The evening opened with a joust, because why not? Guests arrived in costume as literary characters. A “giant” dressed as a Turk led a mechanical elephant into the banquet hall. On the elephant’s back sat a woman in white satin, personifying the Church of Constantinople, which had fallen to the Ottomans about a year earlier. She wept. She begged the assembled knights for rescue. Then came the pheasant. The bird was alive, bedecked in a jeweled collar, and carried on a silver platter. One by one, the noblemen of Burgundy rose from their seats and swore oaths over the bird to go on crusade. The oaths were elaborate. Many were poetic. The chronicler Olivier de la Marche, who served as a kind of event producer for the whole ordeal (and also rode in on the elephant) recorded them in loving detail.

But the crusade never happened. Constantinople (modern Istanbul) remained under Ottoman control for about another 469 years.

Johan Huizinga opens Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (The Autumn of the Middle Ages, 1919) with a claim that has bothered historians ever since. He believed the end of the Medieval era in Europe was not a beginning, but rather a gilded death rattle, and he used the Feast of the Pheasant as his case study. Huizinga wrote his tome in the Netherlands while Europe was still pulling shrapnel from its boys and clouds of poison gas settled over Belgium. His argument is that the 14th and 15th centuries produced their most elaborate art, their most rigid chivalric codes, and their most extravagant ceremony precisely because the structures underneath it all were rotting. The Burgundian court spent more on a single banquet than they did on a military campaign. The codes of knightly honor grew more detailed as actual knights became less relevant. Symbolism thickened as meaning thinned. Huizinga called this “the passionate intensity of life.” But the condition he describes more closely resembles a fever. The heat was a societal symptom, not a mark of health.

That was 1454. But 2026 echoes.

Huizinga only articulated half the picture. The same century that produced the Feast of the Pheasant also produced the printing press, the foundations of international law, and Gothic cathedrals whose architects knew they would die before the nave was finished. Universities were founded. Professional guilds were codifying mastery with a rigor that embarrasses most modern credentialing bodies. Canon law was attempting, for the first time, to regulate warfare. Plague killed a third of the continent and the labor shortage it created gave surviving peasants bargaining power they’d never held before. The medieval period was not only a civilization dying. It was also one inventing at a pace previously unseen. Its aesthetic intensity was an immune response.

That dual condition has returned today. We are living through a medieval moment. A structural recurrence of institutional failure and institutional invention happening at the same speed, at the same time. An ambient instability that makes people reach for anything that feels heavier than the reality they’re currently living in. A growing suspicion that the only thing left worth trusting is whether a person will put their name on something and actually mean it. Religion, politics, military pursuits, and economic policy were all failing the public during the medieval period in Europe, and at the same time influential new institutions were being created faster than the old ones could collapse. The Middle Ages was indeed an autumn. But it was also a spring.

That explains one of the stranger aesthetic trends we’ve seen emerge over the last few years. Chappell Roan wears a suit of armor. Memes about the crusades (which, let’s be clear, were bad) proliferate, especially clips from Kingdom of Heaven. Fashion brands from Rick Owens to Chrome Hearts lean into decorative blackletter type and Gothic, monastic silhouettes. A man named “Sir Deadass” walks around NYC in a 15th century Bascinet fashioned into a Yankees fitted. Game of Thrones is going stronger than ever, with two spin-offs keeping HBO afloat. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, a shockingly detailed, historically accurate, and painstakingly difficult RPG, is one of the most-beloved breakout video games of the last year. A24’s “The Green Knight” was a commercial flop but an aesthetic inspiration (that even launched alongside a fantasy roleplaying game). Teenage Engineering produced a gorgeously bizarre Medieval themed portable sampler. Every button label is in pseudo-Latin. The letter keys are in illuminated manuscript blackletter with red and gold decoration, like a page from the Book of Kells got soldered onto a circuit board. The product description promises "bubonic beats."

The instinct is to call this a trend (#MedievalCore) and move on. Trends have an easy logic. They peak, they circulate, and they die on the clearance rack. Streetwear. Dark academia. Cottagecore. Things you’d see in Pinterest’s end-of-year trend report (in fact, this trend did appear all over social last year in fashion circles). But aesthetics that arrive in response to structural conditions don’t behave like trends. They’re more like visual symptoms of a culture with a fever.

From Heraldry to Hipsters

First came Jazz. Late nights. Racially mixed crowds. Speakeasies. Flappers. Zoot suits, later famously appropriated by Mexican-American pachucos on the West Coast. A complete subversive movement comprised of music, art, fashion, and sociocultural mores. Early jazz and swing actually got absorbed into the mainstream quickly. Young white audiences fucking loved it. Then came bebop. This was a refusal of that absorption. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk deliberately made jazz harder, faster, and more harmonically complex. You couldn't dance to it. That was the point. They created music resistant to easy consumption by the white mainstream that had commodified swing. The aesthetic difficulty was structural, not decorative. Bebop was the first modern example of an art form making itself more frictional on purpose to resist co-optation. This became the hipster standard. The term “hipster” was actually coined to describe bebop fans in the 1940s. It evolved from "hepcat," a label attached to young, often white, urbanites who adopted African-American jazz culture, slang, and fashion, acting as a subculture that valued "cool" over mainstream conformity.

Next came WW2. The Beats wore all-black and read poetry in rooms thick with peyote smoke because the Cold War had made the American dream feel like a dare. Containment was the government’s foreign policy and also, by extension, its domestic aesthetic: suburban homes, pressed shirts, briefcases, the relentless tidiness of a nation pretending it hadn’t just learned how to end the world. The Beat response was formal before it was political. Kerouac’s run-on sentences were structurally anti-institutional. The clothes followed the syntax. You dressed like you had nowhere to be because the whole point was that the places America wanted you to be were an illusion. The hippies did something similar with Vietnam, but with a crucial addition: they built a counter-infrastructure. Communes. Festivals. Alternative press. Head shops, record stores, co-ops, and campus newspapers. All the mainstream signals of hipsterdom (or gentrification) today.

Post-9/11 indie sleaze, which is near and dear to my heart, is the movement closest to what’s happening today. These kinds of hipsters are the most honest about their own limitations. Nobody in Williamsburg in 2003 thought they were building a better world. There was no manifesto. There was cheap rent, a lot of cocaine, zines, PBR, synths, and the collective decision to boldly feel something in an American moment that was overwhelmingly numb. The aesthetic was hedonistic and low-brow. What Kerouac termed a “licentiousness.” American Apparel, trucker hats, The Strokes. A deliberate embrace of ugliness as a way of refusing the curated perfection that would, within a decade, become Instagram’s entire business model. This was not “millennial optimism,” but rather millennial nihilism. The style said: I’m here, I’m wasted, and I’m not pretending this is fine. My fishnets are ripped. My mascara is running. My nose is bleeding. But tonight, I’m having fun.

These were so much bigger than trends. They were the continuation of a long-held tradition for young people to define themselves against the system they exist in. Yet every one of them shared a structural prerequisite that no longer exists: a mainstream to push against.

The Beats needed Eisenhower’s America. The hippies needed Nixon’s. Indie sleaze needed the Bush-era culture of fear and its accompanying aesthetic of earnest, flag-waving sincerity. Subculture is, by definition, sub. It requires a dominant culture to live underneath, to define itself against, to scandalize. The hipster, that much-maligned figure of the early 2000s, was the last creature to occupy this niche. The hipster had taste, or believed she did, and deployed it as a class marker against the normie mainstream.

Then the floor fell out.

Algorithmic distribution collapsed the distinction between mainstream and margin. Geographic scenes dissolved. You didn’t need to live in Williamsburg or Silver Lake or Shoreditch to access the references anymore. They come to you pre-packaged, flattened and frictionless, through a feed. Gatekeepers are few and far between. Subculture requires scarcity of access, and the internet destroyed it. The hipster couldn’t survive because there was no longer a normie to be hipper than.

Jazz musicians, Beat poets, Hippies and Hipsters all built something new. But plenty of cultural movements have also responded to a lack of meaning in society by reappropriating another era. When the present fails, cultures reach backward, and the moment they choose is never random. Napoleon dressed his revolution in Roman eagles and Doric columns because he desired legitimacy. The Victorians built neo-Gothic churches in the middle of industrial cities because they sought out craft and spiritual weight. The Pre-Raphaelites tried to roll painting back four centuries because they thought the Renaissance had polished the soul out of art. Art Deco borrowed Egyptian and Aztec permanence for a generation that had just watched Europe destroy itself. This is why Gen-Z has seemed to pull from every decade of the 20th century at the same time for inspiration. When the floor is algorithmic and the ceiling is content and every aesthetic is equally available and equally meaningless, what do you reach for?

The era you reach for tells you what you think you’ve lost. And right now, we are reaching for the medieval.

Ballast

There is a word sailors use for the heavy material loaded into the hull of a ship to keep it from capsizing. Ballast. Sand, stones, iron, water. Dead weight, in the literal sense. It does nothing productive, generates no speed, creates no lift. Its entire purpose is to keep the vessel from tipping over in open water. Without ballast, a ship is faster and lighter. It is also, in any serious weather, sinking.

The medieval moment is a ballast.

Consider what it opposes. The dominant texture of contemporary life is smooth. Every interaction has been optimized for speed, reduced to a tap, a swipe, a frictionless glide from desire to fulfillment. Our entire built environment, digital and physical, has been engineered to eliminate resistance. To remove the feeling of a thing between your hand and its consequence.

Medieval culture is the maximum-distance overcorrection from all of this, on every axis. The fashion read of this is where most “trend reporters” begin and end. We want “armor” for difficult modern times. Sure, whatever. More interesting are the larger implications. Decoration over flatness. Craft over scale. Permanence over disposability. Guild over platform. Oath and honor over terms of service. Maintenance.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is the most instructive example because its designers made friction the product. The combat system is deliberately clumsy. You swing a sword and it feels heavy and wrong and slow, because a real longsword would feel that way. The save system requires brewing a specific in-game potion, meaning you can’t quicksave before a fight and reload when you lose (I mean, you can, but it would go against your oath as a knight). Every action you take, every line of dialogue you select, comes with consequences. You live with your mistakes. Five million people bought this game. Not despite the friction, but because of it.

The horror genre, long ahead of its cinematic competition, has also intuited this. The most resonant new subgenre of the last decade might be what the MIT Press recently termed “Institutional Gothic”: Severance, The Stanley Parable, and especially The Backrooms, which A24 is now adapting into a film. Traditional Gothic horror lived in medieval spaces. Crumbling castles, feudal secrets, aristocratic sin. Institutional Gothic transposes the architecture but keeps the dread. The setting is an infinite, featureless office. Fluorescent lights at permanent hum. Mono-chartreuse. Identical rooms in every direction. No texture, no weight, no exit. It is the frictionless world rendered as a nightmare. The Backrooms went viral because it described, without naming it, just how scary a world with no friction at all might be. An endless, optimized nowhere.

Blackletter typography operates on the same principle. It is the anti-font. In an attention economy that demands legibility at scroll speed, blackletter resists reading. It slows you down. The letterforms are dense, ornate, and interlocking. They require the eye to work to comprehend the story they tell. Every brand that adopts blackletter (and there are now dozens, from luxury houses to streetwear labels to craft breweries to AI startups) is making the same unconscious statement: this is not for scanning. This is something for you to pay attention to. The typeface itself is a demand.

But the medieval turn isn’t only aesthetic. The linguistics are coming back too. Freelancers and creators organize into “guilds.” They use the word deliberately, because no modern term fits. A guild isn’t a company, a union, a collective, or a Slack channel. It’s a reputation network bound by craft. The word returned because the structure it describes is returning: small groups of practitioners, admission by demonstrated skill, collective reputation staked to individual work. European countries are heavily investing in craft schools and training to revitalize traditional skills, focusing on merging heritage with digital innovation and sustainable business models.

It’s no coincidence that many VCs use “guild” terminology to describe their internal networking and membership communities, too. The YC badge functions exactly like a guild mark, telling the market this work has been vetted by practitioners, not institutions. Patreon is patronage, democratized. Substack is a kind of feudal contract between a writer and their readership. The college degree is collapsing as a credentialing instrument, and what’s replacing it is the portfolio, the body of work, the demonstrated mastery. This is guild logic. Master and apprentice, not professor and student.

All of this is very medieval. The people largely in control of our future are looking to the past to weave their way out of a complete institutional collapse. The organizations that removed friction from society now seem to understand that we need it back.

Fealty

Every generation dresses for its disaster.

In the medieval world, weight and meaning were inseparable. Your oath was heavy because breaking it collapsed the social order. Your craft was slow because mastering it took a lifetime and your name was on every piece that left the shop. Your cathedral was permanent because it was a promise to generations you would never meet. Friction was not the cost of commitment. It was evidence of it.

This is what we’ve lost and yearn for. Not weight. Not texture. Not craft. Not friction even. But rather the connection between friction and meaning. Fealty.

Modern life is full of commitments that cost nothing: click “I agree” to a 12,000-word legal document you will never read. Follow someone. Subscribe. Unsubscribe. None of it really seems to matter. In the medieval world, any commitment cost you something. Everything was difficult, despite the promise of a world enhanced by science just on the horizon. The difficulty defined the progress.

And so everything today feels too easy, and too empty. We yearn to weigh ourselves down. We don’t want the armor itself, but what the armor meant - the scarcest resource in 2026: a person who means what they say. A “man of his word.” The thing a handshake used to certify. The thing a knight swore over a bejeweled pheasant. All the emblems, heraldry, typefaces, games, guilds, and fashion statements ladder back to this. A code of honor.

The oaths being sworn right now are beautiful. Poetic, even. Abundance. Intentionality. Authenticity. Utopia. Olivier de la Marche would be proud. But Constantinople is still burning.

K. is not oppressed. He is processed. Persecution requires an adversary with ill intent. But the castle is neither a villain nor a dictatorial force. It’s a bureaucracy. Clerks and procedures. Departments that refer to other departments, which refer back to the first department. K. exhausts himself against a system that is not hostile but rather dully impervious, a civil service so byzantine that the question of whether it is functioning properly or failing catastrophically becomes, from the outside, impossible to answer. Kafka died in 1924 with the manuscript unfinished. His editor Max Brod published it anyway. Because of the subject matter, it works. The novel has no ending because K.’s situation has no ending. The castle is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be endured. It doesn’t stop.

The American professional services economy is a castle.

Not metaphorically. Structurally. An accountant in the United States must complete 150 credit hours of education (a full year beyond a bachelor’s degree), pass the four-part CPA exam, accumulate 1-2 years of supervised experience, and maintain continuing education credits every year thereafter. A lawyer must survive three years of backbreakingly expensive graduate school and then pass a bar exam that costs $1,500 to sit for each time she takes it. A doctor completes four years of medical school followed by 3-7 years of residency for pay that, calculated hourly, fall below minimum wage in most states. A financial advisor needs a Series 65 or Series 66 license, or a CFP certification requiring 6,000 hours of professional experience. Each of these credentials is, individually, defensible. Collectively, they constitute a moat.

The people inside the castle are not villains. They endured the process, survived the bureaucracy, and eventually pass through the gates. Most of them genuinely believe the system is meritocratic because it was meritocratic for them. The view from inside is very different than the view from the village. With AI, that’s about to change. To understand how a castle falls, you have to understand how the new one gets built. The pattern is older than anyone in the professional class realizes. It involves energy, the origins of venture capital, and mountains of bird shit.

Colliers

In the 1500s, England quite literally almost ran out of trees. Iron production, the cash cow of the Elizabethan era, required charcoal. Charcoal required forests. Thus, the forests were vanishing. The people who made charcoal were called colliers. They lived in temporary camps at the edges of woodlands, tending slow-burning kilns for days at a stretch, sleeping in huts made from the same timber they were converting to fuel. A collier could produce roughly 60 bushels of charcoal from a single burn, enough to smelt about 200 pounds of iron. The work was ancient, essential, and doomed.

England had no plan. What they called the “wood famine” seemed terminal. Eventually, they kind of resigned, they’d simply run out of trees to convert. Then someone realized you could burn the funny black rocks beneath the countryside (something the Ancient Chinese and many Native American tribes figured out centuries earlier). Coal was abundant, cheap, and contained more energy per ton than charcoal ever could. The crisis evaporated almost overnight. The English countryside still has her trees. But the colliers had to find work elsewhere.

The pattern repeats with an eerie consistency throughout history. In the 1840s, the world’s cities ran on whale oil. The American whaling fleet was huge, and at one point the fifth-largest industry in the country. Nantucket was rich. New Bedford was even richer. Hudson, New York, still has whales emblazoned all over town despite being over 100 miles from the ocean, as it was a key deep-water port for processing and distribution of whale oil. The origins of venture capital actually lie here. A whaling expedition was extremely expensive and equally high-risk. Roguish captains pitched consortiums of wealthy investors to fund voyages to far-off oceans, sometimes frozen, sometimes tropical, always promising a share of the profits from successfully killing a 60-foot, 40-ton animal from a wooden ship. Like startups, most expeditions failed. Like founders, the best captains contained some kind of intangible skillset for sniffing out the best whaling spots. The successful ones became millionaires, and their investor became even richer. Then petroleum arrived. Kerosene smelled worse than whale oil, burned less cleanly, and easily exploded. It also cost a fraction of the price and didn’t require harpooning ancient cetaceans that could put up quite a fight. By 1870 the whaling industry had collapsed. By 1890 it was gone. The lamps stayed lit.

One more, because it’s fun. In the 1890s, global agriculture hit a wall as the population increased. The limiting factor was nitrogen for fertilizer, something people understood they needed at the time but had limited resources to create. The only viable source was guano, or decomposed seabird droppings, harvested off the coast of Peru under conditions that were essentially slave labor. Wars were fought over bird shit. Peru, Chile, Spain, and Bolivia all engaged in naval battles to secure it. The US, of course, even got involved towards the end. Then Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch figured out how to synthesize ammonia (a form of nitrogen that plants can absorb easily) from thin air. 78% of the atmosphere is actually nitrogen, so this resource is essentially both abundant and almost free. The Haber-Bosch process, perfected by 1913, still feeds roughly 4 billion people every day.

Radiolab named this phenomenon the Malthusian Swerve. Malthus, the original Ebenezer Scrooge, thought that population growth was inseparable from depleted resources, famine, and disease. He was correct that humanity constantly races toward a resource cliff, over and over. Yet the swerve dictates that innovation almost always provides a substitute, often at the last moment. The car swerves from the edge of the cliff. We survive.

But the colliers didn’t survive. Neither did the whalers. Neither did the guano miners. In every case, the displaced class made the same argument: you need us, the substitute can’t match our quality. They are largely correct. Charcoal produces a cleaner burn than coal. Whale oil was superior to kerosene for lubrication. Natural guano has properties that synthetic fertilizers still lack. None of it mattered. The substitute was cheaper, more abundant, and scalable. Being right about your own value has never once prevented a swerve. Not once in five centuries has the displaced class survived the transition with their livelihood intact. Many people believe the latest swerve concerns energy, especially as AI and data centers boom. But the more concerning resource that’s now under threat is something we’ve never had to reckon with before: employment, en masse.

Six to One

In early March 2026, Sequoia Capital published “Services: The New Software.” The thesis, written by partner Julien Bek, is bracingly clear. For every $1 spent on software, $6 are spent on services. AI has crossed the capability threshold where it can now perform most rule-based, pattern-driven cognitive work autonomously, or soon will. The next trillion-dollar company won’t sell a tool to the professional. It will sell the professional’s work directly to the client. An app that closes the books. A swarm of agents that write and review contracts. A copilot sells the tool. But an autopilot does the work itself. The “copilot era,” Bek believes, is ending. Bek thinks this is a wonderful opportunity.

A few months earlier, Josh Wolfe at Lux Capital made the same observation with an inverse conclusion. He believes that as AI generates synthetic abundance (content, code, analysis, design), the scarce asset becomes human authenticity. Trust. Judgment. Wolfe isn’t sure that technology’s implicit promise of creating more jobs than it destroys holds this time. He calls it the breaking of Silicon Valley’s “social contract.”

Bek and Wolfe are both right. They are merely describing the same event from opposite sides of the table. Bek maps the opportunity. Wolfe worries about the wreckage. There was a man in Pennsylvania in the 1860s who saw the glowing chance to get rich off of petroleum and there was a man on Nantucket who saw the end of everything he had ever held dear. They were both looking at the same barrel of kerosene.

