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Niche InternetBRANDS AFTER VIBES
what is the future of branding in the age of slop?
The provocation for this particular stream of thought was a Tiktok video by brand strategist Eugene about branding in the era of brainrot.
This video declares that the age of brands as stories has ended. There are no more ninety second spots that tell a tale, he argues, now there’s only vibe, something more like sentiment or affect – what's picked up in a crowded feed, two or three seconds between footage of catastrophic climate change and a monkey who’s learned to do makeup tutorials. He gives the example of a Twitch stream: it may be too hectic to read the individual posts, but you can monitor the sentiment. You can catch the vibe.
New things – brands, products, trends – are increasingly defined in relational terms to such an extent that they become devoid of any unique story, character, or essence.
Moodboarding as a practice is maxed out. It’s become a nearly absurdist consumer hobby, and it’s part and parcel of our algorithmic reality, targeted yet vague. Similarly, slop can’t be meaningfully curated because there are too many actors, algorithms, and microtrends being expressed simultaneously, in too many automated iterations.
When the brand is a person, an entity with a personality. The idea is that you can hone this personality in order to define your organization better and make more money out in the world. “All organizations have an identity whether they control it or not. A corporate identity programme harnesses and manages this identity in the corporate interest,” Wally Olins wrote.
Brand as story is the other conventional frame that’s been very popular, as mentioned in the Tiktok that kicked this off. This one is all about using things like narrative structure and the hero’s journey to structure the way a brand shows up and communicates, and also using stories as branding opportunities. Brand “lore” is an updated subset of brand as story.
These stories tend to coalesce around a charismatic founder (Tesla and Elon), a social cause (Patagonia and the environment), even a countercultural position (SST records and punk rock). The depth of the lore is directly correlated to brand value. Consumers can become pay-to-play characters of the story.
Brand as pattern is about creating something that shows up iteratively in the world, rather than repeating messages rotely. This has classic examples, like Absolut ads, and more mimetic ones, where users take on the pattern and create the brand themselves
Memes are an advanced form of this practice – everything from Pepe to Brat makes use of this repetition to create flexible and iterative meaning. Brands that rely heavily on UGC are often related to brand-as-pattern.
Then there’s brand as world, the less eggheaded, more contemporary version of brand as story. Worldbuilding as a brand activity feels intuitively more digital and immersive, less linear than straight narrative.
Many luxury brands employ this practice to help us imagine a world of accessible wealth where people are more beautiful, more free, more actualized. Disney offers an accessible, albeit more fanciful version of this practice – creating an actual destination with its own culture and characters. In either case, the brand is a portal that gives you partial access to an alternative reality.
Brand as coherence is another more philosophical way of looking at brands, one that Nemesis-friend Michael Rock of 2x4 talks about a lot. In this world the brand is the je ne sais quois or x factor that makes everything fit together. It’s the systematic principle itself.
This coherence can be emotional…
“When we talk about a strong brand, what we mean is that it consistently delivers the emotion it promises. The most successful brands, or at least the ones everyone emulates, have the knack for using design to produce an emotional coherence that spans from content to product to experience. Think Apple or BMW or Chanel. Not everything has to look alike, but it all has to feel alike. Whenever we encounter them we get that familiar brand sensation. That tingling tells you it's working.” (Michael Rock, Hooked on a Feeling)
Or technical…
“I know that [branding] is an incredibly distasteful term in cultural and academic organizations, but like it or not branding has become one of the major organizing principles of the world as we know it right now. States have brands, corporations have brands, people have brands, institutions have brands — everyone’s talking about that, and when they talk about brand, they may all be talking about different things, but I think it’s a way of thinking about this idea of assembly…I would say maybe that branding is this act of assemblage that creates seemingly coherent entities.” (Michael Rock, Berkeley design lecture)
there’s the brand as vibes. These are not just brands that have us asking what the there-there is. They’re also brands like Marc Jacobs’ Heaven, which has brought together disparate objects that fit a sort of dreamy Gen Z moodboard to great effect, creating new life for what was quickly becoming a legacy brand. Then there’s A24, perhaps one of the greatest vibe brands of them all.
vibes are something we feel, and have something to do with a sense of recognition or belonging.
In a sense, vibes are procedurally generated, created by following resonant patterns and associations rather than by directly expressing new ideas or unique sentiments. The value assigned to brands built on vibes is similarly transitive – if you like X you will probably like Y.
In the best cases, a brand can create and embody its own ineffable vibe that imbues all of its products and endeavors with a sense of magical value. Seeing the new A24 film is more about experiencing a new iteration of the brand than it is about the movie’s actual plot, cast, or story. Fans want to see a particular sensibility applied to the world around it.
