The Compression

How movements form, win, and fade in the algorithmic era — and what comes next

In 2022, a Stanford-trained physician who’d quit her surgical residency to start a continuous-glucose-monitor company was largely unknown outside Silicon Valley wellness circles. Her brother, a Harvard MBA who’d worked in food and pharma consulting, was less known than that.

By 2024, Casey and Calley Means had co-authored a bestselling book, advised a presidential campaign, helped flip RFK Jr. into Trump’s coalition, and become the public faces of “Make America Healthy Again.” In May 2025, Casey was nominated for Surgeon General. In April 2026, the nomination was withdrawn.

Two years from obscurity to a cabinet-adjacent appointment. Then a collapse.

This is not unusual. It’s the defining political pattern of the last five years, and the Means siblings are one of at least a dozen clean examples. Understanding the pattern: what produces it, what it cannot do, and what comes next, is the project of this essay.

The pattern

A previously low-profile figure with credentials adjacent to (but not fully inside) an established institution adopts a single repeatable phrase aimed at a clearly named villain. They feed the phrase into a long-form podcast circuit. An army of clippers, sometimes paid, sometimes ideological, sometimes both, chops the long-form into hundreds of short videos. A monetization layer runs in parallel, ensuring virality converts to income before the moment passes. Within roughly two years, the movement produces an institutional outcome that would have taken a decade in the pre-algorithmic era.

A short tour of the dataset:

Andrew Huberman, a tenured Stanford neuroscientist, launched a podcast from a closet studio in January 2021. Two years later it was the world’s #1 health podcast. His “protocols” vocabulary — cold plunges, morning sunlight, dopamine stacks — is now standard wellness language.

Liver King (Brian Johnson, no relation to the next one) hit six million followers in a year promoting “ancestral lifestyle” raw-organ content, built a $100M supplement business, and collapsed in late 2022 when leaked emails showed his physique was steroid-built.

Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur who sold Braintree to PayPal, founded Project Blueprint in 2021. By 2025 it was a Netflix documentary, a longevity company with $60M in venture funding, and a “Don’t Die” community movement.

Christopher Rufo, a Manhattan Institute fellow, used a 2020 Tucker Carlson appearance and a sustained Twitter campaign to take “critical race theory”, a niche legal term, and turned it into Rufo-aligned education laws in over twenty states.

Andrew Tate accumulated 11.6 billion TikTok views in 2022. That July, he was Googled more than Trump and COVID-19 combined.

Zohran Mamdani entered the 2025 NYC mayoral primary polling in single digits. A viral content operation: bodega videos, food-truck interviews, a Coney Island polar plunge to dramatize a rent freeze, won him the primary 56 to 44, then the mayoralty.

Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation in March 2024. Within months, “phone-based childhood” was being cited in school-board meetings, state legislatures, and national policy across multiple countries.

The Mahsa Amini protests, the Canadian Freedom Convoy, the Means siblings, all variations on the same engine.

The mechanism is technically indifferent to ideology. The same playbook elected a Democratic Socialist mayor of New York and amplified a misogynist influencer in Romania. The same infrastructure that pushed Haidt’s school-phone reforms drove Rufo’s curriculum bans, turning critical race theory against itself. Treating the playbook as politically neutral is the only honest analytic posture, even if its consequences obviously aren’t.

The floor problem

Every successful figure above had to clear a threshold first. Call it the floor: the noise level beneath which content is functionally invisible. It’s not zero engagement. It’s the condition where the algorithm registers your post, declines to push it past your existing followers, and moves on. The single-digit-view post isn’t a failure of effort. It’s the default state of communication on these platforms.

The floor exists because every platform optimizes for retention. Your post gets shown to a small test audience. If they don’t pause, like, comment, or watch through, you don’t get promoted further. A post can travel from two hundred followers to twenty million, but only if it survives a series of compounding tests, each of which the median post fails. The platform isn’t hostile to new entrants. It’s statistically indifferent, which produces the same outcome.

The floor has gotten higher over time. In 2018, consistent posting on Instagram could build a real audience over a year or so. By 2024, the same effort produced negligible results because the supply of creators had multiplied while attention consolidated around figures who broke through earlier. Same pattern on TikTok, YouTube, and X.

This is the practical problem every aspiring movement faces, and it’s the part most strategy advice gets wrong. The successful figures didn’t clear the floor by being more diligent or authentic than the thousands of contemporaries posting similar content into the void. They cleared it through one of five mechanisms.

Borrowed audience. Almost every breakout figure since 2021 cleared the floor by appearing on a program with a pre-existing audience large enough to dwarf platform-level discovery. The Joe Rogan Experience is the single most consequential floor-clearing venue of the era. The Means siblings didn’t become MAHA leaders by posting to TikTok. They became MAHA leaders by going on Rogan and being clipped from there. Casey Means’s first Rogan appearance reached more people in three hours than her social presence had reached in years.

