Brands After Vibes: Branding in the Days of Slop

What happens when everyone becomes a brand for fifteen seconds? And what happens after brands become nothing more than ambient frequencies in our endless scroll? Today, we’re running back the highest-rated talk from VISIONS: LA.

Emily Segal (K-HOLE, Nemesis) presents groundbreaking research on the post-peak vibe era, exploring what comes next when brands can no longer hide behind mood boards and atmospheric storytelling. From “strawberry girl summer” to “rodent boyfriend energy,” we've reached the absurdist endpoint of vibe-driven commerce…but what emerges from the wreckage of algorithmic sentiment monitoring?

The Death of Vibes and What Comes Next

Key takeaways:

• Post-Peak Vibe Reality: We've moved beyond brands as storytellers to brands as frequency emitters, where TikTok and Spotify algorithms understand our emotional states better than therapists, creating a landscape of "slop"—low-grade AI material that looks the part but doesn't feel authentic.
• The Algorithmic Gaze: Vibes aren't just cultural phenomena—they're how we see the world through machine learning's eyes. When we catch a vibe, we're processing information like an auto-encoding algorithm, making certain perceptual elements more obvious while obscuring others.
• Heritage as Just Another Vibe: Even attempts to escape contemporary vibe culture through "authentic" heritage branding ultimately become vibes themselves. There's no outside to the constant vibe machine, and stealth wealth still leaves traces of exposure.
• Three Paths Beyond Vibes: The future belongs to brands that are either impossibly dense with human labor (too substantial to reduce to vibes), exceptionally simple (pure speculative energy), or deliberately incoherent (escaping algorithmic detection entirely, like dazzle camouflage for brands).

Join the visionaries forming tomorrow’s culture through commerce at VISIONS Summit: NYC. Step into the future for 50% OFF with discount code AFTERVIBES.

Associated Links:

• Check out Future Commerce on YouTube
• Check out Future Commerce+ for exclusive content and save on merch and print
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
• Emily Siegel's Substack: nemesisglobal.substack.com
• Register for Vision Summit NYC with code "aftervibes" for 50% off at FutureCommerce.com/visions

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!