Tom Wants You to Remember He’s in a Bubble, and So Are You

Hey folks,

I’ve been thinking a lot about information bubbles lately. I know a lot of attention is given to misinformation and disinformation, and those are important. But almost no attention is given to bubbles. Bubbles may not outright lie to you like misinformation or disinformation, but they can distort things. Let me think of an example.

Let’s say it’s true that Quality Market raised the price on its chocolate bars by 10 cents. They did it because the rent on their location just went up, and they’ve noticed that people tend to just grab chocolate bars because they want them and they’re not very price-sensitive. They also know that they sell a lot of chocolate bars. So they did the math and found that raising the price ten cents will barely be noticed by people, but even if it reduces sales a little, it won’t reduce it too much, and the increased price will balance out the increased rent.

For the Quality Market owner, it’s a way to make sure they don’t have to raise prices on anything else or cut pay for workers. But they also know that if people know the price increased, it might lower sales a little more because people will be thinking of it. And one of the reasons chocolate bars aren’t that price sensitive is because people don’t put too much thought into it.

Now for imaginary reactions from three differnt eras.

In 1986

A few shoppers notice the increased price. They talk to their friends and mention that the price went up. Their friends say they hadn’t noticed. And then they kind of forget about it and get distracted talking about their kids and the upcoming county fair. Most people don’t even think about it, but if they do, they shrug and notice that the rest of their items didn’t go up in price.

In 2016

A few shoppers notice the increased price and mention it online. A discussion starts about why the chocolate bars’ price went up at Quality Market and not IGA or Kroger. A few people say they won’t be buying chocolate bars at Quality Market until they bring their prices even with the other stores. Quality Market notices that the sales of chocolate bars have fallen more than they would have expected. Someone points out the social media posts. But they know if they give in on the chocolate bar price and raise the price of something else, the attention will just shift to that. They decide to leave the price as is but do some posts explaining what happened. This helps some but also causes even angrier backlash and some call for a boycott. It doesn’t stick but in the end Quality Market has to find other ways to cut costs and raise other prices.

In 2026

A few shoppers notice the increased price and mention it online. A bot network sees the beginning of engagement over the topic and begins injecting thousands of variations of arguments why Quality Market is evil for doing this. Almost all the bot posts go unnoticed, but there are enough of them that one actual shopper sees one and is taken by it and reposts it with a commentary. It says that Quality Market must have chosen chocolate bars because they are against fair trade chocolate policies, and the move is anti-immigrant. This sparks a hot debate with people defending Quality Market and others laying into them. While most customers aren’t participating in the debate, those who are tell them “everyone is mad at Quality Market.”

Some other folks find a few more older botnet posts that were trying to accuse Quality Market of fat shaming its customers and putting a tax on them. That fuels the debate more. The amount of engagement on the debate catches the attention of the algorithm, which starts to feed the posts to others on the platform. It starts to become one of the more popular topics. Now even the people not on social media say they’ve heard Quality Market is bad.

Newscasters looking to social media for trends to report on create special reports on the Controversy at Quality Market: Are Their Policies Racist and Sexist? Now everyone hears the headline and decides they probably shouldn’t shop there, even if they don’t know exactly why. The company has to cut far back on costs, cutting workers and reducing hours.

OK Tom, Nice Straw Man

This is a wholly imaginary scenario of course. But you can see the outlines of real things in it, and it shows what the bubble does. Very few people were affected by the price rise. But being in a bubble made people think it was more important in 2016. And the bubble magnified the perceived popularity of the opinion even more in 2026, because the bots and the algorithms worked to blindly drive it more, and the people on the platform became emotionally convinced that “everyone” was talking about it and so spread it off the platform.

The point here isn’t that we shouldn’t hold companies accountable for their policies. We should. The point is that your bubble is not the same as the majority of other bubbles.

That doesn’t mean everything in our bubbles is unimportant. It means that the fact that it is in my bubble doesn’t make it important. Its importance or unimportance lies outside that. And it’s hard to tell which is which. Our brains are wired to see three or more people talking about something as meaning it is of high importance. Our brains also developed to be in a village of 20 people discussing very few unusual things. We’re not built to handle constant infinite scrolls of unusual and important things verified by hundreds of other people as important. Hundreds, some of whom aren’t actually people, and even those who are, aren’t representative of the wider population.

I’ve been making an effort to compare bubbles with people. We look at each other’s feeds, and it’s always surprising how differnt they are.

This is not a plea to change your mind about anything or to decide something you think is important isn’t important. But it is a reminder that when I feel emotional, positive or negative, about something I see on social media, it’s good to remind myself that nothing on that platform is a good gauge of whether I should feel that way. So I try to temper those feelings until I can back them up from other sources, especially real people I talk to in real life who aren’t in the same bubble as me.