Hours after the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s emergency power tariffs, the President imposed a new 10% 15% global tariff for 150 days. But as stocks fell on Monday, financial media outlets like Bloomberg offered an alternative explanation for the decline: a social media post.

While the northeast was hunkering down for a once-in-a-decade blizzard this weekend, financial research firm Citrini Research published a macro note that made waves among the highly online tech bro and finance bro crowd on X (formerly Twitter). In the lengthy read, Citrini augurs a world where artificial intelligence (AI) delivers on its promise — and it’s not bullish.

The “hypothetical scenario” posits that 10%+ unemployment and a nearly 40% decline in stocks could arise from a boom in superintelligent AI. And while Citrini says that the note is “a scenario, not a prediction,” it underscores that it’s a scenario that has been “relatively unexplored.”

It’s just a story, but for many investors, it’s more than that.

Can science fiction shape market reality?

There’s one big reason why the scenario might not have been explored earlier: Wall Street has been sounding off about the AI boom. They’ve spent years pumping up AI stocks like Nvidiaand Palantir, sold on the promise that AI will lead to a productivity boom. In the process, they’ve largely left the other stones unturned, such as questions of what happens if AI replaces significant swaths of the workforce or disrupts the economy.

Optimists hold that AI will simply lead to what economist Joseph Schumpeter termed “creative destruction,” creating new industries and jobs to replace the ones it renders obsolete. The pessimists, on the other hand, are bracing for a case that more closely matches Citrini’s hypothetical. They generally go to the nth degree in service of their claims; critics complain that Citrini’s detailed hypothetical largely ignores the ways negative externalities could be spun into a positive for the market and the economy.

Instead, mass layoffs are already here, forced by the hands of boardrooms backed up against a wall of grandiose expectations, largely created by the same sorts of investors who bought into the dystopia case. Either way, large pockets of these online characters are consumed by the acceleration in AI; the thinkers estimate that we are just a few short years away from superintelligence.

Why does that matter? Well, because the “boom” has really been huffing exhaust. There are now worries that the payoff from AI won’t be commensurate with the massive levels of capital investment that have already been poured into it, and that it won’t be massively transformative (at least not as quickly as some of its biggest boosters say it will be).

That anxiety is repricing the entire market; as I’ve written before in this forum, it’s both “a fear of AI and the fears from AI.”

Then, in drops the Citrini piece. More reasons to be fearful. More reasons to sell, even if the reason itself is a fiction. Both The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg have credited the post for a selloff in “delivery, payments, and software stocks” mentioned in the report. Only, if we use a little common sense, it’s pretty goofy to believe that the market is being moved by hypotheticals in science fiction. It’s even goofier when you consider that these pockets of the market have been facing a weeks-long selloff, also driven by promises of AI disruption.

The future belongs to the posters

It’s not the first time that Wall Street has been moved by hypotheticals in science fiction. The last few years have seen a rise in mass delusions, even among the ultrawealthy. In their estimations of AI’s potential, many “smart” people make leaps of understanding, reaching conclusions that support their arguments while largely ignoring the circumstances necessary to reach their posited endgame.

It would not be uncommon to find this sort of thinking among the tech optimists in San Francisco. I think billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper sums up this thinking quite succinctly. What transformed the Bay Area was ignoring all the ways in which something could fail; instead, technologists focus on “what if it works?” That idealism can be respectable and lucrative. It has helped make the Bay Area one of the wealthiest places on Earth.

This thinking is a little more foreign on Wall Street, but apparently, not so much anymore if thought exercises are said to be shaping markets. I don’t personally buy that the Citrini note is the culprit of Monday’s declines; if it were, it just provides a convenient ruse for investors to exit ailing positions. There’s a saying among traders that you “don’t fight the tape.” This is why smart money tends to avoid catching knives; that is, falling stocks with no positive catalysts. Yes, it’s probably really just that investors want reasons to sell.

But regardless, the level of coverage and attention paid to this singular note should be a wake-up call for those who aren’t highly online. From this vantage, pockets of tech and finance commentary appear increasingly intertwined. Many who have spent time on social media platforms like X know the retail crowd has its pocket of influence. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the Citrini note, but this line of thinking has one key problem: It doesn’t explain how we will get there.

The market is excusing how we might arrive at a juncture; no knowledge of how we got there. Therein lies the opportunity. If AI will be revolutionary, there are revolutions that will need to be had: a boom in electricity production, new memory capacity, and more capable and efficient models are just a few of the examples. The market has priced many of these realities. At the same time, it’s pricing many of its delusions, too.