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The Revolution of Weird: How Mass Markets Are Dying and Individuality is Rising
Ever wonder why some of the most successful companies today seem to cater to the oddball rather than the average consumer? Seth Godin's "We Are All Weird" provides a compelling explanation: the mass market is dying, and weird is taking over. This isn't just another business trend-it's a fundamental shift in how our society functions. The book has become something of a cult classic among entrepreneurs and marketers, with figures like Tim Ferriss and Simon Sinek citing its influence on their thinking. When it was first published in 2011, many dismissed its central premise as exaggerated. A decade later, as TikTok algorithms serve up increasingly personalized content and major retailers struggle to maintain relevance, Godin's predictions seem almost prophetic. This manifesto challenges us to consider: are we creating for the weird, or desperately clinging to a mass market that no longer exists?
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The Death of Mass: How We Got Here and Where We're Going
For generations, our entire economy and culture have been built around a simple premise: find what appeals to the largest number of people, make it efficiently, and market it aggressively. This wasn't a natural evolution-it was deliberately engineered. The factory came first, then the mass market followed. Governments promoted conformity for control, but marketers truly embraced it, concluding that tighter market conformity meant more profit. Why make left-handed products when you could force left-handed people to buy what you already made?
This mass market mindset is relatively new in human history. In 1918, two thousand car companies operated in America. By 1925, the most popular saddle maker had a minuscule market share. Contrast that with Heinz at its peak, found in 70% of American refrigerators, or Microsoft dominating every Fortune 500 company. No wonder market leaders fear the weird-they've built empires on the premise that most people want the same things.
But now, mass is dying, fighting desperately to control conversations, commerce, and politics. It will fail; it must. The twentieth century's defining idea was mass, which gave us efficiency, productivity, and wealth for some. It also gave certain people power and control over millions. That era is ending.
This change threatens those whose work revolves around finding, creating for, or selling to the masses. For others, it represents the opportunity of a lifetime. The world is inexorably moving toward more information, choice, freedom, interaction, and weirdness. This isn't just about consumer products-it's about our fundamental freedom to choose who we are and how we live.
Take a walk down First Avenue and 8th Street in Manhattan, and you'll see this transformation in action: an Islamic cultural center next to Atomic Wings, Veniero's Italian bakery with Chinese tourists outside, a Korean-Virginian chef's noodle bar, uptown lawyers mingling with downtown kids, hydroponic herb shops, turmeric vendors, and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Nothing here would seem normal to a time-traveler from 1965. Instead, there are unexpected collisions of ideas, cultures, and concepts, filled with positive energy.
This isn't just semantics. Population variation is changing rapidly-not in height or other physical characteristics, but in everything under our control. We're stretching behavior outside that first standard deviation, destroying the 68% hump that statisticians call normal. Everything not normal is weird, and there's more weirdness than ever.
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The Four Forces Driving Us Toward Weird
What's causing this seismic shift? Four powerful forces are pushing us away from mass and toward weird:
First, creation is amplified. Whether publishing a book, selling a painting, customizing a car, or designing a house-whatever your passion, it's easier and faster to do it, and more likely that part of the world will notice. The ability to reach and change those around you has been transformed forever by internet connections and the fact that anyone, anywhere can publish to the world.
Second, wealth allows us to do what we want, and what we want is to be weird. Only wealthy organisms can culturally diversify, and as humans get richer, our instinct is to become weirder. As productivity skyrockets, so does our ability to do what we'd like rather than merely focusing on survival. Standing out takes time, money, and confidence-more of us have all three now.
Third, marketing is far more efficient at reaching the weird. The long tail isn't just clever phrasing; it accurately describes the market for almost everything. It's easier than ever to reach particular pockets of weird people with things they're obsessed with. This makes it far easier to be weird, because marketers now accommodate your desires instead of forcing you to do only what they want.
Fourth, tribes are better connected. Because you can find others sharing your interests, weird is perversely becoming more normal, at least within the small tribes we now congregate in. Your chosen community can mirror and amplify your interests, encouraging you to push further. The Internet connects and protects the weird by connecting and amplifying their tribes.
Here's the conflict: what made us rich was our ability to process, produce, ship, and market in mass. Productivity advances came from large-scale innovations in production and delivery. Yet this wealth fuels a movement undermining its foundation. We needed mass audiences to leverage assembly lines, supported by TV ads. But as marketers and factory owners grew wealthy, that wealth made the market wealthy enough to stop obediently doing what we're told, undermining the very system creating the wealth.
