VISIONS by Future Commerce

A replay from VISIONS Summit: NYC featuring YouTuber and architect Dami Lee.
From the stage of VISIONS Summit at MoMA, Dami Lee reveals why the most chaotic spaces often teach us the most about what it means to be human. 
As a licensed architect turned YouTube storyteller with over 200 million views, she's discovered that making architecture approachable isn't about simplifying complexity, it's about finding the human stories embedded in our built environment. Through her exploration of places like Kowloon Walled City, Dami demonstrates how the most profound spaces emerge not from master plans but from organic human adaptation, creating connections and meaning through what philosophers call "rhizomic growth."
When a Deeper Connection Is Better Than a Wider One
Key takeaways:
Human framing trumps technical perfection: No matter how many hours spent making content beautiful or technically accurate, none of it matters without taking time to make it human and frame architecture from a human angle.
Personal investment drives authentic storytelling: Topics perform best when team members have genuine personal connections to the subject matter, leading to deeper research and more compelling narratives.
Rhizomic processes create unexpected connections: Non-linear, seemingly inefficient creative processes allow for serendipitous discoveries and cross-categorical insights that wouldn't emerge through structured approaches.
Extremes ignite curiosity: Audiences gravitate toward architectural stories that push boundaries—like the world's densest city—because extremes reveal fundamental truths about human behavior and adaptation.
Associated Links:
Check out Dami Lee on YouTube
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Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
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Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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A replay from VISIONS Summit: NYC featuring Future Commerce Co-Founder Phillip Jackson
What happens when you bury the essence of an entire civilization fifty feet underground? Live from VISIONS Summit: NYC, Future Commerce co-founder Phillip Jackson takes us on an archaeological journey through time capsules—from the monuments of the Westinghouse's World's Fair to NASA's Golden Record floating through space. Through the lens of these cultural artifacts, we explore a provocative thesis: that commerce is culture, and in five thousand years, only brands will survive to tell our story.
What We Buy Buys Us Back
Key Takeaways:
Commerce is culture: What we buy literally buys us back, shaping who we become as individuals and societies
Brands as time capsules: Companies like Westinghouse and Panasonic have created some of history's most comprehensive cultural documents through their time capsule projects, and brands are the most central figures in these critical containers
The psychology of consumption: Repeated exposure through performance marketing mirrors the spreading activation theory that drives curiosity and attitude formation
Cultural permanence: In an era of synthetic reality and AI, time capsules may represent the last authentic artifacts of human civilization
In-Show Mentions:
More from VISIONS Summit: NYC
Westinghouse Time Capsules (1938 & 1968) - World's Fair, Flushing Meadows, Queens
Time Capsule location in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park
Panasonic (Matsushita Electric) Time Capsule EXPO '70
NASA's Voyager Golden Record Project
The "Story of the Westinghouse Time Capsule" book
Voyager Golden Record contents and images
The supermarket image on the Voyager Golden Record
Associated Links:
Check out Future Commerce on YouTube
Check out Future Commerce+ for exclusive content and save on merch and print
Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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The world’s most recognizable brands employ artists and storytellers to preserve their legacy.  Today, on Episode 2 of the second season of VISIONS, we're going live to the VISIONS Summit, recorded in June of 2023, in Chicago, and we'll listen in to our special guest, José Cabaço, the former Global Creative and Storytelling Director of Adidas and Orchid Bertelsen, the COO of Common Thread Collective and former Head of Innovation at Nestle Foods. Two experts who discuss the very real challenges we face in an ever more artificial world.
Artificial Ignorance
{00:03:25} “It's easy to get into the fandom business, but it's really, really hard to be genuinely adopted by the culture that you're trying to be a part of, engage with, promote to the benefit not just of your brand, but that culture that you're putting the spotlight on. I think there are very few brands that do it nicely.” - José Cabaço
{00:07:07} “Oh, innovation happens. It happens because you listen, you collaborate. The outcome, the data conversion of that is product that then betters your performance, becomes desirable beyond the function it was created for.” - José Cabaço
{00:18:28} “It absolutely takes courage from a brand to very meaningfully and intentionally open up a platform and use a very iconic product that they have that has a lot of history, a lot of legacy.” - Orchid Bertelson
{00:19:52} “You already mentioned the notion that if it's generated in AI, it's not property of anyone or a brand can claim the property of it or the ownership of it. Kind of. Because, for example, if you look at these two brands and you see the amount of archives that they have of their own products, if that is their prompt, that is theirs still.” - José Cabaço
{00:23:35} “The line is very clear. You either are willing to be led in a conversation that you decided to engage with a certain culture, or you're not.” - José Cabaço
Guests
Orchid Bertelson, Chief Operating Officer and Common Thread Collective
José Cabaço, Artist and Global Creative Director and Head Storyteller at brands like Hurley, Nike, and Adidas
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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This season on VISIONS will explore the content of VISIONS: Volume IV by Future Commerce. VISIONS is an audio-visual Annual Trends report that examines the changes in culture and commerce and their impacts on the technology industry that serves them. VISIONS: Volume IV took place over three months, from April to June 2023, bookended by two events.