When a brand is a person, you have an emotional connection with them (they also have rights: see Citizens United). When it's a story, it entertains you and holds your attention. When a brand is a world, there's immersion and escape. When it's a pattern, you can replicate it and play with it.
With all this in mind, the key to successful brands after vibes may be in creating...
something dense and irrefutable: a brand that flaunts itself as proof of work, that makes clear the amount of real information and human effort that went into creating it, that can’t become blurry.
The brand is labor itself, a direct expression of the work that produces it.
something exceptionally simple – logo only, that is, just one coordination point…or better yet, a ticker, a single letter, a point of pure speculative energy. Something so singular it can’t be spun off into iterations, but due to its singularity, can freely attach to and feed itself by anything and everything.
The brand is an atom, a particle, a single-cell organism.
something like dazzle, the makeup that helps a face escape facial recognition software: something so incoherent it can't be read by the model or algorithm, something that cannot be expressed as or compressed into a vibe.
In this case, the brand is noise, something rule breaking that jams an orderly system of meaning / value.
Ricky Mondello » Apple Passwords’ Generated Strong Password Format
You Can Use Text-wrap: Balance; On Icons | CSS-Tricks
Russia amplified hurricane disinformation to drive Americans apart, researchers find
Without Knowledge or Consent
Opinion | Voters prefer Harris’s agenda to Trump’s — they just don’t realize it. Take our quiz.
Frustrated with science denial : r/QAnonCasualties
How does bottoms get pleasure? : r/askgaybros
Political fundraisers WinRed and ActBlue are taking millions of dollars in donations from elderly dementia patients to fuel their campaigns
Israel kills Yahya Sinwar.
Netanyahu is the same leader who released Sinwar from prison. Netanyahu encouraged Qatar to fund Hamas, emboldening and sustaining the organization. Netanyahu trusted Sinwar, he helped Hamas become what it is today, and he helped it secure its power in the Gaza Strip. He apparently underestimated Sinwar so much (or was so distracted by his own legal troubles) that October 7 happened in the first place. Netanyahu has failed to get the hostages home. The IDF was only able to kill Sinwar after a year of devastating, blunt-force violence across the entire Gaza strip, and now it appears to be settling in for a long-term insurgency. The hostages are still hostages and the war rages on, having spread to seven fronts (as Netanyahu himself says).
no, I don't "give him credit" for killing a leader he supported in order to topple an organization that his policies helped embolden. I credit Netanyahu with a failed strategy to fund Hamas, a massive national security failure that allowed October 7, and the failures of war and diplomacy that have put Israel in the position it is in now.
Accountability sinks - A Working Library
In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Here’s an example: a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room. There’s no one to call to complain, no way to communicate back to that distant leader that they’ve scotched your plans. The accountability is swallowed up into a void, lost forever.
Davies proposes that:
For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system.
Another mechanism of accountability sinks is the way in which decisions themselves cascade and lose any sense of their origins. Davies gives the example of the case of Dominion Systems vs Fox News, in which Fox News repeatedly spread false stories about the election. No one at Fox seems to have explicitly made a decision to lie about voting machines; rather, there was an implicit understanding that they had to do whatever it took to keep their audience numbers up.
you could conclude that to be accountable for something you must have the power to change it and understand what you are trying to accomplish when you do. You need both the power and the story of how that power gets used.
an account is something that you tell. How did something happen, what were the conditions that led to it happening, what made the decision seem like a good one at the time? Who were all of the people involved in the decision or event? (It almost never comes down to only one person.)
Al Gore thought stopping climate change would be hard. But not this hard
In his decades of talking to the public about climate change, he says he’s learned a few things. You have to keep in mind a “time budget” that people will give you to speak with them, as well as a “complexity budget” so that you avoid dumping facts and numbers onto people. Finally, he says, you need to allot a “hope budget” so they don’t get too overwhelmed and depressed.
Review of ‘Hard Truths’ (2024) ★★★★
Trump’s Likely FCC Boss, Brendan Carr, Tries To Undermine Popular Infrastructure Bill Broadband Improvements
We Created a Monster: Trump Was a TV Fantasy Invented for 'The Apprentice'
Remember That DNA You Gave 23andMe?
DNA might contain health information, but unlike a doctor’s office, 23andMe is not bound by the health-privacy law HIPAA. And the company’s privacy policies make clear that in the event of a merger or an acquisition, customer information is a salable asset. 23andMe promises to ask its customers’ permission before using their data for research or targeted advertising, but that doesn’t mean the next boss will do the same. It says so right there in the fine print: The company reserves the right to update its policies at any time. A spokesperson acknowledged to me this week that the company can’t fully guarantee the sanctity of customer data, but said in a statement that “any scenario which impacts our customers’ data would need to be carefully considered. We take the privacy and trust of our customers very seriously, and would strive to maintain commitments outlined in our Privacy Statement.”
