Issue #6: Adam Bracegirdle-Black and Tim Barnett. Cover: Unknown Artist “Wii are at the bowling alley” (2026)

Sometime in the last year, you almost certainly watched a company try to change the world, and felt absolutely nothing.

It happens at every launch now. A founder walks onto a sparse stage, or materialises in a softly graded talking-head video, and explains, calmly, that the thing they’ve built will rewrite medicine, or education, or what it means to think at all. The stakes, by their own account, are civilisational. And the way they tell you about it is a slow procession of benchmark scores, parameter counts and phrases like “frontier capability” and “unprecedented reasoning,” delivered in the flat, devotional monotone of a research paper being read aloud at gunpoint. The most consequential news of the decade, narrated with the emotional register of a software changelog.

This is the strangest thing about the most important industry on earth: it is sitting on the best human stories of our lifetime, and it has decided to encrypt every single one.

Call it scholastic. It’s the house style of an industry that talks exclusively to itself. Everyone inside the building is fluent — you know what an eval is, you know why the context window matters, you can hold a straight face through “agentic.” You are not the problem. The problem is everyone else: the customer, the recruit, the public, the culture, the people whose attention and belief the whole thing actually runs on. For all of them, the defining developments of their lifetime keep arriving pre-encrypted, in a dialect engineered to impress other engineers.

The result is an industry that is story-rich and brand-poor. Notion is the cleanest case. A genuinely sublime product, used by tens of millions of people, almost none of whom could describe it to a friend or feel a single thing about it. Ask someone what Notion is and watch them reach for a sentence and come back with a shrug and a hand gesture. The brand is a wordmark and a vibe. Now run that across the entire sector — the labs, the SaaS tools, the model providers — and you start to see the scale of the silence. These are, in person, some of the most interesting people alive: obsessive, funny, slightly unwell, operating from a worldview they’ve thought about more carefully than you’ve thought about anything. Then they open a laptop and communicate exclusively in patch notes.

“The tech and software industry is the only industry that could announce the future of humanity and make it sound like a compliance update.”

AI has levelled the means of production. The landing page, the launch film, the manifesto, the founder’s “personal” essay — all of it can now be produced by anyone, at the same quality, at the same speed, for roughly nothing. We are walking into the slopification of everything: an infinite, frictionless tide of competent, on-brand, utterly interchangeable content. Six years ago Alex Murrell was already writing about The Age of Average — the eerie sameness of brand identities, interiors, faces, films, all converging on a single optimised mean. Since then, Generative AI has only gone and poured rocket fuel on it. Every AI startup’s site is basically the same: the same gradient, the same lowercase wordmark, the same three-word mission, the same hero shot of light moving through glass. Vibe coded, top to bottom.

When everyone can produce the same asset at the same speed, the asset has no gravity. It’s weightless. It scrolls past. You felt this with Sora — a few weeks of genuine wonder, then a strange, flat numbness, because once anyone can conjure any image, no single image means anything at all. This is the part the enablement crowd never says out loud: the flood doesn’t make content valuable, it makes it worthless, and it does it to everyone at once. Engagement softens. Fatigue sets in. The cultural attention that brands have spent a decade strip-mining quietly evaporates.

Faced with this, tech’s instinct is, predictably, to make more. The fix-of-the-moment is for every founder to “become a creator” — to start the podcast, post the LinkedIn-philosophy carousel, shoot the same talking-head reel in the same beautifully lit kitchen. Funds are spinning up in-house media teams. Everyone is suddenly a storyteller. But producing more frictionless content to solve a frictionless-content problem is just bailing water into the boat. It isn’t humanisation. It’s slop with a face on it.

The one thing the machine can’t fake. And it isn’t a slicker launch film — it’s the opposite. It’s the technology dragged out of the building and into real life: what it actually does once it’s loose in the world, the person whose day it quietly changed, the community that assembled around it, the strange new culture forming in its wake. The why, not the what. Not the model on a stage but the model in someone’s kitchen, classroom, clinic or group chat — told by people who were there and cared how it landed. As the slop rises, this kind of human-made, long-form, documentary-grade storytelling doesn’t get cheaper, it gets more premium, because it’s the one form that can’t be generated: it demands time, access, taste, and the nerve to point a camera at something true and let it sit there, unhurried, refusing to optimise. Real, slow, hand-made things become a form of resistance, the way vinyl and film cameras did. The trust, the authority and the belonging that this kind of work earns are the only assets AI can’t print. Scarcity is the one thing the machine can’t manufacture.

It helps to name what these companies actually are. The frontier tech brands are, whether they’d ever use the word, luxury brands — the highest-status, highest-margin, most aspirational names of the age, the closest thing this century has to new Maisons. Which matters, because luxury has quietly rewritten its own rules. Status used to be a function of price; now it’s a function of knowledge — of what you understand and what you’re admitted to. Desire has migrated from ownership to access, from image to values, from advertising to entertainment, from being broadcast at to being brought inside. New luxury is bought into, not just bought: it runs on cultural credibility, on authority rather than reach, on making people feel like initiates rather than targets. Not a gram of that can be spun up on a landing page. It’s precisely the currency documentary trades in — knowledge, access, values, belonging. Tech is already competing on luxury’s terms; it just keeps turning up to the contest in a fleece vest, handing out spec sheets.

“The future was always going to look illegible if you only describe it in benchmarks.”

