of the United Kingdom’s capitol city.
The new year ushered in a vibe shift within the online marketing community, and the new vibe is AI Doomerism. As the industry would have you believe, the future looks like this:
AI will take all of our jobs in the next two years. As a skill set, marketing will become irrelevant, and the only thing that can save us is “taste.”
These posts are often accompanied by a photo of the music producer Rick Rubin, who released a self-help book for artists last year. Every data analyst, web developer, media buyer, and email marketing agency bro is now grinding to become a creative director.
Let me stop you right there, because this quest for “taste” is misguided.
The word “taste,” like “luxury,” has been overused. It works like a boomerang: your attempts to convey information about some external object or situation fly back and hit you in the face–you’ve bared your soul instead.
Before the taste discourse goes off the rails, I want to use this space to transform taste from a buzzword into a practical framework for surviving the AI apocalypse or whatever “interesting times” we’re in for the near future.
The quest for taste in marketing isn't just misguided—it's a desperate grasp at a rope that's already burning.
“Taste” Is Four Practical Things
If taste were an action, it would be “picking things.” Taste is making decisions, pruning down an almost infinite set of options to a limited selection that suits the occasion.
But this terminal action of picking things originates from four distinct starting points:
Communion With The Divine, aka Transcendent Art
This is the process described in books like The Artist’s Way and The Creative Act–tapping into the divine to create something beautiful, moving and transcendent. The work that emerges from this process doesn’t always have mass appeal or marketability, but it can.
The distinction between what is “art” and what is simply popular, marketable and/or perceived as valuable is a murky one, and beyond the scope of this piece.
Cultivating Secret Knowledge, aka Building “In-Groups”
This is the mechanism beneath the surface of taste discourse: “good taste” vs. “bad taste” vs. “playing with the conventions of bad taste but making it good taste.” This discourse is simply a tool for separating the in-group from the out-group.
At one point in time, the “in-group” were true patrons of the arts who had the expertise to base these distinctions on something tangible. In the present day, this has become a marketing tactic.
Achieving A Pragmatic Goal, aka Picking Winners
This is the ability to comb through the publisher’s slush pile and pick out the future best seller. It’s the ability to review dozens of scripts and pick out the blockbuster, then curate the team that is going to make the material shine.
In marketing land, it’s the ability to pick the campaign concept that will “go viral” or produce the ad that’s going to scale on Meta.
This is the ability to serve as a conduit between the mass of cultural production and the market. It is the ability to use cultural production to achieve a financial goal.
In the age of AI, being a tastemaker isn't about divine inspiration or cultural expertise—it's about accepting the role of human scapegoat in an increasingly inhuman system.
Making Hard Decisions, aka Being The Scapegoat
A hitmaker can pick winners, but how much should a patron, publishing house, movie studio, etc. invest in producing and marketing that content? How many winners should be funded each year? What is the right balance between “sure things” and moonshots?
Most importantly, who will accept the blame when some of these decisions inevitably fail? That’s the domain of radical accountability. This is the person on the chopping block when things go wrong.
Cultural Production Usually Involves All Four Modes Of Taste
Cultural products with mass recognition–especially over hundreds or thousands of years–are usually the product of all four modes of taste.
Paintings with global recognition–the kind that is printed on cheap dorm room posters–were produced through communion with the divine, preserved and promoted as “art” worthy of study by Secret Knowledge Cultivators, and printed on posters and coffee mugs by Pickers and Scapegoats.
Rick Rubin is a Picker who helps artists in communion with the divine shape their work to become more commercially viable. Scapegoats fund him, and his expertise is elevated beyond the commercial by the music press–Secret Knowledge Cultivators.
If you analyze any work of cultural production that is both considered “good” or “art” by domain experts and has mass appeal, you will find the same pattern.
The “Promise” Of AI = Making Taste Obsolete
If High Art is plugging into a divine wavelength, then Picking Winners is tapping into the collective subconscious–messy human emotions and motivations catalyzed by a raw drive to survive.
In the marketing world, few are better at Picking Winners (or creating winners out of thin air) than successful affiliate marketers promoting drop shipping operations. This is the crucible of marketing: highly competitive markets where margins are slim, and the products have no inherent differentiators.
Success on this battlefield is the product of pure storytelling and mind hacking. Sometimes, the tactics employed here are so outrageous that they bubble up to the mainstream, refusing to be ignored. This happened in October 2024 when some TikTok trend watchers noticed multiple videos using North Korean propaganda to sell supplements.
The TikTok accounts name-dropped in the article have been deleted. But the strategy works like this:
- Come up with a narrative conceit that is highly exaggerated and includes a curiosity-driving element.
- Use AI to draft hundreds of iterations of that narrative.
- Use AI to create photo-realistic but exaggerated images that illustrate the narrative.
- Turn this AI output into hundreds of TikTok slideshows with dramatic (AI) background music.
