The Influencer Decade as Informational Thermodynamic Collapse: Operational Closure, Knowledge Allostasis, and the Bifurcation of the Digital Ecosystem (2012–2025)

The contemporary crisis of information search and distribution systems is not a transient cultural phenomenon but the mathematically predictable output of a decade of massive low-epistemic-density input. This paper argues that the period 2012–2025 functioned as an uncontrolled experiment whose initial conditions — the algorithmic democratization of digital reach without epistemic hierarchization — produced chaotically amplified effects consistent with the sensitivity to initial conditions described by Lorenz (1963).

The sustained decline of organic reach on Meta, from approximately 16% in 2012 to 1–2% in 2025, is structurally correlated with the parallel growth of its advertising revenues, from $4.28 billion to $196 billion over the same period. Although Meta consistently framed these changes as improvements to user experience, the data show a clear structural correlation between the sustained reduction of organic reach and the strong growth of advertising revenues.

The paper introduces the concept of knowledge allostasis to describe the migration of high-density knowledge toward lower-resistance structures such as Zenodo, OSF, and ArXiv, and argues that artificial intelligence, incapable of producing content of its own, requires precisely the epistemic difference that the mass influencer ecosystem was never able to generate. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Lorenz (1963), Schrödinger (1944), Varela and Maturana (1980), Bateson (1972), Friston (2010), and Prigogine (1977), the paper proposes that current phenomena — including Google's credibility crisis, user migration toward alternative platforms, and the growth of open science repositories — are structural consequences of initial conditions established between 2012 and 2025. In Dabrowski's (1964) terms, what we observe is not decadence but positive disintegration at systemic scale.