Paid amplification. Tate’s “Hustler’s University” paid affiliates a 48% commission to repost his clips. Thousands of accounts pushed the same source material into the algorithm simultaneously, and the algorithm read coordinated posting as engagement signal. It’s ethically fraught and increasingly attracts platform enforcement, but it works.

Single viral artifact. One moment that generates an engagement signal far above floor and produces enough algorithmic momentum to carry the creator above the threshold for everything after. Liver King eating raw testicles. Mamdani jumping into the ocean. Greta Thunberg’s “smalldickenergy” reply to Tate, retweeted 570,000+ times. The Mahsa Amini footage. These artifacts are nearly impossible to manufacture deliberately. Most attempts fail. Treating it as a strategy is closer to gambling than planning.

Institutional accelerator. A think tank, publisher, campaign, or media organization with existing distribution lends its infrastructure. Rufo at the Manhattan Institute. Haidt at NYU and Penguin. The Means siblings at Avery and through the RFK campaign. Mamdani through DSA’s organizing infrastructure. This mechanism is the least visible from outside but probably the most replicable. A movement without a borrowed audience, without paid amplification, and without a viral artifact can still potentially clear the floor by attaching to an existing institution that distributes for it.

Permission structure timing. The 2021–2025 wave was enabled by post-pandemic institutional distrust and a rapid shift in the Overton window. Movements aligned with the dominant cultural anxiety cleared the floor more easily than movements working against it. A health-skeptical movement launched in 2018 would have struggled where MAHA succeeded in 2024, not because the messaging was different, but because the Overton window had not yet moved.

The uncomfortable conclusion: most movements that fail to break through don’t fail because their messaging is wrong. They don't succeed because they lack access to these five mechanisms and are relying on organic posting strategies that no longer work at the scale the platforms have reached.

“Create good content and be consistent” is advice that produces visible results only when at least one of the five mechanisms is also operating in the background.

The “book”

One of those five mechanisms deserves its own section, because almost every successful movement in the dataset used one, and most people misunderstand what it’s actually doing.

The misconception is that a book is a vehicle for ideas. Write something serious, get reviewed in serious places, and gradually accumulate intellectual authority. That model still works for academic careers. But it does not clear the algorithmic floor, nor does it build movements.

What a book actually does is integrate the five functions above that no other mechanism integrates at once.

It launders credibility. A figure with a Penguin or Simon & Schuster spine becomes “the author of,” and that credential travels into venues that podcasts and tweets cannot reach. It doesn’t need to sell millions of copies to perform this function. It needs to exist with the right imprint.

It provides a six-to-twelve-month tour structure. Publishers run book launches as campaigns: pre-orders, embargoed media, podcast tour, op-eds, and festival keynotes. This is the single most reliable way to generate the long-form content that short-form clippers can mine. Without the book, the tour wouldn’t exist.

It supplies the single repeatable phrase. Good Energy. The Anxious Generation. Don’t Die. The Let Them Theory. Hillbilly Elegy. Titles aren’t titles; they’re the phrases that travel. The book forces the phrase into existence and then pays for its repetition across hundreds of venues.

It produces a citable artifact. Legislators, journalists, and policy organizations need something to point at. A podcast episode is hard to cite. A tweet is embarrassing to cite. A book is unambiguously citable, and the citation further launders the movement into legitimacy.

It creates a financial floor. The advance funds the months of work required to do the tour and build the next product, before the supplement company, the Substack, or the speaking fees come online.

The books that work as movement vehicles share a recognizable profile. The title is a phrase, not a description (Good Energy works; Metabolic Health and the American Chronic Disease Crisis doesn’t). The argument compresses to one sentence. The chapters are modular, so clippers and journalists can quote from anywhere without context. The voice names villains directly. There’s at least one counterintuitive statistic that anchors media coverage. And the book is short or feels short, 250 to 350 pages, because length signals to gatekeepers whether it can be summarized in fifteen minutes, which is the actual constraint on whether it gets booked.

The books that fail share an opposite profile. Books written to defend professional reputation in front of disciplinary peers don’t break through. Books that try to be both academic and popular usually achieve neither. Self-published books almost never serve as movement vehicles, because the imprint laundering function doesn’t occur.

A book is one of the most powerful instruments available to a movement that already has the other elements in place, and one of the least useful instruments to a movement that doesn’t. The figures who used books most effectively understood what the book was actually doing and deliberately built around those functions. The figures who treated the book as an end in itself mostly produced books that no one outside their existing audience read.

