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Life After Lifestyle
As founders, community leaders, and shapers of these new cultures, this is the most important question we have to ask. Because we’ve seen that we’re not only creating culture: we’re producing personality in people. In other words, we’re creating types of guys.
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
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?
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
If authenticity culture was being eroded—by the paradox of its own scale, by internet cultures built on togetherness, by memes and Likes and whole way the internet turns attention into shared value—then it may be the case that the deeper moral source may also be undergoing a paradigmatic transformation. If people could unironically like brands now,... See more
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
what would it mean for brands to stop pointing to culture, and to start being it? To do so, they would have to go far beyond marketing, to offer meaningful modes of participation. Is it even possible for companies to be in service of something greater than themselves?
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
Starter pack memes reverse engineer the demographic profile: people are composites of products they and similar people have purchased, identified through credit card data and internet browsing behavior tracked across the web.
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
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.
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
As a consumer, you subscribe to one vision or another: what’s your version of hiking out doors? What type of vibe are you about? Purist? Gorpy? High intensity? Meditative? But in all cases, the branded subculture itself is the main thing, while the role of physical goods is diminished. Their job is not to drive value, but to add another layer of
... See moreToby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
In the new cultural economy, the culture is the product. It is composed of practices, ideas, and discourses. Products are auxiliary, supportive, but not the main event. And most importantly, people now opt into these designed cultures with full knowledge and awareness that these cultures might change who they are.
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
In the old world of broadcast communication that Naomi Klein wrote about, promotion was limited to a few channels, so multinationals with massive advertising budgets had the power to sell a brand monoculture. Now every night, on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok, we scroll and see brands smushed up next to real people in the feed. Branding
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