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But then, a few days later, it’d pop up again – maybe alongside that anime character twirling a leek to a Finnish folk song. This time, you’d give a reluctant grin. ‘Alright then, that’s actually funny,’ you’d admit, and started humming the song in the real, outside world.

Before long, your feed was knee-deep in the stuff. The confused little girl, the celebrating kid, Nicolas Cage’s gloriously unhinged face from Vampire’s Kiss. We started laughing at them and sharing them across our chosen social media platforms. Eventually, these odd artefacts became a fixture of our daily culture. For some of us, even the ‘deep’ Internet, dark and grim memes of the time (asdfmovie, anyone?) started to feel like a new normal. In Poland, we had Demotywatory and then Kwejk, which were essentially galleries of popular memes. The English-speaking Internet was still smitten with (pre-political) Reddit and (pre-‘cancelled’) 4Chan.

Memes have become more than just fun. They have become an escape from the troubles of everyday life, from work, school, depression and other sorrows. They were just a wee moment during the day when we had a chance to breathe… although often these meme sessions ended with regular loud snorts rather than calm breathing. But, in a way, it was our way to relax.

What’s even more interesting, memes started having their own ‘marketplaces’. By that, I mean separate platforms for people in specific industries.

In the early 2010s, I was working at a large media agency – the type of business that helps in efficient media reach for commercial partners. We worked on the digital side of things, making sure that our clients don’t waste their money in the old media sinkholes (no grudge against the traditional media, but we knew the revolution was coming). And so, one of my colleagues found a link to a gallery collecting memes on life and work in marketing and media agencies like ours.

For the first week, we couldn’t focus on anything else – the hundred-strong company was having a blast exchanging the best memes from this platform. The best part was that members of the management board joined the exchange chain and had a blast with us.

After a few days, the scale of it became problematic, so they told us to limit the time on memes. Yes, they actually told us that we should work and not share memes. We had to move underground with further laughter.

Nevertheless, the meme era had properly arrived.

It’s more than a joke

Memes were never just a joke. Even back then, they played a more advanced role in our online lives. We didn’t just like them because they were funny. We liked them because they meant something. They carried a feeling.

‘I actually feel like that,’ was my first thought when I saw a meme about a media-agency employee trying to explain to a client why and how an econometric model might improve the lead-optimisation process — what they now, rather grandly, call Media Mix Modelling. In that moment, this meme signalled exactly who we were at this particular agency – or at least who we felt like being there.

It is because memes are social by design, built to provoke a reaction.

Think of a meme as having two layers. On the surface, it’s the image or video clip that drops into your feed, the visible artefact. Underneath, and more importantly, it’s a cultural, portable format for packaging context and social cues. And it is efficient in doing so. Its popularity comes from how neatly it can compress shared meaning, which is often hard to grasp in ~5 seconds. How to tell someone that you don’t feel like it, but you still have to do it, more efficiently than by sharing the Hide The Pain Harold?

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Things get a bit messy here because there is more to meme than this.

On one hand, a meme is simple and tangible. It’s something you can point to on your mobile screen that encapsulates humour. It is a captioned image, a cat video, a reaction shot from a movie with a popular actor, or even just a random photo of your typical Saturday in Manchester. It follows recognisable conventions (One does not simply is known for its thousands of interpretations), you can even nest memes inside other memes (think of a ‘Karen’ line recycled inside another meme). Sometimes, to get it, you need the relevant shared cultural reference points. But often, it’s just as simple as it is because even without the cultural reference, you know someone who does that.

In that sense, a meme is basically a piece of shareable media plus the social convention for how to use it.

At a deeper level, however, a meme is more than just a graphic or short video. It is a cultural object that travels across networks, or more precisely, through people. Memes exist because we find a use for them. We recognise it, adopt it and incorporate it into our shared, everyday language (eg, Dancygier and Vandelanotte, 2025). It is a fascinating concept to grasp that memes have become part of the internet’s everyday language for several generations now. Yes. If you read it and you were born before the early 1990s, there is a high chance that you lived through at least two ‘generations’ of memes. It also becomes a kind of badge; something that people recognise as part of a shared online identity. This could be a community on Reddit or 4Chan for the Millennials, or a TikTok and Twitch for the Gen Z’s.

Economics is, at its core, about individuals choosing and coordinating under scarcity and uncertainty, given that resources have alternative uses. If you treat a meme as just another funny image, the question about the role of the meme stays rather narrow. You might ask what’s in it, or perhaps puzzle over its virality – where did it come from? But if you apply an Austrian lens, the object shifts from the image itself to the process. Memes become economic objects not because they are serious or humorous, but because people invest scarce time and funnel their attention into creating and circulating them. They don’t know if any of these memes will be popular. They don’t know if their friends will like the reshared meme. But they can learn via the feedback and do it again, based on how their network reacted to it. Social and platform signals (think of reach and interaction levels) act as imperfect guides for what resonates and for which audience.

And so, what follows is a set of more concrete questions. What is being produced in a memenomics (not this memenomics) – a moment of someone’s attention, an inside-joke for an online community, a status signal on LinkedIn? A sense of belonging? What inputs are being committed, and what are their alternative uses? What returns are expected? Monetisation? And, ultimately, what is being valued in a meme… and by whom?

The Meme Delusion

Let’s take a step back and focus on the conceptual framework for memes. To understand the term, we have to briefly visit Richard Dawkins. And bear in mind that I am not here to discuss the ideas of God and how He might be, or might not. After all, Dawkins spent over two decades writing about the New Atheism and has been widely known as one of the most outspoken critics of religion worldwide… But before that, in the 1970s, he wrote a widely popular book on gene evolution, The Selfish Gene. And when I said it was widely popular, I mean it. Interestingly, he wasn’t only writing about the genes themselves. In the book, he argued that there is a single unit of cultural transmission that can jump from mind to mind by imitation across the population – it can be a fashion item (Eminem’s blonde hair in the early 2000s sparked a something dubbed eminemification – Google it!), a phrase (LOL!), a story or a music tune (Coca-cola Christmas jingle comes to mind).

Dawkins called it a meme.

He argued that genes replicate biologically, carrying out the best traits from generation to generation whilst evolving the non-preferred elements of it. In culture, he argued, the same function is performed by memes. Both persist (or die out) through similar mechanisms, and both spread faster when they fit a particular environment.

So, a meme was never just the image, but rather the replicating idea behind it.

