of the United Kingdom’s capitol city.
You would think that a proof-of-life photo is a simple artifact: one image, one body, one implied claim: “he’s alive.”
Yet, when the image of a captured President Nicolás Maduro circulated on social media, the discourse quickly swung from “is this AI?” to “where can I buy that track jacket?” Specifically, a Nike Tech Fleece tracksuit.
“Like information, images want to be free,” says cyberethnographer Ruby Thelot. Images get pulled into the gravitational field of cultural discourse, and this culture, at least, has learned to metabolize geopolitics through commerce. So a photograph that, in a prior age, would settle a political question becomes the opening recitation of a new consumer ritual.
From Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift to the new Pope Leo to Luigi Mangione, and now an ousted dictator, this is the contemporary form of participation for people who are geographically distant, morally conflicted, politically exhausted, and culturally trained to process the world through objects. If our grandparents were shaped by newspapers and broadcast TV, we are shaped by feeds, marketplaces, and micro-interactions whose signals accumulate until they take on the aura of destiny that we will, eventually, participate with a purchase.
In The Idolatry of the Algorithm, we wrote about recommendation engines as invisible gods, tailored by our actions and micro-actions, and capable of rewarding or punishing us with a kind of eerie omniscience. “Engines that govern content recommendations are tailored by our interactions, even micro-interactions, whose signals are so plenteous they cannot be numbered.” Those engines do not stop at content, they spill over into commerce. And they govern what rises, what trends, what sells out, what becomes legible, and what gets canonized.
In a world like this, a proof-of-life image is not merely proof. It is a seeding event to a larger form of multiplayer participation for both human and agentic traffic alike.
And these events… can now become financial markets.
The Reliquary Economy
There is a phrase we keep reaching for when we watch the internet fixate on objects during moments that should, in theory, be larger than objects: reliquary.
A reliquary is a container for a sacred fragment. It is the token that lets the believer say, “I touched the story.” It’s not the sacred object itself, the object is a substitute for proximity, and proximity is the currency of modern participation.
When we wrote Divine Economics: The Sacred Marketplace of Papal Transition, we were tracing a similar impulse through a holier scene. The discourse around Pope Leo’s watch was not simply idle curiosity, it was a consumer yearning for an item with a story that could be shared, debated, and worn. “Devotion and consumption aren’t opposing forces,” we wrote, “they’re complementary expressions of how humans process moments of historical significance.” Watches, curiously, are reliquaries for brand stories (like the Omega Speedmaster’s history with the Apollo program). But now we’re treating any cultural moment and faintest brand association as a reliquary.
Where the public thinks it is decoding meaning, the system reads the decoding as intent—and then the system builds reality around that reading.
That sentence matters because it frames the phenomenon without dismissing it. It also gives brand executives an uncomfortable clue about the operating system beneath contemporary culture. People are not only buying objects: they are buying a mechanism for meaning.
The Reliquary Economy first shows up in the bright corners of pop culture, because pop culture is at in intersection of idolatry, parasocial relationships, and participation. When Travis Kelce wears a Kid Super jacket, it becomes a shopping wave. When Taylor Swift hints at an era? A color palette becomes commerce. Fans do not just watch, they coordinate. They purchase tokens that make membership visible.
And the tools of participation don’t change when the objects of cultural fascination change. Luigi Mangione’s backpack? That was a Peak Design Everyday v1. A convicted killer or an ousted dictator’s tracksuit can become a consumer artifact. The moral weight changes, but the participation substrate stays stable.
In When Brands Make (Alleged) Murderers Relatable, we named the darker side directly: “Commerce has become the lens through which we understand cultural moments, even the darkest ones.” You can call this tacky or late-stage capitalism. None of those labels change the mechanism. The Reliquary Economy is now the primary interface between the public and history, especially for those who are distant enough to experience history as media.
Verification as Participation
The most important shift is not that people buy the relic. The shift is the behavior that happens before the purchase: verification.
Soon after the images of Maduro in the Nike Tech Fleece began trending, we saw Nike start promoting the product on its performance marketing channels. How could this be? Some speculated that the brand was being opportunistic, and praised them for acting quickly. Others slighted the brand for even participating in the discourse.
The reality is it could have been neither. The flood of traffic could have caused automated campaigns to promote.
Verification used to be a journalistic act, but now it is a consumer reflex. The crowd does not wait for reporting, it performs its own forensic ritual, and the ritual is participatory by design. It invites everyone in, and it requires no credentials—it merely requires our interactions.
The loop looks a lot like this:
There is a reason this loop feels satisfying, because it converts ambiguity into motion and it turns the spectator into an actor. It creates a series of micro-decisions that feel like agency, even if the only thing you have actually done is click. Verification is not neutral in this environment, verification is labor. Even screenshot is a form of participatory labor. A reverse image search, a comment asking “ID?”, a link drop, a repost is labor, a skeptical quote tweet—is a form of participatory labor, because they are all signal to the algorithms that drive interest back to the products in question.
This is where the line between participation and amplification dissolves. The act of verifying becomes the act of producing demand signals. Where the public thinks it is decoding meaning, the system reads the decoding as intent and then the system builds reality around that reading.
Here’s a real-world example: in 2023, Amazon third-party sellers, reportedly using generative AI tools without review, began publishing listings with product titles that were literally error messages, including “I’m sorry, I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy.” Business Insider+1 The titles were funny, then unsettling, then ubiquitous. Screenshots circulated on Twitter, Reddit, and then newsfeeds. And then the listings started trending.
Here’s where the insidious loop distorts reality: opportunistic sellers appeared to chase the traffic by renaming other products with the same title:
This is why the phrase “multiplayer” has become more than a metaphor for brand culture. It is an operational description of how narratives now form. Participation does not require belief, only action.
That statement is uncomfortable because it collapses our favorite moral distinction. We want to believe that participation comes from conviction. Yet most modern participation is procedural. It is a series of micro-gestures performed in public, whose meaning is then retroactively assigned. You verify. Then you feel more involved. Then you feel more entitled to a take. Then you post the take. Then you have created the conditions for the next person’s verification.
What makes this era distinct is that the audience is no longer only human. Agents, bots, scrapers, and SEO optimizers are participants in culture, not because they have inner lives, but because they produce measurable signals that change outcomes. Agentic traffic is not a theory. It is a new layer of participation that brands increasingly compete for, whether they admit it or not.
Performance marketing systems, recommendation systems, marketplace search systems, and trend systems have a shared bias: they privilege acceleration. They treat spikes as truth. They interpret motion as desire. They do this because speed is legible to machines, and meaning is not.
This is why certain media moments feel like they “snap” into place with unnatural quickness. The public supplies verification signals. The systems interpret verification as interest. The systems then amplify what appears to be interest. The amplification returns to the public as legitimacy. Legitimacy recruits more verification. The loop tightens.
This is also where agentic traffic matters most. Scrapers and bots can create verification pressure without creating human conviction; they can inflate attention without inflating belief. Yet the system reacts anyway, because velocity is still velocity, regardless of its provenance. Traffic to sites from ChatGPT queries is still traffic, but it’s traffic with a wholly different intent.
Brands that merchandise on signal, and a certain class of ultra-fast fashion marketplaces like Shein in particular, treat this as a core operating principle. They do not wait for meaning; they track trends and market motions and signals. They their version of mapping culture is measuring acceleration. They do not ask why, they ask how fast.
This is the automation of meaning. Meaning becomes what the system can measure, and measurement becomes what the system rewards.
Apparel as Soft Power Signaling and Brand Alignment
Once the systems layer is understood, the semiotics layer becomes even more interesting.
Apparel is a uniquely efficient signaling technology because it is both intimate and mass legible. The red MAGA hat is a sign of direct affiliation, whereas the Nike Tech Fleece would be a sign of ironic affiliation and affirmation of the same, carried out through policy. Apparel is unique in that it can carry identity without requiring overt speech. It can be dismissed as “just clothes” while serving as a flag.
