Toby Shorin
Life After Lifestyle
After everything has become a lifestyle brand, the frontier of cultural creation is now faith itself.
The year is 2017. You are a creative with a liberal arts degree. You work at a direct to consumer brand. Like every company you are starting a blog. You learn about content marketing. You go to a pop-up museum filled with balloons. You take pictures for the gram. Product photos are beautiful. Sophisticated. Shot at an isometric angle. It’s the new “lean luxury.” You buy coffee from Blue Bottle. (View Highlight)
You work at a direct to consumer brand. Like every company you are starting a blog. You learn about content marketing. You go to a pop-up museum filled with balloons. You take pictures for the gram. (View Highlight)
For every new subway ad featuring an online pharmacy and a nice monstera plant, there was a new pop-up skate shop soaking up the runoff of Supreme teens (View Highlight)
They have behaviors they condone and reward, and behaviors they deem unworthy. And each has its own moral sensibility.2
A culture is a coherent system of these foundational elements. See footnote 2 for a further explanation. As (View Highlight)
to understand how “culture” is transmitted, I came to understand that in order to be a part of a culture, you have to learn to participate in these elements. That’s how a culture becomes part of your identity: you learn to use the language, you read the community lore online, you post photos with the same aesthetic, and you know you’re “fitting in” when you start to get reblogs. And naturally, you buy objects too. By the end of this journey towards “fitting in,” you can tell your own story of membership and identity in the community (Wenger & Lave, 1991). Yet it is also clear that a crucial element of participation is practice. You can cut your hair like a skater and dress like a skater, but if you can’t do an ollie you’re not a skater. You can buy testosterone enhancer and maca root powder, but if you don’t post your gains, are you really a bodybuilder? Subcultures have these practices, participatory elements that I call “central” to what they are. (View Highlight)
Dena Yago charts out the many permutations of the artist-brand “collab” in her article “Content Industrial Complex.” Among others, there is the brand-artist sponsorship, the content marketing advertorial in which brand and artist portray each other as aspirational, and “co-creation” initiatives like the Tom Sachs Nike shoes (View Highlight)
Across food, across fashion and accessories, legal cannabis products, beverages, athleisure, skin care, supplements, and other permutations of consumer packaged goods and apparel, every manufacturing and last-mile strategy has become possible, from dropshipping to just-in-time, from small-batch to make-on-demand. Products begin their life as an unbranded commodities made in foreign factories; they pass through a series of outsourced relationships —brand designers, content creators, and influencers—which construct a cultural identity for the good; in the final phase, the product ends up in a shoppable social media post. Each step, a service rendered that turns a commodity into a cultural item, turning the logic of all manufacturing into this: your brand, our products. (View Highlight)
Easier than ever to launch a brand. More goods than ever. Software-enabled, integrated supply chain driven business models. An explosion of online social media cultures. These elements have become omnipresent, splashed across our lives like the patterned splotches of a magic eye book. Stare long enough, and you begin to see the whole: an economy where culture is made in service of brands. To be even more literal: cultural production has become a service industry for the supply chain. (View Highlight)
The idea was that my cultist participants had to think holistically, not just about products and brand symbols, but about the practices, the stories, the people and places and rituals. This wouldn’t be a brand that just points to a subculture, but an entire subculture in and of itself (View Highlight)
VC I talk with occasionally once gave me his own assessment of the cultural moment. “The obvious opportunity,” he said, “is to build a new religion.” (View Highlight)
Products are auxiliary, supportive, but not the main event (View Highlight)
From an era where brands are designed to sell products to an era where brands are designed to be culture, to transform lives, to instill beliefs. (View Highlight)
Note: this is rhe opportunity
Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, is building a new company called Metalabel. According to Yancey, labels are startups for culture: exist to promote a specific aesthetic, region, or point of view, to fund, distribute, and promote culture of one kind or another (View Highlight)
I keep asking people to get more specific about the culture they’d like to see. What do you think it would be good if there was more of? What do you wish people were spending more of their time on? Instead of building a culture-agnostic platform, can you find a way to support that? To encourage that? (View Highlight)
The further from goods and services you go, the closer you get to ideology and belief (View Highlight)
Yet tradition is something different, handed down through mediums of memory, by opening up to which we transcend reason and find communion with those who have come before and will come after us. (View Highlight)
Note: interesting that tradition bothers me, so does nostalgia, but eternalism is somehow interesting and natural but at some level they are very similar
