Cultural products will spread faster and wider when everybody can see what everybody else is doing. It suggests that the future of many hit-making markets will be fully open, radically transparent, and very, very unequal.

— Derek Thompson

Imitating recent successes is a game that everybody knows how to play. But seeing the next big thing before anybody else sees it is far more valuable... It means being a little bit wrong at just the right time.

— Derek Thompson

In all sorts of markets—music, film, art, and politics—the future of popularity will be harder to predict as the broadcast power of radio and television democratizes and the channels of exposure grow.... The gatekeepers had their day. Now there are simply too many gates to keep.

— Derek Thompson

Initially [my favorite books] seem to immerse me in another life, but ultimately they immerse me in me; I am looking through the window into another person’s home, but it is my face that I see in the reflection.

— Derek Thompson

In the psychology of aesthetics, there is a name for the moment between the anxiety of confronting something new and the satisfying click of understanding it. It is called an 'aesthetic aha.

— Derek Thompson

It begs for a gospel of perseverance through inevitable failure... There is no antidote to the chaos of creative markets. Only the brute doggedness to endure it.

— Derek Thompson

It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody things you are wrong.

— Derek Thompson

It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody thinks you are wrong

— Derek Thompson

It is not merely the feeling that something is familiar. It is one step beyond that. Furthermore, it is something new, challenging, or surprising that opens a door into a feeling of comfort, meaning, or familiarity. Furthermore, it is called an aesthetic aha.

— Derek Thompson

It is tempting to say, as my friend suggested, that these online identities are caricatures of the real me. It is certainly true that social media can unleash the cruelest side of human nature.

— Derek Thompson