The truth of your brand isn't what you've marketed yourself as. It's not even what your customers believe you to be. It's the shared mythology that exists somewhere in between.
The conspiratorial Nike discourse belongs here, not as a fact claim, but as a cultural artifact. The public’s pattern-matching instinct is not irrational. It is a learned response to a world governed by invisible systems. Conspiracy is a folk language for describing a reality where causality is opaque, institutions are distrusted, and outcomes arrive too quickly to feel earned.
When the crowd says, “the styling is uncanny,” what they are often expressing is a deeper suspicion: the system is talking to itself again, and we are watching the call happen in public.
This is the uncomfortable truth brand executives rarely say out loud: the truth of your brand isn’t what you’ve marketed yourself as. It’s not even what your customers believe you to be. It’s the shared mythology that exists somewhere in between. And that somewhere in between, for apparel brand Origin, is a dictator in a blue hoodie.
Origin’s “Patriot Blue” hoodie carries with it the founder’s story of reviving an “American-made” ethos, which in turn allows them to build a brand mythos. Is this covert signalling of the DEA agents who are aware of Origin’s cofounder, Jocko Willink’s Navy Seal background? Does it matter? It’s all interpretive fuel. They allow the product to function as more than fabric. It becomes a token, a wink.
Where Nike’s performance marketing of the media moment was algorithmic, Origin’s was opportunistic. After sending a pre-order email for the blue hoodie to their customers, founder Pete Roberts took to YouTube to address some of the social media commentary and to deliver their founding story.
Prediction Markets as Media and the Politics of Settlement
If algorithms and apparel are how meaning and participation spread, then prediction markets are the future of how news breaks and meaning gets certified.
Prediction markets have become an emergent format for headlines. In my 2026 predictions, I said that Polymarket and Kalshi would be my Media Winners of 2026, if for no other reason than markets have become a narrative interface. People increasingly treat an odds percentage as a summary of reality, much the same way they once treated a front page.
Mere hours before the raid on Maduros compound in Caracas, a mystery trader created a market on Polymarket, placing a sizable bet (that would eventually net them some $400,000 if awarded) that the dictator would be ousted by the end of January 2026. What a coincidence.
Polymarket’s view: the language the user used when creating the market used the word “invasion,” and this was not, in their view, an invasion.
That is why prediction markets are not merely financial instruments for degens. They are media systems that narrate plausibility in real time (often for insiders with privileged information that they’re trying to make money on), and they do so with a potency that traditional media is now trying to get in on. Kalshi and CNN have announced a news partnership they’re calling “The Future of News,” so help us God. But, alas, the number moves, the crowd reacts, the story updates itself.
The spectacle is built in. The real power, however, is not in the forecast, it’s in the settlement, and that’s where prediction markets (read: gambling platforms) like Polymarket and Kalshi hold all of the power like a traditional media business.
Settlement is where a platform decides what “counts,” and where ambiguity can be dissolved into financial outcomes. The verb “qualifies” becomes a moral instrument. The platform becomes an arbiter, not just of outcome, but of framing. Curiously, this is not about the actual truth, it’s about the platform’s interpretation of the outcome of a market, which is their version of the truth. Kind of like media organizations in the 1990s and 2000s, CNN and Fox News played this role.
To be clear, Polymarket has political interests. Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm, 1789 Capital, is an investor in Polymarket, and Polymarket hired former Trump campaign adviser David Urban to lobby for prediction markets in Washington.
These platforms operate within political ecosystems that require lobbying. They require regulatory favor. They require partnerships and advisory networks. They cannot be outside power, because their legitimacy depends on power’s permission.
Rupert Murdoch’s power was not only about content, it was also about repeatability at scale, about turning one framing into the default framing through distribution. Prediction markets risk a similar function through a different interface. They convert interpretation into a number, then convert the number into authority, then enforce authority through settlement.
When you place that next to the verification loop, the full arc becomes clear:
- The public verifies a relic
- The system amplifies the relic
- The market narrates the outcome
- The platform settles the narrative
- The crowd experiences settlement as truth
That’s a governance layer in the modern age, as media.
From Odds to Authority
The civic square has not disappeared. It has been replatformed.
It now lives in feeds, carts, and odds, where participation is measured, priced, and amplified. The Reliquary Economy supplies the token. Verification supplies the labor. Velocity supplies the legitimacy. Apparel supplies the semiotics. Markets supply the attempted verdict.
And because our systems are built to reward motion (not meaning) the future brand executive challenge is not simply brand safety or political neutrality. It is the governance of amplification, in a world where human and agentic participation are wound so tightly that the system itself begins to feel like fate.
A proof-of-life photo used to be an endpoint.
Now it is a ritual. Rituals grow into markets. Markets grow into narratives.
You would think that a proof-of-life photo is a simple artifact: one image, one body, one implied claim: “he’s alive.”
Yet, when the image of a captured President Nicolás Maduro circulated on social media, the discourse quickly swung from “is this AI?” to “where can I buy that track jacket?” Specifically, a Nike Tech Fleece tracksuit.
“Like information, images want to be free,” says cyberethnographer Ruby Thelot. Images get pulled into the gravitational field of cultural discourse, and this culture, at least, has learned to metabolize geopolitics through commerce. So a photograph that, in a prior age, would settle a political question becomes the opening recitation of a new consumer ritual.
From Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift to the new Pope Leo to Luigi Mangione, and now an ousted dictator, this is the contemporary form of participation for people who are geographically distant, morally conflicted, politically exhausted, and culturally trained to process the world through objects. If our grandparents were shaped by newspapers and broadcast TV, we are shaped by feeds, marketplaces, and micro-interactions whose signals accumulate until they take on the aura of destiny that we will, eventually, participate with a purchase.
In The Idolatry of the Algorithm, we wrote about recommendation engines as invisible gods, tailored by our actions and micro-actions, and capable of rewarding or punishing us with a kind of eerie omniscience. “Engines that govern content recommendations are tailored by our interactions, even micro-interactions, whose signals are so plenteous they cannot be numbered.” Those engines do not stop at content, they spill over into commerce. And they govern what rises, what trends, what sells out, what becomes legible, and what gets canonized.
In a world like this, a proof-of-life image is not merely proof. It is a seeding event to a larger form of multiplayer participation for both human and agentic traffic alike.
And these events… can now become financial markets.
The Reliquary Economy
There is a phrase we keep reaching for when we watch the internet fixate on objects during moments that should, in theory, be larger than objects: reliquary.
A reliquary is a container for a sacred fragment. It is the token that lets the believer say, “I touched the story.” It’s not the sacred object itself, the object is a substitute for proximity, and proximity is the currency of modern participation.
When we wrote Divine Economics: The Sacred Marketplace of Papal Transition, we were tracing a similar impulse through a holier scene. The discourse around Pope Leo’s watch was not simply idle curiosity, it was a consumer yearning for an item with a story that could be shared, debated, and worn. “Devotion and consumption aren’t opposing forces,” we wrote, “they’re complementary expressions of how humans process moments of historical significance.” Watches, curiously, are reliquaries for brand stories (like the Omega Speedmaster’s history with the Apollo program). But now we’re treating any cultural moment and faintest brand association as a reliquary.
Where the public thinks it is decoding meaning, the system reads the decoding as intent—and then the system builds reality around that reading.
That sentence matters because it frames the phenomenon without dismissing it. It also gives brand executives an uncomfortable clue about the operating system beneath contemporary culture. People are not only buying objects: they are buying a mechanism for meaning.
The Reliquary Economy first shows up in the bright corners of pop culture, because pop culture is at in intersection of idolatry, parasocial relationships, and participation. When Travis Kelce wears a Kid Super jacket, it becomes a shopping wave. When Taylor Swift hints at an era? A color palette becomes commerce. Fans do not just watch, they coordinate. They purchase tokens that make membership visible.
