Author: sapere

Long before there was a single logo, there was fire.

A man who could make warmth where there had been only cold did not need to announce himself. The light did it for him. He was the one others moved toward in the dark, and the movement was the first status our species ever knew. Luxury, in the beginning, was not an object you owned. It was something you could do that others could not. Ease where there had been struggle. Warmth where there had been winter. The better hunter, the deeper well, the cave that did not flood. We have spent forty thousand years forgetting that this is what the word has always meant.

Comfort was the first luxury, and it was shown, because to be resourceful was to belong. The tribe gathered around usefulness. To hold the surplus was to hold a seat at the fire, a say in the hunt, a place in the line of the living. Status and survival were the same animal. There was no vulgarity in it yet, because there was nothing to falsify. You could not fake the warmth. Either the fire burned, or it did not.

Then, slowly, the warmth became a symbol of itself. The thing that signaled ease replaced the ease itself. We moved from what a man could do to what a man could hold, and from what he could hold to what others could not. Beauty now meant scarcity. The point of the object was no longer that it served you. The point was that another could not have it. The logos arrived to make possession legible at a distance so that the signal could travel faster than any conversation.

For a long time, this held, because a logo still promised quality. If it was rare, it was good. Then the promise broke. The logo went everywhere. The price climbed while the product it was fixed to grew simpler. And somewhere in the last decade, an entire generation began paying immense sums for objects that do nothing, hold nothing, and mean nothing, then performing peace about it for an audience that was doing the same. We called it taste. It was noise wearing the costume of taste.

Look closely at the last loud thing you bought. Underneath it sits a question you never asked aloud. Is it worth it? Not the money. The meaning. You bought it to be set apart, and ten thousand strangers bought the same thing to be set apart in the same direction. Anyone can copy a logo. That is the whole quiet tragedy of it. The product you reached for to be individualistic is what made you identical. The signal you paid the most for is the one that sets you apart the least.

An editorial for the Kith for BMW 2024 collection, featuring a vintage car from Ronnie Fieg’s personal collection (https://www.cosmos.so/e/902111897) 

What no one says, because it is uncomfortable to say, is this. Status does not die. It cannot. Status is energy. It is neither created nor destroyed. It only changes its shape. The man who swears he is humble is reading the room as closely as anyone, scanning for signal in others and in himself, because the mind is built for it and will not be argued out of it. So the question was never whether to want status. The question is, which form are you still chasing after, after the old one turned out to be embarrassing?

And it has turned embarrassing. In 2023, shelves in North America carried forty percent fewer heavily logoed goods than the year before. The quiet market, the one that refuses to announce itself, was worth $137 billion and is climbing toward $278 billion. Three in four aspiring buyers now place quality above exclusivity, above price, above any famous name attached to it. More than half of high earners would rather spend on an experience than on a thing. The crowd did not stop wanting status. The crowd is only learning, late, what the secure have always known. The supreme signal is the one you can send without explaining. Respect, without asking for it. Dominance, without showing it. Effortlessness returned.

I once watched two men across a single evening. The first described a thing his family had lived through, a real feeling, and the room went still and warm and forgot its phones. The second listed his cars. By the third car, the listing had become a kind of begging. I have not thought about one of those cars since. I think about the first man often.

That is the whole shift, in one room. A logo can be copied by morning. An experience cannot be copied at all. A friend of mine still keeps a bookmark from a hotel, a seemingly ordinary object, because the people there had noticed he read, had noticed he kept coming back across the years, and chose to show him they had been paying attention. He has told that story a hundred times. The bookmark became a sign of luxury. Not the marble. Not the price. The attention. The new status is made of knowledge, of art, of taste, of the things a person had to live in order to carry. You cannot buy the story. You had to have been there.

And the frontier is moving again, past the body, past even the mind. We live drowning in stimulation, lit by a thousand small fires a day, and in a world like this, the rarest possession on earth is a calm nervous system. The places that understand this are the ones the powerful now disappear into. An Aman. An Oberoi. A silence you can afford. They sell almost nothing you can hold. They sell the return of a person to himself. The final luxury is not a watch or a wing of a house. It is presence. The capacity to be here, unhurried, while the world claws at your attention and comes away with nothing.

So the old luxury wanted to be seen, and spent everything arranging the seeing. The new luxury would rather be known by the few who can read it.

Photo by David Martínez for El País Semana, n.d.l https://www.cosmos.so/e/858328335 

And here is where it closes. Status never left the room. It only found a harder thing to wear. The world has grown so abundant that wealth can buy almost anyone now, and almost anything. A name, an hour, a loyalty, a view. Everything carries a price, and most people quietly carry one too. The single thing that has refused to be bought is peace. You cannot purchase it, cannot inherit it, cannot fake it across a dinner. You can only build it slowly, or be given the rare conditions in which it is allowed to arrive.

That is the whole opening left for anyone who makes things. A brand no longer wins by adding to a person. It wins by adding to their peace. The car, the cloth, the room, the object, if it deepens the calm of the one who carries it, it has earned its place in this new order. If it adds noise, complication, one more small fire to tend, it belongs to the old world already, already dying, whatever the logo on it. So this is where status went. Not away. Inward. The calm man in the room is not above the game. He is winning a harder version of it. And the only luxury still worth selling, the one thing all this abundance can never flood, is a quieter mind.