People spread them for their own reasons, under their own constraints, inside particular contexts. Often, they pass them along with only a partial sense of what they’re carrying. Maybe we just like the vibe. Maybe we want to make a mate chuckle. Often, we are just tired of something, and we signal it via the meme – it functions as a means to say something without words, even if it is controversial – like laughing at Netflix’s casting habits. And with that in mind, a meme’s success is the outcome of countless individual decisions, made within specific social and technological contexts. But, and that is very important, a meme can convey wildly different meanings to different groups.

Is there an economics of memes?

Before going even deeper, we need to separate two things: the meme template and the meme instance. Why? Because they differ from the economic point of view. The template is the repeatable format. Think of the Distracted Boyfriend or the Wojak character. It’s a vessel waiting to be used to convey a message. The instance is a specific use of that template. It’s one particular post, with one specific caption, created at a specific time for a specific audience.

This distinction is critical. The template holds potential value for different contexts and meanings; the instance realises it in this particular… well, instance. Economically, this means we’re dealing with two layers of production and consumption – the creation of the shared format itself, and the almost endless generation of unique, contextual uses of it. Memes are carriers of meaning, but also of attitudes – framing the same template with a different (social) angle can change the meaning of a meme from pro-stance to an opposite anti-stance.

Memes are the signals of preference. Not in the literal sense that a like equates to a demand curve, but in a more Hayekian way. Memes reveal what people notice and find relevant, what they consider acceptable to say in a given setting, or the mental frames they adopt in public. A meme often acts like a statement that tests against the audience. When it spreads, it’s a repeated confirmation that a certain framing works for a certain audience at a certain time. So the path a meme takes (where it goes and when) traces a live map of what people care about right now. That’s knowledge that’s contextual and hard to put into words any other way, which we can analyse post-factum. To gain a better understanding of this topic, I would recommend reading some of the most interesting works on the cultural economy, particularly the hermeneutics of Don Lavoie, as well as the works of Storr (2013) and Chamlee-Wright (2015).

But memes are also objects of allocation. When you interact with a meme, you’re allocating scarce resources of yours – time, attention, effort, social capital, even a bit of reputational risk. Something as simple as forwarding one meme is an investment of attention and a small wager on how it’ll be received by your network of contacts on a given social media platform. If you doubt it, think of a meme that made you laugh uncontrollably at first, but then you realised you shouldn’t have because of cultural, social or status-related factors. I mean, Irish banter is not something that everyone can engage in daily.

In that sense, memes are both measurements taken by the system (revealing preferences under real constraints) and inputs that feed back into it. Their usefulness depends entirely on context, timing, and the structure of the audience.

An Austrian inquiry into memes

A meme doesn’t have value like a phone or a computer. Or a car. Or a cat.

Yet it is worth something. Its value exists in the minds of people who find it useful. When someone focuses attention on it, they’re demonstrating that – for them, in that particular moment – the meme is a better use of their scarce time and social bandwidth than anything else they could be doing. Memes don’t spread because a platform or some higher power wills it. No collective agent is deciding on what is going to be viral on Tuesday. What exists is a cascade of individual, local choices. One person reposts some funny meme, another laughs at it, a third ignores it, but a fourth shares it again, a fifth loves it so much they buy the T-shirt with it (they actually do), and a sixth thinks of the meme’s format for their own marketing activities. The viral patterns we see are just the aggregate outcome of all these micro-actions interacting. And if you want to explain why a meme format persists, you look for the incentives of the people using it.

This gets to something fundamental. As Hayek taught us, the most relevant knowledge in a society is often tacit. We can’t fully articulate the rules for what will make our friends laugh or what might subtly offend our colleagues online. We just know that it might, and then we test it out. The success of memes is often more about informational fit rather than just raw humour. This also explains why an extremely popular template from the past has long since disappeared from the internet. It no longer serves the needs.

And even if most meme-sharing is casual, some users treat memes in a highly instrumental way.

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The online meme ecosystem is not static but rather a constant process of adjustment – a feedback loop between what people want (or can be encouraged to want), what they’ll tolerate, what they’ll share, etc. The ‘prices’ here are typically non-monetary, such as reputation, follower growth, social capital, and so on. However, these signals function in the same way as prices in any other market. They guide action and reallocate creative effort towards formats and messages that better serve users’ needs.

This leads us to the idea of economic goods. And, more specifically, to the idea of capital goods. As the eager Austrians here remember, it is not defined by its physical form but by its role in a plan. In the meme economy, the template can be perceived as that piece of deployable capital. It’s a reusable tool, a format one can wield to produce particular outcomes – be it gaining social platform followers.

Most importantly, memes are almost always complementary goods. A template is a document that is used to help you to create something. It is not something that you can use on its own. Whether or not it works depends on other things around it: do people trust it, and/or will they like it? Is it timely, or still relevant? Has it been edited well so that people can actually understand it? Can the platform handle it? After all, if it is a political meme, it can get banned because it triggers something unwanted by the platform. Finally, does the meme support the brand or story? In other words, is that meme actually about Ryanair or will it misfire? The same template in the hands of two different actors can have entirely different productivity because the surrounding capital structure differs.

Moreover, such capital goods are radically heterogeneous. After all, memes are not interchangeable. Some templates can be used for lots of different things. They are easy to read and can be adapted to many topics. Others only function inside a particular subculture, with lots of background knowledge and a narrow range of acceptable stances (think of the Karen meme I mentioned earlier – if you don’t know what Karen is, you wouldn’t be able to understand that meme).

This difference affects how long it will last. And it follows that there is a risk associated with deploying such a template. Obviously, if you and I share a bad meme online, it doesn’t matter – as long as it’s not making someone feel we are not a good commercial partner because of it. And if a meme creator misfires with some instance, making a joke of something that becomes a part of a negative trend, they can lose followers and share of market that affects commercial deals, and so on. These are all real and tangible effects on their market position.

Some readers can ask a very timely question – if I claim it is a capital good, where does monetisation come from?

Well, I hinted at most of that already. Most monetisation happens around memes, in adjacent markets, because the meme’s primary output is rarely a priced good. Direct pathways are the most visible, obviously. Some are straightforward retail (think of merch, like T-Shirts). Some are contractual (licensing a template or a character where rights are clear enough to do so). On the latter, Polish meme-maker (copypastas creator) Malcolm XD, published books and made movies around his creative outputs, including The Fanatic – a movie based entirely on the copypasta written and published on internet forums in the late 2000s. Sponsorship and affiliate funnels sit in the same bucket. The meme is the top-of-funnel attention device; the revenue arrives when attention is converted into forms of user interactions (again, think of Ryanair’s meme strategy, including their recent Twitter exchange with Elon Musk).