Because here’s the thing the scholastic crowd keeps getting backwards: the technology was never the story. The human the technology touches is the story — the patient, the kid in the town with one library, the founder’s actual, specific, slightly embarrassing reason for not taking the safe job. Tech puts the model on the stage and leaves the person in the footnotes, then wonders why nobody outside the building feels anything. The model is the plumbing. The person is the plot.

There are, in fairness, a few bright sparks. Anthropic’s recent film There’s Hope in Hard Questions — made by the agency Mother and directed by Myles McAuliffe — is about the closest a frontier lab has come to speaking like a human. In a somewhat unexpected way, it opens on the fear: surveillance footage, disaster, a voice asking who’s going to hit the brakes if we need to. The agency recorded actual anxieties pulled from surveys of tens of thousands of real people, before turning the film slowly toward hope. It leads with doubt rather than certainty, and it isn’t perfect. The imagery is so ominous that Sam Altman quote-posted it assuming it was satire. And of course there’s the unresolved tension of the company building the most powerful AI in the room casting itself as the one wondering whether it should. Directionally though it’s interesting in a way almost nothing else in the category is: it treats its audience as wary adults rather than a funnel to be optimised, and it grasps that trust is bought by naming the hard things it means to solve.

There’s a deep irony coming. The industry building the infinite-synthetic-everything machine is the one that will end up paying the highest premium for the handful of things it can’t synthesise. The brands that matter in five years won’t be the ones who generated the most. They’ll be the ones who looked at the extraordinary, world-rearranging, deeply human thing they were already sitting on — and bothered to decode it, in a language a human could feel, before the rest of us drowned in the beautiful, weightless, perfectly-on-brand nothing.

Issue #5: Tim Barnett and Adam Bracegirdle-Black, with interview footage by Clive Martin and Charlie Bone at Undergrowth. Cover: Unknown Artist “Gold Chain Noodles” (2025)

A few weeks back I was given the unenviable task of picking a restaurant for a mate’s birthday in Clerkenwell — that part of London where every doorway hides a chef with a concept and a PR plan. What should’ve been a simple choice turned into a forensic investigation: TripAdvisor tabs multiplying like fruit flies, TikTok reels of chefs blowtorching scallops in slow-mo, PDFs of 12-course tasting menus downloaded and scrutinised until I’d forgotten which restaurant they were from. It was a culinary tour of the entire postcode, completed without leaving my sofa. By the time we actually sat down to eat, I’d already seen every dish, every garnish, and every drizzle. The food was good, but it all felt like déjà vu — like I’d already eaten the surprise course somewhere online.

Often, it feels like we’re living in a spoiler version of the human condition. Surprise used to be the spice of life, but it’s increasingly at odds with ‘watch time’ and ‘completion rate.’ On board the hellcoaster of the endless scroll, genuine discovery is thin on the ground, replaced by served-up slop precision-designed for the feed, and semi-masticated well before we even click ‘read more.’

“For centuries, art existed to be experienced in person. To stand before it, to feel its presence. But for over a hundred years now, what we engage with is not the artwork itself but its image.”

Snippet from Fakewhale: Beyond the Real: Art in the Age of Perpetual Reproduction

Posting like this makes sense for influencers. In pursuit of follower counts, the more obediently you serve the algorithm, the more numbers you get, and the more money you can make. Can’t knock that. But brands blindly following that are missing a major trick.

See, for millennia our minds have prized the unexpected. A sudden storm, a new tool, a tasty (and not deadly) berry bush: surprise forced attention and rewired memory. This isn’t just some apocryphal anecdote, it’s widely backed up by peer reviewed neuroscience. Study after study shows that “when our expectations are violated, the hippocampus shifts into encoding mode”... a fancy way of saying that we remember the unexpected far better.

“It seems nowadays that everything is consumed twice: first via filters, hashtags, hype-drops; then in real life — when you walk into the gallery, taste the dish, hear the track live. But the magic is spent on screen.”

An unintended effect of the algorithm and our new-found frictionless society is the loss of this memory encoding. By optimising for engagement, it completely removes the jeopardy of memory. If you miss something, it will be vaguely remixed and served again within 24 hours. While it’s easy to blame it all on the algo, the problem goes deeper.

• Think about restaurants: you open Google, check Instagram, pick your dish before you arrive. The menu becomes a checklist.

• At the cinema: trailers reveal the story, TikToks spoil the twist, then we nod pleasingly instead of committing to memory.

• We watch shows with subtitles on, reading punchlines before they can be delivered, flattening humour and expression into functional, repetitive storytelling for second screeners.

• When was the last time you saw something new in a museum or gallery? It’s hard enough to find a new angle to photograph key exhibits, let alone discover something entirely unseen.

The weird thing is, brands and agencies are completely aware of this. “Surprise and delight” still appears in briefs at more or less the same rate it always has – because we all know it works. But unfortunately, fear of algorithmic irrelevance overrides the bravery required to pursue impactful memory.

It’s pretty bleak. But it doesn’t have to be this way. What if we told you you can take both pills? That you can optimise for engagement and ride the algorithm while still building moments of deep reward? There are analogies and examples of this hidden throughout culture, if you know where to look.

Game developers – especially single player, story led games – have been nailing this for years. How do you make something play through at pace, while remaining replayable again and again? The best devs build layered storylines – a simple, consumable one, and a deep dive littered with easter eggs along the way.

