It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone to point out that we are really bad at doing things in moderation. It’s easy to see this in the ways we engage in various activities, such as eating and playing. But I think it’s also true in the way we adopt new things or trends, where we tend to over-adopt. Whenever the benefits of something new become apparent, they are circulated widely, often leading to adoption above what is optimal. Advertising, and marketing in general, acts as a major accelerant, and help push things to the extreme. This over-adoption almost always causes a rebound, when people eventually realize that in many cases, downsides of the new thing are outweighing the benefits, and start to cut back and look for alternatives.

This process is analogous to when a person first discovers the deliciousness of burgers, eats 5 a day (which is over the optimal), then a year later finds out that they are fat, and now has to lose weight by cutting back and getting a gym membership (the rebound). This rebound then may become the next thing to be over-adopted, and thus forming a loop. I think This loop is very much a type of cycle of disruption. The rebound may never have happened if not for the over-adoption, which is itself due to how bad we are at doing things in moderation, artificially inflated by over-marketing.

One thing about this type of rebound-based disruption is that it tends to be just a re-packaging of some old idea, because it’s essentially about reverting to some previous change that went overboard. So looking at where potential over-adoption happens and landing on the rebound curve at the right time might be a good way to find great areas of opportunity. Here are some examples of the over-adoption and rebound type of disruption:

• The Cloud -> edge compute (re-packaging of personal computers)
• Email -> Slack/Teams (re-packaging of IRC/Google Hangout)
• Mass media news -> Substack (re-packaging of high quality op-eds from traditional newspapers)
• Social media -> smaller, tighter communities on Discord (re-packaging of subject-area focused BBs/forums)

An interesting related thought is just how much some of the flaws commonly attributed to Americans actually help drive this cycle. People outside of the US (and many inside) often poke fun at Americans for their lack of self-control (e.g. many Americans are obese) and extreme consumerism driven by hyper-effective marketing (e.g. the US allows drug companies to advertise to consumers directly, which most other developed nations forbid). But maybe these kinds of flaws are a critical factor in making America the center of disproportionately many disruptions and innovations. By being extra bad at doing things in moderation, the US creates more over-adoptions, which drives more rebounds in the forms of paradigm shifts.