Active Materials is a newsletter by Jordan Willis for creative strategists exploring the intersections of art, culture, and technology. Browse the archive to dive deeper.

If this found its way to you, and you’d like more, subscribe below.

Subscribe now

The Ultradome

Welcome to the Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance.

Inside a studio, under the glow of lights and cameras, sits a round table where entrepreneurs Jordi Hays and John Coogan present their daily, live tech talk show.

Think of it like your favourite ‘two bros chilling’ podcast, a la Throwing Fits (which I’ve always loved), shooting the shit around tech-industry news, equipped with a meme-literate soundboard and amped-up Bloomberg-Television-cross-ESPN design aesthetics. Forest green aplenty. It’s fun, it’s digestible, and the interview schedule reads like a who’s who of the industry surrounding AI.

This is TBPN. One of the fastest-growing shows in tech, recently described as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession” by The New York Times.

And now, part of OpenAI.

A Sensemaking Machine

That shift matters. At a time when public perception of AI is generating real anxiety, every man and their dog is telling you now’s the time to become a plumber, and a broader sense of doomerism around tech, the acquisition reads like a play to take back control of the narrative.

And TBPN is the perfect vehicle for it because, beyond being a tech show, it’s really setting up to be something more specific: a cultural sensemaking machine.

What TBPN does well is turn complex, uncertain topics around AI into graspable conversations. Not through reports or polished takes, but through talking things through in public.

Testing opinions in real time. Letting meaning form socially rather than delivering it fully formed. The casualness helps. The humour makes it enjoyable.

The loose, talk-show energy makes dense ideas feel incredibly digestible. This builds trust in a way that corporate comms or explainer content simply can’t.

That’s what I think makes the show powerful.

Building Taste in Tech

Zoom out from TBPN, and there’s a wider pattern forming.

Tech companies are increasingly layering culture and taste into their product offerings, moving beyond the incrementality battle that most traditional product specs are fighting over.

A Cold Wall* founder and designer Samuel Ross is now Global Creative Director of Whoop, and what could easily be another wearable fitness tracker suddenly becomes something more stylised, more textured, because the added design layer communicates a new worldview rather than just a new feature.

Charlie Smith, the previous marketing chief at Loewe, is now Chief Brand Officer at Nothing, a company that’s already turned design friction, transparent hardware and retro-future dot-matrix interfaces into an identity.

What shifts when you put a Loewe marketing chief or an A Cold Wall* founder at the creative helm of a tech company?

The product stops being just the product. Design and aesthetics become strategic positioning. That’s the playbook these brands are buying; the same one used in markets like Luxury Fashion.

Apple knows this; its playful campaigns and recent TikTok launch with the MacBook Neo show a company that’s long understood the game, now doubling down on cultural fluency. Tech is getting fun, expressive, and sticking its hands deep into building cultural capital.

In that context, the TBPN acquisition is a cultural move more than anything. If culture is where meaning is formed, then shaping culture becomes strategic.

A Future ESPN?

TBPN currently sits at around 70,000 viewers per episode. Currently, the audience most likely consists of Silicon Valley players, tech founders, investors, and startup employees.

Sure, OpenAI wants to be behind your favourite tech-bro’s favourite tech-show. But I think the real investment thesis syncs up with the wider pattern we just talked about.

As tech companies push toward these culture-first models, TBPN could become something like an ESPN for technology, a platform whose audience gradually expands beyond insiders into a more casual user base, people who don’t work in tech, but whose lives are increasingly shaped by it.

And the reason that growth is plausible is precisely because of the sensemaking format. TBPN makes news around AI and tech more watchable, more talkable, more social. You might one day soon find your housemate flicking off the latest prem game to catch up with the past week’s TBPN digest.

Koyaanisqatsi’d

In a recent interview with Cultured Mag, John Coogan (one half of the presenting team) was asked: “What’s one work of art that got you through an important moment in your life?” His answer: Koyaanisqatsi, the 1982 documentary directed by Godfrey Reggio.

If you’ve seen it, the choice is kind of perfect. The film is a non-narrative, visual and auditory experience designed to depict the chaotic relationship between humanity, nature, and technology.