- Launch a new TikTok account and post multiple slideshows per day for weeks until something goes viral and drives product sales.
The cost to run this strategy is essentially zero if your AI tools are good enough to produce an acceptable output. These marketers might even be using AI to generate the original conceits; “giving birth on Mt. Everest” is another one I’ve seen in the wild.
Before AI, the four dimensions of taste had a tangible benefit: they prevented brands and individuals from losing money.
AI allows brands and individuals to bypass taste with no financial risk. You can test infinite iterations of an idea, then nuke the whole thing if it doesn’t work, and quickly move on to the next thing.
The future doesn't belong to those with good taste, but to those who understand that taste itself is becoming irrelevant in a world of infinite iteration.
The “brand impact” is minimal (especially if a given tactic never goes viral) because the marketing is hyper-personalized. These strategies only break through when they’re very successful. And even then, a niche of dedicated trend-spotters are the only ones who notice.
In this framework, the idea of “building brand value” as a decades-long proposition is both an advantage and a disadvantage. If Nike tried to do this, someone would notice and it probably would negatively impact the brand’s perception.
This reveals the path forward for marketers who want to future-proof their careers against AI.
How To Futureproof Your Marketing Career Against AI
So, how will this all play out? Futurecasting is pointless without a plan that will allow you to thrive in your predicted future. This is my prediction:
In the short term (3-5 year time horizon), the ability to leverage AI to iterate at a high volume and low cost will confer a competitive advantage. Variations of the viral North Korean TikTok strategy will become more common and increasingly more sophisticated.
This will make a relatively small number of individuals wealthy. Still, it will erode consumer trust in the digital content they consume and trust in independent brands and creators more broadly.
Big, established brands won’t be able to take advantage of these strategies. Instead, they will be forced by market pressures to employ AI as a cost-cutting measure. Leading big teams will cease to be a resume-booster or a mark of seniority.
The era of the Yes Man will give way to the era of the scapegoat–you can’t scapegoat an AI. Corporate careers will become even more precarious, and the middle management class even more risk-averse.
Some will see the writing on the wall early and upskill in AI. They will join consulting firms that help larger companies use AI to generate operational efficiency, work with smaller brands on execution, or start their own brands.
This is already happening.
In the medium term (5-15 year time horizon), the average American consumer will become a lot less concerned with physical reality. In postmodernism, everyone gets exactly what they want, but no one is happy. AI will gradually, then suddenly, usher in a future where all entertainment is personalized.
Box-checking a list of personal quirks, interests, and fetishes will be prioritized over knowledge of technique, history of the craft, or transcendence of the work. Cultural production will be highly stimulating and disposable.
People will check out of their digital fantasy worlds long enough to meet basic living expenses, or they’ll give up on work entirely (UBI might come into play here). The types of work available will be lower-paid and more physically taxing.
“Consumer culture” will shift online, and mass trends will cease to exist. Today’s consumer trends are based on novelty, self-care and status-seeking; personalized digital content will fulfill most of those needs.
The physical world will become the domain of people with the time and inclination to lift their head from the AI slop trough and do the work to savor and preserve physical reality. Who will these people be?
- People who are wealthy enough to step away from the rat race and live intentionally.
- Weirdos who build their own communities outside of consumer culture, who will insulate those communities against marketing and build their own value systems from scratch.
If you’re selling physical goods, you will be competing to meet the minimum viable physical needs of the masses OR selling luxury products to rich people.
This is already happening.
I don’t necessarily believe this means you should buy stock in LVMH. Overexposed luxury brands will be disrupted if they don’t adjust their playbook and systems of meaning. That said, studying the mechanics of the luxury industry is beneficial.
As entertainment becomes more personalized, the concept of “mass taste” will become less and less relevant. Instead of trying to pivot from data analyst to creative director, marketers should:
- Start experimenting with AI tools now, with the goal of automating some part of your own job in the next six to 12 months. If doing that gets you laid off, develop a plan to monetize this knowledge outside your full-time job.
- Honestly assess if you’re being paid to “perform productivity” or if you’re being paid for your unique talents and impact. If the former, develop an exit plan this year.
- If you want to stay in consumer marketing, start learning about High Art and Cultivating Secret Knowledge OR study the consumer habits and trends of the bottom half of the income distribution in third world countries.
- Stop seeking out stable paths or proscribed “how-to” guides. Become comfortable with navigating ambiguity.
- Taste systems will become obsolete. Value systems will help guide you through ambiguity, create value, and connect you with the right partners and consumers.
Don’t blow up your life based on a blog post. But if the “vibe shift” unsettles you, use these steps to reclaim agency.
————
Note: Future Commerce may earn commissions from the Amazon affiliate links included in this article. These partnerships help support our mission of providing incisive analysis of commerce trends, but never influence our editorial perspective.
