Today’s Clever is Tomorrow’s Cringe

Imagine you’re at dinner with some friends. 

Someone makes a joke, it lands, people laugh, all’s well and good.

Ten minutes later, the aspiring comedian runs it back. Different wording, same joke.

This time, the whole table cringes. 

What changed? Everything. Because humor, like most things actually worth having, is a stateful system, not a stateless system. 

A stateless system has no memory. Same input, same output, every time, forever. A vending machine.

A stateful system remembers. Every move changes the board. What you did last round decides what’s available to you this round.

Stateless may be boring and bland but it’s easy to manage. That’s why we love pretending the world and our organizations work this way. They don’t.

For years, when a brand commented on an influencer’s post, it read as charming. Cute. A little human moment from a big company.

Recently, when eBay did, an influencer named Seb rebelled and sent eBay an invoice for $3,120 for “social media exposure.” His post went viral, picking up 15 million views across TikTok and Instagram. 

As he said: “Normalize invoicing brands who try to use your comment section for free publicity. I am growing tired of billion dollar corporations in my comment section begging for attention. It’s time to make them pay. (Literally.)”

TikTok largely sided with Seb. 

One commenter wrote, “I’m so unbelievably tired of content creators just going along with the blatant unpaid advertising. Finally someone does something about it!” Another came up with the slogan, “silence, brand.”

eBay retaliated by blocking him and disabling comments on its new posts. TikTokers flooded to previous posts that still allowed commenting to shame eBay for its behavior. While we’ll reserve judgement on if this was a useful way to spend time, what ebay did was run an old play from an outdated playbook. 

If culture were stateless, the same move would work forever. But culture is the ultimate stateful system. It remembers everything you’ve done and updates your next move accordingly. What worked yesterday is exactly what won’t work tomorrow.

This is why culture building is an infinite game. There’s no “I’ve won;” there’s only “I’m currently winning.” 

There’s no such thing as figuring out how to ‘solve the game’ forever and ever because the game will always change.

The 5th century philosopher Heraclitus told us this 2,500 years ago, “Change is the only constant. No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”