The $6 spent on services for every $1 spent on software is not a market abstraction. It’s payroll. Accountants, researchers, lawyers, designers, strategists, consultants, analysts, project managers, recruiters, bankers, writers, media buyers. It’s the castle. The professional-managerial class. The people who went to college specifically to avoid becoming colliers. And now, no matter which side you look at it from, they seem destined for exactly that fate.

Parables

Every displaced class tells itself a parable. The white collar professionals of today have chosen the bank teller.

When ATMs arrived in the 1970s, everyone predicted mass unemployment. Another Malthusian swerve. Instead, teller employment actually rose. Since ATMs reduced the cost of operating a branch, banks opened more of them, and more tellers did higher-value work. J.D. Vance cited this story in an interview with Ross Douthat. Economists built careers around it. It became a load-bearing parable for anyone who wanted to believe that automation fears are always overblown. It was true. Until it wasn’t.

David Oks, writing on Substack, pointed out the second act nobody talks about. ATMs didn’t kill teller jobs right away, but the iPhone did. Between 2010 and 2022, teller employment fell from 332,000 to 164,000. ATMs had reached full saturation long before. What changed was that mobile banking made the branch itself unnecessary. Bank of America has closed over 40% of its locations since 2010.

The distinction Oks draws is between task automation and paradigm replacement. As long as that paradigm of physical banking held, the tellers survived. The iPhone built a new paradigm in which the teller’s role simply didn’t exist. They didn’t need to be automated, because they were no longer necessary. Within a generation, customer behavior adjusted. Today, 77% of consumers prefer to manage their bank accounts through a mobile app.

The professional class in 2026 is telling itself the bank teller story. AI can’t replicate judgment. It can’t exercise taste. It can’t navigate ambiguity the way someone with 20 years of experience can. All of this is true. It also doesn’t matter. The “copilot phase“ is doing something an ATM could never. The tools are mapping the entire paradigm from the inside. Every time a strategist uses Claude to draft a brief, she is demonstrating that the brief can be described in enough natural language for a machine to produce it. Every time a lawyer uses an AI tool to review a contract, he is generating the training data that makes the next version capable of reviewing it without him. Bek’s language is precise: “Today’s judgment will become tomorrow’s intelligence.” He’s right.

The swerve doesn’t need to replace 100% of what we do. Kerosene didn’t need to be better than whale oil at everything. It needed to be part of a system (petroleum infrastructure, refineries, distribution networks, internal combustion engines) that made the question of whether or not to use whale oil irrelevant. Once the machine has the full map, someone will build the structure that doesn’t need the branch at all. This is the swerve facing about 70 million professional knowledge workers today (around 44% of the US’ entire workforce). We all have a right to be worried.

The String Quartet

In 1966, the economist William Baumol identified a mechanism he called “cost disease.” Sectors that resist productivity gains see their costs rise perpetually because they still compete for labor with sectors that are increasing productivity. A string quartet in 1826 required four musicians playing for 40 minutes. A string quartet in 2026 still requires four musicians playing for 40 minutes. Zero productivity gains in 200 years. Meanwhile manufacturing has improved output per hour roughly 8,000% over the same period. The musicians have to be paid wages competitive with the productive economy even though their output hasn’t budged. So do the doctors, lawyers, accountants, and financial planners.

This is the engine underneath the affordability crisis that everyone is yelling about and nobody is naming correctly. Healthcare is 18% of U.S. GDP. Professional and business services, another 13%. Financial services, 8%. Education, 6%. Nearly half of the American economy is locked inside sectors riddled with cost disease. Castles. The reason tuition and a lawyer’s bill and a hospital visit feel like they’re strangling the middle class is that the labor has resisted automation for decades while the wages rose to match an increasingly productive economy. The populist right campaigns on this as lived experience: everything costs too much. The progressive left campaigns on the exact same thing, just through the lens of ownership: the professional and managerial classes are extracting wealth from everyone beneath them. They actually agree on the problem. They just disagree on who to cast as the villain, which is always, conveniently, whoever isn’t currently donating to their PACs. Neither side has named the mechanism, because doing so requires saying the quiet part out loud: the professional class that donates to both parties, staffs every administration, and runs the policy apparatus is the same class whose labor costs are partly driving the inflation they rail against.

AI is the first technology in history that directly attacks Baumol’s cost disease. Every previous automation wave hit the productive sectors: manufacturing, agriculture, logistics. The industries already getting efficient got more efficient. The knowledge workers were untouched because their labor was cognitive, relational, and judgment-heavy. You couldn’t automate a diagnosis, a contract review, or an audit. That was the load-bearing wall of the castle. AI removes it, the way the iPhone removed the need for bank tellers. But when a wall this big comes down, the structure doesn’t gently settle. It collapses to a new price, the same way every previous swerve’s pricing did. Coal didn’t modestly undercut charcoal. It obliterated the price point and made the Industrial Revolution possible. The Haber-Bosch process didn’t slightly improve on guano. It made nitrogen functionally infinite. The deflationary event isn’t a prediction. It’s what swerves do. And this time, it’s coming after a lot more than colliers.

K.

Kafka never gave K. a full name. He is anyone who has ever tried to access a system that was not designed to be accessed. Who has ever been told that the process is the process. Who has credentialed and qualified and waited patiently and still found the gates neither open nor closed but simply, permanently, pending.

The professional class built a castle and called it expertise. It is an extraordinary structure. It produced the modern economy, the research university, the teaching hospital, the integrated law firm, the venture-backed startup advised by credentialed authorities at every stage. The people inside it are, in aggregate, the most educated and capable workforce in human history. The castle serves its purpose. The swerve doesn’t care.

Every swerve ensures the old resource gets replaced. But the need it served doesn't disappear. England still needed to smelt iron. Cities still needed light. Crops still needed nitrogen. The need persists. It’s just the castle that changes. Will AI become the new castle? Of course it will. Petroleum didn't eliminate gatekeepers. It created Rockefeller, then OPEC, then the entire geopolitical architecture of the 20th century. The new castle won't be credentialing. It'll be whoever controls the infrastructure that replaced the credentials. The model layer. The data. The trust architecture.

The question isn't whether there will be a new castle. There always is. The question is whether you're building a new one, or if you’re still investing in defending that doomed structure on the hill.

The Castle has no ending because Kafka died before finishing it. But Max Brod reported that the author had described to him the intended conclusion. K. would wait. He would eventually lie on his deathbed, still without an answer. At that exact moment, word would arrive from the castle that his claim had been approved. Not on its merits, the castle would note explicitly, but as “an act of grace.” Permission, finally granted to a man who no longer needed it, by an authority that never acknowledged his existence while he was alive to use it.

But then the researchers changed the terms. One monkey received cucumber. But the monkey in the adjacent cage, performing the identical task, received a grape. The cucumber monkey could watch the grape transaction happen in real time. And she didn’t like it one bit.

Rejection rates doubled instantly once the grape was introduced. The monkeys didn’t just refuse the treats. They threw them. They began to hurl cucumbers back at the researchers, often hitting them directly in the face. They rattled their cage walls. They slapped the ground. They screamed at the top of their lungs. De Waal noted that when both monkeys got cucumber, “they’re perfectly willing to do this 25 times in a row.” But the grape changed everything.

When the experiment escalated further and one monkey received a grape for free (no token required), rejection rates soared even higher. One famous video of the experiment (which has been viewed tens of millions of times, because watching a monkey throw a cucumber at a scientist is one of the few pure pleasures left in academic research) shows a capuchin so outraged by the inequity that she appears to be staging a one-primate labor strike. The cucumber monkeys overwhelmingly rejected the snack, even when it was later offered for free. They would rather starve than participate in a system they could see was rigged.

Capuchins diverged from the human lineage roughly 35 million years ago. Whatever circuit fires when that monkey throws the cucumber is old. Older than language, older than culture, older than human beings. Fairness is not a value that enlightened societies invented when they sought out human rights. It is not a concept that emerged from the Magna Carta nor the US Constitution nor 21st century DEI training. Fairness is a biological reflex. It precedes us. It will outlast us. And it’s worth paying more attention to.

The Ultimatum Game

The same year the monkey labor strike paper was published, a neuroeconomist named Alan Sanfey put 19 people inside an fMRI machine at Princeton and asked them to play a game. Two players split ten dollars. Player A proposes a division. Player B accepts or rejects. If player B accepts, both keep the money. If player B rejects, nobody gets anything.

This is the ultimatum game. Economists have run it since 1982, when Werner Güth first published “An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining” from his lab in Cologne. It’s been reproduced by psychologists, anthropologists, and neuroscientists in dozens of countries across the globe. The result is always the same. Any offer below a 50/50 split gets rejected at the mean. People walk away from FREE MONEY to punish someone who got more free money than them. Over and over again. Australian economist Lisa Cameron’s 1999 study in Indonesia ran the game with a $100 pot, which was three months’ average expenditure for the participants. Didn’t change a thing. People routinely turned down $30 offers even though that equaled about two weeks’ wages. What Sanfey wanted to know was where this response lived in the body. What neural architecture could override economic self-interest so completely that a person would destroy free money on principle?

He found it in the anterior insula. A small fold of cortex buried deep in the lateral sulcus, involved in everything from taste to empathy to bodily self-awareness. Most neuroscientists associate it with one specific function: disgust. This is the neural tissue that activates when you smell rotten meat or see an infected wound. Its evolutionary job is obvious. Without a sense of disgust, without understanding when something or someone has been contaminated by a contagion, you would likely not make it through childhood.

Disgust is its own thing. It’s revulsion. A genetic distaste. What the kids these days might call the “ick,” if they’re even still saying that (I’m an elder millennial, sue me). When player Bs received an offer they deemed unfair, their insulae fired with the exact intensity pattern of someone encountering a dead body, or a maggot in their food, or any other kind of biological contaminant. The activation scaled. The more unfair the offer, the stronger the disgust response. At 90/10, the insulae were screaming.

Cultural Contagion

Unfairness is not processed in our brains as disappointment, fear, frustration, or anger. It’s closer to contamination. The behavioral output is identical to encountering poison or a plague rat. Reject and avoid. Do not consume. Do not return. The response is pre-cognitive, pre-verbal, and effectively irreversible. You cannot reason your way out of a disgust response.

When you evaluate a price, a product, or a brand interaction, your insula fires before your prefrontal cortex begins its rational cost-benefit analysis. Cognition is always playing catch-up. Your brain processes every transaction the same way the capuchin does: is this exchange clean, or is it contaminated?

Some brands keep the insula quiet. They are clean, and they achieve cleanliness through three distinct mechanisms: Craft, Conviction, or Contract. A few rare companies have all three (Apple, I’d argue). But you only need one to build a brand that feels safe enough to advocate for. Others trigger the disgust response. Pricing makes things feel unfair, but so does a litany of other factors (that 30% full bag of chips, for example). Hypocrisy. Betrayal. Broken promises. These are contaminated brands, and contamination also manifests in three ways in the market: Confusion, Concealment, and Cosplay. These brands are inherently unfair in one way or another. Especially once the grape of a more legitimate alternative is dangled in front of us.

We’re going to largely use fashion and retail for our primary examples here, because consumer brands are the ultimate litmus test for sentiment en masse. In most categories, fairness and disgust can hide behind utility. You’ll tolerate a contaminated exchange if the product is necessary enough or mandated by your boss (ahem, Microsoft Teams). But fashion is pure surplus, by definition frivolous. It’s the fMRI machine of culture.

Alligator Farms: Clean by Craft

Hermès. A single Birkin takes one artisan 18 to 25 hours of hand labor. The leather is sourced from specific tanneries. Hermès owns and operates its own crocodile and alligator farms for its exotic leather products. The thread is waxed linen, saddle-stitched with two needles operating simultaneously. $12,000 and up, waitlists that stretch years. Neither fact triggers the insula because the exchange feels legible. You can trace the money to the labor, to the care, to the artisanship. Craft through process. Compare this to a Louis Vuitton monogram bag at $2,000+. Social credibility in some circles, but made of waxed cotton canvas, not leather. They do not last very long. A Birkin can be passed down through generations.

Brunello Cucinelli. The man owns and has restored the 12th-century medieval village of Solomeo in Umbria, transforming it into his company headquarters and a humanistic factory town. A hamlet of cashmere and harmony. Craft through commitment. Hermès posted €15.2 billion in revenue in 2024, up 15%, with operating margins above 40%. Cucinelli grew 10%. In the same year, LVMH’s fashion division declined 8%. Same economy. Same consumer. One makes cucumbers, the others make grapes.

Craft isn’t defined by a price point, although it helps you build a more competitive pricing strategy. A $22 sandwich can be clean by craft if you see (and smell) the bread being baked every morning. But so can a $3 bacon egg and cheese from the bodega on your corner, because you’ve watched them make it the same for 11 years, and the owner calls you “boss,” and you needed that. At its core, craft is about clarity. An exchange of value that feels fair.

Never Flinch: Clean by Conviction

Ralph Lauren. Products that are not, on a materials-and-construction basis, always proportional to their price. Doesn’t matter. Ralph Lifshitz from the Bronx built an entire world of WASP-y Newport regattas and aristocratic British pheasant-hunts and turquoise-encrusted Colorado cowboys. Professorial tweed blazers and regimental silk repp ties and old money suede safari jackets and prep-punk skull and crossbones chinos. He did it with such absolute commitment that the fantasy became, over half a century, indistinguishable from the product itself. He has never flinched. Like an auteur filmmaker, the aesthetic is the story is the product. When the brand collaborated with British streetwear stalwart Palace, the partnership worked because it was two clean containers mixing. No risk of contamination. A shared conviction. And an independent streak, as well. It’s notable that Polo has never worked with Supreme, like every other brand on the planet. Ralph Lauren’s FY2025 revenue hit $7.1 billion, up 7%, with gross margin at 68.6%. The brand looks essentially the same as it always has. It recruited 5.9 million new customers last year anyway.

Rick Owens. The dark prince’s eponymous line is brutalist, stark, and strange. Designed to shock and repel. A tailor for gothic peacocks who want to be noticed and perhaps feared at the same time. Owens’ codes are monastic. Draped leather, elongated silhouettes, concrete runway shows staged inside ancient Roman ruins. Numbers for Owenscorp are hard to come by, since the company remains owned and operated by Rick and his muse Michèle Lamy. But revenue reportedly exceeded €150 million in 2025. This puts the brand in its own stratosphere for independent fashion. He hasn’t meaningfully shifted the look in over 30 years. Ralph hasn’t in over 50.

Conviction, unlike craft, doesn’t require performatively expensive materials or intensely visible labor to keep the insula quiet. It demands something harder to buy. Time and restraint. A commitment to changing nothing as the world around you changes everything.

Dollar Dogs: Clean by Contract

Costco. Products that don’t need to justify their price through visible craftsmanship or aesthetic consistency because the structure of the exchange itself is transparent. The social contract is the product. Costco’s membership model is a structural alignment of incentives so elegant it barely qualifies as a business strategy. It feels more like a religious decree. They profit from fees, not markups, so every product on the floor is priced as close to cost as possible. The iconic $1.50 hot dog has remained unchanged since 1985. Costco founder Jim Sinegal famously told then-CEO Craig Jelinek:

The rotisserie chicken sells at a loss. Kirkland Signature matches mainstream brands at a fraction of the price. And something remarkable is happening inside these halogen-lit warehouses. Costco is selling Le Labo Santal 33 for nearly $100 less than Nordstrom. It carries Creed, Tom Ford, Aesop, and…at one point Rolex? In January 2026 they shock-dropped the Kirkland Signature x Nike SB Dunk Low at select locations. Pairs resold for $1,000 within days, despite the noticeably cool sneaker market of today. The insole has a hot dog on it, of course. Somehow, Costco feels like the cooler brand here. The one Nike is drafting equity from the way it has in the past with Supreme, Off-White, and Travis Scott. A concrete box in a nondescript parking lot is becoming a destination for premium brands because the container is neurologically trusted.

Costco posted $270 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025, up 8%. Membership renewal rates sit above 90% in the US and Canada. The fee increase they implemented in September 2024, the first since 2017, didn’t slow sign-ups. Membership grew 6.3%. You raise the price and more people show up. The contract is so clean that anything placed inside it inherits the purity.

IKEA runs the same mechanic through radical process transparency. You see the particle board, you read the tag, you pull the flat-pack off the shelf yourself, you assemble it at home with a wordless manual and a hex key (god willing). The BILLY bookcase has cost roughly the same since 1979. The ownership structure, a Dutch foundation with no outside shareholders, means no one in the room is demanding margin expansion. IKEA is also irrationally culturally relevant. Just ask Punch, the viral baby monkey who was abandoned by his mother and now clings to a $20 IKEA orangutan plushie as a surrogate. The toy sold out within days. Ingka Group posted €41.5 billion in revenue in FY2025 while, like Costco, actively lowering prices.

Contract-clean brands don’t need craft’s visible labor nor conviction’s auteur mythology. They need something harder to fake: a pricing structure and a customer relationship so transparent that the deal always feels fair and the customer never thinks twice.

What all three mechanisms share is legibility. Craft makes the labor visible. Conviction makes the commitment to a vision visible. Contract makes the terms of operations visible. The customer can see where the money goes and believe what they see. Our insulae stay quiet. The brands stay clean. And clean brands, as the data shows, are growing while the rest of the market contracts.

Of course, most brands today are decidedly not clean. It’s worth noting that confusion, concealment, and cosplay aren’t fringe corporate failures. They are the dominant business and sociopolitical model of the last 20 years. Growth-at-all-costs was built on concealment. The DTC boom was largely cosplay. Luxury conglomerate rollups are confusing by design. The system is contaminated.

Cringe: Contaminated by Confusion

Michael Kors. Burberry. Givenchy. Brands whose customers can no longer locate where their money goes. Kors’ revenue dropped 14% in 2025. Their owner Capri Holdings’ CEO has said “we were disappointed with our results” for three consecutive quarters, which is the earnings-call equivalent of a hostage video. Prada, a clean brand, bought Versace from them for $1.4 billion at the end of 2025. The way you might buy a neglected vintage sportscar at a foreclosure auction.

Burberry lost 17% of revenue in FY25, posted a £3 million operating loss versus £418 million profit the year prior, and is cutting 1,700 jobs. Givenchy is three creative directors deep in five years and culturally invisible. On LVMH’s most recent earnings call, Bernard Arnault told investors that “some houses have increased their prices in a somewhat extravagant manner without really giving any justification.” He’s correctly diagnosed that his brands are contaminated by confusion, he just doesn’t know it yet.

These companies are charging $400 to $4,000 for a handbag but can’t explain whether you’re paying for heritage, for design, for a creative director who was fired two seasons ago, or for a logo the brand itself seems embarrassed by. No one inside these companies can agree on what’s being sold, or to whom. On what their story is. On their “why?” That's confusion. It’s the opposite of conviction. And consumers have a word for it too: Cringe.

Regina George'd: Contaminated by Concealment

Concealment is simpler and uglier. When a lie is revealed, the disgust response is retroactive and total, even if it’s just a rumor. Every prior transaction gets re-contextualized. Every positive experience is neurologically reclassified as a falsehood. Brands that are caught in concealment trigger the same feelings that a cheating spouse or con-artist business partner would. Volkswagen's diesel emissions scandal is the most glaring corporate concealment case in recent history. 11 million cars, $33 billion in fines, stock lost over 30% of its value in mere days. But examples abound if you’re brave enough to actually Google the brands you love.

Most damning in fashion is the recent scandal at LVMH’s Dior. Milan prosecutors found that Chinese-owned workshops near the city were assembling the luxury brand’s €2,600 bags for about €53 apiece. The workers slept in the factories, safety devices were removed from machines, and many laborers lacked legal documentation. Because the workshops were local, Dior’s goods still carried the valuable “Made in Italy” label. Dior is facing a slowdown in sales. 2025 results showed lower revenue and profit, hit by a 3% dip in the U.S. and an 11% drop in the ever-important Asia market. Now Arnault has concealment to deal with too. No wonder he seems to be obsessed with trying to buy Hermès.

