Cultural Signals: The Internal Experience Economy

The experience economy is dying because its key commodity (umami) has transformed into a new, more internally facing key commodity: knowledge.

The commodification of experience made everything not-special. The only place now left to find the 'umami' is within ourselves.

We believe the experience economy is transforming into what we call the internal experience economy — the more personal, spiritual, intellectual sister of the experience economy. A few thoughts on what this means:

As knowledge becomes the next social currency, our Instagram feeds will perhaps see less Coachella, more literary references. The cultural shift will have far-reaching consequences on how the next generations shape their identity, ambitions, and ideas about and in relation to the world.

Practically this means a shift away from the external towards the internal. And by internal we mean the new social capital is created by knowledge (theory, ideas, thought processes, etc) — that is being shared and translated through new (ex: the cozy web) and old (ex: brand collabs and the 'if you know, you know' mentality) mechanisms.

The experience economy caters to those able to physically move from A to B to witness an event, or to consume any given thing that adds to a list of site or material-specific experiences. However, when social capital is created by knowledge, rather than 'umami', a more democratic, interesting, and potentially productive value system can take over.