Culture for delivery
No quote, no glory.
The weeping of the guitar begins.
The wine glasses of dawn shatter.
It’s useless to silence it.
It’s impossible to silence it.
…
I learn more from a poem by Lorca, and from what reading it does to my identity, than from the latest personal branding book you have to read or else. Because if you don’t, your thinking won’t fit in a quote. And if it doesn’t fit in a quote, it can’t be shared.
Business schools. Schools of thought. Schools. Everything gets rule-bound. Everything gets standardized. Everything gets packed into neat boxes that fit in an Excel sheet and export to a PowerPoint. Those slides also fit the grand words we all repeat — like synergy. A synergy that doesn’t exist outside the slide where it was drawn.
And it makes sense. Because your thinking, yours, is worth nothing unless you can cite someone as collateral. Someone you feel articulated, in better words, what you think but can’t yet name. Someone who can validate you.
That’s how it works.
If your thinking can’t be filed inside a mental frame, a thinking model, or a framework (which sounds like a higher invoice) that someone articulated a few decades ago to fit reality into a mold that was theirs… good luck with that.
That’s how authority gets transferred. That’s how responsibility gets outsourced. That’s how we forget to think in depth, to push back, to question. We’ve shed our skin: we went from producing thought to translating what others thought before us.
We translate, and we let ourselves be translated along the way. Even if it’s more lost in translation than found in meaning, in terms of identity.
The scenario
Look around you. Look at your feed. Look at your inbox.
Brands now hand us everything pre-translated. Well-chewed. So nothing gets lost. So everything gets standardized. So everything scales. So everything fits into a function, into a mathematical operation.
And then we believe we’re making magic.
We translate trends. We translate content for the algorithm and algorithms for the audience. We translate what we feel into slide-speak. We translate what we know into client-speak. We translate what the client tells us on Monday into the brief we sign on Friday. We live translating.
And when everything is translation, there’s nothing original left to translate. Just copies of copies.
We keep operating with other people’s thoughts to define a reality that isn’t yours, but theirs. Another context, other vectors, another window in time. Athens. Boston. The seventies. The nineties. The one before this thing you're living right now even existed.
But context shifts, decades pass, and yet synaptic absolutism still reigns: the same connections, the same quotes, the same molds. As if thinking meant repeating the neural pathways someone else installed.
And I’m not a “no-past” girl. This isn’t about denying the past. It’s about not letting yourself be reduced to what others have already named, thought, or dreamed.
Translate vs. Transduce
There’s a concept in physics and biology that fascinates me: transduction.
Cells do it all the time. They convert an external stimulus — the bass of a song — into an internal signal — your smile, your feet keeping the beat. They’re waves, and yet they become chemistry.
That’s what it means to transduce: to be crossed by something and come out converted into something else, without ceasing to be what you were. The wave doesn’t translate into feet. The wave becomes your feet.
When you think outside the boxes of the standard someone else defined, you have two options: translate or transduce.
Translating is what keeps words that no longer mean anything to anyone — because nobody remembers what they actually meant — circulating with the backing of the quote.
The quote gets repeated, restacked, printed on a t-shirt, attributed right if you’re lucky, wrong most of the time, doesn’t matter. The phrase no longer means what it meant. It just circulates. Fast.
Transducing is something else.
Brands get translated into their most scalable, most replicable version, until their real meaning becomes a footnote.
The brands that transduce, and let themselves be transduced, don’t fall into that trap. They operate from another frame, from another altitude. And that altitude changes the pressure, changes the light, changes the air you breathe. And if you’ve ever climbed a real peak, you know this isn’t a metaphor.
Culture can’t be translated
Brands want to transcend. They want to permeate culture. And they want culture to cross back through them. They want to be transducers.
But now culture is being squeezed into a text box. And made scalable as a concept. And turned into a commodity, sold to the highest bidder.
Sad, but true.
Brands factorize culture.
They break it down into its minimum operable parts — format, hook, trend, beat, hashtag — and recombine them into something that looks like culture, exports like culture, measures like culture, but no longer crosses you, transforms you, or changes you.
Standardizing is making everything sound the same, until no melody sounds at all.
Trying to turn culture into something that fits the format is a waste of time. No matter how much taste and curated have become the new synergy and essence. In five years, or five months, they’ll make us laugh, or rage, but in the meantime, they scale.
I find life a bit bland. From taking away the salt and the substance, we’ve lost the savor. Right when everything is as liquid as the screen you scroll through on loop, while your finger slides on its own. Right when we want to put more dams in the sea.
We pretend to turn culture into a commodity for the market. The funny thing is, you can’t fence a field. You can’t dam the middle of the ocean.
No matter how hard you try to reduce it to a frame, to an algorithmic function, to a prompt, culture is one of those invisible forces. One that won’t be caught, drawn, or corseted. One that exists only to cross through you.
And if you’re awake — awake enough — it’s precisely the force that, when it crosses you, doesn’t leave you in the same position, or in the same place.
Everything fits in boxes. What pretends to be culture, the brands that factorize it, schools of thought, business schools. They standardize. And whatever falls outside the box gets treated as a footnote. If that.
Deep drag. Long sip. Bitter.
Because coffee, like thinking, is better when you take out the sugar.
Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com