The film is sensemaking too, a different kind, slower and more meditative, but the same impulse. Making sense of a world that’s moving faster than our understanding of it. Something is telling about the co-host of tech’s most energetic daily show, citing a film about life out of balance.

Prophetically, Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi term meaning, among other things, “life out of balance”.

Maybe TBPN is OpenAI’s attempt at restoring some of their balance. Or maybe it’s just another way of making the imbalance feel comfortable.

An exciting space to watch.

Your Curiosity Means a Lot

Active Materials exists to build a community of curious individuals, people open to new ways of seeing, making, and understanding the world. Learn more about us here. In the archive, you can find other ideas to explore.

Enjoyed this? Send it to a friend.

Share

Interested in collaborating or contributing?

Comment below or send me a message at hello@jordanwillis.xyz to get in touch.

Active Materials is a newsletter by Jordan Willis for creative strategists exploring the intersections of art, culture, and technology. Browse the archive to dive deeper.

If this found its way to you, and you’d like more, subscribe below.

Subscribe now

The Laptop Performance

Over the past two weekends, Justin Bieber headlined Coachella, and for most of the set, the 32-year-old sat on stage with a laptop, streaming YouTube clips of his hits while singing over them live.

Beliebers aplenty watched grainy home videos, early performances, memes, and the songs that made him. A pop star who grew up at the same time as the internet grew around him, now treating the internet as his instrument. The laptop, this everyday object, this portal to everything, becomes the stage itself. It’s almost too perfect.

Nostalgia and performance aside, I feel like there’s something interesting here. When Bieber scrolled through his own hero’s journey on stage, he collapsed the distance between the start of his career (his origin) and his now 32-year-old self, both existing simultaneously on stage.

The performance turned his biography into a myth. And with Skylrk - Bieber’s brand that launched last year after years of teasing - positioned front and centre, myth becomes merchandise.

What Makes a Myth Stick

By performing through YouTube, Bieber turned the platform into a stage. The laptop acting as this object that said, “There’s no industry here, no construction, just a chill guy and his music,” flattening all that industry capital into something that feels organic (Bieber’s $10 million fee is apparently the highest-paid artist in Coachella history).

Bieber’s platform-mediated fame is presented as natural; talent meets visibility, let the algorithm do the rest. That’s the stardom formula we’ve come to know.

And that’s also the mythmaking at work. Influential French theorist Roland Barthes (big in the 50s) argued that myth works by making culture seem like nature, taking values shaped by history and power and presenting them as universal truths. This is what the Coachella performance does: it makes his rise to fame seem like fate.

Merchandising Myth

When looking at the production of modern American myths, it’s always good to look at a brand like Ralph Lauren. One of the most famous brands that injects emotional elements of aspirational Americana iconography into everything it builds within its brand world. From Ivy League to the Wild West, the whole brand system is distilling upward mobility and creating a world with infinitely repeatable rules.

Lauren made a myth you could literally wear. And right now, the myth is paying off. While global luxury spending contracted over the past two years, Ralph Lauren’s revenue rose 10% in the final quarter of 2025. In a recent article from the Economist, David Lauren, the founder’s son, who oversees branding and innovation, was quoted as saying that people visit “because they love the ambience”.

This success is partly due to a preppy revival. ‘Ambience’ is just Americana by another name. But the hidden reality is that buying into this aesthetic doesn’t grant elite social standing; it makes an exclusive lifestyle appear as a default, desirable cultural norm.

Two Systems, One Dream

Both Bieber and Lauren operate as systems that make the American Dream feel accessible. Bieber through the language of platforms, Ralph through the language of products. The erosion of the industry, the marketing, and the conditions that shape who gets through is when the myth becomes effective.

What’s left is a smoother, cleaner version of reality. This, as Barthes’ ‘naturalisation’ process critiques, can suppress reality, conflict, and the diversity of cultural expressions.

From Performance to Production

Bieber’s myth-making performance seems to have already translated into a Ralph-Lauren-esque ‘myth production mode’. Bieber’s brand Skylrk sold $5.04 million worth of merchandise during Coachella’s first weekend - tripling the festival’s previous two-weekend record of $1.7 million in just three days. Three days. Ralph Lauren built his world over decades. Bieber built one over a weekend...