Smart brands are already lifting this, augmenting their mass campaigns with nuggets that require intention. It doesn’t need to be the exclusive domain of the well endowed budget – niche music releases are supporting their social and OOH campaigns with listening previews at Berlin’s Kwia (get in quick as it’s closing next year). The Row banned phones at their runway show in 2024 (and continues to do so) then embraced leak culture. Jacquemus adds IYKYK slides in almost every carousel.

As much as we’d like to be paid to say this, it seems a little unfair to gatekeep this strategy (attitude?)... so we at COPE have put together a bit of a cheat sheet for weaning yourself of algorithmic dependency:

1. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Everyone shoots more than they need, and saying no is incredibly rewarding.

2. Niche up your TA. Zoom in until it feels impractical, then look for what unites them. What are they all in pursuit of?

3. Write the long form before the short form. There’s a reason writers find endings hard – because they must pull together the story. If you’d started there, the story would be predictable.

4. Create with, not for. Build the thing that can’t be captured in a screenshot. Find the depth first, then decide where to go wide.

5. Resist the temptation to only surprise influencers. They’re not loyal, nor are their audiences.

If everything is shown, then nothing is felt. If nothing is felt, everything becomes background noise. And in the attention economy — surprise surprise — if the moment is not memorable, what’s the point?

Issue #4: Tim Barnett, Edited by Adam Bracegirdle-Black, Cover: A still from the music video for Sinking by Anna Malina, co-directed with Max Siedentopf

In 2022, basically overnight, Graza Olive Oil broke foodstagram. It wasn’t a revolutionary product. Pretty good olive oil in a squeezy bottle, branded in the tone of an Aperol spritz.

At the time it felt accidental — hindsight now tells us it was inevitable. After all, two years earlier, skincare had already been decanted, emulsified and reshaped into the social currency of a generation. But nothing in the world of olive oil (a USD$15B market) suggested it would be successful. Opaque, plastic bottles went against all perceived wisdom in the market.

Sure, chefs had been decanting oil into similar shaped plastic bottles for ages, but they were getting through a bottle a night. It just wasn’t a logical product evolution.

The established, major players were left scratching their heads, wondering what had happened. Graza didn’t win by playing to logic. It won by playing to a feeling. And it felt just right. This is what AI doesn’t understand — and what your LinkedIn feed refuses to admit.

Scroll through LinkedIn and you’ll see the same parade, a carousel of AI enablement fantasy: bland mockups, generic GPT hacks, and performance-obsessed product heads pontificating the death of creative friction whilst filling their carts with Allbirds and Aesop.

It's a contradiction they can't square because they don't (won’t?) understand that people don't buy rationally. They never have. They are not predictable machines awaiting conversion. Buying decisions exist in a weird, irrational, contradictory chaos, and there’s a massive opportunity for those who embrace that.

But Silicon Valley has never embraced chaos. It is desperate for control. And with AI, it believes it can not only have it, but scale it. And as they get their way, the next two years are fast becoming an absolute golden age for garbage. A slop era.

Deepsee.io, an Ad-Ops market leader, found a 717% rise in AI-generated “slop sites” in under a year. At best, these are low-effort, high-volume digital landfills that clog programmatic pipes and deliver no meaningful engagement at all. At worst, they are riddled with phishing and fraud. Which is perfectly at home alongside the increasing wave of auto-generated social ads with glistening grins, infinite carousels of sterile insights, and copy that reads like it was spat out by a vacuum-sealed robot with a content calendar.

Every day, new AI-led tools promise faster content, smarter insights, more engagement, less effort. Zuck’s pitch — you won’t need an idea. You’ll just need a product. It’s marketing, but now with less friction! And while marketers marvel at a 0.04% CTR, real culture bleeds out the back.

Meta’s vision of the future is based around some key indicators — and researchers are now conducting covert social experiments using AI personas on platforms like Reddit. In one case, an academic team from Zurich used AI-generated characters — including a male rape survivor and a Black critic of Black Lives Matter — to test persuasion in the wild without users' consent. Not unsurprisingly, AI proved disturbingly effective at manipulating opinion using so-called “one-shots”, amalgamated responses tuned to each individual — even outperforming humans in forums explicitly designed for civil debate. For the most part it wasn't just the ethics that alarmed people — it was the hyper optimisation of conversation, and the seamless, mimetical results it achieved.

But here’s what they don’t say: you can’t optimise your way to influence. You can automate production, sure. You can flood the zone with messaging. But influence, true influence – requires going against the grain. It demands contradiction, specificity, texture, timing. It is not the product of automation. It is a product of thinking.

“But here’s what they don’t say: you can’t optimise your way to influence.”

The rise of synthetic data is only making things worse. Entire strategies now hinge on insights pulled from hallucinated personas built from flattened behaviours. "Millennial Dads" who meal-prep with one hand and trade crypto with the other. "Gen Z Creatives" who care about the planet but love a good haul. These aren’t people. These are ad-lib ghosts. And yet, they form the foundations of million-dollar brand strategies.

But while it’s hard not to feel al ittle depressed, the truth is, it's never been a better time to be a challenger brand. Not because you have better tools. But because everyone else is using the same ones. While the majors fall over themselves to publish another AI-generated insights deck on "authenticity at scale," the brave ones are asking better questions. They're listening. They're paying attention. They're asking people.

To be a challenger today isn’t just so much about fighting Goliath, but more like watching Goliath slowly sink into limbo whilst you build not for the median, but for the meaningful. Or at the very least, sounding like a human in a sea of slop.

