Welcome to the Sociology of Business. In my last analysis, Virality is dead, Lee Maschmeyer and I explored why, when everything is viral, there is no virality. If you are on the Substack, join the chat. With one of the paid subscription options, join Paid Membership Chat, and with the free subscription, join The General Chat on The Sociology of Business WhatsApp group.
In the pre-algorithmic culture, a viral moment could dominate conversations for weeks. A Super Bowl commercial like Apple’s “1984” could define a brand for years.
Viral moments of the past had staying power because the cultural metabolism was slow enough to digest them. There was enough time and context for viral moments to preserve their newness, nurture their original references, accumulate meaning, and become material for future remixes. There was only so much content, so many chronological feeds, and so many creators. Cultural moments were far and few in between. For example, when it was widely shared, Gingam Style was a new format; it was rich in local cultural hooks, it accumulated meaning as it spread from South Korea to the West, and it became an often remixed meme that assumed a social life of its own.
When something “broke through,” it was not because it was served through algorithmic personalization to a number of taste profiles and optimized for maximum engagement. It was because it developed cultural legibility.
In contrast, Bad Bunny and Super Bowl ads were all over my social feeds for a day.
They were short-lived not because they weren’t good; it’s because my (and everyone’s) algorithmic feeds refreshed the next day with new content. Even so, brands spend large sums of money trying to create moments that will “break through” and spread rapidly. Pay a celebrity partner to post once and move on. Or influencer campaign where hundreds of creators make nearly identical content. Or shock-value creative designed to generate conversation, but not tied to any durable brand meaning. What brands do not realize is that they are competing in an environment where breaking through means nothing because everything, by design, breaks through now.
Platforms are literally made for virality. Virality is so common that it is no longer a competitive advantage, but table stakes.
Algorithmic optimization treats every piece of content as an experiment in engagement maximization. All of the corresponding generates metrics—impressions, views, shares, comments are a trap, because they encourage optimization for short-term metrics that the algorithm already knows how to game.
It turns brands into content factories producing variations on what worked yesterday, which is just repetition of the past dressed up as innovation. And brands are seeing diminishing returns on every dollar spent chasing attention this way.
None of it builds the kind of cultural value that translates into desirability, pricing power, customer loyalty, market share growth or sustained competitive advantage — and anything that doesn’t drive long-term value is just expensive distraction.
Brands face a choice: compete in the attention economy where virality is common but meaningless, or compete in the legibility economy where recognition is scarce but valuable.
Legibility is something that brands can actually build and defend over time because it requires cultural program that can’t be instantly copied or algorithmically optimized. This program is about creating friction; designing for slow build; creating limited access; and building meaning over time rather than fighting for immediate engagement. It’s not about making things harder; it’s about making things matter more to consumers
Legibility means launching cultural products that accumulate meaning over time, rewarding cultural literacy required to understand what makes something culturally (and subculturally) significant, and what creates and nurtures enduring fandoms, not short-term algorithmic engagement.
Cultural value indicates whether a brand built something durable or rented attention temporarily from an algorithmic system designed to move on to the next thing as quickly as possible. Cultural value is in things that algorithm cannot compress, and it’s made of three aspects: