25.5 ASPIRATIONAL HUMANITY
Soulfulness as luxury
Back in January, I wrote about Offline Escape as a key trend for the year, situated within the larger macrotrend of Analog Soul. The essay ended with a note about how we’d likely be seeing further manifestations of anti-technology sentiment:
Over the past few months, while developments in AI have continued to rapidly accelerate, we’ve indeed witnessed a rising consumer backlash. Although people love using technology to simplify life and cheat on everything, they aren’t always quite as keen on synthetic slop and aesthetic repetition.
As media companies (Spotify; Netflix; Disney) flock to reduce costs by integrating artificial intelligence, we’re inevitably hurtling towards a compression of creative culture folding in onto itself. AI will only further escalate the flattening effect of algorithms and the stagnating effect of decontextualized visuals. The antidote to cultural compression is identifying and amplifying the essential qualities differentiating authentic from synthetic; distinguishing humanness from technology. As artificial intelligence hyper-flattens mass culture, anything denoting evidence of humanity becomes aspirational.
I haven’t decided yet whether Aspirational Humanity sits within the Analog Soul macrotrend, or if it has actually overtaken Analog Soul as the macro. Would love to hear what you think in the comment section.
When I first conceptualized Analog Soul several years ago, it had similar drivers, fueled by a desire for humanistic integrity in response to digital fatigue and algorithmic overwhelm. The keywords in my original deck from 2021 are:
These all still ring true, but the drivers have intensified. The evolution towards Aspirational Humanity comes from how the current technological landscape intersects with socioeconomic stratification.
Artificial intelligences promises unprecedented efficiency, which means it will have the most dramatic effect on mass market cultural output. Industrialization enabled mass production of consumer goods and thereby elevated the value of handcrafted goods as luxury, while artificial intelligence now enables the same disparity in creative cultural output. This gap will grow wider than ever, as mass anchors to optimization and luxury aspires to soulfulness. In the unfortunate future state that our techno-oligarchs are marching towards, the masses will consume AI slop while anything human-created will be preserved for the exclusive enjoyment of the elite.
If you spot a detour to escape this route, lmk…
In the meantime, there is clear potential to strategically leverage the trend towards Aspirational Humanity.
While mulling over this for several weeks, I’ve come across several writers who have deftly explored some of these dynamics and identified actionable near-term implications in a variety of contexts. I wanted to pull some of these ideas and strategies together below, organized as they relate to various business functions, and adding my personal perspective where relevant:
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