Branding, untethered

If the tech sector is enshittifying, does that leave the creative sector polishing turds?

Feb 12, 2025

Hello readers, it’s been a little while! Since I revamped this blog and resolved to write more, I got really busy with design work, which is great but does mean I have less space and time for writing. I have a hunch this is a good thing — you probably don’t want to have every thought I have about everything going on clogging up your inbox or feed! So the sort of monthly-ish posting schedule works for me, I hope it does for you too.

At this point in the year 2025, it feels almost obligatory to start a blog post or newsletter with a big healthy scoop of trepidation. The beginning of the year has been what you might call ‘turbulent,’ and I think most of our eyes are distracted by the chaotic goings on in the US government right now.

One thing I’ve been thinking lately is that attention is what’s giving the capital-R-Right power. It doesn’t matter if it’s outrage or fanaticism, any reaction seems to work for them. So I think one thing we could do is stop giving them what they want. Stop performing outrage on twitter, stop participating in and reading about the endless discourse.

Anyway, below are some thoughts about this strange tech/culture pivot and how the design industry is entwined in it. It’s kind of a rant, and I don’t really have any conclusions, but I hope some of it resonates.

Some links and pods at the end!

The Veil Evaporates

Through the 2010s, design agencies tapped a rich vein of free money, siphoning off venture capital and seed funding by transforming cadres of anti-social capitalists into glossy startup brands. For many it was our job to lend them credibility and enable them to give the impression they cared about things like ‘culture’, ‘diversity’ and ‘rights’ and not just productivity and exponential growth.

As we watch that artifice break down—as Zuck trades in his neoliberal creds for the reassuring masculinity of a heavy black t-shirt, and Elon takes to dismantling the US state like it’s an overvalued micro-blogging platform—what does this mean for the branding industry whose purpose was to build up the façade? Will the fintech and direct-to-consumer brands of the near future start to look somehow anti-woke? Or will the need for branding at all just disappear as platforms care less and less about looking like they actually care about their users? Will we see the rise of ‘anti-brands,’ carefully and professionally curated to seem like they haven’t been touched by a professional?

Metaphysical brands

Advertising and marketing emerged in the previous century with mass production, when it became possible to sell the same product to lots of people regionally, nationally, internationally. While desire for products had to be manufactured—birthing the advertising industry—it was at least tied to the physical realm. We could project our longings, insecurities and hopes on to a curated selection of items that we could use as talismans of our desired identities.

This new century has been one of disembodiment. We’ve been gradually but rapidly detaching ourselves from the physical. Marketing has become less and less tethered to the product itself, and more about associating a brand name to a certain lifestyle. Now there’s almost no need for a product. There is only brand. It makes sense from the capitalist’s perspective: the perfect business is one that doesn’t have to deal with the costly overheads of manufacturing an actual thing or managing an actual service.

What is Airbnb, Deliveroo, Uber’s product? The uber driver owns their car, and is not considered an employee of the company. The airbnb host owns their property, and uses contractors to service and maintain it. This type of platform ‘brand’ is simply an interface. A leech applied only because the village has taken to a belief in blood-letting.

This is the fantasy of 21st century branding. All those startups wasting tax-free hoards of investors’ cash on transaction-skimming and data-extracting schemes, packaged as frictionless services that promise a shortcut to social-mobility while entrenching and exacerbating a stratified social order. These are the companies that have driven the branding industry for this first quarter-century, facilitating a boom in small- to medium-sized design studios who ape the language and culture of those they service. Moving fast and breaking things. Dynamically, disruptively, energetically pressuring designers to think of more logo options at 9pm on a Wednesday.

In 2025 this feels almost naive, like we were playing pretend, building make-believe companies and making them all shiny just like a real, actually useful business. But just as sub-prime mortgages led to the 2008 financial crash, we shouldn’t be surprised when venture capital pulls the rug out from under the entrepreneur class and leaves the rest of us with nothing to dress up (the tailor has no emporer to make clothes for?).

And so now we’re experiencing the financialisation of culture, converting human endeavours and interactions into casino chips, rooted in nothing but speculation. Nowhere is this analogy more apt (barely even an analogy) than in the brave new frontier of meme coins. Here discourse, memes, edgy in-jokes and online culture more broadly is speculated on in an ironic facsimile of the stock market — a tacit understanding of the unreality of our digitised, mediated culture. It’s a world that has, through desperation or nihilism, utterly lost faith in the promise of a social contract. When you see your prospects on a steady decline, you might conclude that if you can’t beat em you may as well see how many free drinks you can get in their casino.

We might see this unexpectedly influencing the branding trends of the next few years, as companies try and ride the wave of extremely-online culture breaching the mainstream. Perhaps the next step is brand wojackification.

As we see the tech sector discarding any and every employee seen as superfluous to the core objective (harvesting user data to sell to other data-harvesters so they can more effectively harvest data) and dropping all pretence of wider societal improvement, maybe branding is superfluous too, now that we’re not pretending anymore.

Can we get back to reality as designers, as a design industry? Where can we help, be actually useful, make sense of things? Is our economy able to sustain businesses that don’t just grow exponentially? If we’re going to maintain a habitable world, at some point it’s going to have to.