The new year ushered in a vibe shift within the online marketing community, and the new vibe is AI Doomerism. As the industry would have you believe, the future looks like this:
AI will take all of our jobs in the next two years. As a skill set, marketing will become irrelevant, and the only thing that can save us is “taste.”
These posts are often accompanied by a photo of the music producer Rick Rubin, who released a self-help book for artists last year. Every data analyst, web developer, media buyer, and email marketing agency bro is now grinding to become a creative director.
Let me stop you right there, because this quest for “taste” is misguided.
The word “taste,” like “luxury,” has been overused. It works like a boomerang: your attempts to convey information about some external object or situation fly back and hit you in the face–you’ve bared your soul instead.
Before the taste discourse goes off the rails, I want to use this space to transform taste from a buzzword into a practical framework for surviving the AI apocalypse or whatever “interesting times” we’re in for the near future.
The quest for taste in marketing isn't just misguided—it's a desperate grasp at a rope that's already burning.
“Taste” Is Four Practical Things
If taste were an action, it would be “picking things.” Taste is making decisions, pruning down an almost infinite set of options to a limited selection that suits the occasion.
But this terminal action of picking things originates from four distinct starting points:
Communion With The Divine, aka Transcendent Art
This is the process described in books like The Artist’s Way and The Creative Act–tapping into the divine to create something beautiful, moving and transcendent. The work that emerges from this process doesn’t always have mass appeal or marketability, but it can.
The distinction between what is “art” and what is simply popular, marketable and/or perceived as valuable is a murky one, and beyond the scope of this piece.
Cultivating Secret Knowledge, aka Building “In-Groups”
This is the mechanism beneath the surface of taste discourse: “good taste” vs. “bad taste” vs. “playing with the conventions of bad taste but making it good taste.” This discourse is simply a tool for separating the in-group from the out-group.
At one point in time, the “in-group” were true patrons of the arts who had the expertise to base these distinctions on something tangible. In the present day, this has become a marketing tactic.
Achieving A Pragmatic Goal, aka Picking Winners
This is the ability to comb through the publisher’s slush pile and pick out the future best seller. It’s the ability to review dozens of scripts and pick out the blockbuster, then curate the team that is going to make the material shine.
In marketing land, it’s the ability to pick the campaign concept that will “go viral” or produce the ad that’s going to scale on Meta.
This is the ability to serve as a conduit between the mass of cultural production and the market. It is the ability to use cultural production to achieve a financial goal.
In the age of AI, being a tastemaker isn't about divine inspiration or cultural expertise—it's about accepting the role of human scapegoat in an increasingly inhuman system.
Making Hard Decisions, aka Being The Scapegoat
A hitmaker can pick winners, but how much should a patron, publishing house, movie studio, etc. invest in producing and marketing that content? How many winners should be funded each year? What is the right balance between “sure things” and moonshots?
Most importantly, who will accept the blame when some of these decisions inevitably fail? That’s the domain of radical accountability. This is the person on the chopping block when things go wrong.
Cultural Production Usually Involves All Four Modes Of Taste
Cultural products with mass recognition–especially over hundreds or thousands of years–are usually the product of all four modes of taste.
Paintings with global recognition–the kind that is printed on cheap dorm room posters–were produced through communion with the divine, preserved and promoted as “art” worthy of study by Secret Knowledge Cultivators, and printed on posters and coffee mugs by Pickers and Scapegoats.
Rick Rubin is a Picker who helps artists in communion with the divine shape their work to become more commercially viable. Scapegoats fund him, and his expertise is elevated beyond the commercial by the music press–Secret Knowledge Cultivators.
If you analyze any work of cultural production that is both considered “good” or “art” by domain experts and has mass appeal, you will find the same pattern.
The “Promise” Of AI = Making Taste Obsolete
If High Art is plugging into a divine wavelength, then Picking Winners is tapping into the collective subconscious–messy human emotions and motivations catalyzed by a raw drive to survive.
In the marketing world, few are better at Picking Winners (or creating winners out of thin air) than successful affiliate marketers promoting drop shipping operations. This is the crucible of marketing: highly competitive markets where margins are slim, and the products have no inherent differentiators.
Success on this battlefield is the product of pure storytelling and mind hacking. Sometimes, the tactics employed here are so outrageous that they bubble up to the mainstream, refusing to be ignored. This happened in October 2024 when some TikTok trend watchers noticed multiple videos using North Korean propaganda to sell supplements.
The TikTok accounts name-dropped in the article have been deleted. But the strategy works like this:
- Come up with a narrative conceit that is highly exaggerated and includes a curiosity-driving element.
- Use AI to draft hundreds of iterations of that narrative.
- Use AI to create photo-realistic but exaggerated images that illustrate the narrative.
- Turn this AI output into hundreds of TikTok slideshows with dramatic (AI) background music.
- Launch a new TikTok account and post multiple slideshows per day for weeks until something goes viral and drives product sales.
