When the edge pays best

Every group settles on its own way of doing things. How to dress for a family visit, what counts as a proper gift, which jokes land at the table. Most of us belong to a group partly for that steadiness, the relief of being in step with the people around us.

Every group also has a few who love the new. They try the strange thing first, and if it holds, the others follow, slowly.

That slowness used to be built in. For most of living memory, whatever reached a whole country passed through a handful of hands: a few channels, a few newspapers, a few stations, a few editors deciding what the evening would carry. Those people had every reason to stay near the middle. Upset the audience and it switches off, so the safest choice was the familiar thing with a little novelty on top.

The feed on a phone works the other way round. It is tuned to whatever makes a thumb stop, and what makes a thumb stop is surprise, anger and fear. Those live at the edges. So the people making things for it learned to move away from the middle, sometimes toward views they do not even hold, because the edge is where attention gets handed out.

Here is the trouble. An edge that gets that much attention stops being an edge. It becomes the new middle, and the next person hungry for attention has to go further out still.

Culture used to change at the speed of its most careful gatekeepers. Now it changes at the speed of its loudest outlier, and then faster again. No wonder so many people feel unsteady. What once slowed change down has been replaced by something built to speed it up, and nobody running it is rewarded for easing off.