Chicken or The Egg

50 years ago: History is about to be made. Man is going to land on the ??

January 14, 2019: History is about to be made. An ?? is the most liked social media post in history and it was only posted on January 4.

Often, I ask if we’re living in a Black Mirror episode, but there is no doubt about it now, we truly are.

This is like some previously unheard-of tennis player who only just started playing beating Roger Federer in the final of the Australian Open. 

This is like some singer having the number one album on the charts despite only selling 823 albums.

This is like the Cleveland Browns winning the Super Bowl – ok lets not get carried away

Their original goal was to become the most-liked Instagram post of all time. That was Kylie Jenner’s post which had 18.5 million likes. The previous second most was Justin Bieber’s engagement announcement which had 13.4 million. The Egg has more than them combined and just cracked 40 million.

And have to stress it again - the egg isn't even 2 weeks old.

After scrambling the Instagram record, it moved onto beating the record of most liked online post of all time - Despacito’s 31.56 million on YouTube.

Clearly they knew what they were doing for the handle was world_record_egg.

In this world of fake this and fake that where celebrities have turned into marketing pied pipers, did we require an egg to teach us that there is more to social media than the Jenners and Christiano Ronaldo?

There are so many unanswered questions swirling round?

• Who is this?
• What are their true goals?
• How did they do this?
• Is it kosher? As we have seen with Facebook, YouTube, Netflix and now Tidal, just like with an egg, one needs to take metrics with a grain of salt.
• What’s next for these social media geniuses?

The media have been at a loss to explain what is going on. As you can imagine there’s be a lot of speculation whirling round – for me the greatest takeaway was that one article quoted a University researcher of internet memes  - in many ways, this is more wonderful than the egg.

Of course, this says more about us as a species than it does about the Egg.

Whether it’s planking, Harlem Shake,  Facebook Photo challenge, Ice Bucket challenge, Mannequin Challenge, or In My Feelings challenge, we can be so easily manipulated into taking part; wanting to be a part of it.

Everyone liked the Egg even Kylie Jenner herself.

Is social media just a ponzi scheme engagement designed to bring people to a central place where they can marketed to and sold stuff?

When the egg is finally unveiled you can bet there will be sense of anti-climax – how can there not be?

They will sell their story. Agencies will try to poach them.

It will be copy-catted and cloned.

Netflix will make a movie about it.

There will be a Super Bowl commercial about it.

It will be studied at University and featured as a case study.

And then something else will come along and grab our attention.