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The Wealth Revolution: How Prosperity Creates Weirdness
You need to be rich to be weird-not Rockefeller rich, but rich enough to not worry about surviving. Most animals aren't rich; they forage or hunt daily or die. Humans, however, have grown increasingly productive and weird. Consider cave paintings from 17,000 years ago-evidence of early "wealth" allowing someone time off from survival tasks to create art. These Lascaux cave paintings weren't just decorative; they represented the first instance of humans having enough surplus resources to invest time in cultural expression.
Compare that single cave to today's Museum of Modern Art with its endless variety-not better art, but vastly more diverse. From abstract expressionism to digital installations, from performance art to conceptual pieces that challenge the very definition of art. As productivity compounds over centuries, we gain wealth from inventions made long ago. Even those labeled "poor" today are rich enough to make choices about what they watch or eat, with access to entertainment options that would seem magical to our ancestors.
The marketplace isn't just about profit-it enables personal choice and engagement. As our productivity has skyrocketed, the cost of basics like light has plummeted (from 50 hours of work for an hour of sesame oil lantern light 2,200 years ago to half a second today). Consider other examples: in 1800, a cotton shirt cost the equivalent of $3,000 in today's money. Now it's $30. A three-minute international phone call in 1950 cost about $400 in today's dollars; now it's essentially free through internet services.
Our compounding productivity creates miracles of choice-from $400 handmade typewriters with USB connections to $500 unlimited monthly air travel passes. We benefit from innovations paid for generations ago; computers that should cost billions now cost $200. The first hard drive in 1956 stored 5MB and cost $50,000 - today you can store 1TB for $50. This explosion of productivity since 1920 has ironically created both mass marketing and the trend toward weird that now challenges it.
The Internet's greatest cultural shift is enabling individuals to impact their own culture. The Pro-Am revolution allows amateurs to create professional-quality work for fun-discovering asteroids, editing encyclopedias, or writing code. Citizen scientists have identified new galaxy types, amateur astronomers track near-Earth objects, and volunteer programmers create sophisticated open-source software. Connected tribes reinforce ideas that might otherwise die, creating feedback loops that accelerate creation.
This was impossible forty years ago. Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime and lived in isolation-imagine if he'd been connected to fans and fellow artists. Today, post a guitar video online and you'll hear from other guitarists within hours. A novice photographer can learn from experts worldwide through online communities, while aspiring writers can publish instantly to global audiences. This rapid skill-sharing accelerates creative development in everything from skateboarding to public speaking, creating unprecedented opportunities for specialized interests to flourish and evolve.
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The Bell Curve Is Spreading: How Markets Are Fragmenting
For a century, marketers delighted in tight bell curves-almost everyone drank Pepsi or Coke, wore Keds, spoke English. Running cafeterias was easy because everyone ate the same thing. Travel agencies thrived because everyone wanted the same destinations.
Distribution curves remain, but as the anchors holding behavior in place have loosened, the bells have spread like thawing ice sculptures. The number-one rice brand used to be Carolina; now it's "other." Corn Flakes once dominated cereal shelves that are now longer than entire packaged-food sections were decades ago. Cars that once came only in black now include Scions deliberately designed to be customized.
Consider fishing-once work, not leisure. Only with increased wealth could we afford to fish for fun and throw back our catch. As this hobby emerged, media and marketers ensured most people approached it the same way. Field and Stream taught the "right" techniques, while sporting goods stores sold standardized equipment.
Now, in mere seconds, you can find a $3,500 Orvis Special Edition bamboo fly rod or Al Troth's specialty flies for 99 cents online. Fishing techniques have diversified as much as the fishermen themselves, each supported by eager communities.
Or take bread-for 5,000 years, it was homemade from local ingredients. Industrialization gave us bakeries, factories, and ultimately Wonder Bread-white, refined, pure and always the same. In less than a century, we moved from personal to industrial, with mass ruling.
Then Wonder's parent company went bankrupt as the curve spread out. Now Daniel Leader's Bread Alone earns millions selling organic, spelt, sourdough and sunflower breads to tens of thousands of otherwise normal people exercising their ability to choose. No industrial baker can ignore the fringe anymore-the center is hollowing out while the fringe drives what bakers make and what we eat.
Forty years ago, bestselling books might remain listed for a year, and movies dominated for months. We spent considerable time consuming what everyone else was consuming. Now bestsellers last only a week or two before being replaced. Instead of one list, we're seeing many bestseller lists layered atop each other, as different tribes nominate different hits-a rap song followed by a ballad, a thriller then a comedy, a book for thirty-year-old geeks then one for mothers.
