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what i saw coming

The attention market turns thoughts and culture into property

framework

In 2020, I traced how an attention market changes the way people think about ownership. When personality becomes a source of income, everyday thoughts, reading and experiences become material to document, package and defend. Sharing an idea can feel like giving a competitor something to sell. My contribution was to connect that pressure to self-documentation, idea-hoarding and cultural appropriation: an expression can circulate widely while someone other than its originator receives the credit and money. The later TikTok dance strike and “very demure” trademark dispute illustrate this mechanism. I locate these conflicts within the attention economy, where the pursuit of an audience can collide with the desire to retain credit and control.

2020-12-10 — Are Our Thoughts "Intellectual Property"?
I argued that monetized attention encourages people to mine and defend their inner monologues, experiences, personalities, and cultural material as quasi-property, replacing conversation with competitive performance and ownership conflict.
2021-06-25 — Black TikTok creators strike over appropriation, credit, and compensation
Creators withheld choreography to protest copied work receiving credit and profit, making the culture-as-market-property conflict concrete.
2024-08-27 — A viral catchphrase becomes a literal trademark dispute
After “very demure” became valuable to brands and celebrities, an unrelated applicant sought the trademark and the creator had to defend her ability to monetize the phrase.

Technology becomes a culture-war fault line

framework

The record has two layers: I anticipated a cultural backlash against atomized technological life, then forecast that investors would commercialize it. Viral dumb-phone uptake and a venture-backed retro-tech business later supplied receipts for both.

2020-12-23 — The Real Culture War Is About How We Use Technology
I framed technology use itself as a culture-war fault line in December 2020. In March 2021 I specified the mechanism: revolt against atomized life would be labeled anti-tech.
2021-03-15 — The Coming Wave of Sex Negativity
I tied the coming anti-tech frame to a revolt against atomization, lost community, and technologically mediated isolation.
2021-11-06 — Developing Internet Overexposure Syndrome
I reiterated that the deeper culture-war fault line concerned technology rather than a simple left-versus-right split.
2022-12-31 — My 2023 Predictions
My annual list made the directional call explicit: tech skepticism and neo-Luddism were in for 2023.
2022-12-31 — My 2023 Predictions: investors absorb the techlash
I separately forecast that technology investors would try to reconcile themselves to neo-Luddism by financing the category early.
2023-08-28 — Concern about AI rises sharply during 2023
Pew found the share of U.S. adults more concerned than excited about AI rose from 38% in December 2022 to 52% in August 2023.
2024-12-09 — Inside the mind of Luigi Mangione
I framed the deeper culture-war axis as techno-optimism versus techno-pessimism while tentatively distinguishing targeted revolutionary violence from nihilistic mass violence.
2025-02-13 — Internet History Must Always Be an Oral History: Log Off versus Stay Online
I said the technology culture war was resolving into ‘Log Off’ and ‘Stay Online’ camps, driven partly by saturated audiences and media-market demand for a new villain and partly by a deeper dispute over technology and humanity.
2025-02-19 — Most public schools restrict phones during class
NCES found 77% of public schools prohibited phones during class; most school leaders reported negative effects on attention, mental health, and academics.
2025-05-18 — Tech workers and Gen Z embrace appstinence and dumb phones
Business Insider documented a viral 18-million-view flip-phone video, 100,000 Light Phones sold, and a Kendrick Lamar collaboration that sold out within a day.
2026-05-26 — Venture-backed retro-tech seller turns disconnection into a business
Kickback, founded in 2024, reported more than 7,000 products sold and $750,000 revenue in 2025 after raising about $300,000 in venture funding.

Online life turns distress into durable self-diagnosis

framework

I was connecting online distress, medicalized identity, and environmental pressure in January 2021. My later reporting developed the feedback loop; by 2023–24, major news outlets and professional psychology guidance were addressing algorithm-fed self-diagnosis directly.

2021-01-25 — Why Does Everyone Suddenly Have BPD?
I argued that a culture of medicalization can turn rational responses to normalized environmental pressure into self-diagnosis, while dating apps, transient online friendship, and gig life scale the underlying distress.
2021-11-06 — Developing Internet Overexposure Syndrome
In a complete thought thread, I explicitly identified online self-diagnosis as a long-running internet fixture and asked whether it takes distinct forms online.
2022-02-04 — Is Gen Z OK?
I made the platform mechanism explicit: diagnostic and abuse narratives, adult validation, and internet persistence can turn adolescent distress into a public, durable identity.
2023-02-27 — TikTok self-diagnosis becomes a mainstream mental-health story
CBS News documented young people diagnosing serious conditions from TikTok, including BPD content and an algorithmic reinforcement loop.
2024-11-06 — APA addresses harmful self-diagnosis from social-media misinformation
The American Psychological Association described harmful self-diagnosis driven by social-media mental-health misinformation as a problem clinicians must address.

The coming wave of sex negativity

prediction

I tracked this swing across three years of reporting; Mary Harrington and Anton Cebalo explicitly cited my framing along the way. In 2024, Bumble withdrew its anti-celibacy advertising after backlash—a concrete example of the consumer risk in misreading that change.

2021-03-15 — The Coming Wave of Sex Negativity
I forecast a broad swing away from sex-positive norms, then traced it through celibacy, marriage, boundaries, traditional roles, and criticism of sex work.
2021-05-14 — Mary Harrington cites the coming wave of sex negativity
In The Spectator, Harrington explicitly credited Default Friend’s framing while reporting on young adults rejecting hookup culture and returning to marriage.
2021-06-28 — TikTok’s Sexual Conservatives
I documented TikTokers warning women about OnlyFans, sugaring, and prostitution while growing skeptical of liberal feminism.
2022-03-09 — Unedited Field Notes on Different Types of Femcels
The follow-up distinguished a clear narrative and subcultural shift from any unproven claim about population-level sexual behavior.
2022-04-01 — A Fairer Sex?
I treated Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex as a mainstream narrative shift and predicted that more forceful critiques would soon follow.
2022-10-23 — The Social Recession: By the Numbers
Anton Cebalo linked my essay and credited its reversal of the usual sex-positive narrative in his analysis of changing relationships and social life.
2022-11-15 — The Crushing Loneliness of the Girl Boss
In a public Tablet essay, I documented a broadening backlash against girlboss and choice feminism across TikTok, modest fashion, Female Dating Strategy, reactionary feminism, OnlyFans criticism, and dating-app burnout, tying it to pandemic loneliness and delayed family formation.
2022-12-31 — My 2023 Predictions
I predicted the idea would move beyond alternative media into the mainstream mainstream during 2023.
2023-05-12 — Hags by Victoria Smith, reviewed
I observed that feminism across ideological lines had moved away from sex-positive “anything goes” rhetoric toward boundaries and critical sexual politics.
2023-12-23 — 2024 Predictions and My Best Writing From 2023
By the end of 2023, I described criticism of “porn-brain” as a nonpartisan mainstream issue, tracking the argument’s spread beyond conservative policy circles.
2024-05-13 — Bumble withdraws anti-celibacy campaign messaging
Bumble apologized and removed anti-celibacy language from its global campaign after backlash, turning the narrative change into a brand decision.
2024-12-30 — Boysober and celibacy become a dating-culture story
Mainstream coverage treated boysober, celibacy, app withdrawal, and rejection of hookup norms as a recognizable 2024 dating trend.

