Social media and smartphones are sterializing humanity.

There is an absurd claim I saw the other day. It's a popular call out "The Porsche diffusion" on Chinese interwebs. It goes like this

If one woman dates a guy who drives a Porsche, she’s unlikely to settle for less afterward.
Then nine of her BFFs think, “If she can get a Porsche guy, why can’t I?”
Now you have ten women who won’t consider non-Porsche men.
That’s the Porsche Diffusion Law.

I initially dismissed this as a blatantly misogynistic take on hypergamy. It felt like one of those cynical internet takes trying to reduce complex human behavior into a cheap punchline. Then someone did a bit of napkin math:

Imagine a mega city with 10 million people. Say there are about 20,000 people who can visibly signal high status - not just wealth, but performative wealth. Think luxury cars, curated lifestyles, Instagram-ready relationships. Call them “Porsche guy”

That’s 0.2% of the population.

The question isn’t “how many Porsche guys exist from commoner's perception?”

To translate into Math: what’s the probability you’ve seen at least one Porsche guy around you?

Consider a typical social graph. Between friends, coworkers, friends-of-friends, and social media exposure, it’s not unreasonable for someone to be indirectly exposed to a few hundred distinct individuals.

Let’s say 300.

What’s the probability that none of those 300 people are connected (directly or indirectly) to someone in that top 0.2%?

Roughly:

(1 − 0.002)³⁰⁰ ≈ 55%

So there’s about a 45% chance you will encounter at least one “Porsche-level” signal within your immediate social horizon.

Now add recommender algorithms.

You are no longer sampling randomly from 300 people. You are sampling from a biased, algorithmically amplified feed - one that disproportionately surfaces high-status, high-engagement content.

Your effective exposure probability is no longer 45%. It’s closer to saturation.

At that point, the system changes character.

I actually went a bit further into this topic. Checkout my post few weeks back in Chinese.

Thinking about this made me realize something a bit unsettling.

In early development of a human body, every cell starts out basically identical. Same DNA, same potential. Then some local chemicals kick in, and only a tiny fraction become germ cells. The rest become somatic-functional, necessary, but no longer part of reproduction.

No cell is forced. It’s just the gradients.

The system ends up with massive scale, high efficiency-and very few cells actually reproducing.

If you squint, the pattern doesn’t feel entirely alien.

I wrote this blog because of an HN thread. Praise the unholy AI trinity of 搜广推 business (Another Chinese connotation which stands for Search, Ads, and Recommendation engines in case you are wondering).