Well, growth hacking is a buzzword for a marketing position in a company encountering the steep part of the curve. I suppose one of the innovations is that a wi

Well, growth hacking is a buzzword for a marketing position in a company encountering the steep part of the curve. I suppose one of the innovations is that a widget becomes more attractive to a segment of the population when you bolt on some social functionality, what you’re seeing. At the top of growth is incumbency. I think that’s where your second paragraph comes in. Incumbents surveil innovations, and “growth hackers” don’t like to talk about this obvious conclusion. They’d rather inhabit a role that concludes once growth has succeeded and slowed. This is no more revolutionary than traditional marketing. Marxism talks about capitalist marketing as a way to channel alienation among working classes away from collective organization. But, Marx from the beginning needed to market his ideas to different groups. He needed those groups to realize that they needed his political orientation. He tries to do this with abstractions, and explicitly gives up on whole classes he deems unfit to understand those ideas (the lumpenproletariat). As the product of a growth hacker reaches incumbency, marketing gives way to public relations. We might consider Cambridge Analytica public relations hackers. Same level of statistical sophistication, same single-focus of corporate promotion over all other advancements.