Going to loose my job
Data Laced with History: Causal Trees & Operational CRDTs
After mulling over my bullet points, it occurred to me that the network problems I was dealing with—background cloud sync, editing across multiple devices, real-time collaboration, offline support, and reconciliation of distant or conflicting revisions—were all pointing to the same question: was it possible to design a system where any two revisions of the same document could be merged deterministically and sensibly without requiring user intervention?
It’s what happened after sync that was troubling. On encountering a merge conflict, you’d be thrown into a busy conversation between the network, model, persistence, and UI layers just to get back into a consistent state. The data couldn’t be left alone to live its peaceful, functional life: every concurrent edit immediately became a cross-architectural matter.
I kept several questions in mind while doing my analysis. Could a given technique be generalized to arbitrary and novel data types? Did the technique pass the PhD Test? And was it possible to use the technique in an architecture with smart clients and dumb servers?
Concurrent edits are sibling branches. Subtrees are runs of characters. By the nature of reverse timestamp+UUID sort, sibling subtrees are sorted in the order of their head operations.
This is the underlying premise of the Causal Tree.
In contrast to all the other CRDTs I’d been looking into, the design presented in Victor Grishchenko’s brilliant paper was simultaneously clean, performant, and consequential. Instead of dense layers of theory and labyrinthine data structures, everything was centered around the idea of atomic, immutable, metadata-tagged, and causally-linked operations, stored in low-level data structures and directly usable as the data they represented.
I’m going to be calling this new breed of CRDTs operational replicated data types—partly to avoid confusion with the exiting term “operation-based CRDTs” (or CmRDTs), and partly because “replicated data type” (RDT) seems to be gaining popularity over “CRDT” and the term can be expanded to “ORDT” without impinging on any existing terminology.
Much like Causal Trees, ORDTs are assembled out of atomic, immutable, uniquely-identified and timestamped “operations” which are arranged in a basic container structure. (For clarity, I’m going to be referring to this container as the structured log of the ORDT.) Each operation represents an atomic change to the data while simultaneously functioning as the unit of data resultant from that action. This crucial event–data duality means that an ORDT can be understood as either a conventional data structure in which each unit of data has been augmented with event metadata; or alternatively, as an event log of atomic actions ordered to resemble its output data structure for ease of execution
To implement a custom data type as a CT, you first have to “atomize” it, or decompose it into a set of basic operations, then figure out how to link those operations such that a mostly linear traversal of the CT will produce your output data. (In other words, make the structure analogous to a one- or two-pass parsable format.)
OT and CRDT papers often cite 50ms as the threshold at which people start to notice latency in their text editors. Therefore, any code we might want to run on a CT—including merge, initialization, and serialization/deserialization—has to fall within this range. Except for trivial cases, this precludes O(n2) or slower complexity: a 10,000 word article at 0.01ms per character would take 7 hours to process! The essential CT functions have to be O(nlogn) at the very worst.
Of course, CRDTs aren’t without their difficulties. For instance, a CRDT-based document will always be “live”, even when offline. If a user inadvertently revises the same CRDT-based document on two offline devices, they won’t see the familiar pick-a-revision dialog on reconnection: both documents will happily merge and retain any duplicate changes. (With ORDTs, this can be fixed after the fact by filtering changes by device, but the user will still have to learn to treat their documents with a bit more caution.) In fully decentralized contexts, malicious users will have a lot of power to irrevocably screw up the data without any possibility of a rollback, and encryption schemes, permission models, and custom protocols may have to be deployed to guard against this. In terms of performance and storage, CRDTs contain a lot of metadata and require smart and performant peers, whereas centralized architectures are inherently more resource-efficient and only demand the bare minimum of their clients. You’d be hard-pressed to use CRDTs in data-heavy scenarios such as screen sharing or video editing. You also won’t necessarily be able to layer them on top of existing infrastructure without significant refactoring.
Perhaps a CRDT-based text editor will never quite be as fast or as bandwidth-efficient as Google Docs, for such is the power of centralization. But in exchange for a totally decentralized computing future? A world full of devices that control their own data and freely collaborate with one another? Data-centric code that’s entirely free from network concerns?
I’d say: it’s surely worth a shot!
A Syllabus for Generalists
In recent years, there’s a tendency towards specialism and specialists, from the job market to identities to relationships to education and more. Conversations around university education, for example, tend to be focused on high-earning job prospects, rather than on developing multidisciplinary ways of thinking. The job market tends to favor people who have had a clear, laddered path to success.
