Brands Made of Bubbles

Across the globe, rising sea temperatures during summer act like rocket fuel for algal reproduction. Massive blooms grow to cover hundreds of square miles of ocean, thriving in the heated surface water. They’re often beautiful from afar, giving off a strange luminescence at night, but up close, their weirdness and artificiality become palpable.

Eventually, after consuming all the available nutrients in the surface water, they die and decay, mixing with fish scales, dead plankton, and marine bacteria.

Summers bring torrential rain, washing tons of terrestrial matter into the ocean, where it mixes with the algae and the other debris to form a thin, film-like scum that traps air bubbles. High temperatures often come with large swells, which churn the ocean and force enormous volumes of air into the scummy water.

This creates foam.

Thick, sinewy, more a primordial organism than marine byproduct, it grows until it engulfs beaches, and then, buoyed by onshore winds, climbs out of the sea and envelops the land.

Foam has been used as a metaphor in philosophy and architectural theory to describe globalized modernity at a macro scale. Today, I want to use it to understand something more specific: the movement and shape of popular taste, which no new metaphor has captured well since the death of the mainstream. Once we have our heads around foam, I’ll offer some thoughts about what this means for brands trying to find cultural resonance in this new terrain.

But first, let's take a whistle-stop tour of the mainstream: its history, achievements, and discontents.

How the main stream became mainstream.

The Scottish philosopher and social critic Thomas Carlyle is credited with the first figurative use of ‘main stream’ in the 1830s, applying it to the dominant direction of British thought during industrialization. He stood apart from the popular thinking of his time, diagnosing mass society as mechanical in its inner life. Over the next 150 years, the term caught on, finding its most famous expression in ‘mainstream media,’ which was coined by Ralph Nader in 1985 and later taken up by Noam Chomsky. ‘Mainstream’ became a critique of corporatized, advertising-driven media that suppressed alternative voices and turned audiences into products.

The ‘mainstream’ held expressive power for several reasons. It captured the linear feeling of history, culture, and broadcast media. Its consolidated force was difficult to resist: High barriers to entry confined alternatives to minor tributaries, while anything attractive was drawn into the main current. And it was objective. You knew when you were in or out of it, and it flowed whether you were there or not, because it wasn’t defined by your interaction with it.

But things don’t feel linear anymore. Geopolitical conflict and tech-fueled class tension have thrown us back into a history that’s cyclical and unfinished. Platforms have made consumption episodic and unstable, fragmenting a dominant mass ‘taste’ with a constant stream of new entrants. More generally, mass culture feels subjective: Your engagement with it defines what it is. That radical subjectivity makes people question whether culture is still ‘mass’ at all. These are dynamics the neat old mainstream can’t quite capture, and they make for tricky water-cooler chat.

Enter: foam.

Foam captures the paradoxes that characterize contemporary taste and culture.

Foam has no center or solid core. It consists of insulated interiors held together only by external surfaces: The bubbles' walls, their source of separation, are also their source of connection. Each bubble maintains its own atmosphere and perspective but is reinforced by the pressure of its neighbors. Every bubble helps form the whole, but no bubble can steer it, it moves in irregular, often arbitrary ways. Seen from within, foam is locally differentiated; seen from a distance, it forms a homogeneous mass. While the foam image may be new, this sense of homogenization and cultural placelessness has been widely felt and articulated in a number of different ways (flattening, enshittification, slop). The more important question: what are people doing about it?

From resonance to fortification.

The mainstream era was created by broadcast media’s scarcity of choice: On a Thursday night, you could watch “Friends,” or you could watch paint dry. Popularity wasn’t a notable quality. It was a base condition of participation.

As media options expanded, culture broke free of the mainstream’s banks. It re-formed into heterogeneous, regional worlds reminiscent of the pre-broadcast era, but now with a distinctly online character: more accessible, protean, and performative; less concrete and lived.

