It was 2012 and I was in college at Northwestern taking a course called “New Media and Popular Culture.” Our group project was designed around studying what “virality” meant. Instagram hadn’t been invented yet. Two years later, in 2014, I wrote my senior thesis about the “Attention Economy” at a time when digital attention was scarce and contained, and therefore obtaining it meant obtaining a kind of enduring wealth.

A decade later and it almost feels like you’re in the minority if you haven’t gone viral at least once