Subprime Social Crisis

A four-part Free Agency series, January–February 2025.

What It Is

A crisis exists when there is a mismatch between what people believe something is worth and what it actually is. Subprime mortgages did not fail because the houses were bad — they failed because the instruments claimed a quality the underlying assets never had, and that gap eventually closed.

Social engagement is running the same trade. The metrics claim a depth of attention the underlying relationship cannot support, and the correction is already underway.

The Three Domains

Media does not move on its own. It reflects sociology, economics, cultural shifts, technological advance, and vibes, smushed together — so the series reads the crisis across three fronts.

News and information. Prestige has shifted from role to platform. A streamer can give a better interview than a cable network; veteran columnists are leaving for newsletters because direct-to-consumer pays and grants freedom. Journalism still matters — the form and delivery are what changed. Trust accrues to whoever does what people actually need, which is why the L.A. Times gained subscribers during wildfire coverage while the paywall was down.

Business and technology. AI adoption demands a skills revolution. More people will act as conductors of technology rather than operators of it. Large companies consolidate to stay competitive, because in an unpredictable market it pays to buy your competitors.

Culture and society. Less coupling, less religion, fewer third spaces, more loneliness. Relationships shifted from necessity to option within a century, and that reorders what people buy, want, and are willing to build. Everything is politicised, even where it shouldn't be, because people keep voting with their attention — so policy is always personal.

Why It Matters

Expertise is a differentiator; distribution is a multiplier. Sustainability now runs on personality and portability rather than on institutional position.

The practical stake: one byproduct of something disintegrating is that it leaves space for something else to emerge. The series is written for people who would rather be emergent than reactive.

Part 2 — Platforms, Positioning, and AI

We used to have a common space. The Fairness Doctrine, instituted by the FCC in 1949 and repealed under Reagan in 1987, required equal airtime for candidates, coverage of controversial issues, and a right of response. It worked because broadcast was the only way to reach the country at scale. Nothing replaced it, and now what reaches you is curated by who you follow — which is why nobody is sure what or who to believe.

Platforms compete for share of attention, not share of users. A platform and a business are different objects: TikTok as a platform is elite for discovery; TikTok as a business is competing with Amazon for commerce. The US app is under 10% of ByteDance's global business, and Douyin alone has 900M users. Users in the US need TikTok. ByteDance does not.

TikTok is also the only internet company operating at scale in both the US and China — X, Meta, Google, and YouTube are all absent behind the Golden Shield, the state oversight programme instituted in 1998. There is a reason for that.

Positioning lives and dies on whether the promise a platform makes is one it can keep. YouTube is the search engine you cannot stop watching on your TV. TikTok is Gen Z's search engine. X is where opinions go to get misconstrued. WhatsApp is where anyone with family outside the US talks.

Each platform carries its own lore — a story and an imaginative environment that personal experience adds to. Discovering something you love somewhere creates a deeper attachment to the place you found it, and the algorithm learns from that. Which is what made 48 hours of TikTok uncertainty enough to cause panic: it is hard to focus when the thing you feed yourself with looks like it might disappear.

The same week, Georgia suspended all poultry activity over a bird flu outbreak — the country's largest chicken producer, and one of the largest globally. A real infrastructure failure, dwarfed by an attention one.

AI compounds it in three moves. Models dictate how the technology functions, and each generation is more powerful and more opaque. Layers let models be built on other models, so capability and complexity rise together. Speed outpaces understanding — adoption is destabilising, and things only change when they are built into an identity rather than a plan.

We are drowning in data and starved for insight, and the flow of information is a firehose. Thinking clearly takes time, and time is what platforms take. The agency left is in what you choose and how you imagine your time there. We have never had more places to be and less time to go there.

An Internet Administration. Online attention is the most powerful form of modern currency — capturing it, deploying it, monetising it. We made that collectively, by migrating what we do, think, buy, and disagree about onto platforms that can change at any moment. A government positioned around that means policy plays out live, at a speed we have not seen before.

Part 3 — Everything Maxxxed

Maxxxing is the effort to find the edges of what is possible and do as much of that, for as long as possible. Between the technological shift, the distrust in legacy media, and the hunger for actual voices, it produces a specific opening: individual market influence — one person taking what they know, distributing it at scale, and producing value and capital from it. Value is subjective to an audience. Capital is tangible.

Single-person entertainment companies are not pipe dreams. They are the backbone of a new media ecosystem.

The pattern runs in three moves. Audience — find what people need and give it to them consistently; the tools are not that different, so it comes down to presentation and action. Curation and distribution — as the audience grows, so do leverage and options. The flywheel — combine the individual elements, a channel, a newsletter, a book, a tour, so each one adds margin to the others, and businesses can be built on top of the distribution rather than beside it.

The point of the ecosystem is that an audience can enter from any angle and still arrive at the same place. Popularity in a niche buys air cover and credibility; the business underneath is what it funnels into.

Unlimited possibility will always lose to intentionality. If you can do anything, what you decide to do matters more, because momentum follows decisiveness rather than optionality. In a space bombarded by what could be, actually doing something consistently is what stands out.

Part 4 — Opportunities, Pitfalls, and Unanswered Questions

Opportunities. Single-purpose apps — software that does one thing at the expense of features other people want — are answering personal curation with close connectivity. Build a library for leverage, then let the library become entertainment: finding product-market fit is itself a show worth watching, and Doechii documented her process five years before the Grammy. Everything compounds; the evidence surfaces later. Going direct is the quickest route to growth and leverage — a four-minute announcement can move more than a law, and even public AI research becomes an event. Third spaces and nostalgia are wanted: Barnes & Noble is opening 60 stores after eight months of losses in 2019, with BookTok as a leading indicator. And the growth is in the Global South, which most of the discourse ignores — better explained by willful avoidance than malice. Imagine missing generational talent because of perceived marketability.

Pitfalls. Platform risk comes for everyone, and will not stop while the incentive to post stays high. The litmus test: if the platform disappeared tomorrow, what remains? Legacy thought still holds the budgets, so the cost of being early is real — budgets lag creativity rather than lead it. And margins vary by platform, not just by creator, so the highest-order investments cost the one thing that cannot be recovered: time.

Unanswered questions. Does AI make distribution more precise, or reward volume over depth? What happens when the measurement we rely on stops being the right standard? Will the next generation focus less on audience growth and more on compounding engagement? What happens when people tire of always-on communication? Does intentional scarcity become an advantage? If the creator industry becomes investible as an asset class, what do returns mean? And where is the infrastructure for a distributed ecosystem coming from?

The Age of Audacity. Perspective is the product now — how you reach your ideas, what you notice, your process, references, and how you articulate it. It is the trademark that cannot be replicated. The most effective players master signal against noise and use communication as a lever rather than an output.

The Series

1. States of Play — the premise and the signals
2. Platforms, Positioning, and AI — where distribution is moving
3. Everything Maxxxed — saturation, and what is left when every lever has been pulled
4. Opportunities, Pitfalls, and Unanswered Questions — where the openings are