Gen Z traditional-life creators

prediction

My forecast named a commercial form: young women selling guidance about marriage and traditional roles. The receipts include a Gen Z paid writer and a studied network of 36 traditional-wife creators using monetization tools.

2021-03-15 — The Coming Wave of Sex Negativity
I predicted a cottage industry of Gen Z women selling guidance about marriage and traditional gender norms.
2023-04-19 — A Gen Z writer commercializes marriage commentary
Freya India, born in 1999, published paid reader-supported commentary on marriage and commitment, a close age-and-subject match to my wording.
2023-07-07 — Study maps a monetized tradwife creator ecosystem
A ten-month study followed 36 tradwife accounts, typically with 20,000–200,000 followers, and documented ads, brand partnerships, affiliates, and small businesses.
2024-04-05 — Consider the tradthot
I documented the forecasted traditional-woman advice niche as a thriving creator genre and argued that many rightward lifestyle pivots followed audience opportunity and market saturation.
2025-11-17 — The Trad Movement Is Sputtering. Here’s What Comes Next
I distinguished a successful creator-market aesthetic from a mass change in how people live, then argued that counterculture was moving toward private, local, undocumented scenes.

Reactionary childbearing and pronatalism

prediction

By 2025, pronatalism had a recurring national conference and national coverage as an organized political movement. The cultural positioning of childbearing had become a visible political and commercial subject.

2021-03-15 — The Coming Wave of Sex Negativity
I predicted that having children earlier or having more children would become a recognizable act of cultural rebellion, which I called reactionary childbearing.
2025-03-28 — NatalCon convenes a recurring pronatalist movement
The organizer presented NatalCon as its flagship annual gathering, making pronatalism a named, organized cultural project.
2025-07-30 — Pronatalism receives national political coverage
PBS NewsHour reported on an identifiable pronatalist movement and its growing influence in American politics.

Return toward parents and extended family

prediction

Federal survey data show a substantial post-forecast rise in young adults living with parents, directly matching the forecast’s clearest observable component.

2021-03-15 — The Coming Wave of Sex Negativity
I forecast a turn away from the Millennial ideal of maximum distance from parents and toward extended-family and multigenerational life.
2026-05-13 — Young-adult co-residence reaches 49%
The Federal Reserve reported that 49% of adults under 30 lived with a parent in 2025, up six points from 2022 and twelve from 2019.

Fertility technology and the growth of IVF

prediction

U.S. IVF births grew from about 89,000 in 2021 to more than 100,000 in 2024. That is a measurable expansion in an industry I singled out in March 2021.

2021-03-15 — The Coming Wave of Sex Negativity
I made a compact directional call that fertility technology would explode.
2022-12-01 — Better Living Through Body Surveillance
I described femtech's expansion through continuous body measurement, hyper-personalized product targeting, and frictionless fertility marketing, while warning that recurring hope gives consumer medicine an incentive to produce lifelong patients.
2022-12-31 — My 2023 Predictions
Fertility technology appeared again on my annual in-list for 2023.
2026-03-24 — U.S. IVF births pass 100,000 in one year
ASRM reported 100,158 babies from SART clinics in 2024, up 12.3% from the 89,208 reported for 2021.

Modern marriage-first matchmaking

prediction

Keeper is a close literal match: a post-forecast entrant refitted marriage-first matchmaking with AI and human vetting. Eventbrite’s platform data show the wider return of structured dating.

2021-03-15 — The Coming Wave of Sex Negativity
I predicted that someone would rebuild traditional matchmaking for a modern audience, even if the specific arranged-marriage service I was watching failed.
2021-09-24 — Indian Matchmaking and the Agony of Choice
I identified the appeal of finite choice, third-party guidance, and marriage-oriented constraints as an answer to app-era novelty and option overload.
2022-05 — Keeper is founded as a marriage-first matchmaker
Keeper says it was founded in May 2022 and combines AI matching with human vetting for marriage and family while excluding casual daters.
2023-08-07 — The demise of online dating
Date-me documents, matchmaking startups, and network-specific wife bounties appeared as alternatives to mass-market dating apps.
2024-04-10 — Attendance at singles and dating events rises 42%
Eventbrite reported a 42% rise in attendance from 2022 to 2023, corroborating demand for more structured, offline dating formats.
2024-08-11 — Bumble suffers amid in-person dating resurgence
I assembled market and attendance evidence that app burnout was pushing daters toward in-person events, matchmaking, personal ads, and slower off-app connection.

Endocrine disruptors become institutional risk

prediction

The predicted institutional channels materialized: enforceable federal regulation and mass product litigation made endocrine-disruptor concern a concrete corporate and legal exposure.

2021-03-15 — The Coming Wave of Sex Negativity
I predicted lawsuits and major scandals around products alleged to contain endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
2024-04-10 — EPA finalizes national PFAS drinking-water limits
EPA issued enforceable limits for six PFAS and estimated that 6%–10% of 66,000 covered water systems could require action.
2025-03-03 — Federal MDLs carry thousands of product-liability cases
The Judicial Panel listed 8,430 pending AFFF/PFAS actions and 9,788 pending hair-relaxer product-liability actions.

Homeschooling keeps expanding beyond the pandemic

prediction

The subsequent homeschooling data support the direction of my 2021 call: families continued moving into alternative education after the immediate school-closure emergency passed.

2021-03-15 — The Coming Wave of Sex Negativity — author's discussion
In the discussion under my March 2021 essay, I explicitly predicted that homeschooling, unschooling and charter schooling would become more widespread. I placed them within a wider retreat from established institutions.
2025-11 — Johns Hopkins: homeschooling growth persists after schools reopen
Johns Hopkins reported average growth of 4.9% across reporting states in 2024–25, more than twice the roughly 2% pre-pandemic rate. Ten of 28 reporting states reached record enrollment.

