tldr; Culture is a service that is sold to brands to help them sell whatever they want to sell.

In the 2010s, on the heels of the big tech companies like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter emerged a Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) movement which revolved around brands like Supreme, Peloton and Daily Harvest.

These brands were selling old goods in new ways, leveraging the power of new internet subcultures amplified by social media. The problem for DTC startups is not “what product to sell”, but rather “what subculture of people to target”. In this sense, Life After Lifestyle says that cultural production has become a service industry for the supply chain of generic products.

 It’s why, in the absence of something real to aspire to in 2010s culture, everything has become vaguely aspirational, even sugar water.

Credits: Life After Lifestyle

Segmenting every available socio-demographic audience into niche brands which piggyback on microinfluencers, gives birth to the Cultural Production Service Economy (CPSE). The ability to classify consumers into these niches is warranted by digital data analytics and marketing tools that are built into our social media applications.

Class is expressed merely by price points that exist within consumer subcultural categories

And for brands, because the-one-man-brand everything becomes a distribution problem: purely a matter of target demographic. And brands-form-identities.