Imagine you’re one of the biggest AI researchers in the world.

Now imagine Big Daddy Zuck knocks on your door and offers you hundreds of millions of dollars for your work. He wants to collect you like an infinity stone.

This is one of the many current dramas playing out in the tech world, but it’s also a perfect example of how traditional power laws are warping, just like ChatGPT’s record-shattering adoption rate, which now allegedly has ~10% of the world population using their system

Das a lot.

But you probably didn’t even hear about Zuck’s insane talent raids, or ChatGPT spreading faster than a venereal disease. And I don’t blame you!

You’re just trying to not catch strays — alarming headlines, convoluted graphs, cringe takes - all of it. If it helps, we’ve always had to deal with a mixed bag containing the lies and truth together.

But as more people spend more time on their phones than nearly anything else, expect the shock value to increase.

The algorithms feeding you content have been perfectly optimized for one thing - keeping you scrolling, not informed.

Thanks to this technology that we all know and love, we’re traversing through the age of vibe shifts, where perception and reality are having a very messy divorce. The “trends” screaming for attention are often not what they seem. The quiet revolutions reshaping the world are often buried under memes, and boring stability is twisted as existential crisis.

As your monitoring-the-situation guy, I'm here to be your Virgil (Dante’s Inferno, not Abloh) through this media hellscape.

You’ve now seen the extent to which Zuckerberg will go to poach AI talent. That was a little appetizer though. Now these power laws have power laws.

Welcome to Extremistan.

Let’s start with the vibe coders.

Vibe coding = writing prompts to AI agents so they build you a website, app, or other software tool that traditionally depended on you writing code.

No, this image below is not just a revenue graph from the company Replit, an app used for vibe coding.

As Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison has pointed out, “we’re probably in the most pro-upstart era we’ve ever seen.” The keys to the kingdom have been handed over.

Non-technical people can now make software within hours. And that’s what you’re seeing in the graph above. You no longer have to know how to code; you can just tell an AI agent to make what you want.

The rise of AI won’t mean death to entire professions like software engineers, but it’s definitely changing it. Many companies report that most code is now AI-generated while engineers spend their time debugging and reviewing it.

You can spin up an app in days and sell it in weeks. Like this guy.

The Attention Paradox

Replit’s revenue growth shows perfectly how industries are rapidly shuffled, and pseudonymous account, signüll, summarized a phenomenon taking off hand-in-hand:

“in job markets, dating, creator economies, anything internet really, high liquidity concentrates almost all attention on outliers…when everything is infinitely accessible & abundant, attention becomes the true scarcity.."

Congrats! It’s now easier than ever to create something, but harder than ever to capture what matters most: attention.

The internet has simultaneously democratized _barf access while creating winner-take-all dynamics all over the Internet:

China’s Silent Explosions

While you're worried about TikTok, China's actually dominating in:

Even Boba tea.

The Quiet Epidemic

Sports betting basically went from illegal to ubiquitous overnight. For some reason, we collectively decided to strap ourselves to this rocket with zero discussion

It's almost perfect vice for our age — invisible, phone-based, dopamine-optimized.

Your best friend could be losing their life savings and you'd never even know! At least smokers and alcoholics usually have physically detectable symptoms.

Soon, you’ll be able to bet on anything, including which trends will pop off next.

While some things moon _lol without notice, others crater in equal silence.

The Great De-criming

Plot twist: the U.S. is hitting near record lows of crime, despite the ~vibes~

The U.S.’s crime rates are much higher than most developed nations, but I’ll take the dub.

Even incarceration rates have collapsed since 2007!

But remember, more people today think crime is worse than people in the actual high-crime '90s did. Vibes seem to beat statistics every time.

Drop The Fertility

It looks like fertility rates are base jumping, not just declining. This Financial Times visualization of Latin America captures just how bad it is:

This really is no bueno. The more we fall below fertility replacement rates (where there are more deaths than births), the more we creep into a dystopian world:

~ dark, somber tone coming in hot ~

“For a picture of rural America's future, go to rural Newfoundland. There, you will see sky-high median ages, empty houses, zero industry, and next-to-no children. The few teenagers around are ALL planning to move to Alberta to work in the oil sands. Even immigrants will not move to these communities; the few who try leave quickly for bigger cities. The sense of isolation in those towns is extreme. It is deeply sad, somber, feels like "the end." There's no "revival" there. It's not possible. There's no "putting down roots" and "staying no matter what" or "never giving up on your hometown." You're either staying there to die because you're old, or if you're young, you have simply got to leave.” - A.M. Hickman

Damn you, Micky D’s

Despite last year's inflation panic, food spending as a percentage of income is at historic lows.