What we saw is myth converted to capital in real time. The laptop performance naturalises the origin story; Skylrk turns it into a product.

A New Archetype

Just as Ralph Lauren synthesised American archetypes to build his brand: the pioneer, the outlaw, the explorer. Bieber has created a new one: the digital-native pop prodigy. Discovered on YouTube at 13. Scaled into global fame through platforms. Built in public. Collapsed in public. Rebuilt in public.

The Coachella performance turned this biography into a repeatable myth, and through Skylrk, he’s made it available as a system others can buy into. It’s the Ralph Lauren playbook on speed.

If Lauren proved you could package frontier-Americana and make it repeatable, Bieber is proving you can do the same with internet-native Americana. The performance at Coachella cemented it, a modern American myth.

Your Curiosity Means a Lot

Active Materials exists to build a community of curious individuals, people open to new ways of seeing, making, and understanding the world. Learn more about us here. In the archive, you can find other ideas to explore.

Enjoyed this? Send it to a friend.

Share

Interested in collaborating or contributing?

Comment below or send me a message at hello@jordanwillis.xyz to get in touch.

Active Materials is a newsletter by Jordan Willis for creative strategists exploring the intersections of art, culture, and technology. Browse the archive to dive deeper.

If this found its way to you, and you’d like more, subscribe below.

Subscribe now

On Listening Bars

Summer nightlife in London has its own rhythm. The heat draws us outside, softens our plans, and turns nights into one long drift between parks, pubs, and whatever else you and your friends catch on the breeze. Personally, it’s music that helps set the season’s pace.

In the wake of a post-COVID nightlife shakeup (club closures, shifting habits), sonic experiences outside the club have found new resonance. Foremost: listening bars. One of my favourites is Brilliant Corners.

Just below Dalston Junction, this low-lit listening spot serves casual Japanese food, quality drinks, and a corner-to-corner sound system to meet all your audiophile dreams. Inspired by Japanese izakayas, Brilliant Corners has spent the last decade creating a space where music takes the centre stage.

Listening bars have been thriving globally, fuelled by a turn toward community-led nightlife and slower, more deliberate ways of listening. But the thing I keep coming back to - is their names.

Because when the music stops, it’s often the name that echoes.

The Power of Names

Names aren’t neutral. They shape expectations, encode values, and quietly nudge perception. Psychologists call it “nominative determinism”: the idea that our names might influence our career or life path. In 2015, a group of British doctors found that names like “Dr. Payne” and “Dr. Gore” show up in fields like anaesthetics and surgery more often than chance would suggest. Of course, our names don’t seal fate, but it is funny to think it might nudge us toward it.

In branding, naming is often the first layer of storytelling. Some names evoke feelings (Apple, Nike); other names place the brand in a specific cultural, aesthetic, or ideological space. In the 90s, Death Cigarettes marketed itself as “an honest smoke”, stripping away illusion to become a cult symbol of anti-brand branding (the similar meta-awareness Liquid Death has obtained).

A ‘good’ name can help differentiate a brand and forge a strong connection with its intended audience. They curate the world the brand lives in, and hint at who should feel at home there.

Taste Signals

Looking across London’s listening bars, a trend emerges: unsurprisingly, many of them borrow their names from songs, albums, or figures in music. In a small sample of 16 venues, nearly half referenced music directly in their name. A quiet but telling signal:

• Brilliant Corners, Dalston, East London: 1957 album by Thelonious Monk

• Goodbye Horses, Islington, North London: 1988 song by Q Lazzarus

• Space Talk, Farringdon, North London: 1976 song by Asha Puthli

• The Marquee Moon, Dalston, East London: 1977 song by Television

• All My Friends, Hackney Wick, East London: 2007 song by LCD Soundsystem

• Spiritland, King’s Cross, North London: 1977 song by Elkie Brooks

• Bar Levan, Peckham, South London: After House legend Larry Levan

I think these sonic references act as a kind of taste signal. A taste signal doesn’t explain itself; it suggests. A dropped reference tells you what kind of space this is, and who it’s for. It rewards the listener who’s already tuned in.

So, what are these names really doing? Beyond the music reference, they act as social cues, subtle flags to those who’ll recognise the song, artist, or scene. These names speak to a specific kind of knowing, the kind that signals you're already inside. But in a world of endless reference, how long can that signal hold?