The cost to run this strategy is essentially zero if your AI tools are good enough to produce an acceptable output. These marketers might even be using AI to generate the original conceits; “giving birth on Mt. Everest” is another one I’ve seen in the wild.
Before AI, the four dimensions of taste had a tangible benefit: they prevented brands and individuals from losing money.
AI allows brands and individuals to bypass taste with no financial risk. You can test infinite iterations of an idea, then nuke the whole thing if it doesn’t work, and quickly move on to the next thing.
The future doesn't belong to those with good taste, but to those who understand that taste itself is becoming irrelevant in a world of infinite iteration.
The “brand impact” is minimal (especially if a given tactic never goes viral) because the marketing is hyper-personalized. These strategies only break through when they’re very successful. And even then, a niche of dedicated trend-spotters are the only ones who notice.
In this framework, the idea of “building brand value” as a decades-long proposition is both an advantage and a disadvantage. If Nike tried to do this, someone would notice and it probably would negatively impact the brand’s perception.
This reveals the path forward for marketers who want to future-proof their careers against AI.
How To Futureproof Your Marketing Career Against AI
So, how will this all play out? Futurecasting is pointless without a plan that will allow you to thrive in your predicted future. This is my prediction:
In the short term (3-5 year time horizon), the ability to leverage AI to iterate at a high volume and low cost will confer a competitive advantage. Variations of the viral North Korean TikTok strategy will become more common and increasingly more sophisticated.
This will make a relatively small number of individuals wealthy. Still, it will erode consumer trust in the digital content they consume and trust in independent brands and creators more broadly.
Big, established brands won’t be able to take advantage of these strategies. Instead, they will be forced by market pressures to employ AI as a cost-cutting measure. Leading big teams will cease to be a resume-booster or a mark of seniority.
The era of the Yes Man will give way to the era of the scapegoat–you can’t scapegoat an AI. Corporate careers will become even more precarious, and the middle management class even more risk-averse.
Some will see the writing on the wall early and upskill in AI. They will join consulting firms that help larger companies use AI to generate operational efficiency, work with smaller brands on execution, or start their own brands.
This is already happening.
In the medium term (5-15 year time horizon), the average American consumer will become a lot less concerned with physical reality. In postmodernism, everyone gets exactly what they want, but no one is happy. AI will gradually, then suddenly, usher in a future where all entertainment is personalized.
Box-checking a list of personal quirks, interests, and fetishes will be prioritized over knowledge of technique, history of the craft, or transcendence of the work. Cultural production will be highly stimulating and disposable.
People will check out of their digital fantasy worlds long enough to meet basic living expenses, or they’ll give up on work entirely (UBI might come into play here). The types of work available will be lower-paid and more physically taxing.
“Consumer culture” will shift online, and mass trends will cease to exist. Today’s consumer trends are based on novelty, self-care and status-seeking; personalized digital content will fulfill most of those needs.
The physical world will become the domain of people with the time and inclination to lift their head from the AI slop trough and do the work to savor and preserve physical reality. Who will these people be?
- People who are wealthy enough to step away from the rat race and live intentionally.
- Weirdos who build their own communities outside of consumer culture, who will insulate those communities against marketing and build their own value systems from scratch.
If you’re selling physical goods, you will be competing to meet the minimum viable physical needs of the masses OR selling luxury products to rich people.
This is already happening.
I don’t necessarily believe this means you should buy stock in LVMH. Overexposed luxury brands will be disrupted if they don’t adjust their playbook and systems of meaning. That said, studying the mechanics of the luxury industry is beneficial.
As entertainment becomes more personalized, the concept of “mass taste” will become less and less relevant. Instead of trying to pivot from data analyst to creative director, marketers should:
- Start experimenting with AI tools now, with the goal of automating some part of your own job in the next six to 12 months. If doing that gets you laid off, develop a plan to monetize this knowledge outside your full-time job.
- Honestly assess if you’re being paid to “perform productivity” or if you’re being paid for your unique talents and impact. If the former, develop an exit plan this year.
- If you want to stay in consumer marketing, start learning about High Art and Cultivating Secret Knowledge OR study the consumer habits and trends of the bottom half of the income distribution in third world countries.
- Stop seeking out stable paths or proscribed “how-to” guides. Become comfortable with navigating ambiguity.
- Taste systems will become obsolete. Value systems will help guide you through ambiguity, create value, and connect you with the right partners and consumers.
Don’t blow up your life based on a blog post. But if the “vibe shift” unsettles you, use these steps to reclaim agency.
————
Note: Future Commerce may earn commissions from the Amazon affiliate links included in this article. These partnerships help support our mission of providing incisive analysis of commerce trends, but never influence our editorial perspective.
The new year ushered in a vibe shift within the online marketing community, and the new vibe is AI Doomerism. As the industry would have you believe, the future looks like this:
AI will take all of our jobs in the next two years. As a skill set, marketing will become irrelevant, and the only thing that can save us is “taste.”
