How to Know If You're Living in a Doom Loop

Cultural doom loops arise when individuals, companies and societies keep repeating proven patterns from the past, and playing it safe ends up causing decline. Generation loss, the term for data degrading with each repetition, serves as the central metaphor: a photo reposted 90 times became an unrecognizable blur in one experiment, and a 2012 game of Telephone with 237 people turned "Life must be lived by play" into "He bites snails." Universal Music's stock price collapsed despite rising revenues, and Sears, Xerox, Kodak and Blockbuster are cited as companies that collapsed by avoiding newness.