And the tools of participation don’t change when the objects of cultural fascination change. Luigi Mangione’s backpack? That was a Peak Design Everyday v1. A convicted killer or an ousted dictator’s tracksuit can become a consumer artifact. The moral weight changes, but the participation substrate stays stable.
In When Brands Make (Alleged) Murderers Relatable, we named the darker side directly: “Commerce has become the lens through which we understand cultural moments, even the darkest ones.” You can call this tacky or late-stage capitalism. None of those labels change the mechanism. The Reliquary Economy is now the primary interface between the public and history, especially for those who are distant enough to experience history as media.
Verification as Participation
The most important shift is not that people buy the relic. The shift is the behavior that happens before the purchase: verification.
Soon after the images of Maduro in the Nike Tech Fleece began trending, we saw Nike start promoting the product on its performance marketing channels. How could this be? Some speculated that the brand was being opportunistic, and praised them for acting quickly. Others slighted the brand for even participating in the discourse.
The reality is it could have been neither. The flood of traffic could have caused automated campaigns to promote.
Verification used to be a journalistic act, but now it is a consumer reflex. The crowd does not wait for reporting, it performs its own forensic ritual, and the ritual is participatory by design. It invites everyone in, and it requires no credentials—it merely requires our interactions.
The loop looks a lot like this:
There is a reason this loop feels satisfying, because it converts ambiguity into motion and it turns the spectator into an actor. It creates a series of micro-decisions that feel like agency, even if the only thing you have actually done is click. Verification is not neutral in this environment, verification is labor. Even screenshot is a form of participatory labor. A reverse image search, a comment asking “ID?”, a link drop, a repost is labor, a skeptical quote tweet—is a form of participatory labor, because they are all signal to the algorithms that drive interest back to the products in question.
This is where the line between participation and amplification dissolves. The act of verifying becomes the act of producing demand signals. Where the public thinks it is decoding meaning, the system reads the decoding as intent and then the system builds reality around that reading.
Here’s a real-world example: in 2023, Amazon third-party sellers, reportedly using generative AI tools without review, began publishing listings with product titles that were literally error messages, including “I’m sorry, I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy.” Business Insider+1 The titles were funny, then unsettling, then ubiquitous. Screenshots circulated on Twitter, Reddit, and then newsfeeds. And then the listings started trending.
Here’s where the insidious loop distorts reality: opportunistic sellers appeared to chase the traffic by renaming other products with the same title:
This is why the phrase “multiplayer” has become more than a metaphor for brand culture. It is an operational description of how narratives now form. Participation does not require belief, only action.
That statement is uncomfortable because it collapses our favorite moral distinction. We want to believe that participation comes from conviction. Yet most modern participation is procedural. It is a series of micro-gestures performed in public, whose meaning is then retroactively assigned. You verify. Then you feel more involved. Then you feel more entitled to a take. Then you post the take. Then you have created the conditions for the next person’s verification.
What makes this era distinct is that the audience is no longer only human. Agents, bots, scrapers, and SEO optimizers are participants in culture, not because they have inner lives, but because they produce measurable signals that change outcomes. Agentic traffic is not a theory. It is a new layer of participation that brands increasingly compete for, whether they admit it or not.
Performance marketing systems, recommendation systems, marketplace search systems, and trend systems have a shared bias: they privilege acceleration. They treat spikes as truth. They interpret motion as desire. They do this because speed is legible to machines, and meaning is not.
This is why certain media moments feel like they “snap” into place with unnatural quickness. The public supplies verification signals. The systems interpret verification as interest. The systems then amplify what appears to be interest. The amplification returns to the public as legitimacy. Legitimacy recruits more verification. The loop tightens.
This is also where agentic traffic matters most. Scrapers and bots can create verification pressure without creating human conviction; they can inflate attention without inflating belief. Yet the system reacts anyway, because velocity is still velocity, regardless of its provenance. Traffic to sites from ChatGPT queries is still traffic, but it’s traffic with a wholly different intent.
Brands that merchandise on signal, and a certain class of ultra-fast fashion marketplaces like Shein in particular, treat this as a core operating principle. They do not wait for meaning; they track trends and market motions and signals. They their version of mapping culture is measuring acceleration. They do not ask why, they ask how fast.
This is the automation of meaning. Meaning becomes what the system can measure, and measurement becomes what the system rewards.
Apparel as Soft Power Signaling and Brand Alignment
Once the systems layer is understood, the semiotics layer becomes even more interesting.
Apparel is a uniquely efficient signaling technology because it is both intimate and mass legible. The red MAGA hat is a sign of direct affiliation, whereas the Nike Tech Fleece would be a sign of ironic affiliation and affirmation of the same, carried out through policy. Apparel is unique in that it can carry identity without requiring overt speech. It can be dismissed as “just clothes” while serving as a flag.
The truth of your brand isn't what you've marketed yourself as. It's not even what your customers believe you to be. It's the shared mythology that exists somewhere in between.
The conspiratorial Nike discourse belongs here, not as a fact claim, but as a cultural artifact. The public’s pattern-matching instinct is not irrational. It is a learned response to a world governed by invisible systems. Conspiracy is a folk language for describing a reality where causality is opaque, institutions are distrusted, and outcomes arrive too quickly to feel earned.
When the crowd says, “the styling is uncanny,” what they are often expressing is a deeper suspicion: the system is talking to itself again, and we are watching the call happen in public.
This is the uncomfortable truth brand executives rarely say out loud: the truth of your brand isn’t what you’ve marketed yourself as. It’s not even what your customers believe you to be. It’s the shared mythology that exists somewhere in between. And that somewhere in between, for apparel brand Origin, is a dictator in a blue hoodie.
Origin’s “Patriot Blue” hoodie carries with it the founder’s story of reviving an “American-made” ethos, which in turn allows them to build a brand mythos. Is this covert signalling of the DEA agents who are aware of Origin’s cofounder, Jocko Willink’s Navy Seal background? Does it matter? It’s all interpretive fuel. They allow the product to function as more than fabric. It becomes a token, a wink.
Where Nike’s performance marketing of the media moment was algorithmic, Origin’s was opportunistic. After sending a pre-order email for the blue hoodie to their customers, founder Pete Roberts took to YouTube to address some of the social media commentary and to deliver their founding story.
Prediction Markets as Media and the Politics of Settlement
If algorithms and apparel are how meaning and participation spread, then prediction markets are the future of how news breaks and meaning gets certified.
Prediction markets have become an emergent format for headlines. In my 2026 predictions, I said that Polymarket and Kalshi would be my Media Winners of 2026, if for no other reason than markets have become a narrative interface. People increasingly treat an odds percentage as a summary of reality, much the same way they once treated a front page.
Mere hours before the raid on Maduros compound in Caracas, a mystery trader created a market on Polymarket, placing a sizable bet (that would eventually net them some $400,000 if awarded) that the dictator would be ousted by the end of January 2026. What a coincidence.
Polymarket’s view: the language the user used when creating the market used the word “invasion,” and this was not, in their view, an invasion.
That is why prediction markets are not merely financial instruments for degens. They are media systems that narrate plausibility in real time (often for insiders with privileged information that they’re trying to make money on), and they do so with a potency that traditional media is now trying to get in on. Kalshi and CNN have announced a news partnership they’re calling “The Future of News,” so help us God. But, alas, the number moves, the crowd reacts, the story updates itself.
The spectacle is built in. The real power, however, is not in the forecast, it’s in the settlement, and that’s where prediction markets (read: gambling platforms) like Polymarket and Kalshi hold all of the power like a traditional media business.
Settlement is where a platform decides what “counts,” and where ambiguity can be dissolved into financial outcomes. The verb “qualifies” becomes a moral instrument. The platform becomes an arbiter, not just of outcome, but of framing. Curiously, this is not about the actual truth, it’s about the platform’s interpretation of the outcome of a market, which is their version of the truth. Kind of like media organizations in the 1990s and 2000s, CNN and Fox News played this role.
