The cultural logic of the 2010s is best represented by the starter pack meme. In the starter pack meme, classes of people are identified through oblique subcultural references and products they are likely to consume.

social media has created a mass ability to publish images and curate them. On Tumblr and Pinterest and Are.na, you can group images into categories and comment on them. Through cheaper, consumer-grade media production tools, ideas once restricted to the underground or the zine now have glossy indie magazines, self-burnt mixtapes, and dozens of

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

Just outside the mainstream stuff, you have roleplayinggame culture, you have furry culture, you have indie music culture, you have graphic designers… You have “cores” and “waves” and completely invented subcultures bootstrapped off Tumblr curation—techwear, bloghouse, cottagecore, daddy’s girl, pro-anorexia girls, witch girls… if you were on

All in all, product marketing businesses can only do so much to situate their goods in these broader cultural worlds without eating into their margins.

The posturing of DTC brands as cults reveals an impasse. People are looking for more meaningful narratives and communities than brands can offer, and companies want to supply this “meaning demand”—but are structurally disincentivized to do so.

We even saw the rise of subcultures where the entire notion of participation is simply consumption. r/mechanicalkeyboards is the classic example, but it also applies to hypebeast culture, or to that Tumblr subculture of design heads who make their entire personality about owning Dieter Rams objects and Leica cameras.