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I wrote for nearly 3 hours straight over two train journeys at the weekend. It was mostly, just a big rant about everything and everything. Written whilst having a terrible cold, and under the influence of strong cold and flu medicine. lol ‘Narrative Bubbles’ is one of the sections I dashed out in my journal that I’ve tried to tidy up.
Narrative Bubbles
Almost to the same extent that I find the current moment ‘thrilling’, I also find it extremely annoying. Mostly, I’m exhausted by ‘discourse.’ The behaviour and level of maturity on display by both sides of the ongoing culture war over almost everything, but especially AI is irritating.
Personally, I find it hard to gauge if we are actually in a financial bubble around AI, as fundamentals are extremely strong, and economics are complex and still unfolding. But what is very clear however, is that we are in a Narrative Bubble.
Having spent so long in crypto, I’m relaxed and maybe even a bit cavalier about bubbles and quite relaxed about volatility. But what I have realised is that its really important to try and decern the source of the bubble. Is it a narrative, or a financial bubble? So enmeshed as we are within the attention AND financial economies, there is always a feedback loop between the two. It can be one or the other, or perhaps, a bit of both. But broadly put it will come from one of two primary drivers: a financial bubble is about asset prices in the financial economy; a narrative bubble is about speculative participation in the attention economy.
In a narrative bubble, it does not really matter if what is being said is true: it only matters that something is being said.
Examples of narrative bubbles include: Gamergate (2014) The Dress (2015) Brexit (2016), Pizzagate (2016), Q-Anon V1 (2017), Russia Gate (2019), Q-Anon V2 (2020), Gamestop / WallStreetBets Short Squeeze (2021), AI-Generated Drake & The Weeknd Song (2023), and Moo Deng (2024).
In a Narrative Bubble, the point is that if you post, meme, quote-tweet, or subtweet, you might harvest a sliver of attention, status, or virality for some kind of gain. It’s about clout chasing, rather than profit taking.
Narrative bubbles produce what @akhilrao.bsky.social on BSky called at some point, the “bullshit equilibrium”.
A state in which talkers talk bullshit and listeners listen to it. In this equilibrium, everyone knows that truth is an orthogonal concept to the observed talk, but everyone also knows that everybody else will act as though the bullshit is true for the sake of participation. The payoff isn’t tied to the narrative’s veracity, but to its memetic fitness. This equilibrium allows the bubble to inflate, powered by a collective suspension of disbelief. In markets, investors rush in, expecting prices to rise simply because others are buying. Online, engagement works the same way: the more people interact with a narrative, the more platforms amplify it, further reinforcing its centrality in the discourse.
In older old media cycles, TV shows end, a book finishes, or a newspaper editor kills a story and everyone moves on. Narrative Bubbles however don’t have built in end points or conclusions. They can’t resolve only deflate.
Whilst the bubble is inflating, the narrative market within the attention economy is driven by speculators who fall into two main archetypes:
The Boosters (Long)
Evangelists, Hype-Merchants, Bag Holders, Trend Surfers, Cheerleaders, Opportunist Influencers are all good names/terms for the different kinds of narrative niches that boosters can inhabit throughout the expansion phase of the narrative bubble in the media ecosystem.
In the attention economy these participants are betting on the “up only” narrative. If you do not get on board immediately you will be left culturally or financially destitute. Selling anxiety around getting left behind, clout comes from inflating the perceived value of the story in the moment.
The Bursters (Short)
Denialists, Doomsters, Curmudgeons, Rejectionists, Anti-Hype Beasts and Naysayers are good names for roles that derive status from performative “sanity” and loudly predicting failure. Personal brands on the premise of a future pay off of “I told you so” or “this will never work”.
In financial terms, they are shorting the narrative. They are betting that the bubble will pop, and they want to be the ones pretending to hold the pin when it does.
In any Narrative Bubble, both they are functionally interfacing with the same mechanisms of the platform apparatus of the media. And both are grifters. Betting on narrative volatility in the Attention Economy.
The “Anti-AI” influencer needs the “AI Bro” just as much as Joker needs his Batman. Both sides are locked in a loop of dunking, quote-tweeting, and debunking each other. I strongly belive neither side cares if the tech works right now, how it works, or what the mundane realities of actual implementation looks like. They only care that the post hits and generates clout.
