Fall 2017 · 2017-12-11 · between the beaming selfies and the thunderous applause at TED...

by Sean Monahan & Sophie Secaf

Fall2017

Poptismism .............................Memethink ..............................Post personal Brand .............GenExit .....................................

04294459

Content & Creative DirectionSean Monahan & Sophie Secaf

Content EditorRony Rodrigues

Art Direction & DesignMarcella Brito Franco

ContributorsAndré Alves & Bruna Baffa

Sponsorbox1824.com

Based on trend research, semiotic analysis and qualitative studies conducted in eight U.S. states during the spring 2017.

— 1

It’s the best of timesIt’s the worst of times

We live in an age where people are individually optimistic and collectively pessimistic. Somehow between the beaming selfies and the thunderous applause at TED conventions, there’s a creeping paranoia. Despite the hype: We might be lost.

Look at your friend’s Instagram page. Then take a peek in their medicine cabinet. Everyone’s a ‘thot’ in the streets and an insomniac in the sheets. Our lives are defined by cognitive dissonance. In public, we project perfection. In private, we’re swamped with doubt.

1 — POPTIMISM

We’ve all been incepted by the Secret. What’s social media if not a vision board for the life we wish we had? We don’t share what we have. We chart what we want. We’re faking it until we make it, using the vernacular of pop culture to conjure the lives we want.

We know a better world is possible — just look at any well-curated feed. But we don’t quite know which exit to take to get there… Food, Travel, Wellness and Likes are the raw material of our social Poptimism Coping Mechanisms.

Ingrid Goes West

1 — POPTIMISM

When we ask:

Who am I?

The internet answers...

This is what you want.

POPTIMISTCOPING

MECHANISMS

Alternatives to the anxiety of everyday life.

1 — POPTIMISM / 1.1 POPTIMIST COPING MECHANISMS

Kale is My AntidepressantKale is for subs. Only a masochist fetishizes a food that needs to be massaged before it’s edible. A little lemon juice. That half avocado that escaped your toast’s morning schmear. All is well. Food has become more than a health obsession. It’s a declaration of identity.


FOOD

HEALTH


FOOD

IDENTITY

Better Than WellIs life a balancing act or a competition? Are we treading water or running an uphill marathon? With life coaches selling their services in chunks of texting time, wellness looks more like a data plan than actual self-care. The world’s a crazy place. If there’s one thing we should be able to control—it’s how we feel.


WELLNESS

CARE


WELLNESS

CONTROL

Vacation in BetaVacations used to have a tempo. Two weeks for the Americans. Two months for the French. But all following the logic of: You went, you saw, you returned. Today, we are perennial hot dog legs. Splayed out on the same beach at a smattering of different geographic locations: Phuket, Dominica, Stromboli, etc. There’s no serious business that can’t be typed out on a smartphone. Are they relaxing? Are they working? It’s unclear. They are, however, drinking frozé on a beach.


TRAVEL

PERSPECTIVE


TRAVEL

POWER

$$$Likes$$$ for LikesInfluencer networks can be built the easy way (through bots) or the hard way (through personal brand). You can buy likes, followers, retweets, whatever. The only people who will know if your network is real or fake are those determined enough to lurk your follower count. But for the most part, high numbers give you momentum. They’re the definition of fake it ’till you make it.


FRIENDS

LOVE


FRIENDS

REACH

— 2

our brains think in memes

Those viral bits of culture that clog up our feeds are also clogging up our brains. Our opinions sound like we’re retweeting someone else’s hot takes. Everybody’s eyebrow game is identical to everyone else’s.

Memes (cultural content that spreads virally from person to person) aren’t new, but the speed and reach of their spread have been amplified by the internet.

2 — MEMETHINK

In the olden days, memes were super rare. Culture moved slowly. The memes you got from your family were more or less what you were stuck with. Today, not so much. The world is awash in memes. About what to eat (avocado toast), memes about what to wear (Stan Smith’s), memes about what to do (fidget spinners), memes about what to care about (#goals) and, of course, memes about what to think…

This isn’t conscious copying. It’s unconscious synchronicity.

2 — MEMETHINK

But there’s a danger here (and it’s not that the internet has made people less “real,” less “true,” less “authentic”)...

The slippage between what people say they want and what people really want isn’t really anything new. Double entendre, reading between the lines, dog-whistling: these are all terms for subtle, coded, or ironic forms of communication.

More to the point, we exist in a media environment defined by a very specific form of coded language: marketing. It’s become second nature for us to presume everyone has some ulterior profit motive. We’ve all internalized this messaging style.

