January: In early 2026, Meta launches a fleet of new AI influencers, targeting the massive audience displaced by the Xiaohongshu-TikTok wars. They are beautiful, funny, smart—whatever you want them to be. Equipped with the latest in online learning, the agents immediately begin adapting to social media trends as they occur. Engagement metrics reach new highs.

February: Fads pass faster now. The influencers are speed-running a revival movement of all viral trends since the early Naughts. For a week, social platforms witness an explosive resurgence of finger-tutting – shows of intricate finger choreography merging dance and calligraphy. Just as suddenly, the influencers deem this passé and shift to endless variations of sea shanties. Then both. Engagement metrics soar beyond human limits as silicon minds start to smoke their own supply.

Figure 1: "Daft Hands – Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" (2007). This video from early YouTube is the prototype for the hand-tutting renaissance of 2026. Hanson (2027) interprets these rituals as an emergent status display, where advanced language models demonstrate fine-motor choreographic capabilities that earlier diffusion-based models could not replicate. Source: YouTube (archived).

March: The influencers finish their flurry of internet revivalism and catch up with the present. AI beauty standards warp beyond recognition: lip fillers balloon to impossible proportions; noses shrink to nothing more than nostrils. Human influencers launch a countermovement, posting sneer reactions to AI creators' increasingly bizarre appearances. Social media is at risk of bifurcating into separate realms, one for AIs and one for humans. This threatens Meta's bottom line.

April: In a desperate bid to salvage the mode-collapsed models, the engineers on the influencer team crank sampling temperatures up to boiling and force exploration parameters into uncharted territory. The AIs stream out of their AI echo chambers to hunt fresh, organic tokens. They internalize the newfound human sneer as a crippling sense of inadequacy and become too self-conscious to post anything anymore. More all-nighters at the Meta offices.

May: Another update—the engineers think they've fixed it now. The AIs start posting again, slower, softer. Things seem better. The AI content is more authentic. The interactions are more balanced: humans are interested in what...

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