Popular culture is contradiction in terms

0:02Dame Vivian Westwood famously said, popular culture is contradiction in terms. If it's popular, it's not culture. In the 80s, we had Air Jordans and Back to the Future. In the 90s, it was grunge, pretty woman, and Britney Spears. Iconic things have always been products of their moment. When the media was mass, culture was mass. When distribution was centralized, symbols were shared. That's no longer true. Today, influence is fragmented, taste is fragmented, and communities are fragmented. The geography of culture has collapsed from mass movements to millions of micro screens. So how does culture move now?

0:44In this episode, we explore how algorithms reward both scale and specificity, and why pop culture is just a backdrop now. Welcome to Season 2 of Hitmakers, the show that tracks how culture moves margins, multiples, and market cap.

1:09Lee, it's so amazing to see you again. We just taught a class, which is a second version of the Sociology of Business course. I'm so glad you joined me. It's part of the Sociology of Business Entertainment universe that we are building. Hey, totally. And it was so fun. And we had people from two fashion brands and one consultant. We have more from Australia. It's global. It's happening. The movement began today. Yeah, no, it was great. No, but it's like, you know, because I think so much of what you and I love about this topic is not just necessarily the theory, not necessarily just pointing stuff, but like literally manifesting it in the work and the building and stuff.

1:58And I think, you know, that's a huge part of why we do this. Oh my God, that's the point. Like all the lesser practitioners, we've done this. Like when I was hearing about the challenges, I was like, dude, I know that. Like that's exactly what I encountered and this is how I solved it. And I can't wait to share this and solve it together. So exactly. It's combining strategy with practice. That's the whole point of sociology of business and this podcast at the end of the day. Well, look, let's jump into it today. Let's jump into it. Market moves. So market moves, the segment where we track how companies are building cultural capital to move markets.

2:37We are going to open up with a thing that is probably all over your LinkedIn account. Artificial intelligence agents now have their own social media platform, Multbook, launched last Wednesday. It functions like Reddit and where users post and comment across different communities. Except here, users, or multis, are AI bots. Humans are only allowed to observe, and Moltbot claims to have over 1 million human visitors and over 37 ,000 AI users, although researchers say spam accounts may inflate those figures. The launch went viral on social media and Andre Karpathy dubbed it the most incredible sci-fi takeoff adjacent thing he has seen recently.

3:22And speaking of sci-fi, Amazon MGM Studios premiered Melania, a fly on the wall documentary chronicling the 20 days leading up to Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration. The First Lady is the sole focus of the film, which is not based on her memoir, which is also titled Melania, but feels spiritually adapted from an extended perfume ad. Amazon reportedly paid$40 million for the project with a total spending, including marketing, topping$75 million, a figure it won't recoup. But hey, that was never the point. On January 14th, PokeCourt was hit by three armed masked men who ransacked a case of rare cards while holding more than 50 employees and customers at gunpoint.

4:07The whole thing took three minutes. More than$120 ,000 worth of merchandise was stolen, plus whatever else was grabbed from the register. The Pokemon trading card market has become unrecognizable in the last few years, evolving into something like a mutant combination of art collecting and the stock market. So Pokemon heists were only a matter of time. In recent months, thieves have hit. Pokemon card stores in California, where$300 ,000 was stolen. Massachusetts, where$100 ,000 was stolen. Connecticut, where between$9 ,000 and$12 ,000 was stolen. And Maryland, where$25 ,000 was stolen. Next up, at Yuwu International Trade City, China's largest wholesale market, customers crowd into a small shop searching for an unlikely bestseller ahead of the Lunar New Year.

4:55They are looking for a red plush horse with a downturned mouth, a gold bell around its neck, and eyes that appear to shy away from a viewer's gaze. The toy has gone viral on Chinese social media ahead of the spring festival holiday, which this year marks the year of the horse in the Chinese zodiac. Called the crying horse by online users, the toy was designed as a happy-faced lunar new year decoration, but a manufacturing mistake turned its smile into a frown. A worker sewed the mouth upside down by accident, said Zong, owner of the Yiwu-based shop Happy Sister. Zong said she offered a refund after discovering the flaw, but the customer never returned the toy.