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The Power of Choice: How Consumer Agency Is Transforming Markets
Not all hedge fund operators are alike, nor are all rural peasants. Systems treating them as homogeneous groups strip away their individuality. Mass marketing had little choice but to do this, lacking effective ways to reach the few interested customers.
Today's marketplace can't maintain this blindness. When people choose to interact, they gain power because their choice belongs to them, not marketers. If you want my business, acknowledge and respect my weirdness.
Outside Berelli, India, I met a fruit vendor making $3 daily who chose and purchased his own solar lantern. He wasn't given it-he selected it because, by his calculation, it was worth it. This means D-light must figure out how to delight people like him to gain more customers.
This man is now rich-not because he has everything he wants, but because he can make choices and participate in a marketplace that cares about his interests. When people making just a few dollars daily join those entitled to choice, you've opened the door to half the world.
Smart marketers are now leading the push toward weird, co-marketing with segments rather than marketing at masses. Disney will help you get married in Orlando, Zappos sells exactly the shoe you want, and Threadless lets customers design and sell T-shirts to each other.
Smart marketers not only make what niche markets desire but actively grow those niches. If you sell $900 handmade rifles to collectors, you grow sales by creating more collectors. This creates a cycle where marketers fan the spark of weirdness, hand it back to the market, who get weirder still. Stereophile magazine runs ads for $1000-per-meter speaker cables, which funds articles about audiophiles, which encourages readers to push the hobby further.
While we celebrate choice in principle-no one claims preferring chocolate over vanilla is morally wrong-organizations and producers feel threatened by choice, fear weirdness, and push conformity. Yet consumer power grows exponentially as affluence runs parallel with increased choice.
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The End of Mass Media: From Three Networks to Infinite Choice
We've been living with the assumption of mass for so long that we don't even notice how deeply ingrained it is. From the mom buying normal baby clothes to fit in, to the kid forbidden from wearing his Batman cape to school, to the high schooler getting sick on beer to be cool-we're trained from birth to enforce the status quo.
Our bias is to the many. We admire politicians by vote counts, listen to Top 40 radio, build institutions for the many. Yet surprise: the weird are now more important than the many, because the weird are the many.
Brands like Seven Up and Tide became valuable because for forty years, TV ads were too cheap. TV delivered mass to marketers-buy enough ads and you bought trust. For three generations, TV generated more value than it cost advertisers. The ads didn't need to be great, just plentiful.
Few marketers understood this opportunity, but those who did became hooked on mass-creating average products for average people and advertising them heavily. Then suddenly TV splintered, leaving thousands of brands stranded without a plan. They're addicted to mass and there's no mass available.
In 1972, The Tonight Show was watched by twice as many people as the 2010 versions of Late Night and Leno combined. We pretend network TV matters for reaching masses, but it doesn't-there are fewer masses.
The Beverly Hillbillies has been replaced by Mad Men, but fifteen times more people watched Jed Clampett than watch Don Draper. Does the opportunity to grab the middle even exist anymore?
Anil Dash points out there's no longer a canon-no corpus of work a culturally intelligent person could be counted on to have experienced. You might never have seen Star Wars or heard Beethoven live, or know Keith Hernandez or Keith Moon.
Making it worse, endless variations and remixes mean even if you've experienced part of the canon, there's another version only obsessives know. This explosion of choice sets us free to spin at random, getting weirder at every turn-once you're a little out of sync, there's little reason to avoid getting more out of sync.
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Education and Weirdness: Rethinking How We Learn
From a distance, everything looks the same. When educating 4 million new students yearly, administrators must view them from afar, optimizing for normal.
Normal is the pretty cheerleader with good grades, the popular football player, or the compliant student who studies hard. We organize our education system around these ideals, making allowances only for the exceptionally smart or disabled.
The system takes precisely twelve years, built around a standardized curriculum. Get ahead and you stress the system; fall behind and you're reprocessed. Corporations seek these normal graduates-those who follow instructions without issues.
We enforce this normalcy through bullies who torment outliers, coaches who bench enthusiastic but less talented players, and teachers with classes too large to focus beyond the middle. Education reform focuses on raising standards for this middle, testing students harder to ensure reliable, normal output.
Great educators discover there is no blob of normal. Instead, there are millions of individuals and small groups that learn, think, and dream differently.