Even hot new brands are at risk for this. David Protein, which is oh-so-hip, is marketed at 150 calories with only 2 grams of fat. A class action lawsuit filed this January alleges independent testing found 83% more calories and 400% more fat than the label claims. Peter Rahal, the founder, says the suit’s testing methodology (something called bomb calorimetry) is inherently flawed and he will be counter-suing. Rahal may be right, yet the internet is already saying they feel like they’ve been Regina George’d. The brand, like Dior, has the equity to recover. But right now it may feel contaminated by concealment.

Earth is Not a Shareholder: Contaminated by Cosplay

Cosplay borrows the language of cleanliness to mask the contamination underneath. Oatly built a countercultural identity so convincing that the brand turned getting sued by the Swedish dairy lobby into a greatest-hit punk rock marketing campaign. Then they took $200M from Blackstone, whose portfolio includes companies linked to deforestation in the Amazon. Market cap has collapsed from $10 billion to roughly $340 million. The product didn't change, but the container got contaminated.

Allbirds told us they were saving the planet with wool sneakers and a carbon-neutral supply chain. The company went public at a $4 billion valuation. Revenue dropped 25% in 2024, U.S. stores are closing, and market cap has cratered to about $20 million. The product didn’t back up the story. Allbirds shoes famously fall apart, sometimes with only months of wear. No amount of carbon neutrality survives a sole that doesn’t.

But most nefarious is one of my generation’s favorite brands. Or at least it used to be. In 2011, Patagonia ran a full-page ad in the New York Times on Black Friday. “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” Revenue jumped 30%. By 2022, they’d crossed $1.5 billion.

That same year, founder Yvon Chouinard announced he was giving the company away. “Earth is now our only shareholder.” He did not give the stock to Earth, or an environmental nonprofit of any kind. He made his own. 98% of shares were transferred to the Holdfast Collective, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that can make unlimited political donations. The Chouinard family retained all voting shares and paid $17.5 million in gift taxes on a company now valued at $3 billion. They avoided an estimated $700 million in capital gains taxes in the process. In 2019, the company stopped selling its fleece vests to financial firms. The bankers didn’t seem to mind. In fact, they’re the only people openly admiring Chouinard’s tax evasion scheme.

Patagonia now sells tinned “organic smoked wild salmon fillets.” Indeed, something smells off. Revenue has declined every year since they stopped selling those vests. Two rounds of layoffs in 2024 alone. E-commerce down 10%. Meanwhile, Arc’teryx surpassed $2 billion in sales that same year, grew 36%, and is targeting $5 billion by 2030. The gorpcore customer didn’t leave the great outdoors. But she has left Patagonia.

All’s Not Fair

When de Waal presented his findings on the capuchin labor strike at Berkeley, a philosopher in the audience objected. He said it was impossible for monkeys to have a sense of fairness because fairness was invented during the French Revolution. He was not joking.

The dominant emotional register of 2026 is rage, which is really disgust, which is really unfairness. The modern information environment has made this structural. Every consumer now lives in a cage adjacent to every other, simultaneously, on a screen in their pocket. You can see every time someone else gets a grape, even if you’re rich in cucumbers. Our insulae never get to rest. This isn’t an irrational anger. It’s the correct biological response to an environment saturated with visible inequity. Brands are stuck in the middle of all this.

Rage is obvious, but it’s not a smart emotion for marketers to target. It’s the realm of politicians, and it’s not working for them. In 1958, 73% of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing. By 2023 that number cratered to 16%, among the lowest in nearly seven decades of polling (keep in mind, Trump wasn’t even President then). Trust is low. But trust is also a buzzword that comms alone cannot build. People don’t lose trust in your brand because it showed up next to a post they don’t like on Twitter. They lose trust because your proposition is unfair. And fairness you can do something about. Right now. The brands that survive the next decade will be the ones that taste like grapes in a market full of cucumbers.

So build a clean brand. Not because it’s ethical, although it might be. Not because it’s sustainable, although it can be. Not because it’s good marketing, although it’s the best marketing there is. Build a clean brand because no matter what you make, there’s a part of your customer’s brain that’s older than language itself. It will outlive your company, your category, and your career. And it calls bullshit.

The human team wrote:

“Access cash from the equity in your home.”

But Persado’s algorithm wrote such poetry as:

“It’s true — You can unlock cash from the equity in your home.”

JPMorgan’s CMO at the time, Kristin Lemkau, called this “incredibly promising.” She also was either so hoodwinked by Persado, or so scared of her own job security, that she made the mistake of saying the quiet part out loud: “Machine learning is the path to more humanity in marketing.” This is the person deciding what good communication looks like at the largest bank in America? Nope. Not anymore. She’s now the CEO of JP Morgan Wealth Management. She got promoted.

A few variables are worth exploring here. First of all, this study is valuing effective copywriting only through clicks. A click is not persuasion. A click is curiosity at best and muscle memory at worst. It measures whether someone's thumb moved, not whether their mind changed. By this metric, a typo in a subject line that makes someone think they got a bank alert would outperform Hemingway or Shakespeare. Clicks are the lifeblood of performance marketing, and performance marketing is not actually marketing. It’s sales. Digital direct mail. Copywriting for such ads is not really copywriting. It’s math. And in this sense, sure, Persado might have a leg up on us mortals. But when it comes to AI writing anything that makes us think, makes us feel, or convinces us to change our minds about a product, person, or platform, I’ve yet to be impressed.

More importantly, copywriting itself is an art and a science that requires study. There are experts and there are charlatans, and most are the latter. I wonder which humans wrote the copy in this test in the first place? It certainly was not a team of the world’s best, as they would’ve known that putting the “It’s true!” at the beginning of the statement is a classic, proven, tried-and-true copywriting strategy. The technique is called a "truth claim" or a "belief opener." More precisely in the craft, it's an example of leading with validation before the ask. The Gary Halbert types would call it a "readiness frame." You soften the reader's skepticism before you make the proposition by pre-agreeing with them: Yes, this is real. No, you're not being tricked. A tactic as old as the written word itself. The human version from Persado’s case study is flat, transactional, and forgettable. The AI version is marginally better, the way a splinter is better than a paper cut.

But here’s what nobody in the breathless coverage of this deal bothered to assess: Persado didn’t beat an actual pro-level copywriter. It beat a mortgage marketing department. It beat the kind of copy that gets written at 4pm on a Thursday by someone who has 19 other deliverables due, a hangover, and a compliance review in half an hour. The bar it cleared was so low you'd need sonar to find it. Pit Persado against Dan Kennedy or David Ogilvy and I can guarantee you the machine would not win.

And yet, six years later, Persado has won. It’s booked over $2 billion in “incremental revenue” (how do they define this catchall term? unclear) for its financial services clients. It won a 2025 Tearsheet award for “Best Product Designed for Gen Z,” which, what the fuck? Persado is better than TikTok or Depop? It has helped the AI copywriting industry metastasize into a multi-billion-dollar ecosystem of tools, templates, and frameworks, all promising to replace the expensive, subjective, frustratingly human process of writing words that sell things with…more clicks.

Before the Word

For at least 30,000 years before a human wrote anything down, we were making images. Cave paintings at Chauvet in southeastern France date to roughly 36,000 years ago. Lascaux, 17,000. The primeval artists who made them sourced pigments from up to 155 miles away, built fat-burning lamps to work in total darkness, and used the flicker of firelight to create the illusion of animals in motion. Picasso once visited Lascaux and reportedly said “we have invented nothing.” Every child can draw something, at least once, that’s remarkably moving. Yet most people live their whole lives without being able to put a coherent sentence together on paper.

When writing finally appeared, around 3200 BC in the Sumerian city of Uruk, it had nothing to do with stories, poetry, philosophy, or self-expression. The earliest written tablets are inventories. Grain shipments. Livestock counts. Beer rations. The occasional customer complaint. Approximately 85% of all proto-cuneiform texts recovered are administrative bookkeeping. Writing was created to serve ancient middle management. Cities got too big, transactions got too complex, and memory could no longer hold the ledger. It took 600 years for the Sumerians to attach sounds to these symbols, which finally allowed writing to represent spoken language. Then it took another few centuries before anyone thought to use this accounting technology to create art. The first known author in human history was a priestess named Enheduanna, and she didn’t come around until roughly 2300 BC.

Soon thereafter, writing was being used mainly to sell things. Egyptian merchants hawked papyrus handbills to demonstrate their UVPs. In ancient Rome, politicians hired professional sign-painters to write campaign slogans in red and black paint on the facades of wealthy homes. Over 3,000 electoral inscriptions have been recovered from Pompeii alone, including endorsement deals, competitive slander, and what can only be described as attack ads in the form of graffiti. Enemies of a candidate named Vatia plastered the city with copy like “The petty thieves ask you to elect Vatia as aedile” and “All the drunkards ask you to elect Vatia.” Not bad.

Persuasion through language predates literacy itself. People were selling with words before anyone could read them. The spoken pitch is older than the written sentence. And the craft of choosing which words will move another person to act, which is all that copywriting really is, is as old as human social life itself. It has never been a problem of information or automation. It has always been a problem of nerve. Which brings us back to the machines.

Frameworks All the Way Down

Visit the websites of the major AI copywriting platforms and you will encounter a universe of mediocre nonsense. Jasper, which claims to have “read 10% of the internet” (how would this make you a better writer?) offers over 50 templates organized by advertising frameworks like AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action), PAS (Problem, Agitate, Solution), “Emotion-Logic,” “Picture-Promise-Prove-Push,” “Awareness-Comprehension-Conviction-Action,” and many more. You input your product, your customer persona, and your unique selling proposition. You select a tone of voice (they suggest “Tony Robbins” as an option). You click generate.

So I asked Jasper to write copy for its own product using the AIDA framework. Here’s the beautiful prose it spit back out:

“Attention: Do you hate writing copy for your marketing campaigns? Interest: We know that not everyone is a great writer, but we also know that you can’t afford to have bad content on your website. That’s why Jasper.ai was created — so you don’t have to worry about it anymore! Desire: Now with just one click of a button, Jasper will create the perfect piece of content for any campaign or promotion you’re running. Action: Click here right now and sign up for a free trial of Jasper today!”

This is the product demonstrating itself. The sample on the showroom floor. And it reads like a hostage letter written by someone who learned English from infomercials. Ignoring the AI giveaways, every sentence performs the mechanical steps of persuasion while achieving none of the emotional effects. It is copy that sounds like copy to someone who has never actually read good copy.

Copy.ai, another competitor, pushes their messaging into even more absurd territory. The brand pivoted from its original copywriting premise to calling itself “the first-ever GTM AI platform,” which is the kind of phrase that tells you everything about what a company wants to be and nothing about what it actually does. Our hero Persado describes itself as “reinventing marketing creative by applying mathematical certainty to words, the foundational DNA of Marketing.” They throw around the term “Motivational AI.” Capital-M Marketing. Mathematical certainty. Applied to words. Ok.

The copy that AI copywriting companies use to promote AI copywriting is the most damning evidence against AI copywriting. They can write, but they can’t sell, even when it comes to their own product. To understand why, you have to appreciate what a large language model actually does.

Mongoose

The people who build AI models don’t fully comprehend how they work, if they can actually “think,” or what goes on inside their digital “minds.” Mikhail Belkin, a computer scientist at UC San Diego, said in a 2024 MIT Technology Review piece:

That’s the real question. Can they learn language? Or are they performing a very impressive parlor trick? Anthropic’s Dario Amodei put it even more plainly in his excellent 2025 essay “The Urgency of Interpretability”:

In theory, LLMs predict the next most likely token in a sequence. Given “Access cash from the equity in your…” the model assigns probability weights to every possible next word and selects from the highest-weighted candidates. “Home” scores high. “Dreams” scores low. “Mongoose” scores essentially zero, I’d imagine. The architecture of LLM is an engine of likelihood. It is not thinking as much as guessing. It generates language by asking, thousands of times per second, what word would most likely come next? It’s advanced probability theory. It’s not, however, doing anything close to what people do when we write.

Consider some of the most iconic and effective lines in the history of advertising, and how they all contain some kind of tension that would be difficult to predict if you were a math-driven model writing from scratch:

• “Think Different.” Grammatically incorrect. The adjective “different” where the adverb “differently” should be. Apple’s agency, Chiat Day, chose the wrong word on purpose. The friction here is the message. It tells you that this company does not follow the rules. It reinforces the line itself. A probability engine would likely edit it, because models are trained on grammatically accurate text and reinforced toward correctness by human evaluators.

• “Murder Your Thirst.” Insane. Nonsensical. The tagline takes the most benign consumer act imaginable, drinking water, and casts it as homicide. It works precisely because it shouldn’t, and because it’s wholly unique in the category. An LLM asked to write taglines for a water brand would produce variations on purity, refreshment, and hydration. The semantic field the training data points toward. It would likely never arrive at violence as a metaphor for drinking, because the leap requires a willful disregard for category convention that probability cannot replicate.

• “Got Milk?” Incomplete. No subject. No verb conjugation. Two syllables. The California Milk Processor Board’s agency, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, built a $100 million campaign on a sentence fragment. The imperfection creates an accusatory intimacy, like someone checking your fridge at 11pm with a plate full of warm cookies. It feels human, and is one of the most effective taglines ever written because of it.

• “Where’s the Beef?” Wendy’s, 1984. A Fortune 500 fast food corporation adopting the register of an irritated elderly woman examining a competitor’s hamburger. The tonal shift from corporate to colloquial is so drastic that it became a national catchphrase and even entered a presidential debate. The training data for QSR advertising does not contain the speech patterns of frustrated grandmothers, and so LLMs would likely not be able to come up with something like this. Like Liquid Death, the phrasing is both deeply realistic and exceptionally bizarre.

• “Just Do It.” The most famous line ever. A contextless imperative from a company that sells shoes. It does not mention shoes. It does not mention sport. It does not mention Nike. It is three words of pure command that assume you already know what “it” refers to, and more importantly, that you’ve been failing to do it. It was famously inspired by the last words of a murderer about to be executed by firing squad in Utah in 1977 (he said “Let’s do it,” but close enough). The line works because it meets you in your hesitation, your excuse-making, your cowardice. It addresses the Hamlet in all of us. The 20th Century default human condition of inaction, only exacerbated over the last 25 years. It is timeless. It is perfect. Persado could never.

Every one of these lines is a statistical anomaly. They succeed because the writer chose the word that a probability engine would not. These are stylistic choices, but they’re also deeply human. Structural violations of the logic by which language models operate. This kind of approach is not a bug in the copywriting process. It is the copywriting process. The line that works best is usually the line that has no business working in the first place.

The Comfort Mandate

The problem with LLMs’ ability to write with impact is the same as our own: training. A writer with raw skill can be sharpened by good mentorship, constant rejection, and a decade of killing darlings and getting fired from magazines. Contemporary language models are shaped through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Human evaluators rate model outputs on criteria including helpfulness, harmlessness, accuracy, and clarity. Outputs that are ambiguous, confusing, or could create discomfort get penalized. The model learns, through millions of these cycles, to reduce friction. To smooth. To clarify. To complete.

But good copy lives in friction.

What’s happened to design over the last decade or so has been widely bemoaned by professionals in branding. Everything is flat. UX all looks the same because it needs to be easy. God forbid anyone needs to click more than once. Typography has, quite literally, lost its legs, even though we are now experiencing a very predictable (and wonderful!) serif revival. But the same thing that performance marketing and digital commerce did to design, it did to language too. Perhaps even more so. Let’s call this trap The Comfort Mandate.

The Comfort Mandate is not a bug that will be fixed in the next model release, nor is it a prompt engineering problem. This is the fundamental orientation of digital technology. Language models are built to be helpful. Good copy is interruptive. Language models are built to be clear. The best copy is irreducibly ambiguous. Language models are built to be comprehensive. Effective copywriting is an act of savage sketchiness.

We’re losing the cultural value of good writing, and this extends to copywriting, because it often makes us uncomfortable. The economics tell the story. Graydon Carter reportedly paid $500,000 for three long-form articles a year at Vanity Fair. That number sounds absurd now. Not because good journalism isn’t worth it, but because the market has collectively decided that it isn’t. We’ve spent two decades optimizing language for speed, scannability, and SEO. We’ve trained an entire generation of readers to skim and an entire generation of writers to let them. To get a debut novel published today, you need 100k+ social media followers for an agent to even consider you. The mean drops a little every year. AI didn’t cause any of this. It is the product of it. Models trained on the internet write like the internet because the internet is what we asked language to become. AI can write puns. It can identify wordplay. It can explain why a joke is funny, which is of course the most reliable way to make it unfunny. What it cannot do yet is feel the rhythm of a sentence the way a drummer feels a beat, knowing exactly where to place the rest, the silence, the space where the listener’s brain fills in what was left unsaid.

Machines might have the math, but they don’t have the nerve. Chase didn’t sign a five-year deal because the copy was that great. They signed it because it was cheaper and the clicks went up. The AI won not on quality but on economics.

This cycle is how most crafts end up dying a slow, meaningless death. Lampposts used to be beautiful. Now they are featureless aluminum poles with a bulb on top. The old ones were intentionally designed. A product of craft. The people who made them cared about something that didn’t need to scale. The new ones are spec’d. Mass produced. Created to be forgotten. Both light the street. Only one makes you look up. Economics wins out again.

The same thing has happened to language. Not because AI killed it, but because we’ve optimized it into a featureless grey pole. Decades of SEO, A/B testing, character limits, readability scores, and conversion rate optimization have produced a world where most commercial writing reads like it was generated by a machine long before machines could generate it. AI didn’t flatten our vocabulary. We did. LLMs just automate all the flatness.

Expensive Boxes

There are alternatives to RLHF, but none of them escape The Comfort Mandate. Anthropic’s Constitutional AI, the most sophisticated training approach currently in use, replaces human evaluators with a set of written principles that the model uses to critique its own outputs. This is basically AI training AI to be better at being AI, and although it might make your eyes roll, it seems to be creating a vastly superior product in Claude. Humans train humans. Perhaps AI should train AI. Nonetheless, the principles themselves still optimize for clarity, helpfulness, and harmlessness, and I’ve yet to see even Claude’s powerful Opus model be able to write effective copy even when custom-briefed with extensive bespoke skill documents. The rubric changed hands. But it didn’t change.

Effective copywriting comes from a deep knowledge of the product and the customer. Everything else follows. The nerve, the subtraction, the willingness to risk the wrong syntax. These are outputs that a LLM could probably be trained for. But the input is still remarkably analog.

Manhattan Mini Storage has been writing some of the best OOH copy in America for 20 years. Their team is two people. Their media budget is zero, because they own the buildings that they emblazon their ads on. Their product is storage units, the most boring category on Earth. Yet their billboards have become a cultural icon in NYC, the world’s noisiest advertising market. They’ve received front-page coverage and cease-and-desist letters, which is a better metric of effectiveness than any click-through rate Persado can report. The copy is often political, rarely makes perfect sense, and has a mean streak to it, just like New Yorkers! “Your closet’s so narrow it makes Dick Cheney look liberal.” “Does this butt make my room look small?” “Why leave a city that has six professional sports teams, and also the Mets?” Lines like these work because Archie Gottesman, the woman who writes them, knows exactly what she’s selling (expensive boxes in an expensive city) and exactly who she’s selling it to (space-deprived, politically opinionated New Yorkers with a distinctly local sense of humor). The lines come last. The subtext comes first.

This is the kind of real-world context that has never been digitized, which means it has never been scraped, which means it is not in the training data. It is, by definition, out of reach for LLMs. It also explains why local advertisers from injury attorneys’ outrageous jingles to used-car salesmen hawking Hondas at 2am on regional TV become icons. Dollar for dollar, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these campaigns outperform Liquid Death or Nike. They’d certainly outperform whatever Persado could come up with. But no one runs those tests.

Chutzpah

LLMs are extraordinary at research. They are increasingly exceptional at analysis, at synthesis, and at pattern recognition. They can identify market positions and competitive white space and audience segmentations. They can create solid strategic frameworks. For the work that precedes the writing, for the thinking that sets up the line, AI is the most powerful tool we’ve ever had. It can write the brief. But the brief is not the ad.

The distance between “this is a more sustainable bottled water company” and “Murder Your Thirst” is not one that better processing or more data or smarter frameworks can close. It is the gap between knowing what to say and knowing how to say it, and this second kind of knowing requires a human body that has felt thirst, and felt existential dread. Not a logical leap. A stylistic one. It requires, in other words, a person.

