The Banana Problem

I'll eat a banana whenever I can find one. I admire their consistency. For most of my life, they've been my favourite fruit – and it turns out I'm not alone. The banana is among the most consumed fruits on earth.

So why am I rambling about bananas today? Because despite their popularity – or actually, because of their popularity, bananas are catastrophically fragile.

The yellow curved fruit in your local supermarket, wherever you are in the world, is quite likely to be a Cavendish banana. An identical twin of every other one. Not just a genetic cousin – a literal twin.

All bananas are clones. They're reproduced through cuttings, not seeds, which means there's no variation between them.

The banana you ate this morning is genetically identical to every other Cavendish banana on earth, to the extent those genes weren't artificially modified.

We've been doing this for decades, and it worked very well until the 1950s, when the banana almost disappeared. The Cavendish of yesteryear was the Gros Michel – the world's previous favourite banana. Then something called 'Panama disease' obliterated them – and it was so devastatingly effective precisely because we make a single perfect banana spread around the world.

The Gros Michel is essentially gone. If you want to understand what bananas tasted like before the 1950s, you mostly can't. The variety that defined the fruit for most of human history was too optimised, too consistent, and too successful at being one thing. When a random disease came, there was nothing to fall back on.

It's a useful way to think about more than fruit.

The banana-fication of work

Becoming a banana isn't just the story of becoming a corporate sellout or a career salaryman. The perfect cog in the corporate machine who becomes first in line for layoffs in a recession.

Banana-fication comes for all of us.

You open your phone and open your social app of choice and you see them there, scroll by scroll: bananas. Creatives who found a format that worked and just kept cranking. Doing the same schtick. Performing the same gimmick. Whether they came up with it or another creator did. But they'll keep doing it to get an audience, and then they have to keep doing it, because the audience doesn't want anything else.

I've had a weird and backwards relationship with the internet, and I won't pretend it was some genius master-plan. I've found every way to fumble building a consistent online presence. I quit YouTube in 2012. You read that right. Before most creators even started on the platform I'd grown tired.

And then on Twitter, now X, I was getting up to 30 million impressions per month cracking jokes under a semi-anonymous account, until my legal career started taking off. I switched to a 'full government name' account by 2018 once my picture was in Yahoo Finance and strangers online were referring to me by my first name.

My tweet impressions fell off a cliff so steep it was almost inverted.

In fairness to me I'd set up my twitter account in college to enter some competition and I just happened to have grown up and had more professional interests. I wanted to share the kind of thing that would eventually become this newsletter, but no one seemed interested.

I consider myself fortunate that I wasn't on the wheel long enough to become a banana, despite what it may have cost me financially. It is ironic that I was getting YouTube cheques (they actually used to mail you) while I was in university +10 years ago and am still scrounging to get monetised today.

There are other kinds of bananas too.

Intellectuals who only read works or essays by those deemed important. Artists who paint themselves into a corner due to audience capture.

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote Sherlock Holmes and the character became so successful that Doyle tried to kill him. He threw him off the Reichenbach Falls in 1893 because he wanted to write other things, and Holmes was consuming him.

Public outcry was so intense that Doyle eventually brought Sherlock back, wrote him for the rest of his career, and spent decades resenting the character that had made him famous.

He became a banana against his will, trapped by his own most successful creation.

Elvis never found a way out. By his final years he was performing a costume of his former self. Just a man in a jumpsuit, repeating moves, oscillating moves, and surrounded by sycophants who were siphoning money hand over foot.

The optimisation process that made Elvis globally recognisable became a cage he died in at forty-two.

Picasso on the other hand, moved through radically different periods. Blue, Rose, Cubism, collage, Surrealism. Each time one popped off, he shed it before it became a formula.

Miles Davis likewise alienated his audiences repeatedly by refusing to remain what they'd loved him for.

Neither destroyed what they'd built for its own sake. They maintained genetic variation. They kept something alive in themselves that consistency would have killed.

Long live the wolf

My dog is not Miles Davis or Picasso. Cute, loveable, and downright dependent. Not because those men weren't, but because they were creative mutts. My dog is a mix of a Bichon Frise and a King Charles Cavalier.

Dog breeds have names because you know what they are - what they were always meant to be. My dog, Harry, had been selectively bred, as most domesticated dogs are, for specific traits that make him ideal company and yet useless in the wild.

My dog used to be scared by occasional bits of flapping plastic. He is not a wolf.

Wolves developed as generalist survivors, not engineered pets. They adapted across climates and conditions, hunted varied prey, and thrived without human support for millennia.

When wolf populations declined, it was through hunting and habitat destruction – external forces typically imposed by humans. Not because the world changed and they couldn't keep up. Not because they'd optimised themselves into fragility.

We bred that resilience out of dogs deliberately, because consistency and predictability were more useful to us than survival capacity. They became the animals we needed. They stopped being the animal that could exist without us.

The same process happens to people, institutions, and ideas. The optimisation process that gives things scale produces brittleness.

The algorithm that makes you famous overnight can make you irrelevant twice as fast. Ask Alex from Target, or Hawk Tuah, or that kid who did the funny dance on Ellen and had to keep doing it for people to recognise him.

The consistency that might make you visible will eventually make you fragile if it becomes a gimmick. The formula that builds your audience can become the thing that prevents you from outgrowing them.

Looking like a banana is often exactly how you achieve mainstream success.

But to survive the long haul, somewhere in the portfolio of what you are, you'll need some genetic variation. Not enough to make you unrecognisable. But just enough that when the disease comes – and it comes for all monocultures eventually – there's something to fall back on.

Don't become a gimmick. Don't become a banana. Keep trying things. Keep experimenting. Keep developing, and mutating, and growing.

(For more on this check out Chapter 12 of my book, Sovereign.)