This isn’t a call to luddism. Obviously AI is here, and it’s not going anywhere. But maybe the opportunity with AI isn’t where tech LinkedIn thinks it is. Maybe it's not about replacing creativity, but redistributing it. Maybe it’s not about efficiency, but about elevation. The best ideas won’t come from prompts. They’ll come from people who know what to prompt for — who understand what matters — who can use AI not to say more, but to say something.

“The best ideas won’t come from prompts. They’ll come from people who know what to prompt for — who understand what matters — who can use AI not to say more, but to say something.”

The next few years are going to be dominated by noise. The winners will not be the brands with the most content. They will be the ones with the clearest point of view. They’ll look a little messy. They’ll say the wrong thing sometimes. But they’ll be real. This isn’t the end of creativity. It’s just the beginning of a different kind of taste.

Welcome to the Slopportunity.

Issue #3: Lisa Cadwallader, Adam Bracegirdle-Black, Tim Barnett, Edited by Clive Martin, Cover: André Boadu of Keinemusik

Last July, a new club opened in Berlin, but this wasn’t the kind of place you type into Google Maps and ride the UBahn to. In order to get to the newly opened “Phantom Bar” you would be guided only by a cryptic Spotify playlist link, with each song providing details of the where and when, while the location was passed secretly between local club goers.

This rather unusual method of wayfinding is partially down to the fact that the owners are already well known for operating outside of Berlin's (rather lax) licensing laws. But the playlist had another purpose — it was a kind of fortress against the algorithmic churn of mainstream culture, a way to prevent the TikTokability and subsequent virality of the delicate subcultures found inside.

The idea was to make it difficult enough to ensure that those who weren’t truly committed probably wouldn’t bother. Some people might call this ‘Gatekeeping”, but for those trying to cultivate and nurture the codes of a niche scene - and prevent its mass adoption, duplication and eventual burn out - methods like this could prove vital.

“Gatekeeping”, once a term of derision, has found new relevance as a form of cultural encryption in an era where trends burn out before they can even take root. In the hyper-accelerated churn of TikTok and YouTube, where virality is the ultimate currency, the friction inherent to gatekeeping feels almost subversive. It demands effort, insider knowledge, and time—qualities that platforms optimised for mass appeal and immediacy seem designed to erode. Yet this friction is precisely what gives subcultures their meaning, allowing communities to develop codes, aesthetics, and ideologies that resist commodification.

Memes like “Oh You Love X? Name Every Y” mock outsiders for their perceived lack of authenticity, and on platforms like TikTok and Reddit, this behavior becomes performative—a way to signal insider status while shaming those who arrive late to the party. But here’s the rub: in an ecosystem of infinite information, no one can ever truly arrive early. Trends peak within days, often before most users even encounter them. By the time you’ve learned the dance or understood the reference, the moment has already passed.

Platforms like TikTok and Instagram thrive on trends that feel exclusive yet accessible, creating an endless loop of discovery and derision. The result? A culture where everyone is both a gatekeeper and a gatecrasher.

The problem isn’t just speed; it’s scale. The phenomenon of "first!" comment races and adoption-curve elitism on platforms like YouTube seemingly stems from that oh-so-Millenial concept of “FOMO”, a socially amplified anxiety disorder driven by algorithmic feeds that reward immediacy and exclusivity, compelling users to engage instantly or risk being left out of the fleeting cultural moment.

But now, it feels as if the “I was here first” era is over — the internet’s infinite reach ensures that no one is ever truly “early.” By the time you encounter a trend, it’s already been replicated thousands of times, leaving little room for the organic evolution that once defined cultural movements.

Think of punk veganism in the 1990s: zines, potlucks, and local shows created spaces where ideas could ferment slowly, reinforced by face-to-face interactions. These were publics in the truest sense—communities bound by shared labour and discourse. Today’s digital publics are more like crowds: vast, transient, and governed by algorithms rather than shared intent. The immediate algorithmic sterilisation of anything that lives outside the norm creates an even greater sense of ephemerality to niche culture, and a feeling that ‘scenes’ may be dying out entirely.

Ever since YouTube's 2017 "Adpocalypse" and the algorithmic demonetisation and penalisation of controversial topics, we’ve seen a shift toward sanitised, mass-appeal content, driving creators to further self-censoring and platform conformity. Algorithms are optimised for engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and watch time, favouring content that appeals to the largest possible audience in the shortest amount of time. As Kyle Chayka notes in Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, this creates a "self-reinforcing blandness" where cultural products are stripped of complexity to maximise their viral potential. Gatekeeping, by contrast, thrives on friction—on requiring effort, context, or insider knowledge to fully engage with a piece of content. This friction is antithetical to the seamless consumption which algorithms demand.

This brings us to the paradox of gatekeeping in 2025: while it preserves depth and authenticity within niche communities, it feels increasingly at odds with the endless scroll of platforms like TikTok and YouTube.

But thankfully, nature is healing — as digital spaces propel culture at breakneck speeds, real-world meetups are surfacing as grounding counterbalances. Physical spaces inherently slow things down—they require presence, effort, and often exclusivity. A members-only club or curated gallery can act as an airlock against the algorithmic vortex, creating pockets where ideas can mature before being thrust into the public domain. Offline gatherings allow for what sociologist Eva Cherry calls “the interanimation of talk and ties,” where shared labour transforms individual participation into collective meaning-making.

