Something has shifted in how Americans signal status. The shift is visible in small ways — the book carried as an accessory, the Substack launched by people who never previously wrote for public audiences, the conversation at a dinner party that turns on a long nonfiction argument rather than a shared television reference. It is also visible in larger ways: the podcast as the primary vehicle for extended public intellectual engagement, the essay as the dominant form of cultural commentary, the byline as a credential that functions independently of the institution that publishes it.
The sociologists and trend forecasters have a name for this. They are calling it “wisdom flexing” — the public demonstration of intellectual depth and cultural sophistication as a form of status signaling. The argument is that something specific in the current information environment has made the performance of genuine knowledge more valuable than it has been in decades.
The diagnosis begins with information abundance. The internet did not produce a more informed public. It produced a public with access to more information than at any previous point in history and less ability to sort it, evaluate it, or use it. The result is what might be called an insight shortage — the condition in which the raw material for understanding is everywhere and the refined form of understanding is scarce. Hot takes, which are predictions or opinions delivered quickly and with high confidence, thrived in this environment for roughly a decade. They could be produced quickly, consumed quickly, and forgotten quickly. The cycle suited the economics of digital media and the psychology of an audience that had been trained to expect constant novelty.
The hot take environment has degraded. This is partly because the density of hot takes has made any individual take indistinguishable from the background noise, and partly because the conditions that made fast confident opinions feel useful — a relatively stable information environment where most claims could be evaluated against shared facts — have eroded. The Iran war, the tariff cycle, the AI disruption, the Federal Reserve succession, the breakdown of the 60/40 portfolio: none of these are situations where a hot take adds value. They are situations where the ability to hold multiple variables, trace second-order effects, and tolerate genuine uncertainty is the cognitive skill that matters. The demand for that skill has outpaced the supply.
The argument for this shift as something real and durable — rather than a trend piece in search of a trend — runs through the economics of attention in the AI era. Generative AI has made the production of average-quality content nearly free. A competent 800-word explanation of any topic can be produced in seconds. The market value of that explanation has collapsed accordingly. What has not been replicated by AI, and what remains genuinely scarce, is the synthesis that comes from years of engaged attention to a specific domain — the ability to recognize when the current situation resembles a historical pattern, to know which variables are actually being tracked by people inside an institution, to understand what an expert believes privately versus what they say publicly. That kind of knowledge requires time to accumulate and is difficult to fake. Its scarcity has increased as everything adjacent to it has become abundant.
The argument against treating wisdom flexing as a genuine cultural shift rather than a marketing concept runs through the gap between performance and substance. Status signaling around intellectual depth is not the same as intellectual depth. The Substack boom has produced many writers who present themselves as rigorous analysts and many readers who cannot reliably distinguish between genuine rigor and its performance. Books carried as accessories are not books read. The cultural appetite for the appearance of serious thinking and the cultural appetite for serious thinking are not the same appetite, and conflating them produces a market for sophisticated-sounding content that is actually as shallow as what it claims to replace. The demand for insight does not guarantee the supply of it.
The distributional reality is that the shift, to whatever extent it is real, benefits people who already have the credentials and platforms to signal depth credibly. A person who spent twenty years developing expertise in energy markets, central banking, or labor economics has a product that is now more valuable than it was five years ago. A person who wants to develop that expertise and lacks an institutional affiliation or an established audience faces a market that is easier to enter and harder to get paid in than at any previous point. The Substack economy has democratized publishing and concentrated readership around a relatively small number of established voices. The insight economy rewards people who already have insight or who can credibly perform having it.
There is something worth taking seriously in the underlying observation, even if the term for it is too neat. The conditions that produced the hot take era — abundant content, scarce attention, stable shared facts, fast news cycles — have changed. The conditions that now characterize the information environment — AI-generated noise, contested facts, complex slow-moving structural crises, audiences that have learned to distrust speed — reward something different. Whether that something different gets called wisdom flexing or depth signaling or simply good analysis, the market for it is not imaginary.
What it gets called matters less than whether what it rewards is the real thing.
