Narrative Oversaturation

When narratives overextend into reality

Jan 29, 2025

Welcome to all the new subscribers that have joined us over the last week! If you haven’t already, you should check out my last article here:

The Erosion of Taste in the Age of Mass Production

January 15, 2025

Read full story

If you like what you read, please subscribe to Superfluid here:

It's no secret that narratives rule the world, but at what point do they become oversaturated?

From a tech perspective, the last two weeks have been insane.

We've seen Trump's inauguration become a parade of tech CEOs willing to do anything to appease him in exchange for looser regulations and more business-friendly policies, and then pivoted straight to the release of DeepSeek and the various takes on what this means for AI safety, infrastructure and apps.

Every time I open any social media app, I’m hit with a deluge of posts on either topic that sounds more confident than the last. Everyone’s not only an expert, but they’re also the one who has finally figured out what it all means.

Hot takes and outlandish opinions are the recipe for going viral, but something really feels different about the last two weeks.

What I’m really intrigued about is the growing chasm between the level of open conviction and what they truly believe, and how they let that guide their actions and decisions.

Focusing on tech and VCs more particularly, many live by a common tech maxim "strong opinions, loosely held." Originally concocted as a way to have easily malleable conviction - a true paradox in itself, but necessary in a fast-paced technologically driven environment - its basically become a shield for reactive thinking.

In the case of DeepSeek, VCs' immediate responses mapped perfectly to their portfolio exposure. Investors who were heavily invested in AI apps celebrated it as a way to increase margins for their portfolio companies.

Meanwhile, foundational model and defense tech investors cried about it being a national security threat. Funny how that works for an open-source model.

This is what happens when your opinions are closely linked to financially incentivised narrative positioning.

However, the irony is that this makes actual conviction hard to maintain. The funding markets for early-stage technology are designed to be illiquid for a reason. It allows companies to experiment with the novel and explore uncharted territories through trial and error. It also forces companies to commit with conviction and build something meaningful.

When investors look to over-position the narrative, or worse yet, let the short-term narrative guide their longer-term advice, we’ll be stuck in an endless cycle of narrative oversaturation, where the strongest conviction is reserved for the meta-game of narrative manipulation itself.

Since this week’s article is shorter than normal, I thought I’d chuck in a few of my favourite memes about DeepSeek!