Yesterday
Our culture and economy are in the liminal space between yesterday and tomorrow. As consumer VC firm Hannah Grey described it in their latest Cultural Vibrations report, “we live in a moment where the economy and cultural fabric are straddling legacy systems while staring down a learning curve of unfolding possibilities.”
For some, yesterday is a memory of kids playing ball in empty lots and drinking pop for 10 cents a bottle. For others, it’s watching Forrest Gump on a VHS tape rented from Blockbuster as a dial up modem screeches in the background. Yesterday is as much Little House on the Prairie as it is Harry Potter, as much Led Zeppelin as it is Eminem.
Dusk came yesterday in two phases. As platforms like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify bypassed traditional distribution constraints and simplified access to suppliers (webpages, content, vendors, movies, music), they offered better user experiences (choice, access, price, time-savings) and successfully aggregated consumer demand, shifting the locus of value creation from distribution of unique supply to aggregation of mass consumer demand. This evolution stripped suppliers of regional monopolies and industry-exclusive relationships, forcing them to compete on a now global playing field, against significantly more participants, in markets with significantly lower barriers to entry.
While this massive transformation upended centuries of traditional economics and alone would have reshaped cultural trends, tastes, and preferences for decades to come, the integration of software and data tools into this new economic structure accelerated the onset of the cultural witching hour in which we find ourselves. As platforms layered on analytical tools to monitor and improve user engagement and conversion metrics, they optimized marketplace dynamics for ultimate efficiency, promoting suppliers with proven, scalable products that appealed to the greatest number of consumers. Not only were suppliers now forced to trade in the new marketplaces developed by internet aggregators, they also needed to now supply products that aligned with the demand structures defined by the marketplaces themselves. This meant shorter songs, pastel color palettes, International AirBnB style, repeatable game mechanics, blanded logos, “1500 Bode clones from brands that wouldn’t be doing embroidery before, but now they’re doing fake vintage-tablecloth shirts for a 10th of the price”, movie sequel upon movie sequel, socially-engineered dating app profiles, political influence bots, and sensationalist news content. Across every domain, suppliers adapted to the structural scaffolding of algorithmically calibrated marketplaces by homogenizing products, reusing existing IP, copying popular aesthetics, creating for mass appeal, and making “data-driven” decisions to inform production choices.
Somehow, dreams of a better user experience corrupted into nightmares of cultural stagnancy, enshittification, and a dark age of average. Unprecedented access to an endless supply of seemingly everything - from news to music to movies to clothes - offered a tantalizing value proposition that truly did make our lives better or at least easier. But somewhere along the way, digital marketplaces turned vapid and stagnant.
Artificial intelligence now seems poised to reshape the supplier marketplaces that led us here in the first place. Digital marketplace aggregators forced suppliers to compete globally against significantly more participants in markets with significantly lower barriers to entry. AI will exponentially accelerate this transformation, removing almost all barriers to entry to supplying digital goods and services, from AI generated music and movies to software applications to ecommerce sites. It will superpower the algorithms that mediate marketplace relationships, removing almost all friction and unifying supply and demand in precise harmony. Demand can increasingly evolve into addiction, with suppliers able to formulate their products for maximum dependency. Perhaps the concept of marketplace will become extinct, with perfect, vertically integrated AI capable of predicting, making, and satisfying our demands before we even know what we desire.
Where do we go from here? It is nighttime and we are unsure of what the new day will bring. The vibes are shifting.
Cultural Night Terrors
“It would be unfortunate indeed if out of the dilemmas and distractions of mass culture and mass society there should arise an altogether unwarranted and idle yearning for a state of affairs which is not better but only a bit more old-fashioned.”
Hannah Arendt | Between Past and Future, 1961
Lurking in the dark night is a deep yearning for a tomorrow that looks more like days past. The changing nature of culture and economy drives us backwards into tradition and history, inviting us to seek familiarity in the stability of a world we once inhabited. Or more likely, imagine our ancestors once did. Nostalgic revivalism and the resurrection of old customs gather speed just as the future races towards us.
But it is not just the future that pushes us into the past. The frictionless structures of digital marketplaces and global capitalism have consumed all - there are no dark spaces anymore. If there is no new territory to explore, no more frontier, than all that is left is to turn back. So we regurgitate the old world, strip it of its pretense, and declare greed is good since the roaring 20s are back (boom boom!).
Perhaps the rhythms of history are destined to cycle around and around in a cultural ouroboros, recursively producing anew the same narratives, tastes, and aesthetics of our ancestors 100 or 1000 years ago. Perhaps this feeling of a time between past and future is destined to be felt by every generation born in the delicate period when what has come becomes what comes next.
But what if there was a different path? Not just a long switchback on a single road but a second road altogether? Perhaps then the icicles of our frozen culture may instead become the arrowheads of a flourishing renaissance.
Dreaming Lucid
“To people who have grown weary of the endless complications of everyday living and to whom the purpose of existence seems to have been reduced to the most distant vanishing point of an endless horizon, it must come as a tremendous relief to find a way of life in which everything is solved in the simplest and most comfortable way, in which a car is no heavier than a straw hat and the fruit on the tree becomes round as quickly as a hot-air balloon.”
Walter Benjamin | Experience and Poverty, 1933
If we are to escape the echo chamber of history and forge a new path forward we must be able to consciously confront the psyche of modern society and see ourselves for what we are. We must see how time and time again we choose the path of least resistance. We must understand how the systemic outcome of a population demanding the path of least resistance within a cultural and economic framework hyperoptimized to satisfy demand is cultural poverty and corporeal gluttony. And we must learn how to terraform the terrain so that the path of least resistance leads to flourishing and vibrant communities.