In all these cases, the meme is deployed as a productive input into a revenue-generating arrangement.

Indirect pathways are often more important and more robust. A meme page can function as a reputational machine. That reputational capital can then be exchanged for job offers or other paid collaborations. For some creators, the meme layer is primarily an audience-building layer that later enables migration to monetisable channels. Fundraising works similarly. ‘Coffee-buying’ mechanisms as well. Memes can mobilise attention and solidarity quickly, then convert that into donations once a cause or project is made salient.

In other words, building memetic capital goods is a way of positioning oneself to exploit uncertain future possibilities.

With that in mind, memes deserve more attention than their throwaway appearance suggests. Even if you treat them as ephemeral cultural cues, they still mobilise our scarce time and attention, they transmit signals about what an audience reaction to them will be, or shape the reputational and organisational pathways that later can be cashed out elsewhere.

Memes are not the whole story, obviously. They are part of cultural markets that have outgrown the Internet itself. But pay more attention to them, because – frankly – it is only one of thousands of newly emerged markets we are still in the process of discovering. Some, like cryptocurrencies, have tangible footprints (they are more traditional for most of the economists), while others are much more fluid. But all demand our attention; failing to recognise their influence means risking irrelevance.

My article ‘Ephemeral capital: How memepreneurs profit from memes’, that the above is based on, is forthcoming in Economic Affairs (DOI: 10.1111/ecaf.70034).

A shorter version originally appeared on the IEA blog.

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Memenomics

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In fact, that might be the best reason for it.

In the winter of 2026, Wroclaw, one of Poland’s most dynamic cities, found thirty million PLN (roughly 7 million euros) for its largest football club, Śląsk. The timing was notable, as the club had just been relegated to the second division and, according to its management, it was facing potential financial catastrophe only the city could have resolved. Yet this financial support was nothing new. For years, Śląsk has demonstrated a remarkable, consistent ability to absorb public funds with barely a ripple of opposition from the media or the city’s voters.

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To understand why this is striking, some context is necessary. Between 2016 and 2024 alone, Wrocław channelled a total of 172.5 million złoty, approximately forty million euros, into the club. It did so while carrying roughly seven billion złoty in debt.

This is not, however, the story of a struggling municipality. Wrocław is widely regarded by Poles as one of the country’s top cities for quality of life and its vivid culture. It is beautifully located, with mountains and national parks within an hour-two drive. It is ambitious and expansive, seemingly always in the middle of some new investment and something fun to do. And it’s not too big.

Almost a perfect place to live in, one could assume.

However, there’s a catch. Even a successful city must deal with the costly and unexciting realities of urban life. It shares the same everyday responsibilities as any other serious local government. This includes allocating taxpayer funds across various municipal areas such as schools and transport, disability services and social support, street maintenance, staffing and the constant housing pressures.

Essentially, Wrocław shoulders all these responsibilities but also carries a substantial debt – a common issue for Polish towns.

Yet somehow, amid all of that, there is always money for Śląsk.

Karol Michalak’s data journalism has done more than anyone’s to force this comparison into the open. Early childhood development programmes received 44.5 million złoty. Special preschools for disabled children: 36 million. Food assistance for struggling families: 30.9 million. Rehabilitation services for people with disabilities: 19.2 million. Material aid for students: 5.5 million. The total for all of those programmes, together, falls short of what went to the football club over the last years.

Wrocław found more money for professional footballers than for disabled children, food assistance, rehabilitation, student support, and volunteer emergency services combined.

It’s possible to debate the legality and ethics of any municipal budget, considering its costs to taxpayers and the benefits it provides, as well as whether it’s optimal. However, certain expenditures fall into a completely different category. Funding the wages of professional footballers, who operate within the deeply commercialised and globalised world of European sport, is not a serious answer to the question of how to manage a city’s finances. It is not a necessity in any given book.

Yet somehow, amid all of that, there is always money for Śląsk.

—

Obviously, Wrocław is not unusual. Consider Płock – about 110,000 people on the Wisla river banks, a compact old town, a refinery operated by Orlen just outside the city limits. Orlen is one of the largest petrochemical companies in Central Europe, reporting revenues close to seventy-five billion dollars last year.

The Polish State Treasury holds nearly fifty per cent of it.

Between 2016 and 2024, the city transferred at least 102 million złoty to Wisła Płock. More than thirty million euros, in a city of 110,000, for a professional football club in the commercial top flight.

Then, in the Upper Silesia, Piast Gliwice and Górnik Zabrze have each absorbed sums around the hundred-million mark. GKS Katowice, ninety-six million. Once the capital land of the Polish industrial development, has become the graveyeard of public funds that – instead of reframing the area’s economic potential – are getting wasted across variety of top-level football organisations scattered around the region.

The question that nags at anyone paying attention is not whether this is outrageous.

Beacuse it clearly is.

The question is what kind of machinery makes it happen.

What makes it happen reliably, year after year, across dozens of cities simultaneously, apparently insulated from the kind of scrutiny that would disrupt almost any other category of expenditure at this scale.

Let's be clear about one thing.

This is not a series of accidents. It is not a collection of random, disconnected events that just happened to unfold in unison across the country, year after year, for the entire thirty-six-year history of Poland's market economy.

No.

This is a system, and a coherent one. Understanding the system requires setting aside the usual dismissal, like ‘it’s just sport’ and ‘there are bigger fish to fry’, and looking carefully at what Polish football actually reveals about how public money moves, and who benefits from it.

And, ultimately, why it is so difficult to stop it.

The Idea of Public Choice

James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize in 1986 for applying economic reasoning to political behaviour, spent much of his career on a deceptively simple observation: the people who run governments are human beings with careers they need to carry on. And therefore, they are interested in various forms of political (and economic) incentives, if only, a desire to be re-elected.

Once you accept that, a great deal of apparently puzzling political behaviour becomes straightforward.

Let’s start with those thirty million złoty ‘investment’ for Slask earlier this year.

Did you know that Wrocław’s 30 million złoty subsidy for Slask breaks down to about 47 złoty per resident of this beautiful city?

For the median taxpayer, that is almost nothing. It’s lost in a budget of billions, because it is roughly the price of a meal out for a single person. It’s less than a Classic and fries in a Burger Ltd (Wroclaw, Psie Budy 7/8/9). So why would you care if you are a Wroclaw citizen. It’s not worth it, right?

But let us zoom out and think of the beneficieries of this subsidy, the club’s players, coaches, management, and the entire ecosystem of agents, lawyers, and hangers-on who extract value from its operations. For them, that same 47 złoty, multiplied across a city of ~650,000, pays multiple six-figure salaries.

