brand dead
we passed peak scale
In a brainrot world, we're brain dead and brand dead.
Legibility is in decline. Google isn't building the Library of Alexandria with search. It's pursuing intelligence as a commodity. Gemini is a competitor to OpenAI, which founder Sam Altman described as a utility on tap, which raises the question: if intelligence is a commodity, why endure the inefficient process of cultivating it in yourself? Why learn to read at all?
Many struggle to answer it. In The Atlantic's latest coverage of mass illiteracy, "The End of Reading is Here", the two top details are a Harvard student using Claude to decipher the "Old English" of A Clockwork Orange and data revealing more Americans gamble everyday than read for pleasure…
Brand is also about literacy. It has a canon. It imagines itself as part of a public discourse. It aspires to create meaning.
The first clue that a parallel process is underway is the absence of new contenders. There are no new Great Books. There are no new Great Brands. Will we ever see another McDonald's, another Nike, another Starbucks, another Apple? These are brands so big that their logos are etched into the collective unconscious. They formed a brand avant-garde, the tip of the spear for globalization and Westernization, even if we don’t use that term anymore.
Attempts to replicate their ubiquity feel a bit like Coach insisting it belongs in the same tier as Hermès. Is Samsung Apple? Is On Running Nike? Is Shake Shack McDonald's? They're successful, but they’re not icons. They lack the product prefix that unifies the iPhone, iPod, and iMac; the instantly identifiable Swoosh logo; the Golden Arches franchised across the globe. They lack brand.
Platforms founded in the 2000s and 2010s tried to pull off something similar, leveraging the post-Obama halo for the same glow of optimism U.S. multinationals inherited after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But Facebook and Google threw in the towel and rebranded as Meta and Alphabet in an attempt to avoid the brewing antipathy of the first techlash.
Luxury brands like Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton traded pedigree for pop cultural relevance in that same era. But without Demna at the helm Balenciaga or Virgil Abloh steering Louis Vuitton, their growth stalled and has now gone into reverse.
We've passed peak scale. The monoculture has fragmented. The celebrities are old. Global population is in decline. Brand loyalists are now brand victims. They turn to brand as a means of self-expression, something bigger than themselves that can help them connect with others. But the references fall on deaf ears.
It’s like expecting a Harvard student to be able to read Anthony Burgess. It’s all Greek to them.