To be clear, Polymarket has political interests. Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm, 1789 Capital, is an investor in Polymarket, and Polymarket hired former Trump campaign adviser David Urban to lobby for prediction markets in Washington.
These platforms operate within political ecosystems that require lobbying. They require regulatory favor. They require partnerships and advisory networks. They cannot be outside power, because their legitimacy depends on power’s permission.
Rupert Murdoch’s power was not only about content, it was also about repeatability at scale, about turning one framing into the default framing through distribution. Prediction markets risk a similar function through a different interface. They convert interpretation into a number, then convert the number into authority, then enforce authority through settlement.
When you place that next to the verification loop, the full arc becomes clear:
- The public verifies a relic
- The system amplifies the relic
- The market narrates the outcome
- The platform settles the narrative
- The crowd experiences settlement as truth
That’s a governance layer in the modern age, as media.
From Odds to Authority
The civic square has not disappeared. It has been replatformed.
It now lives in feeds, carts, and odds, where participation is measured, priced, and amplified. The Reliquary Economy supplies the token. Verification supplies the labor. Velocity supplies the legitimacy. Apparel supplies the semiotics. Markets supply the attempted verdict.
And because our systems are built to reward motion (not meaning) the future brand executive challenge is not simply brand safety or political neutrality. It is the governance of amplification, in a world where human and agentic participation are wound so tightly that the system itself begins to feel like fate.
A proof-of-life photo used to be an endpoint.
Now it is a ritual. Rituals grow into markets. Markets grow into narratives.
You would think that a proof-of-life photo is a simple artifact: one image, one body, one implied claim: “he’s alive.”
Yet, when the image of a captured President Nicolás Maduro circulated on social media, the discourse quickly swung from “is this AI?” to “where can I buy that track jacket?” Specifically, a Nike Tech Fleece tracksuit.
“Like information, images want to be free,” says cyberethnographer Ruby Thelot. Images get pulled into the gravitational field of cultural discourse, and this culture, at least, has learned to metabolize geopolitics through commerce. So a photograph that, in a prior age, would settle a political question becomes the opening recitation of a new consumer ritual.
From Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift to the new Pope Leo to Luigi Mangione, and now an ousted dictator, this is the contemporary form of participation for people who are geographically distant, morally conflicted, politically exhausted, and culturally trained to process the world through objects. If our grandparents were shaped by newspapers and broadcast TV, we are shaped by feeds, marketplaces, and micro-interactions whose signals accumulate until they take on the aura of destiny that we will, eventually, participate with a purchase.
In The Idolatry of the Algorithm, we wrote about recommendation engines as invisible gods, tailored by our actions and micro-actions, and capable of rewarding or punishing us with a kind of eerie omniscience. “Engines that govern content recommendations are tailored by our interactions, even micro-interactions, whose signals are so plenteous they cannot be numbered.” Those engines do not stop at content, they spill over into commerce. And they govern what rises, what trends, what sells out, what becomes legible, and what gets canonized.
In a world like this, a proof-of-life image is not merely proof. It is a seeding event to a larger form of multiplayer participation for both human and agentic traffic alike.
And these events… can now become financial markets.
The Reliquary Economy
There is a phrase we keep reaching for when we watch the internet fixate on objects during moments that should, in theory, be larger than objects: reliquary.
A reliquary is a container for a sacred fragment. It is the token that lets the believer say, “I touched the story.” It’s not the sacred object itself, the object is a substitute for proximity, and proximity is the currency of modern participation.
When we wrote Divine Economics: The Sacred Marketplace of Papal Transition, we were tracing a similar impulse through a holier scene. The discourse around Pope Leo’s watch was not simply idle curiosity, it was a consumer yearning for an item with a story that could be shared, debated, and worn. “Devotion and consumption aren’t opposing forces,” we wrote, “they’re complementary expressions of how humans process moments of historical significance.” Watches, curiously, are reliquaries for brand stories (like the Omega Speedmaster’s history with the Apollo program). But now we’re treating any cultural moment and faintest brand association as a reliquary.
Where the public thinks it is decoding meaning, the system reads the decoding as intent—and then the system builds reality around that reading.
That sentence matters because it frames the phenomenon without dismissing it. It also gives brand executives an uncomfortable clue about the operating system beneath contemporary culture. People are not only buying objects: they are buying a mechanism for meaning.
The Reliquary Economy first shows up in the bright corners of pop culture, because pop culture is at in intersection of idolatry, parasocial relationships, and participation. When Travis Kelce wears a Kid Super jacket, it becomes a shopping wave. When Taylor Swift hints at an era? A color palette becomes commerce. Fans do not just watch, they coordinate. They purchase tokens that make membership visible.
And the tools of participation don’t change when the objects of cultural fascination change. Luigi Mangione’s backpack? That was a Peak Design Everyday v1. A convicted killer or an ousted dictator’s tracksuit can become a consumer artifact. The moral weight changes, but the participation substrate stays stable.
In When Brands Make (Alleged) Murderers Relatable, we named the darker side directly: “Commerce has become the lens through which we understand cultural moments, even the darkest ones.” You can call this tacky or late-stage capitalism. None of those labels change the mechanism. The Reliquary Economy is now the primary interface between the public and history, especially for those who are distant enough to experience history as media.
Verification as Participation
The most important shift is not that people buy the relic. The shift is the behavior that happens before the purchase: verification.
Soon after the images of Maduro in the Nike Tech Fleece began trending, we saw Nike start promoting the product on its performance marketing channels. How could this be? Some speculated that the brand was being opportunistic, and praised them for acting quickly. Others slighted the brand for even participating in the discourse.
The reality is it could have been neither. The flood of traffic could have caused automated campaigns to promote.
Verification used to be a journalistic act, but now it is a consumer reflex. The crowd does not wait for reporting, it performs its own forensic ritual, and the ritual is participatory by design. It invites everyone in, and it requires no credentials—it merely requires our interactions.
The loop looks a lot like this:
There is a reason this loop feels satisfying, because it converts ambiguity into motion and it turns the spectator into an actor. It creates a series of micro-decisions that feel like agency, even if the only thing you have actually done is click. Verification is not neutral in this environment, verification is labor. Even screenshot is a form of participatory labor. A reverse image search, a comment asking “ID?”, a link drop, a repost is labor, a skeptical quote tweet—is a form of participatory labor, because they are all signal to the algorithms that drive interest back to the products in question.
This is where the line between participation and amplification dissolves. The act of verifying becomes the act of producing demand signals. Where the public thinks it is decoding meaning, the system reads the decoding as intent and then the system builds reality around that reading.
Here’s a real-world example: in 2023, Amazon third-party sellers, reportedly using generative AI tools without review, began publishing listings with product titles that were literally error messages, including “I’m sorry, I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy.” Business Insider+1 The titles were funny, then unsettling, then ubiquitous. Screenshots circulated on Twitter, Reddit, and then newsfeeds. And then the listings started trending.
Here’s where the insidious loop distorts reality: opportunistic sellers appeared to chase the traffic by renaming other products with the same title:
This is why the phrase “multiplayer” has become more than a metaphor for brand culture. It is an operational description of how narratives now form. Participation does not require belief, only action.
That statement is uncomfortable because it collapses our favorite moral distinction. We want to believe that participation comes from conviction. Yet most modern participation is procedural. It is a series of micro-gestures performed in public, whose meaning is then retroactively assigned. You verify. Then you feel more involved. Then you feel more entitled to a take. Then you post the take. Then you have created the conditions for the next person’s verification.
What makes this era distinct is that the audience is no longer only human. Agents, bots, scrapers, and SEO optimizers are participants in culture, not because they have inner lives, but because they produce measurable signals that change outcomes. Agentic traffic is not a theory. It is a new layer of participation that brands increasingly compete for, whether they admit it or not.
