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Fernando NikolicWork with me
Ideas

Microprophets

Ten million people following ten million specialized authorities.

When I was growing up there were a handful of places that told everyone what was true. A couple of TV channels, a couple of papers, the radio. You could disagree with them, but everybody was disagreeing with the same ones.

Now everyone has their own. Somebody on YouTube for macro, somebody on X for nutrition, a podcast for Bitcoin, a Substack for geopolitics. Each of them has a few thousand or a few hundred thousand people who trust them more than any newspaper. I call them microprophets. Ten million people following ten million specialized authorities.

Some of them are much better than the institutions they replaced, because they actually know their niche and they answer to their audience every day. Some are selling supplements. Either way the shared middle is gone. There’s no common set of facts that everyone starts from anymore.

A lot of Bitcoin’s narrative problems come from here. Adoption is fragmented, and every subculture has its own prophets and its own story about what Bitcoin is for: savings, freedom, energy, treasury companies, AI. They mostly don’t talk to each other.

It’s also why I built Perception the way I did. When the conversation is spread across thousands of sources and voices, you need something that reads all of it, or you only ever know what your own prophets told you.

For marketing it changes the job. You used to buy reach from a few gatekeepers. Now you find the right microprophets for your niche and earn their trust one at a time. It’s slower, and when it works it sticks.

From the library

  • We’ve created more human-made information in the last five years than in all of human history before them.

    A Field Guide to Lies, Daniel J. Levitin

  • The intellectuals are, therefore, the “opinion-molders” in society. And since it is precisely a molding of opinion that the State most desperately needs, the basis for age-old alliance between the State and the intellectuals becomes clear.

    Anatomy of the State, Murray N. Rothbard

  • Peddlers of “news” seldom are partisans of controversy in ways that would undermine their own profits. They may be partisan. They may even be outrageously so. But they seldom report conclusions that would convince subscribers to cancel their subscriptions and head for the hills.

    The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age, James Dale Davidson

Where I’ve talked about it