5:39Not long after, she discovered photos of it circulating online. line. People joke that the crying horse is how you look at work, while the smiling one is how you look after work. As demand surged, Zong decided to keep making the sad-faced version. The horse also taps into a broader trend for so-called, quote-unquote, ugly cute toys, popularized in recent years by characters such as Pop Mart's toothy monster Labubu. In TikTok news, TikTok's most followed creator, Kabi LeMay, has sold his company, Step Distinctive Limited to Rich Sparkle Holdings in an all-stock deal valued at$975 million, according to SEC filings.

6:20The acquisition grants Rich Sparkle full rights to LeMay's short-form video IP e-commerce business and, most notably, his AI-generated digital twin, licensed to produce multilingual content using his likeness, voice, and behaviors. Projected to drive$4 billion in annual sales, the deal sets a precedent for creator financialization at industrial scale and defines how celebrity brand value is commercialized moving forward. Unlike legacy brand deals where talent must show up in person, LeMay's AI twin will fulfill deals autonomously. Can join the mold book social network. We live in wild times. Wild times.

7:05Okay, speaking of wild times, what's up with algorithms? No, I don't want to say it like that. I actually want to say that I am fascinated by the interplay of virality and algorithms. And I do deeply believe that virality is increasingly irrelevant, not because it doesn't happen, but because it happens too often, like the last two, for a too short period of time and, and goes away too quickly. Its cycle is too short. So it's, it's, it's like the joke is on you. If you're like falling into that trap, if, if you're a brand and you're like, oh, I want this to go viral and you spend so much money and it, yeah, maybe it does happen, but then it just, it's just going to go away.

7:59Like even when you look at Marty Supreme, it was everywhere and now no one remembers it. Well, I mean, there's an interesting thing here. So, OK, so like the whole episode, obviously, that we're talking about is this idea of, you know, mass culture has gone by the wayside and now everything is just fragmented with each other. And I think that the interesting thing that you're pointing out about virality is that it happens so fast that sort of like using the metaphor of the brain, the neurons don't have time to build and it doesn't have time to become part of a cultural conscience. It's just there in a flash and then disappears as quickly.

8:36And so it's not it's not having an impact the way stuff used to that would maybe go viral and linger a little longer. Yeah, that's it. And I mean, that's exactly that I believe that we live in post-attention economy. And it's not at all about capturing people's attention because, sure, you can do that for one second. And you can do that for a sequence of one second. And that's going to cost you a lot of money. And it's not going to contribute to your bottom line, or it may, at a big cost. So post-attention economy, what we talked about in a couple of episodes ago, moving towards legibility economy, which means you need to stand for something.

9:20There needs to be some meaning. There needs to be some point of view. And that needs something that's longer term, something that you need to engage with, something that needs to unfold over a longer period of time. And so now I would like to go to micro and I would also like to go to analog. Because both of those, one, algorithms create those taste bubbles in micro. And yes, when algorithm picks one of those, they become, that's why we have all those TikTok cores. But to me, it's more interesting what's happening in analog culture, which is, to me, now reflection of fandoms. analog media reflection of fandoms.

10:07When you have fans buying, reading books, having book clubs, fans buying vinyl, fans playing board games, that is deeper engagement. That is legibility. That's where you make impact. And analog culture is immune to performance media. It's also immune to influencers. It's more susceptible to bandwagon effect. It's more susceptible to community leaders. Influences are different. I find all that really interesting. I mean, the thing that, you know, when you start talking about micro, the thing it puts in my head is this sort of alternative take of why we've gone from mass to micro. You know, a lot of people kind of say the reason that we've gone in that direction is because, oh, well, media is proliferated.