Memethink is an image-based form of groupthink, which makes it all the more dangerous than its Orwellian cousin. Thinking in images is inherently more emotional than logical. It leaves us open to having our thoughts hijacked by stupid, half-baked, and just plain evil ideas.

2 — MEMETHINK

The rise of the Alt-Right has been a case study in the semiotic instability of images. The same way Hitler loaded a good luck symbol (the swastika) with racism, the Alt-Right loads Facebook stickers (Trash Dove), reaction buttons (Gratitude Flower) , and cartoon frogs (Pepe) with similar implications.

Redpilling is the right wing’s term for weaponizing Memethink.

The goal is two-fold. First, to convert: If you’ve been a Spongebob superfan since you were 10, he’s the perfect vehicle to convince you vaccines cause autism. And second, to destabilize: What better way to undermine meaning than insist anything can be subverted?

2 — MEMETHINK / 2.1 MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS VS. MARKETPLACE OF IDENTITIES

Originally, people thought the internet would combat superstitions, conspiracy theories and ideologies. Yet our hyper-mediated world is warping our brains, making us unable to discern truth from fiction. The internet was supposed to be a Marketplace of Ideas. Instead, it became a Marketplace of Identities, a marketing vector — for brands and people alike.

Have you ever felt like social media was more work than play?

That you weren’t really being yourself, but selling yourself?


When we put identities before ideas, we put authenticity before truth, desire before reality. When Oxford English Dictionaries named Post-Truth the 2016 word of the year, they were channelling this zeitgeist.

To thrive in this Marketplace of Identities, we’ve been told we need to cultivate our authentic inner selves and manifest them as Personal Brands. Through coherent, pub-lic-facing, cross-platform media output. We’ve been told this is the future. When in fact, it’s just the present.

This vision is so endemic that when we try to imagine an alternative, we have trouble imagining anything that breaks with or even challenges this paradigm.

We’ve become characters in our own lives, worried about settings, motivations, story arcs. We’re waiting for the third act. But the third act never comes.


Is this photo #myaesthetic? Does it ruin the grid? Sharing too often? Not enough?

If this all sounds exhausting, that’s be-cause it is. The logic of Personal Brand is anti-fluid. Every day is a slog to maintain coherence, a fight against the entropy of everyday life. But if we’re all exhausted, we have to consider the possibility.

Maybe we don’t want to live in a movie?Maybe we want real life.

2 — MEMETHINK / 2.1 MARKET PLACE OF IDEAS VS. MARKET PLACE OF IDENTITIES

PEOPLE DON’T KNOW WHO THEY AREPEOPLE DON’T KNOW WHAT MATTERSPEOPLE DON’T KNOW WHO TO TRUSTPEOPLE DON’T KNOW HOW TO FEEL

— 3

She logs into her Facebook account and searches around for Account Settings. Facebook’s helper asks if she’s looking for Privacy Settings.

“No,” she thinks. “I’m done”

3 — POST-PERSONAL BRAND

She finds Deactivate Account and it gives her a list:

This is temporary. I’ll be back.

I spend too much time using Facebook.

I have another Facebook account.

I get too many emails, invitations, and

requests from Facebook.

I don’t understand how to use Facebook.

I don’t feel safe on Facebook.

I have a privacy concern.

I don’t find Facebook useful.

My account was hacked.

Other, please explain further...

She picks Other and types in: Ughhhhhhhhhhhh

If you look at Gen Z, the emerging demographic born from 1998 to the present, a different story emerges. Information is scarce about them. None of them have left their teen years behind, and few are even legally adults. They’re a generation defined by technology, like the older Millennials. As a result, we tend to characterize them as Millennials on Steroids: more tech-saavy, more progressive, more entitled, more diverse.

Yet, they’re abandoning Facebook. They keep their Instagrams private and rarely have more than nine posts. The uber-ephemeral Snapchat is the platform of choice, if only because of its narrowcast functionality. This rejection of social media’s broadcast possibilities is at odds with the Turbo-Millennial narrative. Why the disconnect?

Oftentimes, we’re only looking at the Dazed One Million. The rich, privileged, urban youth buying what the


Dazed One Hundred are selling. This hyper-visible demographic of micro-celebrities and digital influencers is biasing our read on reality. Are all Millennials like Kim Kardashian? Are all Gen Xers like Kurt Cobain? Are all Baby Boomers like Donald Trump?

