The Death of Popularity

Nothing is popular anymore. Even the big things aren’t really that big. What are the biggest cultural events of the last few months? Hard to say—everything is too scattered, fleeting, fragmented, niche, etc. now. There’s Avatar 2, but that doesn’t really count. That’s a holdover from a different era. There was White Lotus season 2 that was pretty popular I guess, but only among a certain jaded bored upper class audience.

It sort of feels like the NBA is getting more popular, but even that is way less popular than the NFL. And it sort of feels like the NFL is getting less popular. Yes ratings are big, but culturally and socially it feels increasingly marginal. The old stars are all gone, like Brady, or on the way out, like Aaron Rodgers, and the new guys, like Patrick Mahomes and Jalen Hurts and so on, aren’t really all that famous. I admit I don’t pay that much attention to the NFL, but I hadn’t heard of “Jalen Hurts” until like last week. He still sounds kind of made up.

And it feels like wide receivers and running backs aren’t nearly as popular as they used to be. Back in the day, Terrell Owens, Chad Johnson, Randy Moss, and others were as popular as any athletes in the country. Now can anyone name any big active wide receivers? Or running backs?

So even the popular things aren’t all that popular. The upcoming Super Bowl will probably have huge ratings, but I bet it will be one of those Super Bowls that nobody really remembers. Popular things don’t have any staying power anymore. And getting back to Avatar 2—it came out in December, and is one of the top 5 highest grossing movies ever, but still doesn’t really feel like it made that much of an impact.

In politics, the whole populism thing is over too. On the left and the right. Bernie and AOC were the left wing populists, and they are now totally irrelevant. Biden has never been popular—his approval numbers have stayed low as hell his whole presidency—but it still feels like he will probably win again. Even though nobody really likes him. Trump and DeSantis—his two main challengers—are both “populist” guys, who hate the establishment and so on, but they aren’t really all that popular outside of the hardcore MAGA base. Even populism is kind of niche now.

The only popular things are basically just on TikTok. But that’s really fleeting and scattered and niche too. The algorithm directs content to you based on what you will like. It isn’t a mass appeal thing—it’s just appealing to you individually. TikTok stars won’t be famous for long periods of time, they’re just here today gone tomorrow. And TikTok itself is being banned all over the place. If and when the USA goes to war with China, it will for sure be banned. And then the only popular thing will be gone.

It’s kind of funny that TikTok, basically the only popular thing in America, is not only not from America, but is from our main enemy, China, and is so hated by the ruling class that they want it banned.

It feels like the only really big star at this point is someone like Andrew Tate. He has been talked about more than probably anyone else so far this year. His popularity feels a lot like Trump’s back in 2017 or so—everyone hates him, and that just makes him bigger and bigger. What’s he famous for? I think just doing like “toxic masculinity” videos on Instagram and maybe TikTok (I don’t know, I’m not on TikTok).

But again, Tate is not “popular,” he is hated, and that makes him popular—but only for a while. Being popular because you’re hated is not a sustainable kind of popularity.

Nobody loves anything, nothing is popular—except hate itself. We have nothing left to love except for hate. Hate has won, and the fight wasn’t even close. It was a blowout win.

When everything is catered to you directly—like how the algorithm just suggests things that it knows you will like, based on your previous activity—you end up hating it. That’s the contradiction in all of this—during this time when content is crafted to your specific tastes, using the most advanced technology to give you exactly what you want, everyone hates everything more than ever.

What’s the lesson from all this? That when you get what you want, you end up hating it. And when massive effort goes into giving you exactly what you want, to a level of precision that used to be reserved only for like NASA space launches—you end up hating things with a nuclear intensity.

So what we have here is a whole society filled with people whose specific tastes have been catered to down to the fucking millimeter—and they have never been more furious. But our culture doesn’t know any other thing than giving people what they want—and using new technology to give people what they want in a super high-octane way. This has created a kind of arms race, where people are given what they want more and more, and it just makes them more and more pissed off.

All that’s left is just to see exactly how pissed off everyone can get. What levels of collective hatred can we reach? This is really all that new technology can achieve—unprecedented levels of mass hatred. The sky’s the limit!