Of course, exclusivity comes with its own risks—and elitism is chief amongst them. Soho House may attempt to preserve cultural depth through its vetting processes (and forgetting about them the moment memberships fall off), but it also replicates systemic biases that exclude marginalised voices. Hybrid models offer some solutions: private Discord servers create intimate spaces for discourse while remaining accessible to those willing to engage deeply. Even something as simple as normalising latency—celebrating old trends rather than chasing new ones—could shift our collective focus from immediacy to reflection.

Ultimately, gatekeeping isn’t about keeping people out; it’s about keeping meaning in—a concept that should resonate deeply with marketers and brand strategists. In the age of infinite, optimised media, where virality often eclipses substance, the real challenge for brands is creating cultural depth that transcends fleeting trends. Embedding friction into participation—whether through cryptic references, exclusive drops, or offline rituals—can be a way to foster genuine connection. These moments of resistance invite audiences to lean in, to decode, to invest emotionally, and ultimately to feel like insiders in a world that rewards their effort.

But this approach demands finesse. Friction without accessibility risks alienation; too much accessibility risks dilution. The question for brands isn’t whether to gatekeep or not, but how to do it thoughtfully—how to preserve cultural integrity without falling into exclusionary hierarchies that repel rather than engage. Perhaps gatekeeping can be reimagined not as a defensive act but as a collaborative one: a way of inviting audiences to co-create meaning and build worlds together. True fandoms aren’t born from passive consumption; they emerge from active participation in something that feels rare, significant, and worth protecting.

For marketers navigating this paradox, the takeaway is clear: depth beats reach when it comes to building lasting cultural capital. The brands who succeed won’t just chase clicks or impressions; they’ll cultivate ecosystems where meaning thrives, where audiences feel seen and challenged, and where the act of belonging becomes its own reward.

Issue #2: Claire Arnold, Masha Batsii, Sam Peskin (Early Studies), Edited by Clive Martin, Cover: Beauty explorations in Midjourney by Lisa Michalik and Gil Anselmi

Late last Saturday, as the world was bracing itself for a second Trump term, TikTok went dark in the US. Immediately, a generation of content creators was at a loss, wondering where their next sponsored mukbang would come from, desperately trying to remember their X passwords. But then, just days later, the Trump administration would restore TikTok services, giving the social platform another 75 days to find a US suitor to buy a majority of its shares.

It was in that brief moment of darkness that a tantalising offer was made to the board at TikTok — rather than selling the whole US operation to Elon or Bezos, why not merge the platform with one of the world's most advanced AI platforms, San Francisco-based Perplexity AI?

News of the potential merger was largely overshadowed by the looming inauguration—and by reactions to the shutdown—but the results of such an alliance could be monumental.

The rise of AI in predictive content and product development is already reshaping the landscape of creativity, particularly in fashion, art, and advertising. But in the world of AI, timing is everything. Today’s large language models (LLMs) learn from the past—they employ datasets that are static, historical, and often outdated by the time they’re indexed.

Culture, however, moves at the speed of TikTok: dynamic, ephemeral, and constantly evolving. This temporal gap between how AI learns and how culture unfolds has long been a limitation. But what happens when AI closes that gap? When Silicon Valley begins to understand what moves people and what doesn’t. The proposed $50 billion merger between Perplexity AI and TikTok could bring us closer to finding out.

TikTok already operates as a cultural nerve centre, shaping trends in real time through its algorithmic mastery of short-form video and user behaviour. The controversial platform is terrifyingly effective when it comes to reacting and delivering but not so good at forecasting.

Perplexity AI, on the other hand, excels in precision search and discovery, transforming queries into actionable insights. And here’s where it gets really interesting: together, they could create a platform where AI doesn’t just observe culture—it participates in it as it happens.

By integrating TikTok’s real-time data streams with Perplexity’s advanced LLMs, this merger could allow AI to predict trends before they fully materialise, bridging the lag between cultural creation and machine comprehension.

For brands and creators, this presents both opportunities and challenges. Imagine an algorithm so attuned to cultural shifts that it can generate content, campaigns, or collaborations that feel not just relevant, but inevitable. The results of this merger could kickstart a new era of cultural production.

Brands could leverage this technology to create hyper-personalised ads or products that resonate on an individual level. Creators might gain access to tools that push their output further and faster than ever before. But with such precision comes a hefty cost: because if AI can replicate the emotional resonance of human creativity, how do we distinguish human taste from machine-generated mimicry?

Taste has long been a differentiator in a world of uniformity. It’s what elevates a brand from functional to desirable; it’s what makes art feel alive, rather than algorithmic. Yet, this merger raises the possibility that taste itself could become another input to optimise. The argument for taste as a differentiator hinges on its ineffable quality—a "bone-deep feeling”. Taste is not just about knowing what to make but understanding why it matters.

TikTok’s algorithm already shapes what we see, and combined with Perplexity’s capabilities, it could begin to shape what we want before we even know we want it. The result could be a creative culture that risks becoming even more homogenous, optimised for engagement rather than originality.

This isn’t just speculation—there are precedents for how AI flattens creativity into patterns. As Alex Murrell argues in The Age of Average, visual culture is already stagnating under the weight of algorithmic optimisation. Brand logos all look alike; films follow formulaic plots; even cars are designed using algorithmic efficiency data, creating a sea of sameness. A Perplexity-TikTok merger could accelerate this trend by engineering virality at scale, leaving little room for the serendipity and subversion that often define great art.

