In the last few weeks, I’ve been spending some time speculating about how the emerging agentic ecosystem might look from several angles.
We’re approaching a pivotal moment in commercial history: the emergence of machine aesthetics, a system of preferences, tastes, and cultural values that AI agents develop independently of human judgment.
This isn’t science fiction speculation; it’s the logical endpoint of agents interacting with billions of data points, developing implicit preference models through reinforcement learning, and propagating those preferences through agent-to-agent communication.
For the first time, brands won’t just need to appeal to human consumers. They’ll need to be “cool” to machines.
The implications are profound and largely invisible to traditional marketing thinking. While human brand managers obsess over emotional resonance, storytelling, and visual identity, a parallel universe of machine preferences is forming, one where “coolness” is measured in metadata richness, semantic density, and computational elegance.
The Mechanism: How Machine Culture Emerges
