nicolas cevallos

Challenge is to capture the mood while it’s happening. To be able to get something to resonate with the the vibe of the moment, we should look at contradictions, inversions, oddities, and coincidences in our culture, economy, and society.

In “Against Interpretation,” the 1964 essay that made her name as a critic, Susan Sontag railed against the digging of “meanings” out of works of art. She felt that interpretation, by turning art into “content” that can be parsed intellectually, drains it of its wild, unruly vitality, makes it “manageable, conformable.” Interpretation “is the... See more

In the 1990s or 2000s someone created a social network designed to make it possible to tell that you were about to take a flight with someone with whom you have something in common. The idea was you could reach out to them and spend flight time in conversation with someone who might become a friend or at least a useful contact.

Substack sells intellectual taste as cultural currency and contemporary belonging.

This is the promise, and perhaps the tyranny, of the language age: that all experience can be rendered as text. First we had text, then hypertext, and now megatext , if you will. That’s the world large language models operate in. Everything must be made legible to the machine. And legibility, here, is evidently linguistic.

But experience is much more. The philosophical discipline of phenomenology is helpful here, especially in the tradition of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who reminds us that perception precedes articulation, or, in other words, that we do not merely think our way through the world, we live it through our bodies. The body is the very condition of... See more

No amount of trend research will help if findings are not integrated much earlier in the strategy process.

What so many organizations get wrong about marketing today is that they treat foresight, cultural intelligence and social listening as downstream efforts.

Too often, every single day, we attempt to map already finalized products to a mismatched... See more

There is an interesting implication in the design of the user experience. It assumes a text-first approach to “relationships”. I can understand how the designers came to that conclusion. Most young people predominantly communicate through text, and if we’re only communicating through text, we begin to understand human relationships in that same... See more

Contrary to the deep stories of consumerism and Western heroic mythology, interacting with meaning is actually something much closer to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi (difficult to succinctly encapsulate, but basically the idea that beauty depends on the imperfect, incomplete, impermanent, humble, and unconventional) vs. a compulsive cycle of... See more