Life After Lifestyle

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sequence: post-authenticity

Life After Lifestyle

Toby Shorin

September 14, 2022

Entry 032

Concepts

cultural theory

post-authenticity

understanding meaning

This essay debuted as a talk at FWB Fest in Idyllwild, California, 2022. I’ve rearranged and expanded the material for the essay version.

It is 2018 and I am on a flight to San Francisco. I am seated next to a harried woman who pays fifty dollars for WiFi and rattles out Slack messages. She is an employee of one of the largest digital agencies, and is clearly on her way to a client presentation. I can’t help but side-eye her screen as she edits a presentation deck. “Shipt isn’t just a delivery service,” she types in a large green sans-serif font. “It’s a super detailed, expert level, highly knowledgeable ideology.”

Shipt is a same-day grocery delivery business, an Instacart competitor owned by Target. It is a B2C company that provides a commodity service. Grocery delivery, an ideology?

On the one hand, it’s easy to laugh at consultants charging brands a hundred thousand dollars for a deck that says they should become a cult. But it’s another thing to acknowledge that brands today have real cultural power. This essay was first delivered as a talk at a festival by Friends With Benefits, a digital community that promotes cultural creation on web3. But where are FWB’s products? Instead, the culture seems to be the main thing, the product itself.

I’m going to argue that we are leaving one era and entering a new one, with new models for how culture is thought about and created, and new models for commerce, but also new critical questions, and greater moral challenges. But to understand these new models, we first need to know where we’re coming from, so I’m going to start with a retrospective. What were the 2010s?

Think back.

The Cultural Production Service Economy

The year is 2011. You just found out about Everlane.com. You order a blouse, an oxford. You browse on tumblr, scrolling through fuckyeahmenswear and photos of neatly arranged, squared Braun products. The year is 2014. You visit Carryology. You hear about Casper mattresses on the podcast Serial. Recession hipster culture is over, but its premium mediocre detritus is everywhere. The year is 2017. You are a creative with a liberal arts degree. You work at a direct to consumer brand. Like every company you are starting a blog. You learn about content marketing. You go to a pop-up museum filled with balloons. You take pictures for the gram. Product photos are beautiful. Sophisticated. Shot at an isometric angle. It’s the new “lean luxury.” You buy coffee from Blue Bottle. The year is 2019. You order your medication from Hims and Hers. You and your friends want to launch a pop-up brand for the weekend. You go on Alibaba and find blank t-shirts then spend the weekend slapping together a logo and some graphics. The year is 2022. You go to a workout class at the Bala store. You do yoga inside its sculpted pastel interior, like being inside of an Instagram advertisement. It feels like every aspect of your life could live in this world. Delightfully packaged, seamless, products that elevate all of your activities to a luxury branded experience.

The 2010s is what I want to call the era of Lifestyle. You know what it felt like, because you lived through it. And I did too. Since 2014 I have lived in New York, inside the machine where Lifestyle is made. Spending my waking moments moving through these branded experiences, I felt they they pointed to something I could say but not name.

Lifestyle was defined by three elements — brands, culture, and supply chain. The way these components were tied together by technology in the 2010s resulted in a particular organization of culture. To understand this model, we must look at each component in turn.

Let’s start with brands.

Via Bloomberg

Hot on the tails of the 2008 financial crisis and the housing crash came the Great Recession and Occupy movement. Graduates were entering a de-industrialized economy, a poor job market, and the double broken promises of affordable homeownership and a job guarantee for college graduates. But as Obama optimism ramped up and the economy began to recover under quantitative easing, a new wave of aspirational companies began to launch. This was the moment of Warby Parker, of Bonobos, of Birchbox. This was the era of the direct to consumer brand.

The overall brand promise of the DTC brand, “cutting out of the middle man,” can be seen as a reflexive response to the post-Occupy, anti-corporate sentiments that saturated the early part of the decade. The DTC moment was also driven by a renewed wave of startup enthusiasm. Fawning profile pieces peppered the media landscape, and the overall message emanating from the advertising, marketing, and investment worlds was: let’s not shop from these bloated multinationals; now we can buy from American entrepreneurs who are starting...