You could say we’re in a low trust era, but I think that framing is too soft and leads us to the wrong conclusions. We’re in a state of unreality now, where the things that are happening in our world feel beyond surreal.
We don’t share the same facts, and oftentimes we don’t even share the same comments section on the same piece of content. Gallup is ending its 90 years of presidential polling. Some say jobs numbers are being doctored. GDP masks the truth of the economy. And everyday, whether it be through acts of war or the largest criminal coverup in history, we are freshly reminded that monsters do exist. Unreal is the only word that fits the bill.
This is what Jean-Louis and I dig into in our relaunch episode of Unseen Unknown, our podcast about culture and what it means for brands, business, and markets. We're back biweekly, friends! Watch the full video above or subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
When the world starts to feel like a habitat of monsters, there is no reforming the system. People stop looking for “better”. They start looking for slayers.
That's the cultural logic operating underneath everything right now, and almost no brand has figured out how to speak to it, which means almost no brand is actually being heard.
In this episode, we map the three moral eras of brand trust: consequence brands, the emotivism of the permission-to-feel era, and our most recent virtue ethics of founder-led everything. Each era was a product of its time and gave people a language for trust that reflected the cultural moment.
But this moment is turning into something else entirely. Monster slaying is no longer a metaphor, it’s a positioning strategy. One that very few brands are capable of achieving, but something everyone is waiting for.
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Natural States
Here’s what we’ve been consuming.
Body Futurism (Toby Shorin ): The surest sign of software exhaustion is that tech positivism is in the process of escaping itself into a variety of other domains. You no longer need to work “in tech” to hold the cultural positions of tech workers […] But very few grasp the most vital point of this moment. Whether in ignoring the role of violence in maintaining the state or “memeing things into the discourse” as a worldbuilding strategy, the futurist tendencies of recent decades made little room for the physical person. With the fall of software comes the return of the repressed—the body itself.”
How Medicube became a $1.1B brand by buying reaction rights (Camille Moore): “What Medicube understood, and what the Vogue Business piece doesn’t cover, is that the real value of a celebrity post isn’t the post itself. It’s what they did with the post afterward. Medicube not only paid for celebrities to use the product and post about but they also paid for usage rights so that their affiliate army of over 34,000 creators could create content with notable names. By doing this, Medicube wasn’t just paying for a single piece of content but paying for reaction rights (the right to use that celebrity content as the foundation for thousands of additional videos).”
The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature (William Cronon): “The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world. The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living—urban folk for whom food comes from a supermarket or a restaurant instead of a field, and for whom the wooden houses in which they live and work apparently have no meaningful connection to the forests in which trees grow and die.”
How to Read the Signs of Collapse: Economic Stagnation, Resource Scarcity, and Europe’s Industrial Decline (The Great Simplification Podcast): “Collapse has long been discussed in the public imagination as something that happens suddenly, immediately turning the world upside down. But history shows that collapse is more often characterized by the slow unraveling of a civilization. Usually, this is due to some combination of resource scarcity, economic stagnation, and compounding disruptions to productive capacity – yet it’s barely perceptible in the day-to-day lives of the people within it. What are the signs that we could be living through such a moment right now, and if we are, how does history tell us to prepare for what’s to come?”
Don’t build for a dead future.
Yours,
I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist.
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