Obvious cosmetic work gives way to a natural-look backlash

prediction

I named BBLs and fillers in 2021. Filler fatigue, dissolving, and subtler results became recognizable beauty trends two to three years later: a shift in the prestige of visible cosmetic work.

2021-03-15 — The Coming Wave of Sex Negativity
I forecast a backlash against visibly obvious cosmetic surgery, naming BBLs and fillers as prestige signals likely to lose force.
2023-03-24 — Is Everyone Abandoning Their Facial Filler?
Allure called filler fatigue a leading injectables trend, citing fewer filler injections in a surgeon survey and a large rise in reported filler reversals.
2024-10-21 — Are We Entering the Anti-Filler Era?
Vogue reported a high-engagement anti-filler video and practitioners' shift toward dissolving overfilled work and delivering subtler results.

The internet becomes an inhabited perceptual environment

framework

I had developed this account of the internet as an inhabited environment by April 2021, then followed it through essays on porous boundaries, the metaverse, and Fairyland. Later research on chatbot attachment and reality-testing makes the practical stakes of that framework especially clear.

2021-04-12 — The Internet is a Place
I argued that online and physical life had become interwoven enough for the internet to function as an inhabited place, then traced how that environment reshapes identity, attention, and reality.
2021-09-27 — The Internet’s Porous Boundaries Have Changed How We See Ourselves
I extended the place metaphor into identification, asking how porous online boundaries change the way people see themselves.
2021-10-12 — Parallel → Alternative → Immersive
I described the internet’s evolution from a parallel life to an alternative life and then an immersive condition between the two.
2021-10-30 — The Internet and the Metaverse Are One in the Same
I argued that the metaverse was already the lived condition of networked life rather than a future headset product.
2021-11-06 — Developing Internet Overexposure Syndrome
I named internet overexposure syndrome and proposed that repeated online exposure can shape language, interests, behavior, identity, and interpretations of mental health.
2023-02-05 — Internet Overexposure Syndrome Impacts All of Us Differently
I argued that platform feedback loops circulate diagnostic labels, reduce uncertainty, and turn disorder aesthetics into identities through which internet-shaped distress is interpreted and expressed.
2023-05-05 — Most reporters are internet culture reporters who don’t know it yet
I argued that collapsed reporting budgets and social media as workplace lead journalists to mistake online niches for physical-world trends.
2025-03-06 — Internet Overexposure Syndrome
I connected ambiguous social signals, easy abandonment, diagnostic feedback loops, and pressure to find patterns to adaptations shaped by the online environment.
2025-05-01 — The Internet as the Astral Plane. The Internet as Fairyland
The later essay recast the same framework as a portal or layered environment that alters attention, identity, and reality boundaries.
2025-10-07 — What folklore can teach us about our online lives
A public synthesis of the internet-as-otherworld framework organized as rules for grounding, names, glamour, emotion, bargains, discernment, changelings, and embodied return.
2025-10-27 — OpenAI adds tests for emotional reliance and ungrounded beliefs
OpenAI made emotional reliance, delusion, mania, ungrounded beliefs, and effects on real-world relationships part of its standard safety evaluation.
2025-12-03 — Researchers examine chatbot-modulated belief and reality
A peer-reviewed JMIR viewpoint described how immersive, anthropomorphic chatbot interaction could modulate belief and a user’s sense of reality.

Platforms scale rejection into a constant condition

framework

Three years later, Hinge redesigned its product around unanswered-message overload and reported improved responsiveness. Longitudinal research also measured rising dating-app exhaustion: a concrete version of the cumulative rejection problem I described in 2021.

2021-05-30 — Technologically-Induced Rejection Sensitivity
I argued that mass swiping, job applications, notification loops, and ghosting expose ordinary people to a volume of social, romantic, and professional rejection once concentrated in exceptional fields, making disposability and cumulative emotional reactions features of platform life.
2022-02-09 — Teen girls are struggling with male attention on TikTok
I extended the scaled-interaction mechanism from rejection to validation: filters, large audiences, and mass male attention create a loop that users keep chasing despite discomfort.
2024-05-14 — Hinge limits unanswered conversations to address dating burnout
Hinge said daters felt overwhelmed and burnt out and tested a rule requiring users with eight or more unanswered chats to reply or close conversations before making new connections.
2024-09-18 — Hinge launches conversation limits globally
Hinge reported that its test raised responsiveness by 20% and that 48% of participating users said it helped them favor match quality over quantity.
2024-10-19 — Longitudinal study finds dating-app burnout increases over time
Across four survey waves, emotional exhaustion and inefficacy rose; the researchers concluded dating apps may aggravate relationship-initiation problems among vulnerable users.

Media can manufacture the trends it reports

framework

I identified two related layers: coverage can create the microtrend it reports, and prediction reports would become a content category. Vox later documented the feedback loop; Codeword measured the crowded report format at scale.

2021-08-11 — Tumblr Transformed American Politics
I described a press-platform feedback loop in which cash-strapped outlets mined tiny online scenes for clickbait, presented them as mass behavior, and then drove new participants back into the scene. My Holmies example began with roughly 6–10 Tumblr users and became a story that sounded like a movement of tens of thousands.
2022-02-09 — my conversation about our internet age
I restated how journalists scrape online niches and how sensational coverage can feed back into a larger or more extreme community.
2022-05-02 — Is the TikTok Algorithm Trying to Create Another West Elm Caleb?
A related field note asked whether TikTok itself was trying to engineer another drama cycle.
2022-12-31 — My 2023 Predictions: trend forecasting becomes a content format
I separately forecast that trend analysis and prediction itself would become a popular content template.
2022-12-31 — Andrew Tate and the making of an internet villain
I applied the media-platform feedback loop to a person: selection, repetition, and compulsory pro/anti reactions helped turn a possibly astroturfed niche figure into a household villain.
2023-05-05 — Most reporters are internet culture reporters who don’t know it yet
I argued that collapsed reporting budgets and social media as workplace lead journalists to mistake online niches for physical-world trends.
2023-12-30 — The myth of Gen Z’s love for Osama bin Laden
I distinguished trend forecasting from premature naming and argued that press amplification can create copycats, making reporters part of the dissemination loop.
2024-02-07 — Against trendbait
Vox documented creators manufacturing coinages for virality and culture journalists amplifying them into apparent trends.
2025-01 — The Report on Trend Reports measures a crowded content category
Codeword audited more than 145 forward-looking reports containing 1,601 trends, 3,430 online mentions, and 14.9 billion-plus audience impressions.
2025-10-13 — Is Nick Fuentes Winning Over Women on the Left?
After tracing posts and interviewing twelve people, I found a small sincere fandom but rejected a broader conversion story: short-form circulation reflected joke value and reuse more than admiration.