These posts are often accompanied by a photo of the music producer Rick Rubin, who released a self-help book for artists last year. Every data analyst, web developer, media buyer, and email marketing agency bro is now grinding to become a creative director.
Let me stop you right there, because this quest for “taste” is misguided.
The word “taste,” like “luxury,” has been overused. It works like a boomerang: your attempts to convey information about some external object or situation fly back and hit you in the face–you’ve bared your soul instead.
Before the taste discourse goes off the rails, I want to use this space to transform taste from a buzzword into a practical framework for surviving the AI apocalypse or whatever “interesting times” we’re in for the near future.
The quest for taste in marketing isn't just misguided—it's a desperate grasp at a rope that's already burning.
“Taste” Is Four Practical Things
If taste were an action, it would be “picking things.” Taste is making decisions, pruning down an almost infinite set of options to a limited selection that suits the occasion.
But this terminal action of picking things originates from four distinct starting points:
Communion With The Divine, aka Transcendent Art
This is the process described in books like The Artist’s Way and The Creative Act–tapping into the divine to create something beautiful, moving and transcendent. The work that emerges from this process doesn’t always have mass appeal or marketability, but it can.
The distinction between what is “art” and what is simply popular, marketable and/or perceived as valuable is a murky one, and beyond the scope of this piece.
Cultivating Secret Knowledge, aka Building “In-Groups”
This is the mechanism beneath the surface of taste discourse: “good taste” vs. “bad taste” vs. “playing with the conventions of bad taste but making it good taste.” This discourse is simply a tool for separating the in-group from the out-group.
At one point in time, the “in-group” were true patrons of the arts who had the expertise to base these distinctions on something tangible. In the present day, this has become a marketing tactic.
Achieving A Pragmatic Goal, aka Picking Winners
This is the ability to comb through the publisher’s slush pile and pick out the future best seller. It’s the ability to review dozens of scripts and pick out the blockbuster, then curate the team that is going to make the material shine.
In marketing land, it’s the ability to pick the campaign concept that will “go viral” or produce the ad that’s going to scale on Meta.
This is the ability to serve as a conduit between the mass of cultural production and the market. It is the ability to use cultural production to achieve a financial goal.
In the age of AI, being a tastemaker isn't about divine inspiration or cultural expertise—it's about accepting the role of human scapegoat in an increasingly inhuman system.
Making Hard Decisions, aka Being The Scapegoat
A hitmaker can pick winners, but how much should a patron, publishing house, movie studio, etc. invest in producing and marketing that content? How many winners should be funded each year? What is the right balance between “sure things” and moonshots?
Most importantly, who will accept the blame when some of these decisions inevitably fail? That’s the domain of radical accountability. This is the person on the chopping block when things go wrong.
Cultural Production Usually Involves All Four Modes Of Taste
Cultural products with mass recognition–especially over hundreds or thousands of years–are usually the product of all four modes of taste.
Paintings with global recognition–the kind that is printed on cheap dorm room posters–were produced through communion with the divine, preserved and promoted as “art” worthy of study by Secret Knowledge Cultivators, and printed on posters and coffee mugs by Pickers and Scapegoats.
Rick Rubin is a Picker who helps artists in communion with the divine shape their work to become more commercially viable. Scapegoats fund him, and his expertise is elevated beyond the commercial by the music press–Secret Knowledge Cultivators.
If you analyze any work of cultural production that is both considered “good” or “art” by domain experts and has mass appeal, you will find the same pattern.
The “Promise” Of AI = Making Taste Obsolete
If High Art is plugging into a divine wavelength, then Picking Winners is tapping into the collective subconscious–messy human emotions and motivations catalyzed by a raw drive to survive.
In the marketing world, few are better at Picking Winners (or creating winners out of thin air) than successful affiliate marketers promoting drop shipping operations. This is the crucible of marketing: highly competitive markets where margins are slim, and the products have no inherent differentiators.
Success on this battlefield is the product of pure storytelling and mind hacking. Sometimes, the tactics employed here are so outrageous that they bubble up to the mainstream, refusing to be ignored. This happened in October 2024 when some TikTok trend watchers noticed multiple videos using North Korean propaganda to sell supplements.
The TikTok accounts name-dropped in the article have been deleted. But the strategy works like this:
- Come up with a narrative conceit that is highly exaggerated and includes a curiosity-driving element.
- Use AI to draft hundreds of iterations of that narrative.
- Use AI to create photo-realistic but exaggerated images that illustrate the narrative.
- Turn this AI output into hundreds of TikTok slideshows with dramatic (AI) background music.
- Launch a new TikTok account and post multiple slideshows per day for weeks until something goes viral and drives product sales.
The cost to run this strategy is essentially zero if your AI tools are good enough to produce an acceptable output. These marketers might even be using AI to generate the original conceits; “giving birth on Mt. Everest” is another one I’ve seen in the wild.