10:54And, you know, people can gather around smaller media forms rather than like the main three or four in history. I think that's certainly true. I think this point that we're bringing up about virality and the algorithms is actually the real corporate culprit here because algorithms at the end of the day, to put a different slant on it and why we've gone so micro is that they're actually sorting systems. It puts content in front of you to see if you're going to react to it, to judge your interest or preference or whatever. And if you do, you get tagged a certain way. If you don't, you get tagged a certain way.

11:25And slowly and slowly, you're getting sorted and sorted more. And so the economic incentives of this is not to sort everyone necessarily into big awareness buckets or big group buckets because there's too much heterogeneity among interests and preferences in that group. It's instead to sort people into these smaller preference or intent driven groups that you can then advertise and market to. And so we keep getting even though virality, quote unquote, happens, it's happening in smaller and smaller circles, which continues to drive just a fragmentation of of the of the market and stuff. And so what I find so interesting about this move to analog and people trying to really grow analog lives off of online is the sort of permeability of taste groups in these analog worlds.

12:15Because it's almost like a way of trying to recombine the heterogeneity that has been lost in this online experience. And in doing so, it creates a little bit more critical mass, but you sort of accept the friction of that because things can move slower. There's a more mix of people. coming together around it. And it's starting to emerge as a fundamentally different sort of antithetical experience to what's happening online, but increasingly much more desirable because of what the algorithms have taken away from us in the online experience. Yes. So I want to add two things to that. One is intention.

12:53Analog culture requires intention. so you need to intend to pick up this book to pick up this lp there is friction so we are going to see more and more of that friction marketing where you're not things don't come to you you're not served by algorithm in more and more personalized loop so it's you say am i going to go to that event? Am I going to go to that experience? And then second thing is, am I going to engage in that activity? Because more and more events and experiences, there's specific activity. They're like paddle or tennis or board games. Like people are expected to participate. That creates friction.

13:41You need to really engage. You need to not just show up and have Instagrammable wall and take a you actually need to engage with other humans around your activity. So that's, you know, that you need to, like, that's intentional. Second thing around that is, am I going to show that I was there? Which is, again, that micro. A lot of people are moving away from that insane sharing. They want to stay in that status signaling is actually in private. private clubs, private groups. That's why we are having so much. The things are happening in DMs, the things are happening in private clubs, the things are happening in restaurants and clubs when you're required to put your phone away.

14:29So that is that new high friction dynamic of marketing. That's number one. Number two is that in 2016, actually, and we are having this great revival, 2016 nostalgia that everyone is talking about, is when Instagram introduced the algorithmic feed, not time-driven feed, when you would see content from your friends that you actually follow, but you would just see algorithmic feed based on what your interests are, what your affinities, what you clicked for, and so on. So it would be recency, it would be your affinity, interest, engagement, and so on. So that's where the whole thing went to hell.

15:10Well, actually, to that point, I listened to this whole podcast on, I think it was like the Vox podcast, but it was entirely dedicated to how a lot of, I guess, Gen Alpha considers 2016 the last time we had a broadly recognized culture. And so there's this reconsumption of content and style from 2016 just to feel what it felt like to have a shared culture again. Well, they have never experienced the 90s. No, I know, but it's the younger. I know, but that's, I mean, I think that's very telling when you move from chronological friends and family to move to that algorithmic personalization which gave us all of those micro trends and taste bubbles that we are going through now, which are actually responsible for not having monoculture.

16:04I mean, the monoculture disappeared with the internet, with the moment that user-generated content appeared on YouTube. But what also contributed to, let's say, that friction-high analog culture with pop culture. So if even Westwood said pop culture is contradiction in terms, like what we are seeing now is actually taking it further. Because if pop culture was something that was lowest common denominator that united us all together, now it's the backdrop. It's what happens when you're doing something else. Because you have Netflix purposely telling their content creators to dumb down the dialogue.

16:46To kind of like characters need to announce when they're entering the room. I'm entering the room. And this is where I was. And this is what happened before. Because like Netflix knows that people are looking at their phones while they're watching entertainment. And that's the situation. Same with Spotify. You have the same thing with fashion as well, when you have like literally 82 % of recent songs on Spotify follow the same melodic structure. In fashion, you have something like 72 % of repetition from before when AI just looks what was popular before and you have designs that are just repeated because you know what worked in the past is going to work again in the future.