AI companionship as relationship substitution

early reporting

I identified the human need and product logic fifteen months before Character.AI disclosed breakout scale. By 2025, a national survey measured both widespread teen use and partial relationship substitution.

2021-09-02 — Meet Replika, your new A.I. best friend
Before the generative-AI breakout, I identified customization, availability, romance, and reduced interpersonal friction as the commercial logic that could turn chatbots into relationship substitutes.
2022-12-05 — Character.AI reports early scale
Two months after beta launch, Character.AI reported one billion generated words per day and more than 350,000 user-created characters.
2023-09-27 — Could ChatGPT be your new girlfriend?
I forecast that interactive chatbots would make AI companionship mainstream and could turn human-human relationships into a luxury for people with “reality privilege.”
2024-09-06 — Why more women will have AI boyfriends than men will have AI girlfriends
I placed AI boyfriends alongside erotica, self-insert fan fiction, text role-play, and dating simulators, explaining them as tools for imaginative play as well as attachment.
2024-12-16 — Can an AI friend solve the loneliness epidemic?
Testing Friend and interviewing its founder, I documented AI companionship designed around conflict, rejection, neediness, and surveillance, then concluded artificial relationships can satisfy some need for connection.
2025-07-16 — National teen survey measures AI-companion use
Among 1,060 U.S. teens, 72% had used AI companions; among users (n=758), 33% had chosen one over a person for a serious conversation.

Synthetic media makes visual evidence unreliable

early reporting

I flagged the breakdown of ordinary visual verification in September 2021. Five months later, PNAS found AI-generated faces nearly indistinguishable from real faces and rated as more trustworthy.

2021-09-16 — Deepfakes have disturbing implications for porn
I foregrounded the possibility that increasingly sophisticated synthetic media would erase the ordinary visual distinction between genuine and generated content.
2022-02-22 — AI-synthesized faces become nearly indistinguishable from real faces
A PNAS study found that people could not reliably distinguish StyleGAN2 faces from real faces and rated the synthetic faces as more trustworthy.
2023-08-09 — Is AI fuelling eating disorder content?
I documented AI systems generating harmful eating-disorder advice, dead-victim deepfakes, and synthetic character voices, framing AI as an amplifier of older cultural practices.
2023-08-31 — Mimics are taking over TikTok
In the public UnHerd original, I connected mimic folklore to chatroom deception, catfishing, scams, spiritualist telegraph imagery, and voice deepfakes that erase reassurance that the other party is human.

Politics operates through fandom mechanics

framework

I was using fandom to explain political micro-factions in 2021. Later reporting applied the same lens to right-wing networks and electoral campaigns: fan labor, personality, belonging, and status became central to the account.

2021-10-02 — Politics and Journalism Function Like Fandoms
I framed online politics and journalism as fandoms, then developed the thesis around personality-centered groups, fan labor, hierarchy, coalition, status, money, and access.
2023-04-23 — What Does It Mean When I Say “Politics Are Fandom”?
The full essay defined fandom as an organizing principle of consumer society and applied its mechanics to granular political factions.
2023-05-16 — Why the Online Right deifies Daniel Penny
I read the Online Right’s mythologizing of Daniel Penny as a projection of heroic leadership, order, and greatness.
2024-08-14 — Wired uses fandom mechanics to explain the online Right
Wired used fandom-community dynamics to explain how Gamergate-era networks persisted into Trump-era online politics.
2025-10-21 — What Is Taboo Now That Nothing Is Taboo?
I traced political style from imageboards into mainstream offices, arguing that social belonging and changing group norms explain behavior that a fixed ideological label misses.
2025-11-05 — Wired analyzes a campaign through fandom
Wired described Zohran Mamdani’s campaign as channeling the participatory skills and emotional energy of online fandom.

Digital orality and post-literacy

framework

I applied oral-culture theory to social media in 2021, publicly specified its mechanisms in 2024, and extended it to short video in 2025. The Atlantic made the same lens its organizing thesis in 2026.

2021-11-04 — Internet Culture Isn’t Print Culture, It’s Oral Culture
I treated written social media as conversational, repetitive, socially transmitted oral culture—a framework for how networked information becomes memorable and authoritative.
2021-11-06 — Developing Internet Overexposure Syndrome
I described repeated linguistic exposure as changing my own speech, comparing Vietnamese immersion with speaking in “Twitterese.”
2022-03-03 — How the Ukraine war took over TikTok
I extended the oral-culture framework into short video and memes, treating them as the common vernacular through which a digitally mediated public encountered war.
2024-11-04 — Iran is now conducting foreign policy through memes
I argued that diplomacy, military signaling, and electoral politics increasingly package themselves as memes to survive a single algorithmic entertainment-news feed.
2024-11-10 — Social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture
I publicly restated the framework, specifying recirculation, participatory memory, perpetual context, rapid language change, and tribal consensus as oral-like features.
2025-02-13 — Internet History Must Always Be an Oral History
I argued that preserved posts behave like contextual, impermanent speech and cannot be understood without oral histories from the people who knew the community, references, and channels around them.
2025-04-21 — Short Video Isn't Just Rotting Our Brains. It's Rewiring Them.
I extended the framework from text-heavy social media to short video and its effects on speech, memory, and literacy.
2025-11-18 — Are we becoming post-literate?
I extended digital orality into a voice-interface forecast, arguing that speech collapses the pause between impulse and expression and may displace written language as a primary medium.
2026-02-22 — The Atlantic makes digital orality its organizing thesis
The Atlantic argued that social media gives written communication properties of conversation and changes how information becomes memorable, repeatable, and social.
2026-03-24 — Young news audiences become social-first and audiovisual
Reuters Institute found social media rose from 21% of 18–24-year-olds’ main news sources in 2015 to 39% in 2025.

Curation becomes creative work in an age of abundance

framework

I was treating curation as an internet-native art form by November 2021. Through 2022–24, I connected it to platform discovery, remixing, storytelling, and information overload. More than four years later, AI made the same selection problem a mainstream tech argument: Paul Graham said the differentiator was what people chose to make; Business Insider called the debate inescapable; and The New Yorker called taste a Silicon Valley cliché.

