Yesterday 1:08 AM
You can just study something and then figure out, okay, this is the object, what can be the desire we can attach it to? Or okay, this is the object, there might be some culturally iconic object to which I can attach this to. And then we can easily get to some desire that we can tap into to get attention. Basically, we can surrogate this topic or whatever we are studying to some cultural iconic object, and then that iconic object gives us some desire. So maybe the desire is, like, fluctuating per video, but at least all our topics are getting attention.
Yes. This gives you a much more flexible content machine because you no longer need one permanent aspiration for the whole account.
The pipeline becomes:
Thing worth studying → object/situation → culturally loaded surrogate → desire/tension → attention
The key is that the raw topic does not have to be interesting on its own. You can borrow meaning from something the audience already understands.
Suppose you study:
“Why companies hoard cash.”
The raw object is cash on a balance sheet. Pretty dead.
But you can surrogate it to a king keeping an army in reserve.
Now the culturally loaded object already carries meanings: power, optionality, war, survival, waiting for the right moment.
That gives you desires almost automatically:
power → freedom → preparedness → not being helpless → winning when opportunity appears.
So the video is no longer “Here is why companies maintain cash balances.”
It’s conceptually:
Why the strongest companies sometimes do absolutely nothing.
And then you trace Berkshire, Apple, whoever. The cultural object got you into the human desire; the researched object gives you the substance.
Same thing with AI context windows.
Raw object: context window.
Possible surrogate: working memory / backpack / RAM / desk space.
Culturally iconic version: Sherlock Holmes’s mind palace.
Desire: intelligence, remembering everything, becoming superhuman.
Now suddenly a technical topic has a human doorway.
And there is another important consequence of what you’re saying:
Your niche doesn’t necessarily need one desire. It can have one method of creating relevance.
You could talk about finance today, AI tomorrow, Napoleon the next day, and marketing after that, provided every time you perform the same transformation:
“What does this thing connect to that people already care about?”
The desires can fluctuate:
money today,
status tomorrow,
freedom next,
revenge,
beauty,
security,
leisure,
power,
belonging,
curiosity,
romance,
fear of loss.
That actually gives you more range while maintaining a recognizable editorial instinct.
I would only add one layer to your model. There are really two kinds of surrogates:
Icon surrogate: attach the obscure thing to something culturally recognizable.
KV cache → RAM
corporate cash pile → war chest
distribution network → Roman roads
LLM agents → employees
And state surrogate: skip the famous object and attach directly to a desired/feared condition.
KV cache → “why your AI gets slower and more expensive the longer you talk to it”
inventory → “the thing that can bankrupt you even while sales are growing”
customer acquisition cost → “why some businesses can't afford to grow”
So when studying something, you can basically ask:
What is this literally?
What famous thing behaves like this?
What human condition does that famous thing represent?
Why would someone care about that condition today?
That is almost a relevance compiler.
You feed it knowledge.
It outputs something culturally legible and desire-loaded.
And then your old rule kicks in: hook/select the interesting object, then trace the process. The icon/desire gets the click; the process gives them the payoff.
the naunceis this !
Exactly. The pond example makes the mechanism brutally legible.
A pond by itself has almost no attention.
Then you attach it to a culturally enormous object:
pond → Krishna → divinity → pilgrimage → ritual → visitors → commerce
The pond has not physically changed. Its meaning density has.
And once enough people act on that meaning, the myth starts producing real-world consequences:
story → visitors → offerings → stalls → roads/signage → festivals → photos/videos → more visitors
At that point the attention becomes self-reinforcing. The myth creates traffic; the traffic becomes social proof that the place matters.
That is what makes sacred geography such a clean study of surrogacy. A tiny local object can inherit centuries of cultural capital from a much larger icon.
The useful abstraction is:
Low-attention object + high-attention cultural association = borrowed significance.
Then, with enough repetition and behavior around it, the borrowed significance can become native significance. Eventually people no longer need to hear the full Krishna story. They just know: that pond matters.
That’s basically how an object graduates into an icon.
Without polluting the idea too much, has someone discovered this surrogacy or noticed something like this? Is there any literature on it? Has any legend noticed this? Is the framework more developed than we have right now somewhere?
Yes. I found something much closer than the loose myth/anthropology stuff we were circling around.
The closest established idea to your “surrogacy” is Grant McCracken’s meaning-transfer model. In his 1986 paper, Culture and Consumption, he argues that cultural meaning is mobile: it exists out in the culturally constituted world, and advertising/fashion can move that meaning onto goods; rituals can then move it from goods onto people.
Then in 1989 he makes the mechanism even clearer with celebrities. A celebrity is useful not merely because they are famous or attractive, but because they already contain a bundle of cultural meanings. The endorsement creates an association that transfers those meanings onto the product.
That is almost your mechanism:
McCracken:cultural object loaded with meaning → association → new object inherits meaning
You:low-attention object → culturally iconic surrogate → new object inherits relevance/desire → attention
The difference is important: McCracken is primarily trying to explain meaning and consumption. You are asking specifically how to deliberately borrow attention potential.
