virality is so last season

And now everything has meet these two contradictory requirements. It must fill the void and also be the most popular thing ever. It must reach the scale of MrBeast or it can’t exist. Ironically enough, though, when something does reach that scale now, it’s so watered down and forgettable it doesn’t actually feel like it exists.

Hype became a dirty word, and longevity increasingly feels like a myth.

Virality got conflated with relevance, while relevance comes with the curse of becoming imminently passé. Whist new gen brands like Corteiz are propped up by persistent presence, institutions such as Apple resist exploring their own hype, choosing omnipresence instead.

This beg

... See more

In fact, one of the things that will not survive is novelty itself: trends, fads, fashions, scenes, vibes. We are thrown back into cyclical time; what’s growing old is the cruel demand to make things new.

It also means that increasingly the real value or trick won’t be in blowing up, though of course, it will only get harder and harder to do so as we continue to exponentially increase our output of content, but rather in holding on to the 15 seconds of fame once we have it.

The nature of our fad culture is driving more value not just to those who blow up, but to those who can hold on to their 15 seconds of fame, a task made harder thanks to our information overload.

Another unique thing about virality is that it comes and goes over time depending on the channels available. These viral channels are constantly in flux. Not true with network effects, which are more stable over time.

Over the past ten years, media companies have responded to their loss of audience by creating “viral” editorial that performs well inside the platform’s engagement-at-all-costs ecosystem. Predictably, however, quality editorial – the context journalists create for a living – rarely qualifies as viral.