The irony of feeding a machine that seeks to replace us is not lost on many artists. In fact, it has become one of the most poignant dilemmas in the rise of AI in creative industries. At its core, artificial intelligence relies on human creativity to function—it learns from our art, our writing, our music, and our cultural expressions. Yet, as it becomes more adept at mimicking those very outputs, it risks undermining the value of the human processes that fuel it.

By feeding these systems with our creative output—our art, our writing, our music—we are effectively training them to replace us. The more we contribute to this ecosystem, the better AI becomes at mimicking us. It’s a paradox that involves us offloading the one thing that makes us human in return for a feed of generic aesthetics.

All this leads us to another realisation: the more we offload human creativity, the more likely AI will ultimately create a closed-loop system of cultural production. But what happens when this feedback loop becomes recursive and self-referential?

When AI begins to generate content that feeds into its own training data, we risk entering a doom spiral where originality is replaced by iterations of iterations.This dilution isn’t just an abstract concern; it has tangible implications for how we experience culture.

The consequences for brands are equally complex. While the creation of so-called “synthetic audiences” built on large cultural data sets could offer unprecedented opportunities for hyper-personalised marketing and real-time trend analysis, if every brand has access to the same AI-driven tools and insights, true differentiation becomes harder to achieve.

With this merger on the horizon, are we actively creating a future where we become mere curators of memetic machine-generated content? It feels as if we’re crossing another threshold, where authorship is deprived of further importance, and we begin to lose track of where ideas come from entirely.

On the flip side, many believe that the rise of insular, recursive AI-generated content may paradoxically create a sharper distinction between machine-driven outputs and the work of true artists. As AI systems increasingly train on their own outputs—referencing the reference of the reference—their content risks becoming derivative, predictable, and devoid of the emotional nuance that characterises human creativity.

In this landscape, imperfection and unpredictability could become the ultimate markers of authenticity, making it easier to identify and celebrate genuine artists who defy algorithmic norms. In a world flooded with hyper-optimised, machine-generated content, the rawness and depth of human creativity could become a powerful differentiator. The irony is that, while AI flattens aesthetic diversity by amplifying sameness, it simultaneously highlights the value of originality.

This shift could accelerate the discovery and recognition of authentic artists—those whose work resists easy categorisation or optimisation—allowing them to gain visibility and opportunities more quickly than ever before.

Ruby Justice Thelot’s astute analysis in ARTnews reinforces this idea by drawing parallels between the Industrial Revolution’s impact on folk art and today’s generative AI revolution. Just as mass production pushed folk artists to cultivate niche audiences and move their goods upmarket, today’s creators may find themselves retreating from mass platforms to more intimate digital spaces like Discord or Patreon.

These smaller communities foster direct relationships between creators and their audiences, allowing for a deeper appreciation of craft and individuality. As Thelot observes, “User-generated content will be a form of resistance,” much like vinyl records or film cameras in their respective digital eras.

This potential separation between human and machine creativity could redefine how we value art and creativity. Instead of being lost in a sea of AI-generated sameness, truly original work might shine brighter as audiences seek out what feels real and resonant.

The challenge for creators (and the brands who work with them) will be to navigate this new terrain without succumbing to the pressures of algorithmic optimisation. But for those who resist this pull—who embrace imperfection and unpredictability—the future may hold unprecedented opportunities for recognition and connection. By standing apart from the homogenised outputs of recursive AI systems, these artists could redefine what it means to create in an age dominated by machines.

Perhaps this potential merger forces us to confront what we truly value in culture. Is it the efficiency of prediction or the beautiful chaos of human creativity? Because if taste becomes just another lever for algorithms to pull, what happens to individuality? What does it mean not only for brands and creators, but for everybody who treasures cultural expression? The answers may define not only the future of AI but also the future of how we connect as humans.

The real battleground may not be between human creativity and AI, but between two competing visions of value: one that lies outside the algorithm and is rooted in human experience and narrative, and another that lives within a highly consumable framework of virality and scale.

For our inaugural issue we’ve decided to tap into our esteemed network for their perspectives on the culture industry’s last soiree of 2024, Miami Art Week.

Miami Art Week was first launched back in 2002, with the aim of bringing a dose of high culture to the shores of South Florida. Since then, it’s mostly been a resounding success story, luring in thousands of visitors and big-name galleries, all showing off their success under the winter sun.

But in recent years, the event has become something of a playground for blue-chip brands seeking credibility, so much so that they often overshadow the art itself with lavish activations aimed at aligning their identities with the art world.

This year, the tension between commerce and creativity was particularly palpable. As brands, galleries, and artists collided in symbiotic spaces, sometimes we couldn’t even tell them apart. When Power Dynamics visited this year’s edition, pushing through the heaving, star-studded lineups, it often felt as if we were not at a must-see arts intervention or a hyped gallery opening but a full-service brand experience.

It’s no secret that Miami Art Week is an eccentric commercial destination, but what’s interesting is how the influence of brands has expanded rapidly over recent years. The multitude of fairs, exhibits, and public artworks on show are not solely attended by Brooklyn sculptors and ageing Geneva businessmen in Commes suits but increasingly by a mishmash of HODL crypto-bros, household name celebrities, members of what Virgil Abloh called “the influence gulfstream,” and a diverse array of non-traditional art collectors.