Redefining Value In a World Saturated with Information

We are living through the largest democratization of information in human history.

Today, anyone with a smartphone can access more knowledge in a few minutes than most specialists would gather in days, only a generation ago. Naturally, this raises a question: if information is now effectively free, what remains valuable? Why invest years in learning anything when AI can explain almost everything?

The answer is that information was never a scarce resource. Judgment was.

AI has democratized access to knowledge, but it has not democratized the ability to recognise quality, authenticity, significance, or value. That ability, the essence of connoisseurship, is gaining value quicker than ever.

The anxiety surrounding artificial intelligence often assumes that expertise is primarily a matter of possessing information. If machines can access and reproduce knowledge at scale, what remains for human experts? Yet this assumption misunderstands what expertise has historically been and, in many ways, continues to be. For centuries, we confused expertise with information because information was difficult to obtain. Books and archives were expensive and inaccessible. Specialised knowledge lived inside institutions and professions. The expert appeared valuable because they possessed facts that others did not.

AI has shattered that arrangement almost overnight. As barriers to knowledge acquisition tumbled, people stopped turning to specialists and instead placed their trust in technology. Information became universal. Exceptional talent did not become less relevant; remarkably, it became more appreciated over time. Judgment was, and remains, its defining mark.

Connoisseurship is traditionally associated with art collecting; the term refers to expert discernment in matters of quality, authenticity, and taste. A connoisseur is not someone who possesses knowledge and information. A connoisseur is someone who has spent enough time looking, comparing, handling, tasting, observing, and evaluating that they can recognise quality when they encounter it.

This kind of expertise has always been difficult to explain because it does not exist primarily in language. A language model can describe the taste profile of Barolo. It can explain tannins, terroir, and vintage variation. It can summarise the opinions of critics and reproduce decades of wine literature. But none of this is the same thing as tasting hundreds of wines over twenty years and developing a sensory memory sophisticated enough to recognise a vintage blindly.

The difference seems obvious when framed this way, yet much of the current discussion around AI ignores it. What AI excels at is explicit knowledge: information that can be written down. Facts, definitions, explanations, summaries – these are the forms of knowledge that dominated education and intellectual status throughout much of the modern era.

Detail from the Hermès A/W 1998-1999 Collection by Martin Margiela, 1998. Photo by Marina Faust (https://www.cosmos.so/e/187787329)

Through his famous observation, “We know more than we can tell, ” philosopher Michael Polanyi argued that a great deal of human knowledge operates differently and cannot be conceptualized, almost like an instinct acquired through experience. A master violin maker cannot fully articulate every judgment that goes into evaluating a piece of wood. An experienced photographer often sees qualities in an image before being able to explain them. A jeweler notices details indiscernible to a novice. A chef recognises balance long before it can be reduced to a recipe. This level of insight is only cultivated through years of hands-on work in the retrospective field. And it is precisely this kind of expertise that gains visibility as informational knowledge becomes commoditised.

Historically, connoisseurs were valuable for exactly this reason. Nineteenth-century art scholar Giovanni Morelli became famous for attributing paintings by studying minute details such as ears and hands. Later, Bernard Berenson built one of the most influential careers in the art world through attribution and authentication based largely on cultivated visual judgment.

Their advantage was perception and experience, which wasn’t available to everyone. This distinction becomes increasingly important in the age of AI as we enter a world saturated with simulated knowledge. You can instantly access tons of information, essays, and recommendations. For the first time in history, information itself is becoming cheap enough to be taken for granted. When that happens, value migrates elsewhere. Luxury has always followed scarcity.

When books were rare, libraries were a luxury. When global travel was inaccessible, seeing distant places was a luxury. When expertise required years of research, knowledge itself functioned as a luxury good.

An artisan handcrafts a piece of Sophie Buhai jewelry in Los Angeles (https://www.cosmos.so/e/1052835843) 

In the modern day and age, information is no longer scarce. This may be the most important cultural consequence of AI. Far from destroying connoisseurship, it transforms it into a new form of premium value. Connoisseurship cannot be mass-produced. We can take the winemaking sector as an example. An AI model can summarise the history of Burgundy wine, but it cannot spend years tasting it, accumulating sensory memory, and developing preferences through experience.

The same principle applies far beyond wine. Watches, furniture, architecture, fashion,

photography, literature, gemstones, music, design, food, every field where quality must be recognised rather than merely described becomes more valuable as information becomes easier to generate.

In this sense, AI does not diminish expertise. It separates expertise from information and reveals what was always underneath. Possessing endless data and knowledge is no longer an advantage when AI assistants are accessible at a few clicks on a phone. The real advantage is knowing what matters.

In a world flooded with generated content, opinions, recommendations, and aesthetics, the more valuable people are the ones whose judgments others trust.

This is why connoisseurship should not be confused with elitism. A person of affected taste uses taste to signal status, while a connoisseur pays attention to details to develop understanding. The difference matters because connoisseurship is not a social rank.

The future belongs neither to those who know the most facts nor to those who generate the most content. It belongs to those who can exercise judgment in conditions of abundance. And that is why connoisseurship is not disappearing.

Ultimately, the question arises: what forms of understanding gain value precisely due to the existence of AI?