There’s a moment—somewhere between the last viable business model and the first desperate publicity stunt—where an ecosystem stops being an ecosystem and becomes a carnival ride with broken hydraulics. In the 1970s it was Fonzie on water-skis; in 2025 it’s Web3 shoving “social trading” into your feed like a malfunctioning vending machine. That’s what “jumping the shark” means: the instant when the cultural machinery quits running on narrative logic and starts running on fumes.
Once upon a time—you remember, back when apps were apps and not lifestyle debt instruments—“fake it till you make it” was actually an operating principle. Between 2010 and 2021, Silicon Valley had enough soft money, soft landings, and soft-headed optimism to cushion any amount of managerial delusion. You could set $50 million on fire, call it “iteration,” and still get acqui-hired like a prodigal nephew returning from his gap decade. It wasn’t innovation; it was a boomtown religion. And the tithe was paid in stock options.
But the miracle stopped. The sky closed. The ZIRP angels retired to their offshore villas. Now the same behaviors that once read as “visionary” look suspiciously like negligence. You’re not “failing fast” anymore—you’re failing slow, publicly, and without severance. The creator economy is no longer an economy; it is a digital Dust Bowl populated by newsletter sharecroppers and podcasters panning for algorithmic gold. The trust reserves are tapped out. The opportunity costs have become geological.
And right at this moment—this exact historical nanosecond when everyone is out of cash, out of patience, and out of plausible deniability—Web3 decides to take its big swing. Its crowning innovation. Its torch held high to light the future.
Social trading.
A parasocial casino with web-native paint and a rent-seeking engine thrumming underneath. A scheme so exquisitely ill-timed it feels like performance art. It’s pitched as “decentralized epistemology,” “permissionless coordination,” “the next evolution of digital community.” In practice it’s a liquidation sale of whatever trust still remains, packaged in a shiny interface that whispers, “But this time the house doesn’t win… unless you’re the house.”
This is Web3 jumping the shark—not out of bravado, but because the writers’ room has run out of plot.
“Social trading” in 2025 feels less like a product launch and more like the final boss of late-stage crypto cope. It’s the point where the ideology circles back to devour its own tail: we were promised exit from rent-seeking middlemen, and the exit turned out to be a slightly more baroque rent-seeking middleman wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and quoting Vitalik in the whitepaper. Social trading is the tell. It’s what you build when you’ve accepted—deep down, in the part of the reptile brain that still flinches at quarterly numbers—that real structural change is off the table, so the only remaining alpha is extracting another turn of the financialization crank. Turn followers into options contracts. Turn parasocial relationships into derivative instruments. Turn “community” into a book of open interest. It’s not even evil; it’s just exhausted. It’s the creative class equivalent of a heroin addict selling the TV for one more bag.
The cruel part is that the collapse isn’t happening because the kids didn’t try hard enough. It’s structural. The indie ecosystem didn’t fail; it was smothered. Five companies own discovery, distribution, monetization, hosting, and the social graph. We built a civilization on top of a monoculture, and now we’re shocked that the soil is dead. Every “independent creator” is actually a tenant farmer in a hyper-regulated micro-fiefdom. You don’t own your audience; you rent them at surge pricing.
You can’t simultaneously cosplay as cyberpunk revolutionaries and defend the most concentrated corporate power in human history without some cognitive dissonance, so the dissonance gets externalized as “antitrust is literally violence” memes and 180-IQ explanations of why Google having a 92% search share is just the market rewarding excellence.
The most devastating counterargument to “antitrust stifles innovation” is this: the internet itself would not exist without breaking up AT&T. Before 1984, Ma Bell systematically suppressed packet-switching technology, banned non-approved devices from the network, and blocked any innovation that threatened their circuit-switched revenue model. The decentralized, “dumb pipe” architecture of the internet was antithetical to their monopoly business—so it simply couldn’t flourish under their control. Only after the breakup, when suddenly competing carriers were forced to innovate and couldn’t block new technologies, did the commercial internet explode into existence. Every tech fortune, every digital platform, every online service of the last 30 years exists solely because we ignored AT&T’s warnings that breaking them up would destroy innovation and harm consumers. The people now claiming antitrust kills innovation are making that argument using infrastructure that only exists because we broke up the last monopoly. We’ve already run this experiment. We know how it ends. And what we found on the other side of antitrust enforcement was the entire modern economy.