Before AI, the four dimensions of taste had a tangible benefit: they prevented brands and individuals from losing money.
AI allows brands and individuals to bypass taste with no financial risk. You can test infinite iterations of an idea, then nuke the whole thing if it doesn’t work, and quickly move on to the next thing.
The future doesn't belong to those with good taste, but to those who understand that taste itself is becoming irrelevant in a world of infinite iteration.
The “brand impact” is minimal (especially if a given tactic never goes viral) because the marketing is hyper-personalized. These strategies only break through when they’re very successful. And even then, a niche of dedicated trend-spotters are the only ones who notice.
In this framework, the idea of “building brand value” as a decades-long proposition is both an advantage and a disadvantage. If Nike tried to do this, someone would notice and it probably would negatively impact the brand’s perception.
This reveals the path forward for marketers who want to future-proof their careers against AI.
How To Futureproof Your Marketing Career Against AI
So, how will this all play out? Futurecasting is pointless without a plan that will allow you to thrive in your predicted future. This is my prediction:
In the short term (3-5 year time horizon), the ability to leverage AI to iterate at a high volume and low cost will confer a competitive advantage. Variations of the viral North Korean TikTok strategy will become more common and increasingly more sophisticated.
This will make a relatively small number of individuals wealthy. Still, it will erode consumer trust in the digital content they consume and trust in independent brands and creators more broadly.
Big, established brands won’t be able to take advantage of these strategies. Instead, they will be forced by market pressures to employ AI as a cost-cutting measure. Leading big teams will cease to be a resume-booster or a mark of seniority.
The era of the Yes Man will give way to the era of the scapegoat–you can’t scapegoat an AI. Corporate careers will become even more precarious, and the middle management class even more risk-averse.
Some will see the writing on the wall early and upskill in AI. They will join consulting firms that help larger companies use AI to generate operational efficiency, work with smaller brands on execution, or start their own brands.
This is already happening.
In the medium term (5-15 year time horizon), the average American consumer will become a lot less concerned with physical reality. In postmodernism, everyone gets exactly what they want, but no one is happy. AI will gradually, then suddenly, usher in a future where all entertainment is personalized.
Box-checking a list of personal quirks, interests, and fetishes will be prioritized over knowledge of technique, history of the craft, or transcendence of the work. Cultural production will be highly stimulating and disposable.
People will check out of their digital fantasy worlds long enough to meet basic living expenses, or they’ll give up on work entirely (UBI might come into play here). The types of work available will be lower-paid and more physically taxing.
“Consumer culture” will shift online, and mass trends will cease to exist. Today’s consumer trends are based on novelty, self-care and status-seeking; personalized digital content will fulfill most of those needs.
The physical world will become the domain of people with the time and inclination to lift their head from the AI slop trough and do the work to savor and preserve physical reality. Who will these people be?
- People who are wealthy enough to step away from the rat race and live intentionally.
- Weirdos who build their own communities outside of consumer culture, who will insulate those communities against marketing and build their own value systems from scratch.
If you’re selling physical goods, you will be competing to meet the minimum viable physical needs of the masses OR selling luxury products to rich people.
This is already happening.
I don’t necessarily believe this means you should buy stock in LVMH. Overexposed luxury brands will be disrupted if they don’t adjust their playbook and systems of meaning. That said, studying the mechanics of the luxury industry is beneficial.
As entertainment becomes more personalized, the concept of “mass taste” will become less and less relevant. Instead of trying to pivot from data analyst to creative director, marketers should:
- Start experimenting with AI tools now, with the goal of automating some part of your own job in the next six to 12 months. If doing that gets you laid off, develop a plan to monetize this knowledge outside your full-time job.
- Honestly assess if you’re being paid to “perform productivity” or if you’re being paid for your unique talents and impact. If the former, develop an exit plan this year.
- If you want to stay in consumer marketing, start learning about High Art and Cultivating Secret Knowledge OR study the consumer habits and trends of the bottom half of the income distribution in third world countries.
- Stop seeking out stable paths or proscribed “how-to” guides. Become comfortable with navigating ambiguity.
- Taste systems will become obsolete. Value systems will help guide you through ambiguity, create value, and connect you with the right partners and consumers.
Don’t blow up your life based on a blog post. But if the “vibe shift” unsettles you, use these steps to reclaim agency.
————
Note: Future Commerce may earn commissions from the Amazon affiliate links included in this article. These partnerships help support our mission of providing incisive analysis of commerce trends, but never influence our editorial perspective.
The new year ushered in a vibe shift within the online marketing community, and the new vibe is AI Doomerism. As the industry would have you believe, the future looks like this:
AI will take all of our jobs in the next two years. As a skill set, marketing will become irrelevant, and the only thing that can save us is “taste.”
These posts are often accompanied by a photo of the music producer Rick Rubin, who released a self-help book for artists last year. Every data analyst, web developer, media buyer, and email marketing agency bro is now grinding to become a creative director.
