Philosophical concept explains modern culturefrom @orenmeetsworld

Transcript

Do you ever have the sinking feeling that nothing is cool anymore? You land in a city you've never been to. You walk through the airport, same monocle cafe, same keels. You get to the hotel, same artful lobby, same playlist, same mountain and better equivalent in the bathroom. You step outside and the high street has a Zara rank Aesop, vintage stores with the same stuff, and of worse, a coffee shop that looks exactly like the one near your apartment. We fly 5,000 miles, and it doesn't really change. On your Instagram, the girls on your explore page kinda blend into each better. More rank club bras, another washed hoodie in your ads. This isn't an accident. It's the result of something a German philosopher named Walter Benjamin warned us about. He had this concept called aura. The Zoomer stole it from Walt. Aura, the way he defined it, is the unique presence of something rooted in a specific time and place. The feeling that you are experiencing something that isn't reproducible. Benjamin was writing about photography, positioning against mechanical reproduction. But what he predicted has become the scaled operating model for every brand and every category on the planet, not to mention the arts. Every Zara is the same Zara. Every Best smells the same as every w. Every consumer experience runs on the same playbook, good, experience at the cost of feeling. And here's the thing, we feel it. We're exhausted by it. This is why rank clubs exploded, why catchy b t's no foam party in LA drew hundreds of people. Kids are voluntarily going to church. We are starving for aura in a world that systematically destroyed it. It's so apparent it's become a meme. Now some brands tried figuring this out. Aesop designs every store with a different architect. Using local materials that reference the neighborhood, they have a beautiful catalog online of every choice. They want an Aesop in Melbourne to feel completely different than an Aesop in Brooklyn, which feels completely different than one in Tokyo, but they're not. These brands are trying to manufacture aura at scale, which is fascinating and deeply ironic because the system producing them is completely reproducible. It's just designed to feel like it isn't, but that's the code. The experiences and brands we want aren't the ones with the best product or the lowest price. Wirecutter trained a generation no want some mid. We want the experiences to make us feel like we're somewhere that couldn't exist anywhere else. Aura is the new luxury, and you either build it or you're just another Best.