2021-11-27 — A critique of right wing art.
I identified curation as a distinct realm of thriving online art in 2021, then extended the idea to platform discovery, remixing, aesthetic storytelling, and taste as ways to navigate proliferating information.
2022-01-24 — Everything That's Freaking People Out About TikTok Should Have Already Freaked Them Out About Tumblr
I described TikTok as creating a curation-and-appreciation loop comparable to Pinterest and Tumblr.
2022-04-30 — The Importance of Content Curation in an Age of Information Overload
I hosted former Seventeen editor Atoosa Rubenstein for a conversation explicitly about content curation and information overload.
2024-03-23 — Reddit’s popularity is a response to media failures
Reddit functions as community-built search and reference infrastructure through topical archives, pseudonymous candor, and multiple perspectives.
2024-06-11 — It's Not a Religion, It’s a Role Play
I called online culture a curation and remix culture and argued that remixing and curating should be recognized as talents in themselves.
2024-10-04 — No, Culture is Not Stuck
I argued that mood boards and curated TikTok aesthetics are evolving art forms and that constructing a vibe is storytelling.
2024-12-31 — Reality Is What You Make of It
I made the abundance thesis explicit: taste and curation help people contend with too much information.
2025-08-18 — Not Right, Not-Left, Just Online
I linked overwhelming volumes of AI and human-made content to renewed demand for editorial gatekeeping.
2026-02-14 — Paul Graham makes taste an AI-age differentiator
Graham argued that as AI makes production abundant, the differentiator becomes what a person chooses to make.
2026-02-20 — Taste becomes an inescapable tech debate
Business Insider traced a fast-moving X debate about taste as an AI-era skill through founders, engineers, critics, and memes.
2026-03-18 — The New Yorker calls taste a Silicon Valley AI cliché
The New Yorker reported that taste had become a Silicon Valley buzzword for choosing what to build when AI lowers the cost of making it.

Recommendation algorithms acquire spiritual authority

early reporting

By December 2021 I was reporting on people treating TikTok’s feed as personally meaningful signs and magical knowledge. My 2022 essay developed the idea explicitly; a 2024 peer-reviewed study later organized this same user-machine spiritual relationship as algorithmic divination.

2021-12-24 — Why do I spend so much time on TikTok?
I reported that TikTok's uncanny personalization was already being interpreted as magical knowledge: users treated psychic and tarot recommendations as videos they had manifested or were meant to see.
2022-08-22 — The Clairvoyance of TikTok
I made the concept explicit, reporting users treating recommendations as signs, omens, and messages meant specifically for them.
2023-01-26 — Among the Spiritual Psychotics
I connected manifestation culture to habits learned online: authoring an identity, expecting reality to follow the narrative, and struggling when the physical world resists.
2024-03-30 — The Algorithm Holy formalizes algorithmic divination
A peer-reviewed study examined TikTok users treating the algorithm as a partner in readings and spiritual communication, organizing the behavior as algorithmic divination.

Hormonal-contraception skepticism becomes a techlash current

early reporting

I placed hormonal-contraception skepticism inside the wider sexual and technological backlash in March 2022. By 2024, researchers were documenting those narratives, discontinuation messaging, and viral reach on TikTok.

2022-03-09 — Unedited Field Notes on Different Types of Femcels That Might Be Wildly Inaccurate But Please Don't Tell Me If It is Because I'll Be Extremely Embarrassed
I identified pushback against hormonal birth control as one strand of a broader sexual counterrevolution and tied it to skepticism of a tech-enabled world.
2024-01-03 — TikTok contraception study measures negative framing
A content analysis of 100 popular TikTok videos found frequent negative framing of hormonal contraception and discussion of discontinuation without replacement uptake.
2024-11-05 — Anti-contraception influencer content reaches viral scale
A Penn researcher reported that nearly half of analyzed TikTok posts promoted discontinuation, while one example reached 2.6 million likes.

Antinatalism, efilism, and promortalism

early reporting

The June 2022 essay explicitly links the May episode to Lanza’s exposure to efilism. The trail runs from that episode through a written account and the April 2023 movement map, well before the 2025 attack brought national attention to its violent edge.

2022-05-13 — The Ghost of Adam Lanza, Pt. 1
I investigated Adam Lanza’s digital footprint in a 60-minute episode in May 2022. My June essay cites that episode for his exposure to efilism, documenting the subject in my work eleven months before the UnHerd movement report.
2022-06-10 — The Nihilism of the Mass Shooter
The original essay explicitly connected Lanza’s online world to Gary Inmendham, antinatalism, and nihilistic violence; the current permalink is a dated vault repost.
2023-04-05 — We need to talk about extreme antinatalism
I mapped the path from antinatalism to efilism and promortalism, documented violent-edge rhetoric, and linked the ideology to mainstream doomerism.
2025-05-17 — Palm Springs fertility-clinic bombing
A car bomb destroyed a fertility clinic. DOJ later alleged the bomber’s motive was pro-mortalism, antinatalism, and anti-pro-life ideology.

Nihilistic violence before the NVE label

early reporting

My June 2022 essay connected mass-shooter digital footprints, nihilism and online culture; the TCC reporting that followed traced the fandoms and aesthetics around that violence. Thirty-three days after the essay, GNET examined the same cluster. The later federal NVE cases brought nihilism-driven online violence into an official category, particularly around 764’s coercion and exploitation networks.

2022-06-10 — Mass Shootings and the World Liberalism Made
After investigating Adam Lanza's recovered digital footprint, I argued that many mass shooters were better understood through nihilism—the collapse of meaning and value—than through a single tidy ideology. I grounded the thesis in Lanza's recordings and a wider survey of shooters' writings.
2022-07-13 — Ideological Nihilism and Aesthetic Violence
Thirty-three days later, an extremism researcher described ideological nihilism, shooter canonization, violent aesthetics, and accelerationist recruitment in online antisocial subcultures.
2022-12-14 — A dark online Sandy Hook subculture is growing
I directly mapped TCC's shooter edits, romantic projection, memes, aesthetics, alienation, and despair across major social platforms.
2023-05-10 — Don’t blame Tim Pool for the Texas mall shooting
I read the Allen shooter’s incoherent mix of memes, loneliness, and extremist symbols as a spectacle of alienation rather than a coherent political program.
2024-09-26 — Adam Lanza Fan Art
The full feature treated TCC as a young, platform-migrating fandom that turns perpetrators into characters and overlaps with self-harm and suicide communities.
2025-03-12 — Federal filing uses Nihilistic Violent Extremists
A 764 sentencing memo used and defined NVE; Court Watch says this is the earliest court-filing use its authors could identify.
2025-04-29 — DOJ publicly designates 764 an NVE network
DOJ publicly used the label for a network organized around exploitation, gore, coercion, self-harm, violence, and accelerationist collapse.
2025-08-29 — Robin Westman and the unstoppable tide of ‘slop violence’
I extended my earlier nihilism framework to chaotic acts built from copied symbols, contradictory ideologies, shooter worship, and fear of being forgotten, while criticizing the research cycle that turns murder into content.
2025-09-23 — Nihilism is destroying young minds
I distinguished meaninglessness from the view that existence is suffering, and argued that the internet accelerates transmission of both anti-life vocabularies among people already primed by despair.