Both are feeding a cultural machine that rewards polarisation. Nuance has absolutely no liquidity in the attention economy at all. This is not to say that it doesn’t exist in the wider landscape, it does, but in general it yields no great return on attention. Nuance i think the ultimate long position and will provide consistent returns in retrospect, as it is closer to reality in the moment. But the down side is that the dividends only arrive well after the Boosters and the Bursters have moved on to the next narrative trade.
All Narrative Bubbles, ultimately, are an extraction mechanism, a con that tries to convinces us to pick a side, and pretend or feel like we are participating in history. When in reality, we are just providing narrative liquidity for someone else’s clout. I personally think both hype-men and haters play us for fools. Honestly some of the things that people are writing (and then others are sharing) is just embarrassing.
People think they are too smart to be manipulated, but really everyone is just playing in the casino now.
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Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Recorded Epsiode 302!
- Had a long call learning about the role of desktop CNC mills in Ukraine conflict.
- Did some spreadsheet work
- Fleshed out some more of SLOP MACHINES.
- Booked sorted out hotel and flights for Berlin tomorrow.
Terminal Access
This short piece in the Observer about ‘The next status symbol is an offline childhood’ is interesting.
I suspect that the millennial babies in my life and the corners of my Instagram feed, obscured with many emojis, will grow up into children who will be lovingly protected from the dangers of the internet to the point where they will become a sort of neo-luddite. They will be encouraged to partake in sensory play, gentle-parented away from Cocomelon. They will be educated at forest schools – the fees for which, in my local area, can exceed five figures per term (though some branches are free) – and know the value of a good honest hike. Screens will be verboten to the point they will not know how to turn on an iPad.
Dipping the Stacks
In early 1995 I was 23 and living in a terraced house in Bristol with four friends, about 18 months after leaving university. I’d given up on trying to be an illustrator, had a bit of freelance work making models for Aardman Animations, and would soon be the only one of my friends not to have permanent work. I was increasingly interested in technology and this brand new thing: Internet.
In Defense of Generative Video Accelerationism
generative video will force fans of the moving image to acknowledge that it’s a fun medium for artistic expression but no way to understand the world.
Why are UK homeowners so delusional about the value of their property?
Loss aversion is a particular concern now because of the sheer number of homes that are worth less than they were bought for. Prime central London prices have fallen 22 per cent since 2014, according to Savills. And even sellers who are sitting on gains can be biased by loss aversion, since they often anchor their sense of their home’s value from where it reached during the last peak.
Screen Sick | Matthew Shen Goodman
The history of literacy is a list of complaints. Critics reliably decry each new technological development as an attention-stealing toy. Before recent grousing about ChatGPT, protestations were uttered about the detrimental effects of the internet (fearing endless distraction, Jonathan Franzen destroyed his laptop’s ethernet port); the word processor (the ease of moving text around declared “an irresponsible whimsicality” by Alexander Cockburn in the eighties); the typewriter (“The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm,” wrote C. S. Lewis, in 1959, to a schoolgirl requesting writing advice); and the very reproducibility of the book (Song-era scholar Ye Mengde held that woodblock texts too often propagated uncorrected errors). In Plato’s Phaedrus, writing itself is suspect
We Used to Read Things in This Country | Noah McCormack
fixity is less important than the emergence of a commodity that could spread written information to large swaths of the population previously undreamed of by the most fevered educationalists. Because of the low barriers to entry and easy smuggling of the product, print resisted those states that attempted to create printing monopolies. Literacy also saw explosive growth alongside the Protestant Reformation, which spurred further printing and created an ideological justification for reading: if man could commune directly with God, he would need access to God’s word as given in the Bible.
Reading
I’m still reading Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparouhova but I also started reading Marguerite Porete: The Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete.
I also started ‘Elitism: A Progressive Defence’ by Eliane Glaser. I’ve had the book on shelf since James interviewed her on Novara FM during lockdown. Really good!
Music
Sessa – Pequena Vertigem De Amor
My barber DM’d me on instagram to tell me to listen to this album. It’s a hyper contemporary take on bossa nova. It’s not ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ but instead something very modern, quiet, and dreamy. The thing that makes this album stand out to my ear are the rhythms in the Brazilian percussion section. Absolutely hypnotic though out, everything else floats over the top. So good.
Remember Kids:
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
Groucho Marx
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