What the pattern can’t do

The list of successful examples is long. The list of durable ones is short. This is the part of the analysis most often skipped.

Liver King collapsed in eighteen months. Tate is in a Romanian courtroom. Bryan Johnson is fighting New York Times investigations. Casey Means’s nomination was withdrawn. The Freedom Convoy dissolved within weeks of being cleared from Ottawa. Even Huberman has absorbed sustained scientific criticism that has measurably dented his credibility with the audience he most needs.

The pattern produces founder-dependent movements. The clip economy rewards a face, a voice, a phrase, and when the face takes damage, the movement takes damage. The few cases that have outlasted their founders did so by converting attention into institutional infrastructure within a roughly eighteen-month window.

Rufo’s CRT campaign survived because it was institutionalized into more than twenty state laws. Haidt’s school-phone reforms survived because they crossed party lines and produced legislation in multiple jurisdictions, including Australia’s under-16 social media ban. The Mahsa Amini movement persisted because it tapped a pre-existing dissident network rather than relying solely on the viral footage that started it. The cases that didn’t make this conversion dissipated when their principal figures took damage.

The strategic question for any movement of this type is whether it can convert viral capital into an institutional position before the principal’s vulnerabilities are exploited. The Means siblings appear to have understood the question. The Surgeon General nomination was an attempt at exactly this conversion, and the fact that it failed tells us how narrow the window is.

The deeper structural problem: the same mechanics that produce an explosive rise produce explosive scrutiny. Every successful figure accumulates enemies in proportion to the attention they receive, and the platforms that amplified them on the way up amplify their critics on the way down. Because these platforms monetize both the rise and the fall of said individuals.

Saturation

The 2021–2025 wave is now visibly saturating.

The “credentialed-adjacent renegade with a podcast and a phrase” template is no longer novel. There are hundreds of figures running it across health, fitness, masculinity, longevity, education policy, and urban affairs. Audiences calibrate. Marginal returns drop.

Saturation also raises the floor. As the supply of credentialed-adjacent podcasters has multiplied, the engagement signal required to break through has risen with it. A 2021 Huberman appearing in 2026 wouldn’t break through on the same content. The book market shows the same compression; by 2026, the calendar of new health and longevity titles is so crowded that the book-as-floor-clearing-instrument is itself becoming less reliable.

This is the condition under which the next wave forms. New movement structures consistently emerge from formats the previous wave’s practitioners consider too cringe, too informal, or too amateur to take seriously. The political consultants of 2019 wouldn’t have advised a candidate to spend their time on TikTok. The health-policy professionals of 2021 wouldn’t have advised a Stanford-trained physician to go on Joe Rogan.

The breakthrough format is, by definition, the one currently being dismissed.

Where the next wave is forming

This is the speculative part. None of these is a confident prediction. Together, they suggest the rough shape of what comes next.

AI companions and the loneliness substrate. Per Pew Research’s October 2025 survey, roughly two-thirds of American teenagers now use AI chatbots, with about three-in-ten using them daily. Parents underestimate this by thirteen points. A meaningful share of these interactions aren’t homework, they’re companionship. Custom-built personas, sustained parasocial relationships, often experienced as romantic. The current discourse is moral panic: wrongful-death suits against Character.AI and OpenAI. There is legislation in California and Australia, and proposed bans in Manitoba to counter this wave. The political development underneath the panic: a generation is forming its first intimate relationships with corporately-owned tunable entities. The assumptions about love, attention, and selfhood that result will not map onto any existing political vocabulary. The first movement that learns to speak to that cohort in its own language — probably from inside the cohort itself — will look completely illegible to current observers when it appears.

The transpartisan anti-platform coalition. Australia banned under-16-year-olds from social media at the end of 2025. The UK, Singapore, and multiple Canadian provinces are moving in similar ways. State-level school phone bans now have bipartisan support in the U.S. Read as moral panic about screens, this looks like a passing concern. Read as political development, it’s the early formation of a coalition with the structural features of a successful movement. There is a clear villain (the platforms), a repeatable phrase (”phone-based childhood”), a foundational book (The Anxious Generation), and a policy pipeline that already runs. Whether this coalition stays narrowly focused on youth protection or expands into broader anti-platform politics: antitrust, Section 230 reform, or regulatory restructuring, is the open strategic question.

Livestream as the new long-form. Kai Cenat. IShowSpeed. Adin Ross. Streamers who pull in viewerships dwarfing those of most podcasts and political programs combined. The 2024 male youth electoral shift was substantially mediated through this layer. The next breakthrough political figure is more likely to emerge via livestream than through podcast appearances alone. Political strategists are under-investing because the format comes across as juvenile. The floor on livestream platforms is currently lower than the floor on TikTok or YouTube precisely because adult institutions haven’t flooded the space.