Performance marketing systems, recommendation systems, marketplace search systems, and trend systems have a shared bias: they privilege acceleration. They treat spikes as truth. They interpret motion as desire. They do this because speed is legible to machines, and meaning is not.
This is why certain media moments feel like they “snap” into place with unnatural quickness. The public supplies verification signals. The systems interpret verification as interest. The systems then amplify what appears to be interest. The amplification returns to the public as legitimacy. Legitimacy recruits more verification. The loop tightens.
This is also where agentic traffic matters most. Scrapers and bots can create verification pressure without creating human conviction; they can inflate attention without inflating belief. Yet the system reacts anyway, because velocity is still velocity, regardless of its provenance. Traffic to sites from ChatGPT queries is still traffic, but it’s traffic with a wholly different intent.
Brands that merchandise on signal, and a certain class of ultra-fast fashion marketplaces like Shein in particular, treat this as a core operating principle. They do not wait for meaning; they track trends and market motions and signals. They their version of mapping culture is measuring acceleration. They do not ask why, they ask how fast.
This is the automation of meaning. Meaning becomes what the system can measure, and measurement becomes what the system rewards.
Apparel as Soft Power Signaling and Brand Alignment
Once the systems layer is understood, the semiotics layer becomes even more interesting.
Apparel is a uniquely efficient signaling technology because it is both intimate and mass legible. The red MAGA hat is a sign of direct affiliation, whereas the Nike Tech Fleece would be a sign of ironic affiliation and affirmation of the same, carried out through policy. Apparel is unique in that it can carry identity without requiring overt speech. It can be dismissed as “just clothes” while serving as a flag.
The truth of your brand isn't what you've marketed yourself as. It's not even what your customers believe you to be. It's the shared mythology that exists somewhere in between.
The conspiratorial Nike discourse belongs here, not as a fact claim, but as a cultural artifact. The public’s pattern-matching instinct is not irrational. It is a learned response to a world governed by invisible systems. Conspiracy is a folk language for describing a reality where causality is opaque, institutions are distrusted, and outcomes arrive too quickly to feel earned.
When the crowd says, “the styling is uncanny,” what they are often expressing is a deeper suspicion: the system is talking to itself again, and we are watching the call happen in public.
This is the uncomfortable truth brand executives rarely say out loud: the truth of your brand isn’t what you’ve marketed yourself as. It’s not even what your customers believe you to be. It’s the shared mythology that exists somewhere in between. And that somewhere in between, for apparel brand Origin, is a dictator in a blue hoodie.
Origin’s “Patriot Blue” hoodie carries with it the founder’s story of reviving an “American-made” ethos, which in turn allows them to build a brand mythos. Is this covert signalling of the DEA agents who are aware of Origin’s cofounder, Jocko Willink’s Navy Seal background? Does it matter? It’s all interpretive fuel. They allow the product to function as more than fabric. It becomes a token, a wink.
Where Nike’s performance marketing of the media moment was algorithmic, Origin’s was opportunistic. After sending a pre-order email for the blue hoodie to their customers, founder Pete Roberts took to YouTube to address some of the social media commentary and to deliver their founding story.
Prediction Markets as Media and the Politics of Settlement
If algorithms and apparel are how meaning and participation spread, then prediction markets are the future of how news breaks and meaning gets certified.
Prediction markets have become an emergent format for headlines. In my 2026 predictions, I said that Polymarket and Kalshi would be my Media Winners of 2026, if for no other reason than markets have become a narrative interface. People increasingly treat an odds percentage as a summary of reality, much the same way they once treated a front page.
Mere hours before the raid on Maduros compound in Caracas, a mystery trader created a market on Polymarket, placing a sizable bet (that would eventually net them some $400,000 if awarded) that the dictator would be ousted by the end of January 2026. What a coincidence.
Polymarket’s view: the language the user used when creating the market used the word “invasion,” and this was not, in their view, an invasion.
That is why prediction markets are not merely financial instruments for degens. They are media systems that narrate plausibility in real time (often for insiders with privileged information that they’re trying to make money on), and they do so with a potency that traditional media is now trying to get in on. Kalshi and CNN have announced a news partnership they’re calling “The Future of News,” so help us God. But, alas, the number moves, the crowd reacts, the story updates itself.
The spectacle is built in. The real power, however, is not in the forecast, it’s in the settlement, and that’s where prediction markets (read: gambling platforms) like Polymarket and Kalshi hold all of the power like a traditional media business.
Settlement is where a platform decides what “counts,” and where ambiguity can be dissolved into financial outcomes. The verb “qualifies” becomes a moral instrument. The platform becomes an arbiter, not just of outcome, but of framing. Curiously, this is not about the actual truth, it’s about the platform’s interpretation of the outcome of a market, which is their version of the truth. Kind of like media organizations in the 1990s and 2000s, CNN and Fox News played this role.
To be clear, Polymarket has political interests. Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm, 1789 Capital, is an investor in Polymarket, and Polymarket hired former Trump campaign adviser David Urban to lobby for prediction markets in Washington.
These platforms operate within political ecosystems that require lobbying. They require regulatory favor. They require partnerships and advisory networks. They cannot be outside power, because their legitimacy depends on power’s permission.
Rupert Murdoch’s power was not only about content, it was also about repeatability at scale, about turning one framing into the default framing through distribution. Prediction markets risk a similar function through a different interface. They convert interpretation into a number, then convert the number into authority, then enforce authority through settlement.
When you place that next to the verification loop, the full arc becomes clear:
- The public verifies a relic
- The system amplifies the relic
- The market narrates the outcome
- The platform settles the narrative
- The crowd experiences settlement as truth
That’s a governance layer in the modern age, as media.
From Odds to Authority
The civic square has not disappeared. It has been replatformed.
It now lives in feeds, carts, and odds, where participation is measured, priced, and amplified. The Reliquary Economy supplies the token. Verification supplies the labor. Velocity supplies the legitimacy. Apparel supplies the semiotics. Markets supply the attempted verdict.
And because our systems are built to reward motion (not meaning) the future brand executive challenge is not simply brand safety or political neutrality. It is the governance of amplification, in a world where human and agentic participation are wound so tightly that the system itself begins to feel like fate.
A proof-of-life photo used to be an endpoint.
Now it is a ritual. Rituals grow into markets. Markets grow into narratives.
You would think that a proof-of-life photo is a simple artifact: one image, one body, one implied claim: “he’s alive.”
Yet, when the image of a captured President Nicolás Maduro circulated on social media, the discourse quickly swung from “is this AI?” to “where can I buy that track jacket?” Specifically, a Nike Tech Fleece tracksuit.
“Like information, images want to be free,” says cyberethnographer Ruby Thelot. Images get pulled into the gravitational field of cultural discourse, and this culture, at least, has learned to metabolize geopolitics through commerce. So a photograph that, in a prior age, would settle a political question becomes the opening recitation of a new consumer ritual.
From Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift to the new Pope Leo to Luigi Mangione, and now an ousted dictator, this is the contemporary form of participation for people who are geographically distant, morally conflicted, politically exhausted, and culturally trained to process the world through objects. If our grandparents were shaped by newspapers and broadcast TV, we are shaped by feeds, marketplaces, and micro-interactions whose signals accumulate until they take on the aura of destiny that we will, eventually, participate with a purchase.
In The Idolatry of the Algorithm, we wrote about recommendation engines as invisible gods, tailored by our actions and micro-actions, and capable of rewarding or punishing us with a kind of eerie omniscience. “Engines that govern content recommendations are tailored by our interactions, even micro-interactions, whose signals are so plenteous they cannot be numbered.” Those engines do not stop at content, they spill over into commerce. And they govern what rises, what trends, what sells out, what becomes legible, and what gets canonized.
In a world like this, a proof-of-life image is not merely proof. It is a seeding event to a larger form of multiplayer participation for both human and agentic traffic alike.
