Is spontaneity a luxury good?

On line culture, algorithmic curation, and the death of wandering

It’s a beautiful Saturday in New York City, and what are you doing?

Waiting in line, of course.

I’m already an impatient person, so the epidemic of line culture has become a personal affront. Maybe it’s my fault I live in a neighborhood that’s a cultural destination for pop-ups and trendy restaurants.

But I struggle to fathom that what appears to be a large cohort of the city wakes up in the morning and says to themselves, Wow, it’s so nice outside. You know what I want to spend multiple hours doing today? Waiting in line.

@bentonmcclintockHow long would YOU wait on line for matcha ?! #nyc #lines #matcha #newyork

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

It doesn’t matter what they’re waiting in line for, really. It could be frozen yogurt, or venture-capital coffee chain, or stuffed animals, or bagels, or tea or pizza¹. If there’s a consumer good that’s algorithmically amplified, someone is going to spend their precious time on Earth standing and waiting to pay for it.

The most egregious example I saw recently was the Rhode pop-up, where people waited for over 10 hours to (unless I’m horribly mistaken) be able to buy a sweatshirt.

Line culture is at best, unbelievably annoying, and at worst, a huge economic problem that’s rooted in the loneliness epidemic and convenience culture, and (yes) has fully reshaped how we spend and value money. Let me explain.

We’ve always been influenced by what other people buy

Most of what we spend money on — outside of rent, groceries, prescriptions, the stuff you actually need to survive — is shaped by our environment. By who we’re around, what we see, what seems normal. I’ve written about this a lot — we use spending to communicate who we are, to signal belonging, to participate in the groups we want to be part of.

Buying the same shoes as your friends, going to the same coffee shop as everyone in your neighborhood, wearing the brand that marks you as part of a particular scene — this is all identity spending, and it’s been happening forever.

The way trends have always worked is that someone discovers something, tells their friends, the friends tell their friends, and a thing becomes popular through a slow, organic spread. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole book on this. The whole process was fairly messy and unpredictable and it meant that a lot of different places, products, and experiences could coexist, because discovery was decentralized. There was no single funnel directing everyone to the same 20 spots.

Until now.

The winner takes it all

Over the past decade, social media has completely restructured how we discover things.

@shwinnabegoWe need to discuss waiting in line (in nyc)

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

And the algorithm, by design, picks winners. It tests content on small groups, and if it performs, it pushes it to bigger and bigger audiences. The result is algorithmic concentration: millions of people get funneled toward the exact same handful of places.

Maybe you’ve experienced it before, when TikTok blows a place up. When I lived in East Village I had a local bookstore-slash-coffee-shop that I worked at every day, until a few viral posts rendered it uninhabitable.²

Whenever you see a line, or an article about “an impossible reservation,” it creates the impression that there’s a shortage of good places to eat, or drink, or shop.

This is a textbook misallocation of demand. It looks like a supply problem — not enough restaurants, not enough seats — but it’s really an information problem. There is plenty of supply. The algorithm has just convinced everyone to want the same thing.

Kyle Chayka wrote a whole book about this phenomenon called Filterworld — how algorithmic recommendation has homogenized culture to the point where cafés in Nairobi look like cafés in Portland, and every Airbnb has the same furniture. You can find this flattening everywhere, from the media we consume to the places we eat to the technology we use.

Spotify’s Discover Weekly shapes what music you think you like. Netflix’s recommendation engine determines what you watch — and therefore what gets made. Amazon’s recommendations feature drives purchasing patterns across millions of consumers toward the same products.

And this flattening applies specifically to money. These forces reshape how you spend, what you think you want, and whether you can even tell the difference between a desire that’s yours and one that was manufactured for you.

And it changes how businesses operate

When your ability to get customers is dependent on TikTok, you start designing for the algorithm instead of for the people who eat your food.

And a lot of these places are built this way on purpose — because looking like the kind of business that goes viral is also how you look like the kind of business that gets funded. I’ve written about the VC and PE pipeline before — how companies optimize for what investors want to see (growth, hype, branding) rather than what customers actually need (good product, fair prices, a place you’d go back to without posting about it). Many of the places that blow up on social media are hospitality group–backed operations with investor money behind them. The virality is the business model, the algorithm is the distribution channel and the content is the marketing.

BTW this is an hours-long line for a heavily-backed VC coffee chain which has 100 locations across the city.

The algorithm shapes your desires and then charges you for them

The thing about algorithmic curation is that it doesn’t just show you where to eat or what to buy. It shapes what you want. And then it monetizes the want that it shaped.

We often talk about algorithms like they’re neutral tools that surface things we’d probably like based on our preferences. But your preferences are being actively built by the same system that profits from them. The restaurant you “discovered” on your For You page was surfaced because it drives engagement, not because it’s the best meal you could eat for that price. The product you “stumbled on” was placed in front of you by a system that utilized millions of data points to identify the most profitable thing to show you, specifically.

A study on consumer autonomy and AI-driven recommendations found that while algorithms expand the appearance of choice, they simultaneously create filter bubbles and bias outcomes — reinforcing existing patterns and narrowing your world while calling it “personalization.” Another study on Spotify’s algorithmic curation found that recommendation algorithms reinforce prior preferences, reducing musical diversity and leading to what the researchers called “taste tautology.”

