In a world of glut, craft is king
For a long time, quality was the floor. Now it is becoming the ceiling.
I banned the word from my strategy workshops a while back. Not because quality does not matter, but because it had stopped meaning anything. It was the kind of word that everyone nodded at and nobody defined, a placeholder for ambition that the room had collectively agreed not to examine too closely. Quality. Sure. Obviously. Next slide.
What changed my thinking was not a revelation so much as an accumulation. A slow, creeping sense that the floor I had assumed was fixed had quietly dropped out.
The enshittification of everything
Cory Doctorow named it better than anyone: enshittification. The process by which platforms and products are optimised not for the people using them but for the extraction of value from them. It happens gradually, almost politely, until one day you notice that the thing you relied on has become measurably worse, and that this was not an accident or an oversight. It was the plan.
Facebook is the canonical example. There was a moment, difficult as it now is to remember, when it was genuinely useful. You saw what your friends were doing. They saw what you were doing. Simple. Then came the algorithm, the ads, the pages you never followed, the outrage content, the marketplace, the reels, and eventually the AI-generated images of soldiers cradling babies in front of sunsets accumulating forty thousand likes from accounts of uncertain humanity. The product did not get better. It got more. More formats, more surfaces, more ways to monetise the same eyeball. Somewhere in that process the thing that made it worth using quietly left.
Nobody announced this. It just happened, one update at a time.
Google Search now requires scrolling past ads, AI summaries of debatable accuracy, and content written by nobody for nobody before you find an actual result. Streaming services spent a decade promising to kill the cable bundle and have collectively built, through sheer competitive chaos, something functionally identical to the cable bundle, except you are paying for five of them. LinkedIn has somehow gotten worse, which is an achievement of sorts, now largely a platform for motivational parables about encounters with strangers in airport lounges that definitely happened.
The innovation, meanwhile, has been something to behold. AI pins you clip to your shirt and speak to in public. NFTs, which were certificates of ownership for things you did not own. The metaverse, where Meta spent tens of billions so that people could attend meetings as legless avatars in empty rooms. Crypto solutions wandering the earth in search of problems. Apps that are, on close inspection, other apps with a different colour scheme and a waitlist to make them feel exclusive.
Social media is where all of this concentrates most visibly. The same videos made by different people, the same hooks and formats and beats copied across platforms until the original is impossible to locate. And underneath that, AI content that does not even have the decency to copy from a human original, existing purely to fill the feed, to simulate presence without having any.
Too much of everything
Alex M H Smith puts his finger on something important here. We live, he argues, in an age of cheap convenience, and most things are quietly, deliberately getting worse in the name of value extraction. The abundance that was supposed to liberate us has produced instead a kind of low-grade exhaustion. There is always more, another option, another version, another tab, and the sheer volume of it makes it increasingly hard to tell anything apart.
Nothing disappears anymore. Nothing lands either.
When everything looks the same and is optimised toward the same frictionless adequacy, something shifts. The thing that is genuinely different starts to carry disproportionate weight. Not different as a marketing claim, not different as a font choice, but different in the way you can actually feel when you use it. The thing that was clearly made by someone who cared what they were making.
Trust becomes scarce in a world of glut. And scarce things become valuable.
The case for craft
Brand, in this environment, is not a communications problem. It is a trust problem. A well-built brand is not a logo or a tone of voice document or brand guidelines nobody reads. It is accumulated evidence that the thing you are selling is what you say it is, that the person behind it means it, that it will be the same tomorrow as it is today. That takes a long time to build and almost no time to lose, which is part of why so many companies treat it so carelessly. The cost of erosion is invisible until suddenly it is not.
Spending on genuine product quality and the brand that communicates it is not, in this environment, a luxury. It is closer to the only durable strategy available. Everything else can be copied, undercut, or automated into commodity. The thing that cannot be convincingly faked, not for long, is the real thing.
When nothing is real, the real thing becomes the most valuable thing in the room.