THIS I BELIEVE
Humans live in “worlds”, the most meaningful of which operating three-dimensionally, blending complex information structures, crafted design, and rich interactivity.
As the old bastions of fandom (TV, print, radio) continue to be subsumed by Web3-adjacent platforms (Substack, Discord, Reddit, Patreon, TikTok), capital “C” culture is blown apart into infinite subcultures, bubbles, spheres, and scenes, each with their own emergent properties that defy the norms of the newsfeed. Now, fans can bypass “lowest-common-denominator” aggregators and interact directly with the creators of their favorite music, apps, books and more, along with the communities they create.
“Nerd culture" increasingly charts the future and predicts the path of mainstream attention. Video-games explored virtualizing aspects of reality before the term "meta-verse" existed. Comic books have been going wild with the idea of a "multiverse" for decades. Subcultures operate as a safe-haven for “marginalized” (i.e. emergent) peoples to discover, develop, and express new ideas.
The ideas, IPs, brands, and platforms that dominate culture are the ones that behave like “worlds” — they constantly create endlessly discoverable universes, ever-deepening lore and in-group language, countless ways to identify your role with them, and trans-media storytelling that fluidly blends information, design, and interactivity.
“Whatever else we’ve been told or inherited, imagination - the ability to see things that do not yet exist, that could exist, or might exist and work out in our minds how they might work - is central to the practice of strategy." — Martin Weigel
