Marshall McLuhan warned that electric media would abolish both space and time. Six decades later, that theory is now a supply-chain feature: your kid can buy a 1999 bucket hat inside a 2025 Roblox world and have it delivered tomorrow.

The past is always in stock, the future is always on pre-order, and the present is a single scrollable pane of “now.” In that pane lives everything from painstaking craftsmanship to what the culture calls slop—the low-effort, high-reach filler that swells feeds and hollows attention. Faced with this simultaneity, brands have two choices: flood every surface until they become ambient noise, or retreat behind deliberate mystery that invites pilgrimage.

Our digitally-saturated culture collapses past, present, and future into one participatory moment, forcing brands to pick revelation or secrecy as their only viable growth strategies.

Act I: The Collapse

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “the early bird gets the worm” many times. You might have also heard the expression “the second mouse gets the cheese.” These two forms of wisdom have been at odds with each other for many years in go-to-market strategies. “First mover advantage” can lead to becoming the “sacrificial lamb.”

Except it’s also tough not being the first mover right? But now all of this debate is for naught. Time is shifting; or at least our perception of time is shifting. In a very pragmatic way perhaps this is the same thing. 

In the past, we’ve had a few windows to understand the passage of time to understand history. Things like artifacts and antiques give us a viewpoint into the world as it existed before. We created museums, memorials, and time capsules (as Phillip is deep into) to help provide context on how things change because our memories and oral histories are unreliable.

Most of all, we use the technology of the written language to record what’s happened to give us a record and understand how things have unfolded.

Time Became a Flat Circle

As a result, our perspective is that time is sequential. Articles are written sequentially. Histories and stories are written in order. Artifacts are buried beneath layers of soil and silt. Time is linear. There is a canon of texts that help us understand progression.

My favorite communication from the past is an aged bottle of wine. It’s a window into the terroir, weather, taste, and perspective on both their present (what they enjoyed at the time) and the future (hope for what the wine will taste like years later).

But now, our increasingly digitized world is cataloging everything for our consumption: sensors, the Internet of Things, blogs, live video, IoT, and recording devices of all times. Every culture and perspective is being logged away and sold off to the highest just-in-time ad auction bidder. Have a perspective on something? “Search it up,” (as the kids say these days) and you’ll likely find someone else who has documented that perspective.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Brian, I have a unique idea that no one has thought of yet.” Well, good on you. Go look to see if someone else has thought of it. You might not find it. But you know what, you can’t tell me with honesty that you’re not tempted to publish about that idea so you can get credit. Better yet, ask AI what it thinks about your idea. It’ll probably have more thoughts about it than you did. This is why synchronicity seems to be increasing. We all have a deep-seated desire to be original, so we’re publicizing our ideas as fast as possible.

The thing is, when we publicize an idea now, we’re doing so to the whole world, not just to our gatherings of family and friends and local communities. Anyone who has ever had a similar thought is going to think, “Same!”

Everything is being published digitally and wrapped up for consumption. Data, ideas, products, places, emotions, wisdom. We’re now at a place where a single brain can’t absorb all of the best stuff available to consume, let alone everything else that’s been recorded for consumption.

Once, we communicated with the past through tokens, ruins, and time capsules. But from here on out, the past will be as the present—and perhaps even the future—is latently present as well. We’ve entered a world of simultaneity. It’s forcing all things—people, media, brands— to either embrace the end of time or take an entirely new path to building value.

The past is always in stock, the future is on pre-order, and the present is a single infinite-scrollable pane of now.

Act II — The Consequence

This means slop can be dead for whoever wants it to be. This has always been true, but slop recently has had its heyday and seems to have taken over. We’ve all felt it. Friend of Future Commerce, Ruby Thelot, recently penned “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Slop” because slop has become pervasive.

But slop isn’t running me over. It doesn’t even worry me. It’s good content that’s destroying me right now. That’s my real worry. I can’t keep up.