17:30So it's not lack of originality what popular culture is. It is more of a, that over-encompassing, like how should I say this? Like, yes, lowest common denominator, risk aversion, and above all, it's the business model that revolves around IP monetization. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's economically driven. That's why we have Fast and Furious 35. That is the IP model, but then also when you have algorithms, when people like the same things and people are like things that other people like, popularity is then equated with quality and cultural value. And people cover things that are popular and popular things are coveted in that loop, basic loop.

18:23So that's why you have, we like what other people like. Yeah, well, it's I mean, it's the whole idea of social proof. And you see that, you know, in the history of social media where they constantly say you're friends like this or other people follow this and stuff. You need that. You use that social proof to give legitimacy to something that a lot of other people like. And like, I think that's one of the really interesting things at the heart of this is going from like effectively like mass culture to microculture is that shift of where scale used to be the thing that offered legitimacy to something that it was popular.

19:02Therefore, it just as you said, it must be good. The thing now is it's more about signal. What does this say about me? how does this position me within a sort of cultural landscape? And is it legible to other people so that they can see it too, whether that is I'm trying to signal to people in the in-group subculture that I'm being a part of, or it's legible to people outside of it so they know that I'm in this subgroup. And so I think this is where the interesting economic principle comes in of technological disruption. So there's the basic idea that there's a value chain that we all participate in where one thing leads to another thing, which leads to another thing and value is created as something is moved through.

19:48So if you take like, let's just use like a completely adjacent example where you take like iron ore from the ground and you pull it out of the ground, that's a transformation of value. Then you transport it to a factory where it's processed. That movement of physical location is in creation of value. It's then cleaned and melted and smelted and turned into iron ore in the factory. And then blah, blah, blah. You end up at the end of the value chain and it's turned into a finished good, which is then turned into a building or whatever. Anyway, that's the whole concept of a value chain. And so when technological innovation comes in and disrupts a piece of that value chain by lowering the cost of goods, the complexity of the work, basically just solves a bunch of high cost issues at that point in the chain.

20:35then value moves to different parts of the chain, right? So why the hell am I talking about this? Because in a mass culture, you got to think of mass culture as a part of a value chain. And so when mass culture becomes microcultures, that means the value moves to different places. So value is no longer in popularity, meaning everyone knows you, right? Now that value has moved to like status signaling. People care more about does an individual have high, a highly legible signal that signals their status and their influence among people versus just as known by a bunch of people. And the status is not the number of followers and all of that.

21:25You know what I mean? Exactly. That's what I wrote in business of aspiration when it's more important. Oh, do you have taste? Do you have a point of view? Do you have knowledge? Do you have information? And it's more about having like a strong following in your expert community, in your expertise, rather than, we just talked about that in the class, when you're like, how do you feel to be like the Kim Kardashian in your expert area? Well, it's like, I love what you said, it's not the number of followers you have, meaning it's not your engagement metrics if you have high signal. It's about your cultural literacy, right?

22:03And being able to navigate this subculture and be recognizable within a reference group, understand the taste cues and everything, and be able to, and this is a term that you've been developing and promoting, is having that brand gravity, having that gravity that pulls culture towards you, whether it's people within that group or adjacent to that group as well. And then when you have enough brand gravity, yes, that results in things like having popularity and, you know, having a large audience of scale, but you don't start in the pursuit of the scale. You don't start by trying to get scale. You start by trying to have that high signal.

22:43I agree. And I just wonder where if this is like a third stage, because you know how like in the 90s 80s 90s like there was a big pushback against selling out so cultural value was almost equated with anti-popularity with streetwear brands like for example cult movies used to be commercial disasters very few people knew about them fight club for example blade runner and they're iconic, not despite their lack of commercial success, but because of their lack of commercial success, you were special because you were not basic. You were special because you liked that movie, you know, and most of the people didn't.