And there is empirical work behind his idea. Later research has found transfers of things like personality, appearance, feelings, values and credibility from celebrities to brands, including studies using Indian consumers.
There is an entire adjacent literature called image transfer in sponsorship. The basic sponsorship logic is wonderfully blunt: an event already possesses an image; a company associates itself with that event so some of that image gets transferred to the company. Studies even find associations spilling between brands that merely appear together around the same event.
So:
Nike sponsors athlete.
Athlete = performance, victory, discipline.
Nike gets some of that semantic payload.
That is commercially institutionalized surrogacy.
But then I found something even more relevant to your pond + Krishna example.
Diana Eck actually calls what she studies the “grammar of signification” of Hindu sacred geography. Her work examines how myths “take place” in thousands of local shrines and pilgrimage locations, creating an interconnected symbolic landscape across India. She specifically emphasizes duplication and the way local, regional and pan-Indian sacred geographies become linked.
That’s fucking close.
Your pond example:
random pond → Krishna was here → Krishna mythology attaches → pond becomes sacred
is basically one of the processes her work is designed to describe.
She is not framing it as an attention-hacking strategy. But structurally:
small geography gets plugged into enormous mythology.
Once plugged in, it no longer needs to manufacture meaning from zero.
Then Stanley Tambiah gives you another piece. His term is “objectification of charisma.” In his work on Buddhist saints and amulets, charisma that originally belongs to a saint can become concretized and “sedimented” into physical objects; those objects then operate as repositories of that power for believers.
That gives you the reverse direction:
famous/sacred person → associated physical thing → physical thing inherits person's significance
Which is basically:
Krishna → pond
saint → amulet
celebrity → sneaker
Olympics → Visa
Batman → jawline
Same primitive operation underneath: association allows meaning to migrate.
There is even a much older conceptual ancestor. Frazer’s The Golden Bough described the “law of contagion”: in sympathetic magical thinking, things that have been in contact are believed to retain a connection afterward. Modern psychology has studied similar intuitions—people often behave as though an object’s “essence” can transfer through contact.
So “Krishna touched this rock” is particularly potent because it isn’t merely an arbitrary association. Humans appear quite receptive to:
important person touched X → some importance/essence remains in X.
Then there is Douglas Holt’s How Brands Become Icons. Holt moves one step later in the lifecycle: rather than asking how an ordinary object borrows meaning, he asks how brands themselves eventually become cultural icons. His model argues that iconic brands perform “identity myths,” using symbols and stories that address broader cultural tensions and desires.
So I think the literature actually gives us a beautiful lifecycle:
1. Borrow meaning — McCracken
Culture/icon → object.
2. Anchor meaning geographically/materially — Eck + Tambiah
God/saint/story → pond, shrine, amulet, place.
3. Select what survives culturally — cultural transmission research
Certain memorable, emotional and counterintuitive elements disproportionately survive repeated retelling.
4. Eventually become the source of meaning — Holt
The once-ordinary object itself becomes an icon.
And this produces something very close to what we independently arrived at:
Stage 0: Nobody cares about X.
Stage 1: Attach X to Y, where Y already has enormous cultural meaning.
X ← Y
Stage 2: Repetition strengthens the association.
X ≈ Y
Stage 3: Ritual, stories, social proof and physical symbols stabilize it.
Stage 4: X begins carrying the meaning independently.
X → meaning
Stage 5: X can now become somebody else’s surrogate.
That last step is wild.
At some point Krishna himself does not need explaining. He’s a meaning reservoir.
Nike doesn’t need Michael Jordan every time anymore. Nike itself can transfer athletic meaning onto another object.
A cultural icon, in this framing, is basically an object with enough accumulated semantic capital that other objects can now borrow from it.
So I don’t think you have discovered the primitive phenomenon from scratch. Anthropology, consumer research, branding, religious studies and cultural evolution have each discovered pieces of it.
But I did not find a canonical framework that combines the pieces in quite the way you’re using them:
Given an object with insufficient attention potential, deliberately find a culturally loaded surrogate whose existing associations map to a high-TAM human desire, transfer those associations to the object through packaging, and eventually make the object capable of carrying that attention itself.
That’s the synthesis.
And I would actually keep calling it surrogacy rather than replacing your vocabulary with “meaning transfer.” “Meaning transfer” describes what happens. Surrogacy describes the strategic act: this object cannot carry the attention requirement itself, so another object carries it on its behalf.
If you want to go down exactly this rabbit hole without getting lost in 50 adjacent fields, I’d read only three things, in this order:
- Grant McCracken — “Culture and Consumption” (1986) — the general machinery of movable cultural meaning.
- Grant McCracken — “Who Is the Celebrity Endorser?” (1989) — the cleanest worked example of one culturally loaded object transferring meaning to another.
- Diana Eck — “The Imagined Landscape” / India: A Sacred Geography — basically the pond-Krishna version operating over an entire civilization.
Those three seem closest to the thing you’ve been constructing.
Yesterday 11:11 PM
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