The top 2026 X accounts gives insight into the lie that X is the town square.
These people are niche celebrities and their influence on X does not represent influence elsewhere.
Your participation is not going to change this graph
www.natesilver.net/p/social-med...
Fun detail about this article: I didn't notice until it was published, but writing about AI really changed the citation structure of my bibliography. Simply put, most of my references were super-recent. One-quarter came in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Over 50% since 2025.
Oh, for crying out loud, @bsky.app! 🤦♂️
This essay is especially meaningful to me personally, as over the past few years, I've spent a lot of time pondering about how the search for truth co-exists with worlds of performance and kayfabe. Pro wrestling may be an "act", but so is life in general. @heterodoxacademy.bsky.social
This essay makes this case for academia, where the price of endless performance is worse science. But the lesson is not only for scholars.
The credibility that actually moves a career comes from being known as someone who will occasionally say the true and uncomfortable thing.
We spend most of our careers - if not also our lives in general - in kayfabe and almost none in shoot. Yet, the shoots are what people remember. Trust gets built in the rare moments someone steps out of character and levels with you.
Professional wrestling has a word for something you do at work every day.
Kayfabe is the art of treating a staged performance as if it were real.
Wrestling has a counterpart: the shoot, the moment a performer drops the act and says what they actually think.
