The Museum of 2025 Marketing Practices

A guided tour through the urgency, glitter, and curated sincerity.

On a sunny Tuesday morning, a Visitor enters the Museum of 2025 Marketing Practices. She has heard rumours of its oddity, but mostly she came for the café and the possibility of good air conditioning.

She is greeted by a Guide. The Guide has the posture of someone who has a pension and a sense of humour about it.

Guide: Welcome. Please lower your expectations further. This museum is not interactive. It’s a graveyard.

Visitor: Of marketing?

Guide: Of performance.

They walk slowly past the turnstiles made of expired domain names, and under a glowing sign that reads Welcome to the Era of More.

An animatronic figure in yoga pants types rapidly on a laptop with one hand while filming with the other.

Guide: This was called High-Performance Burnout. People built empires from their kitchen tables while slowly vanishing from themselves. You’ll notice the carefully staged houseplants and the curated bookshelf in the background—all part of a ritual known as Relatable Professionalism, the art of looking casual while monetising your glow.

They continue.

Visitor: And this one? All these pinned images with quotes in curly fonts—were they religious materials?

Guide: Ah, no. That was the Instagram Strategy. Quite sacred in practice, though. The fonts were chosen for “emotional resonance,” the quotes for “shareability,” and the whole lot was sacrificed to an invisible entity called The Algorithm. They spent a lot of time trying to figure out what The Algorithm wanted from them. Researchers recovered extensive digital archives dedicated to decoding its will.

Visitor: And this glass case of small pastel tiles?

Guide: Ah yes. That’s a collection of Carousel Posts. Often used on Instagram, usually beginning with a confession or a bold claim: “I’m going to say something unpopular,” or “Nobody talks about this”, and then unrolling a series of graphics revealing absolutely nothing new, but arranged in digestible squares. A marvel of form.

Visitor: Were they successful?

Guide: Well, we must remember they measured success very differently back then. Metrics like impressions, reach, engagement formed the basis of their Digital Faith. Many began their work with sincerity and a desire to make something meaningful, but the system they entered, this thing called Online Visibility, was engineered to punish depth and reward urgency. So they learned to perform: not from malice, but from exhaustion. They began with gold, but were taught to polish it into glitter. Glitter scaled better. It was noise, but the right kind of noise could buy you credibility and pay your bills.

Visitor: This one seems... sinister. A skeleton with “You are the brand” written on it, over and over.

Guide: A cautionary piece. From the 2020s, when personal identity was a full-time product people were told to share their vulnerabilities as a growth tactic. Not for connection or healing, but to “build trust.” It was called Authenticity Marketing.

Visitor (frowning): Sounds like a hostage situation.

Guide: In many ways, it was. The curator calls that room The Trauma Economy. Please do not touch the Emotional Labour Display—it is still smouldering.

Visitor: And this peculiar relic?

Guide: That’s an Offer Stack. You see, they were told that value needed to be “stacked” to be believed. A single session wasn’t enough. You had to throw in PDFs, lifetime access, a secret podcast, early-bird pricing, one-time bonuses, exclusive Discord chats, and a closing countdown timer. If you didn’t add scarcity, you were considered unserious.

Visitor: What were they selling?

Guide: Clarity, mostly. Though no one could remember what it meant by the time the offer went live.

Visitor: Okay, sounds weird. Well, what do we have here? This looks rather fascinating, with all the loudspeakers…

A glass vitrine shakes slightly. The Guide opens the door, and a wall of noise explodes outward from the cabinet—a vintage mic, three ring lights, and a podcaster’s voice chanting, “Value, not volume!” through the amplifiers.

Guide (yelling): This is Broadcasting Over Resonance. At that time, the ones who shouted loudest got all the attention.

The Guide pushes the vitrine door shut against the noise wall and taps the locket. It’s quiet again.

Visitor: You would think they were exhausted and deaf.

Guide: Oh, they were. But they always had the opportunity to brand their silence as Sacred Recalibration so nobody really noticed they were completely burnt out and slightly deranged. The timeline was so tight that one week offline meant career collapse, and people publicly apologised for being quiet for four days.

Visitor: Were they famous?

Guide: Mostly to themselves. And many did try to speak plainly instead. They built with care, and made beautiful things slowly. But it was hard to be seen without selling the spectacle.

Visitor: Were they the happier ones?

Guide: Depends on how you define happiness. The records suggest that they slept better, had friends, and laughed more, but fewer people clicked. And Conversion was everything back in their days.

Visitor: What about these piles of tinned goods? This looks like a shelf of canned declarations.

Guide: That’s Content. A word used to refer to anything a human made—art, writing, video, audio, pottery, love letters, inner transformation. It was labelled, market-tested, and blessed by The Algorithm.

Visitor: What is this—a hawk in a labeled hoodie?

Guide: That was Branding. Or rather, Polishing the Signal. Even then, real inspiration arrived wild and whole, but the structures built to share it treated freedom like a liability. Strategy and spontaneity were pitted against each other, as if soul and scaffolding couldn’t coexist. Eventually, many forgot what they were actually saying, but at least it looked familiar, and because people were so tired and overstimulated, they didn’t want to read or listen—just swipe something easy to swallow.

They pause in front of a looping installation titled The Pivot.

Visitor: This person seems to have rebranded 17 times in one year.

Guide: Yes, it was called the Niche Era. Many believed their message would only land if they found the perfect core promise to then repeat endlessly. It kept them beautifully distracted from doing the actual work they loved.

They walk on, and arrive at an amphitheatre filled with flipcharts and sticky notes with “magnetism,” and “soul-led niche” scribbled on them. A looped voice whispers, “Refine, align, define,” and the actors take turns stepping into a spotlight.

Visitor: And that one?

Guide: That is Authenticity Theatre. A very popular genre. People would publicly share highly curated vulnerability, timed perfectly to coincide with a launch.

Visitor: Did people believe it?

Guide: Only the tired ones, but there were a lot of them.

They reach the final room: The Exit Through the Funnel.

Guide: This is where it all ended. The Funnel—once designed to guide strangers into connection—became so complex, so optimised, so dense with gestures to keep you warm until a sale—lead magnets and nurture sequences, they called them—that even the ones who built it didn’t know what they were selling anymore. The funnel became a labyrinth. Some entered and never returned. There’s still a copywriter and a content manager somewhere there. The curator tried hard to localise them, but could find only traces of rudimentary AI tools and matcha latte.

Visitor: Did anything survive?

Guide: Yes. Presence. Connection. Expression. I know it’s hard to believe, but there were a lot of good-hearted, creative people at that time.

They exit through the gift shop. It sells artisanal iced coffee and tote bags that say “Be the Algorithm You Wish to See in the World.” The Guide waves her goodbye as she steps out with a coffee called The Optimiser’s Remorse in her hand. The sky is clear. She drinks her coffee while a breeze plays with the corner of the museum map.

I write about things that don’t always introduce themselves as related, but they appear to ferment quietly somewhere near, then rise up and leak into my writing before I can stop them. I’ve tried tightening the lids. I’ve tried being less perceptive. It doesn’t work. So, here we are: you'll get my words here, and they may or may not make sense to you, and either way, I could ask, what is sense after all, but a consensus of consciousness, and there’s always something beyond. So, I make no promises except to leave the funnel where I found it.