So when you stand in a line for an hour, it feels like your choice. You chose this restaurant, you wanted this, right? But the wanting itself was shaped — or at the very least, heavily subsidized — by a system that has financial incentives to send you there. This is the same model that creates manufactured hype around artists, movies, and product drops: engineer the scarcity, amplify the demand, collect the margin.

And because it all feels like a decision you made freely, it’s much harder to recognize overconsumption when it’s happening. If your taste is shaped by what’s algorithmically served to you, and what’s served is determined by profit incentives, then taste itself becomes a form of consumption.

But then we start doing it to ourselves

At some point, people stopped just responding to algorithmic curation and started running the same logic on themselves.

Sure, it’s easy to brush off someone who stands for 10 hours in a pop-up line to buy a sweatshirt as stupidity, but it sort of misses the point.

Because you’re waiting in line to consume, yes, but you’re also documenting that consumption. And that documentation earns you the possibility of social capital (clout). And so the waiting, itself, becomes consumption.

I’ve written about optimization culture before — the way we’ve started treating ourselves as projects to be measured, improved, and performed. Line culture is the consumer spending version of that same impulse. Where you spend signals something about who you are, and then you document it to prove you were there.

If you didn’t record yourself doing something, did it really happen?

We live in a consumption culture where a lot of that consumption has become content production — and it almost doesn’t matter what you’re actually consuming. A study on social media–centric consumption found that 84% of respondents reported consuming products or services primarily to generate social media content, motivated by the need to signal identity and increase social value. We are experiencing less and recording more, optimizing for a digital audience instead of for ourselves.

And this has a very real effect on how you spend. When you’re choosing restaurants, products, and experiences based on what will perform online rather than what you actually value, you’re making spending decisions on someone else’s criteria — and you’re likely spending more, because the places that are popular charge a premium. The dopamine hit of posting alongside the dopamine hit of spending reinforces the behavior, and the cycle continues.

What dies when spontaneity goes away

@yourbrainonmoneyOn reservation culture, tierfication, and why optimizing every experience is making us lonelier. #tiktoklearningcampaign #learnontiktok

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Ft. a TikTok I made earlier this year on the subject.

There’s a guy on TikTok whose whole thing is trying to walk into restaurants in New York without a reservation, and (surprise, surprise) he often doesn’t get in.

In my opinion, he’s essentially documenting the death of something that used to be normal (and expected!) from living in a city. You could walk around, see a place that looked good, and go in. That was, historically, how people interacted with restaurants, shops, bars, the whole consumer economy. You browsed. You wandered. You stumbled into things. You developed a sense of what you liked through direct experience, not through an algorithm telling you what you should like, but through the slow, messy process of trying things and seeing what stuck.

That’s what spontaneity actually was, economically. It was the mechanism through which people developed independent judgment about what things are worth, what they actually enjoy, and how they want to spend their money. Jane Jacobs wrote about this decades ago — the whole value proposition of cities is that density creates serendipity. The sheer concentration of options means you can compare, experiment, and develop real preferences instead of algorithmically assigned ones.

When every restaurant requires a reservation, every experience requires a waitlist, and discoveries get exclusively filtered through the digital world, you lose that mechanism entirely. Living in the city becomes a curated, pre-sorted experience that’s sort of … boring.

And then it gets lonely

I write about the loneliness epidemic constantly in this newsletter because it is, at its core, a financial problem as much as it is a social one. Lonely people spend more because they’re easier to sell to. Disconnected, dissatisfied people are the ideal consumers because of their isolation, not in spite of it.

Line culture has eliminated the conditions for spontaneous connection — the kind of unplanned, low-stakes interaction that builds social fabric and makes people less lonely. When most experiences require advance planning, a reservation, a waitlist, or an hour of standing in line staring at your phone, serendipity disappears. And sure, you’re standing next to people, but mostly everyone is on their phones.

The infrastructure that manages consumer demand at scale also dismantles the conditions for the kind of connection that used to happen by accident. The economy has built systems to manage human desire efficiently, and the cost of that efficiency is the spontaneity that made both financial autonomy and genuine connection possible.

So, if a tree falls in a forest …

The problem isn’t really individual behavior, it’s more about the system that shapes the behavior. Though I personally would recommend against getting in a line you have no idea what people are waiting for.

Next time you are standing in a line, or booking a table three weeks out, or adding something to your cart because you saw it on your feed — ask yourself: Would you still want this if nobody knew you had it? Would you wait in that line if you couldn’t post about it? Would you go to that place if the food didn’t look as aesthetically pleasing?

If the answer is yes — if you’d still want the thing in a world where no one was watching — then go ahead. Enjoy it.

But if the entire point is the story, the post, the proof that you were there, then I would argue what you’re spending money on is a performance. A performance that your algorithm wrote. That quite an expensive way to live.

1. I live around the corner from said pizza place and unfortunately, the pizza is very good, which makes me almost want to begrudgingly accept the line.

2. filled to the brim with NYU students performatively studying, preventing me from performatively working.