Branded Quality in the Age of Slop ⇥ zhenyi.gibber.blog
With advertising, the market acts as if all goods are high-quality. When everything claims to be high-quality, consumers no longer know what high quality means. Over time, people can no longer differentiate between high and low-quality products. Then they no longer care. They’ve lost their taste.
Recently, I was trying to buy a watch winder for my father-in-law. I went to Amazon, and every watch winder is from an unpronounceable, alphabet-soup brand. They all had 4.2 stars. How could I tell which one was better? I had no idea. So I checked Reddit, and the only “branded” recommendation was a Wolf watch winder that costs thousands of dollars. I just wanted a machine that rotates a few times per day.
One of the things a brand is supposed to do is to align a set of products with the distinct qualities of their maker. If you buy tickets from Air Canada or WestJet, you understand it to have the backing and reputation of a company interested in maintaining a specific reputation. But this does not always pan out for two reasons. One is that some companies, like Flair Airlines, do not give a single care about how they are perceived and have nothing to lose by being terrible.
The other, though, is what Tan is getting at in this essay: name-brands compromise trust for volume, to the extent it is hard to distinguish them from some Scrabble-bag Amazon seller. This is particularly pronounced in luxury circles — Gucci and Louis Vuitton are not selling belts and card holders and fragrances because they believe they are particularly good examples of their craft — and it is similarly true in the more normal worlds I and (probably) you spend time in. The stuff on Amazon looks an awful lot like the stuff you might buy in a store; it might even be some of the same stuff. But it is difficult to know when everyone seems to be dishonest.
We are rapidly losing any framework we may have had for trust. It is hard not to see the products of A.I. making that worse, at least for now. I am not saying it is suddenly making us believe all sorts of horrible or untrue things we did not think before, but I do think its existence accelerates the ongoing erosion of trust.