In this strange new geography, where anyone can participate, mere presence no longer proves belonging. You have to demonstrate that you deserve to belong by mastering and displaying the codes: symbols, icons, histories, and rituals. This is nothing new, Trekkies had their Vulcan salute decades ago; post-punks, their pawn-shop Jazzmasters, but foam has heightened the stakes. Bubbles in foam rapidly and randomly reorganize, making it hard to keep a sense of place. People, in response, double down on performing signals to plant an identity stake in the ground.

Once a taste profile, symbol, or object becomes widely legible, it becomes available for imitation, circulation, and commercial capture, and it stops signifying a particular place within the foam. Research tells us that speed sharpens this problem: Things that grow in popularity too quickly announce their coming ubiquity, which turns off prospective adopters looking for something in particular to say. Stanley’s rise and fall offers a recent example. 

In response to this sense of threat, people are withholding distinctly meaningful things from circulation to preserve their specificity and, with it, their power. This appears in arguments for gatekeeping, accusations of gentrification, protectionist policies, and attempts to curb overtourism, to name just a few. The pressure has intensified as nearly every consumer choice now doubles as an identity signal.

What should brands do?

While fortification might work for people and local coffee shops, it's not a winning strategy for mass-market brands. Gatekeeping doesn't scale. Artificial scarcity gets read correctly as, you guessed it, artificial. And embracing ‘quiet luxury’ (suppressing your own signifiers to the degree that only ‘true’ insiders can notice you) often means you just go unnoticed.

Brands can’t hide from exposure. They have to be built to withstand it, becoming more durable in hostile and indifferent hands.

But the exposure and homogenization of foam do not erode every kind of meaning equally.

They are especially corrosive to brands whose meaning depends on reference to a single intensive point, which always takes the form of something defined against an undefined mass (e.g., Londonness vs. everywhere else, Detroit techno vs. all other music, Memphis barbecue vs. all other barbecue). Such meaning is strongest close to its source. Yet business growth requires circulation, which often pulls brands away from that source and weakens the specificity their meaning depends on. A cult fashion label rooted in a particular London scene struggles to preserve that meaning once it operates identical stores in every global city.

This is not every brand’s fate. Others derive their meaning from qualitative difference. The Barça-Real Madrid soccer rivalry is a useful example here: 10 million new Barça supporters need not make Barça less meaningful because they do not consume a finite supply of ‘Barçaness.’ They create more places for that identity to be performed, contested, and sustained.

But if not managed, qualitative difference can collapse. Barça defined itself against Madrid, (system against stars, Catalan particularism against metropolitan power, etc) but as they borrowed each other’s models and slowly became each other’s double, the polarity weakened, and the meaning started to fall in on itself.

The challenge, then, is to build meaning that holds its shape at scale.

A good place to start is a test of your brand’s semantic durability. What remains standing when the meaning is re-presented by hostile hands?

Take a meaning your brand owns, then hand it to each of the actors below and see what survives.

1. A dupe. Someone copies the product or experience but not the story.
2. A stranger's 15 seconds. Someone who has never met your brand shows it to the camera for 15 seconds without context.
3. A robot. Prompt an image or video model with your brand and category, and read what comes back.
4. A hater. A parody, a bad review, a meme at your expense. Which part of the meaning is still legible when someone is actively deforming it?

One way to come out of this wringer intact is to stop treating meaning as something solely contained in a totem and start treating it as something produced and sustained through ritual. When a totem travels beyond the context that gave it force, as often happens when brands go where they don’t have the right to be, its meaning thins. Ritual reinforces the totem by restaging its generative context: the relationships, actions, and contrasts from which its meaning emerged.

So, how do we make a brand’s meaning not just something to possess but something to enact? The foam metaphor gives us a starting point: Retain your shape not by resisting contact but by giving each new pair of hands a way to remake.

About the Writer

Michael is a Senior Strategist at SYLVAIN, based in New York. He’s interested in uncovering the hidden structures shaping culture and human behavior, and finding ways to change them.