The AI copywriting industry has built a $2.5-billion-and-counting business on a category error: the belief that copy is a product of information and structure. It is not. Copy is a product of nerve. Yiddish has words for this particular type of productive anxiety. The best writers have chutzpah, a kind of arrogant self-confidence. But they also have shpilkis (literally “pins” or “pins and needles”), an impatient, nervous energy. A jitteriness. A crushing self-doubt that crescendos into wild self-aggrandizement and then crashes back down again over the movement of a comma or the swap of a synonym for the umpteenth time. Copywriters are writers, after all. And the most effective ones are insecure, imperfect, and prolific procrastinators. “Just Do It” was famously written on deadline.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. 30,000 fires had been set in the preceding four years. Youth unemployment was at 60%. The Son of Sam was stalking pretty brunettes with a .44 Special revolver and a Satanic missive assigned to him by his neighbor’s talking dog. Hundreds of women and girls dyed their hair blonde. The city was bankrupt. When Mayor Beame attempted to negotiate a federal bailout and failed, The New York Daily News published what remains one of the most famous headlines in American history: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Every system designed to serve the population - the local government, the economy, the schools, the police - had either failed completely, been decayed by corruption, or fled altogether. And now the lights were off.

Within hours, glass shattered and sirens sounded. 1,616 shops were looted. Over 1,000 fires were set. 16,000 storefronts were damaged across 31 neighborhoods in all five boroughs. Four people were murdered under mysterious circumstances.

It was a catastrophe, and the Bronx got the worst of it. The South Bronx had already lost over 600,000 jobs by 1977. Up to 40% of the borough’s buildings were unusable, with many reduced to rubble. Chickens and dogs wandered the streets. Images from this time could be mistaken for Dresden in 1945 or Mosul in 2017. 176 people died of tuberculosis, which was cured in the mid-1940s.

The blackout is often remembered by New Yorkers as the Yankees’ infamous “The Bronx is Burning” season. It was their first World Series win in 20 years. The Bronx was, indeed, burning. And somewhere in the pitch-black haze of smoke and cinder, a kid named Curtis Fisher started a different kind of revolution.

Fisher (aka Grandmaster Caz) was DJing with his partner Luis Cedeno (aka Disco Wiz) in a park when the power cut. Panic set in as they thought they’d been responsible for blowing the circuit. But then the whole block went dark. Then the whole city. Caz walked a few blocks to The Sound Room, an electronics store where he’d bought his first setup, and lifted a Clubman 2 mixer. All over Brooklyn and the Bronx, kids were doing the same thing. They grabbed turntables, speakers, mixers, extension cords, and mics. They were deliberate, cobbling together sound systems from whatever they could wrap their arms around.

Before the blackout, you could count the hip hop crews in NYC on two hands, and in the rest of the world on none. After 1977, as Disco Wiz put it: “You had a DJ on every block.”

This was probably the most important cultural moment of the last half century. A global, multi-billion-dollar industry that reshaped music, business, fashion, language, advertising, and the entire concept of “cool” was catalyzed by a power failure and a crime spree. No A&R man approved it. No development executive greenlit it. No content strategy informed it. No police officer cared to stop it. No institution had the authority to say “no.” Because no one could see anything at all.

mētis

In 1998, the political scientist James C. Scott published Seeing Like a State. Scott’s argument is that institutions fail when they try to make complex systems “legible.” One might assume that taking a Byzantine organic structure and making it feel more readable, measurable, and manageable is good. But one would be wrong. Scott roots this in his key concept, something called mētis - a Greek word for the practical, local, informal knowledge that can't be captured in a framework or a policy statement. Your nonna’s gravy recipe or the mechanic who can hear what's wrong with your engine before he even opens the hood. Every time an institution imposes rational order on a system that operates through mētis, it destroys the thing that made the system work in the first place. Scott’s examples are illuminating. The Prussians invented “scientific forestry” and killed all their forests. The Soviets used a Marxist collectivistic framework to “rationalize” agriculture and produced nothing but a famine that killed between 7-10 million Ukrainians. Brasília was designed to be the perfectly-planned modern city. Yet once it was complete, nobody wanted to live in it.

Hip hop is pure mētis. Or at least it was. Oral, local, improvised, and illegible to every institution that existed in 1977. There was no business model. There was no audience research. There was not even a genre, as the term didn’t exist yet (at the time common idioms included “disco-rap” and “old school”). Trailblazers like Caz and Wiz and Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa were operating below the threshold of institutional visibility, which is the only reason they were operating at all.

Scott’s insight isn’t that institutions are stupid or malicious. It’s that legibility itself, the act of making something measurable and manageable, is incompatible with the thing that makes a system feel organic and alive. The forest looks like chaos to the forester, but it makes perfect sense to a fox or an indigenous tribe. The neighborhood looks like an inefficiency to the urban planner, but its idiosyncrasies are what gives it character. The mixtape looks like piracy to the label, but it's the only reason anyone heard the music in the first place. Scott's primary concern was the destruction of these kinds of systems. But destruction invites a second act.

mētis as culture doesn’t just survive disaster. It requires it. The world’s coolest neighborhoods almost always used to be the seediest. And it wasn’t just hip-hop that required catastrophe as catalyst. Punk came out of the same wreckage, only a few years earlier. The Bowery was a wasteland. CBGB existed only because nobody else wanted the lease. The Ramones were playing to empty rooms in a city that was too broke and too scared to notice. The pattern is, remarkably, almost always the same. The institution collapses, or retreats, or simply looks the other way. The people left abandoned in this void, the ones with no system to rely on and no authority to appeal to, build something within it from instinct. Then, we swoop back in and try to monetize it.

This is how “culture” is actually born. And it explains why brands and politicians alike have such a hard time engineering it for their own use. You can’t manufacture a blackout. You can’t schedule a collapse. But you can, apparently, deregulate one.

Weird Cartoons

President Reagan was known for his love of God, jelly beans, and deregulation. Energy, business, transportation, finance, environmental standards, labor. In 1984, his FCC brought the free market to something a tad more niche: children’s television. The old rules included limits on advertising, separation of programming from commercials, and requirements for educational content. These were gutted. What followed was the most commercially captured era of children’s media in American history. By 1985, cartoons featuring licensed characters had increased 300%. He-Man, Transformers, GI Joe, Care Bears, My Little Pony. Every show was essentially now a 22-minute toy commercial. The top ten best-selling toys all had their own series, and kids loved them. Children’s programming had achieved total legibility. Every show existed to sell a product. Every output was measurable against a sales target. The system was working perfectly. But the culture was dead.

Then came Vanessa Coffey.

Coffey had spent years at Murakami-Wolf-Swenson making exactly these kinds of toy-ads-as-content, notably Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (which, don’t get me wrong, still rocks). One day she got sick of it all and called Nickelodeon, which barely had an animation department at the time. They gave her a mandate to develop original animated programming and almost no infrastructure to do it with. No development process. No brand safety apparatus. No talent pipeline. Coffey was essentially a one-woman green light committee operating on instinct. And her instinct was killer.

Jim Jinkins walked in with a drawing of Doug Funny and a book proposal. Approved. John Kricfalusi pitched a variety series called Your Gang. Coffey didn’t want any of it. But she liked two of the side characters — a psychotic chihuahua and a dimwitted cat. Arlene Klasky proposed a show based around what children actually thought about all day, with characters designed after her creative partner’s own kids. Doug, Ren & Stimpy, and Rugrats all premiered on August 11, 1991. The Nicktoons block had one of the highest-rated debuts in cable history.

These shows were weird, and difficult to spin off into merchandisable IP. But they pale in comparison to what followed. Coffey had ushered in the golden age of increasingly bizarre children’s television. Rocko’s Modern Life. Aaahh!!! Real Monsters. Courage the Cowardly Dog. Ed, Edd n Eddy. Invader Zim. Dexter’s Laboratory. Sheep in the Big City. The Powerpuff Girls. Johnny Bravo. Between Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network (which Turner launched in 1992 as a dumping ground for Hanna-Barbera reruns before it accidentally became a creative powerhouse), an entire generation of children was exposed to programming that was artistic, surreal and existentially bleak. These cartoons were overwhelmingly nihilistic, often inappropriately sexual, and completely unconcerned with whether any adult approved of them. Ren & Stimpy featured so much psychotic violence and body horror that the creator was eventually fired by Nickelodeon’s Standards and Practices department for pushing too far. But by then the show had already reshaped what children’s animation, and culture, could look like.

They weren’t all strange for strangeness’ sake, however. Hey Arnold! was starkly realistic, addressing issues like substance abuse, depression, suicide, social inequality, and the thanklessness of altruism. Courage the Cowardly Dog was a horror show about an elderly couple deteriorating in rural isolation that directly addressed mental health through not-so-subtly monstrous metaphors. Rocko’s Modern Life had a penchant for critiquing capitalism. The show’s world was run by “Conglom-O,” a corporation whose tagline was “WE OWN YOU”.

These shows were made for an audience that was alone in the room. No co-viewing data. No parental engagement metrics. No Common Sense Media ratings. No phone to distract them. The creators knew that the kids watching after school were unsupervised, and they made art that took advantage of that. Programs that treated children as capable of handling darkness, ambiguity, and discomfort. Shows that prepared them for the world, rather than sanitized it. The result was a generation with an unusually high tolerance for the strange. Millennials are particularly weird, and oddly resilient, because we were the last generation raised inside of a supervision failure.

This window opened because the old legibility regime (toy commercials) had collapsed and the new one (content strategy, licensing pipelines, sensitivity reads) hadn’t formed yet. Another kind of blackout. And in the dark, a handful of creators with mētis made the best children’s animation in American history. When the institutions caught up, when Nickelodeon became a real corporation with real development processes and real brand safety infrastructure, the golden age ended. Not because the talent disappeared. But because they were now increasingly being watched.

Blackout Zones

There are still places where the lights are off right now.

Independent print is back. Not as Kinfolk-adjacent hipster nostalgia, but as good business. Risograph-printed, staple-bound, hyperlocal publications are proliferating. Print fairs have multiplied from Brooklyn to Atlanta to Boise. DIY zine tutorials have millions of views on YouTube. Print readership is actually rising among younger demographics for the first time in decades.

Field & Stream, founded 1895, once had over a million print subscribers. A series of corporate owners gutted it and killed print in 2021. Then two country musicians bought it in 2024 and relaunched. Garden & Gun never collapsed at all. Southern lifestyle, hunting, food, and culture. Thriving for years by serving a specific audience that mass media abandoned. Niche favorites like Apartamento, the Drift and HommeGirls are all widely-read and reportedly profitable. Mushroom People (exactly what it sounds like) is a huge seller, as is its sister publication Catnip (yeah, it’s about cats). Texas Monthly punches above its weight as “The National Magazine of Texas.” The names alone tell you something about what grows when creators are left unsupervised.

This is far from the only blackout zone. In Manila, a regional EDM genre called budots went international through a TikTok challenge that no brand nor strategist programmed. In Lagos and Accra, designers are building influential fashion brands through WhatsApp, not Instagram. In Louisville and Tucson and Detroit, the hyper-legibility of the live music industry (dynamic pricing, algorithmic booking, corporate venues) has pushed DIY shows into living rooms and warehouses and unlicensed basements. As every trend reporter opines about the “monoculture,” there’s actually more interesting stuff going on now than there was 10 years ago. It’s just, largely, in the dark.

Chaos emerges from lack of supervision. But so does culture. It’s time to turn off the lights.

You probably read Cicero in High School, and you definitely read him if you went to Law School. He was a towering figure in history whose influence on politics and philosophy is felt to this day. In 44 BC he published a treatise I bet you have not read. De Divinatione concerned the Roman practice of reading the future in the guts of animals. This was such serious business that it even had a name and official job function: haruspicy. Sounds like a special at a sushi restaurant. Anyway, in the practice of haruspicy, a trained priest split open a sheep, examined the liver for abnormalities, and then pronounced what the gods intended.

The Hermetic tradition, named for the mythical Egyptian priest Hermes Trismegistus, was built on an even more explicit version of the same principle. In Hermeticism, it’s imperative that “sacred knowledge” is sealed away from the unprepared (aka everyone). We still invoke The Magical Mister Trismegistus every time we describe something as “hermetically sealed.” The modern industry of strategy itself is hermetic in both senses.

The Etruscans systematized these traditions so rigorously that they even created carefully crafted bronze model livers divided into specific regions labeled with the names of deities, and used them as training aids. Armies marched on the readings. Emperors expedited or delayed decisions. The Roman Senate kept haruspices on retainer the way a Fortune 500 keeps McKinsey on speed-dial. And for the same reason too. Not because the readings were accurate, but because the institution required someone with the authority to convert uncertainty into what seemed like an informed expert recommendation.

Cicero, who had served as an augur himself, said the obvious part out loud: that no two haruspices could look at each other without laughing. They knew. The sheep couldn’t predict what it was going to eat for dinner, let alone could its internal organs foresee the future. The liver wasn’t a text that could be read. It was a liver. But the institutions needed someone to stand between the chaos of the world and the people with the authority to act in it, and that someone needed a title, a methodology, and the appearance of meticulous professionalism. The haruspex provided all three. The bronze liver was his framework. The examination was his process. The pronouncement was his deliverable. He was a strategist. And his fee was, of course, considerable.

I have been a strategist for 15 years. I have read the entrails of consumer segmentation studies, NPS scores, brand health trackers, social listening dashboards, industry trend reports, and copious amounts of moodboards. I have stood in rooms and pronounced meaning. I have been the haruspex. And I am here to tell you today what Cicero knew 2,000 years ago: the sheep don’t know shit.

The Interpretive Class

Every civilization produces a kind of priestly interpretive class. The pattern is so consistent it might be structural to organized human activity. They used to be called augurs or oracles or soothsayers. Today they’re called “strategists.”

When the laws became too complex for ordinary citizens to navigate, lawyers appeared. When knowledge of the body became too overwhelmingly specialized, doctoring emerged from barbering (a split that took roughly four centuries in Europe, during which your surgeon and your haircutter were the same man, and the red-and-white barber pole still commemorates the blood and bandages of that original dual practice). When financial instruments became too abstract for even the people trading them to explain, analysts swooped in to save the day. And perhaps most nefariously, when markets became too diffuse for a single executive team to comprehend, management consultants reared their ugly heads.

The interpretive class always works the same way. First, they guard something you can’t read on your own. Sometimes the complexity is real — case law is genuinely impenetrable. Sometimes it’s invented — your consumer is not actually that mysterious, but a $40 billion research industry depends on treating her as if she is. Second, they need to keep it unreadable. The medieval Church conducted services in Latin not because God speaks Latin, but because a congregation that could understand the text directly would no longer need a priest to explain it. Third, they produce artifacts that look like knowledge but function as ritual objects. The diagnostic report. The legal brief. The political poll. The customer analysis. The strategy.

That last point is important. The strategist’s primary artifact is a fucking deck. A form that emerged from an overhead projector in the 1960s has now metastasized through PowerPoint in the 1990s into the dominant liturgical text of the modern knowledge economy. The deck is doctrine. Hallowed and pristine. The output that proves a strategist has done the sacred work of interpretation. 5 slides. 50 slides. 150 slides. It makes no difference. There’s a framework here. A consumer segmentation there. Charts. Oh, are there charts! A “strategic territory” brings all this very serious data into clear view. Now a vision is beginning to crystalize. And the client loves it, because it was designed to make them love it. There are also a lot of words. Words like “permission” and “tension” and “culture” and “action plan“ and “white space” and “deliverables.” Acronyms abound. The deck is the scripture. The tissue session is the service. The almighty “insight” is the sermon.

I don’t mean this metaphorically. When you strip the business language from what a strategy department or a management consultant does on a daily basis, what remains is a priesthood. A class of people whose institutional authority derives from their claim to be able to interpret something the rest of the organization cannot access. The consumer. The culture. The market. The pulse of the nation. The intentions of our enemies. The zeitgeist. These are not really empirical objects. They are more of a sheep’s liver. And the strategist is the only person licensed to read them. For now, at least.

Holy Orders

The priesthood of strategy extends well beyond marketing departments.

McKinsey charges $500,000 or more for a strategy engagement that produces… a deck. The deck contains very fancy frameworks (2x2 matrices, waterfall charts, TAM/SAM/SOM pyramids, oh my!) that organize information the client already possesses into a shape that looks like conviction. The supreme Partner presents the findings. Everyone leaves the room feeling that a decision has been made, though frequently the decision is to ask McKinsey to come back later with another deck. McKinsey’s own research has shown that roughly 70% of corporate transformations fail, a number that has not changed appreciably over the decades of McKinsey advising corporations on transformation. Cicero’s batting average was probably similar.

There’s a great book about all this by a journalist with an even better name, Duff McDonald. In The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business, he tears into McKinsey’s legacy with a mix of admiration and horror. McDonald suggests McKinsey may be responsible for more American job losses than any single entity in history, primarily through the use of their own special bronze liver, "overhead value analysis." This is a methodology invented by consultant John Neuman in 1975 which basically systematizes corporate downsizing. Any MBA student could tell you that firing people is a great way to save money fast. But they couldn’t analyze your value from an overhead perspective, of course. The book’s most important insight (there’s that word again), however, is that McKinsey's greatest product is McKinsey itself. The alumni network ensures that former McKinsey consultants keep hiring McKinsey consultants. The priesthood doesn't just interpret. It reproduces. Hermetically sealed.

Military and political strategists are not immune to this model. Robert McNamara might be the purest strategist who has ever lived. He was a Ford Motor Company “Whiz Kid” who brought statistical analysis to the auto industry, then imported the same methodology to the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. His Vietnam strategy was a masterpiece of the interpretive class: body counts, kill ratios, hamlet evaluation reports, probability matrices. It all read like a consultant wrote it, because a consultant did. The data was technically accurate. The frameworks were internally consistent. His briefings were immaculate. 58,000 Americans died anyway, nearly 10x than both of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan put together. Vietnam was the most disastrous war in modern American history. McNamara spent the rest of his life apologizing, most notably in Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War, which is essentially a two-hour confession from a haruspex who finally admitted the liver was better off chopped on rye bread than cast in bronze.

History is littered with people like this. In every case, the question nobody asks is “Why can’t those with the power to act also interpret?” With the amount of resources available to religious institutions, federal governments, corporations, and kings - why do you need a strategist at all?

Killing God

Johannes Gutenberg did not kill God, but he did kill the Catholic Church. Or at least its centuries-long monopoly on power in Europe. Before the printing press hit the scene in 1440, a single Bible took a scribe roughly three years to copy by hand, and cost the equivalent of a laborer’s lifetime earnings. The scarcity was not incidental. The fewer Bibles in circulation, the more essential the priest who could read the one chained to the pulpit like a pen at the bank. When Gutenberg’s invention reduced the cost of a Bible by 80% in a single generation, and when Martin Luther insisted it be printed in colloquial German rather than the canonical Latin, the priest’s role as the sole interpreter of divine text collapsed. Of course the Church didn’t actually disappear, but their authority migrated from almighty institution to demonstrated value. All of the sudden, you had to be a priest worth listening to if you wanted to impose influence. You had to be good at priesting. Most weren’t.

The same thing is happening right now. To strategy? No. But to strategists. Oh yeah. The industry of strategy remains hermetically sealed by choice, not necessity.

When a founder can spend a few hours prompting Claude or ChatGPT to understand their business, plug in some consumer data, and generate a brand positioning framework in 30 seconds, the monopoly on interpretation evaporates. The AI’s output will not be brilliant. But it will be competent if you do it right. And competency is the floor most strategists are already operating at. The median strategy deck is, and always was, just another guy staring at a sheep’s guts and making some educated guesses. A performance of expertise, divided into labeled regions, that let an institution’s leadership feel as if they had done their due diligence before making a decision they were probably going to make anyway.

The illegibility that justified the cult of strategy is now dissolving. The consumer is not really all that complicated. The culture is far from unreadable. Put in a modicum of effort to understand how strategic thinking works, and you can do it whether you’re a plumber or a PhD. The tools to interpret any market mystery are now available to everyone, the same way the Bible is. You can choose to turn to a supposed “expert” to read it for you. But you might discover it’s more enriching to do it yourself.

Reformation

The interpretive class has survived every previous disruption by retreating further into its own illegibility, adding more frameworks, more jargon, more livers with finer and finer regional subdivisions. That magic trick is now running thin. The monopoly on interpretation has been broken by AI the same way it was broken in 1440. Not by producing better priests, but by handing the congregation a new technology that sheds light on obscured knowledge and encouraging them to make their own decisions.