I am not sure if the sources are correct, but some of them report that Mariusz Malec annual contract alone is worth ~740.000 PLN. On top of that you’d have to add some additional money that Slask had to pay to sign him from other club, some fees they had to share with his agents, and so on.

There are at least several people or organisations involed in the budgeting of the club. Lots and lots of beneficiaries.

But usually when we discuss the budgets of clubs like Slask Wroclaw or Wisla Plock, we talk about the aggregates. After all, some politicians claim, it is only this and that much per year per person in our town. And we will have so much fun and such a promotion out of such public expenditure.

We will get back to the politicians’ claims, let’s focus on the economy first.

This is what James Buchanan termed a concentrated benefit with dispersed costs. A small, organised group receives large, specific gains from a political institution. All, whilst the costs are spread so thinly across a large, unorganised population that they become virtually invisible. Again, Malec’s salary is only 1,1 PLN per year per person. It’s nothing, right?

Most people have better uses for their time than finding information on where does the actual financing of a football club in their town coming from. Surely, they either like the club or not, they follow football or not, but most of the time, they really do not care that much. They work, raise kids, maintain homes, pursue hobbies. They dance, walk, run, scroll through some stupid articles on Substack, and so on.

Mastering the intricacies of municipal football financing offers no material reward for most.

Also, one importa notion here – from the ‘average Joe’ point of view, a single vote cannot change anything. Even if they have noticed something, they often feel like they can’t do anything about it. They feel that the probability that their vote decides an election is infinitesimal.

The expected value of becoming informed is therefore near zero.

What is Rational in Politics?

Anthony Downs calls this rational ignorance. Bryan Caplan wrote a fascinating book on the phenomenon that I strongly recommend you to read.

Politicians understand it perfectly. They don’t fear informed voter backlash because voters often won’t become informed. The information is technically public (satisfying transparency requirements) while remaining practically invisible.

That’s why you have city councillors doing whatever they want in public, as long as there is no reaction from a large number of voters at once.

Rational ignorance protects their election pipeline.

Side note – when a business invests in product development, it creates value that didn’t exist before. That’s positive-sum. When that same business lobbies for subsidies or favourable regulations, it’s fighting over slices of an existing pie. That’s zero-sum at best, negative-sum once you count all the money wasted on lobbying.

That’s essentially what happens in football.

In its essence, Polish football clubs are master rent-seekers (Gordon Tullock’s term for such a phenomenon).

They invest heavily in political relationships. Club officials maintain close ties with councillors and mayors. They orchestrate supporter demonstrations timed to budget deliberations. That is why at some point you will see some media reporting that city this and city that, say that the football ‘investment’ will make enormous returns to the citizens (voters). The municipality orders studies to claim that it will impact local economy, and so on.

Obviously. Any type of public transfer will impact the local economy – the question remains, in what way.

The Chorzów case reveals the mechanism in naked form. The city ran a 4-million-złoty tender for promotion of its image with requirements that only Ruch Chorzów could meet, including mandatory use of the slogan, which happens to be the club’s marketing tagline. They created a legal pretense for a transfer by running a competitive process structured so only one bidder could win.

Multiply this across dozens of municipalities, hundreds of millions of złoty, years of accumulated practice, and rent-seeking becomes normalised.

The people who participate in this, engage in something called fiscal illusion - the true magnitude of government handouts is obscured through multiple fragmented mechanisms. This prevents the citizenry from understanding the cumulative fiscal impact. Slask Wroclaw has been sponsored by so many social institutions that probably even people inside of the city hall might be confused when enumerating them.

I mean, a zoo has been funnelling the money to Slask…

—

There is one another instrument that is often used by politicians in such scenarios.

They will use sophisticated ways to present the club ‘investments’ as vital social institution funding. You know, like people (including media!) claiming that spending money on football team is akin to sponsoring hospitals or theatres.

Getting back to Slask case, it is even more interesting because it also involves something that is known in economy as the Baptists and Bootleggers effect.

This one is fascinating. Bruce Yandle, who came up with the idea, describes how policies are often supported by an unlikely alliance of moral advocates (the Baptists) and self-interested parties (the Bootleggers). The Baptists are the sincere fans who view the club as a sacred community symbol. Their passion provides the moral legitimacy for public funding – we really need to support the club, otherwise it will fall. Right? Now, the Bootleggers are the agents, players, and contractors who extract millions from the club’s budget.

Politicians serve the interests of the bootleggers while hiding behind the moral cover provided by the baptists. They somehow understand all of this, whether they have names for it or not. They do not fear a backlash from voters who will not become informed. The subsidy is protected by the very structure of democratic attention.

We’ve seen them in these Twitter discussions over the last few weeks.

And so when the outsiders questions the efficiency of a massive ‘investment’ (and, practially, the public expenditure) the politician and the bootleggers frame the critique as an attack on the fans’ identity and local heritage. In effect, such an identity capture makes political opposition to football subsidies extremely costly, as it is framed not as a fiscal debate but as a cultural betrayal. Team betrayal.

In other words, people feel like opposing the mechanism is wrong.

—

You might ask, why is that still working?

Let me begin as simply as possible. The system exists because basic political economy incentives favour it.

Or, in other words, it works because it is worth it for those involved.

We live in a democratic political system. We vote for a group of people who then decide how our tax money is spent across different sectors. But in making those decisions, the politicians we elect interact with various other agents seeking to influence them.

Knowing why the system exists is not the same as understanding how it works.

There is a useful theoretical framework for understanding these interactions. It is called the entangled economy, developed by Richard E Wagner. Its core insight is that market and political exchange interpenetrate – they bleed into one another. And when they do, something interesting happens to the logic of both.

To see how this system operates, we first need to understand a basic distinction. In a pure market, exchanges are voluntary and mutually beneficial by definition. You want to watch a football game, you purchase a ticket, and the club receives money. Simple. Both parties walk away satisfied, or the transaction doesn’t happen.

Political exchange operates on a fundamentally different logic. When a municipality transfers money to a football club, no such bilateral consent exists. The person paying – you, along with thousands of other taxpayers – is often not a willing participant in the transaction. This is not to say you would necessarily oppose sponsoring a football club. The point is structural. In this scenario, the price signal that normally guides market decisions is absent, while the person making the decision bears none of the cost. A city councillor voting for a 30 million złoty subsidy to Śląsk Wrocław does not lose 30 million złoty himself. At best, he might lose some votes.

As we’ve already discussed, rational ignorance makes that outcome even less likely.

Wagner’s insight is that the modern economy is not one or the other.