Curiosity for curiosity’s sake is not discouraged, per se, but it’s not clearly monetizable either, and therefore can be deprioritized.
The art of the pivot, part 2: How, why and when to pivot
people mix up two very different types of pivots and that it’s important to differentiate which path you’re on:
Ideation pivots: This is when an early-stage startup changes its idea before having a fully formed product or meaningful traction. These pivots are easy to make, normally happen quickly after launch, and the new idea is often completely unrelated to the previous one. For example, Brex went from VR headsets to business banking, Retool went from Venmo for the U.K. to a no-code internal tools app, and Okta went from reliability monitoring to identity management all in under three months. YouTube changed direction from a dating site to a video streaming platform in less than a week.
Hard pivots: This is when a company with a live product and real users/customers changes direction. In these cases, you are truly “pivoting”—keeping one element of the previous idea and doubling down on it. For example, Instagram stripped down its check-in app and went all in on its photo-sharing feature, Slack on its internal chat tool, and Loom on its screen recording feature.
Occasionally a pivot is a mix of the two (i.e. you’re pivoting multiple times over 1+ years), but generally, when you’re following the advice below, make sure you’re clear on which category you’re in.
When looking at the data, a few interesting trends emerged:
Ideation pivots generally happen within three months of launching your original idea. Note, a launch at this stage is typically just telling a bunch of your friends and colleagues about it.
Hard pivots generally happen within two years after launch, and most around the one-year mark. I suspect the small number of companies that took longer regret not changing course earlier.
ou should have a hard conversation with your co-founder around the three-month mark, and depending on how it’s going (see below), either re-commit or change the idea. Then schedule a yearly check-in. If things are clicking, full speed ahead. If things feel meh, at least spend a few days talking about other potential directions.
Brex:
“We applied to YC with this VR idea, which, looking back, it was pretty bad, but at the time we thought it was great. And within YC, we were like, ‘Yeah, we don’t even know where to start to build this.’”
—Henrique Dubugras, co-founder and CEO
The art of the pivot, part 1: The definitive list of successful pivots
Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain - Nature
Claude summary: This research provides new insights into how psilocybin affects large-scale brain activity and connectivity. The key finding is that psilocybin causes widespread desynchronization of brain activity, particularly in association cortex areas. This desynchronization correlates with the intensity of subjective psychedelic experiences and may underlie both the acute effects and potential therapeutic benefits of psilocybin. The desynchronization of brain networks may allow for increased flexibility and plasticity, potentially explaining both the acute psychedelic experience and longer-term therapeutic effects.
Psilocybin acutely caused profound and widespread brain FC changes (Fig. 1a) across most of the cerebral cortex (P < 0.05 based on two-sided linear mixed-effects (LME) model and permutation testing), but most prominent in association networks
Across psilocybin sessions and participants, FC change tracked with the intensity of the subjective experience (Fig. 1f and Extended Data Fig. 4).
Principles of Vasocomputation: A Unification of Buddhist Phenomenology, Active Inference, and Physical Reflex (Part I) – Opentheory.net
Alpine Loop: the fruit of collaboration between Fukui craftsmanship and Apple
These ribbons, upon closer inspection, appear to be two layers of machine-made fabric sewn together to form a single piece with one side puffed out like an arch in bridges, the “Alpine Loop” band that symbolizes the Apple Watch Ultra, which was just announced in the fall of 2022. The band is made of lightweight yet sturdy polyester fiber, the band is designed for outdoor activities by threading a metal hook through a hole in the fabric that expands in arch pattern, which prevents it from being pulled out in any direction. The fact that this intricate and delicate band is woven is astonishing.
The “Alpine Loop” uses 520 warp threads, which is far more than the number of threads used in ordinary fabrics, and this first process alone takes about six full days even for experienced employees.
After inspecting the heat treatment process on the first floor of the factory, I asked Tim Cook about his impressions of the company.
“I love the the ability to scale something that is so intricate, something that is so detailed. And you know they’re making a lot of these as you can, tell but they’re doing it in such a high quality way. And the yields are very high.”
“They were very flexible, and willing to try new processes, new ways of doing things. This was the first time that this particular process was ever used. And so they have to be very nimble but that nimbleness has to be underpinned by great expertise. And they have that great expertise here. And I can’t stress enough the attention to detail and quality. These are the things that make the products look so great right out of the box.”
Apple prefers to use the term “supplier” over alternatives such as “subcontractor” because they believe in equal business partnership.
