Malt Liquidity 31

The Curious Case of Cranial Correlation

Does anyone remember Tiger King? I sure do. I never watched the show, but a wrong number I accidentally texted told me that, in China, she was trying to download the show at the same time as everyone else.

Cultural diaspora isn’t an odd thing in and of itself; for example, we all remember McDonald’s in Red Square.

But what was sort of built on an aura of exclusivity - think Cartmanland in South Park - now grows much more organically and virulently through a combination of in-group coercion and network effects that seem totally unprecedented to me. The correlation of behavior spread so far and wide through just tangential resonance is possibly one of the most curious cases of convergence I’ve ever seen.

Remember how everyone started baking bread at the beginning of the world shutting down, and how we all had our Zoom happy hours? (And isn’t it odd that plenty of other quality video calling apps exist, yet we all ended up finding the one person with corporate Zoom to host?) Then people started to learn how to cut their own hair, started a podcast, or traded stocks. Of course, everyone gravitated towards the exact same political topics. First it was the Australian fires, then it was George Floyd, and so forth. Also, there was an election that, for whatever reason, was considered breaking news every four hours for an entire year. This is not to say that it is wrong to follow the topics everyone else is, just that people are following them across completely different environments and regions of the world with no direct or indirect contact through completely different sources at the exact same times. Since everyone was forced to sit on their screens, though it is all in “one place” - your phone, your desktop, the internet - the coercion effect comes from every facet of your life bombarding you through the same medium of the screen, such as Twitter trends, Chrome news suggestions, the Netflix algorithm, or a steady stream of group messages. Unless you are particularly stubborn, you probably will end up thinking “Why not have a look? Not like I have anything better to do”, and checking out the Netflix show that people seem to talk about or whatever the new movie premiering on HBO MAX is.

The HBO MAX thing is a particularly interesting thing, as I have written about before:

Auto-generated content plays on our expectations and stereotypical in-group thinking flaws: "All my other friends watched this, I might as well see what the deal is", or "It has celebrities in it! It can't possibly continue to be this unbearable, I'll give it more of a chance", which leads to sunk cost fallacy entering around the 35 minute mark or 45 minutes until bedtime, depending on the time of day. Streaming services depend on people ignoring that content is not made based on its quality, but rather its marketability, perhaps accurately assessing that most people are not malcontent personified and won't rant about how horrible most of their catalogue is to a readership of five.

These movies are obviously bad, yet, in the virtual or physical social setting, even the most cantankerous of us fall in line. Thus, even yours truly ends up watching an episode of “The Bachelor” now and then.

Take the case of Donald Trump. Since he announced his presidential run, you would not have been able to spend any reasonable amount of time on the internet or eavesdropping on conversations without hearing his name mentioned in some shape or form. Yet, as soon as he is removed from both Facebook and Twitter, I find that everyone seems to have collectively memoryholed their conversation topics pre-deplatforming. Certainly, on one level I am thankful I don’t have to hear awful takes directly piped from the NYT or Tucker Carlson into conversation anymore, but why did it take Facebook and Twitter doing something for a 90% reduction in conversation volume? On a systemic level, this level of implicit correlation of thought induced by private entities is flat out terrifying.

This all played out in a “game stock” itself in what was essentially a crowd-sourced Ponzi scheme with underlying brokerage and fund chicanery. As I put it:

Remarkably, an astonishing 28% of Americans bought GME or some other meme stock in January! For context, approximately 32% of Americans contribute to their 401k. What was even more surreal is that in Australia, people piled into GME without even bothering to see if it was the right one, and internet savvy Indian kids smashed the bid on GME as well. In Germany, Gamestop flat out broke retail brokerage apps.

Of course, “internet induces correlation in thought” is a milquetoast take, but one wonders what the implications are when, much like passive investing makes markets move as a monolith, human thought converges around the same focal points like the “Elon Musk North Star”. Heavy auto-correlation indicates much more violent dispersion, and one really wonders what will happen once life “returns to normal”.

To be continued…