Main Character Energy

Internet-protagonists-as-a-service

And why do people chase main character energy? Partly because the internet has collapsed the distinction between personal and professional identity. For many, visibility online is survival: it drives career opportunities, relationships, even credibility. The main character isn’t just a cultural meme. It’s a survival strategy.

But there’s also a deeper cultural current. Mass culture has fragmented, and traditional institutions of narrative (Hollywood, mainstream news, publishing) no longer hold a monopoly on attention. Instead, stories emerge from the crowd. Being a protagonist is a way to insert yourself into the cultural script when there’s no longer a centralized stage. In a world where everyone is shouting, main character energy is a way of saying: “the plot matters, and I’m in it.”

Of course, protagonism has its downsides. The internet’s main characters are often chosen involuntarily, elevated by outrage or mockery. Many are “canceled” or meme-ified in ways they can’t control. Even those who deliberately cultivate main character energy risk burnout, para-social collapse, or entrapment in a persona they can’t escape. The internet loves protagonists, but it doesn’t necessarily love you.

That’s why some people are experimenting with distributed protagonism. Instead of a single face at the center, communities and collectives can adopt main character energy as a rotating mantle. Think of anonymous meme accounts, DAOs, or online movements where the protagonist is more of a role than a person. In these models, the audience invests not in the individual but in the continuity of the narrative.

Here’s where it gets stranger. If protagonism is the scarce resource of the internet, markets will form around it. We’ve already seen early signs: influencer tokens, betting markets on content virality, NFTs tied to digital personas. Imagine futures contracts on main character arcs, or DAOs that collectively manage a stable of protagonists and auction off their narrative moments. In some corners of crypto Twitter, this isn’t hypothetical. It’s just Tuesday.

The logic is straightforward. Attention is scarce, and protagonism is the highest form of attention. If you can financialize it, you can trade it. If you can trade it, you can monetize it. That means the next wave of platforms may not be feeds or forums but protagonist exchanges: places where narrative arcs are minted, bought, and speculated on like commodities. For example, time.fun is a marketplace where domain experts can monetize access to themselves - their thoughts, time, and persona - via tokenized, redeemable minutes instead of just commoditized content.

The most interesting possibility, though, is not speculation but collaboration. If main character energy can be distributed, maybe it can also be co-authored. Instead of one person carrying the story, groups could pass the protagonist role like a baton, building shared lore in the process. This turns internet culture from a series of viral spikes into a longer narrative fabric, one where people can belong not just as spectators but as characters themselves.

We’re already seeing hints of this in online experiments that blur the line between fiction and social media. Collaborative storytelling projects, ARGs, and community meme accounts. The “internet protagonist” isn’t just an individual anymore. It’s a network role, a cultural slot that can be filled and refilled.

So, what? Here's what I believe:

• Protagonism is the internet's real currency. Forget "content is king" - what the internet actually runs on is protagonists across industries and niches. Attention always orbits around a main character, and we're now industrializing that to the point where protagonism has become more valuable than the content itself. The cycles of hype and virality are really cycles of protagonism, and platforms reward narrative arcs more than truth or quality. If you understand protagonism, you understand how the internet works, and why it feels exhausting.

• Main character energy is no longer just a joke, but a service. Just as "software-as-a-service" become an entire investment category, so will "internet-protagonists-as-a-service" (VCs may not like it as much as SaaS though). Infrastructure has emerged to let anyone buy, rent, or automate main character energy in the form of AI agents, influencer markets, and creator economies. We're entering an era where being the protagonist is less about luck and more about tooling.

• Distributed protagonism is the way forward. Main character energy is inevitable but unsustainable when carried by individuals alone. On the internet, protagonists get eaten alive. But communities and collectives are experimenting with rotating or shared protagonism. This model may lead to a healthier, more resilient form of online culture. The real design challenge of the next decade is figuring out how to turn protagonism into a network role rather than a personal burden. At ninetynine labs, we're working on solving that problem with ctrl+enter, a distributed protagonism network for tech's main characters.

Main character energy is a design space. Platforms, creators, and communities are all figuring out how to harness it. Whether to monetize, to organize, or simply to exist. The open question is whether this leads to healthier forms of online culture or just deeper cycles of clout-driven exhaustion.

In the meantime, the main characters will keep coming. Some will be human, some synthetic, some collective. Each will grab the spotlight, however briefly, and pull the internet’s narrative gravity toward themselves. Because on the internet, there always has to be a protagonist.

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