Welcome! If you found this video, or my recent posts What I shared at Carnegie Mellon about gazing into the eye of the Monster/ Machine or Trust In A Time of Monsters to be useful, I invite you to become a free subscriber to get more of my articles on the intersection of strategy and culture.
The middle is disappearing, and what’s left looks like two kinds of people.
One group is going all in: AI maximalism, founder mode, the sense that the window is closing and you have to build your way through it now.
The other is redefining success as non-participation: slow life, smaller careers, agrihoods, leaving the US in record numbers.
They’re two completely different theories of how to survive a moment where reality is up for interpretation.
When a culture bifurcates this sharply, the shared system of signals that once told people what to build toward doesn’t make sense anymore. But we don’t lose our ambitions in that vacuum. We invent entirely new languages for what ambition should look like.
In our newest episode of Unseen Unknown, Jean-Louis and I use the lens of “distance” to trace how aspiration moves when money stops being a reliable signal and people can’t agree on what productivity even means (or if its a good thing).
What we’re seeing is a shift from having to being, from acquiring the right things to inhabiting the right feeling.
That rewrites what brands are actually speaking to, and what it means to build something people want in a world that’s rethinking its desires.
Second Order Strategy
Over 200 people signed up for our last lightning lesson on 9 Frameworks Every Brand Builder Needs, and we’ve got another lesson coming up.
This time we’ll be talking about Second Order Thinking for Brand Strategy on Tuesday, April 7th.
Come join us!
Strong Pull
Here’s what we’ve been consuming.
Strategic Centers of Gravity and the Art of Bespoke Reasoning (Table Briefings): “There have been many privileged moments in history where leaders did not have to worry about a multitude of converging crises. Unfortunately, we have moved past the eras of relative climate stability, healthy demographic balances, and abundant freshwater. Today's leaders of nations and corporations alike often act as if they missed the memo on this shift. Consider this as that memo. To navigate this volatility, we must embrace a worldview grounded in “Strategic Centers of Gravity”: five immutable, inescapable forces that dictate the boundaries of modern strategy.”
America built the greatest cultural machine in history. Then quit. Here’s what filled the vacuum. (Found Object): “What happens when a strategy works so completely that the machinery that produced it looks unnecessary. The Cold War was over. The Berlin Wall was down. America had won. The cultural apparatus that helped win it, the jazz ambassadors, the libraries, the magazines, the covert book smugglers, looked like a wartime expense in peacetime. Which is how you lose the next war before it starts.”
Your Brain Is Not An Information Processor (AI's Without Minds): “Because here is the thing: any serious theory in the sciences of the mind/brain takes for granted that the brain processes information. That’s a trivial uncontested and uninteresting fact. The interesting facts emerge when you develop a theory of some particular capacity of the mind/brain and use that theory to learn something about how the works.”
Every strategist needs to build their second order thinking skills. This is how.
Hi, I’m Jasmine Bina. I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist.
If you love this newsletter and need more:
My private brand strategy community Exposure Therapy
My agency Concept Bureau
