Jason Schreier

But it raised all these questions about modern marketing firms that claim that they can like organically produce.

build online engagement or viral fame you know by like seeding accounts and having accounts you know show clips from you know from a band or something and then that if you do that enough it fools the algorithm into thinking that this is bigger than it is which then actually causes it to become big so you can

basically game the algorithm in order to engineer viral success for your client and just to be clear like it's not really demonstrated the extent to which geese actually benefited from this like they're actually a band that has a following that people know about and they're good and everything but they were kind of an inflection point in talking about this kind of stuff it's come up in a lot of other stories recently in the news as well

It kind of ties in with the whole clipping economy thing, the stuff that ties in with like clavicular and these other kind of right wing or like manosphere influencers.

It's kind of the question of is modern marketing, is modern social media marketing just elaborate advanced astroturfing?

And is there really a difference between the two things?

It's this whole world that seems very undefined and a little mysterious, but does seem like...

It's very relevant to current marketing.

And I don't know how it works.

I think a lot of people don't know how it works.

And that's what makes it hard to talk about.

And maybe a reason that we shouldn't even get too deep into it.

We can maybe link to a couple of things.

Garbage Day has done some great coverage of this, like summarizing what's going on.

But it is something that's just like in the back of my mind whenever I think about marketing and trying to sell attention in 2026.

I mean, it feels like that's what happened in Crimson Desert.

That was everywhere on TikTok and Instagram before launch.

But again, who knows how much of that was organic.

And even saying it, right, it feels like conspiratorial.

Well, we don't have any answers to that.