If you pay attention online you might have heard of “The Current Thing.”

What’s The Current Thing? The Current Thing is any concept that grabs hold of public attention, sometimes out of nowhere, and which demands an answer: are you for or against?

I also like Marc Andreessen’s explanation.

If not supporting it gets you disinvited from the dinner party, it’s the current thing.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) April 5, 2022

But where does The Current Thing come from? Does it just happen or is it made? How does it work?

And so, I read through the paper “Availability Cascades and Risk Reputation,” after Andreessen mentioned it as a seminal work on The Current Thing. Here’s how the paper begins:

“An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse. The driving mechanism involves a combination of informational and reputational motives: Individuals endorse the perception partly by learning from the apparent beliefs of others and partly by distorting their public responses in the interest of maintaining social acceptance.”

There’s a lot in just that first paragraph. Some of the main points:

• There’s a “self-reinforcing process…” That is, a positive feedback loop.
• “Increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse.” People start to hear about the current thing everywhere and therefore start to believe it.
• “The driving mechanism involves a combination of information and reputational motives…” The informational motives comes from our inability to vet all information. The reputational motives come from not wanting to appear out of synch with others.

The paper was published in 1999, but it relates well to today.

I don’t write on a breaking news cycle so I’m late to the party here. You may have already seen a common representation of The Current Thing in the form of the “NPC Wojak badge,” which looks like this (original poster currently banned from Twitter, of course).

There are even people selling t-shirts of it (Ukraine version here).

But is The Current Thing made or does it just happen? On the “made” argument is the chain reaction — a positive feedback loop — that the authors above describe as being designed. What interested me was that the positive feedback loops are engineered and without consideration of unintended consequences. The goal is not a stable system, but movement in a desired direction.

This is different than my earlier post on Morals of the Moment, where I described how focusing on what is “right” led to bad outcomes like the student loan crisis, bigger wildfires, and worse hiring practices for minorities.

“Leading with morals makes it uncomfortable to disagree with the reason for doing something. Or do you want students denied an opportunity at college? Or is it you want forests to burn? Or do you want to deny people a fair chance at employment?

“When we lead with morals we also more easily fool ourselves. I doubt that proponents of any of the policies above really wanted the outcomes their policies produced. But those paths were made smoother by believing that they were doing the right thing.”

Here are some of the main points of the paper “Availability Cascades and Risk Reputation.”

Availability Heuristic. People have limited time and limited access to information. Therefore, they need to use heuristics just to get through their day — the Availability Heuristic comes in here.

“[T]his heuristic interacts with identifiable social mechanisms to generate availability cascades… through which expressed perceptions trigger chains of individual responses that make these perceptions appear increasingly plausible through their rising availability in public discourse… Under certain circumstances, however, they generate persistent social availability errors — widespread mistaken beliefs… The resulting mass  delusions may last indefinitely, and they may produce wasteful or even  detrimental laws and policies.”

We can’t investigate many new claims. We can’t even access and analyze the data on many claims. What do we do instead? Take a clue from the responses we see others make and ride on their judgment. But did they make their judgments