Thought this week​

The following article was originally published in the December issue of SPUR magazine in my Tomorrow column. These are written by myself 2 months prior as my Tomorrow Column is exclusively in print and needs time, something that always encourages me to work on topics that are not hype.

It’s the Summer of 2024. My editor and I are discussing ‘Tomorrow’s next theme. As always, the mission of my column is to inspire you to join a movement for systems that foster creativity, innovation, sustainability and authenticity. The column seeks to promote hope and challenge the status quo. ‘Humanise’ will be the theme for the next few issues, named after Thomas Heatherwick’s book and the movement he has pioneered.

For us ‘Humanise’ starts with the question: how can we nurture authenticity? As always, when decoding culture, it’s key to run an honest diagnostic, even if it leads to uncomfortable conversations. Today, people and brands around the world want to disentangle themselves from a chaotic sense of culture, media and dizzyingly fast trend cycles.

Trends are the microchip that brings more or less speed to Culture, to make a very 2024 analogy. Culture is part of the complex operating system that is society. But right now, culture feels fragmented and glitchy, in part due to social media and algorithms, in part due to our own incessant and anxious quest for more newness, more likes, more sense of relevance.

Algorithmic determinacy

To humanise, let’s first dissect the opposite: algorithmic determinacy. Amidst it, we risk losing our human authenticity, something Kim Córdova and Bruce Schneier point out for E-Flux in ‘The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt: ‘Culture is increasingly mediated through algorithms’. In the 2000s, internet data became the new oil and thus started a journey where our authentic lives became tracked and commodified by platforms, marketers, brands and, of course by us, resulting in today’s top career goal for GenZ: becoming an online influencer or creator (as opposed to astronauts in the 1950s).

Culture is an invisible mass we are obsessed with quantifying. How has it become so engineered and commodified? Authenticity is inevitably compromised when culture becomes a transaction, primarily motivated by likes, conversion rates and data-farming. In the process, it micro scams us and we, unwillingly or not, become micro-scammers as well. We rob ourselves of the power to create and engage with culture authentically when everything becomes a promotional stunt.

Our very human obsession with hype

Our obsession with hype is very human and goes far into history, even anthropology. Babies learn to copy their parents to absorb and replicate their culture. Marie Antoinette was a controversial trendsetter whose fashions were scrutinised and multiplied for status signalling. K-Hole, known for their innovative trend reports and popularizing the term norm-core shared with Ssense “there is an intensity in the trend cycle, and it is about keeping up with things.”

For brands what this means, as stated in my report Hypercycle with Gung Ho “Banking too much on commentary on viral trends, cultural and technological moments in the media can prove short-sighted and even wasteful. It’s already hard enough for brands to be seen as genuine by the public. The deeper risk is the loss of brand authenticity.”

Emotional restoration

To every dark side there is light. Today there is a growing cultural conversation reflecting the human desire to regain authenticity. The feeling of being caught in a constant online promotion has caused emotional dissonance for brands and people alike. There is a need to go back to the basics, focusing on community and serving authentically.

This is a journey of ‘Emotional Restoration’, a term borrowed from Jasmine Bina in her piece ‘Creating new units of culture’. Bina highlights the need to reconsider the units and rulers with which we measure the quality of experiences we create, in a bid to redefine what matters. Seth Godin in his best-selling book This is Marketing anticipated the 2020s pitfalls of the internet and social media. Godin sought to humanize marketing, urging to focus on ‘Who do you serve and precisely what change are you trying to make’.

Deep Community

If we were to create new units of measuring culture, where would we start? First, we could explore what gets the ‘highest score’? For myself, it would be what and who serves “regenerative cultural production for the greater good of people and the planet.” In his SXSW 2024 Keynote ‘Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web’, Patreon CEO Jack Conte advocates for spaces on the internet where creators and their communities connect directly and authentically to ‘create what they want, and control their own destinies’. He encourages us to steer away from units of measure prioritising numbers only and instead focus on passionate community, tapping into Kevin Kelly’s theory of 1000 true fans.

Why? Culture is a lived experience, something we create with and for humans. Social media platforms sit at the intersection of culture and community, and can be redirected to co-create and support diverse and authentic culture. We haven’t found the answer yet, but we are on our way.

Dare to be inconvenient and prioritise on ‘Emotion as a function’

As Thomas Heatherwick states in the context of design and architecture ‘Accept that how people feel about a building is a critical part of its function.’ What matters is not numbers or popularity, it’s emotion. Fashion is emotion. Authenticity is emotion. Dare to be inconvenient and not follow something or someone because it’s popular. When we stop comparing, it nurtures creativity. Perhaps we tap into the purity, even if briefly, of knowing nothing. Ernest Hemingway once wisely said ‘the thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing’.

By Geraldine Wharry