This is a response which had gotten too long for hackernews to be on responding to Paul Graham's recent article "Brand Age" : https://paulgraham.com/brandage.html , The below paragraph was my response/original comment which is going to be the entirety of this post.
I think some of my comments on Hackernews have touched on this topic of how Engineering/Infra being diluted with AI leads to the value of marketing (brands) being the largest differentiator so comparing this to the watch industry might be apt.
From one of my previous comments
The marketing industry has been very closely linked to sometimes scam prone areas and shady areas of the internet and engineering used to be clean from all of this for the most part. Now, the norm to me feels like buy github stars and buy twitter attention or pray to be in an algorithm which you can't read but it reads every move you make, and yes this is your business strategy now
The marketing industry feels very shady to me. Even with these brand watches for example, They might be paying who knows how many billions in advertising and the shady practices that come with it.
Marketing has happened since the dawn of time I suppose but as PG mentioned, it became the differentiating factor for swiss watches.
I suppose this is what purest form of capitalism wants. At some point, Engineers are more likely to do things organically than marketers. It just feels more authentic. The capitalism of today loves liquid money, the idea of injecting money into getting more money business endeavours make it feel like a dream come true for them.
If the bottleneck becomes marketing/advertising, the best way to do that is by throwing more money at it. Requiring a constant liquid source of money for advertising/one time full nozzle of buckets of cash to market.
I don't ever wish to buy a swiss watch but a lot of the advertising seems to me to generate a peer pressure, even within the NY banking symbols, it was to create a dynamic of us (we rich people who got gold rolex watches) vs them.
There are movies where I live in which a fiance pretends to lose the gold rolex watch and he constantly belittles her for saying how valuable that watch is and how reckless she is and so much more. The subtext of it feels to me that society has drafted people into spending months of their savings on watches and of course they are gonna be mad if people lose their watch and this puts a draft on the relationship. It's better to have a few dollars worth of watch.
That being said, it isn't that I don't understand the points of luxury watch. My brother has a decently expensive watch that he has bought. He likes it. Although I liked the casio watch that he gifted me once he got the new one (which I sadly lost) but it was around ~50$ and personally just assuming a watch being lost of many multitudes (as had happened with my brother with one of his previous watch that my father gifted to him), he was sad about it and it becomes a sort of joke for him to take of watch now.
I don't quite realize tho how within this article, I feel this wave of inevitability. Some, This is the way and only way. It seems to me that what PG seems to be suggesting is that for swiss watchmakers of the golden age (ft software Engineers), its best to focus on brand and embrace the transition and the subtext being that only those who do this will win.
Between the early 1970s and the early 1980s, unit sales of Swiss watches fell by almost two thirds. Most Swiss watchmakers became insolvent or close to it and were sold
Imagine spending decades perfecting a craft for the craft to become worthless. I can only imagine the hair pulled by these swisswatchmakers feeling a lack of autonomy of the whole situation as it may've happened.
I am not quite sure if Engineers have the same fate. PG certainly feels like suggesting so. I do think that we have quite a say in things.
Should branding be done on the basis of who has the more money to inject into black boxes or should it be done on a more authentic basis?
This is something that I can't comprehend of but the current form of centralized marketing attention grab on some limited platforms to me feels like a form of rent tax. If you want your business/livelihood to survive/thrive, spend money on us and famously, Adam Smith was against rent-seeking behaviours. We all can agree on this I suppose that big tech's largest "innovations" only work out because of rent-seeking patterns of their scale. I am not completely discarding the engineering innovations but their biggest cases of persistence/growth to me feels like they are too big to fail, too big to not be part of, too big to not give ads on, too big to not give money to.
What PG suggests by branding doesn't feel authentic brands to me. They feel brands which work by injecting money into its lifecycle.
I can't help but think that the continuation of this as PG wants to compare with engineering industry is anything but good for people who are truly passionate about making software (or in the past making watches), They did get screw over by the past and it feels to me like suggesting, this way or the high way.