The signs are already there for any strategist to read. McKinsey went from 17,000 employees to 45,000 during a decade of priestly expansion in the 2010s, then shed 5,000 the moment growth flatlined in 2025. In the same year, Omnicom swallowed IPG for $13 billion and immediately killed DDB, FCB, and MullenLowe, eliminating 10,000 agency jobs and counting. In 2024, prediction markets like Kalshi called the presidential election decisively while the pollsters were still insisting it was a toss-up, because it turns out people with money on the line are better haruspices.

What remains precious is what was always valuable in the first place: the capacity to translate interpretation into action. To plan, and then to do the damn thing, all in one workflow.

“Strategy” in its purest form was never true knowledge. It was an alibi. A six-figure permission slip. Now anyone with a laptop and some AI fluency can generate a competent plan in a few hours, if not minutes. The strategist who can also make things will survive the way the priest who could also build a school or run a hospital outlasted the Reformation. The executive who can write the strategy and then write the headline. The political consultant who can read the polls and then shoot the campaign ad. The military analyst who can map the threat landscape and then plan the operation. That person is dangerous, because nothing stands between the idea and its execution to sand down the edges.

Somewhere, Cicero is still laughing.

This was August, 1945. Two apocalyptic, world-eating devices. The first was called Little Boy. The second was called Fat Man. Diminutives. The kind of names you’d give a vaudeville duo or a pair of neighborhood drunks or maybe a set of pet gerbils. The plane that carried Little Boy to Hiroshima was famously dubbed the Enola Gay, named after the pilot’s mother.

The people who built the bomb did not call their project CODE ZERO or PROJECT ANNIHILATION or HADES or ANUBIS or anything cool at all, but rather Manhattan. The plot to create the most destructive weapon in human history, something so dangerous some scientists involved believed it could accidentally ignite the atmosphere and end life on Earth in perpetuity (a real concern made famous by Oppenheimer), was named after a borough you visit to see a matinee.

None of this was accidental. When humans build something that terrifies them, the first thing we do is give it a name that makes it feel smaller. Cute, even.

Adamantine

Naming is the first act of control we exert over the things we don’t yet understand. It’s how we’ve always metabolized the new and the frightening. Right now, a new generation of companies building technology they can’t fully articulate let alone understand are reaching for the same instinct. They call their products things like “Codex” or “Gemini,” as if a reference to mythology or literature makes it less likely to replace you. They’re not the first to try this. The impulse is ancient.

I name things for a living. Today we just call it “Verbal Identity.” Nothing is more fun, nor more taxing, nor more underestimated in its ability to impose influence. Before we had tools, we had names. To name something is to claim authority over it. Genesis understood this. God’s first task for Adam wasn’t farming or building or worship or even reproduction. It was to name every animal (where’d he come up with platypus?). Every act of colonization begins with renaming the conquered place. Most scientific revelations end with the discoverer’s name bolted onto a theory or a principle. Names carry a lot of weight.

We’ve always known this. But what we didn’t have, until relatively recently, was anyone willing to explain exactly how it works.

Sign Language

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure spent his career on a single, devastating observation: the word and the thing it describes have no natural relationship. There is nothing about the sound “dog” that is dog-like, or “death” that sounds like dying. The connection is arbitrary. Culturally constructed. A shared hallucination we agree to maintain.

The French philosopher Roland Barthes took this idea and made it lethal. If the relationship between a word and its referent is invented, then every name becomes a power play — because names are among the only words we get to choose. To Barthes, they don’t describe. They argue. They recruit. Little Boy isn’t a description of the bomb. It’s the bomb’s opening argument. The military’s unconscious confession that world-ending annihilation is easier to authorize when it sounds like a superhero’s hapless sidekick.

The Romans understood this without needing any academics to explain it. Their Senate wielded the power to chisel a disgraced emperor’s name from every inscription, coin, and public record. Damnatio memoriae was a condemnation of memory. It wasn’t symbolic punishment. It was the recognition that the name often held more power than the person it belonged to, even after they had him killed. Medieval demonologists (yeah, that was a job) worked the inverse logic: to speak a demon’s true name was to cage it. The word was the trap.

Once you start reading names this way, as arguments rather than labels, the entire history of human technological innovation opens up like a medical chart. We soften the scary parts and sharpen the dull edges. The only thing that changes is what we’re afraid of, and why.

A Taxonomy of Terror

The Ancients described tools simply for what they were made of and, more importantly, who owned them. A bronze shield was a bronze shield. But it was also Agamemnon's shield, or Achilles’ spear. Weapons were the main form of tech, and we named them after their owners and their patron gods. This was still its own form of anxiety management. You're not afraid of the sword, you're afraid of the man holding it.

The Industrial Age named machines after what they did. Spinning jenny. Cotton gin. Locomotive. Power loom. There was no anxiety to manage because these were understood as extensions of the human hand. You don’t need to soften a machine that amplifies the output of labor, and seemingly makes everyone’s lives easier. So we named them for their function, and we moved on.

The Nuclear Age referred to tech with diminutives and domestics. Little Boy and Fat Man were just the beginning. We had Daisy Cutter. Peacekeeper (an ICBM). Honest John (a tactical nuclear rocket). The naming strategy was miniaturization. Make the incomprehensibly horrible sound harmless, familiar, and maybe even friendly. You can’t process a weapon that can unmake a civilization, but you can process Husky Pup (a nuclear test). The names were a kind of sedative. Even the Russians did the same, naming their tests things like Raduga (rainbow). When they designed the most powerful atomic weapon ever tested, however, they dropped the niceties and simply called it Tsar Bomba. A demonstration of imperial strength. They wanted you to fear it.

Then came an uneasy peace, and the Space Age. We’d flown close enough to the sun to scare ourselves. Should we even be able to go to outer space, let alone colonize it? So we named rockets after gods. Mercury. Gemini. Apollo. Atlas. Saturn. Most of these names double as planets. The anxiety had shifted. These weren’t weapons, but rather vehicles for leaving our home planet. So the names reached for folklore because the project required the confidence of a myth. You name your rocket Apollo when you need the public to believe you’re on a divine mission, not a suicidal one. NASA ran a verbal identity strategy built on manifest destiny dressed in a toga.

By Web 1.0, Silicon Valley named things with technical acronyms. HTTP. HTML. TCP/IP. FTP. No anxiety at all. Nobody in 1993 thought the internet was going to eat the world. The nomenclature was bureaucratic because the technology was perceived as infrastructure. Just plumbing. Strings of code. Letters and numbers.

But by Web 2.0, the bubble had burst and the anxiety arrived. So we named new platforms like toys. Flickr. Tumblr. Grindr. Skype. Twitter. Zynga. The dropped vowels, the overuse of lowercase, the nonsensical playground energy productized. The entire Web 2.0 naming convention was an act of disarmament. Because these companies are built entirely around network effects, they needed you to play before you understood what the game even was. It worked.

And now comes AI. We’re just getting started, but so far we’ve been naming these new digital gods after art, literature, cultural references, and real people. Opus. Sonnet. Haiku. Claude. Gemini. Grok. Atlas. Comet. Copilot. Siri is Norse for “beautiful woman who leads you to victory.” They took a Valkyrie and transformed her into a voice assistant with a penchant for mismanaging your calendar. Alexa is named after the Library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of human knowledge ever assembled. It was also burned to the ground. Amazon put all that historical heft onto a cylinder that listens to everything you say in your kitchen. When SpaceX recently developed its own custom version of Grok, they called it Spok. Cute. Until it refuses to open the pod bay doors.

Word.

Juliet said “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Republican strategist and messaging expert Frank Luntz (no, not the guy from 30 Rock) built a career proving her wrong.

To Luntz, naming isn’t description as much as it is emotion. He advised his party to stop fighting the “estate tax” and start calling it a “death tax.” Same policy. Different name. Public opinion shifted overnight. He did the same with “global warming.” Too slow, too abstract, too existentially dreadful. So it became “climate change.” Now it just sounds like weather. Natural, even. By the time the evidence shows up, the verdict is already in.

We’ve never named things innocently. Not the swords, not the bombs, not the rockets, not the platforms, not the LLMs. Descriptive names trigger anxiety, so they get replaced with more palatable ones. When an AI model confidently generates something false, engineers don’t call it a statistical error. They call it a “hallucination.” As if the machine dropped too much acid rather than got its math wrong. This is Luntz applied to computer science.

Words aren’t just useful in branding technology. They are technology. And they’re free for all to use. The word arrives before the argument. It always has. By the time you think to ask what the thing actually is, you’ve already been calling it something else for years.

Anthropic is currently the strongest brand in the AI race. The company’s founder writes gorgeous longform essays with titles like “Machines of Loving Grace” and staffs his offices with poets and philosophers. It named its frontier models after three artistic forms in increasing order of complexity: Haiku, Sonnet, Opus. These names launder the machine through the vocabulary of an Ivy League humanities department. It’s smart. Even “Claude” sounds like an erudite dude you can trust. The product was dubbed in honor of Claude Shannon, an American mathematician known as the “father of information theory.” It could’ve been named after an ancient omniscient God or a character from Blade Runner. But instead, it’s just kind of… a guy.

Anthropic’s naming conventions do the best job of softening AGI’s ominous presence, which looms on the horizon. Yet they work largely because they speak to the real anxiety around this kind of technology, as all good names do. It’s not that AI will be something scary, it’s that it might be not be something at all. It might be someone. The company cleverly positions itself with language that assuages this fear. The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch defined by humans becoming the dominant force on Earth, and shaping the planet to our will. Anthropic’s branding reminds you, quietly, that humans still come first.

Don’t worry.

Des Esseintes is the first tech founder.

He edits brilliantly. He selects impeccably. His references? Exquisite. His vision? Obsessive and singular. Yet he produces nothing, and eventually goes insane (or converts to Catholicism, these are the only two options in Decadent literature…but I digress). His taste is a closed system: all input, no output. A consumption engine so well-curated it collapses like his pet reptile from its own pursuit of perfection. Huysmans understood, 140 years ago, that a taste level which only consumes eventually consumes itself. The book was Oscar Wilde’s favorite. It even makes a cameo in The Picture of Dorian Gray, another foreboding tale about vanity and artifice. Accidentally, it’s the most accurate portrait of Silicon Valley’s relationship to aesthetics ever written. It explains why everything AI generates looks the same. Why we call software products things like “artifacts” and “codex.” And why the people with the most powerful creative tools in history keep making the same Dieter Rams knockoffs over and over again.

Anodized

A few days ago, Jony Ive unveiled the interior of the Ferrari Luce, the prancing horse’s first electric car. The tech design community immediately praised him as a living God. He’s “done it again!” He’s “nailed it.” He “needs to be Knighted” for the work. It looks like a giant Apple Watch.

Squircles. Gorilla Glass. Milled aluminum. Anodized everything. Hacker News, unexpectedly, actually nails it: “If you phone up Jony Ive you’ll get a slapdash re-run of 2010s iPhone design.” Ive spent five years with a company whose 1960s cockpits were so raw and evocative they made your hands shake. And the output is an extremely generic consumer electronics interface bolted inside a half a million dollar car.

Ive is the most celebrated industrial designer alive. He’s also the most advanced Des Esseintes in history. A man so deep inside his own aesthetic system that he can no longer see outside of it. The savvy critics see his post-Apple work for what it is: a guy encrusting a tortoise with jewels.

This is what happens when you mistake having taste for having style. And it's endemic. Half of Silicon Valley talks about taste now the way sommelier hobbyists talk about terroir: with enormous confidence, zero productive capacity, and the unmistakable pleasure of smelling their own farts. They think having taste means knowing the right references and owning a Noguchi lamp. It doesn't. Taste, real taste, has always been a darkly contrarian impulse. The private compulsion to push on reality in ways that delight you before you can explain why. The people who actually had it were almost never the ones talking about it. But we live in an era where every founder who hired a junior designer with a Figma account thinks they've found the next Steve Jobs. So, if these people are tasteless, it's worth asking what taste actually is. Luckily, an Italian philosopher figured this out for us half a century ago.

Mucho Gusto

In 1979 Giorgio Agamben published an essay called Gusto (Taste) that I would bet almost nobody in Palo Alto has read. His argument is that taste is not a way of knowing beauty, but rather the place where cognition and desire meet and fail to resolve. Taste is “a knowledge that is not known and a pleasure that is not enjoyed.” It doesn’t close. It doesn’t decide. It sits in the gap. Uncomfortably. This is why people with taste almost always have a distinct, stylistic view of the world and also spend much of their time interrogating it. They are anxious and ever-churning. They doubt themselves constantly. Yet they also know what they like, even if they don’t know why. Agamben is talking about the literal sense of taste, which he argues is our least-heralded compared to romantic standards like sight and touch. But he’s also talking about taste in the broader cultural meaning of the word. He doesn’t feel the need to distinguish between the two, ironically, because he has taste.

Silicon Valley, brand designers and “creative directors” in general today use “taste” to mean the opposite of Agamben’s definition. To them, it’s a decisive selection. A solution, even. The right typeface. The correct palette. The confident click. Something that can be monetized because people like it. But the moment taste resolves into a system like this, it stops being taste and starts being fashion. And fashion, as Glenn O’Brien (someone with a very high taste level) spent his career insisting, is what makes you the same as everyone else.

Taste is discovery. Taste is editing. Taste is the long, private, often embarrassing process of figuring out what you actually like, as opposed to what you’ve been trained to approve of. It requires getting it wrong, a lot. Wearing something ugly. Loving the work of art all your friends hate. Sitting with a piece of music that makes no sense until, three years later, it suddenly does. Taste is accumulated through contact with the world, not through the production of moodboards.

Des Esseintes never left his house. Neither, aesthetically speaking, has most of the tech industry. They’ve replaced the embarrassing, self-searching, experimental part with the collecting part. Which is like replacing physical therapy with crutches.

Rick Rubin Isn’t Being Serious

Rick Rubin says artists pay him simply for his taste. This has become a viral refrain. He’s obviously joking, for Christ’s sake. Rubin has 40 years of sitting in rooms with the world’s most talented people, listening, failing, and recalibrating across every genre imaginable. That’s not his taste level. That’s scar tissue and intuition. It’s experience and skill. But now all the founders read The Creative Act, and all the VCs listen to Tetragrammaton, and a generation of people who’ve never sat with anything longer than a sprint cycle think they can reference their way into Rubin’s hemisphere.

You can’t. And you shouldn’t want to. Glenn O’Brien didn’t. And neither did Martin Margiela, or Joan Didion, or Alexander McQueen, or Alejandro Jodorowsky for that matter. They all had something better: points of view so specific they couldn’t be borrowed. O’Brien founded Andy Warhol’s Interview, bought Basquiat’s first painting, directed ads for Barneys, and wrote GQ’s “The Style Guy” column for 15 years. When he smoked too much weed and fled his role running (ironically) High Times magazine, he invented the term “editor-at-large.” When GQ replaced him with a vapid millennial, he told them to call his successor “The Style Intern.” Margiela never showed his face. He spent 20 years as fashion’s most influential designer, responsible not only for his cult-status eponymous line but also for stewarding Hermès into their modern era of massive profitability. And you couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. Didion wrote a packing list in The White Album that tells you more about how she sees the world than most designers’ entire portfolios. A self-portrait in objects. McQueen made people physically sick at his shows, on purpose. Jodorowsky spent two years building a version of Dune that was never filmed, and it influenced every single sci-fi movie that followed anyway, plus Virgil Abloh and so many more "tastemakers” of the modern era.

None of these people were curating. They were imposing. A curator selects from what exists. A point of view generates things that didn't exist before, and makes you uneasy about why you like them. Critics hated most of these people when they first hit the scene. Today every 20-something creative walking through Williamsburg is a mini-Didion and every 30-something art director a faux-O'Brien, whether they know it or not. That's what a point of view does - it becomes the weather. Jony Ive would never want to make you uncomfortable. He disdains friction. That's his ceiling, and it’s forgettable. Yet the really interesting question here isn't who has taste and who doesn’t. It's what happens when access stops serving as a bottleneck, and taste is all we have left?

Chopsticks

The mainstream conversation about AI and taste is boring. Can machines even have taste? Will AI replace creativity? Is generative art real art? These are À rebours questions. Consumption and curation. They miss the point entirely.

What is actually happening is obvious, and painfully human. We gave the world a generative engine for taste and 99% of companies, brands, and people produced slop with it. Then we blamed the engine. This is like handing someone a Steinway and cursing the piano when they play “Chopsticks.” AI didn’t create slop. It merely revealed that most of the people who claimed to have a taste level were actually just good at moodboarding and copying Dieter Rams. The moment they had to generate instead of curate, the emptiness was right there on the screen. And it stung.

This was Huysmans’ point. Taste that only consumes produces nothing when you finally ask it to create. We’ve established that real taste is tied to a personal point of view. Well, the one prerequisite for having a point of view is having a life. Not a reference library. A 30-person video game studio in Montpellier, France proved this last year and won Game of the Year doing it. They also used AI to help.

Sandfall Interactive was founded by a group of mainly junior developers on their first production. Their project was led by an art director whose previous job was designing Cirque du Soleil sets and a musical director they found on an internet forum. Together, they built Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a Belle Époque turn-based RPG pulling from Bosch, Beksiński, and Baudelaire as much as Final Fantasy. The game’s design team described their process as “draw stuff we think is cool.” As a result, Clair Obscur looks like nothing else in games. The narrative is the best story I’ve seen on any screen in years. The score is so good it has over 320 million streams on Spotify as of February 2026. It won more Game of the Year awards than any video game in history and sold over five million copies. Most impressively, and controversially to some of the nerds in video game journalism, Clair Obscur was built with the help of AI. Sandfall’s developers took a mass of tools and technologies that didn’t exist five years ago and brought their vision to life with the full artistic determination it required and on a timeline the market demands. Some people begrudge them for this. Those people have no vision. And bad taste.

For those with taste, AI is extraordinary. Runway, a generative AI startup valued at $5.3 billion, is building what they call General World Models. These are systems that generate coherent, physics-aware, navigable environments in real time. Not renderings. Not game levels. Proposed alternate realities. You give it a scene and it gives you back a world replete with consistent geometry, reactive lighting, and functional physics. But it’s still up to you to fill it with characters. The applications of technology like this span the horizon from content production (the company famously collaborated on A24’s Everything Everywhere All at Once) to robotics, where “GWMs” can train machines to navigate physical environments they’ve never encountered, or might not even exist yet.

One common way people describe this is as “simulation technology.” That’s too small-minded. The Matrix is just another useful reference for technologists and dystopians alike. What companies like Runway are building is an infrastructure for externalizing a point of view at full resolution. Every aesthetic decision happens at once: how light behaves, how space unfolds, what exists, what doesn’t. Everything short of scent and touch. A world model doesn’t pick a font. It proposes a reality. Yet to do that and still make it interesting, you need a life full of experiences and the right collaborators to achieve excellence.

The finest creative confederates of the future might just be AI. Good. They don't have egos and they don't take equity. Jodorowsky had to seek out Giger, Moebius, Dalí, and Mick Jagger to design a world that was never even born. Yet it restructured an entire genre anyway. Now any person with a genuine point of view and a world-model engine could theoretically do the same by themselves. This used to require a major studio or a Renaissance patron. Today it requires a subscription.

The question is whether the people building these tools understand what they’ve done. This is not productivity software. It’s not a better Photoshop. It’s a potential amplifier for the gap Agamben identified — the space between knowing and feeling. The place taste actually lives.

Some people will use it to encrust more tortoises. More muted tones, more Bauhaus boredom, more consensus dressed as prophetic vision. Silicon Valley, in particular, is at major risk of falling into this trap. But the people who’ve actually bled for a point of view now have a medium that can hold the full dimensionality of how they think, see, and feel. That’s a game changer.

All this matters because the stakes are decidedly not aesthetic. They’re civilizational. For the first time in history, the constraint on what gets built is not resources, nor distribution, nor technical capability. AI is dissolving all three simultaneously. The bottleneck is now taste itself. The limiting factor on what gets funded, what gets made, and what gets remembered is whether the person holding these new tools has anything worth saying with them at all. It’s clear today that most don’t. Yet.