It is both, tangled together in ways that make the pathologies of each mutually reinforcing. Polish municipal football is, in this sense, a near-perfect specimen.

Follow the money through this entanglement, and the machinery becomes visible.

—

Polish local governments have assembled a remarkably versatile toolkit for channelling public funds into football.

The most straightforward mechanism is the equity injection. The city simply purchases shares in the club. These shares are typically difficult to value and essentially impossible to sell. They sit on the city's books as assets, but their worth bears no reliable relation to what was paid. The transaction looks like an investment, but in practice, it functions as a grant.

Now suppose the city later wants to sell those shares to a private investor. This proves difficult, not only because the shares lack a clear market price, but also because any potential buyer knows they would be competing against an opponent with access to virtually unlimited public spending. Private money versus the municipal treasury is not a contest most investors are eager to enter.

Then there are promotional contracts. The city purchases advertising or visibility at prices no competitive market would sustain. These deals are sometimes tendered, but the tender terms are written in a way that functionally selects the club before the process even begins.

Loans and debt conversions could form another layer. Imagine that a club receives liquidity, the repayment date arrives, and the cash is not there. Instead of enforcing collection, the city rolls the liability forward, postpones it, or converts it into new shares. Yadda, yadda. The debt never disappears; it simply transforms, perpetually deferred.

Municipal-company intermediation adds yet another layer of opacity. A city-owned water utility, transport firm, or even the local zoo becomes the paying entity, signing sponsorship deals with the club. The money still originates with the public, but it now passes through a commercially structured intermediary, weakening the already faint lines of political accountability.

Finally, there are the stadiums themselves, perhaps the most elegant mechanism of all. The city builds, owns, and maintains the football facilities. It services the debt, covers upkeep, and often even pays the utilities. The club pays a preferential rent, typically well below market rates, while capturing all or most of the commercial upside, like ticket sales and matchday sponsorship. A public asset becomes, in effect, a disguised operating subsidy.

But – and it is worth underlining – this is at least a tangible asset. Unlike a grant or a never-repaid loan, the stadium remains on the city’s books. When private investment game returns, the city can still try to leverage it – if only by selling it to the club’s new owners.

—

Zagłębie Lubin represents the starkest case. KGHM, the copper mining giant majority-owned by the Polish state, has effectively underwritten the club’s entire operation for years. The reported numbers are staggering – cumulative sponsorship reaching nine figures over the past decade. KGHM is not a charity, obviously. It is a publicly listed company with minority shareholders and formal commercial obligations. But it is also a company whose board is politically appointed, and whose management understands that certain expenditures are expected of them.

This is what academic researchers call symbiotic clientelism. State companies fund clubs. Clubs provide political cover and mobilised support to the politicians who control those companies. And those politicians maintain the institutional conditions that allow the money to keep flowing. The loop is closed, self-reinforcing, and nearly impossible to break from the outside.

The second mechanism is fragmentation. Financial relationships are dispersed across enough institutional nodes that no single actor can be held responsible for the whole picture – it was the zoo, the housing company, and so on. It wasn’t the city itself, so we – the politicians – are not accountable for the transfer.

This is not necessarily the result of a coordinated conspiracy. It may simply be the natural accretion of a system where each participant has an incentive to find a new funding channel, and no one has an incentive to add up all the channels together.

The result, however, is fiscal illusion at an institutional level.

Funnily enough, it is not just citizens who cannot see the full picture. Politicians themselves often cannot.

And even journalists who try to reconstruct the total sum struggle to piece it together.

—

As we all know, the system is stable across multiple election cycles, through occasional prosecutions and occasional bursts of public outrage.

In preppering to write this piece, I have read articles from mid 2010s, late 2010s, and early 2020s, each reporting the problem and calling for its change.

Yet, the system persists.

Why?

To understand that requires looking at something less visible than budgets and contracts.

Mark Granovetter, the sociologist, spent much of his career dismantling a particular piece of economic fictio – the idea that markets are populated by abstract agents making rational decisions in a vacuum. Real economic action, he argued, is embedded. It happens between people who (most often) know each other, who owe each other, who share histories and favours and grievances.

Obviously we sometimes make transactions with completely random people and organisations, but we most often decide to do it in a trusted environment – or in trusted networks.

The decision to transfer thirty million złoty to a football club is made because the people involved know each other from other settings. In Wroclaw, we would have to look at famous national politician, Grzegorz Schetyna, and his people around the club. At one point, he was responsible for the football division of the club, even though is commonly associated with the basketball part of its operations.

Consider Szymon Michałek, who became mayor of Chorzów. He did not get there through any kind of a back corridor. He won an election with fifty-four per cent of the vote, first round, no runoff required. Super popular amongst his folks. Before politics, he had been a youth organiser for the club’s ultra section. His connection to the club and to the football community was entirely real. When he converted it into political capital, at some point promising a four-hundred-million-złoty stadium and pledging to protect the club at every turn, he was not building pure sentiment but rather redirecting something genuine toward ends that served a much narrower range of interests.

This is what makes the problem so difficult to untangle.

The value created by these networks is real. The collective identity, the shared memory, the sense that your city has something worth caring about on a Saturday afternoon – none of that is fake.

But the financing mechanism that sustains it extracts value from people who never chose to participate in it.

The network creates something worth having, then bills the entire city for it, and pockets most of the difference.

The identity dimension is also what makes political opposition to the subsidies so costly.

When a politician frames continued funding as a defence of the community’s inheritance, they are not entirely lying. The club does mean something to plenty of people.

But the meaning of the club and the identity gets conscripted to defend something quite different. Opposing the subsidy starts to feel like opposing the club itself – and so, the fiscal debate is quietly replaced by a loyalty test.

Let’s get back to the Baptists and Bootleggers concept. The original case referred to the alcohol prohibition. The case was simple. Baptists supported it on moral grounds, bootleggers supported it because it eliminated legal competition and made them rich. The coalition was, in principle, unstable, but in practice durable, because both groups wanted the same policy for entirely different reasons.

In Polish football, the Baptists are the sincere fans. They are people for whom the club is genuinely a symbol of collective memory and local pride. It can be a random person on Twitter, it can be a local journalist like Marcin Torz, or even a local councillor.

The Bootleggers are the people and organisations around the club – often, politicians and their network of people, who capitalise on this entanglement. But also footballers earning six-figure salaries, the agents collecting transfer fees, the executives drawing management compensation, and so on.

Such a coalition is powerful because the Baptists supply moral legitimacy while the Bootleggers supply lobbying muscle and financial resources. Politicians can claim, with a straight face, to be defending community values while effectively serving concentrated private interests.

