what I got wrong about the middle
My friend hated my last Substack.
Right after publishing the middle’s gone. now what?, my dear friend Ashley texted me:
“I hated your last Substack. Now I have to give you a crash course in innovation diffusion and creativity.”
She wasn’t joking. We got on the phone. She walked me through it.
Turns out, I wrote a eulogy for something that was never really alive. The “middle” isn’t dead. It’s conceptual. It’s motion. A blur between extremes, not a fixed point on the map.
Let’s rewind.
the middle is a velocity, not a vibe
Ashley’s core point? The middle is not a stable zone — not a class, not a taste level, not a neighborhood with reclaimed wood and oat milk. It’s transitional. It’s the moment where things move from one place to another.
It’s Everett Rogers 101: diffusion happens when early adopters pass something to the early majority. But that passing moment? That’s the middle. And in 2025, it’s a blink. A flicker. You don’t occupy the middle. You flash through it.
So when I mourned the loss of a “middle,” I was really mourning the loss of slowness. Of cultural build-up. Of incubation. The middle didn’t vanish — we just stopped seeing it because it moves too fast.
performance replaced participation
We used to create in the middle. Test ideas. Build scenes. Make stuff without needing it to be content.
Now? The bottom performs for the top. The algorithm rewards clarity and consistency, not experimentation. You either know how to sell it on the first scroll, or you’re out.
Ashley again:
“There’s no incentive to create from the middle because you’re not creating with anyone — you’re creating for attention.”
And the second you start creating for attention, you’re not in the middle anymore. You’re trying to scale. You’re trying to win. Which is fine. But let’s not pretend it’s the same thing.
compression culture rewards velocity, not depth
There’s data for this. A PNAS study showed that names (yes, baby names) that rise quickly also die quickly. The faster something spreads, the less time people spend forming attachments to it. Sound familiar?
We live in a system that rewards pace, not process.
Speed, not substance.
Recognition, not originality.
The middle — that messy zone where things aren’t quite formed — gets skipped.
so what now?
I still believe in compression. I still think mimicry is the default setting. But I was wrong to say the middle is gone.
It’s not gone. It’s just not somewhere you stay. It’s a pass-through. A burst of energy between what’s emerging and what’s already branded.
Ashley, thanks for the academic drag. I deserved it.
The middle didn’t die. It just accelerated.
And I got lapped.
references & reading list
Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (1962): The OG framework explaining how new ideas spread — from innovators to laggards. Spoiler: the middle is just a passing lane.
PNAS Study on Baby Name Adoption: Berger, J., & Le Mens, G. (2009). How adoption speed affects the abandonment of cultural tastes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(20), 8146–8150.
LinkAna Andjelic, The Sociology of Business Substack + The Business of Aspiration (2020): On how brands use speed, mimicry, and “liquid identity” to stay culturally relevant without ever committing to a point of view.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991): The man who coined “the waning of affect,” aka the reason we feel less and copy more.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (1984): Cultural capital, aesthetic fluency, and why taste is just another form of social power.
Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (2012): Optional but relevant if you want to go deeper into why performance feels more real than reality now.
Header picture by Mario Sorrenti for Jil Sander.