When Power Laws Win

Mediocristan is shaped by independent events averaging out — every human's height adds a little, bounded by biology. Extremistan is shaped by feedback loops that amplify small differences into huge ones. A viral post gets shared because it is already being shared. A book sells more because stores stock it more prominently.

This produces power-law distributions — the 80/20 rule and its extreme cousins. In book sales, the top 20% of titles take 80% of revenue, and the top 1% take 50%. Wherever this preferential attachment exists, the tail grows fat and most of the total mass lives in a few outliers.