The migration to semi-private organizing. Discord, Telegram, Substack chats, private group chats. Public-facing social media has become a performance. The actual coordination has moved to spaces journalists can’t easily cover, researchers can’t easily scrape, and platforms can’t easily moderate. The next major movement may form substantially out of public view and become legible only after it’s already cohered. This is a different epistemic situation than the 2021–2025 wave, which was at least partly trackable through public metrics. It also represents a different solution to the floor problem: rather than clearing the public floor, organize beneath it.

The public floor refers to the minimum level of social, institutional, and cultural acceptability required for an idea or movement to exist openly in mainstream public space without being immediately dismissed, censored, ridiculed, or professionally punished.

It is closely related to the concept of the Overton window, but slightly different. The Overton window describes the range of ideas considered publicly acceptable. The “public floor” is the threshold that determines whether a movement can gain traction openly at all.

A populist anti-AI politics. The current AI conversation is fragmented across existential risk, labor displacement, and corporate ethics. None has produced a mass political constituency. A fourth frame is forming around personal harm — chatbot-induced delusions, parasocial AI relationships, AI-generated impersonation, deepfake harassment, the accelerating sense that something about this technology is destabilizing minds and relationships. The first political figure who credibly speaks to this frame, in language that doesn’t require technical fluency, will likely build a constituency that crosses the existing left-right axis. The book that crystallizes the frame — the Anxious Generation equivalent for AI — hasn’t been published yet. Its publication will probably mark the moment the movement becomes legible to mainstream observers.

Post-influencer aesthetics. Audiences fatigued by the obvious commercial layer of the 2021–2025 wave are migrating toward creators who perform unmonetized authenticity, deinfluencing, and explicit rejection of the supplement-and-sponsorship economy. This is the same impulse that produced the original wave, recalibrated against the new establishment that the original wave became. The recursion is part of the pattern.

Six predictions

Held loosely. Forecasting is the part of analysis where confidence should be lowest.

One. The political-movement structure described here will continue producing new formations through at least 2028, with marginal returns declining and half-lives shortening. Expect the next cohort to rise faster, monetize harder, and collapse sooner than the 2021–2024 cohort.

Two. The floor will keep thickening on major platforms. Successful new movements will increasingly bypass the public floor entirely, building first inside Discord, Telegram, livestream chat, and email lists, surfacing publicly only after they’ve cohered. The era when a movement could be tracked through hashtag analysis is closing.

Three. The durability question will become more important than the breakthrough question. Movements that successfully convert viral capital into institutional position: laws, organizations, infrastructure, candidates, books that become legislative reference material, will increasingly be distinguished from movements that don’t. Many figures currently prominent will be largely forgotten by 2030. The ones who institutionalize won’t.

Four. A transpartisan anti-platform politics will emerge as a major axis of political conflict by the 2028 cycle. It will produce legislation that the current free-speech consensus on both left and right is not prepared to defend, and the resulting realignment will be one of the more consequential political developments of the late 2020s.

Five. AI companions will produce a generational cohort whose assumptions about intimacy, attention, and selfhood diverge from those of prior cohorts in ways that current political vocabulary does not capture. The first movement to articulate this divergence in its own terms, not as moral panic, will achieve outsized influence with that cohort.

Six. The breakthrough format of the late 2020s is currently being dismissed as cringe, juvenile, or unserious by almost everyone qualified to write essays like this one. This isn’t a paradox. It’s the structural condition. The honest analytic posture is to flag the dismissals, watch what teenagers and twenty-year-olds are doing in spaces where adults aren’t paying attention, and accept that the most important developments of the next five years will be visible to insiders before they’re visible to observers.

What this means for you

If you’re trying to build a movement, an audience, or a public-facing project, the operative question isn’t “how do I create good content” or “how do I build my brand.” Those questions assume the floor doesn’t exist.

The operative question is: which of the five floor-clearing mechanisms do I have access to, and how do I sequence them?

If the answer is none, the honest move is to stop and find one before doing anything else. The movements that succeed aren’t the ones with the best ideas. They’re the ones whose principals correctly identified the mechanism available to them and built around it.

If the answer is one or more, the next question is whether you understand what each mechanism actually does. Most people misunderstand the book. Many underestimate the institutional accelerator. Almost everyone overestimates organic posting.

And if you’re not trying to build a movement, if you’re trying to understand the political and cultural landscape of the next five years, the operative question is which of the formations forming right now, mostly out of public view, will surface as durable forces by 2028. The answer isn’t in the legacy media coverage. It’s in the spaces where the coverage hasn’t arrived yet.

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This article may be shared, reposted, and republished with appropriate credit to the author (Robert W. Malone, MD, MS).