Reality Somms: How to Cultivate A Discipline of Knowing What’s Real
How to Serve Propriety as a Business
Preface:
In a series of essays in partnership with Squarespace, we’re making sense of our relationship with reality and how culture is constructed.
Making it real is now an act of rebellion, a middle finger to the paralysis brought on by consensus collapse. The line between fact and fantasy continues to blur, but when reality is this negotiable, the soil for preferred futures is fertile. You can just do things. What’s the future you want to see? Making reclaims agency amidst lost meaning. So, don’t escape this reality — design the one you want. We desperately need your alternatives.
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The following piece is a collaboration between Matt Klein + Brian Lange.
Brian Lange is the co-founder of Future Commerce, an independent research and media organization focused on commerce, technology, and culture, where he writes about commerce as a cultural and media system. His work examines how markets blur boundaries between business and culture, media and retail, and lived experience and abstraction.
Hors d’oeuvre
As organizations, it’s not easy to navigate a disintegration of reality, a prioritization of visibility over depth, and a media environment which is fueled by polarization and utter distrust toward institutions’ messaging.
So it feels like all you can do is just jump on the trend train – activate upon the loudest, widely accepted signal of the moment – and then just jump again at the next, right moment. Squeeze your brand inside a palatable vessel of any meme or moment.
Sustaining this game of trend train jumping requires scale (i.e. an abundance of talent, money, infrastructure, etc.) and extreme commitment. You have to be “always on.” But, as many know, this has psychic consequences, and few can maintain this pace without becoming damaged. Companies which build out this capability can theoretically overcome this challenge, but when it comes to responding, those resources get in the way.
As an alternative, many are inclined to uphold “radical authenticity” as their strategy for resonance. Rather than chasing, stay the course. Never posture. Tell it as it is. But this approach is also problematic. If you adamantly believe in “radical authenticity,” you’ve likely built a business on a mimetic cycle – your business took off when people assumed each other’s desires as a collective and toward a viewpoint an organization already held. Perhaps you may have even inspired this cycle. Or maybe you just got lucky. But if we know anything about memetic cycles, desires flip eventually.
And so, if you’re going to take this posture of “authenticity,” then you must have the appetite to refuse growth when growth makes itself available. This requires a stiff backbone, and most, if not all of businesses that take this route stay small or crash hard.