“What sets Apple apart [from other companies] is that they let us work as a team. If we have a problem, we spend time together to come up with a solution.” Seiji Inoue, managing director of Inoue Ribbon Industry, spoke from the opposite side of Cook’s statement.
In addition to bands for the Apple Watch, the company also produces handles made from woven paper for “Mac Pro” product packaging. Normally, nylon or other materials would be mixed into paper to give sturdiness, but Apple places importance on recyclability, so they need to make them from 100% paper. The team worked together with the Apple staff to find a way to meet these requirements, and when we introduced a manufacturer that could produce paper, they said, “Great,” and accompanied us to the manufacturer.
The first product they worked on was a band for the Apple Watch called “Woven Nylon.” It took four years to develop. At first, Mr. Inoue was fed up with the high quality requirements. Compared to other industries, the textile industry is not very strict about size control.
at some point the front-line workers became accustomed to Apple’s standards, and are now saying, “We have to do this much, don’t we?” and aiming for higher quality manufacturing. He added, “Apple taught me from scratch about quantification and other things. They taught me how to manage, how to make a table like this, how to do standard deviation like this, how to take data like this, and so on. You can’t learn so much even if you paid someone. But Apple shared all those knowledges sayin we are on the same team.”
Mr. Nobunari Sawanobori, the president of Teikoku Ink, which supplies white ink for the iPhone, once said, “The loss of learning through working with Apple is a bigger loss than the loss of orders from Apple.”
After working for so long with Apple, recently Inoue Ribbon Industry began to make proposal or provide supplement data when they work with other clients, Most of those clients are surprised and delighted.
The "Loneliest Generation" Is Transforming the Dinner Party
The Only Reason to Explore Space
Claude summary: > This article argues that the only enduring justification for space exploration is its potential to fundamentally transform human civilization and our understanding of ourselves. The author traces the history of space exploration, from the mystical beliefs of early rocket pioneers to the geopolitical motivations of the Space Race, highlighting how current economic, scientific, and military rationales fall short of sustaining long-term commitment. The author contends that achieving interstellar civilization will require unprecedented organizational efforts and societal commitment, likely necessitating institutions akin to governments or religions. Ultimately, the piece suggests that only a society that embraces the pursuit of interstellar civilization as its central legitimating project may succeed in this monumental endeavor, framing space exploration not as an inevitable outcome of progress, but as a deliberate choice to follow a "golden path to a destiny among the stars."
It's Time to Talk About America's Disorder Problem
- "Disorder" as distinct from crime, encompassing behaviors that dominate public spaces for private purposes (e.g., public drug use, homelessness, littering).
- Despite decreasing violent crime rates in many cities, public perception of safety remains low, which the author attributes to increased disorder. Ex. retail theft, unsheltered homelessness, uncontrolled dogs, reckless driving, and public drug use.
Most conspicuous, in my experience, is the way that retailers have responded. It’s not just CVS; coffee shops seem to have gotten more hostile and less welcoming. This is, I suspect, because they are dealing with people who steal, cause a ruckus, or shoot up in the bathroom—disorderly behaviors that they have to deter before they cost them customers.
I increasingly think this is a more general phenomenon. Disorder is not measured like crime—there is no system for aggregating measures of disorder across cities. But if you look for the signs, they are there. Retail theft, though hard to measure, has grown bad enough that major retailers now lock up their wares in many cities. The unsheltered homeless population has risen sharply. People seem to be controlling their dogs less. Road deaths have risen, even as vehicle miles driven declined, suggesting people are driving more irresponsibly. Public drug use in cities from San Francisco to Philadelphia has gotten bad enough to prompt crack-downs.
Cities’ comparative advantage is agglomeration and network effects: concentrating people in one place can create innovation that yields ore than linear returns. But that only is possible if people have shared public spaces in which to interact. Community life, of the sort that makes cities worth living in, is harder to live in the presence of disorder.
A large share of disorder is generated by a small number of people and places—one drunk or one vacant lot, one uncontrolled bar or one guy shouting on the street, can ruin the whole experience for everyone else. Identifying these problem places and people, and remediating them—not exclusively through the criminal justice system—can bring disorder under control.
On being a great gift-giver
Some people are great at giving gifts. The kinds of gifts that dig into your soul and make you feel seen. I'm trying to become one of those people
Simon conspired with a friend who owns a 3D printer and designed and created a little desktop bear that can hold all of the nice things people have written about Bear. He then wrote each of these entries by hand (suffering only minor carpel tunnel) on sticky notes which the bear now carries like a human bear directional.
These are the kinds of gifts I want to learn how to give. Ones that make the receiver feel like they've been listened to and understood. That don't cost much money but are priceless at the same time.