Online culture often looks bigger than it is. A phrase, app, market, or mood can seem unavoidable inside one feed, while barely registering elsewhere. Ruby Thelot, a cyber-ethnographer and media theory researcher at NYU, says that confusion is now central to how people misread online trends.
Thelot’s view is that virality itself has changed. It can still show that something is moving quickly, but it no longer proves that an idea has real cultural staying power. His book In Defense of Being-On-Line comes out this fall, and his argument points to a more careful way to read social media signals.
Virality Is No Longer the Whole Story
For years, viral reach was treated as a useful proxy for cultural importance. If enough people saw, shared, repeated, or argued about something, it seemed reasonable to assume that it had broken through.
Thelot says that logic has weakened because the internet has become “balkanized.” Instead of one shared public square, people now experience culture from their own “digital island.” What appears massive in one environment may be the result of repeated exposure inside a narrow channel of attention.
This matters because some online phenomena do travel beyond their original communities. The source points to “6-7” and “looksmaxxing” as examples of trends that have recently broken containment. But other digital obsessions do not hold. NFTs were pushed heavily by tech bros in years past, and audio chat apps like Clubhouse were promoted as the future of social media before quickly flaming out.
The practical lesson is simple: a trend needs more than visibility. It needs people to keep using it, adapting it, and finding value in it after the first burst of attention fades.
When the Metric Becomes the Goal
Thelot connects the problem to Goodhart’s law, which the source identifies as coined by British economist Charles Goodhart. The idea is that when a measure becomes a target, it stops working well as a measure.
Applied to online culture, the measure is virality. Once everyone understands that views can bring attention, status, or commercial opportunity, more content gets built for the purpose of producing views. That does not mean the content has the deeper usefulness or resonance required to last.
In Thelot’s framing, creators and media systems can engineer a viral outcome without producing a cultural shift. A post can spread widely and still fail to become meaningful beyond the platform mechanics that pushed it. That is why short-term engagement and long-term adoption should not be treated as the same thing.
For readers, journalists, brands, and anyone trying to understand online behavior, this changes the question. Instead of asking only how many people saw something, the better questions are:
- Is the account or source real?
- Is the content an ad?
- Is the behavior spreading beyond one feed or community?
- Are people adopting it, or only reacting to it?
- Does it have value after the first wave of attention?
Dating Burnout Shows the Risk of Overreading a Feed
Thelot also applies this thinking to dating culture. Dating burnout has received sustained attention over the last few years, and the source notes that dating apps have responded by rebranding around AI. In May, Bumble announced that it was killing its swipe feature to lure users back.
But Thelot argues that the broader story can become overstated. He discusses heteropessimism, which the source describes as reported since 2019 and focused on the general malaise that straight women have when dating straight men.
He does not deny that this feeling exists. Instead, he questions how representative the loudest examples are. He looked at Instagram and TikTok posts, around 1,000 videos that had over 1 million views, to examine what share of the content was actually negative.
The answer, according to Thelot, hovered around 25 percent. That finding led him to ask whether different platforms or algorithms make certain attitudes look larger than they are. He specifically points to X as having a trickier algorithm where things are a bit more negative.
The broader implication is not that online dating frustration is fake. It is that a visible narrative can become inflated when culture writers and audiences treat one stream of content as the whole picture.
Prediction Markets Turn Culture Into Participation
Thelot’s reading of prediction markets follows the same pattern: look beyond the obvious surface signal. On Kalshi and Polymarket, the source says, young people are betting on subjects ranging from Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance to the wildfires in Oregon.
At first glance, this looks like a financial story. Thelot sees something else as well. He studied groups of young men trading meme coins in 2020 to 2024 and found that the activity was often social. It happened in group chats called “the trenches,” where friends exchanged information, traded together, and lost together.
He connects that behavior to male loneliness and describes it as a twisted but interesting form of male bonding. In this view, prediction markets are not only financial instruments. They are also tools for participation.
Thelot’s point is that consumers no longer want only to consume culture. They want to feel close to it. Wagering becomes one way to do that, even when the financial reward is not the main driver.
AI and the Limits of Measuring Intelligence
The source also turns to AI, where Thelot challenges another widely repeated assumption: that intelligence is the decisive bottleneck for the world’s hardest problems. He says he does not think AI is going to end the world, because he does not think intelligence is that important.
His reasoning is that many problems depend less on intelligence than on cooperation, coordination, and alignment of large groups of people toward a common shared goal. He also returns to the danger of turning a metric into a target. Once specific qualities are quantified, the measurement itself can start to dominate the goal.
Thelot argues that focusing too narrowly on intelligence risks leaving out other forms of human value, including emotional intelligence, bodily intelligence, and artistic intelligence. He connects this concern to the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, who, according to the source, talks about how certain things are left behind with each new advancement.
The same warning applies across the article’s subjects. A number can be useful, whether it measures views, negativity, wagers, or intelligence. But when the number becomes the whole story, it can hide the culture it was supposed to explain.