Let me stop you right there, because this quest for “taste” is misguided.
The word “taste,” like “luxury,” has been overused. It works like a boomerang: your attempts to convey information about some external object or situation fly back and hit you in the face–you’ve bared your soul instead.
Before the taste discourse goes off the rails, I want to use this space to transform taste from a buzzword into a practical framework for surviving the AI apocalypse or whatever “interesting times” we’re in for the near future.
The quest for taste in marketing isn't just misguided—it's a desperate grasp at a rope that's already burning.
“Taste” Is Four Practical Things
If taste were an action, it would be “picking things.” Taste is making decisions, pruning down an almost infinite set of options to a limited selection that suits the occasion.
But this terminal action of picking things originates from four distinct starting points:
Communion With The Divine, aka Transcendent Art
This is the process described in books like The Artist’s Way and The Creative Act–tapping into the divine to create something beautiful, moving and transcendent. The work that emerges from this process doesn’t always have mass appeal or marketability, but it can.
The distinction between what is “art” and what is simply popular, marketable and/or perceived as valuable is a murky one, and beyond the scope of this piece.
Cultivating Secret Knowledge, aka Building “In-Groups”
This is the mechanism beneath the surface of taste discourse: “good taste” vs. “bad taste” vs. “playing with the conventions of bad taste but making it good taste.” This discourse is simply a tool for separating the in-group from the out-group.
At one point in time, the “in-group” were true patrons of the arts who had the expertise to base these distinctions on something tangible. In the present day, this has become a marketing tactic.
Achieving A Pragmatic Goal, aka Picking Winners
This is the ability to comb through the publisher’s slush pile and pick out the future best seller. It’s the ability to review dozens of scripts and pick out the blockbuster, then curate the team that is going to make the material shine.
In marketing land, it’s the ability to pick the campaign concept that will “go viral” or produce the ad that’s going to scale on Meta.
This is the ability to serve as a conduit between the mass of cultural production and the market. It is the ability to use cultural production to achieve a financial goal.
In the age of AI, being a tastemaker isn't about divine inspiration or cultural expertise—it's about accepting the role of human scapegoat in an increasingly inhuman system.
Making Hard Decisions, aka Being The Scapegoat
A hitmaker can pick winners, but how much should a patron, publishing house, movie studio, etc. invest in producing and marketing that content? How many winners should be funded each year? What is the right balance between “sure things” and moonshots?
Most importantly, who will accept the blame when some of these decisions inevitably fail? That’s the domain of radical accountability. This is the person on the chopping block when things go wrong.
Cultural Production Usually Involves All Four Modes Of Taste
Cultural products with mass recognition–especially over hundreds or thousands of years–are usually the product of all four modes of taste.
Paintings with global recognition–the kind that is printed on cheap dorm room posters–were produced through communion with the divine, preserved and promoted as “art” worthy of study by Secret Knowledge Cultivators, and printed on posters and coffee mugs by Pickers and Scapegoats.
Rick Rubin is a Picker who helps artists in communion with the divine shape their work to become more commercially viable. Scapegoats fund him, and his expertise is elevated beyond the commercial by the music press–Secret Knowledge Cultivators.
If you analyze any work of cultural production that is both considered “good” or “art” by domain experts and has mass appeal, you will find the same pattern.
The “Promise” Of AI = Making Taste Obsolete
If High Art is plugging into a divine wavelength, then Picking Winners is tapping into the collective subconscious–messy human emotions and motivations catalyzed by a raw drive to survive.
In the marketing world, few are better at Picking Winners (or creating winners out of thin air) than successful affiliate marketers promoting drop shipping operations. This is the crucible of marketing: highly competitive markets where margins are slim, and the products have no inherent differentiators.
Success on this battlefield is the product of pure storytelling and mind hacking. Sometimes, the tactics employed here are so outrageous that they bubble up to the mainstream, refusing to be ignored. This happened in October 2024 when some TikTok trend watchers noticed multiple videos using North Korean propaganda to sell supplements.
The TikTok accounts name-dropped in the article have been deleted. But the strategy works like this:
- Come up with a narrative conceit that is highly exaggerated and includes a curiosity-driving element.
- Use AI to draft hundreds of iterations of that narrative.
- Use AI to create photo-realistic but exaggerated images that illustrate the narrative.
- Turn this AI output into hundreds of TikTok slideshows with dramatic (AI) background music.
- Launch a new TikTok account and post multiple slideshows per day for weeks until something goes viral and drives product sales.
The cost to run this strategy is essentially zero if your AI tools are good enough to produce an acceptable output. These marketers might even be using AI to generate the original conceits; “giving birth on Mt. Everest” is another one I’ve seen in the wild.
Before AI, the four dimensions of taste had a tangible benefit: they prevented brands and individuals from losing money.
