Cool is the new Dead

                                                                    Photograph - Ruven Afandor for Italian Elle

Knock, Knock.

Who’s there?

Cool.

Cool who? (silence…)

Uh hello…cool who?

Hello…

Opening the door and peering outside, ‘cool’ seems to have, disappeared…

Ladies and gents, (and ‘hipsters’), I’m sorry to break the news to you, but cool (as we knew it), is dying off. It wasn’t cool (hunters) who poached style, trendsetters, and counterculture, to the point of making them each an endangered species. It’s the reality that all things have limits, and the digital straw that broke the camel’s back…web 2.0.  

What made cool cool during the last 40+ years were scarcity, mystery and conviction. It was in the hands of the few, was an ethos with swagger, and ultimately, was a way of being. Personified it was Thelonious Monk, Paul Newman, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Malcolm X, Madonna, and Basquiat (to name a few…). Then in the early 90’s cool found a way to be hunted, packaged and sold by a new breed of marketer whose job was to make observations and predictions about cultural trends. The first steps marching it into the industrial consumer complex. A  huge step expediting its downfall. 

Roughly a decade (and some change) later a number of unforeseen ideas would fully bloom: e-commerce, social networking sites, blogs, video sharing and wikis. Directly or indirectly every industry from fashion to manufacturing was coming to terms with the inexorable realities of ubiquity, accessibility and democratization. Tastemakers and big business no longer play ‘tug-of-war’ solely with each other. Their tenuous relationship is now being infringed upon by coders, digital geeks and technophiles. Cool is now being re-calibrated in the era of user generated content.

Additionally in the industrial economy, cool, like every other value in the marketplace, had limited distribution channels. But in a digital world ‘gatekeepers’ no longer hold sway like they use to. The filters allowing the ‘good’ to play and the ‘sub par’ to be kept on the bench, no longer exist. Everyone has access. Whether it’s with a smartphone, wi-fi, or a video camera. You have a mic, and the world is your audience. 

What’s interesting is that what continues to reverberate today is that all assumptions are out the window. The question staring back at every individual, organization or company looking in the mirror of today’s market: how do you become a signal in a world full of noise? In a world, where even cool has lost its edge, this becomes a gripping question.

Unfortunately there’s no silver bullet answer. But I’ll offer this: Post Cool just might be where you’ll might want to start…