Life After Lifestyle
Metadata
Highlights
- As I tried to understand how “culture” is transmitted, I came to understand that in order to be a part of a culture, you have to learn to participate in these elements. That’s how a culture becomes part of your identity: you learn to use the language, you read the community lore online, you post photos with the same aesthetic, and you know you’re “fitting in” when you start to get reblogs. And naturally, you buy objects too. By the end of this journey towards “fitting in,” you can tell your own story of membership and identity in the community (Wenger & Lave, 1991). Yet it is also clear that a crucial element of participation is practice. You can cut your hair like a skater and dress like a skater, but if you can’t do an ollie you’re not a skater. You can buy testosterone enhancer and maca root powder, but if you don’t post your gains, are you really a bodybuilder? Subcultures have these practices, participatory elements that I call “central” to what they are.
- Note: creates a weird dichotomy where there are people stranded on either side (i.e. people who “practice” but don’t speak / post, and people who participate in discourse but don’t practice)
- While companies like SHEIN and ZARA are known for the tight vertical integration that enables real-time, demand-aware manufacturing, API-ification has happened across the entire supply chain. Companies like CA.LA let you spin up up a fashion line as fast as you’d spin up a new Digital Ocean droplet, whether you’re A$AP Ferg or hyped NYC brand Vaquera. Across the board, brands and middleware were opening new supply chains, which then became accessible entrepreneurs targeting all sorts of subcultural plays. And with Shopify, Squarespace, and Stripe, you can open an online store and accept payments in minutes. Once the goods are readily available, everything becomes a distribution problem—a matter of finding a target demographic and making products legible to it.
- Note: API-ification of physical goods… what are the consequences of making it easy to actually create so much physical goods
- Products begin their life as an unbranded commodities made in foreign factories; they pass through a series of outsourced relationships —brand designers, content creators, and influencers—which construct a cultural identity for the good; in the final phase, the product ends up in a shoppable social media post. Each step, a service rendered that turns a commodity into a cultural item, turning the logic of all manufacturing into this: your brand, our products.
New highlights added October 7, 2022 at 9:29 AM
- 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 ingredients for social transformation, not to say upheaval, are in place. We are transitioning out of the era of Lifestyle, and into an era where the production of culture is valued—both subjectively and financially—on its own terms. From an era where brands are designed to sell products to an era where brands are designed to be culture, to transform lives, to instill beliefs.
- I keep asking people to get more specific about the culture they’d like to see. What do you think it would be good if there was more of? What do you wish people were spending more of their time on? Instead of building a culture-agnostic platform, can you find a way to support that? To encourage that?
The further from goods and services you go, the closer you get to ideology and belief. If it’s the case that the goods and services are a means to a different end rather than the other way around, the question is: what are you leading your subscribers towards?
- As founders, community leaders, and shapers of these new cultures, this is the most important question we have to ask. Because we’ve seen that we’re not only creating culture: we’re producing personality in people. In other words, we’re creating types of guys.
- So many of these new communities are formed online first. I wonder about ways they can tap into rich veins of existing culture, to ground themselves in the bodies of knowledge, ways of being, and memory practices that have already outlasted us. This firm ground may be a much older bedrock of belief, or it may be the local food systems that give us life, or it may be the histories of places we make our physical homes. By accepting that these newly designed cultures are meaningful to us, we have already gone beyond the idea of “real” versus “fake”, or “authentic” versus “inauthentic” culture. Yet tradition is something different, handed down through mediums of memory, by opening up to which we transcend reason and find communion with those who have come before and will come after us.
title: “Life After Lifestyle”
author: “subpixel.space”
url: ”https://subpixel.space/entries/life-after-lifestyle/”
date: 2023-12-19
source: hypothesis
tags: media/articles
Life After Lifestyle
Metadata
Highlights
- As I tried to understand how “culture” is transmitted, I came to understand that in order to be a part of a culture, you have to learn to participate in these elements. That’s how a culture becomes part of your identity: you learn to use the language, you read the community lore online, you post photos with the same aesthetic, and you know you’re “fitting in” when you start to get reblogs. And naturally, you buy objects too. By the end of this journey towards “fitting in,” you can tell your own story of membership and identity in the community (Wenger & Lave, 1991). Yet it is also clear that a crucial element of participation is practice. You can cut your hair like a skater and dress like a skater, but if you can’t do an ollie you’re not a skater. You can buy testosterone enhancer and maca root powder, but if you don’t post your gains, are you really a bodybuilder? Subcultures have these practices, participatory elements that I call “central” to what they are.
- Note: creates a weird dichotomy where there are people stranded on either side (i.e. people who “practice” but don’t speak / post, and people who participate in discourse but don’t practice)
- While companies like SHEIN and ZARA are known for the tight vertical integration that enables real-time, demand-aware manufacturing, API-ification has happened across the entire supply chain. Companies like CA.LA let you spin up up a fashion line as fast as you’d spin up a new Digital Ocean droplet, whether you’re A$AP Ferg or hyped NYC brand Vaquera. Across the board, brands and middleware were opening new supply chains, which then became accessible entrepreneurs targeting all sorts of subcultural plays. And with Shopify, Squarespace, and Stripe, you can open an online store and accept payments in minutes. Once the goods are readily available, everything becomes a distribution problem—a matter of finding a target demographic and making products legible to it.
- Note: API-ification of physical goods… what are the consequences of making it easy to actually create so much physical goods
- Products begin their life as an unbranded commodities made in foreign factories; they pass through a series of outsourced relationships —brand designers, content creators, and influencers—which construct a cultural identity for the good; in the final phase, the product ends up in a shoppable social media post. Each step, a service rendered that turns a commodity into a cultural item, turning the logic of all manufacturing into this: your brand, our products.
- 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 ingredients for social transformation, not to say upheaval, are in place. We are transitioning out of the era of Lifestyle, and into an era where the production of culture is valued—both subjectively and financially—on its own terms. From an era where brands are designed to sell products to an era where brands are designed to be culture, to transform lives, to instill beliefs.
- I keep asking people to get more specific about the culture they’d like to see. What do you think it would be good if there was more of? What do you wish people were spending more of their time on? Instead of building a culture-agnostic platform, can you find a way to support that? To encourage that?
The further from goods and services you go, the closer you get to ideology and belief. If it’s the case that the goods and services are a means to a different end rather than the other way around, the question is: what are you leading your subscribers towards?
- As founders, community leaders, and shapers of these new cultures, this is the most important question we have to ask. Because we’ve seen that we’re not only creating culture: we’re producing personality in people. In other words, we’re creating types of guys.
- So many of these new communities are formed online first. I wonder about ways they can tap into rich veins of existing culture, to ground themselves in the bodies of knowledge, ways of being, and memory practices that have already outlasted us. This firm ground may be a much older bedrock of belief, or it may be the local food systems that give us life, or it may be the histories of places we make our physical homes. By accepting that these newly designed cultures are meaningful to us, we have already gone beyond the idea of “real” versus “fake”, or “authentic” versus “inauthentic” culture. Yet tradition is something different, handed down through mediums of memory, by opening up to which we transcend reason and find communion with those who have come before and will come after us.