counter-culture & anti-trends.
The corporate office is the new haunted house
The haunted mansion has been swapped for a fluorescent-lit office. A new cultural subgenre called Institutional Gothic is dominating pop culture right now, and it tells us a lot about what consumers actually want from brands. Here is what it means for your content strategy.
Read the full thing →The Ordinary just set up a stall selling £305 avocados (and it's some of the best anti-marketing we've seen)
The Ordinary built a fake luxury supermarket and sold an avocado for £305. It's a brilliant piece of anti-marketing that exposes the deceptive language beauty brands use to inflate their prices. And it permanently changes how shoppers see every luxury skincare counter they'll ever stand in front of.
counter-culture & anti-trendsWe've turned our friends into coworkers
We've started running our friendships like a business. We schedule coffee weeks in advance, talk about emotional bandwidth like it's a data plan, and quietly calculate the ROI of every relationship. This piece is about how corporate logic crept into our private lives and why showing up anyway is the only radical thing left.
counter-culture & anti-trendsAlgorithmic mysticism is on the rise; should we be trading cold data for corporate magic?
The internet was supposed to make us more rational. Instead, it has become the world's best engine for mysticism and meaning. For marketers, this digital re-enchantment signals a shift from cold optimisation to building brands with narrative, ritual, and depth.
most read in this topic.
The corporate office is the new haunted house
The haunted mansion has been swapped for a fluorescent-lit office. A new cultural subgenre called Institutional Gothic is dominating pop culture right now, and it tells us a lot about what consumers actually want from brands. Here is what it means for your content strategy.
The Ordinary just set up a stall selling £305 avocados (and it's some of the best anti-marketing we've seen)
The Ordinary built a fake luxury supermarket and sold an avocado for £305. It's a brilliant piece of anti-marketing that exposes the deceptive language beauty brands use to inflate their prices. And it permanently changes how shoppers see every luxury skincare counter they'll ever stand in front of.
We've turned our friends into coworkers
We've started running our friendships like a business. We schedule coffee weeks in advance, talk about emotional bandwidth like it's a data plan, and quietly calculate the ROI of every relationship. This piece is about how corporate logic crept into our private lives and why showing up anyway is the only radical thing left.
Algorithmic mysticism is on the rise; should we be trading cold data for corporate magic?
The internet was supposed to make us more rational. Instead, it has become the world's best engine for mysticism and meaning. For marketers, this digital re-enchantment signals a shift from cold optimisation to building brands with narrative, ritual, and depth.
Did we curate the fun out of the feed?
Social media used to feel like a neighbourhood where a half-baked thought could start something real. Somewhere between the death of Twitter and the rise of the perfectly lit OST Reel, we traded organic digital communities for a polished content production machine. Getting back the soul of social media means being willing to post like a real, messy person again.
Luxury rage: who is Matieres Fecales really mocking?
Matieres Fecales showed up to Paris Fashion Week with a collection mocking the ultra-rich. The internet loved it. But when the ultra-rich are buying the clothes, who is actually being mocked?
Wolf in chef's clothing: how the manosphere weaponizes fake allyship for clout
A new type of creator has figured out how to use women's pain as an algorithm hack. They look like allies but they are not. Here is how to spot the difference.
Everyone wants to be a "Glamorous Philosopher"
The glamorous philosopher industrial complex has colonised social media. Dense captions about ontological voids and late-stage capitalism are the new flex. But are we actually asking the big questions, or just performing like we are?
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