The paradox of cool is strongest with hindsight. Something new is simply exceptional and perhaps unique. Truly unique is not cool. 'Cool' is somewhere between truly unique and entirely common, with perhaps some momentum or direction going towards commonality. i.e. a sense of future direction that creates anticipation that feeds back into the 'social' vector. The social network provides the free energy for momentum building. In certain conditions, the potential is high enough to cause a cool avalanche and despite your strongest beliefs and attempts at rationalizing the outcome, cool beats you down with a representative of its effect that cannot be rationalized. If it could be rationalized, it would have a more determinate future and would not accelerate toward convergence. Cool might be the acceleration as opposed to the velocity, or absolute position in a social hierarchy. Or, Cool is an ambiguity that can occur between old and new. Time is certainly involved, and there is a window of time that must pass before that idiom or form may be fashionably used again. Within this window is the itch of nearness and a struggle for identity that is not complete until death. Risk is a key factor and cool might be as simple as 'what you know' + 'risk' = 1 As more social agents elect the new combination, the stuff in the 'risk' moves into the 'what you know' to balance the equivalence....until you know it all and its totally not cool

For another analogy you could try replacing 'what you know' with 'science', and 'risk' with 'artifice'. Rewritten, science+art=1 Every good piece of science or art confronts this equality by striving to minimize the other.

Science + Art = 1