Critics find themselves framed as cold outsiders attacking something people love.

Nothing like we’ve seen on Twitter over the last two weeks, right?

—

This is also why no single city moves first to end such a conundrum.

Consider the position of a reform-minded mayor in Wrocław. Withdraw the subsidy, the club suffers relative to rivals who still receive theirs portion of the public money, and may even be relegated to the lower divisions because of lack of interest amongst the private investors.

Obviously, the fans blame the mayor, and so, the opponent in the next election can run on a single promise, like restore the club to its previous position. Rebuild our local pride.

Make Slask Great Again.

Let’s consider a game in which you have only two outcomes:

1. Collective withdrawal would benefit everyone in football leagues across Poland.

2. But unilateral withdrawal punishes the mover (lower chance of competing against privately-owned clubs if the potential investor still feels like there’s no way to compete with the public funding).

This game is brutal but simple – if you don’t want to sink, make a move.

There’s plenty of similar patterns discussed by economists over the last century, mostly associated with the idea of common resources and Mancur Olson logic.

But, back to the discussed game – nobody moves, and the subsidy race continues until the money runs out; which, as several cities are now discovering simultaneously, it eventually does.

By the time the costs become visible, the switching costs have grown enormous. Contracts were signed expecting continued income. Players were promised wages. Stadium debt was structured around revenue projections that assumed ongoing public support.

If there is a clog in the system it can ruin everything and for everyone.

To stop now is not simply to withdraw a subsidy or sell the club; it is to trigger a cascade of defaults and disappointed expectations that will, inevitably, be blamed on whoever pulled the plug – not on the twenty years of decisions that made pulling it necessary.

Remember the saga around the potential selling of the Slask football club in the late 2025? It never happened and people blamed the local governining bodies for it.

But it was revealed over time that the investors wanted the city to continue some form of financial help – to continue some form of engagement. Similar patterns were observed in other Polish clubs over the years - with private money investors coming in and demanding some forms of public expenditure. Otherwise, they said, we will make the club bankrupt. So the local municipalities signed the newly framed contract or bought the club back because of the fear of the above-mentioned political repercussions.

And the circle continues.

The longer the system runs, the more indispensable it has made itself and the more it has built constituencies whose entire livelihoods depend on its continuation.

This is path dependence in its most punishing form.

Over time, the population adjusts its expectations. Citizens develop a kind of learned helplessness – not necessarily because they approve that, but because their preference for change has never found a viable outlet.

We started to normalise the situation in Polish football because no one ever won this war.

It is a lost cause, everyone knows that.

Privately, many of the people admit something is wrong. But publicly, they say nothing, because saying something carries a social cost higher than the expected benefit of being heard.

And so, plenty of politicians who fought against the public spending in sports across the country, are now vocal proponents of the status quo.

—

But in December 2025, prosecutors in Katowice charged twenty-four people in connection with illegal transactions in Ruch Chorzów, totalling twenty-nine million złoty, covering the period between 2011 and 2019. The investigation had compiled 160 volumes of evidence and interviewed over a hundred witnesses. Among those charged was Andrzej K., the former mayor, accused of acting against the city’s interests, rigging procurement processes, and violating electoral law.

The mechanisms were textbook. Eighteen million złoty in loans, twelve million of which was routed through a municipal company called Centrum Przedsiębiorczości (Entrepreneurship Centre) to obscure the true magnitude; additional annual share purchases; and that rigged four-million-złoty tender, its requirements crafted so precisely that only one bidder could ever have won it.

Subsidies do not merely distort markets – they distort elections, because the people who benefit most from them are precisely the people most motivated to vote.

The legal picture is more complicated than the scale of the pathology might suggest.

EU law prohibits state aid that distorts competition in ways incompatible with the common market. Whether and how that framework applies to professional football subsidies in Polish municipal settings is a genuinely contested question, turning on issues of selectivity, the distinction between genuine services of general economic interest and commercial entertainment, and the scope of the Commission’s enforcement discretion.

But again, the Chorzów prosecution was brought under criminal provisions concerning abuse of public office and procurement fraud, not EU state aid rules.

My opinion is that – unlike many other similar games – we will observe the fall of the system.

—

Here is a useful thought experiment. Imagine you are a reformer.

Not a naive one. You have read the reports. You understand the mechanisms. And against considerable odds, you manage to pass a new transparency requirement. From now on, all money transfers to football clubs in Poland must be itemised and published quarterly. You feel, cautiously, that something has shifted.

Something has. Just not in the direction you intended.

Within two budget cycles, direct grants have decreased. But marketing contracts with the municipal water utility have increased. A new promotional agreement appears, routed through the city’s economic development agency. The zoo signs a fresh sponsorship deal with the club. Dozens of new channels emerge, each one routing around your reform. The total flow of public money remains roughly the same.

You have given the system a workout, and it has returned leaner and more creative.

Nassim Taleb described antifragility as structures that not only withstand stress but also thrive on it. Every attempted reform reveals new weaknesses within the network. Each prosecutorial investigation maps, in painstaking detail, which mechanisms were visible enough to attract scrutiny, so that the next iteration can route around them.

There is also another layer to these considerations – a profound asymmetry of information. The insiders know which budget lines are being watched and which are not. They know, often before new regulations are signed, exactly what the new rules cover and what they do not, sometimes because they consulted on the drafting. By the time an opposition councillor or an investigative journalist has worked out what is happening, the mechanism has already shifted.

Regulatory capture closes the loop. Oversight bodies are staffed by people who live in the same world as the people they are supposed to oversee. They share political assumptions and social circles (if only because they are members of political parties), but since they live in the same city they might have children at the same schools as the people they write about or with whom they will be competing for the municipalities’ positions.

And rigorous scrutiny starts to feel, at some level, vaguely disloyal to their own party, neighbour, or a fellow football supporter.

—

I have written at length because I feel that we need a little more understanding of these mechanisms. It saddens me to see people entrenched in their narratives without understanding the quagmire they find themselves in.

And, as I said above, I also believe that this system will eventually almost certainly consume itself.

Why?

Because there is more and more money in Polish football, and more and more of it is private money.

Oh, and also because there was someone who actually triggered the change. Kudos to Jarek Krolewski.

In this context, there will be greater pressure to change the mechanics of financing this – after all – commercial market.

The second issue is that more and more political players will realise that they can capitalise on the reverse of this mechanism – especially those who operate at the national level and who are more often than not deprived of local ties.

And with this in mind, let us enjoy the weekend’s games!

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We were promised something.