I personally know a ton of incredible writers, and I can’t even come close to even keeping up with the things they’re actively writing, let alone the books, movies, and tv shows that I believe are worth consuming. Gone are the days of watching through the best of your local Blockbuster’s selection, or even all the good stuff on Netflix. Gone are the days of reading key newspapers, magazines, or even your favorite Substackers. The same goes for TV and even YouTube. Again, I’m just talking about the quality stuff, never mind passive “slop” that comes down the frictionless short-form video trough.

Even the people who are very online (whose whole job is just to keep up and consume content), even these elites can’t get to the end of the good stuff. Is there an end?

French philosopher Paul Virilio called this embouteillage statique, or ‘static pileup’—a cultural logjam. The “good stuff,” too, exists in simultaneity: past, present and future. He coined his work ‘dromology,’ the study of power and velocity, as institutions race to compress every delay in order to produce ever more.

Curation isn’t just about sorting through slop anymore and ensuring I get the good stuff. It's a  about which good stuff is the most important.

The outcome of this is that either canon retains strong ideology across disciplines or canon requires even more specialization and loss of generalists. You can believe something across genres, or you can own a sub-sub-sub-genre. You may need both.

Because of digitization, a canon might as well be infinite. By the end of their life, a single person will never be able to reach the end of all the good stuff, even for their given specialization.

But even with all this, slop still exists. When there’s infinite good stuff available, why does slop seem to flood feeds? 

A lot of this is algo hacking, which, by the way is expensive and requires ongoing management to maintain front-and-center. It’s purchased attention. A lot of slop isn’t exactly slop. Our definition of slop is pretty loose; so allow me add some categories to slop. There’s quality and fidelity to consider.

The Quality-Fidelity Continuum

McLuhan famously defined media on a scale of hot to cool. “Cool media,” or low-fidelity media, required multiple senses to engage and was, therefore, more participatory. On the other hand, hot media has higher fidelity and requires fewer senses to engage.

Now, McLuhan would probably disagree (ok, definitely) with including quality in the scale of how to categorize media, but for the sake of even calling something slop, I’m going to add quality to the mix.

Content really is a juicy piece of meat that distracts us from how the medium is changing us, but some meat is definitely more marbled and juicy than others. This is one of the reasons why I’m more concerned about good content than I am about slop.

Here’s a viewpoint on the quality and fidelity quadrant that I think most of you would agree with (or a few of you will disagree with).

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‍Low-fidelity and low-quality media is often viewed as slop. However, most of the time, this content is just participatory output, what used to be fan fiction and amateur media. The audience wasn’t intended to be particularly wide. It was niche, it was for the author and their friends or co-fans. The rise of “slop” began with the surfacing of sub-genres and technology that enabled broad participation. This used to be more private, contained, and challenging to enter or engage with others. 

The real slop—the kind I always found detestable—is low-quality, high-fidelity content that requires low audience participation.

But all of this is being undone. Our tools are getting so good that participatory media can create what we’ve thought of as high-fidelity media. (Google’s Veo3 is a glimpse into the future of slop. See: Prompt Theory.) 

The work of Shy Kids and Airhead is an early example of the fidelity a small team was about to create with AI. When we spoke with Walter Woodman of Shy Kids at VISIONS Summit: LA, he suggested that AI democratized access to filmmaking technology to the best storytellers rather than the studio system elites.

When every feed is full of slop, silence becomes the new signal.

The Saturation Point

Our “high fidelity” media is no longer high-fidelity, or we’ve realized that it was never as high fidelity as we gave it credit. The response to the Minecraft movie is an excellent example of this.

This “high-fidelity” movie inspired group participation that broke social norms (memetic behaviors like throwing popcorn in the theater), let alone the typical onslaught of participatory media of memes, slang, and quotes applied in new contexts. Because the bar is raised, all of what would have previously been low-fidelity digital content is now as high-fidelity as any other digital content. This means that what was previously high-fidelity content is now cool/low, hence the participation at theaters for the Minecraft movie.

AI-driven manufacturing makes even luxury labels participatory. Dupes are participatory. Dupes aren’t slop; they’re just a way to engage in the “real” conversation. The intensification (digital cataloging) of a luxury fashion brand guarantees this outcome because the intensification of anything immediately opens it up to global participation with “high-fidelity” tools.