Yes, I, too, feel in denial.

Your grandparents may well murder you for complaining about grocery prices lol.

HOWEVER, McDonald's has been a sneaky bastard, raising prices way beyond inflation. You're not crazy!

Trump’s Cratering Popularity

This one's wild: Trump's approval among Gen Z went from positive to -40.

NEGATIVE FORTY.

Why? One theory is the role that TikTok and social media algorithms played during election season. Negative content spreads like wildfire, and Biden had the disadvantage of representing the system. But post-2024 election, all of the anti-Biden/Kamala content has nearly vanished from the platforms. So given our love for negative media (and his own actions), Trump is getting flamed.

Although it’s pretty TBD on whether or not Gen Z is an overall more conservative generation, the algorithms seem to play a more important role in this than ever.

Trump is even burning through American soft power, as writer Dominik Presl has pointed out.

Most people around the world don’t like us as much as they did before 2024. This seems to go unnoticed.

What makes this whole thing even more difficult is that, as Derek Thompson quipped, “a lot happens under Donald Trump, but a lot un-happens, too.”

The division between perception and reality seems to have exploded since the advent of cell phones, leading to all sorts of misperceptions surrounding what’s happening on the ground as a major trend vs. what feels like a major trend, but is really in your head.

The “massive trends” that aren’t really moving.. much.

To finish this off, we have some trends that you may think are HUGE trends but are, in reality, pretty disappointing with their normal rates.

Government Spending: The DOGE That Didn’t Bark

Remember DOGE? They were supposed to slash government spending mercilessly.

Even if you’re not a fan of DOGE, you probably, maybe thought that DOGE cuts caused some substantial dip in federal spending.

You’d be mistaken.

Based on last year’s spending pattern, spending has actually increased slightly. The U.S. government remains what it's been for quite some time - a massive insurance company for the elderly with a military attached.

"Kids These Days" (A 2,500-Year-Old Complaint)

Every generation thinks the youth are uniquely terrible. Here's a quote about lazy, disrespectful young people:

“The current generation of youth loves luxury and comfort. They have been spoiled, posess bad manners, and don’t show due respect for figures of authority or adults. These “zoomers” love chit-chat and don’t like hard work. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households.”

I pulled this from economist Maia Mindel’s latest post on Gen Z.

Mai goes on: “Let’s move on by reading the quote above: when and who do you think it’s from? If you said, David Brooks or Jonathan Haidt in the New York Times last week, you wouldn’t be too far off. It’s basically Amy Chua’s whole thing. But it is, in fact, a slightly reworked quote from the Greek philosopher Socrates, who lived 2,500 years ago. The last line is, in fact, verbatim, from what he originally published (as translated, at least). This is because, while the concept of generations is fairly new, the idea that the current generation of young people is uniquely bad in some sort of selfish, me-first, overly generalized way is… not. The term for this is Juvenoia, the idea (among older people) that youth is bad in a multitude of ways, such as being overly narcissistic, entitled, or misbehaved and disrespectful. Moral panics focused on youth have always been common.”

This may be humanity’s oldest bias.

The Class That Refuses to Die

Of course we have problems in this country that we need to fix, like our housing shortages and health insurance burdens.

However, despite endless hand-wringing about the "hollowing out" of the middle class, the data shows something more nuanced:

Again, we have real problems to solve, but the middle class isn’t really disappearing into poverty. It's mostly graduating into upper-middle class. Positive-sum growth is real, even if it doesn't feel like it.

Your send-off: fight against the real ADD - the attention death disorder. The perception-distortion machines we carry around in our little pockets are made by companies worth billions, who’ve invested millions into them. They’re not malicious, in and of themselves - like any machine, they can be used for good or evil. We love to say “protect your peace”. Sure, do that. But also protect your attention, so you can perceive the signal from the noise.

As of today, this is where we stand: reality and perception drifting further and further apart by

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.}