If you Know, You Know… You Know?

In culture, signals often matter more than statements. And few are more potent than the “if you know, you know” reference. There’s nothing new here. IYKYK tactics have long been around in fashion. In 1987, then-it-artist Jean-Michel Basquiat walked the Comme des Garçons runway. Now, the likes of Aimé Leon Dore’s lookbook casting consistently champions IYKYK friends and family of the brand.

In music, electronic music heads discuss the seemingly random titles of artists like Autechre, which often have inside-logic or inside-jokes to them. The more abstract, the greater the potential for a deep-cut reference.

We love to create resonance, and we also love to decode it. Scroll through reels and you’ll find breakdown artists unpacking every reference inside every reference in the same way Patrick Bateman and his peers obsess over minuscule differences in their business card designs.

These IYKYK moments hit the part of the brain wired for pattern recognition. That “aha” we get, it feels good. It gives us a small sense of belonging, of being in on something.

But as culture circulates faster, flatter, and more global – is the octopus eating its own legs? Are we endlessly referencing and decoding everything to stay relevant? Ironic, I know.

If deep-cut references give us a sense of connection, what happens when brands try to weaponize that feeling?

Back to A Subversive Attitude

Dazed Studio recently held an insights panel on ‘The Death of Cool?’, asking how brands can move beyond chasing “cool” and instead build relevance, resonance, and real connection. Standing out has never been harder. For brands, trying too hard just ends up looking like… trying.

‘Cool’ as we popularly know it took off through jazz culture in the 1940s-50s, think Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk. These artists used minimalism, improvisation, and restraint to shape a new kind of outsider identity. That anti-mainstream, outsider identity.

This idea of "cool" still holds weight, but it no longer means what it used to. Cool has become fragmented with the rise of the internet, and brands try to keep up. For the next generation, cool isn't about status, distance or polish; it's about authenticity, alignment, and intention.

What once felt subversive now feels strategic. Cool has been sliced, shared, and sold, but the hunger for resonance hasn’t gone anywhere.

The Joy of Decoding

In a ‘post-cool’ era, authenticity drives cultural relevance. Maybe then, that’s why we love the reference. What’s more authentic than a deep cut? It shows you know, and that you care. For audience members that get it, maybe it lets us in on what you love, and invites us to feel it too.

It’s no surprise that listening bars, communal spaces that champion their style after eras that associated their idea of ‘cool’ with subversive attitudes, are now the very spaces that young people seek out – redefining cool around values of community.

Music sets the pace, but names set the tone. They whisper something about what and who belongs. And the reference? Maybe it’s just a quiet way of saying: you too?

Your Curiosity Means a Lot

Active Materials exists to build a community of curious individuals, people open to new ways of seeing, making, and understanding the world. Learn more about us here. In the archive, you can find other ideas to explore.

Enjoyed this? Send it to a friend.

Share

Interested in collaborating or contributing?

Comment below or send me a message at hello@jordanwillis.xyz to get in touch.

Active Materials is a newsletter by Jordan Willis for creative strategists exploring the intersections of art, culture, and technology. Browse the archive to dive deeper.

If this found its way to you, and you’d like more, subscribe below.

Subscribe now

Introducing Active Materials

What happens when we stop seeing strategy as a fixed proposal and start approaching it as something alive?

A dynamic, evolving material. A shape that responds, adapts, and invites ongoing interpretation.

About a month ago, I was flicking through a book on materials for design professionals. In materials science, the term ‘active materials’ refers to matter that senses and responds to its environment. Think shape memory alloys that return to form when heated, or soft robotic actuators that bend and twist with pressure. Inherently fluid forms where their meaning changes through interaction.

Could this be a useful metaphor for creative work?

A lens to view creative strategy as something in motion, never fully finished. That’s what I want to explore here. This blog is a starting point. Through art, culture, and technology, maybe creative strategists and curious thinkers can uncover better ways of working with ideas that are alive, active.

The Myth of Eternal Strategy

Culture moves faster, always seemingly getting faster. Brands rush to keep up, hoping to sync with what’s trending. But that urgency can backfire, and traditional business planning can lock us into assumptions that no longer hold by the time a campaign hits the ground.