And these events… can now become financial markets.
The Reliquary Economy
There is a phrase we keep reaching for when we watch the internet fixate on objects during moments that should, in theory, be larger than objects: reliquary.
A reliquary is a container for a sacred fragment. It is the token that lets the believer say, “I touched the story.” It’s not the sacred object itself, the object is a substitute for proximity, and proximity is the currency of modern participation.
When we wrote Divine Economics: The Sacred Marketplace of Papal Transition, we were tracing a similar impulse through a holier scene. The discourse around Pope Leo’s watch was not simply idle curiosity, it was a consumer yearning for an item with a story that could be shared, debated, and worn. “Devotion and consumption aren’t opposing forces,” we wrote, “they’re complementary expressions of how humans process moments of historical significance.” Watches, curiously, are reliquaries for brand stories (like the Omega Speedmaster’s history with the Apollo program). But now we’re treating any cultural moment and faintest brand association as a reliquary.
Where the public thinks it is decoding meaning, the system reads the decoding as intent—and then the system builds reality around that reading.
That sentence matters because it frames the phenomenon without dismissing it. It also gives brand executives an uncomfortable clue about the operating system beneath contemporary culture. People are not only buying objects: they are buying a mechanism for meaning.
The Reliquary Economy first shows up in the bright corners of pop culture, because pop culture is at in intersection of idolatry, parasocial relationships, and participation. When Travis Kelce wears a Kid Super jacket, it becomes a shopping wave. When Taylor Swift hints at an era? A color palette becomes commerce. Fans do not just watch, they coordinate. They purchase tokens that make membership visible.
And the tools of participation don’t change when the objects of cultural fascination change. Luigi Mangione’s backpack? That was a Peak Design Everyday v1. A convicted killer or an ousted dictator’s tracksuit can become a consumer artifact. The moral weight changes, but the participation substrate stays stable.
In When Brands Make (Alleged) Murderers Relatable, we named the darker side directly: “Commerce has become the lens through which we understand cultural moments, even the darkest ones.” You can call this tacky or late-stage capitalism. None of those labels change the mechanism. The Reliquary Economy is now the primary interface between the public and history, especially for those who are distant enough to experience history as media.
Verification as Participation
The most important shift is not that people buy the relic. The shift is the behavior that happens before the purchase: verification.
Soon after the images of Maduro in the Nike Tech Fleece began trending, we saw Nike start promoting the product on its performance marketing channels. How could this be? Some speculated that the brand was being opportunistic, and praised them for acting quickly. Others slighted the brand for even participating in the discourse.
The reality is it could have been neither. The flood of traffic could have caused automated campaigns to promote.
Verification used to be a journalistic act, but now it is a consumer reflex. The crowd does not wait for reporting, it performs its own forensic ritual, and the ritual is participatory by design. It invites everyone in, and it requires no credentials—it merely requires our interactions.
The loop looks a lot like this:
There is a reason this loop feels satisfying, because it converts ambiguity into motion and it turns the spectator into an actor. It creates a series of micro-decisions that feel like agency, even if the only thing you have actually done is click. Verification is not neutral in this environment, verification is labor. Even screenshot is a form of participatory labor. A reverse image search, a comment asking “ID?”, a link drop, a repost is labor, a skeptical quote tweet—is a form of participatory labor, because they are all signal to the algorithms that drive interest back to the products in question.
This is where the line between participation and amplification dissolves. The act of verifying becomes the act of producing demand signals. Where the public thinks it is decoding meaning, the system reads the decoding as intent and then the system builds reality around that reading.
Here’s a real-world example: in 2023, Amazon third-party sellers, reportedly using generative AI tools without review, began publishing listings with product titles that were literally error messages, including “I’m sorry, I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy.” Business Insider+1 The titles were funny, then unsettling, then ubiquitous. Screenshots circulated on Twitter, Reddit, and then newsfeeds. And then the listings started trending.
Here’s where the insidious loop distorts reality: opportunistic sellers appeared to chase the traffic by renaming other products with the same title:
This is why the phrase “multiplayer” has become more than a metaphor for brand culture. It is an operational description of how narratives now form. Participation does not require belief, only action.
That statement is uncomfortable because it collapses our favorite moral distinction. We want to believe that participation comes from conviction. Yet most modern participation is procedural. It is a series of micro-gestures performed in public, whose meaning is then retroactively assigned. You verify. Then you feel more involved. Then you feel more entitled to a take. Then you post the take. Then you have created the conditions for the next person’s verification.
What makes this era distinct is that the audience is no longer only human. Agents, bots, scrapers, and SEO optimizers are participants in culture, not because they have inner lives, but because they produce measurable signals that change outcomes. Agentic traffic is not a theory. It is a new layer of participation that brands increasingly compete for, whether they admit it or not.
Performance marketing systems, recommendation systems, marketplace search systems, and trend systems have a shared bias: they privilege acceleration. They treat spikes as truth. They interpret motion as desire. They do this because speed is legible to machines, and meaning is not.
This is why certain media moments feel like they “snap” into place with unnatural quickness. The public supplies verification signals. The systems interpret verification as interest. The systems then amplify what appears to be interest. The amplification returns to the public as legitimacy. Legitimacy recruits more verification. The loop tightens.
This is also where agentic traffic matters most. Scrapers and bots can create verification pressure without creating human conviction; they can inflate attention without inflating belief. Yet the system reacts anyway, because velocity is still velocity, regardless of its provenance. Traffic to sites from ChatGPT queries is still traffic, but it’s traffic with a wholly different intent.
Brands that merchandise on signal, and a certain class of ultra-fast fashion marketplaces like Shein in particular, treat this as a core operating principle. They do not wait for meaning; they track trends and market motions and signals. They their version of mapping culture is measuring acceleration. They do not ask why, they ask how fast.
This is the automation of meaning. Meaning becomes what the system can measure, and measurement becomes what the system rewards.
Apparel as Soft Power Signaling and Brand Alignment
Once the systems layer is understood, the semiotics layer becomes even more interesting.
Apparel is a uniquely efficient signaling technology because it is both intimate and mass legible. The red MAGA hat is a sign of direct affiliation, whereas the Nike Tech Fleece would be a sign of ironic affiliation and affirmation of the same, carried out through policy. Apparel is unique in that it can carry identity without requiring overt speech. It can be dismissed as “just clothes” while serving as a flag.
The truth of your brand isn't what you've marketed yourself as. It's not even what your customers believe you to be. It's the shared mythology that exists somewhere in between.
The conspiratorial Nike discourse belongs here, not as a fact claim, but as a cultural artifact. The public’s pattern-matching instinct is not irrational. It is a learned response to a world governed by invisible systems. Conspiracy is a folk language for describing a reality where causality is opaque, institutions are distrusted, and outcomes arrive too quickly to feel earned.
When the crowd says, “the styling is uncanny,” what they are often expressing is a deeper suspicion: the system is talking to itself again, and we are watching the call happen in public.
This is the uncomfortable truth brand executives rarely say out loud: the truth of your brand isn’t what you’ve marketed yourself as. It’s not even what your customers believe you to be. It’s the shared mythology that exists somewhere in between. And that somewhere in between, for apparel brand Origin, is a dictator in a blue hoodie.
Origin’s “Patriot Blue” hoodie carries with it the founder’s story of reviving an “American-made” ethos, which in turn allows them to build a brand mythos. Is this covert signalling of the DEA agents who are aware of Origin’s cofounder, Jocko Willink’s Navy Seal background? Does it matter? It’s all interpretive fuel. They allow the product to function as more than fabric. It becomes a token, a wink.
Where Nike’s performance marketing of the media moment was algorithmic, Origin’s was opportunistic. After sending a pre-order email for the blue hoodie to their customers, founder Pete Roberts took to YouTube to address some of the social media commentary and to deliver their founding story.