Why do we force visually gifted children to do fractions? Why push problem-solving teenagers toward standardized tests? Why not celebrate students who produce heroic work in mediocre environments?
The education system's challenges stem from our distance from the problem, not lack of money. We're puzzled that a static, history-based approach fails in a world of constant change, yet we cling to a "normal" that never existed.
The alternative to our broken education system is simple but not easy: embrace the weird and abandon normal. Acknowledge that our factories don't need so many compliant workers.
It's difficult because we can't mass-produce students when working with them individually or in like-minded groups. We can't test them into compliance or maintain a factory mindset for education.
The people we pay most, seek to hire, and emulate are outliers-the weird ones. Did Yo-Yo Ma or Richard Branson become exceptional by being normal students? No. The stories of outliers are familiar: they struggled against conformity, suffered, survived, and now they're revered.
My solution: don't waste time pushing kids in directions they resist. Find what weirdness they excel at, encourage that, and get out of the way.
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The Future of Weird: Finding Your Tribe in a Post-Mass World
If you persist in trying to be all things to all people, you will fail. The only alternative is to be something important to a few people-which means disappointing some slightly engaged normal folks who can probably live fine without you.
Consider Jackson Hole ski area: should they cater to extreme skiers or dumb down for average vacationers? Walking away from average is difficult because average represents mass, or the promise of mass. But the field is too crowded for middle-of-the-road normal brands.
If you cater to the normal, you will disappoint the weird. And as the world gets weirder, that's a dumb strategy. By 2010, there was more weird outside the box than normal inside it.
Connection, not commerce, drives the weird revolution. When we join tribes of like-minded individuals, we move further from the mainstream and deeper into our chosen communities. Tea Party rallies push attendees further from the political mainstream. Tattoo websites encourage more ink. Manufacturing conferences push companies toward ever-faster production.
These connection tools have become ubiquitous and efficient, accelerating our move toward multiple silos instead of one giant community. The 141 Bajan firefighters on Ning connect online, reassuring each other they're normal in their weirdness despite spending 80 hours weekly risking their lives for free. Each community becomes its own micro-culture, embracing weird notions and drifting in unique directions.
If marketers cater to edge cases, those edge cases must spend money, speak up, and organize into tribes willing to engage with the outside world. Want interesting new plays on Broadway? Buy tickets when they arrive. Want marketers to make what you want? Tell them, then purchase it when they do. Classical music is endangered because enthusiasts stopped buying tickets and records. Meanwhile, tech devices flourish because tech nerds buy them.
What correlates most with happiness? Research shows it's the ability to be weird, freedom to make choices, and the ability to be heard. Regardless of income, race, or geography, when people can choose what matters to them, they become happier. Not more varieties of jeans, but the opportunity to live where they want, express their feelings, and choose their path.
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Embracing the Weird Revolution
Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark note that the five hundred years of the Gutenberg revolution are ending-even the mass-marketed book won't be around much longer. The ability for billions to create and spread their own version of culture is brand new, making the last decade's changes look trivial.
The opportunity lies in being the one that the weird seek out. Which means you must be weird as well.
If you've concluded you just need to target niche markets, we've both failed. Those in power describe the world as "us" and "not-us"-mass and niche. But this gets you nowhere. The revolution we're living through means mass is no longer the center. Our culture is now a collection of tribes, communities of interest that sometimes get along and sometimes don't. We share communication tools and languages, but we're people with choices who won't change merely because we once had none.
No niches. No mass. Just tribes that care, seeking those who would join, amplify, or sell to them. This isn't utopia, but it is our future.
Cindy Gallop says, "Everyone hates advertising in general, but we love advertising in particular." This extends beyond advertising to politicians, products, causes, and even birthday parties-we hate what's not for us but love what speaks directly to us. Our siloed interests demand organizations that deliver particular instead of general.
Tom's Shoes exemplifies this shift with its radical model: for every pair sold, they donate one to someone in need. Blake understands his shoes aren't for everyone-they're for a tribe that shares an interest and passion. Unlike mass marketers still searching for "a pregnant elephant," Tom's thrives when people resonate with its weird story.
The challenge of your future is to do productive work with the tribe that cares about you-to find them, earn their trust, and lead them where they need to go. This cultural shift has opened the door for creativity, innovation and art. We're at our best when we're weird and enable others to be weird too. Rather than demonizing those who don't fit our definition of normal, we should respect those brave enough to choose precisely what they want.
