The Umami Theory of Value: Autopsy of the Experience Economy
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Highlights
- What do we mean by umami? Not only the meatiness of the French dip sandwich at that restaurant, but also the light as it refracted through the amber liquid of the cocktails, the reflection off the back bar, the quivering of the cake, and, most significantly, the way those elements read in a photo. Umami was the quality of the media mix or the moodboard that granted it cohesion-despite-heterogeneity. Umami was also the proximity of people on Emily’s museum panel, all women who are mostly not old, mostly not straight, and mostly doing something interesting in the arts, but we didn’t know exactly what. It was the conversation-dance experience and the poet’s play and the alt-electronica-diva’s first foray into another discipline (View Highlight)
- Advanced consumers” became obsessed with umami and then ran around trying to collect ever-more-intensifying experiences of it. Things were getting more and more delicious, more and more expensive, and all the while, more and more immaterial.
Umami is what you got when you didn’t get anything. (View Highlight)
- Meaning is always readily available to be repeated, remixed, and/or cannibalized in service of creating the sensation of the new.
How has this manifested? For example, by calling things that were actually old → new; mediocre → premium; bad → good; low value → high value etc. This was Premium Mediocrity. Or by taking existing meanings and mixing them into increasingly novel, bizarre and random combinations and calling them new. This was creative direction. Or by putting people into proximity with newly created meaning of dubious status, and selling it as an experience. This was festival season. (View Highlight)
- The essential mechanics are simple: it’s stating there’s a there-there when there isn’t one. And directing attention to a new “there” before anyone notices they were staring at a void. It’s the logic of gentrification, not only of the city, but also the self, culture and civilization itself. (View Highlight)
- Chang’s text begins with the blockbuster pork bun that catalyzed Momofuku’s success, and established his key metric: “I’d ask, ‘Is this dish good enough to come downtown and wait in line for’ If not, it’s not what we’re after.” Essentially, Chang spells out the link between umami and gentrification. It is literal umami that makes us travel 17 subway stops to spend time in an uninsulated leaking warehouse. One to five years later, metaphorical umami makes the combination of the food and the authenticity of the space somehow culminate in a desire to pay prohibitively expensive rent in a postindustrial wasteland. (View Highlight)
- Meanings that only a few have access to are secrets. In the absence of meaning, the illusion of a secret is created by imposing a subcultural barrier to entry where only through an opaque process of scene work can one ‘get’ it (View Highlight)
title: “The Umami Theory of Value: Autopsy of the Experience Economy”
author: “nemesis.global”
url: ”https://nemesis.global/memos/umami”
date: 2023-12-19
source: reader
tags: media/articles
The Umami Theory of Value: Autopsy of the Experience Economy
Metadata
Highlights
- What do we mean by umami? Not only the meatiness of the French dip sandwich at that restaurant, but also the light as it refracted through the amber liquid of the cocktails, the reflection off the back bar, the quivering of the cake, and, most significantly, the way those elements read in a photo. Umami was the quality of the media mix or the moodboard that granted it cohesion-despite-heterogeneity. Umami was also the proximity of people on Emily’s museum panel, all women who are mostly not old, mostly not straight, and mostly doing something interesting in the arts, but we didn’t know exactly what. It was the conversation-dance experience and the poet’s play and the alt-electronica-diva’s first foray into another discipline (View Highlight)
- Advanced consumers” became obsessed with umami and then ran around trying to collect ever-more-intensifying experiences of it. Things were getting more and more delicious, more and more expensive, and all the while, more and more immaterial.
Umami is what you got when you didn’t get anything. (View Highlight)
- Meaning is always readily available to be repeated, remixed, and/or cannibalized in service of creating the sensation of the new.
How has this manifested? For example, by calling things that were actually old → new; mediocre → premium; bad → good; low value → high value etc. This was Premium Mediocrity. Or by taking existing meanings and mixing them into increasingly novel, bizarre and random combinations and calling them new. This was creative direction. Or by putting people into proximity with newly created meaning of dubious status, and selling it as an experience. This was festival season. (View Highlight)
- The essential mechanics are simple: it’s stating there’s a there-there when there isn’t one. And directing attention to a new “there” before anyone notices they were staring at a void. It’s the logic of gentrification, not only of the city, but also the self, culture and civilization itself. (View Highlight)
- Meanings that only a few have access to are secrets. In the absence of meaning, the illusion of a secret is created by imposing a subcultural barrier to entry where only through an opaque process of scene work can one ‘get’ it (View Highlight)