I Knew About It Before It Was Cool
August 6, 2025
Inspired by: default.blog's "I like Labubus and Dubai Chocolate."
"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
Tiger King was the first moment I really noticed it. This strange new rhythm of cultural memory. For a brief stretch in early 2020, it felt like every single person on the planet had watched it. People weren’t just watching, they were binging, rewatching, quoting entire lines from memory. And then, as suddenly as it arrived, it was gone. Three months later, it was as if the show had never existed. No references. No inside jokes. Collective amnesia.
I’ve started calling this the Tiger King Phenomenon™. And I don’t think it’s limited just to Netflix shows anymore.
You can see it everywhere: in crypto, in memes, in mini-scandals that set Twitter ablaze for 72 hours before disappearing into the void. Shitcoin after shitcoin, memecoin after memecoin. At their peak, people talk about them as if they’re the most important thing in the world. Trading volumes surge. Discord servers buzz. Then, inevitably, the music stops. A token that once carried the energy of a movement is abandoned, limping along with a few thousand dollars of monthly volume.
Labubus. Dubai Chocolate. The Astronomer CEO saga. All once felt omnipresent, and now they’re just whispers in the wind. Outside of the very stable cultural poles (the NFL… and maybe Taylor Swift?), almost everything else has become a fad.
I’ve written before about how grunge probably couldn’t sprout today. That still feels true, but I’d now add a caveat: even if it did sprout in 2025, it wouldn’t last more than three months.
Why? Because the cultural fabric itself has changed.
Individualized Rabbitholes
We don’t have shared channels anymore. Social feeds (I hesitate to even call them “social”) are deeply personalized. A TikTok-heavy feed versus a Twitter-heavy feed may as well be two different planets. People spending two hours a day on each are living in separate realities, with almost no overlap in references, memes, or discourse.
That means the things that do manage to break through burn incredibly fast. They spread at light speed, but they rarely last more than days or weeks before the cultural current sweeps them aside.
The Cult of Early
Another piece of this puzzle: being early has become the most valuable form of cultural capital.
In the early 2010s, the hipster was almost a caricature. “I knew about it before it was cool” was a punchline. Novelty-seeking was something you’d poke fun at, even if certain subcultures secretly admired it.
But in 2025? There’s no higher status than being early. Early to a trend. Early to a meme. Early to a coin.
Maybe it’s because we saw what happened with Silicon Valley. How the biggest returns accrued to those willing to deviate from the mainstream and place bets on the unproven. Maybe it’s because life itself moves so quickly now that there’s no point in digging your heels into what’s “popular” today. By the time you master it, the wave has passed. Maybe the only way to stay relevant is to chase what’s next.
What Now?
So here we are: a society optimized for novelty-seeking. A culture of permanent churn, where attention burns bright and then disappears into nothingness.
Is there still alpha in sticking with one thing, going deep, and ignoring the churn? Yes, probably. But conviction is harder to come by in a world where the half-life of culture keeps shrinking.
The question is whether this churn is sustainable or whether we’re running faster and faster, only to find ourselves in the same place.