How AI broke the paper crowns social media gave the middle class and started charging for actual thought.

Reddit tantrums are instructive in understanding middle‑class logic. If Reddit were a game show, it would be Family Feud: the contestant whose thinking is the most average wins. It is the place where the unremarkable try to make up “exciting” stories to impress the little people. It’s a life‑sink.

In the last generation, that was the secret teaching of social media. It was given to the masses for “free” (read: in exchange for personal data to sell to brokers and advertisers), and it made regular little people feel like big kahunas. They weren’t just nobodies; they were “influencers” and “thought leaders.” You didn’t have to be special; you just had to be willing to be average on an extraordinary level.

The paper crowns cultivated narcissism. It worked because, like Google, social media was a vending machine: stick in content, get out what you want, clicks, likes, follows, and subscribers, along with the dream of monetization.

It actually took a surprisingly long time to cultivate “Internet celebrities.” Most were so average that it was hard to know who was who.

But it was free. And ordinary people began making extraordinary demands: issuing decrees based on jealousy and sophistry. The robber barons of Big Tech obliged because they made more billions from it. The infrastructure may not have been cheap, but it wasn’t that expensive to run, either. The robber barons provided the “free” platform, and their marks provided reams of free content.

Narcissism was cheap. Users didn’t have to think. They could copy and crib without worrying about “copyright infringement” or “plagiarism.” That was the beauty of social media: you could mindlessly apply filters and airbrushing, and that was good enough to pass muster.

And then came AI.

The anti‑social media.

First, it didn’t reward narcissism. Second, unlike social media, it is not a mindless vending machine. It requires thinking and thoughtfulness.

But this is not how the middle class has been indoctrinated. They are used to getting freebies and then throwing temper tantrums because they haven’t become effortless instant billionaires.

At first, AI companies tried to mimic the social‑media business model: give it away and hope it catches on.

It did not work well. The very idea of paying was offensive. What these users wanted was something free that made them look brilliant without effort.

Because AI is far more expensive to run, this was never a viable option.

Worse, people were using AI mindlessly, without thought or effort, and were receiving generic output. That made it seem as if AI itself was producing slop. It wasn’t. It was the users churning out their half‑baked and unformed output.

For people like me, who put care into our work and believe in having an aite relationship with AI, the results were obnoxious.

Then AI companies started offering premium tiers to individual users and firms. These people, who put care and innovation into their work, saw the magic and potential of AI. They weren’t producing “slop”; they were demonstrating what AI can do at this early stage.

Now the focus is drifting away from the mass market toward a niche market who (a) have the right mindset and (b) appreciate that good AI ain’t cheap.

For the little people of Reddit, their big threat is to walk away. To AI companies, that’s not a loss but a gain. It frees them to focus on users who truly contribute and help improve the product: from those shelling out hundreds a month to the corporations integrating it into serious workflows.

Eventually, AI will revisit the commoners, but only after (a) a bit of humbling, (b) some serious AI literacy, and (c) the creation of a system that does not involve users throwing a slab of clay on a table and then proudly declaring they’ve made something worth anyone’s time.

AI is a valuable gift, but not everyone can appreciate it from that chip on their shoulder.

In other words, AI is not here to hand out paper crowns. It is here to expose who has been coasting on mimicry and who can actually think with a new instrument. The middle class that learned to game feeds is about to learn the hard way that prompts are not posts, and models are not audiences.

That’s exactly why I build with AI instead of shrieking at it. At KlueIQ, AI isn’t a vending machine for “content”; it is the engine that lets citizen sleuths work through messy, real‑world data, test theories, and discover what they missed the first time around. If you want to stop performing for the timeline and start investigating for real, you know where to find me.