This is where time starts to fall apart. There’s infinite “high fidelity high quality” content to consume and participate in. Because we can’t reach its end, the content churns in and out of collective consciousness. This means almost all content from here on out will be recognized as derivative, and quickly.

Microrevivals will rise and fall at the speed of content consumption, because we’re trying to get to the next thing. We have to get to the next thing, because there isn’t time to dwell on the good thing we’re re-experiencing, or experiencing for the first time as the collective consciousness of the moment.

This is why anemoia, a trend we’ve covered extensively at Future Commerce over the years, is on the rise. Since the invention of the photograph, we’ve had a documented, contentified set of eras and trends. There are so many generations of this now, and it’s worldwide.

We can experience Americana from the post-prohibition south through a film like SINNERS and even sort of live it out. The Americana hipsters of the 2000s are a perfect snapshot of this kind of wave. Rivers and Roads by The Head and the Heart was a throwback to the type of song that no one of that generation had ever felt as a part of their identity, and yet we all sang it like it belonged to us. It did belong to us: it was real to our personal experience. But then time broke down.

We used to call movements like this trends because they would last so long, but that’s just because we didn’t have enough content and speed yet. It was really time travel through content. Now these “rememberances” can happen so quickly in relation to the original moment that they’re part of the original moment. This is simultaneity. The time at which something echoes back is almost irrelevant; irrelevant because the generation of consciousness that experiences it finds it novel or relevant enough to bring it into their phenomenological experience. 

Because no one can ever get to the end of the good stuff, everything is becoming derivative. There’s no need to create new things when there’s enough good stuff to reabsorb what already is.

On top of that, originality is hard; almost impossible for humans. It almost always requires a new medium to be discovered, and work accomplished around that medium before it becomes an art form. The art hardly feels original by the time it becomes art because it’s been part of building and working first. I recently visited the Costwalds for the first time. Its cute little lanes and city layouts were created for their sheep trade. The sheep would be pushed into the lanes to go to the town center and could be easily counted as they popped out of the lane. The sheep trade was completely obliterated by cotton, and the narrow lanes no longer had purpose. The cities feel like artwork now, with darling architecture and infrastructure. They may or may not have appreciated the lanes as artwork at the time, but the moment they become obsolete, they’re art.

And now all art is digitally cataloged. We don’t need originality because the record collection is too deep. Things that already exist are original from a phenomenological standpoint because normal humans cannot get to all the good content that exists.

The world of the known (the world of the derivative) is quite nearly the only world. Even our “new” stories.

Revelation as strategy

Soon, nearly all of the information that the majority of people consume into the future will already exist. Even “new” stories of peoples’ personal experiences will reflect experiences that have already existed and are cataloged because we will have so many stories. Everything will feel familiar, or if it doesn’t feel familiar, content that already exists will be recovered that fills in the story. Soon, all information that people will consume will already exist. The people of the past will be working their way through the same information that the people of the future will be working their way through. We’re in a time loop.

So what’s a brand to do when time stands still? The first thing is to have acute awareness of what the collective consciousness has stored in our memory. We can only process and remember so many things. The relativity of simultaneity means that if our context shifts, we may be able to re-experience something as if it’s new. 

Act III: Countermeasures

Known or unknown is the real question. Brands must decide: flood the zone or guard the grail?

If something falls out of collective memory, it can be revived. For the most part, there will already be mounds of content built around it. Think about the recent “medieval” aesthetic trend. We rediscovered medieval fonts and vibes. The thing is, we already had a ton of content to address it: Dungeons and Dragons, Camelot movies, goth, etc. The revival was easy.

The more known something is, the more participatory and digital your strategy should be when addressing it, quality and fidelity don’t matter (because all digital content is cool now). The content should be prolific, high spend, with lots of easy ways to engage that are encouraged, be it official or unofficial or both. 

Early is late. Late is early. If something fades out of collective consciousness, it’s a perfect time to revive it because it’s ready to be absorbed.