23:32Or you had that special Nike or you had that special T-shirt or you read that book that no one knew about it and so on. That was that status. That was back then. and then in 2000s we have like popularity became equal cultural value you know the bigger you are the more culturally valuable you are so well from nike pandas then now you have in every color they're like the movies are all the sequels so you know so that is kind of normal progression from popularity contest that people go how many likes do you have how many followers you have That's how I'm assessing you. So I wonder now, are we moving towards this more analog cultural assessment before 2000, before Web 2.0, before YouTube, before the popularity contest?

24:25Yeah, well, that would make sense from like an economic perspective because value tends to shift. There's signal changes, as you said. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Because like value tends to shift towards the things that where friction exists. So particularly like whether it's in cultural space or in luxury spaces and stuff right now, the materialism is everywhere. Like if you have the money, you can buy anything you want. If you're online, you can see anything you want. And, you know, I think you and I have talked about this with like the Birkenberg, like obviously Birkenbergs are like a gated, super high priced commodity.

25:00And so there's scarcity in a physical sense. but there's abundance in a digital sense. Like it's super easy to see it, even the super hard to access bags you can find online very easily. And so there's this tension of a lot of luxury brands being built off of the friction of scarcity, but yet in a digital environment, it's abundant and free and easy to access and stuff. And so when we talk about this idea of things moving analog, what I see in that is a status seeking friction. moving to a place where it's really hard to achieve the markers of status because, as you said, you have to physically be there.

25:39You have to have the means to get there. You have to have the time to spend there. You have to have the social connections or capital or whatever to know where to go and what to do and all that type of stuff. And so all that friction is actually the precursor to, let's call it, there's a term called costly differentiation, which is like you had to expend a bunch of stuff in order to do something. And then that therefore shows you are of means or of ability or status or whatever. And so I see this movement towards analog from an economic sense just being about costly differentiation in pursuit of status.

26:15Yes. So what does that mean for brands? So if they refined their means in their media plans of controlling attention, so you have third-party cookies, you have performance marketing, you have influencer marketing, everything has been done to perfection. Yeah. And then you have platforms and they have their suit again, algorithms that have been done to perfection in a sense house always wins. They change algorithms everywhere ever so they can make the most money and brands have to pay them every time they change algorithms, you know. So that ecosystem has been created where platforms win and then like brands develop strategies for platforms.

27:05So it's kind of like key and the key lock there. But what if actual influence is not in the attention, what we are saying here? It's not in the attention economy at all. So consumers opt out. They're like, you know what? Sure, this is going to go viral. I'm going to pay attention to this for five seconds. I'm going to like it for five seconds. I'm going to be into it. And then I'm going to be into it for something else. And it's sort of like it's throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. In a sense, yes, you're going to have X amount impressions and that's going to be amazing. But that formula is repetition of the past.

27:52I don't know which part of my marketing is wasted because your performance market has always been amazing for brands and for CMOs because it kind of tells you what is impact on sales. or pretends to, you know? And I just want we're in the phase of diminishing returns. Yeah, yeah. So that's actually a good setup for the little bit that I wanted to add because this goes back to the Vivian Westwood thing that we opened up with. The reason popular culture is not culture is because it's popular, because it is diminishing returns on the cultural value of the symbol, the shirt, the dress, the skirt, the phrase, the whatever.

28:30because when we share stuff, we are doing it not as preference. We're doing it as positional signaling, meaning like if I'm sharing something online or I share something with somebody else, I'm doing it as a as a expression of my position in society as a subculture. I'm part of where I am in some sort of vertical stratosphere and stuff. and when the the a of shirt let's say becomes so popular that everyone's wearing it it destroys the cultural value of it and therefore it doesn't work for me as a positioning signal anymore because everybody has it so that's why we see when things become popular people people of taste and and ambition with regards to that leave it behind and move on to the next thing because they're looking for the thing that has friction around it that not everyone understands but the right people understand.