The Journal reports on a genre you may have already met against your will: dash-cam chaos, filmed by young drivers, posted near-daily to TikTok. Swerves, near-misses, full-send lane changes — traffic as content, the left lane as a stage.
The economics are depressingly clean. Attention is a currency, and recklessness is cheap to produce. A generation raised on engagement metrics has discovered that the algorithm pays for the thing insurance actuaries charge for.
Two sober footnotes for the book. Auto insurers reprice this behavior eventually — loss ratios don’t watch TikTok, they watch claims. And the deeper pattern is one we track everywhere: when an incentive system pays for risk-taking, you get more risk-taking — in traffic, and in markets.
No trade — a behavioral-risk exhibit. When an incentive system pays for risk-taking (engagement algorithms here, momentum chases in markets), you reliably get more of it. Auto insurers will reprice this via loss ratios eventually — worth remembering the P&C names (ALL on the watchlist) live downstream of it. The market version of dash-cam content is the meme trade: filmed bravado, real claims.