Arbitrage is at hand if something has been contentified before but is lost to the collective consciousness. The myth already exists. This is where AI will make things super easy to address. AI is very good at taking something that’s widely understood and applying it to different contexts. Lean in hard on using AI when approaching your go-to-market strategy. Also, empower people: your customers, consumers, and audience. Encourage them to bring their voice. They’ll want to participate because the scaffolding is already in place.

The strategy of the Barbie movie was exactly this: They took a franchise that seemed outdated and irrelevant to the moment but was hella contentified and recontextualized it. They released an AI filter to allow people to put themselves into the promotional poster. It took off like wildfire. 

They also didn’t shut down the Barbenheimer mashups that took over. Instead, they promoted. It was fun, it was participatory, it was an echo of the original impact of Barbie.

If something is not digitized or is original, this is where things get tricky. Because there’s so much known “good” content, it will be easy to get lost, and people will reject it because there’s already so much known good stuff available to be processed. People will find it too risky to spend time on the unverified. This has always been a danger with original work. But there’s an even greater danger in contentifying something.

The Hidden vs. the Revealed

The revealing of anything is its end. The moment we turn something into content, it has a shelf life of being consumed, digested, and shat out. It will be scorned by the time it flows through the content cycle, it will be meaningless except to be revived momentarily for profit or perhaps at best to give some rise of empathy. Listening to an echo isn’t actually the same thing as speaking the original words. It can give you some sense of what was originally experienced, but it’s not the experience itself. 

The cataloguing of all is the end of all. This is literally apocalypse. The word apocalypse comes from the Greek word apokálypsis, which means to uncover the hidden, i.e. reveal. We’ve known all along that the revealing of something is its end. And we’re revealing all things.

Cultural theorist Emily Segal—who spoke at VISIONS Summit LA—recently sounded a stark warning: youth culture is effectively “over.” Every form of rebellion has been cataloged, commodified, and re-circulated as content.

At a recent Future Commerce Salon in Chicago, ethnographer Katharine Dee echoed the sentiment: the internet’s archive is so exhaustive that younger audiences now reach for ever more shocking taboos simply to register as new (suggesting they consume CP ‘ironically’). 

When even transgression is pre-packaged for consumption, the last frontier of resistance is not creativity but nihilism—a bleak symptom of a culture that has posted, pinned, and monetized everything else.

This is apocalyptic. 

Everything that gets contentified loses all value, and the full contentification of things is happening faster through participation with better tools. Full contentification of something could eventually be so fast that it’s overnight, or even within a few minutes. Think of what happened with Luigi Mangione. There’s more to the story left to tell, so the cycle is incomplete, but he became contentified throughout what, maybe a week?

In Ruby Thelot’s essay “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Slop,” he discussed the power of the image—that is, the high-fidelity image, the image that stood alone and was marveled at—and the power it held. He talked about how “slop” (i.e., participatory media) freed us from that image's power (i.e., all images are now cool). But what if you want to wield power? Or create value?

With the original and the unknown, the way to continued value is through mystery and wilderness. The end of the untamed is the end. Digital cataloging tames.

Disembodiment can scale infinitely. If you’re working in the world of the known, lean into disembodied strategies. Walmart is doing a fantastic job with this by building digital experiences that people can inhabit, such as Walmart Realms, Roblox experiences, and Walmart Unlimited.

So what’s the opposite of disembodiment? Embodiment of course, right? But embodiment can also be contentified. We’re seeing this through digitally enabled strategies; in-person experiences can connect with digital experiences and make offline feel like online.

Embodied vs. Disembodied Playbooks

Retailers and brands are hyped on in-person experiences right now because they’re flowing out of our contentified world. But this is all still an extension of strategies for the known and have a shelf life. For instance, we can all feel the effects of contentification on even high-fidelity in-person experiences.

Something like a Noma meal should be an escape, but “Chef’s” Table and other shows have made the experience feel like an extension of our digital experience rather than the other way around.

