Good people start out working together, then work together a little less, then turn on each other, all while staying good people and thinking they alone embody the true spirit of the movement. Riffing off his phase structure:.
People start a movement around a weird thing, with no hope of payoff, for sheer love of the thing. There might be fights, but they are nerd fights about technical aspects of the thing. Nobody expects to gain serious status. The zeitgeist changes. The thing catches on. Anyone willing to work hard can go to some virgin tract of ideaspace and start mining it for status. The returns on talent are high.
During this phase, the movement grows in three ways. Forward: People do more of the thing, better. Anyone with even a little talent can participate and create something genuinely new.
Their work will probably be appreciated within the movement. It might even be appreciated by outsiders, as an example of an exciting new trend. Upward: People build infrastructure for the movement. They start newsletters. They hold conferences or conventions. They found organizations. Everything is so new, and growing so fast, that even a little talent is enough to succeed. The first few people to make websites in , blogs in , or YouTube channels in got outsized followings that they were able to leverage into higher status later on.
The first few people to get on board the New Atheist, woke, alt-right, dirtbag left, and intellectual dark web movements all had easy opportunities to become famous; the next few thousand at least had the chance to be well-connected veterans. Other times the Ponzi is even simpler. If you stay around long enough, you gain skills and progress through the ranks. The main selling point is skill at martial arts, but the added bonus is that once you invest enough time, you gain status.
