Softwear as a Service
Why Every Company Wants to be a Luxury Brand
Fashion fades, only style remains the same.
—Yves Saint Laurent
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
—Oscar Wilde
Above: Anthropic’s NYC anti-slop pop up.
The gap between imagination and reality has collapsed and knowledge work is now all but free.
A teenager with a laptop can produce in an afternoon what once took a team a quarter. Copy, code, images, decks, strategy memos are all now conjurable in seconds. The marginal cost of digital creation has approached zero. So has its value.
We’re living through a massive, quiet inversion.
For two decades the trajectory was atoms to bits. Physical to digital. Heavy to weightless.
Music went digital. Movies went digital. Shopping, communication, and work all followed suit. The whole economy sprinted toward bits and bytes because bits and bytes were faster, cheaper, and more scalable.
Then AI finished the job. It made bits and bytes so cheap and easy to manipulate that they stopped meaning anything. A premium brand deck, a gorgeous website, a compelling essay are all now table stakes.
And when the world of bits gets that cheap, atoms become that much more valuable. The physical world becomes the scarce thing. The stuff you can actually touch, hold, wear, feel becomes the proof that someone, somewhere, gave a damn.
Weight. Grain. Thread count. The way a fabric feels against your skin. These are epistemic choices that tell you something is real in a world where everything on screen might not be.
Crypto people had a phrase for this: “proof of work.” The value derived from demonstrated effort. They applied it to computation. The real proof of work in 2026 isn’t hashrates and NFTs (RIP), but thread count and merino wool. It’s whether your product arrives in a box that makes someone pause before they throw it out.
If you won’t throw it out, you’ll keep it. If you keep it, you’ll wear it. If you wear it, you’ll talk about it. And if you talk about it, you’ll believe it.
This is why taste matters more than it ever has. You can fake anything on a screen. You can’t fake how something feels in your hands. And knowing the difference — knowing what’s good, what’s right, what belongs — requires a body. You have to have touched things, worn things, felt the difference between a $12 T-shirt and a $65 one.
Taste lives in your hands, not in a model. Because of embodiment, taste is the last human monopoly.
My friend Joe Wells wrote about this through the lens of Steve Jobs, whose dad Paul insisted that the backs of his cabinets be as beautiful as the fronts. Nobody would ever see the back. But Paul Jobs would know it was there. Steve inherited that obsession. Years later, reviewing the Mac’s circuit board, he criticized the ugliness of the memory chips. An engineer protested that nobody would ever see them. In an interview several years after the Mac was released, Jobs reflected on that conversation:
When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood...
For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality has to be carried all the way through.
How you do anything is how you do everything was once a niche conviction. Now it’s becoming a business strategy as the smartest companies in tech increasingly behave like fashion houses.
In October 2025, Anthropic took over a West Village café and turned it into a “Zero Slop Zone.” Up for grabs were free caps with the word thinking on them. Hundreds lined up. People posted their caps like they’d just left Supreme. The hat worked because it wasn’t merch, but was a physical badge of honor. Proof of presence in an online world chock full of the ephemeral. Anthropic pulled a veritable coup, positioning itself as an AI company selling contemplation, not cognitive outsourcing by hawking objects made of atoms, not images made of pixels.
Stripe Press does the same thing from the opposite direction. A payments infrastructure company publishing hardcovers so beautiful they belong in a gallery. You crack one open and the texture catches light. The books are gorgeous because Stripe believes a thought worth having is a thought worth holding.
The trend goes on.
Palantir is doing capsule drops in heavyweight cotton.
Thrive Capital hired its first Head of Design.
TBPN is selling rugby shirts.
Notion is making merch people actually want to wear.
The pattern is everywhere. When a company treats its swag like a product, it’s telling you something no download or URL can: We give a shit about everything we produce. Nothing is too small to escape our purview.
My parents taught me a simple rule: don’t put your name on it unless you are proud of it.
That rule applies not only to companies, but also to you, too. The things you make, the things you buy, the things you put on your body and into the world all say something about what you value. In an age when everything can be faked, what you choose to touch, hold, and keep is the truest thing about you.
The companies and people that understand this will remain standing in a world that falls for everything
Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.
If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.
With sincere gratitude,
Tom
I'm not sure how to process this one. I get and agree with the importance of the physical, especially today. Although I'd question if people liked Anthropic's caps because they were a proof of presence or because they were free and had a funny word on it (which gets funnier and funnier when you think about the fact that neither Anthropic nor most people who wear them might be considering how 'thinking' is an ironic word coming from an AI company).
But, from there, I don't understand the jump to company merch. Once it's sold, do you still see them as proof of presence? I can see that if you go to a festival and get your favorite band's tour shirt, sure. But what about a jacket that you order online from a company store?
I think I understand what you mean about the quality and the design. Some swag/merch doesn't have the right to be that good. Having worked in tech companies, I have some of these pieces myself. But how do we square the sentiment "we give a shit about everything we produce" with the terrible outcomes that some of them create?
Even if we decouple intention from outcome and externalities, wouldn't that feed the idea that, ultimately, a company doesn't really care about anything other than itself? Aren't swag giveaways a calculated branding maneuver, and isn't merch carefully priced to make money?
A company may care about the quality of a jacket and the impression that it leaves on their customers, while simultaneously not care about them as people. From that moment on, does the quality really represent their general attitude?
No hate here, just trying to get your additional thoughts on it. <3