Kids these days don’t start magazines; they go straight to launching creative consultancies and editorial workshops, hustling for clients with a portfolio site and self-published zines that are almost not about marketing (“place making,” “identity building”). It used to be that you had to contribute to the culture first, establishing your reputatio... See more

It is impossible to think about the Brooklyn authenticity aesthetic, authenticity commodities, the “maker movement,” and startup culture as independent phenomena. It is not a coincidence that they all developed into mainstream culture at the same time. It might have been inevitable but the Great Recession certainly catalyzed the process.

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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In this new era, founders—of every kind—must become tastemakers, and venture capitalists the arbiters of taste. Because in a world where

anyone can create anything

, taste is what matters.

Interestingly, the breakdown of mainstream culture shares its roots with much of the web3 movement: it’s a reaction to centralized authority. For the past century, a handful of studio executives, talent agents, and music producers—mostly in LA and New York—controlled American culture. Now, it’s anyone’s game. There are no rules. This is the same “d... See more