Berlin, baby! This is a city infected with a pre-teen’s idea of “being edgy.”

This dialectic is muddy from the get-go, of course. It’s a version of the more familiar hipster trap: over time, the marginal labor of the bohemian experimentalist and taste-maker is swallowed up by the smug cartoon of the in-the-know consumer clone. But the near inevitability of this process also suggests that the first hipster was already part of... See more

The ‘90s version of not selling out meant refusing to play certain spaces or not letting your song be in a beer commercial. The ‘20s version of selling out means making things in limited quantities to play against mass culture. Though different, the responses come from a similar place. They’re both sensing a culture where, to quote Claire L. Evans ... See more

Give creative feedback like a pro. With this simple framework. There are three levels of creative feedback that we’re looking for; head, heart, and body feedback. Head feedback You want to question the goal, the problem we’re trying to solve, or whom we’re targeting. You’ve got feedback for the brief. In most cases this will require a rebrief.... See more

"vibes" seems to be shorthand now for "a thing that exists and is compelling beyond logic"

As more and more of us sit with the question of what sits beyond intelligence as our true human premium, it seems that we’re doubling down on that ineffable quality that, as of yet, lies beyond the grasp of the machine: intuition.

It’s an entrance into a new era — a noetic era — coined and elaborated upon by Concept Bureau’s Zach Lamb, a brand stra... See more

In other words, “vibes” are similar to the approximations that machine learning systems use, and the two feed off of each other synergistically. The situation is precisely encapsulated by Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

There’s power in signaling insider knowledge to outsiders, so naturally we see the memetic propagation of idiomatic lore artifacts beyond the bounds of where they actually convey meaning. But as time goes on, their density and alienation from more universal lexicons makes it hard for even the ‘in-group’ to keep track of this internal meaning. It’s ... See more

One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death. Eventually—around 2000—everyone understood this, and gave up hoping some subculture could somehow escape this dynamic.