Life After Lifestyle

Robert Putnam showed in his book Bowling Alone

Jenny Odell’s wonderful book How To Do Nothing

starting a brand could seem like an act of creative expression, or even an act of resistance.

These artists are performing a kind of service for brands, lending their credibility and enabling the brands to “insert themselves into an existing cultural conversation.” All of these are various ways in which an artist’s work becomes branding.

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.

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 tur... See more

The judge of a subculture is not its stated axioms, but the type of people who identify as its members.

In the most cynical version of this new world, culture designers are inculcating types of guy who are profitable. The customer lifetime value of a believer is potentially far greater than a user.

The realization that producing culture is about producing types of personhood is the central issue of this new cultural economy.