Much of the art on show is designed not for the elite, but for a broader public—to be accessed via the TikTok algorithm or experienced in an out-of-body mirrored room, rather than merely pondered in the strict institutional tradition. And while MAW is ostensibly about the art, the brand activations surrounding it have increasingly become the main event for many attendees. This year saw the likes of Cartier’s Trinity 100 immersive experience, BMW and KITH’s collaboration on a custom plug-in hybrid paired alongside Ronnie Fieg’s beautiful one-of-one 1981 BMW M1, Gucci’s Wynwood takeover with its giant snow globe and murals by artist Corydon Cowansage, and a migration of wooden elephant sculptures on Miami Beach that turned out to be a launch for luxury perfumer Xerjoff. Even Chiquita Banana got in on the action, with a commentary on the $6.2 million sale of “comedian”, Maurizio Cattelan’s conceptual artwork featuring a real banana affixed to the wall with duct tape.

For most brands, being at Miami Art Week (or any international art fair, for that matter) is, at its core, all about creating some kind of authenticating moment—something that says, “Yeah, what we do is culture too.” It’s a way of moving beyond superficiality and towards higher-value status. The worth of these activations usually boils down to how convincingly brands can align their identity with the values, ethos, and aesthetics of the art space they’re stepping into.

But what does this really look like in practice? Let’s peel back the layers.

To start, art fair audiences—like those found at Miami Art Week—are what you might call “apex consumers,” in that they represent the most savvy, influential, and culturally aware clientele. These audiences are also, by far, the least tolerant towards transactional behaviour. They can spot when a brand is merely ticking a marketing box versus when it has genuinely invested in the culture and community of art. To put it simply, they can smell the cynicism. As one talent manager in our network noted:

This lack of self-awareness in spaces like Miami Art Week can make brand activations feel stale and transactional, a death knell at noisy art fairs where you’re competing with the most exciting artists in the world for attention.

Yet for brands willing to do the work, there’s still immense potential in these kinds of culture-facing programs. By supporting underfunded artists or by creating platforms for emerging voices, brands can position themselves as patrons rather than opportunists and create real, memorable value for potential and current customers. However, this requires a shift from short-term marketing goals and toward long-term cultural investment—a leap many brands seem hesitant or unable to make.

For marketers looking for some inspiration on how to do it correctly, look no further than BMW. The German car giant has charted Miami Art Week's waters since the first season of Art Basel. Its collaborations, such as the long-standing Art Car project and more recent partnerships at events like Superblue, demonstrate a deeper understanding of art’s potential to resonate within the brand emotionally and intellectually. BMW has managed to integrate itself authentically into the art world by building on its historical ties to both design and innovation while giving artists the freedom to create without overly strict censorship or brand safety guardrails.

Ultimately, what most brands are seeking is an elusive sense of “authenticity” in the art world—which is often less about meeting some universal standard and more about aligning actions with intentions. The most successful examples of this create spaces where new ideas can flourish, rather than simply leveraging art as another marketing tool. Really, it’s about respecting the intelligence of audiences who can tell when a collaboration is meaningful versus when it’s just another Instagram moment.

The best examples of this practice reveal that authenticity isn’t just about doing things “right”; it’s also about being honest about your intentions. Brands need to ask themselves why they’re entering the art space in the first place. Is it purely for commercial gain, or is there a genuine desire to support creativity and culture? When brands fail to answer this question honestly—or worse, when their actions reveal their true motives—they risk alienating both artists and audiences.

While brands and artists are changing with the times, so are the audiences. In the current moment, there’s a pervasive feeling that the social media content machine has created a sort of toxic cultural productivity—a hyper-documented production line where low and high culture sit side by side on our timelines, sometimes indistinguishable from each other. This, combined with the innate postmodernism of contemporary reality and an innate distrust of sincerity, has put a lot of people off ‘hardcore’ art and moves us collectively towards more plural, flirtatious, and mass forms of art consumption. It’s the nagging notion that Hailey ‘Hawk Tuah’ Welch may be some great outsider disruptor.

It will be interesting to see how 2025 progresses the more performative notions of “authenticity” that already feel outdated in a newly Trumpified world. These sorts of “virtue signalling” values seem to be on the way out (as the failures of the Kamala campaign have videnced). Because what is authenticity when nobody cares enough to call it out? We’re all a little exhausted by it.

And as the strict political and social codes that once held art circles together continue to erode and dissipate into the algorithmic soup, what will replace them? What is this generation's Doll Factory? If there is one, it will probably be sponsored by Nike or Gucci, just in order to survive. This isn’t necessarily a criticism of the art world, but an observed adaptation to brands entering traditionally institutional spaces with large budgets, coupled with the transformation of many contemporary, content-savvy artists into brands themselves.

As many of our contributors rightly point out, brands should also know that the tension between commerce and creativity is unavoidable in these kinds of interactions. Artists themselves are increasingly adopting branding strategies, blurring the lines between creator and marketer, and this dynamic complicates notions of authenticity further: when both parties are playing by the same playbook of self-promotion and commercial appeal, who decides what’s genuine?

Take commercially-attuned fine artist Daniel Arsham's prolific collaborations with brands like Dior, Porsche, and Uniqlo as an example. By creating a bridge between high art and consumer culture, his eroded sculptures and reimagined objects create a uniquely aesthetic body of work that can be reapplied endlessly to an almost infinite variety of pop cultural objects, symbols, and icons. His work is a perfect reflection of the current fine art zeitgeist—and you’re just as likely to find his work on display at the Perrotin Gallery as you are when shopping for the latest Xiaomi smartphone.

These highly visible, commercially astute, artists-as-brands also expose another of the contemporary art world's inherent inequalities; it is a space dominated by wealth and exclusivity, making it challenging for brands outside the arts industry to break through or find a unique curatorial voice.