Strategy can and should be more than a static document or deck. What if it was something we learned to feel through? A kind of attention to the emotional rhythms, unspoken tensions, and shifts in the world around us?

Just look at how quickly meaning reshapes itself online. Meme culture moves so fast. The post-ironic humour of Italian brainrot memes transforms into a comical ‘who would win in a fight between 100 men vs. 1 gorilla’ masculinity contest. We remix, amplify, reinterpret.

In this environment, strategy in a ‘planning’ sense is about being comfortable with constant change. Learning to ride waves rather than wanting to create them ourselves. It becomes about freedom of movement. If the world is moving, maybe strategy needs to move with it, like an active material.

Strategy as Movement

To embrace strategy as movement, we can look to ancient thinking. Process philosophy provides a lens to see the world as continuous change rather than a permanent state. Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus put it as so:

“All entities move and nothing remains still”

Creative Strategy, too, is never still.

So, perhaps we should understand strategy less as a fixed discipline and more as a movement practice. Social anthropologist Tim Ingold describes creativity as a meshwork of lines and gestures, continuously shaped by the moment. Dance choreographers build meaning from how bodies respond to space and time. Yes, they plan, but they leave room for experimentation with their environment.

Watch the aggressively intimate dance performances of rapper-dancer Blackhaine and you’ll see what this looks like in action. His movement language is jagged, urgent, reactive.

That’s the kind of fluidity we’re trying to imagine.

This movement-oriented approach is increasingly visible today. As tools become increasingly generative and adaptive, like Microsoft’s Copilot or our increasing attachment to ChatGPT, workplaces naturally begin to value flexibility and responsiveness. Teams are shifting toward flexible, generative modes of working, embracing strategy as a living, breathing practice.

Interpretation and Infrastructure

Even movement needs infrastructure. A friend recently played me Keith Jarrett’s ‘The Mourning of a Star’. The adventurous 1971 free jazz album taps into the idea of creative movement as spontaneous improvisation. But behind the improvisation is Jarrett’s meticulous preparation: years of practice, intuition, and emotional groundwork that allow each juxtaposed harmony to unfold meaningfully.

That’s strategy too.

Artists understand this. Consider an Olafur Eliasson installation: beneath sensory experiences of mirrors, light, and fog is a deliberate infrastructure that guides emotional and perceptual responses. Good strategy works similarly. Like active materials, its structure enables interpretation.

Maybe strategy isn’t about having a plan but having a posture. An openness to context, a readiness to respond.

Learning to Live

Today’s business environment continually pushes organisations to become more agile. Requiring them to be stable enough to operate reliably, yet dynamic enough to adapt quickly. Companies need to build flexibility into how they work, without losing coherence.

In 2018, McKinsey likened these agile organisations to ‘living organisms’.

The ability to swiftly sense and respond to changes in an environment is a key competitive advantage. This dual nature fascinates me. Stability creates a safe space for risk-taking, experimentation, and continual learning. Perhaps the real task of strategic agility is to nurture responsiveness. It means embracing uncertainty, empowering small teams, and cultivating responsiveness as a way of working.

When strategy becomes a practice of learning how to live with change, organisations can move fluidly, becoming active participants in their unfolding narratives.

A Strategy that Breathes

Active Materials is a starting point. One that sees creative strategy as a fluid medium, constantly shaped by context, crafted through movement, and nurtured in dialogue. A living, breathing practice.

If strategy is an active material, I like to think of its human form like a ‘living’ room.

What if we stopped treating strategy as a logical win-or-lose scenario and began treating it as a living room instead? A space we continually arrange, rearrange, and grow with. A space we move through.

Let’s sit with that for a moment. If strategy is a living room, perhaps our work lies in keeping it rearrangeable, welcoming, open, and always ready for new conversations.

Let’s stay in this room for a while.

Your Curiosity Means a Lot

Active Materials exists to build a community of curious individuals, people open to new ways of seeing, making, and understanding the world. Learn more about us here. In the archive, you can find other ideas to explore.

Enjoyed this? Send it to a friend.

Share

Interested in collaborating or contributing?

Comment below or send me a message at hello@jordanwillis.xyz to get in touch.