Sublime

Upper-middle class professionals center their tastes around discovery of interesting and superior goods.

“Pattern recognition” is often how I describe the work of my life. I remember the moment, a true click, when I realized there was a connection between the increasing precarity of work, the consolidation of ownership in key industries, and the exponential increases in marketing budgets that characterized the hollow corporate structures of the first

we speak of today’s “creative” as both an economic role and a type, with particular consumption patterns, work habits, and personalities.

Direct-to-consumer model can only work if companies know who their customers are. Granular customer segmentation allows precision targeting, leads to better retention, and higher-value customer acquisition. Best approach here is to go beyond demographic and psychographic, and build taste profiles, like Netflix and TikTok do. Then, we will know whic

“The best explanation for why the zany, the interesting, and the cute are our most pervasive and significant categories is that they are about the increasingly intertwined ways in which late capitalist subjects labor, communicate and consume.”4 They are the material through which we can have perceptions and share judgments that seem most closely re

The evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller divides the products of consumer capitalism into two broad categories: the self-stimulating, and the status-seeking. Self-stimulating products are designed to push the hot buttons in the most ancient part of our brains—bypassing the higher functions, and making a direct appeal to the Reptile. Why do we