Today we go live to the first of those events at the Celeste Bartos Theater at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where we'll speak with a panel of modern culture reporters, foresight analysts, and media creators and ask them the question, “Where is the counterculture?”
Trends are Change
{00:04:11} “What we have right now is a lot of interesting niche subcommunities with their own cultures and then countercultures to those. And I think the result of that is it's very hard to know what's trending because trends really exist within these sort of niche subcultures and microspheres. And then by the time they exit, they're no longer a trend, they're more like a trend discourse.” - Daisy Alioto
{00:06:47} “You can't really talk about counterculture without talking about the capitalization of it all. You can capitalize on these weird trends, whether it's something like Dimes Square, and then you see a year later, the entire Marc Jacobs campaign for a massive fashion brand is these characters. So is that really counterculture if that's cool now?” - Emily Sundberg
{00:09:00} “Sometimes I do get bummed about the lack of existence of new things, and that's why we're going so hard on fashion history because everything feels really referential. But also there's something fun about new combinations and seeing a couch where there's a guy from the White Lotus on it, but there's also a girl that you saw at a party last week.” - Alexi Alario
{00:11:26} “Is there counterculture or subculture or monoculture? It's completely dependent upon the sample size in which we're looking at. And for the most part, I think it behooves us to really broaden our aperture of really understanding what's most important to the most amount of people, because if we have to select too small of a sample size, we're just speaking to ourselves and really ignoring the masses.” - Matt Klein
{00:16:14} “When we're talking about nostalgia and memory as some of the strongest mechanisms for marketing and the relationship that nostalgia and memory have to certain mediums, like the type of film or camera you were using when you first encountered something or the type of car you were driving when you first encountered something, it's very hard to package that in an authentic way, but if you can, that becomes the brand moat. And that's the thing that allows you to excel past all of your competitors.” - Daisy Alioto
{00:24:02} “The thing about de-influencing is, yes, there's a little bit of stoicism of screw it, don't buy this thing, but it's still a form of influencing.” - Matt Klein
{00:28:42} “Daisy Alioto: it's also important to remember that, for every counterculture movement, the response to it will be part of the cycle of the next culture, even if it's happening in this very fragmented way now.” - Daisy Alioto
{00:35:34} “Nothing gets better without criticism. So I feel like it's okay that everyone is a critic as long as I think it creates a heightened awareness. And especially with algorithms. If you're not a critic, you're just going to let them like run over you.” - Alexi Alario
Guests
Daisy Alioto, CEO and Co-Founder of Dirt
Emily Sundberg, Writer, Creative Strategist, and Publisher at Feed Me Substack
Alexi Alario, Co-Host of the Nymphet Alumni Podcast
Matt Klein, Cultural Theorist and Publisher of Zine
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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The fight for our attention is key to understanding the modern media landscape, startup culture, capital allocation, and more importantly and ultimately, our economic system as a whole. Today we go live to the Visions Summit to ask the question, "Just how profitable can distraction be? And can we claw back any semblance of mindfulness without sacrificing prosperity?" Listen now!
Do I Have Your Attention?
Companies have a carbon footprint but also an attention footprint
With so much consumed passively, it’s easier than ever to fill the pipe, but is that creating rich outcomes for all parties involved?
With the expense of durable web traffic ever increasing, will there be innovations ahead to help businesses win that game?
What are we addicted to in the attention economy and how can looking at our devices as a dopamine hit help us accurately assess that?
“If the resistance to iteration is too high, you're never going to find those new things you want to do.” - Mike Lackman
Customers have to spend so much time scrolling through our websites now that it actually begins to waste time because as the technology has become easier, we’ve stopped focusing on providing something enjoyable and worthwhile for consumers
Brands have the opportunity to delight their customers and deliver something that’s really great, and the more we innovate to provide those high-quality experiences, the more the subpar will be drowned out
Guests
Ben Marks, Director of Global Market Development at Shopware
Mike Lackman, CEO of Trade Coffee
Associated Links:
The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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