Social Cache Busting
7th June 2026
If you’ve ever tried chatting with a public figure, you probably know what I mean by “hitting the cache”. They produce slick soundbites that sound smart-ish, and could plausibly be connected to the question you asked, or what you said. But the responses aren’t bespoke. It’s like they have a lookup table, and compare the vague topic and sentiment of what you said to their roster of prepared responses, and return the best match.
This is not unique to public figures. I do it. I think almost everyone does it to some degree. And the degree tends to correlate with how often they get asked the question. (The same way a webserver serves cached versions of the most frequently-requested, slow-to-load pages.) Since public figures get asked the same questions a lot, it makes sense that they serve most traffic from the cache.
The cache can have good stuff in it, but it’s never as interesting as interacting directly with the origin. The cache is stale. The cache is optimized. The cache is safe.
How do we bust the cache?
Wrong question. Take a step back. Why is it so important to ‘bust the cache’? Why does What You Wnat trump What They Want?