AI allows brands and individuals to bypass taste with no financial risk. You can test infinite iterations of an idea, then nuke the whole thing if it doesn’t work, and quickly move on to the next thing.
The future doesn't belong to those with good taste, but to those who understand that taste itself is becoming irrelevant in a world of infinite iteration.
The “brand impact” is minimal (especially if a given tactic never goes viral) because the marketing is hyper-personalized. These strategies only break through when they’re very successful. And even then, a niche of dedicated trend-spotters are the only ones who notice.
In this framework, the idea of “building brand value” as a decades-long proposition is both an advantage and a disadvantage. If Nike tried to do this, someone would notice and it probably would negatively impact the brand’s perception.
This reveals the path forward for marketers who want to future-proof their careers against AI.
How To Futureproof Your Marketing Career Against AI
So, how will this all play out? Futurecasting is pointless without a plan that will allow you to thrive in your predicted future. This is my prediction:
In the short term (3-5 year time horizon), the ability to leverage AI to iterate at a high volume and low cost will confer a competitive advantage. Variations of the viral North Korean TikTok strategy will become more common and increasingly more sophisticated.
This will make a relatively small number of individuals wealthy. Still, it will erode consumer trust in the digital content they consume and trust in independent brands and creators more broadly.
Big, established brands won’t be able to take advantage of these strategies. Instead, they will be forced by market pressures to employ AI as a cost-cutting measure. Leading big teams will cease to be a resume-booster or a mark of seniority.
The era of the Yes Man will give way to the era of the scapegoat–you can’t scapegoat an AI. Corporate careers will become even more precarious, and the middle management class even more risk-averse.
Some will see the writing on the wall early and upskill in AI. They will join consulting firms that help larger companies use AI to generate operational efficiency, work with smaller brands on execution, or start their own brands.
This is already happening.
In the medium term (5-15 year time horizon), the average American consumer will become a lot less concerned with physical reality. In postmodernism, everyone gets exactly what they want, but no one is happy. AI will gradually, then suddenly, usher in a future where all entertainment is personalized.
Box-checking a list of personal quirks, interests, and fetishes will be prioritized over knowledge of technique, history of the craft, or transcendence of the work. Cultural production will be highly stimulating and disposable.
People will check out of their digital fantasy worlds long enough to meet basic living expenses, or they’ll give up on work entirely (UBI might come into play here). The types of work available will be lower-paid and more physically taxing.
“Consumer culture” will shift online, and mass trends will cease to exist. Today’s consumer trends are based on novelty, self-care and status-seeking; personalized digital content will fulfill most of those needs.
The physical world will become the domain of people with the time and inclination to lift their head from the AI slop trough and do the work to savor and preserve physical reality. Who will these people be?
- People who are wealthy enough to step away from the rat race and live intentionally.
- Weirdos who build their own communities outside of consumer culture, who will insulate those communities against marketing and build their own value systems from scratch.
If you’re selling physical goods, you will be competing to meet the minimum viable physical needs of the masses OR selling luxury products to rich people.
This is already happening.
I don’t necessarily believe this means you should buy stock in LVMH. Overexposed luxury brands will be disrupted if they don’t adjust their playbook and systems of meaning. That said, studying the mechanics of the luxury industry is beneficial.
As entertainment becomes more personalized, the concept of “mass taste” will become less and less relevant. Instead of trying to pivot from data analyst to creative director, marketers should:
- Start experimenting with AI tools now, with the goal of automating some part of your own job in the next six to 12 months. If doing that gets you laid off, develop a plan to monetize this knowledge outside your full-time job.
- Honestly assess if you’re being paid to “perform productivity” or if you’re being paid for your unique talents and impact. If the former, develop an exit plan this year.
- If you want to stay in consumer marketing, start learning about High Art and Cultivating Secret Knowledge OR study the consumer habits and trends of the bottom half of the income distribution in third world countries.
- Stop seeking out stable paths or proscribed “how-to” guides. Become comfortable with navigating ambiguity.
- Taste systems will become obsolete. Value systems will help guide you through ambiguity, create value, and connect you with the right partners and consumers.
Don’t blow up your life based on a blog post. But if the “vibe shift” unsettles you, use these steps to reclaim agency.
————
Note: Future Commerce may earn commissions from the Amazon affiliate links included in this article. These partnerships help support our mission of providing incisive analysis of commerce trends, but never influence our editorial perspective.
Continue Reading...
THIS ARTICLE IS FOR MEMBERS ONLY
Insights and futurism for executives in eCom and Retail
Those things we shouldn’t say out loud? We say them on the private feed. Bi-weekly “after dark” podcasts and a members-only newsletter, just for subscribers.
Our research reports combine visionary thinking with data-backed findings from our own advisory panel, made up of leaders at brands you know and trust.
Upskill, cross-skill, and future-proof your teams with Future Commerce Learning, the leading digital eCommerce learning platform, created by professional educators.