Prediction Markets as Media and the Politics of Settlement
If algorithms and apparel are how meaning and participation spread, then prediction markets are the future of how news breaks and meaning gets certified.
Prediction markets have become an emergent format for headlines. In my 2026 predictions, I said that Polymarket and Kalshi would be my Media Winners of 2026, if for no other reason than markets have become a narrative interface. People increasingly treat an odds percentage as a summary of reality, much the same way they once treated a front page.
Mere hours before the raid on Maduros compound in Caracas, a mystery trader created a market on Polymarket, placing a sizable bet (that would eventually net them some $400,000 if awarded) that the dictator would be ousted by the end of January 2026. What a coincidence.
Polymarket’s view: the language the user used when creating the market used the word “invasion,” and this was not, in their view, an invasion.
That is why prediction markets are not merely financial instruments for degens. They are media systems that narrate plausibility in real time (often for insiders with privileged information that they’re trying to make money on), and they do so with a potency that traditional media is now trying to get in on. Kalshi and CNN have announced a news partnership they’re calling “The Future of News,” so help us God. But, alas, the number moves, the crowd reacts, the story updates itself.
The spectacle is built in. The real power, however, is not in the forecast, it’s in the settlement, and that’s where prediction markets (read: gambling platforms) like Polymarket and Kalshi hold all of the power like a traditional media business.
Settlement is where a platform decides what “counts,” and where ambiguity can be dissolved into financial outcomes. The verb “qualifies” becomes a moral instrument. The platform becomes an arbiter, not just of outcome, but of framing. Curiously, this is not about the actual truth, it’s about the platform’s interpretation of the outcome of a market, which is their version of the truth. Kind of like media organizations in the 1990s and 2000s, CNN and Fox News played this role.
To be clear, Polymarket has political interests. Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm, 1789 Capital, is an investor in Polymarket, and Polymarket hired former Trump campaign adviser David Urban to lobby for prediction markets in Washington.
These platforms operate within political ecosystems that require lobbying. They require regulatory favor. They require partnerships and advisory networks. They cannot be outside power, because their legitimacy depends on power’s permission.
Rupert Murdoch’s power was not only about content, it was also about repeatability at scale, about turning one framing into the default framing through distribution. Prediction markets risk a similar function through a different interface. They convert interpretation into a number, then convert the number into authority, then enforce authority through settlement.
When you place that next to the verification loop, the full arc becomes clear:
- The public verifies a relic
- The system amplifies the relic
- The market narrates the outcome
- The platform settles the narrative
- The crowd experiences settlement as truth
That’s a governance layer in the modern age, as media.
From Odds to Authority
The civic square has not disappeared. It has been replatformed.
It now lives in feeds, carts, and odds, where participation is measured, priced, and amplified. The Reliquary Economy supplies the token. Verification supplies the labor. Velocity supplies the legitimacy. Apparel supplies the semiotics. Markets supply the attempted verdict.
And because our systems are built to reward motion (not meaning) the future brand executive challenge is not simply brand safety or political neutrality. It is the governance of amplification, in a world where human and agentic participation are wound so tightly that the system itself begins to feel like fate.
A proof-of-life photo used to be an endpoint.
Now it is a ritual. Rituals grow into markets. Markets grow into narratives.
You would think that a proof-of-life photo is a simple artifact: one image, one body, one implied claim: “he’s alive.”
Yet, when the image of a captured President Nicolás Maduro circulated on social media, the discourse quickly swung from “is this AI?” to “where can I buy that track jacket?” Specifically, a Nike Tech Fleece tracksuit.
“Like information, images want to be free,” says cyberethnographer Ruby Thelot. Images get pulled into the gravitational field of cultural discourse, and this culture, at least, has learned to metabolize geopolitics through commerce. So a photograph that, in a prior age, would settle a political question becomes the opening recitation of a new consumer ritual.
From Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift to the new Pope Leo to Luigi Mangione, and now an ousted dictator, this is the contemporary form of participation for people who are geographically distant, morally conflicted, politically exhausted, and culturally trained to process the world through objects. If our grandparents were shaped by newspapers and broadcast TV, we are shaped by feeds, marketplaces, and micro-interactions whose signals accumulate until they take on the aura of destiny that we will, eventually, participate with a purchase.
In The Idolatry of the Algorithm, we wrote about recommendation engines as invisible gods, tailored by our actions and micro-actions, and capable of rewarding or punishing us with a kind of eerie omniscience. “Engines that govern content recommendations are tailored by our interactions, even micro-interactions, whose signals are so plenteous they cannot be numbered.” Those engines do not stop at content, they spill over into commerce. And they govern what rises, what trends, what sells out, what becomes legible, and what gets canonized.
In a world like this, a proof-of-life image is not merely proof. It is a seeding event to a larger form of multiplayer participation for both human and agentic traffic alike.
And these events… can now become financial markets.
The Reliquary Economy
There is a phrase we keep reaching for when we watch the internet fixate on objects during moments that should, in theory, be larger than objects: reliquary.
A reliquary is a container for a sacred fragment. It is the token that lets the believer say, “I touched the story.” It’s not the sacred object itself, the object is a substitute for proximity, and proximity is the currency of modern participation.
When we wrote Divine Economics: The Sacred Marketplace of Papal Transition, we were tracing a similar impulse through a holier scene. The discourse around Pope Leo’s watch was not simply idle curiosity, it was a consumer yearning for an item with a story that could be shared, debated, and worn. “Devotion and consumption aren’t opposing forces,” we wrote, “they’re complementary expressions of how humans process moments of historical significance.” Watches, curiously, are reliquaries for brand stories (like the Omega Speedmaster’s history with the Apollo program). But now we’re treating any cultural moment and faintest brand association as a reliquary.
Where the public thinks it is decoding meaning, the system reads the decoding as intent—and then the system builds reality around that reading.
That sentence matters because it frames the phenomenon without dismissing it. It also gives brand executives an uncomfortable clue about the operating system beneath contemporary culture. People are not only buying objects: they are buying a mechanism for meaning.
The Reliquary Economy first shows up in the bright corners of pop culture, because pop culture is at in intersection of idolatry, parasocial relationships, and participation. When Travis Kelce wears a Kid Super jacket, it becomes a shopping wave. When Taylor Swift hints at an era? A color palette becomes commerce. Fans do not just watch, they coordinate. They purchase tokens that make membership visible.
And the tools of participation don’t change when the objects of cultural fascination change. Luigi Mangione’s backpack? That was a Peak Design Everyday v1. A convicted killer or an ousted dictator’s tracksuit can become a consumer artifact. The moral weight changes, but the participation substrate stays stable.
In When Brands Make (Alleged) Murderers Relatable, we named the darker side directly: “Commerce has become the lens through which we understand cultural moments, even the darkest ones.” You can call this tacky or late-stage capitalism. None of those labels change the mechanism. The Reliquary Economy is now the primary interface between the public and history, especially for those who are distant enough to experience history as media.
Verification as Participation
The most important shift is not that people buy the relic. The shift is the behavior that happens before the purchase: verification.
Soon after the images of Maduro in the Nike Tech Fleece began trending, we saw Nike start promoting the product on its performance marketing channels. How could this be? Some speculated that the brand was being opportunistic, and praised them for acting quickly. Others slighted the brand for even participating in the discourse.
The reality is it could have been neither. The flood of traffic could have caused automated campaigns to promote.
Verification used to be a journalistic act, but now it is a consumer reflex. The crowd does not wait for reporting, it performs its own forensic ritual, and the ritual is participatory by design. It invites everyone in, and it requires no credentials—it merely requires our interactions.
The loop looks a lot like this:
There is a reason this loop feels satisfying, because it converts ambiguity into motion and it turns the spectator into an actor. It creates a series of micro-decisions that feel like agency, even if the only thing you have actually done is click. Verification is not neutral in this environment, verification is labor. Even screenshot is a form of participatory labor. A reverse image search, a comment asking “ID?”, a link drop, a repost is labor, a skeptical quote tweet—is a form of participatory labor, because they are all signal to the algorithms that drive interest back to the products in question.
