By Dominick Miserandino, CEO, RTM Nexus
There used to be a rhythm to how information moved through the world. The 5 o’clock news came on, you sat down, you absorbed it, and then you had the rest of the evening to actually think about what you’d just learned. That rhythm is gone. I talked about this recently on the Dave Palmer Show, in a conversation that started with the Trump-Musk feud and ended up somewhere much bigger: we’ve stopped contemplating information and started reacting to it.
Consider what happened with Tesla stock over the past few weeks. It’s moved up and down based on Elon Musk’s tweets, not on quarterly earnings, not on delivery numbers, not on any of the fundamentals that used to move a stock price. A single post can now do what used to take an entire news cycle. And it’s not just Tesla. Watch how fast the “No Kings” protests spread this year. I hadn’t heard of them two weeks before they were happening in dozens of cities. Twenty years ago, organizing a coordinated, multi-city protest on a Saturday took real infrastructure and lead time. Now it happens in the time it takes a hashtag to trend.
I call this the Tweet Economy: a marketplace where sentiment, capital, and even geopolitical posture move on social velocity rather than the traditional news cycle. And it has real consequences for anyone running a business, especially in retail and brands, where consumer sentiment is the product you’re actually selling.
The predictability problem
The clearest example of this showed up when I was asked about the ongoing US-China trade tensions. My answer surprised the host a little: retailers don’t actually care whether a tariff lands at 2%, 20%, or 50%. What they need is predictability. If you’re placing orders, sourcing materials, planning your supply chain six months out, the exact number matters far less than knowing the number won’t change again in ten days because of a tweet. Uncertainty, not the tariff rate itself, is what actually stalls business decisions. And in a world where policy signals can shift with a single post, that uncertainty compounds constantly.
That’s the real cost of the Tweet Economy for operators: it’s not just that news moves faster, it’s that the half-life of any given policy position or public commitment has collapsed. Everything is provisional now. Everything might be walked back by dinner.
Everything is documented, nothing is remembered
Here’s the paradox I keep coming back to: we are living through the most thoroughly documented moment in human history, and somehow we have the shortest attention span for any of it. Every post, every quote, every contradiction is sitting there, searchable, permanent. And yet we rarely connect today’s statement to last month’s. We’re not building a coherent record in our own heads; we’re just reacting to whatever is in front of us right now, then moving on ten minutes later.
For brands and executives, that combination is genuinely dangerous. It means your worst moment online never fully disappears, but it also means your audience’s memory of your best moments is shockingly short. You can’t coast on a good quarter of sentiment. You have to keep showing up, because the goodwill decays fast even while the receipts never do.
What this means if you run a business
None of this is a reason to panic, and it’s not new in kind, only in speed. I’ve lived through the shift to mobile, the shift to streaming, the early days of social. The pattern is always the same: a new technology arrives, we overcorrect in one direction, then we recalibrate. AI is the current version of that cycle. The Tweet Economy is just the latest wave, and if you’re surprised every time a wave comes, you’re going to have a rough time out on the water.
The practical takeaway for retail and brand leaders is this: build your planning around volatility as the default, not the exception. Assume the news cycle, the policy environment, and consumer sentiment can all shift meaningfully in the time it takes to place a purchase order. Build in room to adjust. And remember that in a fully documented world, consistency matters more than any single viral moment, good or bad.
The tools will keep changing. The next one after AI is already lining up. But the underlying skill, staying steady while the information environment moves faster than your ability to react to it, is the same skill it’s always been.
This piece grew out of a conversation on the Dave Palmer Show, available here.