american eagle stock up 28% today. the public market equivalent of product market fit right now is cultural meme fit. memetics is a leading indicator, fundamentals as a lagging one.

a long time ago ebay invented internet reputation because no one trusted rando strangers shipping beanie babies from ohio. trust is the lubricant of scale. whenever you add liquidity, you erode the implicit social friction that used to do that job so you have to replace it with a score, a review, quite literally something. tea is just that, but for dating. high frequency, high “anonymity”, zero context dating = an unsolvable game unless you layer in some kind of memetic defense mechanism. dudes are now products. & maybe need reviews. is it gross? maybe. is it inevitable? probably. the real question isn’t “is this app evil?” it’s “why did the market pull this into existence at this very moment?” because that’s what it did.

in the mobile era, we got infinite scroll. with ai, we get infinite everything. infinite game worlds that never end. infinite conversations… infinite content in general. before abundance becomes the norm in society, we’re kinda tasting early infinity in everything digital.

meanwhile on the app store.

every anon i meet wants clout. every prominent public figure wants to be anon. everyone’s almost always optimizing for the opposite constraint. anon craves recognition. public figure craves relief. we do live in fascinating times.

every time i’m back in sf, i feel that pull… so much is happening in tech & ai. it’s the center of gravity. but i also love my life elsewhere. part of me wishes i could clone myself. one to live in it, one to live outside it.

facebook once built a product called timeline… a hyper-structured, surfable biography of your entire life. it let anyone browse your past like an encyclopedia. it was one of the biggest flops in facebook history. people hated it. it triggered a cultural recoil. too much visibility, too much permanence. it helped catalyze the ephemerality movement & paved the way for snap to explode. there’s a recurring pattern here: - products that preserve everything attract academics. - products that erase things resonate with everyone else. most ppl often want to be forgotten strategically. in an ai world where dissection is available on demand like this, will people recoil or will people embrace? that will be interesting to see.

recently found out my tweets are showing up in pitch decks now which is objectively hilarious. “oh yeah we even found an x post from signull…. ” “wait wait, signull said that? okay i’m in.” next stop: getting cited in a a16z memo titled “cultural liquidity & ai native affinity graphs.”

being unhinged online is now a pre seed strategy. the arc is almost too clean: shitpost → audience → ideas → product → bag.

what’s the most persuasive argument against techno acceleration you’ve ever encountered?