The Swan Throne contemplates two public figures, one famous, one increasingly forgotten:
The Transience of Social Media Metrics
The smarter the idea, the fewer that can follow it.
Social media rewards the lowest impulses. The more outrageous the performance, the more it spreads. The system favors anger, envy, and spectacle, not clarity or endurance. Metrics rise when a man panders to the audience’s worst appetites, and they collapse the moment that appetite shifts. This volatility is the core weakness of treating metrics as a measure of worth.
A politician can buy bots and inflate his follower count overnight. A platform can tweak its algorithm and bury a channel with a single update. A wave of coordinated harassment can erase visibility as though it never existed. None of this reflects reality. It reflects only the whims of code, the biases of moderators, and the fleeting moods of a distracted public. When importance is measured by such numbers, it becomes indistinguishable from chance.
The men who have mattered most to the world have almost always been out of step with the crowd. They did not flatter their followers but forced them to confront truths. Their importance could not be captured in likes or shares, because those very metrics would have been turned against them. Plato’s Academy, Aquinas’ Summa, or Burke’s Reflections cannot be reduced to the applause they received at the time. They endured because they held structures of thought that outlived the moment.
The man who mistakes social metrics for real significance plays with shadows. When the crowd moves on, his numbers vanish, leaving him where he began: irrelevant, not because the crowd says so, but because he built nothing beyond it.
What Endures Beyond Metrics
It’s simple math: Nick Fuentes – Noise = 0
What lasts is not the rise and fall of trending graphs but the deeper architecture of culture. Values, language, ideas, institutions, and elite influence form the skeleton that endures when the noise of platforms fades. These are the measures by which true importance is weighed.
Values set the moral direction of a people. When they shift, entire movements tilt with them. Language provides the tools of thought itself; to coin a term is to shape the way others perceive reality. Ideas supply the patterns that give coherence, allowing men to order their experience and chart a course. Institutions anchor those ideas in the world, giving them a physical presence that resists decay. And elites, though often despised in populist rhetoric, are the carriers of continuity. They determine what is preserved, what is discarded, and what is advanced.
The older I get, the more I come to value the historical minds that focused on the Good, the Beautiful, and the True instead of whatever their daily reality happened to be. Not that there isn’t real value in the latter, as without them we simply wouldn’t know anything about what life was like during their times. But the more an author focuses on today’s issues, today’s politics, today’s public figures, the less readable and the less relevant his work tends to be over time.
This is true of fiction, of course. The imaginary landscape of Tolkien hold up much better than, say, Mack Bolan’s never-ending battles with a mafia that no longer exists or even Hollywood’s interminable retellings of that one bad thing that happened during that one war.
Not everything one does has to be significant, of course. One of the beautiful things about AI-generated text is the fact that writers can now accelerate our writing processes and increase our literary output to the point that we might even begin to approach the superhuman levels of John C. Wright and The Legend Chuck Dixon.
However, the writer is correct to observe that which is most popular is seldom that which lasts. One has only to peruse the bestseller lists of 100 years ago to recognize that.