We’ve spent the last 20 years promoting pattern-matchers, rewarding reference-collectors, and building an entire curatorial class whose philosophical capacity tops out at “frictionless design.” But taste is abrasive, and rarer than ever. This should concern you more than any doomer scenario about artificial general intelligence enslaving the human race. We wonder why the culture is flat. Why we produce slop at work, eat slop bowls for lunch, and scroll through slop for leisure. The danger was never that the machines would develop taste. It’s that the people directing them never had any in the first place.

Huysmans ends À rebours with our rakish, neurotic hero Des Esseintes forced back to Paris, his aesthetic fortress in ruins, faced with a choice between madness and faith. We have a third option now. Go make something.

The numbers can seem absurd until you realize what they represent. Over $94 million was invested in 2025 alone into stress-reducing, CBD-infused functional beverages like TRIP ($40M at a $300M+ valuation) and Recess ($30M Series B). The U.S. legal cannabis market hit $45 billion in 2025. Google searches for “sensory deprivation near me” are up 50% in the last year. People are paying premium prices to turn off, tune out, and drop out of the wildly overstimulating world we live in today.

“Shrinkflation” was a hot topic over the last decade, but it was only the start. CPG brands from Dove to Colgate to PepsiCo have all reduced the sizes of their products while increasing prices. Chipotle’s burritos are famously smaller, especially when you order them online for delivery, although Big Burrito denies these allegations. This is more brands conditioning us to accept smaller portions than it is a social movement sparked by consumer demand. But make no mistake, that movement has begun in full force.

The strategic embrace of the void as a value proposition represents a fascinating convergence of consumer psychology, cultural exhaustion, and brand confidence that’s reshaping how companies will communicate value in 2026. This isn’t simply a design trend nor a positioning trick. It’s a fundamental reframing of what constitutes a benefit in the epoch of overwhelming choice, analysis paralysis, and information overload.

Oxford University Press’ word of the year is “Rage Bait,” but maybe it should be “Nothing.”

Ma: The Value in Emptiness

In Japanese aesthetics, ma (間) combines the characters for “gate” and “sun” to elicit the image of light filtering through emptiness. It refers to negative space in paintings, pauses between musical notes, and moments of silence that give speech meaning. But ma isn’t absence. It’s the pause that gives form to everything around it. It’s a palate cleanser. It’s room to breathe.

In traditional Japanese interior design ma is everywhere. And like with most Japanese art forms, it has now caught fire in the West. Today, the most expensive rooms look almost completely empty. The world’s finest hotels, like Aman, are famously architecturally sparse. The distinctly Soviet style of minimal design, Brutalism, is also making a comeback from the theater to typography.

Isaac Stern said music is “that little bit between each note—silences which give the form.” Graphic designer Alan Fletcher noted in 2001: “The Japanese have a word for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission.”

This omission is no more. But of course, through the lens of American consumerism ma takes on a dubious new meaning. Emptiness sells.

Why Brands Are Suddenly Selling Nothing

Athletic brands like Nike, which has always been about bigger, better, bolder design cues, struggle in modern culture. Lululemon’s CEO just stepped down for similarly underwhelming results. These companies used to be simple. Nike made running shoes, and later streetwear staples. Lulu made leggings, and later the full spectrum of yoga wear. Now, they’re behemoths with no clear brand positioning to break through the clutter. They collaborate constantly. They expand SKUs weekly. Their ads are everywhere. But today, these campaigns tend to just add more noise to the visual and digital worlds we live in. So it’s no surprise to see competitors from On Running to adidas buying into the philosophy of nothingness as a winning strategy.

Retail and fashion brands have largely become oppressive. They hawk too much stuff, all the time, constantly in our faces. They don’t build brand intentionally but rather attempt to brute force it into our minds, following the advice of people like Byron Sharp who expound on the benefits of omnipresent availability. But being available all the time can be a turn-off. Just ask your friend whose boyfriend sends 100 texts per day. Companies like Muji and Uniqlo, both notably Japanese, buck these trends. They sell boring, anti-branded reliability because novelty has become exhausting. They’re selling permission to stop, space to think, and freedom from stimulus. And it works. Uniqlo’s parent company Fast Retailing achieved record-breaking results in fiscal 2025 with revenue rising 9.6% to ¥3.4 trillion and operating profit jumping 13% to ¥564 billion, driven particularly by strong performance in North America (+24.5% revenue). Muji’s parent company Ryohin Keikaku posted even stronger growth with revenue surging 18.6% to ¥785 billion and operating profit soaring 31.5% to ¥74 billion as it rebounds from pandemic struggles and expands toward a ¥1 trillion revenue target. Both these companies are quite literally making something out of a whole lot of nothing.

Pei’s Nothing company launched in 2020 with transparent wireless earbuds. Their smartphone followed with a see-through back panel and an LED “Glyph Interface” that communicated through light patterns instead of notifications. The design philosophy was clear from the start: remove features, don’t add them. Nothing OS stripped away Samsung’s bloatware. Their marketing emphasized subtraction. Their positioning statement is clearly-articulated to “Remove barriers between people and technology.” When the Nothing Phone (1) launched at €469 in July 2022, it sold 100,000 units on that day. By 2024, revenue grew 150% year-over-year.

The brands winning in 2025 aren’t the loudest. They’re the quietest. And quietness is quantifiable. 25% of consumers seek simplicity, 18% identify as minimalist seekers, and conversion rates jump 400% as design becomes cleaner and more features get stripped away. In the age of AI, it seems like most modern brands could use a good editor.

The most tangible manifestation of “nothing” as value appears in the explosive growth of clean label marketing. Nearly half of global consumers purchased more fresh, unprocessed foods over the past year, with 30% actively reducing processed foods. This has translated directly into product positioning: 30% of global food and beverage launches now feature clean label claims, with “no additives or preservatives” leading at 14% penetration.

Studies show cleaner designs improve conversion rates by 400% because they remove friction. The real question isn’t whether minimalism works but why it is so clearly effective now when it wasn’t before.

The answer comes down to a structural shift that made emptiness the scarcest resource in modern markets.

The Physiological Crisis of Information Overload

The average person now sees well over 5,000 advertisements daily. Attention spans have dropped to 8 seconds or less according to some studies. Decision fatigue has become a documented medical condition. The human brain wasn’t designed for infinite scroll, algorithmic feeds, push notifications, and email newsletters competing for milliseconds of cognitive bandwidth. So brands offering less aren’t just differentiating on aesthetics. They’re offering relief from this physical and psychological overwhelm.

This is why Calm doesn’t market meditation, but rather sells a decidedly strategic permission to stop. Their push notifications don’t demand action. They offer absence. In the attention economy, Calm is selling the basic human right to opt out. The app isn’t particularly better than competitors like Headspace (which ironically has a famously cluttered UX full of bright colors and cartoon characters), but its focus on nature, sleep, and relaxation has helped it build its own niche in the busy meditation marketplace (yeah, think about how ironic that is for a second). Calm is now worth around $2 billion.

Brands like Apple famously made minimalism cool, but the decades-long shift from aesthetic to philosophical minimalism tracks a more emotional core insight. When everything is abundant, scarcity moves from material to attentional to existential. We’re at the final rung of the attention economy ladder.

The Experience Economy Made Ownership Toxic

Millennials and Gen Z, shaped by the 2008 recession, student debt, and COVID-19 pandemic, have gravitated toward minimalist practices as economic necessity disguised as lifestyle choice. According to PwC, 25% of 18-27 year olds significantly changed shopping behavior toward simplicity. Spending less, expecting more. When economic security is uncertain, excess feels dangerous.

This is a major part of why Nothing’s Phone (2a) succeeded where traditional Android manufacturers have always struggled, including Google’s Pixel phone which is beloved by experts yet commands a paltry 4% of market share despite near-constant advertising featuring every celebrity under the sun. Young buyers aren’t choosing based on specs. They pick Nothing due to the brand’s promise to make them feel less overwhelmed. Clean OS, transparent design, minimal bloat. The value proposition isn’t performance nor design, it’s cognitive relief.

But there’s a deeper cultural shift too that’s more than financial. Around 25% of consumers now prioritize environmental sustainability, and are willing to pay premiums for durable, repairable products. The cost-of-living crisis created “minimalist seekers”—18% of the global population who are research-led, buy fewer high-quality items, and seek trusted brands over novelty. Perhaps this is why Stewart Brand’s Maintenance: Of Everything is becoming a hot-topic in Silicon Valley circles. Many brands have followed suit, recently encouraging customers to return broken or unwanted items to be recycled or repaired. Nudie Jeans offers free repairs forever on all their pricey denim, and services over 100,000 items each year out of their retail stores, which double as sewing shops. IKEA now provides free small spare parts (screws, hinges, knobs, etc.) through their self-service system, delivered directly to customers’ homes. This approach supports IKEA’s goal to become “fully circular and climate positive by 2030”, encouraging customers to repair furniture rather than replace it. New Balance operates a resoling program in Japan that extends the life of approximately 3,500 Made-model shoes annually by replacing soles and repairing components like torn collar linings. The company is working to expand this globally. They also piloted an apparel repair program with The Renewal Workshop and now educates their team to intentionally design for repairability from the start.

Surveillance Capitalism Created Demand for Digital Ma

Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism describes our current reality as existing within an economic system where corporations extract our private human experiences as free raw material, transform them into behavioral data and identity prediction products, and then sell these products to influence and shape our future actions for commercial profit. There’s plenty of debate around how much companies are doing this and how nefariously it is coming to define our lived realities, but it’s certainly a tactic that’s being used by many of our favorite consumer brands and tech platforms. And we’re feeling the effects.

As platforms extracted maximum data and attention, a counter-movement emerged. Digital detox retreats, phones outside bedrooms, bans in schools, app usage limits, and more are all attempts to create ma in a surveillance economy.

The Nothing phone’s transparency is the perfect response. You can see exactly what’s inside because there’s literally not one component hidden from view. No secret data collection, and no algorithmic manipulation. In an age where every free app sells your attention to the highest bidder, seeing emptiness became a luxury signal.

Apple, of course, has perfected this approach. When every other company added more features to their products, Apple pursued a privacy positioning following the logic of nothing as something. “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone” sells negative space. It’s the absence of data harvesting that signals a high-end device backed by Apple’s perpetual promise of premium hardware. They can afford to do this, they seem to signal, because they’re decidedly not a software company, and therefore don’t need to harvest your data unceremoniously in order to stay alive, the way competitors like Google do. That lack of a bad thing commands premium pricing because privacy is the new scarcity. Nothing is the new something.

The Trap of Commodifying Emptiness

Here’s the contradiction: the void that resists commodification becomes highly commodified precisely through its own resistance. Nothing is now the hot new thing.

Fine art theorist Boris Groys first noted that minimal aesthetics now mark elite taste in his 2006 essay The Politics of Equal Aesthetic Rights. Empty galleries require expensive real estate. The yoga retreat selling silence costs $5,000. Absence has been monetized into a luxury good.

The future belongs to brands that master strategic, not total absence. Consider what’s coming: AI-generated content flooding every channel, deepfakes making authenticity unknowable, algorithmic feeds optimizing for maximum engagement expanding to our TVs, our news media, and even our refrigerators. The response won’t be more content. It will be more ma.

Luxury brands are already removing logos to increase exclusivity. SaaS companies like Basecamp are reducing features to improve user experience. Even mass-market companies like Häagen-Dazs are attempting to cash in on the trend of nothing.

This is what marketers should steal from 8th-century Japan: ma isn’t about doing less. It’s about removing everything that prevents clarity. The email newsletter nobody reads. The product features competitors have but users ignore. The brand voice that tries pleasing everyone and resonates with no one. As performance marketing has finally plummeted in creative efficacy after a solid 10 year run, brands are going to have to go back to basics to stand out, and sell out. Emptiness shouldn’t be the goal. But a lack of frivolity might need to be.

We don’t need more things. We need more space between our things. The brands that win will be those that respect the gaps, honor the pauses, and understand that sometimes the most valuable offer is nothing at all.

Remember, Ma isn’t just absence. It’s a quiet presence waiting to be recognized. And in 2026, that might just be worth billions.

To solve this problem, Omnicom pounced on IPG. The company’s mega-merger with Interpublic Group was finally approved last week. With the move, Omnicom has created the largest advertising holding company in history. The merger creates a combined entity with projected revenues around $26 billion.

Omnicom has made quick work of slashing and burning. They announced just a few days ago that around 4,000 people will lose their jobs to redundancies worldwide. But equally frightening is that the new holdco shows no signs of approaching their agency brands with any more care than their competition has. In 2018 WPP combined its 154-year-old creative agency J. Walter Thompson, one of the most famous in the world, with digital network Wunderman, forming Wunderman Thompson. They then folded Wunderman Thompson into VML in 2024, erasing JWT from history in the process (Wunderman, too, was a fairly iconic agency known for inventing direct mail). WPP also killed off brands like Young & Rubicam, another iconic century-old agency, in their consolidation processes.

As holdcos struggle for market relevance and renewed revenue, they’re consistently killing off some of their most powerful brands in the process. Along with the layoffs, Omnicom announced that it is shutting down the 152-year-old FCB network, absorbing it into BBDO as part of the post-IPG merger consolidation. FCB (Foote, Cone and Belding) was founded in Chicago in 1899. It’s a world-famous agency brand known for a clever mix of pioneering marketing science and big idea creative thinking. But even more shocking was Omnicom’s announcement that the brand of DDB, Doyle Dane Bernbach, will also be killed. The press release used anodyne language about “streamlining operations” and “portfolio optimization.” Translation: the agency that invented modern advertising, that proved creativity could sell better than salesmanship, is being dismantled because maintaining a 75-year-old brand name doesn’t justify the overhead on a private equity spreadsheet.

DDB’s death isn’t a footnote. It’s the period at the end of a sentence that started in 1959 when a young Jewish copywriter from the Bronx did something nobody thought possible: he convinced Americans to buy a car invented by Adolf Hitler. The Volkswagen Beetle campaign remains advertising’s creation myth for good reason. It was even ranked as the #1 campaign of the 20th century by Ad Age. But the story everyone tells misses what actually made it revolutionary, and what we’re losing now that the revolution is officially over.

The Creative Revolution

Bill Bernbach couldn’t get a job at J. Walter Thompson. Neither could his partners Ned Doyle and Maxwell Dane. If you were Jewish, Black, Italian, Irish, Catholic, Hispanic or a woman in the advertising business before 1960, the WASP-dominated agencies conducting business at private clubs and golf courses made sure you stayed outside. Grey Advertising, now a WPP multinational, was founded in 1917 by Lawrence Valenstein and Arthur Fatt, two Jewish entrepreneurs who named their agency after the color of their office wallpaper because using their real surnames would cost them clients. Grey didn’t publicly acknowledge their founders’ identities until their 100th anniversary when Grey London cheekily rebranded as Valenstein & Fatt for a few months.

Bernbach accepted the constraint and turned it into leverage. He worked with Jewish clients the establishment shops wouldn’t touch: Orbach’s department store, Levy’s Rye Bread, and El Al Airlines among others. His pitch was simple: we’ll make you famous. And it worked. A survey revealed that New Yorkers believed Orbach’s and Macy’s were the two biggest advertising spenders in the city, for example. In reality, Orbach’s budget was one-thirtieth the size of Macy’s. As Bernbach observed:

“Consumers do not tally the number of ads you run. They simply recall the impression you’ve left on them.”

The reason DDB was so successful from the start was that Bernabch had unintentionally started what we today refer to as “The Creative Revolution” in advertising. This was a structural change in how the work got done.

Before Bernbach, advertising agencies operated like factories. Most used the AIDA model, a marketing framework that outlines four stages of a customer’s buying journey: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. This led to copy and visuals that were largely descriptive and focused on functional benefits. Here’s an actual line from a 1904 real estate ad in The Boston News-Letter that follows the AIDA structure:

“At Oyster-bay on Long-Island in the Province of N.York, There is a very good Fulling-Mill (ATTENTION), to be Let or Sold, as also a Plantation (INTEREST), having on it a large new Brick house, and another good house by it for a Kitchin & work house, with a Barn, Stable, etc. a young Orchard, and 20 Acres clear Land (DESIRE). The Mill is to be Let with or without the Plantation: Enquire of Mr. William Bradford Printer in N.York, and know further. (ACTION)”

Not exactly “Just Do It.”

Copywriters used to write headlines and body text in one department, emphasizing calls to action. Then art directors who worked in a completely different part of the building would arrange the finished text and add illustrations. The underlying assumption was that words sold and pictures decorated. The two disciplines met for drinks after work, maybe, but never collaborated on strategy. Watch an episode or two of “Mad Men” and you’ll see this dynamic in action.

Bernbach’s heresy was merging Art and Copy into a single unit. Now equal partners, conceiving campaigns together from the start. The idea seems obvious now, which is how you know it worked. But at the time, it violated a century of industry practice. This structural change made everything else possible. It allowed DDB to create ads that didn’t feel like ads—that treated the audience as intelligent, skeptical, media-savvy, and tired of being shouted at. Which was fortunate, because by the early 1960s, American consumers absolutely were all those things.

The postwar generation had grown up with television, seen their president assassinated, watched cities burn during riots, and started questioning every institution that asked for their trust. LSD—originally a CIA experiment on college campuses—had rewired how young people processed visual information and narrative structure. The psychedelic generation did everything differently, from music to film to literature to journalism. The hard-sell tactics that worked on their parents now triggered antibodies. Advertising needed to evolve or become irrelevant.

Then Volkswagen walked in the door.

Think Small

The Beetle’s problems were existential. It was conceived by Hitler as the “people’s car” (which Volkswagen directly translates into) for a greater German Reich dependent on automobiles. Famous Nazi Ferdinand Porsche designed it, using concentration camp labor to create the first prototypes. Even after the war had ended, no one wanted the Beetle. British automotive experts declared it “too ugly and noisy” and called manufacturing it “a completely uneconomic enterprise.” Meanwhile, American cars were getting longer, wider, and louder, wrapped in chrome and muscular styling. The Beetle was small, plain, practical, with the engine in the wrong place. It looked like a bug. It represented everything American prosperity had defeated. In 1950, Volkswagen sold fewer than 400 cars in the United States.

Bernbach’s creative team, working with renowned art director Helmut Krone, made a decision that would have gotten them fired at any other agency: they leaned into every single objection. The “Think Small” campaign featured the car itself as only a tiny element overwhelmed by white space. Minimal sans-serif typography was distinctly out of trend. Copy sounded like a friend talking, not a salesman pitching. One ad showed the car with the headline “Lemon” and explained Volkswagen’s rigorous inspection process—coining a term we still use today for defective products. More showed it covered in graffiti. Flipped upside down. Dismantled into pieces. Being towed away with the deadpan caption “A Rare Photo.” The most famous line: “It’s ugly, but it gets you there.”

When Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, DDB ran that headline next to an image of the Lunar Module, drawing an unexpected parallel between the humble Beetle and humanity’s greatest engineering achievement. By refusing to hide the car’s quirks, DDB made it trustworthy to skeptical young customers. More importantly, they repositioned what car ownership could mean. The Beetle became a symbol of non-conformism, an intelligent choice for sophisticated Americans who rejected Detroit’s bloated excess. In the hands of DDB’s creative vision, Volkswagen transformed from a Nazi relic into a countercultural icon. Sales in the US climbed to 150,000 by 1960 alone. Within a decade, the Beetle became America’s best-selling import with over one million sold. Ad recall hit 95%—nearly universal awareness in an increasingly crowded market. The campaign is still taught in every advertising program as the gold standard for how creativity outperforms budgets. The Creative Revolution was in full effect.

What Dies With DDB

The creative revolution that Bernbach started is now the thing holding agencies back. The merged art director/copywriter team that produced “Think Small” takes time. It requires iteration, trust, the freedom to break rules. It’s expensive to maintain compared to the alternative, which is: let AI generate 50 variations in the time it takes humans to conceive one idea, A/B test them programmatically, optimize toward whatever metric the client thinks correlates with revenue. Modern marketing doesn’t reward the patience required for transformative, iconic brand-building. We now reward velocity, scale, attribution modeling, and “portfolio optimization.” The holding companies that own every major agency aren’t in the creativity business—they’re in the margin expansion business. DDB’s brand equity doesn’t justify the overhead when you can consolidate it into a larger unit, cut redundant creative teams, and can thereby improve quarterly earnings. We’re returning to the pre-Bernbach model without realizing it.

