These Glossier-style Gen Z piercing studios are steering the earscape trend

Lots of consumer platforms — everything from Instagram to Youtube to Twitch — didn’t start out as ways for people to make money. They were initially about fun, status, connection and/or fame. They initially started as social networks, but as each grew their users realized they could build income off of them, which changed the trajectory of the comp... See more

“It’s very much about how the space makes you feel and how memories can be created there. Physical retail can bring so much to the customer that then the transaction will follow,” observes The Future Laboratory’s Buller. “Online shopping, social commerce, live-stream selling and all of those things have their place. But, in a physical space it’s ab... See more

The creator of Real Housewives of Clapton had a theory for why niche consumer objects have become such potent symbols online. For millennials and Gen Z-ers, material gain is more about these small, semi-expensive life-style choices—oat milk in your latte—than about bigger ones such as buying a house or having children, which are much harder to achi

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it’s a directionally correct generalization, and it’s showing itself in where and how people interact online. Many young people prefer the facelessness of Discord, Reddit, a crypto pfp. With the rise of privacy online—both anonymity and pseudonymity—we’ll see more people express themselves through new personas that obscure their “real” identity.

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maybe here, we do have an aesthetic counter to the wallflower non-style of Big Tech: a raging messy semiotic meltdown of radicalizing (if absurdist) meme culture where the only ideological no-go zone is the liberal center. Key here is that most of this activity is happening under the guise of avatars, pseudonyms, and collectively run social media a

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what’s remarkable about this particular pendulum swing is that after centuries of wrestling with hierarchies of taste, the cultural stigma that has always come with indulging in bad taste has disappeared.