Never mind the "new nuclear age" clickbait. It's considerably out of date, of course. It's said that generals often fight the last war, not the present war. Th

Never mind the "new nuclear age" clickbait. It's considerably out of date, of course. It's said that generals often fight the last war, not the present war. Theology departments (like this one at Notre Dame University) typically fight the war before last. The headline writer for this article, well, yeah, theologian writing for church people. Ignore the silly headline. But read the article. Our trade is strongly influenced by Rene Girard's understanding of competitive mimetic desire and its violence. Why? The people who organize the ad-driven internet know all about Girard. Peter Thiel invested in FB because he saw its potential for harnessing mimetic desire to drive engagement. (reference: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/john-lanchester/you-are-the-product https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/john-lanchester/you-are-the-pr...) FB-style social media is addictive precisely because of the fear of not being as good as "friends." Mimetic desire is the the human yearning behind the Fear of Missing Out. Driving engagement is most effective when it exploits that fear. It works very well indeed. Other attempts at building social media networks (Stack Overflow, Linked In, Slack, for example) try to avoid that exploitation. They try to use other motivators than FOMO to drive engagement. Can they be successful without overusing mimetic desire? It's the key question they must answer to be successful. The obligatory panel of customer logos just below the fold on SaaS landing pages engages mimetic desire in IT buyers. "Wow! Schwab uses this! I want to be like Schwab!" It's benign in these cases. Girard offers a good unifying framework for understanding the human nature behind all sorts of marketing work. Convincing people their hair is ablaze and offering them ways to put it out is the heart of building new businesses. Getting people to set each others' hair on fire, then putting it out, is the holy grail of new businesses. It's no accident that Silicon Valley employs that framework in lots of ways: he was a scholar at Stanford's Hoover Institution. It can be a hard slog to learn about him. But it's worth your trouble.