The way to find golden ages is not to go looking for them. The way to find them — the way almost all their participants have found them historically — is by following interesting problems. If you're smart and ambitious and honest with yourself, there's no better guide than your taste in problems. Go where interesting problems are, and you'll probably find that other smart and ambitious people have turned up there too. And later they'll look back on what you did together and call it a golden age.
There have been golden ages of wars and in the past century's first half, the golden age of science felt like converging towards atomic bombs/atomic warfare. One can go back and reflect on it and think it was truly the golden age of engineering even, for a man to create such destructive devices previously incapable to be perceived of, manhood transitioning into the powers of god, possesing
But if you go back and reflect on the scientists who worked on it, referring to people like Oppenheimer and how that golden age was used in bringing the nuclear bombs at hiroshima and nagasaki killing so many people in painful deaths and radiations.
It was even hard then in retrospect for these Scientists to grapple with their morality for what have they done to humanity. Oppenheimer is a famous example of it and we all have heard his quote of Oppenheimer
In a 1965 television broadcast discussing the aftermath of the Trinity Test, J. Robert Oppenheimer said, "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent." Recalling a verse from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita, where Vishnu assumes his multi-armed form to impress upon the prince the gravity of his duty, stating, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."
This is more relevant now more than ever because after all, recent events of OpenAI agreeing to be used for Autonomous killing machines without any human in the loop and domestic mass surveillance and the current US/Israel war on Iran.
Maybe all of this can be a good opportunity for capitalists who have money/power but its unclear to me how this is a good opportunity for anyone else or if the people got a say in that.
At some point tho, the problem to me feels like everything has become a statistic. 15 thousand people being fired by amazon because of the dubious AI claim, it turns out to be a statistic. Everything is going to boil down into statistic and to replicate what other statistics have done.
For example, A company which I will not name because that's what the company wants but one which tried to host an illegal party outside of Y-combinator that police had to stop and helps people in cheating their test exams. They were recommended to me on YT shorts one day and they have transitioned to making skits about software engineering and the comments all point out how it has transitioned from product to just brand.
A lot of what they do just feels replicant of what is working within the algorithm/ripping off from other creators in their style or atleast that's my opinion now given that a company that creates tool to cheat would very likely try to cheat its way to your algorithm too.
This might be what PG is suggesting when he mentions tech brands. But I don't want this future, or, this present.
We all also know how billionaires try to act like "us" normal people and all of that as part of branding too. I really despise how branding/marketing works because at times, if the end result is a statistic, and you get money, the morals become infinitely more looser than a authentic person who cares about his product rather than making it solely a machine of profit.
So with all of this, I am not well impressed or optimistic of this particular (brand=marketing) age PG mentions. I am atleast partially hoping that authenticity is gonna play a bigger part. It certainly is playing a bigger part in my line of thinking. I am promoting products that I genuinely find cool and authentic (refer to fluxer.gg, its an amazing discord alternative) who might not have the money funds to promote their product but just word-of-mouth. I do wish if I ever create something, I wish to utilize that too and not play the brand game solely from the perspective of money because I'd rather not do that if possible and I try to promote authentic products now more because I would like to believe its possible.
Theoretically, from the start of programming there was a brand age but the branding felt like this split between marketing and authenticity.
Another point but I don't like artificial scarcity of these swiss watches for the sake of it/more and more profits. If you want scarcity to survive/thrive in a market that's fine with me but having scarcity to get even more than that feels like greed to me.
At some point, the system works because of agreements from the general public that this is the norm but even a minor population changes can snowball something into relevancy and this has been that way from the start of every event which had some positive outcome down the line. Same for negative too though. So I do believe that we have a say no matter how tiny in all of this and its better to use that say to reflect how one feels rather than assuming the inevitability of a course of action.
Just my two cents.