And here’s the punchline—it’s not even a mystery. Everybody already knows what the solution is: antitrust. Break up the megafirms. Dismantle the baroque monopolies that have swallowed whole sectors like a python full of household pets. Reintroduce actual competition instead of this cartoon marketplace full of zombie startups, half-acquired subsidiaries, and metastasized platforms. Washington knows it. Brussels definitely knows it. The consumers muttering darkly under their breath know it. Your grandmother knows it. It’s the worst-kept secret in contemporary economics.
Everyone knows it—except the tech industry itself, which seems to have self-selected into a hermetic ideology where antitrust isn’t just wrong, it’s literally unthinkable. These people inhale libertarian fairy dust like it’s oxygen. They’ve built a subculture where regulation is always a cosmic injustice, monopolies are “network effects,” and any call for accountability is dismissed as the resentful whining of biologicals who can’t keep up with the future. They will paint you a thousand diagrams of decentralization while standing atop the most consolidated corporate structures in American history.
Instead of confronting the obvious—“Hey, maybe we’ve become the exact robber barons we always claimed to disrupt”—they retreat into this Marvel-grade mythology that every social, economic, and political problem is just a routing issue. According to this catechism, if a trillion-dollar platform breaks the public sphere in half, that’s merely a sign the public sphere should have used a different consensus algorithm. If the market calcifies into a handful of giants, that’s not monopoly—it’s “product-market clarity.”
The irony is spectacular. For an industry supposedly obsessed with “disruption,” they have constructed an ideology whose primary function is to prevent anything from being disrupted—especially themselves. No antitrust lawsuit. No structural separation. No accountability for locking the internet into an attention economy that would make a 19th-century opium trader blush. Nothing. Because in their worldview, every failure can be patched, every political impasse can be forked, every monopoly can be rhetorically disguised as a permissionless innovation playground.
And that’s the real malfunction at the heart of all this. The problem isn’t the code, or the incentives, or the business models. It’s the ideology—a utopian operating system running on human hardware, incapable of admitting that power concentrated in a single node is still power, no matter how many blockchain metaphors you paint over it. Antitrust is the straightforward fix. But straightforward fixes don’t survive long in an ecosystem powered by wishful thinking, heroic narratives, and the belief that reality can always be rerouted if you just believe hard enough.
Web3’s big mistake was assuming that you could protocol your way out of monopoly capitalism. That if you just threw enough cryptographic fairy dust at the cathedral walls of Amazon, Google, Meta, and Apple, you’d summon a decentralized Renaissance. But innovation doesn’t beat monopoly; it gets acquired by it, cloned by it, or fed through its content-moderation woodchipper. The entire “permissionless future” thesis was a hallucination brought on by cheap capital and late-night Discord calls. You especially can’t route around it when those five companies have armies of lawyers, lobbyists, and former regulators on retainer, and your side’s master strategy is “issue a memecoin and hope the SEC gets distracted.”
So now the industry, drunk at the afterparty of its own hype cycle, is trying to convince burned-out creators that gambling on each other’s predictions is the missing puzzle piece. That what this brittle, over-extracted ecosystem really needs is a bit more financialization—another mechanism to harvest the last shreds of user attention and turn them into tokens nobody wants to admit are securities.
This isn’t innovation; it’s escapism. It’s not architecture; it’s stage scenery. It’s the moment in the sci-fi trilogy where the scrappy rebels reveal their master plan and it turns out to be a spreadsheet.
The only real exit from this trap is political, not technical: break up the monopolies. Impose interoperability. Treat platforms like utilities. Ban self-preferencing. Force the digital feudal lords to actually compete instead of grazing on user data like sacred cows. But that’s tedious work, and Web3 never had the patience for tedium. It prefers spectacles—glorious, flaming, Fonzie-over-the-ocean spectacles.
And so here we are, watching the water-ski jump in slow motion. The shark below is enormous. The show is almost over. And the rider is grinning bravely, pretending the whole thing isn’t a desperate stunt for one last burst of attention.
Web3 didn’t just jump the shark.
It built an exchange market on the shark, issued a token for the shark, and is now asking the shark to join the community.
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