Maybe. Celebrities have traditionally been used as generational icons. But in our fragmentary media landscape, celebrity seems less paradigmatic and more mundane.

When we zoom out from the most media-savvy, a different set of values becomes apparent for Gen Z:

Declining labor market participation

Stagnating or declining rates of college attendance

Record-breaking third-party affiliation

Exiting School, Exiting Work, Exiting Politics

Young people feel boxed out by urban gentrification, astronomical student debt, and stagnant or declining wages. They’re ambivalent about the old cultural centers –and the life scripts that go with them. The old pillars of identity— credentials, careers, and party affiliations— are being abandoned.

In this scenario, cities like New York, London, and Berlin remain aspirational—but are no longer relatable. Perhaps, this is why we’ve given this new generation the quasi-apocalyptic moniker: Gen Z. The present arrangements clearly don’t work. But it’s important to remember change doesn’t mean The End.




— 4

Before the Facebook, Google, and Amazon triumvirate, there was Friendster, MySpace and LiveJournal. Greyhairs remember those platforms in their heyday. Those too young to remember find kitschy memorials to a more innocent internet past, Wayback Machines to emo teen angst, Avril Lavigne, ties-as-belts.

Every Plague starts with Patient Zero. For MySpace, the beginning of the end started one day in 2006, when Sophia Amoruso’s best friend blocked her after getting bumped from the Top Eight. The current viral die-off can be dated back

4 — GENEXIT

This isn’t Gen Z — it’s GenExit.

to October 3, 2016. Kim Kardashian was hog-tied in a hotel bathtub while some chic Adidas-clad motorcycle gang roared off into the Paris night—$11 million worth of diamonds in hand.

Millennial Kim (born 1980) thought she could keep her real life and her digital persona neatly separated. But the bleed came pre-packaged with the very idea of Personal Brand. For GenExit (born 20 years later), Robbing Peter to Pay Paul was already status quo. GenExit knows maintaining a Personal Brand as a trap. They don’t want to invest scarce emo-tional resources into marketing them-selves. The possibilities of fluidity are more interesting than the coherence of being a brand.

We make a prediction. This generation won’t use social media like their ancestors. They want fluid identities in terms of belief—not Personal Brands. In the same way that Millennials transformed cable into prestige TV, GenExit will remake social media in their own image.

Millennials wanted a long-tail television landscape that could signal their personal taste. Something that internalized the hipster logic of nostalgia and knowingness.

GenExit wants a social media landscape that reinstates the personal over the commercial. A user relationship fixated on imagination, creativity, and intimate connections.

The future is a sketch of a Post-Personal Brand world – more invested in ideas than identity, fluidity than control, anonymity than power, and community than reach.

4 — GENEXIT

MillennialsPersonal Brand

RelevantProgressive

Idealistic

GenExitPost-Personal Brand

RelatableSkeptical

Pragmatic

GENEXIT EDITS

4 — GENEXIT / 4.1 GENEXIT EDITS

Investments in an alternative everyday life.

Flaking on IdentityThe most transgressive thing a brand can do is abandon its color. Imagine a red Pepsi, a blue Coke. The same thing applies to people who buy into the logic of the Personal Brand. Imagine Paris Hilton without her vocal fry babydoll voice. When GenExit hears the word “brand,” the meme of Admiral Akbar screaming “It’s a trap!” comes to mind.



IDENTITY

IDEAS

Experimental ConsumptionShop on Kickstarter. Join the Democratic Socialists and the Log Cabin Republicans. Take selfies with charcoal ice cream, even though you’re paleo. Born into a world gone beta, every opportunity feels fleeting. GenExit buys like nobody is watching, memes like their accounts are private, and lives like it’s the end of the world.



CONTROL

FLUIDITY

High-End HomelessWhy go see the Mona Lisa when you already know what it looks like? Better to Airbnb a garret apartment in Saint-Ouen kitted out in the same Ikea furniture you have at home. Better yet, don’t even tell anyone where you’re going. You’ll still be available, just checking your email at a more leisurely European tempo.



POWER

ANONYMITY

In AbsentiaFixating on social reach is a legacy problem. Media buys and social media sweat equity yield the same results. So why not just take the easy route and buy your eyeballs? The real problem has never been exposure. It’s always been our ability to connect. There’s a flurry of commentary on our newfound desire for community. Some people see this as a good thing. But it needs to be said: If we want something, that means we don’t have it.



REACH

COMMUNITY

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Fall 2017 · 2017-12-11 · between the beaming selfies and the thunderous applause at TED...

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