Andrew McCluskey

At the core of our psychological approach to understanding radicalization is people's drive to re-establish feelings of personal significance following actual or perceived threats to their sense of meaning or belonging in society, a process known as significance quest.

Quantified status also drives entire industries. Influencer marketing is a $24B market growing quickly. The industry is built on status associations. We see this clearly in the 2010s rise of “the lifestyle influencer”—lifestyles are the most obvious markers of status, and the influencer economy is built on aspiration .

“A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.”

But labels and rights-holders see the same tools as built on an enormous act of industrial-scale theft. Decades of copyrighted recordings, the fruits of 100 years of human artistry, have been scrapped and repurposed as training data without so much as a licensing check or a royalty paid.