Just over ten years ago, we were given the keys to the Dreamland. I could have access to everything whenever I wanted to. The digital revolution, with its endless libraries of goods available everywhere we go, was supposed to set us free. No more settling for what the VHS store had in stock (and what that random dude behind the counter felt like recommending) or the radio station decided to play. You will never again have to think about whether you can get this laptop cheaper somewhere else. What type of screws to buy for this piece of furniture, and where to get them. Where to find truly handmade wooden products. Which of the Friends actors wrote that book I’ve heard about on the tube. Every book, every song, every film the world had ever made was now just a click away.

No more late fees and due dates (I mean, that really was our reality not that long ago), unlimited rentals for a flat monthly fee, massive selection delivered straight to your… well, screen, and recommendations that are actually spot on.

At least we thought so

Anyone who has spent a Friday night paralysed on the sofa, scrolling through one of the seventeen video apps for forty-odd minutes, knows the truth behind such freedom.

There is one thing I must underline before falling down this narrative funnel. I have heard many voices claiming that this situation is somehow tragic… that is, that it is tragic that we have such a choice. Of course, this is nonsense. Having gained a choice and access to previously exclusive and seemingly impossible things for ordinary people is a blessing. I carry this conviction with me because I remember, as a child, being fascinated by our bi-weekly supermarket trips. In the 1990s Poland, the concept of a large shop offering virtually everything imaginable (at least from my 8-odd years old’s perspective) seemed unearthly. I was excited every time we were about to do it. Carrying whole bags of food and other goods, and the sheer joy of the experience itself, were simply delightful. It may sound silly now, but for a child growing up in post-Soviet gloom, it represented a breath of something impossible, a world known only from American movies.

Coming back to the main theme, we learned the hard way about the Netflix effect – you know, that thing that makes us freeze because there is too much to choose from.

The idea of having endless choice has led to a new kind of tiredness. We feel tired, if only because we have to make some decisions, and we know what is involved.

I’m willing to hazard a guess that it’s largely because we do not know ourselves. It is because with the ability – and the freedom – to choose, we also gain responsibility for making those choices.

And it’s not like we always had such responsibilities, but decided to go the easy way and made someone (some-thing) else decide for us, right? Right?

To avoid mental exertion, we often seek shortcuts by relying on institutions and influencers. We place our trust in high review scores on platforms like IMDB or Google Reviews, as well as in the endorsements of our favourite celebrities and the popular ‘you have to’ trends on TikTok. While these proxies help minimise the risk of making a poor choice, they come with a downside. They bypass our own learning process, allowing us to outsource the task of discovering our personal tastes, which ultimately prevents us from fully developing them.

How important is it to understand what we like?

Most of us have been taught to believe our preferences are stable things: a fixed catalogue of likes and dislikes stored somewhere inside us.

But have you ever really thought about it in a bit more depth?

We rarely know the true value of something until we’ve experienced it. I don’t know if this particular apple will be tasty. I often don’t even know if it is definitely sweet or sour. I expect the chocolate bar to taste like a chocolate bar, but I am not certain that it is what I really wanted at this point. Only after experiencing it do you know it was something that responded to your wants. Or that it was what you assumed it would be – a chocolate responding to your craving or a concert you were really wishing to participate in.

But most of us don’t have a pre-written answer to every question we ask ourselves daily. Like, for instance, what movie would we prefer to watch tonight? What do I like about this particular food? What would you like for tea, darling? Obviously, we know that we like it. That coffee was brilliant, an amazing one. That bar from last night, banger! Ellie, yeah, sure, loved ‘something about her’! But we don't deliberate. What made us like Ellie? What was it about the coffee that made us want to get back there? And that bar last night? We have been there ten times, and only now has it clicked. We simply feel it in the moment. Something's right, something fits, and so we code it in our heads so that it sticks as our preference point. We make it up as we go along, based on how we're feeling, on the situation around us, on whatever else is on our minds at the time.

This is known in behavioural economics as the psychology of constructed preferences. Economists in the field explain that declarations of preference tend to be post-hoc rationalisations – we decide first, and only then construct a reason for why we decided. People often don't understand how they make judgements which makes it very easy to give entirely wrong reasons for liking something.

What made you choose that fancy dessert in the restaurant last night? Erm, I felt like it. Obviously. Why wouldn’t you? It was only £27,50, and you had to book the table in advance. At least a week in advance. But perhaps – perhaps! – days earlier, you were watching some Instagram reel where a certain somebody said that it is the best dessert in all of London. And in that moment, you felt like it.

But did you really like it that much? Like, £27,50-much? Did you genuinely enjoy the Guns N’ Roses gig last summer in Warsaw? It was the one where there was a cacophony of sounds inside the stadium but outside you swore it sounded better. Have you felt like it or was it the very feeling of seeing them live - not listening to them - that made you enjoy it?

What this means in practice is that what we like can change dramatically, even in a very short period . And it is not because our tastes have genuinely evolved, but because our preferences were never as fixed as we imagined them to be.

Are there the Four Horses of Uncertainty?

We’re famously bad at predicting what will make us happy. We imagine the perfect, cosy evening with a classic film, only to find ourselves bored ten minutes in. And then we blame it on Netflix’s bad casting or the low quality of movies around. In reality, it’s a failure of affective forecasting.

It’s frustrating that a similar experience last week doesn’t always improve our ability to predict what will satisfy us today. We don’t truly understand what truly satisfies us without a framework for understanding ‘why’s’.

This isn’t a single simple phenomenon. It operates across four distinct and compounding dimensions.

(Before anyone points out there might be more depending on the approach – duh. I know, it’s a narrative decision.)

The first is a low awareness of one’s own preferences. People often decide what they like in any given moment without consulting any internal record of what they have enjoyed before. We don’t open a mental notebook before making a selection. People were writing about these ideas for a long time. Some of them belong to the area of experimental economics also worth checking if you feel like learning something new.

The second is a low articulation of those preferences. Even when we have a rough sense of what we enjoy, we struggle to put it into words. Why do you like the films you like? What specifically draws you to them – is it the pacing, the emotional register, the moral complexity? Most people cannot say, which means they cannot communicate their taste clearly to anyone or anything. At least not like Feynman, right? It is a feature of tacit knowledge, the type of knowledge only you have.

The third is a low predictability of future preferences. As I already said, we are famously bad at affective forecasting, that is, predicting how we will feel after selecting something. Initial anchors in preference formation might be arbitrary, but our subsequent assessments align with them, creating a powerful illusion of stable taste – where none actually exists. Having a similar experience last week doesn’t reliably make us better at predicting today.

