail Crowd Piles In Amid After-Hours Surge.”

Are you sure? “Defense tech Theseus landed Y Combinator, the US Special Forces, and $4.3M from a tweet.”

Are you sure? “On the ground, the Trump campaign was at a disadvantage to Kamala Harris’s massive canvassing operations. But many misunderstood the power—and purpose—of influencer marketing campaigns.”

Are you sure the old wisdom is still true? Are you sure that that gravity, which seems to be exerting less pull by the day, isn’t permanently fading? Are you sure that homespun platitudes about doing things the right way aren’t the desperate gasps of a geriatric generation losing its relevance? Is it good advice, or is it cope? Do we think this stuff is true, or do we want it to be true, because we don’t understand—and can’t survive in—the new physics of the attention economy?²

Even still, these are all fairly boring points to make. There are already movies and TV shows and documentaries about all of them too.

—

But third: Have we closed this loop? Have we reckoned with what these two things mean, together? While politicians and CEOs have always been celebrities of sorts, they historically became the former first and the latter second. But today, there is increasingly one path to power: By attracting an audience online.

Though we have corporate euphemisms for this—go direct; be authentic—there is only one internet. The shock jock social media machine that thrives on seduction and rage is not distinct from the one that founders and financiers post on. Rich people are not immune to the euphoric thrill of likes and digital hugs and having a podcast. The machine is in the garden—and in the office, and on Capitol Hill,³ and on Sand Hill Road, and it is the same machine. Everyone is forged in the same fever, by the same game that rewards the same behavior: Be unhinged.

Elon Musk is not the richest man in the world despite acting manic; he is richest man in the world because of it. He is not an exception to the normal laws of social power; he is those laws’ greatest example. There is no anomaly in any of this. This is what we’ve built, working if not as intended, at least as it was designed.

A generation of leaders is behind him. If it’s easier to turn attention into capital than it is to turn capital into attention, then, over time, the influencers will crowd out the management class. The same forces of natural selection that made Jake Paul and Kylie Jenner will make Congress and Davos. Our next CEOs won’t attribute their success to their steady hands or customer intuition, but to their ability to go viral.⁴ Our next politicians will have built their followings by blowing up on TikTok. And the social media’s stunt kings—who were born in its madness, molded by it—could become our elected ones.

---

There used to be a pattern to it. It wasn't predictable, but it was at least legible: Start a company, raise money, work hard. You move fast, you break things, you fix some of them. If you got over-levered—by promising something that you couldn’t build; by building something you couldn’t sell; by hiring for future growth that never materialized—you could blow up. So you tried to honor the rules, if not quite follow them. Be an entrepreneur in good standing; have a code; a man must have a code.⁵

Sure, there were occasional shenanigans: CEOs would sometimes cash out and leave employees in a lurch. VCs have always been willing to knife founders, but, you know, the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party, and all of that. Rich people would sometimes do bizarre rich people things, like buy towns or privatize beaches and sue their disfavored media organizations into oblivion. But there was an approximate sense of decorum: Play nice, try hard, get rich, start a foundation and maybe a new family.

In his piece about social media, Chris Hayes says, “there’s no reason, really, for anyone to care about the inner turmoil of the famous.” Maybe that was true, even a few years ago. Now? It seems as though Silicon Valley’s richest men woke up one morning and realized that they are rich. They don’t need to peddle their influence gently, through political donations and soft power; they can just do things. They can just buy things. Don’t like the media? Buy it. Want to be popular on Twitter? Buy it. Want to run the government? Buy it. Want a company that the SEC won’t let you buy? Buy the CEO. Want a company that doesn’t want to sell itself to you? Buy another CEO. Buy a spot on the ATP Tour; build the deranged AI; build the weird sex bot; wonder, for an uncomfortably long moment, if saving the rest of us is worth it.

Does it have anything to do with social media? Did TikTok eat the rich, the same way it ate Kevin Durant? Did TikTok make the rich? Is the relationship between the dizzying chaos of the last decade and the emergence of our all-consuming global popularity contest causal? Correlated? Merely coincidental?

The pendulum will swing back, we say; there will be a correction; a thermostatic moderation. The madness is temporary; it’s MAGA; TDS, ZIRP, COVID, AI. It’ll all calm down in two weeks. Maybe—but how long do you have to say, “wild times, huh?,” before it’s no longer the times, and it just is?

Social media didn’t start the fire, but is it putting the arsons in charge?

1. Even advice is becoming unhinged:

Advice content online has evolved into an algorithm-optimized spectacle, with Gen Z driving demand for “unhinged” hacks that favor extremity over practicality. (Think beauty tips like “starving saved me money” or finance hacks framed as “diabolical.”) As Dazed reports, the most outrageous suggestions now outperform measured ones, a byproduct of algorithms that reward engagement over nuance.

2. Are you sure you’re not an unc, talking about how real basketball is banging in the post and taking midrange jumpers while getting smoked by the kids jacking up threes?

3. Mike Lee’s Twitter handle is @BasedMikeLee. Congressman Mike Lee.

4. Cluely’s philosophy—“cheat on everything,” because what is considered cheating today will become normal tomorrow—is typically applied to their product, but it could also apply to Cluely itself. In some sense, they’ve grown by cheating: Rather than focusing on building a product like you’re “supposed” to, they pump out viral marketing stunts. And while plenty of people scold them for it, likely just as many are trying to copy it.

5. And women! People! People must have codes! But that was not the quote.