sometimes things gain traction for no reason other than the fact that they are gaining traction.

there’s a github repo called “nocode” that has 64,000 stars.

it contains no code.

it’s creator (Kelsey Hightower) made it in 2018 as a joke.

people are still opening pull requests on it. 459 open PRs on a repo that does nothing. someone filed a bug report. on nothing.

so i’ve been thinking about this for months and i keep going in circles which is annoying because i wanted to write something clean and structured and instead i’m just going to tell you what’s ticking over in my brain.

i think this repo exposes something that nobody in marketing wants to say out loud. not because it’s controversial.

because it makes everything else look stupid.

rabbit hole time

the academic term for this is information cascade.

it’s when people stop making decisions based on their own judgement and start making decisions based on what they see other people doing. but that framing is too clean.

like it implies there’s a moment where someone consciously goes “ah yes, i shall now stop thinking and begin copying.”

and there isn’t.

and i keep coming back to this thing called the keynesian beauty contest.

so Keynes described this newspaper competition where readers had to pick the prettiest face from a set of photographs and the prize went to whoever picked the face that got the most votes overall.

so you weren’t picking who YOU thought was prettiest. you were picking who you thought everyone ELSE would think was prettiest.

and the winners were the ones picking who they thought everyone else thought everyone else would think was prettiest.

judges watching judges watching judges.

and that is Linkedin, lol

nobody asks what’s happening. the happening is the thing.

i get messages ALL THE TIME from people who say they watch everything i post but never engage publicly.

i think the act of publicly liking something on Linkedin is a performance and people are making very quiet calculations about what that performance says about them.

i’ve written about that here

liking a funding announcement is safe. it signals you’re plugged in, you know people, you’re part of the ecosystem. liking something weird or critical or funny is risky. it might say something about you that you didn’t authorise.

so we get this bizarre theatre where everyone is publicly enthusiastic about the blandest possible things.

the social cost of not performing is higher than the cost of performing.

so everyone performs. and the performance looks exactly like engagement which means it looks exactly like traction which means it looks exactly like something is working.

nothing is working. the appearance of something working is working.

i went looking for examples of this and fell down a hole and now i have to tell you about all of them because they’re all basically the same thing.

the egg

january 2019. someone made an instagram account called @world_record_egg. posted a stock photo of a brown egg. the caption said let’s beat Kylie Jenner’s record for most liked post on instagram. it got 60 million likes.

@world_record_egg

Just An Egg 🥚 on Instagram: "Let’s set a world record together…

the creator turned out to be a london ad guy named Chris Godfrey who told the new york times he wanted to “beat the record with something as basic as possible.” which like, mission accomplished i guess. the whole thing was an experiment in whether the internet would collectively decide that an egg mattered more than a kardashian. and it did. overwhelmingly.

a student interviewed about it at the time said “i saw some people that i follow, like some of my friends, already liked it. i saw it on some people’s stories promoting it.”

that’s it. that’s the whole mechanism.
“other people did it so i did it”

vogue wrote that the egg proved the attention economy is basically a scam that requires almost no effort from anyone while commanding the most space in our digital lives. and i think that’s almost right but it’s missing the part where people genuinely enjoyed participating.

the button

before r/place there was the button. reddit, april fools 2015. also made by Josh Wardle (the Wordle guy). it was literally just a button next to a 60-second countdown timer. when someone pressed the button, the timer reset. each reddit account could only press it once. that’s it. no instructions. no prize. no point.

over a million people pressed it. it ran for two months. people formed actual factions. the “followers of the shade” believed clicking was sinful. the “knights of the button” organised to make sure someone always clicked before the timer hit zero. there was a group called the emerald council. someone got labelled “the pressiah” for being the last person to click.

and that’s the thing right? a million people participated in something with no incentive, no shared interest, no outcome. the button didn’t DO anything. it just existed and people couldn’t stop pressing it because other people were pressing it and not pressing it started to feel like missing something.

the pixel wars

reddit’s r/place, launched april fools 2017. (also by the Wordle guy).
a blank canvas where each user could place one coloured pixel every five minutes.

over a million people showed up and collectively made art. by 2022 it was 10.5 million users placing 160 million pixels.

.

the participation was the product. people showed up because other people were showing up.

the pet rock

before the internet had a word for any of this, Gary Dahl was sitting in a bar in 1975 listening to his friends complain about their pets. he joked that a rock would be the perfect pet. no feeding, no walking, no dying.

then he actually did it. bought smooth rocks from Rosarita beach in Mexico for less than a penny each, put them in cardboard boxes with air holes and straw bedding, wrote a 32-page instruction manual that told you how to teach your rock to “sit” (place it on a surface) and “play dead” (it was already very good at this).

sold them for $3.95 and then sold 1.5 million in six months!

every single person who bought one knew it was stupid.

they bought it because it was stupid.

the gap between what the object was (a rock) and what the culture decided it was (a phenomenon) was the entire joke, and being inside the joke felt good.

Dahl himself said he “packaged a sense of humour for a very bored public.”

the $999 app

in 2008, a german developer (why is it always germans) named Armin Heinrich put an app on the iphone store called “i am rich.” it cost $999.99, the maximum apple allowed. it did nothing. when you opened it you saw a glowing red gem. when you tapped the gem it said “i am rich. i deserv it. i am good, healthy & successful.” (typo his, not mine.)

eight people bought it before apple pulled it within 24 hours. one buyer said he clicked buy as a joke and forgot his wife had one-click purchasing enabled. Heinrich said he regarded it as art.

it existed for less than a day and became one of the most discussed apps in app store history despite having no function, no users, and basically no lifespan. the story of the app was more viral than the app itself. the nothing at its centre was the engine. like one of the first NFT type things before we had a word for it.

the million dollar homepage

you’ve probably heard of this one? Alex Tew, 21-year-old student worried about paying for university, made a website with a 1000x1000 pixel grid and sold each pixel for $1. companies could buy blocks and put their logo on them.

he sold every pixel. he made $1,037,100.

the most telling part is what happened next. hundreds of people tried to copy it (and they still are doing so on tiktok today). to me, this was an exceptional piece of scarcity theatre.

(btw Tew went on to co-found calm, the meditation app, lol.)

so what do we call this type of marketing?

i started writing this because i wanted to find the word.

and i don’t think there is one word. “information cascade” is too clinical.
“bandwagon effect” is too dismissive.
“social proof” implies there’s something being proven.
“virality” is a description of the outcome not the mechanism.

the closest i can get is this-

it’s the inverse of marketing. marketing says “here’s why this matters.” these moments say “this doesn’t matter and that’s exactly why it’s working.”

there’s something in there about a currency of nonchalance which i’ll write about another time.

because you can tell when things are manufactured. even the stuff that’s supposed to look organic. there’s something about the posture of genuinely not caring that is impossible to fake on a platform where everyone is performing enthusiasm all the time.

i want to do this on Linkedin. not for a product launch. not for a campaign. just to see if the mechanism works on a platform that has turned corporate performance theatre into its entire personality.

something like “this post gets deleted at 5,000 likes” or something equally stupid. in aid of nothing. that’s the whole point.

ITS IN AID OF ABSOLUTELY NOTHING

i haven’t done it yet.

but i will.

or i won’t. (which honestly might be funnier.)


Love you,

hope you win

Renée xx