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Life After Lifestyle
Unlimited availability and optionality among consumer goods has staged the final competitive battleground in the space of immaterial value, where there is no ceiling on “cultural value add” managers can jazz up a product with. Is it any surprise that brands want to become culture itself?
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
In the 2010s, supply chain innovation opened up lifestyle brands. In the 2020s, financial mechanism innovation is opening up the space for incentivized ideologies, networked publics, and co-owned faiths.
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
Just outside the mainstream stuff, you have roleplayinggame culture, you have furry culture, you have indie music culture, you have graphic designers… You have “cores” and “waves” and completely invented subcultures bootstrapped off Tumblr curation—techwear, bloghouse, cottagecore, daddy’s girl, pro-anorexia girls, witch girls… if you were on Reddi
... See moreToby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
So to me, the problem is not with the buying, nor even with the culture-grifting of brands, but with some kind of insufficiency on the part of the companies themselves. If the meanings they have on offer are starved versions of cultural membership, then perhaps, I started to feel, the brands aren’t going far enough. Could we imagine a version of a ... See more
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
People are always seeing and being seen, and in some ways, owning products does constitute one form of cultural participation. Yet it is also clear that owning goods alone is not a really significant sort of participation.
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
The cultural logic of the 2010s is best represented by the starter pack meme. In the starter pack meme, classes of people are identified through oblique subcultural references and products they are likely to consume.
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
For every new subway ad featuring an online pharmacy and a nice monstera plant, there was a new pop-up skate shop soaking up the runoff of Supreme teens. HSWLD on Delancey, a dozen others lost to memory… Online, I browsed IJJI and v.soon and Anti-Social Social Club on my friend’s Tiny Clothing Stores Are.na channel, this selection a mere trickle of
... See moreToby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
I have occasionally been asked why I’m obsessed with brands. The answer is that brands are things made out of belief. They are amorphous *meanings* that structure our relationships; they are already the same sort of thing that a religion or a culture is. With the cultural production service economy, and now with cryptocurrencies, all of the ingredi... See more
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
The Lifestyle era was not about creating culture; it was about attaching brands onto existing cultural contexts. It was not about shaping people; it was about sorting consumer demographics into niche categories. The new order we are entering into reverses this. For some organizations, culture has become the product itself, and products have become
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