Agencies are becoming intermediaries again, buying media and coordinating placements instead of developing distinctive campaigns. Except now they’re buying programmatic inventory instead of newspaper space. The irony is that the industry DDB revolutionized by merging disciplines and respecting audience intelligence is killing DDB because merged disciplines are inefficient and audiences are now just targeting parameters in a demand-side platform. Omnicom says closing DDB is about operational efficiency. What they mean is: the capability that made advertising matter as culture instead of just commerce isn’t relevant to us anymore. This isn’t because it’s not impactful. It’s because they don’t know how to sell it to their McKinsey consultants and MBA clients.

The Forgetting

Think Small succeeded because Bernbach understood something the industry had forgotten: you can’t trick people into liking you. You have to earn it by treating them like adults. By being honest about your flaws. By making them laugh or think instead of just shouting product benefits at them. That insight made DDB the most awarded, most influential agency in history. It changed how every brand communicates. And now it’s being shut down because the capability it pioneered—turning cultural insight into commerce—can’t be scaled fast enough to justify its existence on a consolidated P&L. When the last agency that proved creativity beats optimization gets optimized out of existence, we should probably pay attention to what that reveals about where marketing is heading. The mad men are dead. The spreadsheets won. For now.

Every time a holding company kills an iconic agency brand in the name of “efficiency,” they’re creating the exact market conditions to let the next DDB emerge. Right now, somewhere, a creative team is pitching a client who is exhausted by AI-generated mediocrity and performance marketing that performs worse every quarter. They’re tired of the rat race. They want to tell their story. An agency is explaining that the reason their work costs more and takes longer is because it’s designed to make people actually give a shit. And that client—who’s watched their brand equity erode while their programmatic spend increased—is considering listening to them.

The holding companies made a choice: chase margins over meaning, optimization over originality. That choice creates white space for the next Creative Revolution. DDB’s death isn’t a tragedy—it’s a signal. When the institutions that should defend creativity start killing it for quarterly earnings, the market corrects. Different models get tested. Algorithms change. The way to fix broken systems is to start building new ones. Bernbach couldn’t get hired at the establishment agencies, so he created one that changed the world. As Mark Twain once supposedly said: “History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.”

Americans bet $148 billion on sports last year. That’s more than we spent on movies, books, concerts and tickets to those sporting events combined. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. “Event contracts” are set to takeover commerce and culture alike in the years to come. Companies like Polymarket (not legal in the US, although traders on the platform think it will be soon) and Kalshi (legal but it operates as a federally-regulated financial exchange rather than a gambling platform) have democratized what was once exclusive to pinstriped traders in smoky Wall Street boardrooms: futures markets.

You can now bet on whether we’ll discover alien life before Bitcoin hits $200k (…no?), how many tweets Bill Ackman will send today (a lot), or hurricane impacts in specific cities (gross). That last one creates a perverse dynamic — people outside hurricane zones effectively become amateur insurance actuaries, selling “compensation” to those in harm’s way.

Indeed, these markets operate in a moral gray zone. Their existence raises concerns around “reflexivity” — betting influencing real-world events. When large sums ride on specific outcomes, people with insider knowledge or power might be incentivized to create those outcomes for fun and profit. Kalshi banned betting on California wildfires for exactly this reason, as such contracts could incentivize arson.

The ethical questions remain unsettled, but the market isn’t waiting for answers. In September 2024, Kalshi sued the CFTC and won, legalizing election prediction markets. For the first time in American history, you could legally make money on who you thought would be President. The polls showed a tight race. Kalshi showed a dominant Trump victory. The gamblers beat the experts.

When Robinhood inevitably partnered with Kalshi six months later, prediction markets went mainstream. Last month, users traded $2.5 billion in event contracts on Robinhood alone.

The whole thing feels futuristic, quasi-dystopian, and comically absurd. It takes the concept of “prop” betting from sports (eg: the over/under on National Anthem length or Taylor Swift screen time at the Super Bowl) to a new level. But trading on what hasn’t happened yet is nearly as old as humanity itself. As are parables warning us of the danger of trying to predict the future.

Prophecy and Profit

In Greek mythology, the Oracle at Delphi warns King Laius that his son will kill him and marry his wife. Laius tries to prevent this, but his efforts ensure the prophecy’s fulfillment. His son Oedipus later flees to avoid the same prediction, only to unknowingly perpetuate it. This tale echoes throughout history from Macbeth to Minority Report. Humans have long tried to outwit fate. And for just as long, we’ve commercialized that impulse.

Around 1750 BCE, long before the Greeks, Ancient Sumer thrived in modern-day Iraq with multiple metropolises, a robust agrarian economy, and a flourishing merchant class with complex financial instruments. At the center of every major Sumerian city stood the Temple Quarter, a religious and administrative hub often marked by an imposing ziggurat. Each city was believed to belong to a patron deity, and the temple served as that specific god’s earthly dwelling.

But these were more than religious spaces. Temple Quarters facilitated sophisticated markets where forward contracts on barley and silver (the main currencies at the time) were carved into clay tablets specifying parties, goods, delivery dates, and prices. Historians call this a form of “proto-capitalism,” enabling merchants and governmental officials to manage agricultural risk. But temples also functioned as warehouses, clearing houses, and regulatory bodies. They were running exchanges, not churches. When someone bought a contract betting that barley would be cheaper after the harvest, was he hedging or gambling? The temple priests likely didn’t care as they collected fees either way. The sacred and speculative were housed in the same institution.

Here’s the story we’ve been told: farmers need to hedge risk, consumers need stable prices, and futures markets facilitate “price discovery.” Speculators provide liquidity to real hedgers.

Yet in reality, this is backward. Speculators vastly outnumber hedgers in every modern futures market, and likely did in Greek and Sumerian times too. The hedging function is the exception, not the rule. Most participants make leveraged bets on price movements they can’t control, hoping to profit from volatility. These are gamblers seeking to carve out a fortune from prophetical visions. The right get rich. The wrong get ruined.

There’s a reason we’ve been betting on the future for so long that myths were written thousands of years ago to warn us of the dangers of doing so: our brains evolved to predict. Compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, humans excel at pattern-matching and forecasting danger - anticipating where the antelope will run, learning where the lion takes his daily stroll.

Not only are we good at this, we like it. Neurologically, making predictions activates the same reward pathways as food or sex - something about it just feels good. When you’re right, you get a dopamine hit. When you’re wrong, the cognitive dissonance hurts. Prediction isn’t just something we do sometimes, it’s likely a core element of how we’ve survived so long and come to dominate the globe as the ruling species. Futures markets simply turned this evolutionary impulse into an extractable commodity.

From Rice Riots to Robinhood

Let’s fast forward to The Dōjima Rice Exchange in Osaka, Japan. It operated from 1697 as a commodities market helping the samurai class manage the price volatility of their most precious crop. But by 1730, the Edo Shogunate banned it after speculators hoarded rice in warehouses, manipulating prices and triggering riots (a similar bread shortage would spark the French Revolution a few decades later). The government reopened the exchange in 1773, realizing they couldn’t stop speculation but could control who profited from it. This created the first class of modern “futures traders,” defined by all the certifications and professional trappings that endure today.

Dōjima also birthed the theatrical aesthetic of 1980s Wall Street — flag-waving communication systems, 24-hour trading, public price displays and a whole lot of chaos and yelling. All of this was intentional, designed to generate excitement, urgency, and the fear of missing out on striking rich. Speculation was always the point. Hedging was always the excuse.

A century and a half later, Western courts had applied anti-gambling laws to futures contracts. But in 1905, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. created an escape hatch. In Board of Trade v. Christie, Holmes ruled that the legal form of contracts mattered more than actual performance. Futures trading was legitimate not because it differed fundamentally from gambling, but because it occurred on organized exchanges with standardized contracts. Institutional legitimacy laundering at its finest.

The Commodity Exchange Act of 1936 codified this narrative on the tail end of the Great Depression. Since then, America has dominated global financial markets. In 2000, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act exempted over-the-counter derivatives from regulation, contributing to the 2008 financial crisis by allowing massive speculative growth. But even then, futures remained accessible only to those professionals who understood the market well enough to profit or lose everything.

This changed in October 2024 when Robinhood launched retail futures trading. Now anyone can bet on crude oil, gold or currency futures, whether they understand it or not.

We need gamblers to make these markets work, we just won’t call them that. CFTC Commissioner Brian Quintenz made this explicit in 2021:

“Bettors participate in games of pure chance [while] speculators in the derivatives market participate in non-chance driven outcomes that have price forming impacts.”

Despite all the lessons history has taught us, the future is more accessible to bet on today than ever before.

Markets That Manufacture Reality

Companies like Kalshi and Polymarket are fundamentally reshaping how Americans interact with information, probability, and truth. They’re creating narrative engines where the press reacts to betting volumes and markets don’t just reflect sentiment — they manufacture it. Someone makes a big bet, the media reports it, more people pile on, and the cycle accelerates. We saw this with GameStop and Dogecoin. Prediction markets have formalized the hype cycle. But now we call it “information aggregation.”

The history of futures markets is the story of convincing society that speculation is legitimate when conducted through particular channels. Kalshi and Polymarket are doing something ancient —betting on uncertain outcomes — using the newest legitimacy structures available: CFTC regulation and blockchain transparency. They’re not breaking the system nor inventing something new. They’re revealing how it has always worked.

When prediction markets become infrastructure — like when Google integrates Polymarket odds into search results as they did literally just today, or when news outlets report prediction market prices alongside polls — we’re changing how we think and who we trust.

The semantics matter. Calling something “gambling” versus “markets” versus “event contracts” versus “prediction instruments” isn’t regulatory hair-splitting - it’s a communications strategy that can fundamentally alter consumer behavior. Gambling carries moral weight, addiction concerns, and social stigma. But markets carry sophistication, rationality, and the promise of meritocratic returns. The language itself determines which regulatory framework applies, which demographics adopt it, and crucially, which companies and brands will participate.

The Financialization of Everything?

Brands spend billions on consumer research and trend forecasting trying to predict what people will want, why and when. But what if you could simply check the cultural futures market? What if brand health wasn’t measured by surveys (which we know aren’t accurate, and never have been) but rather by live markets where traders bet on product launch success or which trend will dominate social media next week?

Some large consulting firms already experiment with internal prediction markets. The interesting shift will happen when this becomes consumer-facing. Rolex launching contracts on watch resale values. Netflix greenlighting shows based on market confidence. Creative campaigns using market movement as sentiment data. It’s less farfetched than you’d think.

Here’s where human psychology gets exploited at scale. We need to be right more than we need to be accurate. Confirmation bias, bandwagon effects, herding behavior — all the cognitive shortcuts that helped us survive in the savanna - can now be productized by platforms that profit from volume. When we see odds moving, we feel the urge to participate.

The American consumer class is experiencing the financialization of daily life, where every opinion becomes a tradeable position. Prediction markets can aggregate information efficiently and hold people accountable for their convictions. But they also turn “having a take” on culture, politics, or sports into something we feel compelled to bet on. And money changes how we think.

For marketers and communicators, this creates both opportunity and obligation. Futures markets generate constant, quantifiable signals about what people believe will happen. Executives and political strategists who learn to read these signals will gain advantages. But in a world where everyone can bet on everything, credibility becomes currency. Make claims about the future and consumers can now bet against you. Publicly.

The semantics of “gambling” versus “markets” will shape the next decade of American commerce. If prediction markets are gambling, they remain in the moral framework of “vice” — regulated, taxed, and largely removed from the mainstream. If they’re markets, however, they become legitimate tools for information discovery and risk management. Same infrastructure, same activity, entirely different cultural meanings and commercial implications.

The next few years will determine whether prediction markets expand into every aspect of life or whether the collision between sports betting and financial regulation forces a reckoning. Either way, these markets have always been about betting on uncertain outcomes — attempting to predict the future.

The temple priests never left. They’re just using APIs instead of clay tablets.

Certain industries are bulletproof. Through tumultuous times, stock market booms, global uncertainty and general chaos – they still flourish. While sectors like defense, pharmaceuticals or energy are generally stable, because they’re cartels, they’re also uniquely vulnerable to the whims of whoever’s running the country at the time, the price of raw materials and, sometimes, the behavior of their customers (boycotts, behavior change, emerging technology adoption, etc.).

That’s where “vice” industries like alcohol, tobacco and gambling come into play. Often deemed recession-proof, these companies usually thrive no matter what’s going on in the world. At the end of a long day, everyone wants a drink. Or a smoke. Or to feel alive for just a moment by betting on the Jets (don’t do it).

Yet something curious is going on in the world of spirits. For the first time in a long time, it looks like the well is drying up.

Hard Facts for the Hard Beverage Folks.

Recently, The Financial Times published a harrowing report concerning the spirits industry’s most luxurious player: Moët Hennessy. The business behind brands like Dom Pérignon, Belvedere Vodka and Glenmorangie Scotch Whisky “went from generating €1bn in cash in 2019 to burning through €1.5bn last year, according to documents… as aggressive price increases and an ill-fated acquisition spree hit the luxury group’s drinks business.” They’ve recently been hit with a lawsuit alleging a culture of sexual harassment, and LVMH shares are down 22.85% year-over-year as of July 8, 2025, profits are down 17% and sales are down 3% for the first quarter of 2025.

Diageo, the stalwart mega-HoldCo in spirits known for portfolio brands like Johnnie Walker, Don Julio and Smirnoff, is not faring much better. Diageo shares are down 16.37% year-over-year as of early July 2025, profits are down 3.88% year-over-year (but a staggering 47% since 2020), and, faring slightly better than their French competitors, sales are up 3.65%. Nonetheless, the company is performing so poorly that they’ve even been identified as a possible takeover target. Additionally, Diageo has also been caught up in lawsuits including a spurious-sounding one from their Ciroc brand’s founder Diddy, who has other more pressing issues right now, and one concerning misleading claims around their popular Don Julio and Casamigos brands being 100% “pure Agave,” which, I guess, they’re not (again this is all alleged, but both brands are certainly in decline).

Pernod Ricard, the owner of brands like Perrier Jouët, Absolut Vodka and Chivas Regal, is down 6% in sales, 7% in profit and 36% in stock price over the past year from Spring to Spring, although they’ve reported stronger profits heading into the second half of this year.

Constellation Brands, which owns Corona, Modelo and Casa Noble tequila among others, is down approximately 23% on stock price, 105% on net income and 6% on sales of spirits (beer still increased 11%, leading to a revenue number that actually beat analysts’ predictions at around $2 billion).

Please note all this data is sure to change depending on when you read this, but the point is, gigantic spirits companies that should be printing money are definitively not, and that’s a big problem for the entire industry. What’s causing this concerning trend in spirits? Let’s start with what’s not.

No, People Have Not Stopped Drinking.

No, It’s Not Gen-Z’s Fault.

Let’s get this out of the way first - the issue facing spirits brands is not the fact that people are "drinking less” these days, and it’s extremely lazy for a marketer or an executive to place all the blame on the customer when it’s our job to entice them. People are smoking a lot less these days, yet the heavily-regulated tobacco industry is routinely beating earnings projections with far more constraints on them than the spirits sector. Innovations like nicotine pouches are driving growth. As amoral as their business may be, tobacco holdcos seem to have pivoted and disrupted their product stack just fine, finding new ways to attract young customers all the time, around the globe, despite being heavily regulated. Remember, alcohol is technically poison too. So let’s get off our high horses.

Among Gen Z shoppers, 84% report buying alcohol, compared to 90% of Millennials, not an industry-killing differential. Gen-Z, on average, drinks 3-4 times per week. There are approximately 69.31 million Gen Z Americans, so that means the total addressable market for Gen-Z is about 58.2 million people. A recent report confirmed that this behavior is only increasing. Also worth noting is much of Gen-Z wasn’t even old enough to drink legally by the time the media and culture had decided they “don’t drink.” Now that they are, and have jobs, they’re turning to a cocktail or two as frequently as the rest of us.

So, to reiterate, Gen-Z drinks. A lot... But unlike millennials who flocked to big name brands, likely a result of well-executed and aspirational ad campaigns we’ve been exposed to since our youth, Gen-Z is indeed drinking differently. The Ready-to-Drink (RTD) category is growing explosively because of young people. In fact, the RTD cocktail market is projected to more than double globally from $1.01 billion in 2024 to $2.23 billion by 2029. Agave-based spirits like Mezcal, Tequila and flavored spirits are also favorites of younger consumers today, with brands like Lunazul (premium tequila) and Ole Smoky (flavored whiskeys and “moonshine”) punching well above their weight class (sales are up +38% from 2022 to 2023 and +160% over the last three years, respectively). Gen-Z and millennials alike also reach for “aspirational” spirits more frequently than our elders, with millennials in particular seeking out premium and super-premium ($100+) bottles to badge themselves with, collect and share.

Even if Gen-Z does end up drinking less than Millennials, this is a trend that’s existed for decades and was never hard to predict. Millennials drink less than Gen X, who drink less than Baby Boomers - yet the spirits industry has rarely suffered the way it is today during previous generational shifts. In fact, something kind of similar happened to them a few decades ago during another cultural moment. The early 1990s decline in the US spirits industry was driven by a combination of new legal enforcement (DUIs, in particular, were much more strictly enforced than ever before), changing cultural attitudes toward drinking and health (the “new age” or “wellness” movement 2.0, carrying over from the 1960s), economic pressures (recession), and a strategic industry pivot toward premium products and global sales. The result was a significant drop in overall alcohol consumption, especially spirits, which only stabilized and began to recover toward the end of the decade. They bounced back from that just fine, largely with the help of millennials.

Additionally, here’s something no one wants to talk about: the heaviest-drinking 10-20% of Americans consume the majority (60-80%) of all alcohol sold in the country. Those people are likely alcoholics, but without them there is no spirits industry. They’re also probably not buying $200 bottles of vodka or $18 pre-mixed cocktails.

So - there’s plenty of market left for spirits brands, and this has happened before even in the recent past. Many brands are thriving right now, often because of, not in spite of, Gen-Z. Yet the holdcos that steward some of the world’s most-beloved and iconic alcohol companies are suffering increasingly disastrous losses. There’s got to be something else at play here. Let’s explore what it could be.

COVID and Cannabis As Catalyst

The COVID-19 pandemic had many erratic side effects that few people would have seen coming, but one of the more predictable behavioral shifts was that Americans started drinking more. It should surprise no one that working from home, government stimulus checks, social isolation, a shift in routines, and general boredom spurred Americans to drink during the pandemic. But as always, this left the country with a hangover. By the end of COVID lockdowns, many felt that they had overindulged, and sought moderation.

This dovetailed with the rising popularity of no and lo-alc brands like Seedlip, Ritual, and Athletic Brewing Co; the general categories of vermouth and liqueurs (which are lower ABV); and “functional” beverages (CBD, mushrooms, etc.). Even more striking was the cultural sensation of “California Sober,” people who chose not to drink but to ingest cannabis on a more frequent basis. Dry January and Sober October became more popular as well, paired with the increasing relevance of the overall “wellness” industry and influencers from Zendaya to Joe Rogan heralding the benefits of sobriety, even if just for a month.

Although all of these trends could not have been precisely foreseen, we predicted most of them back in 2021 in a spirits industry trend report for one of our clients, as did many other brand strategists and industry experts. It should have been crystal clear to the executives running HoldCos like Diageo or LVMH that the increase in alcohol consumption during the pandemic was a special occasion, a fluke, a bubble not indicative of future performance. Surely they wouldn’t use these spectacular, momentary earnings as a benchmark - the “new normal” for their teams to gauge future financial targets on, right? Well…not exactly. This brings us to our next point.

Bad Leadership + Poor Financial Planning

Being an executive at one of these companies is a hard job. There’s massive, global bureaucracy and groupthink to deal with, strong-minded C-Suite and board members to report to, who might be a little more old-school than necessary, and hordes of ad agencies and management consultants swarming to whisper in their ears like Little Finger. No one can predict the future, and this is in no way an indictment of these companies’ management overall. However, it’s beyond clear that some of the key decision makers at both Diageo and Moët Hennessy in particular were at best out-of-touch and at worst incompetent during this period of sensational pandemic growth.

