Unshittification: The Branding Mandate of a Degraded Information Economy

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes our current condition as the Hell of the Same. It is a state where distinctiveness is smoothed over, friction is eliminated and everything is presented with a cheerful, terrifying positivity. In this environment, true meaning withers because meaning requires distinction. It requires the "other" to validate.

We see this manifested in our digital ecosystem every day. Feeds that look identical. Voices that sound synthetic. Brands that mimic each other’s aesthetics in a race to the middle. Then, everything good becomes worse.

This cultural flattening is the direct result of what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification: a cycle where platforms degrade their utility to users in favor of extraction.

But this is not just a platform problem. It is a branding problem.

For organizations, this is not a peripheral cultural issue. It is core business.

 When attention becomes the scarcest resource, the default organizational reflex is to produce more. More messages, more channels, more frequency. But in an environment already saturated, that approach does not build value. It accelerates degradation, increases cognitive load and trains audiences to ignore you. It becomes part of the problem it tries to solve.

So, what is the alternative?

A hypothesis: the next era of brand management will be defined not by amplification, but by unshittification.

This is not a retreat. It is a recalibration. It is the decision to reverse the degradation of experience by designing for meaning, necessary friction and treating attention as a resource to be protected, not strip-mined.

The forces that created the relevance crisis

I see three converging forces making this moment uniquely difficult.

First, the democratization of communication. Anyone with a smartphone can publish, distribute and build an audience. This is a genuine cultural gain. Voices that were historically excluded can speak, niche communities can form, expertise can surface from unexpected places. But democratization also means that gatekeeping has been replaced by an open market, where visibility is often determined by platform mechanics rather than merit.

Second, generative systems have industrialized content. A competent prompt can produce pages in seconds. Entire teams can be simulated. The advantages are quite obvious: speed, access, productivity. The hidden costs, on the other hand, are structural: when production becomes frictionless, the baseline volume becomes infinite. Validation and accountability do not scale at the same rate. And what is produced today quickly becomes training material, reference and precedent for tomorrow.

Third, reality itself has fragmented. Algorithms optimize for reinforcement. They learn what you already believe and they serve it back to you with increasing precision. Over time, this does not simply create echo chambers, but also creates the conditions for disagreement. If we do not share a minimum common ground, conversation becomes impossible because we do not have access to the same generator factor. Debate becomes offensive. Facts become optional.

Together, these forces produce a predictable outcome: people become overwhelmed, trust becomes brittle and attention becomes challenging. In that environment, the ability to focus on what truly matters is systematically undermined by the very information systems meant to serve us.

Unshittification as a branding mandate

If we accept that the environment is degraded, the strategic question becomes clear: will the way you design and deploy your brand expressions contribute to that degradation, or counteract it?

Branding, at its best, is the deliberate act of choosing what deserves to be expressed, for whom and why it should matter. It is the opposite of deliberated content production. It is the practice of relevance.

That is why Erich Posselt’s provocation about a world without brands lands as more than a thought experiment. If brands disappeared tomorrow, we would not just lose logos and campaigns. We would lose a critical layer of meaning-making. In a degraded information economy, coherent brand expressions can function as cognitive infrastructure, helping people on deciding what to trust, what to ignore and what to invest attention in.

What does that look like in practice?

I can think of five principles, with a few examples, that might guide it.

1) Reduce before you add

Most organisations do not have a content problem. They have a curation problem. They publish too much, repeat too often and treat every message as urgent. Unshittification begins with editorial restraint. Fewer messages, sharper intent, quiet excellence.

Bottega Veneta’s deliberate exit from conventional social media platforms illustrates this restraint. By transforming their communication into sparse, high-impact cultural events, they prove that strategic silence projects immense confidence.

2) Make the point, then stop

In a feed-driven culture, verbosity is often a proxy for importance. Strong organizations express their brands cleanly. They make a claim, support it and conclude.

 They do not inflate language to create the illusion of depth.

B2B leaders like Stripe have built loyalty exactly through this discipline. Their communication articulates the infrastructure clearly and systematically minimizes the user's cognitive load.

3) Replace targeting with orientation

Precision targeting can increase conversion. It can also erode trust when it feels manipulative or uncanny. Orientation is different. It helps people understand what you stand for, what you are not and how to decide if you are for them. Branding should optimize not only for persuasion, but for legibility.

Patagonia’s famous "Don't Buy This Jacket" campaign functioned as the ultimate act of orientation. By explicitly stating their anti-waste values, they helped consumers opt-in emotionally, naturally filtering the audience based on a shared worldview.

4) Build cues of accountability

When content is abundant, credibility becomes the differentiator. Accountability must be expressed. Sources can be made visible. Assumptions clarified. Opinion distinguished from evidence. Trust is a system of signals that can be audited.

In the beauty sector, The Ordinary disrupted legacy giants through transparency. By adopting a clean label positioning and anchoring their identity in exact active ingredients, they turned verifiable evidence into their strongest brand asset.

5) Design experiences that don't punish the user

Hidden friction, forced subscriptions, infinite loops and interface tricks are not just UX issues. They shape how a brand is expressed in lived experience. Unshittification means removing extractive mechanics, even when they are profitable in the short term, because the long-term cost is reputational and cultural.

Digital services that offer one-click cancellations exemplify this respect. Making the departure process frictionless preserves the relationship and builds the reputational trust necessary for a future return.

The deeper point: we are still human

The relevance crisis is not only informational. It is existential. The future will not belong to the organizations that publish the most. It will belong to those that help people perceive what matters and that earn the right to be part of it.

People do not just want content. They want to belong to something that makes sense, with meaning, connection, coherence and purpose. And it is precisely in a moment of fragmentation that those needs become more acute.

This is why branding matters now, perhaps more than in the last two decades, because the discipline of branding can be a counterforce to chaos, if practiced seriously.

If you treat branding as simple amplification, you tend to become a louder participant in a noisier world. If you treat branding as unshittification, you may become something rarer: a source of guidance.

Make sense before making noise.