"Artists are just as wrapped up in the machinery of commercialism as the brands they critique—if not more so. Brands are captives of their own realities, driven by numbers, so in some ways, you can’t blame them. These days, it feels like many artists are too comfortable playing along instead of pushing back or challenging the system."

Art fairs are businesses, and they live and die on the capitalist impulse. Transparency issues around pricing and territorial curatorial practices further divide the landscape, often favouring established players over newcomers. Brands entering this space should note the art world’s structural voids: a thriving pool of emerging talent, a secure echelon of established artists, and a glaring lack of support in between.

This hollowing out of the middle is largely due to the disappearance of midsize platforms and is a systemic problem begging for intervention and perhaps the perfect opportunity for a forward-thinking brand to step in. But fostering platforms for growth requires more than token gestures; it demands long-term investment and engagement, something that can often be difficult to achieve within shifting corporate org structures and priorities.

Ultimately, authority in the art world isn't just about financial investment; it's about cultural legitimacy. Brands that seem to succeed at this understand this balance, embedding art into their DNA rather than treating it as an accessory.

Brands that have built long-term relationships with the art world—like Louis Vuitton, Carhartt WIP, Ruinart, BMW, or Audemars Piguet—tend to fare better because these collaborations are seen as part of a larger narrative rather than opportunistic grabs for cultural cachet. These partnerships are not just about aesthetics; they reflect shared values and storytelling that resonate with both art enthusiasts and the broader public.

Set within the final moments of a fractious year and in the eye of the US election hurricane, it's revealing to look at what worked for brands (and what didn’t) during this year's Miami Art Week. It seems we’re moving towards a moment of both opportunity and uncertainty—there are huge opportunities for brands that want to put the work in, particularly with more emerging artists and galleries who struggle to find a voice at big commercial art weeks like Miami Art Week. But it also feels like we’re entering a chapter that allows for a more flexible definition of authenticity in art and more pliable forms of collaboration—it’s an open invitation to brands who want to build cultural depth in 2025.

If we were a brand, here’s what we’d be asking before we rocked up to Miami Art Week 2025:

• First, what is your purpose for being there? Is it to build brand equity, foster cultural connections, or simply generate brand heat? Miami Art Week is a playground for the affluent and culturally attuned, but they can also be an unforgiving crowd if you’re coming in for the wrong reasons. Brands need to ensure their presence aligns with the ethos of the event. A poolside party with no substance might grab Instagram likes but won’t leave a lasting impression. Instead, think about how your activation can contribute meaningfully—whether by empowering artists, creating immersive experiences, or sparking dialogue.

• Next, how does your activation reflect your brand’s DNA? If you’re a heritage brand like Cartier, leveraging your history through immersive storytelling makes sense. On the other hand, if you’re a utilitarian furniture brand like USM, debuting for the first time at Art Week, maybe you simply present your products as high end retail furnishings, both at the official Art Basel Store and at The Standard Spa as containers of art. Whatever you do, ensure it feels organic to your brand’s identity and values.

• Another critical question: what’s the legacy of your project? The art world values longevity over one-off stunts. Will your activation empower artists to create new work? Will it introduce audiences to underrepresented voices? Will it live on in some form after the fair ends? These are the kinds of questions that separate meaningful contributions from shallow plays. For a good example, check out Audemars Piguet’s “Rendez-Vous” concept.

• Then there’s the matter of casting and audience engagement. Who are you trying to reach? Miami Art Week attracts ultra-high-net-worth individuals , younger collectors dipping their toes into the art world, and of course a random smattering of international influencers and DJs. Consider offering multiple entry points—luxury exclusivity for VIPs alongside accessible touchpoints for emerging and influencial audiences. A great example of this done well is Saint Laurent’s Madonna-themed exhibit, combining high-profile gallery events with broader cultural programs for relevance.

• Lastly—and perhaps most importantly — are you prepared to understand the context, beyond surface-level engagement? The best activations at Miami Art Week don’t just showcase art; they immerse attendees in a narrative or experience that feels deeply connected to the culture in that place. Creating connections that reflect genuine community values rather than superficial pop-ups. This might mean collaborating with local artists or curators who bring insider perspectives or designing an experience that reflects local culture or sparks civic conversation. See Prada Mode 👀

Ten years ago two friends from opposite ends of the commonwealth were violently introduced in the eye of a storm called VICE Media. Now much older but not much wiser, they’re back with a new publication, and a new kind of agency — COPE (Community Operated Projects and Experiences) presents Power Dynamics.

Power Dynamics explores the sometimes fractious interplay of content, philosophy and consumerism in today’s bewildering media and advertising landscape, featuring important and often unheard voices from the coal face of what we call the ‘new creative economy’ — a chronically online, 21st century industrialised slurry of social content creation, performative art moments, brand experiences, and brazen materialism.

Our contributors come from a network that lives outside of the advertising industries’ repetitive monoculture. Together we’ll look at brands and the advertising industry that serves them from the perspective of the curators, artists, musicians, and creative thinkers that drive the culture they rely on — tapping the vital nerves that lie beneath the LinkedIn blogosphere.

When individual creatives and communities have more control over the narrative than ever before, the definition of a brand's role is shifting to be as much about belonging, knowledge, and identity as it is about owning a product. It’s this shifting definition of brands and advertising that Power Dynamics will explore and uncover.

Be sure to check us out — COPE assembles authoritative, brand specific incubators that translate the new culture.