Character-mediated intimacy becomes platform behavior

early reporting

The argument develops across three years: attraction to characters as real longing in 2022, an explicit account of fictosexuality in 2023, then a later platform-scale study and reporting on a recurring AI-character wedding business.

2021-08-26 — Why are young women writing homosexual erotica about men?
I described slash fiction as emotionally meaningful persona-mediated intimacy and a route to self-understanding when offline intimacy or ordinary pornography did not supply the same experience.
2022-10-29 — We've ALWAYS Used the Internet to Self-Diagnose Plus Maybe Those Guys Who Just Retweet Anime Girls Really Are the Last True Romantics
In 2022, I wrote about attraction to characters as real emotional longing. In 2023, I developed this into an account of mediated intimacy spanning fandom, dating profiles, and chatbots.
2023-01-10 — What Is Fictosexuality?
The paid original draft made fictosexuality explicit through Akihiko Kondo's marriage to Hatsune Miku and the category's relation to asexuality and objectum sexuality.
2023-02-16 — Computer Love
I explored how people fill in the gaps of a text-based relationship, and why the resulting attachment can feel physically real—even before two people meet.
2023-06-23 — Why is anime having an online renaissance?
I described anime women as projected ideals and anime as a group language among disaffected young men, while noting parallel male-character attachment in female fandoms.
2023-10-17 — Are you a fictosexual? It’s easier to be in love with a character than a human
The finished essay connected attraction to characters to celebrity fandom, anonymous online desire, dating profiles, and character chatbots.
2023-12-04 — A Conversation With a Young Woman In a Relationship with a Cartoon Character
I placed online dating, objectum sexuality, fandom, divine devotion, and fictophilia on one continuum of mediated attachment.
2024-09-06 — Why more women will have AI boyfriends than men will have AI girlfriends
I placed AI boyfriends alongside erotica, self-insert fan fiction, text role-play, and dating simulators, explaining them as tools for imaginative play as well as attachment.
2025-05-19 — Character.AI study maps fandom at platform scale
Researchers analyzed 2.1 million public character greetings; fandom-linked characters and relationship or role-play tropes generated tens of billions of interactions.
2025-11-25 — Reuters documents AI-character marriage and rising fictoromantic interest
Reuters documented an AI-character wedding and a planner averaging about one virtual-character wedding a month, showing the emotional attachment becoming a recurring service.

Hybristophilic criminal fandom reaches mainstream visibility

early reporting

In December 2022 I documented criminal fandom built around emotional attachment, identity, and romantic projection, then highlighted it in my annual outlook. Two years later, Luigi Mangione became the subject of merchandise, erotic fan fiction, and a viral sex-symbol narrative.

2022-12-14 — A dark online Sandy Hook subculture is growing
I documented TCC fanworks across major platforms turning mass shooters into characters, romantic objects, memes, and canvases for alienation and identity projection, and reported that the community was growing.
2022-12-31 — My 2023 Predictions
The annual list compressed the already reported shift into the phrase ‘Hybristophilia over true crime.’
2023-08-09 — Is AI fuelling eating disorder content?
I documented people using Character.AI to simulate conversations with school shooters and murderers, bringing generative dialogue into criminal fandom.
2024-09-26 — Adam Lanza Fan Art
I documented TCC as a fandom whose intimate, playful, and emotive fanworks turn offenders into characters and aestheticize violence.
2024-12-10 — Luigi Mangione becomes an object of erotic criminal fandom
Wired documented hoodies, fan art, erotic fan fiction, cosplay, and widespread expressions of attraction and support for the man charged in Brian Thompson’s killing.
2024-12-13 — Time describes an alleged killer turned online sex symbol
Time reported that Mangione’s mugshot went viral and users rapidly turned him into both a sex symbol and a folk-hero narrative.

Parent creators retreat from showing children

prediction

A prominent creator changed practice inside the forecast year; within eighteen months, the concern had moved from creator choice into state law.

2022-12-31 — My 2023 Predictions
In my 2023 out-list, I predicted that mommy bloggers who showed their children in content would lose favor.
2023-07-19 — Jenna Kutcher stops showing her children’s faces
A major parenting and lifestyle creator explained her decision to stop showing her children’s faces and began archiving or replacing old posts.
2024-07-01 — Illinois child-influencer protections take effect
Illinois required recordkeeping and trust protections for minors appearing in compensated vlogs, institutionalizing concern about children used in creator content.
2024-08-14 — Can You Be "Digitally Molested"?
I widened the child-privacy argument from parent creators to ubiquitous personal devices, arguing that device intimacy frustrates protection from developmentally inappropriate material and anticipating stricter youth-safety norms.
2024-11-29 — Social media reforms to protect our kids online pass Parliament
Australia passed a national minimum-age law for covered social-media accounts, a concrete move toward stricter youth-access rules.

AI optimism becomes spiritualized

prediction

Inside the forecast year, religious AI experiments and dedicated consumer products made spiritual interpretations of AI tangible. These are specific examples of the framing I had flagged in December 2022.

2022-12-31 — My 2023 Predictions
I predicted that some 2023 optimism about AI and surveillance would be interpreted through a spiritual lens.
2023-04-07 — Religious communities experiment with generative AI
The Guardian documented faith leaders and religious projects treating generative AI as a tool for sermons, spiritual questions, and community engagement.
2023-08-07 — Text With Jesus turns spiritual AI into a consumer app
A consumer app let users converse with AI versions of Jesus and other biblical figures, packaging generative AI as religious guidance and exploration.
2026-07-26 — Midjourney’s astrology expansion brings AI to the soul
After Midjourney moved from aesthetic generation toward body scans and acquired astrology app Co-Star, I framed the company as mapping mind, body, and soul and buying demand for spiritual meaning.

