News Analysis
In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called “The Tipping Point” that has since been rolled into the conventional wisdom. The idea is that viral products start very small, gain new adherents, tap into a special something that relates to fear of missing out, and the climb goes higher and higher until that one magic day, everyone has to have it. That’s the tipping point. The burden of the book is to demonstrate the thesis.
It works in reverse too, and here we can draw on Thomas Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (1962). His book is more about failure than success. The orthodoxy that everyone accepts without question is challenged by a new way of thinking that is dismissed out of hand and censored. Its adherents are denounced as cranks….