This is where the line between participation and amplification dissolves. The act of verifying becomes the act of producing demand signals. Where the public thinks it is decoding meaning, the system reads the decoding as intent and then the system builds reality around that reading.
Here’s a real-world example: in 2023, Amazon third-party sellers, reportedly using generative AI tools without review, began publishing listings with product titles that were literally error messages, including “I’m sorry, I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy.” Business Insider+1 The titles were funny, then unsettling, then ubiquitous. Screenshots circulated on Twitter, Reddit, and then newsfeeds. And then the listings started trending.
Here’s where the insidious loop distorts reality: opportunistic sellers appeared to chase the traffic by renaming other products with the same title:
This is why the phrase “multiplayer” has become more than a metaphor for brand culture. It is an operational description of how narratives now form. Participation does not require belief, only action.
That statement is uncomfortable because it collapses our favorite moral distinction. We want to believe that participation comes from conviction. Yet most modern participation is procedural. It is a series of micro-gestures performed in public, whose meaning is then retroactively assigned. You verify. Then you feel more involved. Then you feel more entitled to a take. Then you post the take. Then you have created the conditions for the next person’s verification.
What makes this era distinct is that the audience is no longer only human. Agents, bots, scrapers, and SEO optimizers are participants in culture, not because they have inner lives, but because they produce measurable signals that change outcomes. Agentic traffic is not a theory. It is a new layer of participation that brands increasingly compete for, whether they admit it or not.
Performance marketing systems, recommendation systems, marketplace search systems, and trend systems have a shared bias: they privilege acceleration. They treat spikes as truth. They interpret motion as desire. They do this because speed is legible to machines, and meaning is not.
This is why certain media moments feel like they “snap” into place with unnatural quickness. The public supplies verification signals. The systems interpret verification as interest. The systems then amplify what appears to be interest. The amplification returns to the public as legitimacy. Legitimacy recruits more verification. The loop tightens.
This is also where agentic traffic matters most. Scrapers and bots can create verification pressure without creating human conviction; they can inflate attention without inflating belief. Yet the system reacts anyway, because velocity is still velocity, regardless of its provenance. Traffic to sites from ChatGPT queries is still traffic, but it’s traffic with a wholly different intent.
Brands that merchandise on signal, and a certain class of ultra-fast fashion marketplaces like Shein in particular, treat this as a core operating principle. They do not wait for meaning; they track trends and market motions and signals. They their version of mapping culture is measuring acceleration. They do not ask why, they ask how fast.
This is the automation of meaning. Meaning becomes what the system can measure, and measurement becomes what the system rewards.
Apparel as Soft Power Signaling and Brand Alignment
Once the systems layer is understood, the semiotics layer becomes even more interesting.
Apparel is a uniquely efficient signaling technology because it is both intimate and mass legible. The red MAGA hat is a sign of direct affiliation, whereas the Nike Tech Fleece would be a sign of ironic affiliation and affirmation of the same, carried out through policy. Apparel is unique in that it can carry identity without requiring overt speech. It can be dismissed as “just clothes” while serving as a flag.
The truth of your brand isn't what you've marketed yourself as. It's not even what your customers believe you to be. It's the shared mythology that exists somewhere in between.
The conspiratorial Nike discourse belongs here, not as a fact claim, but as a cultural artifact. The public’s pattern-matching instinct is not irrational. It is a learned response to a world governed by invisible systems. Conspiracy is a folk language for describing a reality where causality is opaque, institutions are distrusted, and outcomes arrive too quickly to feel earned.
When the crowd says, “the styling is uncanny,” what they are often expressing is a deeper suspicion: the system is talking to itself again, and we are watching the call happen in public.
This is the uncomfortable truth brand executives rarely say out loud: the truth of your brand isn’t what you’ve marketed yourself as. It’s not even what your customers believe you to be. It’s the shared mythology that exists somewhere in between. And that somewhere in between, for apparel brand Origin, is a dictator in a blue hoodie.
Origin’s “Patriot Blue” hoodie carries with it the founder’s story of reviving an “American-made” ethos, which in turn allows them to build a brand mythos. Is this covert signalling of the DEA agents who are aware of Origin’s cofounder, Jocko Willink’s Navy Seal background? Does it matter? It’s all interpretive fuel. They allow the product to function as more than fabric. It becomes a token, a wink.
Where Nike’s performance marketing of the media moment was algorithmic, Origin’s was opportunistic. After sending a pre-order email for the blue hoodie to their customers, founder Pete Roberts took to YouTube to address some of the social media commentary and to deliver their founding story.
Prediction Markets as Media and the Politics of Settlement
If algorithms and apparel are how meaning and participation spread, then prediction markets are the future of how news breaks and meaning gets certified.
Prediction markets have become an emergent format for headlines. In my 2026 predictions, I said that Polymarket and Kalshi would be my Media Winners of 2026, if for no other reason than markets have become a narrative interface. People increasingly treat an odds percentage as a summary of reality, much the same way they once treated a front page.
Mere hours before the raid on Maduros compound in Caracas, a mystery trader created a market on Polymarket, placing a sizable bet (that would eventually net them some $400,000 if awarded) that the dictator would be ousted by the end of January 2026. What a coincidence.
Polymarket’s view: the language the user used when creating the market used the word “invasion,” and this was not, in their view, an invasion.
That is why prediction markets are not merely financial instruments for degens. They are media systems that narrate plausibility in real time (often for insiders with privileged information that they’re trying to make money on), and they do so with a potency that traditional media is now trying to get in on. Kalshi and CNN have announced a news partnership they’re calling “The Future of News,” so help us God. But, alas, the number moves, the crowd reacts, the story updates itself.
The spectacle is built in. The real power, however, is not in the forecast, it’s in the settlement, and that’s where prediction markets (read: gambling platforms) like Polymarket and Kalshi hold all of the power like a traditional media business.
Settlement is where a platform decides what “counts,” and where ambiguity can be dissolved into financial outcomes. The verb “qualifies” becomes a moral instrument. The platform becomes an arbiter, not just of outcome, but of framing. Curiously, this is not about the actual truth, it’s about the platform’s interpretation of the outcome of a market, which is their version of the truth. Kind of like media organizations in the 1990s and 2000s, CNN and Fox News played this role.
To be clear, Polymarket has political interests. Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm, 1789 Capital, is an investor in Polymarket, and Polymarket hired former Trump campaign adviser David Urban to lobby for prediction markets in Washington.
These platforms operate within political ecosystems that require lobbying. They require regulatory favor. They require partnerships and advisory networks. They cannot be outside power, because their legitimacy depends on power’s permission.
Rupert Murdoch’s power was not only about content, it was also about repeatability at scale, about turning one framing into the default framing through distribution. Prediction markets risk a similar function through a different interface. They convert interpretation into a number, then convert the number into authority, then enforce authority through settlement.
When you place that next to the verification loop, the full arc becomes clear:
- The public verifies a relic
- The system amplifies the relic
- The market narrates the outcome
- The platform settles the narrative
- The crowd experiences settlement as truth
That’s a governance layer in the modern age, as media.
From Odds to Authority
The civic square has not disappeared. It has been replatformed.
It now lives in feeds, carts, and odds, where participation is measured, priced, and amplified. The Reliquary Economy supplies the token. Verification supplies the labor. Velocity supplies the legitimacy. Apparel supplies the semiotics. Markets supply the attempted verdict.
And because our systems are built to reward motion (not meaning) the future brand executive challenge is not simply brand safety or political neutrality. It is the governance of amplification, in a world where human and agentic participation are wound so tightly that the system itself begins to feel like fate.
A proof-of-life photo used to be an endpoint.
Now it is a ritual. Rituals grow into markets. Markets grow into narratives.
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