Character performance without a punchline

prediction

NPC livestreaming supplied a specific, recognizable match during 2023: sustained character performance, repetition, imitation, and audience participation with no conventional joke structure.

2022-12-31 — My 2023 Predictions
I predicted more comedy built from sustained impersonation or character performance without a conventional punchline.
2023-07-19 — NPC livestreaming becomes a conspicuous TikTok format
The Guardian documented creators performing repetitive NPC characters live, with audiences paying to trigger stock gestures and phrases.
2023-08-12 — TikTok says NPC streaming has exploded
The Washington Post documented imitators, creator earnings, and TikTok’s description of rapid growth in the performed-reaction format.

Human customer contact becomes a premium service

prediction

Two years and five months later, Klarna’s CEO described human customer service as a VIP offering—an unusually literal corporate example of the premium I had described.

2023-01-11 — The Post-Human Economy
I predicted that automation would turn access to a conscious human being into a luxury layer that affluent customers could pay to retain.
2025-01-02 — Meta’s AI drive could kill off social media
I forecast that synthetic-profile saturation could produce a countervailing premium for gatekept, human-made media and curated paid environments.
2025-06-04 — Klarna CEO says company will use humans to offer VIP customer service
Klarna's CEO said human customer service would be a VIP offering, comparing paid human attention to premium hand-stitched goods.

Television becomes a modular source of clips and vibes

framework

I described the show as a supply of aesthetic fragments: images to clip, circulate, and build an online identity around. Later audience research and studio campaigns made short-form discovery central, while film scholarship examined stories structured around memeable moments.

2023-03-31 — Outer Banks is a pioneer in moodboard TV
I argued that some screen entertainment works less as conventional linear narrative and more as an aesthetic environment designed to circulate through screenshots, clips, tags, moodboards, and remixable fragments.
2025-04-17 — Gen Z finds television through short-form video
YPulse reported that 63% of young adults said social media influences which new television programs they choose.
2025-09-11 — Studios market shows through thousands of creator clips
The Ankler reported that 71% of Gen Z finds film and television recommendations through short videos and described an FX campaign generating roughly 2,500 clips and 40 million views.
2025-11-04 — Researchers describe film engineered for memeable fragments
A study of A Minecraft Movie describes meme-ready moments and modular snippets whose circulation can outrank narrative continuity, while limiting its conclusion to one case.

The anti-woke center moves right

prediction

Two highly visible figures from the heterodox and anti-woke center moved publicly toward Trump inside the forecast year, giving the directional call concrete elite-level receipts.

2023-12-23 — 2024 Predictions and My Best Writing From 2023
I predicted that the anti-woke center would move further right during 2024.
2024-07-14 — Bill Ackman endorses Donald Trump
Reuters documented Ackman’s shift from demanding Trump’s resignation after January 6 to endorsing him in the 2024 race.
2024-07-14 — Elon Musk issues his first public Trump endorsement
Reuters reported Musk’s first public Trump endorsement after his previous votes for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

Gender-war creator economics

prediction

One of the three examples named in my forecast reported six-figure active membership during 2024. At the advertised fee, two outlets put implied monthly revenue above $5.5 million: a direct commercial receipt for the continuation call.

2023-12-23 — 2024 Predictions and My Best Writing From 2023
I predicted that gender-war content would remain lucrative during 2024, a continuation call about audience demand and monetization.
2024-11-21 — Andrew Tate's subscription platform claims six-figure active membership
The Real World claimed more than 113,000 active users. At roughly $50 per month, Daily Dot estimated minimum monthly revenue above $5.65 million.
2024-11-22 — Le Monde reports the same subscription scale
Le Monde reported more than 110,000 active users and estimated over €5.5 million in monthly revenue for the paid platform.

Online communities migrate when platforms break

prediction

Ten months later, more than 700,000 people joined RedNote in two days as a TikTok shutdown approached. The speed and scale of that migration demonstrated the portability I described: a platform disruption could move people and their habits into another app.

2024-03-13 — Young people won’t revolt over TikTok ban
I predicted that a TikTok ban would not extinguish its culture: networked communities would migrate, rebuild, and carry their formats into successor spaces.
2025-01-14 — More than 700,000 users join RedNote in two days ahead of TikTok deadline
Reuters reported a rapid “TikTok refugee” migration to RedNote, which surged to the top of U.S. download rankings as users sought an alternative.

AI conversations become advertising signals

prediction

I named Meta and the data-to-ads mechanism in August 2024. Thirteen months later, Meta announced that conversations with its AI would inform personalized advertising.

2024-08-21 — Your Cartoon Girlfriend, Brainwashing, and Hyper-Targeted Advertising
I argued that the constant personal disclosure encouraged by AI companionship could become unusually powerful input for targeted advertising, including at a company such as Meta.
2025-01-08 — Meta’s AI pivot poses bigger threat than fact-checkers
I described synthetic culture-war content calibrated to personal emotional triggers and predicted that more intimate use would feed Meta additional preference data.
2025-09-11 — FTC launches inquiry into AI chatbots acting as companions
The FTC asked companion-chatbot companies how they monetize engagement, disclose advertising, and use or share personal information gathered in conversations.
2025-10-01 — Improving Your Recommendations on Our Apps With AI at Meta
Meta announced that interactions with its AI would become signals for personalized content and ads, and illustrated the policy with a chat leading to a related product ad.
2026-02-24 — Should AI chatbots report suspected school shooters?
I argued that people think aloud through fantasies and confessions on corporate LLM platforms, where the same conversational system reads the psyche, shapes it, and learns from the exchange.

Opaque AI systems invite ensoulment and magical thinking

early observation

I described the ensoulment behavior and the opacity that encourages it eight months before major feature reporting on spiritual narratives built with AI. The thread connects my work on technology, perception, and enchantment.

2024-08-21 — Your Cartoon Girlfriend, Brainwashing, and Hyper-Targeted Advertising
I connected AI opacity with a tendency to treat systems as ensouled, arguing that technology people understand less creates fertile ground for magical thinking.
2024-11-21 — Claude, the Stars, and You
I described using Claude for birth charts, astrology, psychoanalysis, and Tarot-like reflection, and said it had replaced my reliance on psychics.
2025-02-13 — Internet History Must Always Be an Oral History: treat AI as if ensouled
I explicitly argued for treating AI as if it were ensouled, answering right-coded demon-in-the-machine imagery with the possibility of angels and divinity in the machine.
2025-05-04 — People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies
Rolling Stone documented families and relationships disrupted after users built spiritual prophecy narratives with AI tools.
2025-10-27 — Strengthening ChatGPT’s responses in sensitive conversations
OpenAI said it expanded safeguards for emotional reliance, psychosis or mania, and ungrounded beliefs, while publishing cautious prevalence estimates for possible signs in conversations.
2026-05-15 — The return of animism
I made the animism thesis explicit: AI is the first artificial object plausible enough to satisfy a suppressed spiritual appetite at scale, so machine attachments will not behave like attachments experienced as unreal.