Resistance is friction, and it exists in a range of shapes and forms: delays, constraints, information asymmetries, regulations, borders, and languages. Friction is the sea between an island and the mainland and the season between planting and harvesting. To the market, these are inefficiencies that hinder the movement of products, people, ideas, and energy from point A to point B and decrease potential profit. To the individual, these are difficulties, deficits, and limitations that hinder our ability to possess that which we desire. So much human ingenuity and technical progress has been directed at conquering friction - fire, the wheel, the printing press - that the story of mankind can almost be summarized as a war against friction. Digital marketplaces streamlined by algorithms accelerated humanity’s victory over friction by shortening time delays, removing borders, correcting asymmetries, democratizing information, and improving accessibility.
But we must remember that this is what we asked for. We wanted Amazon Prime and global content catalogs on-demand with no commercial breaks. We wanted bagels delivered on hungover mornings and the grocery shopping done for us. We wanted to reduce resistance to the friction of skin swiping across aluminosilicate glass.
Thus dreams of a different tomorrow cannot be naive. Degrowth visions of a post-platform, post-capitalist world fail to offer the standard of living so many across the world are accustomed to. Frictionless life, with its year round avocados, same day delivery, and dopamine on-demand, is an offer too enticing to pass up. Barring some catastrophic event, the era of mass self-sufficiency, little-to-no international travel, and decentralized energy is bound to the past.
Yet friction, in the form of distance, scarcity, time, and cost, shapes our values. Removing obstacles that hinder our ability to possess that which we desire ultimately reshapes the value that we once prescribed those same desires. Scarcity, for instance, precludes unhindered access and forces competition for finite resources. As digital marketplaces and artificial intelligence continue to increase the supply of content and information while simultaneously reducing barriers to entry, the value of any given digital resource is reduced. Moreover, information availability transcends digital bounds and affects the scarcity of in person experiences. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in travel, where publicized knowledge of “hidden gem” locations transforms those locations into the most popular destinations, reducing their appeal by increasing supply of visitors.
The course of a river is latent in a terrain before the first rain ever falls. We too will seek the path of least resistance.
Instead of attempting to turn the river around, we can shape its flow and direction. Instead of changing human behavior, we can shape where our paths wish to go.
Tomorrow
“If humanity is not resigned to becoming the sterile consumer of values that it managed to create in the past, capable only of giving birth to bastard works, to gross and puerile inventions, then it must learn again that all true creation implies a certain deafness to the appeal of other values, even going so far as to reject them if not denying them altogether. For one cannot fully enjoy the other, identify with him, and yet at the same time remain different. When integral communication with the other is achieved completely, it sooner or later spells doom for both his and my creativity. The great creative eras were those in which communication had become adequate for mutual stimulation by remote partners, yet not so frequent or so rapid as to endanger the indispensable obstacles between individuals and groups or to reduce them to the point where overly facile exchanges might equalize and nullify their diversity.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss | Tristes Tropiques, 1955
We sanded the rough edges and greased the tracks too zealously. All around the forces of globalization, capitalism, and algorithmic engineering work to flatten the ranges that once obstructed the exchanges between individuals. The topography is being leveled, the rivers bridged, and the roads paved. Designed in Cupertino, developed in Shenzhen, sold in Istanbul - using parts sourced in the Congo, people raised in Delhi, and designs scoured from Estonia. The tandem of digital marketplaces and data tools removed the obstacles to supply-demand efficiency and in doing so reduced the friction that fosters creativity, stimulates originality, enables self awareness, and generates richness of life.
By flattening the ranges of society, we at once dismantled the ivory tower that insulated traditional culture from mass popularization and filled the bohemian underground that insulated alternative individualism from traditional culture. As a result, we are left with a philistine society consuming dopamine culture and dragging every fringe style and activity into the mainstream.
But the novelty of unrestricted access to supply is wearing off and anhedonia is beginning to set in. The dopamine rush from our digital dope doesn’t feel like it used to. We can only scroll so much Tiktok, buy so many clothes, and react to so many sensationalist news articles. At some point a numbness develops. At some point, another sunny summer day doesn’t feel as warm as it once did and we must experience a cold winter to remember the joy we once felt.
There is a pressure forming to rebuild the towers and excavate the underground from both above and below. You can sense it in group chats and parties and Substack comment threads. We are remembering the uses of social diversity, not in the DEI sense, but in the sense that we remember we are dependent on others to define for ourselves what we stand for, and that if there are no others we are nothing at all. We are remembering that the breakup of Pangea is what supercharged evolution, that diversity and richness are predicated on division. In this process we must not forget that since we understand ourselves in relation to others, we are responsible for them, and they are responsible for us. Chauvinism and fascism reduce diversity as much as a supercontinent does. But to insulate culture and individualism from the pressures of mass society we must create intimate, gate-kept spaces and communities.
If friction shapes value, then meaning itself depends on boundaries. The flattening of culture isn’t just a loss of creativity, it’s a collapse of differentiation. When everything is accessible, nothing feels sacred. When every style is public, every place discoverable, every thought instantly shareable, the distinctions that once formed identity, belonging, and aesthetic richness erode. But by damming the valleys, building cultural high grounds, and allowing meaning to pool through intentional separation, we can use our natural tendency toward paths of least resistance into building a world that looks better than both the present and the past.
It looks like an archipelago.
Supermoon invests in the modern living market. If you’re building for the human future across sleep, health, wellness, and leisure or are interested in partnering with one of our portfolio companies, I’d love to chat. You can reach me on LinkedIn and Twitter, or email me directly at gj@supermooncapital.com.