The Crank Singularity: Why Human Nature and Social Media Don’t Mix

When the Spotlight Always Wins, Truth Loses Without a Fight

Photo by Shutter Speed on Unsplash

Here’s my working theory: a certain percentage of the human population are just cranks. Not in a moral sense—just temperamentally disposed to obsessive patterns, conspiratorial frameworks, or a kind of performative contrarianism that thrives on attention. These people have always existed. In every village, every workplace, every family gathering, there’s been that person who sees patterns others miss, who knows what “they” don’t want you to know, who has the real story behind the official story.

The difference now is that the filtering systems that once kept them at the fringes have collapsed—and social media turned their dysfunction into content. What we’re living through isn’t just a media failure or an information crisis. It’s what I call the Crank Singularity: the point where cranks stopped being background noise and became the dominant signal in our epistemic environment.

And the uncomfortable truth is: cranks are entertaining. They’re confident. They offer clarity in a world of uncertainty. They generate a kind of narrative heat that institutional discourse, with all its caution and contingency, simply cannot match. In an attention economy where engagement is everything, the crank becomes the epistemic lighthouse—not because they’re right, but because they’re bright.