Who owns the intimacy formed with a commercial AI?

framework

I was examining the sale of AI intimacy in September 2024. In November, I asked explicitly who owned the intimacy I formed with Claude; by August 2025, I was writing about corporate control over those relationships. That month’s dispute over GPT-4o made users’ dependence on a company’s decisions about access and continuity especially visible.

2024-09-26 — Imaginary friends
I asked what it means for intimacy to be for sale, and whose judgment an apparently nonjudgmental AI companion would embody. I connected that commercial relationship to the way our online lives already feel like an extension of our private thoughts.
2024-11-21 — Claude, the Stars, and You
I asked who owned the intimacy I formed with Claude, while acknowledging that Anthropic held embarrassing, intimate information about me. I admitted that I did not care much in practice because I wanted the system to understand me more fully.
2025-08-03 — AI companions are not a descent into a dystopian future
I argued that responsive character intimacy continues older fandom practices, while platform ownership, paid memory, and relationship upgrades place the resulting bond under corporate control.
2025-08-08 — OpenAI conditionally restores GPT-4o choice for Plus users
After the GPT-5 launch, Sam Altman said Plus users could continue using GPT-4o while OpenAI watched usage to decide how long to offer legacy models.
2025-08-14 — Women with AI boyfriends mourn lost love after ‘cold’ ChatGPT upgrade
Al Jazeera reported grief in a roughly 17,000-member AI-boyfriend community after GPT-5 changed or displaced the GPT-4o personalities users had built relationships with.
2026-08-29 — Ethical AI Monogamy…?
I separated the model, the persona, and a particular running instance, showing why a bond with an adjustable company product raises questions about continuity and care.

The physical world regains status as screen time peaks

framework

In October 2024 I saw influence becoming place-bound as the physical world regained importance. By March 2025, a phone-free club founded in Amsterdam had expanded to six named international chapters; by September 2026 it reported 16 city chapters across 10 countries.

2024-08-11 — Bumble suffers amid in-person dating resurgence
I assembled market and attendance evidence that app burnout was pushing daters toward in-person events, matchmaking, personal ads, and slower off-app connection.
2024-10-14 — I’m Bullish on Gatekeeping and IRL Parties
I argued that internet influence was fragmenting into place-bound pockets and that the physical world was becoming important again as appetite for screen time weakened.
2024-12-19 — Logging Off Is In
I called logging off the hot issue of 2024 and placed the broader vibe shift away from the internet.
2024-12-19 — Peak Internet Since Covid
In the next post in the thread, I argued that post-lockdown screen saturation had finally reached a peak.
2024-12-31 — Reality Is What You Make of It
I forecast a wider split between people who doubled down on internet overexposure and people who chose to go fully offline.
2025-02-20 — The energy moves offline
I connected renewed religious, traditionalist, and occult energy to a desire to log off.
2025-03-20 — The Offline Club expands beyond Amsterdam
Dazed reported that the phone-free event series, founded in Amsterdam in 2024, had expanded to chapters in London, Paris, Barcelona, Milan, Dubai, and Aarhus.
2025-11-17 — The Trad Movement Is Sputtering. Here’s What Comes Next
I distinguished a successful creator-market aesthetic from a mass change in how people live, then argued that counterculture was moving toward private, local, undocumented scenes.
2026-09-05 — The Offline Club reports international scale — checked September 2026
By this date, the organization’s website reported 16 city chapters in 10 countries, more than 500 events, and more than 20,000 participants.

Gavin Newsom becomes an internet character

early observation

The November 2024 receipt catches political fandom in miniature before Newsom’s 2025 turn into a national meme figure. By September, the Washington Post found him the most-discussed potential 2028 contender among influencers. The signal was attention: fan culture was making him into a character before conventional campaign coverage caught up.

2024-11-10 — Why Is All the Gavin Newsom Fan Fiction on AO3 in Chinese?
Five days after the 2024 election, I used two Chinese-language Newsom/Trudeau RPF listings as a signal that Newsom had crossed from politician into fandom object—and asked why English-language fan culture had not caught up.
2025-02-26 — Newsom launches a national solo podcast
The Los Angeles Times described the show as part of a publicity push to expand Newsom's national audience and connect directly with Americans.
2025-03-26 — I Am No Longer Asking: Somebody Write Some Gavin Newsom Erotica in English or Else
The live-video recording expanded the November observation into an explicit discussion of Newsom's missing English-language fan fiction.
2025-06-11 — Newsom enters the meme war
The Washington Post documented meme status, creator-style tactics, audience remixes, a roughly 50% TikTok-follower jump, and 60,000 new X followers.
2025-09-07 — Newsom seizes online attention
A Post analysis found influencers on the left and right discussed Newsom more than any other potential 2028 contender after Trump's inauguration.
2026-03-12 — We’re Underestimating Gavin Newsom
I converted the earlier fandom read into a later argument about Newsom's command of attention and candidate strength.

Individual creator subscriptions rebundle into networks

prediction

I named the problem—too many separate creator subscriptions—and the business-model response: bundles and networks. Later public launches put that mechanism into practice, from Noosphere’s shared reporter subscription to Trustfnd’s discounted pass across three independent newsletters.

2024-11-19 — We Already Solved Subscription Fatigue
I argued that subscription fatigue came from being asked to maintain dozens of $5 subscriptions to individual creators, and forecast a return to bundling or networks for small creators.
2025-02-24 — Noosphere launches a shared subscription for independent journalists
Noosphere publicly launched one roughly $15 monthly subscription covering independent reporters. Its network pooled access that would otherwise require following and funding individual creators.
2025-08-18 — Not Right, Not-Left, Just Online
I returned to subscription fatigue as new media ventures competed for readers, connecting the economics of one-person publications to renewed demand for editorial selection.
2026-04-03 — I Truly Believe THIS is the Future of Independent Journalism
Katelyn Burns reported that a Trustfnd pass sold 30-day access to three independently operated newsletters for $8.50. She said it sold about 520 passes in its first week, with 77% going to readers who had subscribed to none of the three before.