The fourth, and perhaps most underappreciated, is low provenance clarity — the difficulty of distinguishing between preferences that are genuinely ours and those we have borrowed from others. This is what researchers call socially mediated preference formation, and it is more pervasive than most people realise.

Is it social to prefer something?

Taste is not formed in isolation, nor is it shaped by social structures that affect us from up high. When people don’t know what they want, they often look at what other people have selected and learn about the possibilities. We watch what others watch, endorse what others endorse, and so on, because in the absence of reliable self-knowledge, the choices of others function as low-cost proxies for quality.

In other words, we look at others and their choices, because it can make our decisions – and through it, our life – easier. This social dimension shapes our choices through two main channels.

The first is informational cascades – once we see the choices of others, it can pay to follow the crowd even at the expense of our own private signal. Ideas become popular, but then disappear quickly when people start to question them – or just simply forget about them.

The second is social proof. When it’s difficult to assess the quality of a product before buying it, it helps to seek the approval of experts, institutions or other well-known individuals (celebrities, anyone?), as this can make the decision-making process easier.

What both channels share is that they substitute external signals for the internal work of self-discovery. We don’t learn what truly satisfies us, but rather, what is safe to want.

There are other problems arising from it. One that comes to mind is that it can work the other way around, meaning that we might be afraid of voicing our preference because it can impact our public profile. In other words, we publicly admire the critically acclaimed drama while privately bingeing a reality show we would never admit to watching. We often don’t say we actually liked the Barbie movie because it can influence how we are perceived.

What are bottlenecks, and why are five of them relevant here?

The easiest way to explain the bottleneck in economic theory is by comparing it to a structural constraint. It is a point in the system where the flow of information, or the ability to act on it, is always limited. The problem is structural, and the digital environment has made each of its underlying problems worse.

Institutions emerge precisely to manage these constraints, to offer, as it were, a wider pipe. Tom Cruise, Netflix algorithm, and a curated New Yorker recommendation list are all the same type of response to genuine friction in the individual’s path toward knowing what they want. The problem is not that these institutions exist.

The problem is that they solve for the wrong thing.

They reduce the cost of choosing without reducing the cost of not knowing. And that, compounded across millions of individual decisions, is where the real damage accumulates.

As I said above, there are five main reasons why people are unsure about what they want, and these reasons are making the situation worse.

The first is that ex ante quality is unknown. You cannot assess whether a film, a book, or a restaurant will suit you until you have actually experienced it. Only after consuming a good can a person judges whether their choice was right. Yes, I know that you feel that you will enjoy this particular good… you know you will enjoy it. But it doesn’t work that way. You assume you will enjoy it, based on your previous consumption. But you are in no position to be certain about it.

The second is that introspection is noisy. I don’t mean that there is a particular set of sounds around it. We are prone to forecasting errors, and we often don’t understand our own judgments. We frequently don’t even try to understand ourselves. The effort feels unreliable.

The third is that the choice set is simply too large. We all know that it is extremely tiring when we are faced with thousands and thousands of choices every day, and by the time we are forced to decide, we often do whatever is easiest. With a large selection, decision paralysis increases, motivation to decide decreases, and satisfaction with the eventual choice diminishes.

The fourth is that learning by trying is costly. The various components at play exhaust us. The average person now spends over ten minutes just searching for something to watch. A third states that the time spent searching is a net negative, and among Gen Z, nearly 30% will simply give up and abandon the search entirely.

The fifth, and most consequential, is that substitutes dominate the market because of the interplay of all the above. As I said above, rather than do the slow, costly work of developing genuine taste, we reach for easier solutions. These proxies reduce the immediate risk of a bad pick, but they replace rather than support the individual’s self-learning process.

And so, what can we do about it?

The truth is that the platforms we use every day were built to exploit the above mechanism. It is just how the market runs – if something works, it will be employed by a market agent to profit from it. You might like it, or not, but it is nothing bad in itself.

Algorithmic recommendation systems, behavioural personalisation engines, social curation, and predicted-popularity algorithms each have something in common – they are not designed for preference learning.

They treat the user as a passive signal source. A sort of generator of clicks and watch-through time that can be optimised for the platform’s retention metrics. They are very good at predicting what you will watch next, also because they are actually heavily influential in the selection process.

I mean, it is also because it saves our time, isn’t it? I prefer the Discovery Weekly on Spotify than the actual record-hopping or other ways of searching for the perfect music. Nevertheless, these algorithms are poor at helping you understand why you liked what you just finished. They give you more of the same if you clicked on reaction button (‘liked’ it), but they do not know if it is because there was a specific tune or lyrics used by the artist.

What is more, they are actively reshaping the preferences they claim only to reflect.

AI-driven recommendations are no longer just mirrors of taste, but they are becoming moulds that shape it. Think of the annual ritual of Spotify Wrapped, which packages our listening data into a neat, shareable story about our year in music. We accept it as a true reflection of our musical soul. It was picked by pretty much every other major platform; they were all LARPing social media. It is called algorithmic drift – a gradual shift in user preferences caused by sustained exposure to recommendation feedback loops, complicating the fundamental distinction between ‘what I like’ and ‘what I was repeatedly exposed to’.

At the population level, this leads not to diverse individual profiles, but rather a homogenisation with millions of users funnelled toward the same small pool of popular content. The weird, rich niches of culture get left behind. The system drifts toward a generic, inoffensive middle ground, the cultural equivalent of wallpaper music in an elevator.

This creates a second-order problem. The fluidity of preferences engineered by recommendation systems is leading to a measurable lack of personal satisfaction.

Users feel tired. They look for ways out. And critically, measured trust in AI is now declining over time, while worry is increasing. Many users turned to social media creators as a more human alternative (and indeed, creator-mediated discovery has become an increasingly important substitution for genuine taste search, particularly among Gen Z).

The root problem, as the four insights above converge to suggest, is not the information available about any given product. It is the difficulty of matching the right choice with the specific, evolving, partially-understood person making it.

You.

Every existing solution optimises for something other than this. They capitalise on the broken mechanisms rather than attempting to repair them. They tell us what others want, what is trending, what the algorithm predicts will retain our attention.

None of them ask the more fundamental and more valuable question: what is it that you actually respond to, and why?

The platforms that will thrive in the next decade will be those that realise their primary product isn’t content, but clarity. They will move from measuring retention to measuring something closer to a Certainty Index — how confident and satisfied a user feels after making a choice.

What is truly mine?

Quick note everyone – check www.tasteray.com because they seem to respond to that very problem. Shoutout to the lads!