Most strategies right now are just all extensions of the known. The way that brands justify this strategy is to just keep running with “new” known concepts. And if you build your strategy correctly, this works.

So if both disembodied and embodied strategies are built with a shelf life, how do you get out of the known and into the unknown?

People are turning to the mystical and the mythical and the magical. Look at the rise of Astrology. Many of you can’t escape a conversation without getting into it; people you never thought would be into it are into it. Maybe you’re even getting into it? Are you into it? And even the rise of interest in the paranormal and magical. Katharine Dee is running an Art Bell-style call-in style show on social and is getting thousands of people to tune in live. And yet, much of this exploration is digitally cataloged, part of the known. Little did many people realize, the paranormal and religious were already supercontentified by the people who were in it all along, and therefore ready for primetime.

Everything is recorded for consumption at scale, and its shelf life is becoming exponentially shorter and less meaningful.

Secrets and Steganography

If you want to work in the world of the unknown and the original and create something that will be meaningful to people for a long time, I have a few suggestions. Keep secrets. Some things are only for you and a few others until the time is right and the time is agreed upon to reveal them (which may never be).

Do things with people that require having been present.

Don’t catalog it. Don’t record it. Don’t brag about it (especially online). Let people who were involved tell other people about it. Or if you are going to post about it, post about it in a way that no one but the people who were there will understand. Have anecdotes from these experiences that you save for the people who were there, or use sparingly.

Create new language.

These experiences that require having been there automatically given new context and new meaning to certain stories.

Don’t shy away from shorthand for these experiences. We all do some of this already naturally.

Slang among friends, inside jokes unintelligible to others, deep cut references that sound like normal. Industry speak falls into this category; most of it is a way to prove you understand stuff to the leaders or in-group of the industry. I remember when I got my first project management job, I talked about “agile” processes in my interview. I’m pretty sure that’s what got me the job. Of course, industry speaking is content that’s being made known all the time. The point is if you know the language or signals of a group, you can get in, but if you don’t, you can’t.

There will also be arbitrage in language, its audial nuance and new representations. My co-founder, Phillilp Jackson, made an incredible point about “agentic ghettos,” ie, interfaces that banish AI to operate in and how this is a mistake. The same is true for humans. We may be the ones left in the ghettos if we’re not careful.

Language must evolve and fast. The interesting thing is that our audio and in person communication has so much more built in than our written and recorded communication has built in. What’s communicated in person might be a world different to the people in that room than what’s recorded and passed along, even if it’s audio and video, but especially if it’s just written.

Sometimes, an entire world of meaning might be passed along with a single word between people in person, with context. Tone plus eye contact (or lack of) plus lighting (or lack of) plus gesture (or lack of) can change everything.

Employ steganography.

Embed meaning within meaning. Symbols and words that mean something other than what they are. Hidden messages that require understanding to interpret. Culture has often employed this naturally:  wearing the “right” label is an easy example. We’re seeing this pop up more recently in recent subversive movements like when Hawaiian shirts and the “ok” gesture took on new meaning for a minute.

With these strategies, you will be digitally captured, but at least you’ll have to be deciphered or interpreted.

Put friction in your communication.

Make people work to understand what you’re doing. Let them be wrong about your intended effect. Let there be many judgments about what you mean.

A Field Guide for a Reset

Create new conventions for the new language. If there is to be an even faster evolution of language, we’ll need containers, conventions, and boundaries to wield it to its fullest. New structures and systems to bring it to auditory fullness. We’re going to need poetry. We’re going to need forms. This is where those who dare to venture into the new will find their power. I’ve said in earnest that “the future of commerce is poetry;” that is, the poetry of a rapidly evolving language.

If you want to build a brand and not recycle derivative and packaged experiences until they’re nothing more than echoes of life, do things that the algorithm can’t pick up.

Hide stuff from cameras. Don’t post about it on social. Run away from being contained by the perspective of the camera.

Make people keep up. Make AI keep up.

Speak in rhymes and riddles. Communicate in scents and touches.

Hide yourself in caves and the rocks of the mountains, for all is being revealed, and we are at the end of time.