Model Collapse - The rise of Substack, Twitter, and Polymarket
We are living through a narrative breakdown. The neoliberal order that defined the post–Cold War world, open markets, global capital, liberal immigration, and U.S.-led multilateralism, has lost its grip. Three ruptures mark the moment:
· Tech has replaced finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) as the primary source of economic power.
· The U.S. is actively dismantling the international rules-based system it once enforced.
· The core tenets of neoliberalism, especially on immigration, climate, and globalization are being questioned across the political spectrum.
This is more than a geopolitical pivot. It’s a collapse of the model that explained the world and in its place, new narratives are struggling to emerge. And if we want to see where those narratives are forming we cannot look to the old institutions. Instead we must look to Substack, Twitter, and the markets where knowledge now leaks and coagulates in real time.
When Models Become More Useful as They Become Wrong
We often say that all models are wrong, but some are useful. Yet some models, especially governing narratives like neoliberalism, become more useful as they become more wrong, because usefulness isn’t just about accuracy, it is about coordination.
When a model becomes embedded in institutions it gains inertia. It provides a shared language, a mental map, and a rationale for policy and power. Its defenders believe in it and are often professionally, politically, and financially invested in maintaining it.
Model decay follows two common paths:
· Facts change, but the model doesn’t. For example, the rules-based international order made sense when the U.S. was an energy-independent, industrial exporter and global military hegemon. By the 1970s, America was energy-dependent, facing industrial rivals, and turning inward, yet the Cold War frameworks endured.
· The model is useful to elites but it drifts from the experience of the majority. Globalization, for instance, was long framed as an unambiguous good, even as it hollowed out Western industrial employment. The model persisted not because it described the world but because it justified it.
Today we’re past the petrodollar paradigm. The U.S. is energy-independent again. The industrial base remains hollowed, but the new driver is compute. Tech rather than oil, steel, or even high finance, anchors power. The old models no longer apply.
Why Traditional Institutions Can’t Keep Up
In past cycles we might have turned to mainstream academia, legacy media, or Wall Street research to help us make sense of change. But these institutions are themselves embedded in the collapsing narrative. They are, in effect, part of the problem.
Worse, their business models no longer support real-time, high-resolution sense-making:
· Academia struggles with incentive misalignment and is epistemically rigid.
· Mainstream media has lost authority and runs on outdated ad-driven dynamics.
· Bank research is now largely client-gated and less public-facing, and the rise of alts means much cutting edge work is deliberately kept secret.
They are incapable of updating and economically unable to adapt.
The Rise of Narrative Leak Platforms
In this vacuum, new platforms have emerged to fill the interpretive gap. Chief among them: Twitter, Substack, and Polymarket. Each offers a different piece of the new narrative infrastructure:
1. Knowledge Leaks - When the dominant model fails to track reality, experts outside the institutions begin leaking real insight. These are people with deep, domain-specific experience, engineers, geologists, commodity traders, who now have channels to reach a wide audience.
Example: Doomberg, the anonymous energy writer, has upended assumptions about U.S. energy needs and grid demand. Insights that once lived in paywalled consultancies or trade publications are now public.
2. Narrative Entrepreneurs - In periods of breakdown, new narratives emerge from the fringe. These entrepreneurs often speak in speculative or extreme terms, but they serve a purpose: to question what had been unsayable.
Curtis Yarvin, for instance, offers a radical critique of liberal democracy that resonates in tech circles, not because it’s widely accepted, but because he has the credentials and daring to say what others won’t. From the left MMT advocates or rationalists have played a similar role in challenging economic orthodoxy.
3. Market Signals of Narrative Collapse - Polymarket is the most interesting development here. It represents Hayekian knowledge: decentralized consensus compressed into price. When Polymarket is “right” and traditional forecasts are “wrong,” it doesn’t just suggest informational failure. It signals narrative failure: a large group of people not only disagrees with the consensus, but believes the divergence is actionable.
These platforms have to some degree aggregated, and importantly provided and economic model for, what was previously dispersed among blogs and message-boards. Podcasts, too, play a significant role, though they do not yet have a similar aggregating platform, and Twitter and Substack play an important role in surfacing new and niche pods.
Much tends to be made of closed groups on telegram, Discord, whatsapp, etc. This is mostly because of the glamour of secrecy rather than importance. The principle that ‘if it is on TV, it is a TV show’ holds here: in the attention economy an idea has value once it starts to gain attention, so it is of limited value to try and look upstream of public platforms.
Post-Truth Is a Symptom, Not a Diagnosis
It is common to wring hands over our "post-truth" era. But truth is not the core issue, consensus is. We are not post-truth; we are post-model. The narratives that once structured our understanding have decayed. No shared map means no shared reality.
When sense-making collapses, moral language rushes in to fill the void. It becomes easier to condemn than to interpret. But beneath the outrage is disorientation: the old frameworks don’t work, and no replacement has achieved legitimacy.
Take Jamie Dimon's recent remarks: he linked immigration to stagnant wages in the bottom 20%. Ten years ago there would have been a chorus of op-eds explaining why Dimon was wrong, five years ago he would have been cancelled. Today the statements attract attention but little more. That shift tells us something fundamental has changed.
Narrative Regime Change and the Investment Horizon
There is no consensus replacement yet. The tech/right narrative appears ascendant, but is far from dominant. It may yet be overtaken by a progressive alternative, perhaps something like the “abundance agenda.” But the establishment is unlikely to produce it. The break down is too profound and the almost all establishment institutions too tied to the old model. What we are watching is narrative regime change. The traditional sense-making class, legacy media, academia, even mainstream think tanks, has been sidelined. The new narratives are being forged in real time, on messy, entrepreneurial platforms.
This matters for investors. Getting the petrodollar story right gave you a 50-year investment tailwind. I doubt the next model will last as long but it will be just as powerful while it holds.
My bet is on the technodollar: a regime where compute, not capital or commodities, becomes the organizing principle of global power. But what matters now is knowing where to watch: the leaks, the prophets, the price signals. In a collapsing model landscape, these are our compasses.