Sooo . . . how salty would you be if Instagram discovered horology and then all of the sudden scrap watches started commanding speculation level prices?
Not going to happen for, again, economic reasons. The horological market is well-developed. The Swiss moved 40 million watches last year, for an average price of a thousand dollars. High end is over a million. The "luxury" category starts at about $14k. A healthy high end suppresses the low end. Nobody is going to spend $8k on a $2k Fortis because $8k will buy a reasonable Rolex. And yeah - there's certainly speculation (I still regret not buying a UG Ferrovie dello Stato for $400 'cuz they're at like $800 right now) but there's enough weird old stock that I can buy an Ardath Long Distance for $20 or an NOS Genta movement out of a $12k model for $350. My whole point is that Instagram is creating an artificial market. If Sotheby's has been auctioning your shit for 100 years you can be assured that price discovery is healthy.
There is, though - if there's already "crazy" then "new crazy" can't take root. I can get up on eBay and find a dozen orchids for sale right now for $500 or over. That's the sort of price you can see on the more exotic orchids out there - they go for that at orchid shows, they go for that at orchid societies, they're expensive but someone is gonna buy 'em. The market for crazy expensive orchidsis mature. But if I get up on Instagram and cruise "#plantfluencer" I see two orchids after scrolling through pages and pages and pages of listings. They aren't hyping it to the moon because orchids are already steady-state. But I can look for Prayer Plants and see dozens and lo and behold, a couple dozen for $50 or more on eBay. I buy Prayer Plants for $3 from non-crazy people. And that is my point - social media allows for weird little subcultures of self-referential weirdness to build up, which is what we're looking at here. They're actively in violation of the larger community that gives no shits about Prayer Plants because they've already got Hochstetter's Butterflies. When Antiques Roadshow, Sotheby's, Christies and Phillips all know that your Oyster Cosmograph Daytona is worth more than the average office building, no amount of #watchfam bullshit is going to make your Fossil worth a fuck.