Moët Hennessy CEO Philippe Schaus was fired back in October of 2024, and his strategy was a big part of their problem. Schaus increased prices in an attempt to maintain profitability, which he was obsessed with, leading the HoldCo to focus on foreign markets like China (where brands like Hennessy have traditionally over-performed) and high-priced luxury items during an era when more affordable, mass DTC products were obviously ascendant. He embarked on a series of hit-and-miss acquisitions, including several French wine companies that have yet to establish any sense of brand awareness; and he led a lossmaking push into direct-to-consumer sales. These are standard “MBA” style" approaches that perhaps could have worked if executed properly, or in the 1980s, but they also seemed largely doomed from the start based on timing.

Diageo has also undergone a sweeping leadership overhaul in the past 18 months, with a new chairman, CEO, and CFO all taking the helm amid a period of underperformance and strategic uncertainty. CEO Debra Crew, elevated to the top job following the sudden passing of Sir Ivan Menezes, has faced a challenging environment marked by the company’s first annual sales dip since 2020. The finance function has also seen upheaval, with CFO Lavanya Chandrashekar stepping down in 2024. Under this new leadership, Diageo has struggled to regain momentum in key markets, particularly in North America and Latin America, where sales and volumes have declined. The group’s strategy is basically the same as LVMH’s - focusing on premiumization and selective acquisitions - but results have been mixed. While Diageo has invested in direct-to-consumer initiatives and digital transformation, these efforts have yet to deliver significant breakthroughs, and the company has removed its medium-term guidance due to “ongoing macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty.” This rapid turnover at the top, combined with a cautious consumer environment and a patchy record on recent strategic bets, has left Diageo navigating a period of transition, with investors and analysts closely watching for signs of a more decisive turnaround. Recently they announced impending layoffs and the likely sell-off of several of their brands.

Instead of looking to the future, these types of leaders behave in ways that have been proven to work in the past. Clearly, it didn’t work. For people who, I’m sure, use the word “innovation” hundreds of times per week, they’re simply not thinking in a particularly innovative way: let’s buy more wine companies, let’s jack up prices, maybe the Chinese will buy it! This brings us to our next issue.

Resting on Laurels: Great Brands. Bad Branding.

The spirits industry’s major players’ general lack of foresight has been inexcusable to shareholders, and rightfully so. They gave up on leading the market and their customers to a new, aspirational brand world and instead resorted to financial trickery and data-driven drudgery to try and adapt to the constantly-shifting cultural landscape.

Their approach is formulaic - showcase how the liquid is made and where it is made (even though few people genuinely care about this, at all), invent a broad value prop that’s so inoffensive no one will be upset by it (we’re about MUSIC! We’re about FASHION!) and then attach a celebrity either as a partner of the brand itself or to star in a campaign in order to check the “fame” box. This worked in the 90s, but budgets were better then and there was less competition from other brands as well as from attention-sucking creators on social media.

The brands that are killing it today rarely follow the HoldCos’ formula. They have unique perspectives, often unique products, understand who their customer is and don’t care if other people don’t “get” what they’re doing. Skrewball Peanut Butter Whiskey, for example, sounds and tastes disgusting to me and many other Americans. Their business, nonetheless, has exploded. They have 83% of the market share in peanut butter whiskies, which yes is a category now, and the brand also achieved the number two position in the flavored whiskey category (over $25) for both value and volume, and was ranked number five overall. More examples of this abound, from older well-conceived brands like Hendrick’s Gin (which proudly declares it is “Not for Everyone” on their label) to the Vodka-based hard tea brand Surfside, which was the fastest-growing alcohol brand in the US off-trade last year after it soared by triple digits selling “Sunshine in a Can” at only 100 calories.

The HoldCos own some of the best brands in the history of brands. Few categories have pumped out advertising as iconic as spirits, wine and beer. Their current brand management is akin to keeping a Siberian Tiger in a cage. They own gorgeous, powerful, heritage-driven brands, many of genuine superior quality, that continue to embarrass themselves year over year by trying to be what a board room thinks young people and the ultra-rich think is “cool.” They’ve lost the script, and their own special sauce in the process. But it’s never too late to pivot.

HOW TO FIX IT:

Stop Buying Brands, Start Building Them

A core element of the HoldCo’s failure is a lack of understanding of what “culture” actually is. I’ve worked in “cultural marketing” for 15 years, and I can tell you that the people who work in the luxury space across sectors tend to understand it the least. Their culture is set from the top, and the top wants to meet famous people and throw parties in Miami. They’re convinced their customer is someone cultured, intellectual and artistic (they’re not). They obsess over data without using common sense. They’re afraid to actually be bold or innovative, but they’ll throw those words around in briefs constantly. They try to sponsor an F1 team as their “big idea.” They hire McKinsey.

Big spirits companies need to start by fixing this culture of marketing-as-spectacle and pausing the strategy of big-budget acquisitions. They kill trends as soon as they buy into them because, by definition, they are mass and mass is uncool. Even some of the more successful celebrity-led brands like Aviation or Casamigos almost immediately lost their cultural caché post-acquisition (both by Diageo), despite the giant push in distribution that comes with such a deal.

The big brands are chasing trends, but trends are by definition ephemeral, and by doing this they’re ignoring their own rich histories. They’re also missing out on the fun part - building the brands themselves. The simplest rules of brand-building are consistency, quality and frequency of messaging – and most of the holdcos that are suffering miss out on at least one or two of these.

Even when a creative take is well-received, big spirits brands today seem obsessed with pivoting to meet every cultural moment rather than building a creative voice of their own. Take Belvedere’s campaign featuring a dancing Daniel Craig in a bathrobe in Paris, for some reason. To be honest, I loved it. It’s fun, aspirational and sleek, recapturing some of the brand’s heyday when Terry Richardson was shooting their campaigns and the brand felt premium in a whimsically “downtown” art school dropout kind of way. But they didn’t follow up on it at all - losing out on both consistency and frequency. They ran the ads, bought the billboards, soaked in the positive press and then…nothing. Taika Waititi, who directed the spot, returned in 2025 to highlight Future, who has previously featured in Grand Marnier ads and has absolutely nothing in common with Daniel Craig, nor is he known for drinking vodka. The aesthetic is similar, but the spot has none of the lighthearted, whimsical strangeness of Craig’s campaign, which worked largely because of how unexpected he was as a partner. Rappers are expected. James Bonds dancing, less so.

There’s dozens of examples of missteps like this in the spirits space since COVID. Ironically for LVMH, the spirits industry needs to start thinking more like fashion companies do. When a fashion label, especially the kinds LVMH owns and operates, hires a new creative director they almost immediately go back into the archives. They seek out “codes” of the brand that consumers are familiar with - emotional brand assets from logos to physical design tropes - and then they reinterpret them to best fit their own vision as well as the cultural moment they live in. Brands like Louis Vuitton (founded 1854), Dior (1946) and Loewe (1846) are steeped in heritage that designers and marketers alike can sort through for inspiration without losing sight of what the brands are about. But some spirits brands are even richer in history!

Consistent branding and advertising is not the only reason why these companies aren’t thriving, but it could certainly be a big part of their solution. Moët itself was founded in 1743, Hennessy in 1765, and Tanqueray in 1830. Château d'Yquem, a prestigious wine estate owned by LVMH, has roots dating back to 1593! These are powerhouse brands with literal centuries of inspiration to pull from. Why is Tanqueray running ads that look like I made them on Canva? Why has Moët been essentially transformed into a sponsorship vehicle (F1, US Open, the NBA) without any memorable or engaging branded content or perspective to back it up? As the era of brand marketing returns, the big spirits brands seem to be doubling down on dull, performance-driven tactics and sponsorships in lieu of anything unique, exciting or distinctly branded.

Aligned with this is the idea that you don’t always need to be “innovating.” Tito’s Vodka, for example, has basically not changed their product nor launched anything new (flavors, lo or no-abv, etc.) in the last 20 years. They threatened to release a RTD back in 2022, but one has yet to materialize, and that’s fine for a company that’s currently the top-selling vodka brand in the US, by far. How did Tito’s win? Distribution, sure, but also by being distinct through simplicity during an era when celebrities, collaborations and high-falutin sponsorships ruled the roost. Tito’s simply messages that they’re proudly made in America (a reason to believe they were “early” on that’s becoming increasingly important to US consumers), and that they love and support dogs. They’ve been doing this for decades, consistently, frequently and with quality (if not exactly groundbreaking) creative campaigns to back the brand up. Unsurprisingly, they’re valued at around $3-$5 billion, depending on who you ask.

The lesson is clear. Spirits brands that invest in building their own perspective, consistent messaging and an aesthetic that’s easily-identifiable win - from stalwarts like Tito’s to newcomers like Surfside or Skrewball. They understand their brand codes and emphasize them at every consumer touchpoint. They don’t obsess over celebrities or sponsorships, and most importantly they have defined personalities that they continue to invest in while the world’s biggest spirits brands seem to reinvent themselves on an annual basis. They know who they are, and they don’t try to change that to attract specific customer archetypes, most of whom are imaginary.

Understanding the Luxury Market

As much as the holding companies dominate in luxury spirits, they also have a fundamentally 1980s kind of understanding of what “luxury” means, and how it evolves. LVMH is being attacked on two fronts since their fashion businesses are also in decline. I could write an entire article about this alone - but for the sake of this piece, just know that LVMH has experienced a notable slowdown and modest decline in its luxury fashion and leather goods segment since late 2023 and into 2025: Fashion & Leather Goods revenue fell by 4-5% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2025; Overall group revenue dropped 2-3% in the same period, missing analyst expectations and marking a reversal from the strong post-pandemic growth; and profit from recurring operations declined 14% in 2024.

So, the luxury business is experiencing a disconnect with marketing what modern luxury should look and feel like to a new set of consumers. Part of this may be a fundamental misunderstanding of who their customer actually is, in lieu of a consumer archetype that the brands would like their customer to be. According to Bain and Company, about 75% of global luxury spending is from middle-income households. Those with a high net worth account for only a fraction of the sales since they are, conceivably, smart with their money and don’t waste it on frivolities that don’t accrue value. The most common luxury purchases include designer clothing, handbags, jewelry, watches, cars and, of course, spirits. So, no, your customer is likely not a globetrotting aesthete who loves fine art or attends fashion shows. They’re tired, insecure, average Americans with a little bit of money to spend (or a credit card) who are seeking an escape, and to badge themselves with brands that mirror their personalities, or what they want their personality to be perceived as.

For some brands, like Aperol (which accounted for 24% of Campari Group's sales in 2024), a consistently aspirational approach works wonders. It’s hot out, have a spritz, pretend you’re in Italy (even if you’ve never been there). Aperol’s pricepoint is affordable enough and the brand equity is prestigious and rich. They’ve done a great job of simply communicating this brand as a slice of life on the Italian Riviera, without leaning on celebrities nor trends. What they’ve achieved here is a “timeless” brand positioning that’s working, although certainly they’ll need to adapt when spritzes eventually fall out of fashion.

For other products, like Diageo’s Tanqueray, the same rich brand history yields less impressive results. The brand is down -9% YoY while competitors like Barrister Gin, Monkey 47 and Hendrick's continue to experience growth in an always-tough US gin market. Instead of leaning into the 100+ years of heritage Tanqueray comes with, the brand desperately tries to look modern and young. “Classic or Nothing” is their latest campaign and it says, well, pretty much nothing! It also looks like it was designed by Figma’s AI in about five minutes.

Big spirits brands would be wise to pivot their current perspectives on the luxury consumer. They’re stuck in a kind of “boomer” mindset when it comes to signaling status and prestige, and they also tend to overthink things massively - partnering with fine artists, for example, when their target customer has barely been to a museum in their lives. Again, brand codes help here - a company like Campari has a rich history of engaging artists to create brand campaigns as long ago as the turn of the 20th Century, and Absolut has defined its brand through the lens of creative partners since it launched in the US in 1979. Hennessy, which constantly collabs with artists, does not. Therefore it feels like a contrived money grab, because it is. The customer is smarter than many brand managers may think, and they also have a distinctly modern perspective on what counts as real “luxury.” Sometimes, as with Aperol, it is indeed a breezy afternoon on the Italian Riviera. But if your brand codes don’t align with the aspiration you’re trying to sell, they’ll see right through it.

A final note here - spirits marketing, in its heyday, used to be funny while also selling into a premium customer base. While lower-priced brands from Bud Light to Liquid Death are succeeding with humor-led campaigns, many luxury brands also define themselves with a sense of whimsy and cleverness. Take Hermès’ murder-mystery tour, or Loewe’s cheeky embrace of that tomato meme, for example. The spirits market today is almost completely devoid of any sense of humor, and for this reason it also feels like none of these brands have the personality they once did. Ryan Reynold’s Aviation Gin became big because the brand pumped out hilarious spoof videos aligned with culture and designed to be shared. The minute it got bought by Diageo, the messaging was neutered. Not every brand needs to be laugh-out-loud funny, but it certainly would be worth exploring beyond the current luxury spirits space’s self-seriousness.

From this:

(The very funny “Peloton Wife” spoof)

To this:

(Who cares? And why is he drinking a Negroni in the morning?)

Figure Out DTC

For spirits brands battered by slumping profits and the end of easy pandemic-era growth, the much-buzzed-about direct-to-consumer (DTC) channel is no longer a futuristic talking point—it’s the most urgent path forward. While the big HoldCos have stumbled by chasing trends and playing the sponsorship game, a real opportunity lies in forcing a new consumption behavior. It’s time to go on the offensive in DTC.

The dirty secret of spirits: consumers desperately want DTC, but the producers can’t figure it out. Polling shows that 85% of regular craft spirits drinkers wish they could legally purchase their favorite bottles directly to their doorstep—a hunger that’s only grown each year. New York led the charge in 2024 as the ninth and largest state to legalize DTC spirits shipping, setting up a regulatory “test case” that could quickly roll out nationwide if brands and regulators can prove it works safely and efficiently.

But DTC isn’t just about jumping shipping hurdles. It’s the unlock for everything Big Booze has lost: a direct conduit for storytelling, data, brand loyalty, and—most critically—margin. Forget the era of faceless, fungible premiumization. The winners are pairing DTC with killer subscription models, loyalty programs, and high-touch digital experiences. Done right, brands can trigger a “belonging effect,” offering exclusivity, early access to limited releases, and behind-the-scenes content that transforms occasional customers into loyal evangelists.

In a landscape where 4–5% of visitors to beverage alcohol websites actually buy—some of the highest conversion rates in e-commerce!—brands that control their story, nurture their superfans, and harvest their own first-party data are far better positioned than those clinging to batch-and-blast retail promotions.

Of course, spirits brands must contend with a regulatory labyrinth: only nine states fully permit DTC spirits shipping (wineries get a pass in 47), and every jurisdiction comes with different licensing hoops. That means national expansion takes grit and local know-how, but the trend lines are all moving in the right direction for those willing to invest. Platforms like LibDib are empowering craft brands to sidestep middlemen and legally expand DTC footprints—all while fueling the premiumization and craft movement that today’s consumers crave. Distribution partners like Flaviar and Caskers are primed to continue their growth - illustrating how digital-first, legally compliant DTC strategies emphasizing storytelling, engagement, and member experiences can unlock value and cultivate an enthusiastic customer base in the challenging spirits landscape.

Yes, this will be tough. But big brands have the money and brainpower to figure it out. They may even want to think about lobbying Washington during a particularly nonregulatory period of time to change some of the laws. Remember, this strategy worked for Uber at a time when the business was essentially just operating illegally in order to gather new customers. The upshot? Unlocking DTC is about more than just boxes at the door; it’s about rediscovering what made spirits brands legendary in the first place: a genuine sense of connection. The brands that will thrive are those that marry regulatory savvy and tech platforms with authenticity, community-building, and an obsession with their consumers’ lived experiences, not with what an anonymous distribution report declares is “on trend.”

In Conclusion: Some Big Brands That Still Get It

Let’s talk about a holding company that is, miraculously, doing well! Among the major global spirits holding companies, Campari Group is experiencing actual growth this year. For the first half of 2025, Campari reported net sales of €1,527.9 million, representing a slight uptick (0.3%) over the same period in 2024, with organic sales changes trending positive in the second quarter (+3.5%). While group net profit dipped compared to last year, Campari stands out for its resilience and positive momentum in a challenging market environment. Campari’s long-term outlook also remains bullish: revenue is forecast to grow at 4.6% annually over the next three years, outpacing much of the broader beverage industry in Europe. This growth is anchored by successful brand strategies (such as Aperol’s continued dominance), effective portfolio management, and an emphasis on premiumization and international expansion.

So, it’s not that Diageo and LVMH and the rest were objectively wrong to try and push into international luxury markets. And it’s not that holding companies shouldn’t acquire new brands… that’s kind of the point of them. Campari's latest brand acquisition was Courvoisier cognac, for example, which they purchased from Suntory Global Spirits (formerly Beam Suntory). The deal was announced in December 2023 and finalized in May 2024, making it Campari's largest acquisition ever. In addition to Courvoisier, Campari also recently acquired Trans Beverages Co., a premium spirits importer in South Korea, which has been renamed Campari Korea Co. But these are strategies that only work when you have the corporate functionality, brand equity and cultural caché to back them up. Campari’s fully loaded, while many competitors are shooting blanks.

Another holding company worth shouting out is William Grant & Sons. Although they, too, are in decline. While still investing in its brands and making notable acquisitions (such as Famous Grouse and Naked Malt in July 2025), the HoldCo posted sales declines in 2024, and most of its brands have faced volume drops in 2025. Some bright spots shine through though – like Reyka Vodka and Hudson American Whiskey, which both showed double-digit volume growth. Despite not fully recovering from industry-wide pressure, William Grant has also not sunk as low as some of their competitors, and they are masters at building brands from-scratch like Hendrick’s Gin and Monkey Shoulder. William Grant’s emphasis on cautious, careful brand planning and managing their equity with bold awareness campaigns (like Tullamore Dew’s “Celebrity Free”) will likely continue to bolster the HoldCo, even as their financials are inexorably linked to Diageo’s earnings. Worth noting is William Grant has, indeed, done the lazy thing and sponsored an F1 team with Glenfiddich, which will likely be a waste of money. But hey, at least they’re building most of their brands the right way, with consideration, a lens towards brand vision and personality and distinctivity in an increasingly monocultural booze market.

Campari, however, remains the standout among leading spirits holding companies for actual sales growth and a relatively positive performance so far in 2025, demonstrating the importance of strong brand execution and strategic agility in today’s volatile market and continuing their heritage of cheekily counter-cultural marketing.

TL;DR –

• For the first time in decades, major global spirits companies—like LVMH (Moët Hennessy), Diageo, Pernod Ricard, and Constellation Brands—are suffering sharp drops in sales, profits, and stock prices. This “hangover” isn’t caused by people drinking less, or a generational crisis: Gen Z and millennials still drink heavily and buy premium spirits, and overall consumption remains robust especially in the USA.

• The pandemic and rise of cannabis and wellness culture have shifted the drinking landscape, but these trends were predictable. The biggest miss was overestimating COVID-era “bubble” sales as the new normal, instead of a one-off spike.

• The real culprits: poor leadership, dated “MBA” playbooks, misjudged pandemic era benchmarks, unsuccessful price hikes, and a slavish chase of trends and celebrity culture—all while ignoring the importance of real brand vision, creative consistency, and creating a sense of genuine connection with constantly-evolving consumers.

• The industry’s top earners are stuck in dated models of luxury and out-of-touch customer archetypes, while more nimble brands (Skrewball, Aperol, Surfside) win by knowing exactly who they are, leaning into their heritage or brand vision, and growing through originality, humor, and community.

• The urgent unlock: direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales. 85% of craft spirits drinkers want DTC options, and brands that crack the regulatory code are rewarded with better margins, loyal super fans, and the ability to control their own storytelling and data.

• Brands need to stop relying on mass-market acquisitions and sanitized global campaigns. Instead, they should focus on consistent messaging, building their unique perspective, nurturing superfans, and leveraging digital and DTC models—even if the laws require patience and clever lobbying.

• In a landscape where most holding companies are struggling, Campari Group is the rare global player achieving sales growth in 2025, thanks to thoughtful brand management (Aperol), successful strategic acquisitions, and adaptability. William Grant & Sons shows flashes of success through careful brand building but still faces overall declines.

• Bottom line: Big Booze needs to ditch the copy-paste strategies, rediscover its roots, elevate creativity, exploit DTC, and build brand community—fast—or risk irrelevance in a market that still loves to drink, just not the way the boardroom expects.