there's no real growth anywhere, more and more $ printed and undistributed and nowhere for it to go, real estate bubble, private equity buying tons of diff brands over the last 10 years, buy a brand squeeze out the symbolic value accrued over the years (levis 501 is just an empty symbol, the 501 is a range not a cut, elevated to a thing because its recognizable), then make sneakers make t shirts, the product range of every brand has exploded, but the meaning of anything is thinner and thinner; simultaneously desperate mashups, brand collabs among everything and limited editions (fungus genetics examples, you can breed w your own arm) -- in this situation what you theoretically get from this collab if you're lucky is a little umami

We wrote this because we wanted to sum up some of our impressions after working with brands and organizations for almost three years as Nemesis (and many more as solo agents). This was not meant to be a nihilistic, Gen-X faceplant (“nothing means anything any more”), since we think that perspective can paper over the nuances of consumer experience, business realities, and cultural crisis. Instead, we wanted to link macroeconomic and macrotrend observations to everyday experience, especially in the context of burgeoning collapse.

This is what we found: everything is cancelled, and it’s the beginning of the end of the experience economy as we’ve come to know it. The emerging post-umami economy is still nebulous (and will be the focus of upcoming Nemesis memos). Visceral desire may again rise over the paradoxical kind. In the meantime, we suggest thinking about what you wanted, why you got it, and who happens to be holding the L-Glutamate as it all comes tumbling down. And take some time to cultivate a taste for the sour, the bitter and the straight up repulsive – the only flavors of today’s reality pill. /15

Meanings that only a few have access to are secrets. In the absence of meaning, the illusion of a secret is created by imposing a subcultural barrier to entry where only through an opaque process of scene work can one ‘get’ it (or, if you’re unlucky: if you gotta ask you’ll never know…). Alternatively, they are wrapped in the veil of an elusive X-factor, to which only a privileged few, i.e. the creative director, have direct access.

The key referent of luxury brands used to be one thing they made really well at great cost. But today they have gentrified themselves by discarding any fixed material basis: the only referent that does any work is the price, and the wealth associated with it.

By combining the traditional symbols of wealth with a pool of meaning that was made to seem scarce but was in fact infinite, brands created the umami equivalent of free energy. Everyone wanted money and everyone wanted umami. And there was more money around than ever before. What could go wrong? /14

Let’s take an example. The luxury sector, fashion in particular, has increasingly become a key theater for umami. Throughout the history of human civilization, luxury was premised on being expensive, meaning it resulted from investing an unreasonable amount of work, material or other scarce resources into the making of a thing.

But today’s rich don’t generally wear the 2020 version of royal purple, something like parametrically fitted garments made of nanofibers embellished with synthetic mother of pearl (which might be the results of real growth). Instead, they wear $500 cotton t-shirts with inscrutable references and visual motifs pulled from a smörgås-moodboard that makes little “sense” in any generalizable way. The t-shirt’s price clearly isn’t a function of its material makeup, but rather a result of some form of manipulation of meaning associated with it. But because meaning (or its substrate information) is infinite, it can only become a luxury once it carries the illusion of scarcity. /13

Cultural umami is the vague sense that yes, for some reason, it is. ““This shouldn’t be good but it is” “this doesn’t seem like what it’s supposed to be” “I shouldn’t be here but i am” “this could be anywhere but it’s here” If you tried to unpack your intuition, the absence of the there-there would quickly become evident.

Yet in practice this didn’t matter, because few people were able to reach this kind of deep self-interrogation. The cycle was simply too fast. There was never time for these concoctions to congeal into actual new things (e.g. create the general category of K-Pop patrons for Central European arts institutions). We can’t be sure if they ever meant anything beyond seeming yummy at the time. /12