Shelf Life: The Truth Lasts

“Truth will out,” says Launcelot to his blind father in The Merchant of Venice. You can hide a secret for a long time, but not forever.

Six hundred years later, this idea feels like it applies to everything. All roads lead to FAFO. Product branding, Hinge profiles, and LinkedIn job listings can say one thing, but you won’t know if your expectations meet reality until you sink a bit of time into it, and allow truth to out. There’s some pattern recognition we all use to avoid getting scammed or disappointed, but because the visual and language signals of subculture and quality have become common vernacular, things are easier than ever to spoof. Time feels like the last universal marker of determining if you’ve found The Good One™.

I recently came across a screen-printed shirt that read “Things of Quality Have No Fear of Time.” In an era of ghosting, pivoting, light commitment, anxious attachment styles, and planned obsolescence, that phrase felt almost defiant. Or maybe just honest about what we’ve lost. The idea that quality might be expressed plainly, with honesty and confidence, feels foreign to me in the trust-negative era we find ourselves in.

The Brand Hangover

Every time I scroll past ads on IG, I get flashbacks to the 2010s formula associated with “Expansive Brands” thinking that put values first, product second. The aura of a brand, wrapping its product in abstracted vibes. It emerged from a specific moment, optimistic about transparency, sustainability messaging, and “doing good.” Businesses learned that people care about brands that align with their values, but forgot that people value things that work well, look good, and last long.

Consumer fluency with brand trickery runs deeper than most people building brands seem to realize. K-pop stans now analyze comeback strategies, promotional spend, and label investment like A&R executives. They know what good support looks like because they’ve seen what bad support leads to with the Khia Asylum. Film audiences debate VFX house workloads and production budgets for Marty Supreme with line producer fluency. They can tell when a studio cut corners because they’ve watched enough breakdowns to know what corners look like.

Ten years after the millennial brand formula reached its peak, cultural understanding of commercial outcomes has become dinner-table fodder. When everyone knows how the sausage gets made, the sausage better be good. A real and growing cultural fatigue over brand narratives that don’t match product reality is causing a new tension between products that become brands, versus brands trying to become products.

The Awareness Shift

Now that consumers can tell the difference between “does it look good” and “is it actually good,” the veil has lifted on manufacturing, materials, update cycles, bug fixes, and longevity. Communities are forming around products that last versus products that lie. r/BuyItForLife exists because people got tired of buying the same cheap thing twice. iFixit scores products on repairability because people want things they can fix. Game console modding communities exist to extend the life of high-quality hardware dropped by its corporate stewards.

People know when they’re getting the short end of the stick in quality faster than brands can cover it up with a new campaign or rebrand. With the rise of supply chain awareness thanks to 2025’s tariffs, people understand that the source of physical products are centralized but the market positioning via branding is what differentiates identical products.

When brand premium becomes completely decoupled from product quality, desire evaporates. The romance only works when the product can hold up its end. Right when the initial tariffs hit, Chinese manufacturers flooded TikTok with videos claiming they make luxury bags for brands like Hermès and Louis Vuitton, then ship them to Europe for final touches and “Made in Italy” labels. A Birkin bag that sells for $38,000 allegedly costs $1,400 to produce.

Whether the claims were accurate or a counterfeit market sprang to seize an opportunity, the viral response revealed something important: people weren’t outraged, they were interested. Interested in cutting out the markup. Interested in going straight to the source. When the gap between brand story and product reality becomes that visible, the sham of brand loyalty cedes to “I want the best thing that lasts the longest for the least money.”

This same pattern is playing out in software. People are using AI to rebuild SaaS products that were always just branded wrappers around databases and basic logic. That $29/month productivity tool that’s really just conditional formatting and email reminders? Someone can prompt Claude or Cursor to build their own version in an afternoon. The brand premium evaporates when people realize the product was never that sophisticated to begin with. The software with real staying power solves problems complex enough that you can’t just spin up a replacement.

I used to watch How It’s Made with my dad, a show that ran from 2001, back when seeing how things were actually manufactured felt special. Coming out of the 2010s into the 2020s we’ve had an onslaught of Netflix docs, YouTube tell-alls, and TikTok factory tours that have revealed that a lot of the messaging from the Expansive Brands era is performative at best or a farce at worst. We assume transparency is selectively applied at this point.

The process of making products is public whether you’d want it to be or not. Someone, somewhere, will document how your thing actually works. How it’s actually made. Whether it actually holds up. But transparency without quality is just the documentation of failure. The audience’s understanding of brand as a wrapper around thin products creates higher stakes for shaky product ideas. They can tell the difference between commitment and convenience or something built to last over something built to ship.

At the end of the day, none of that scrutiny matters if the product isn’t the right fit at the right moment. A panopticon of product reviewers doesn’t make better products alone, but it does make the bad ones impossible to hide.

Software That Endures

If audiences have a surface level idea of how products are made and can read quality this well, the question becomes: what actually survives? When you look at the product landscape today across physical goods, hardware, software and cultural fixations, there’s a consistent arc of relevance, usefulness and quality. Nothing lasts forever. Ideas, objects, and technology all decay and eventually expire.

Software, especially in the age of AI, experiences something like a half-life. After release, it enters an exponential rate of decay influenced entirely by the strength of the core problem it solves. Like food, ideas expire. They can only sit for so long before they wither away in their cellophane wrapper. This is especially true in our current micro-trend, accelerationist moment, where, pulling from the past, we’re constantly remixing and smashing together legacy ideas with bleeding-edge technology, obsolescing essential aspects of society faster than we can patch the holes.

McLuhan’s media tetrad theory nods to this concept, but what if we push this thinking with scales of time? What does it look like to create software with Shelf-Life in mind, combining our understanding of the half-life (rate of decay in use) with the impending expiration date of the underpinning idea itself within a moment’s cultural context? What decisions create something that lasts in use, in memory, and in culture — on purpose? How can we prove the worth of digital experiences by thinking less about total users and more about whether software has been designed to endure?

A great example of software with an enduring Shelf-Life is Craigslist. The site looks like it was built in 1995 because it was. It’s never had an injection of venture capital, really any major redesigns, or a random pivot to vertical video. It’s just a collection of browse-able classified ads. The interface isn’t contemporary, but the product has extraordinary Shelf-Life because it does exactly what it promises. Craig Newmark didn’t need to craft a brand story about community or connection. The product is community and connection with growth driven by word-of-mouth.

VLC player is another example of software in this category. That orange traffic cone icon on your desktop is the main expression of VLC’s brand. VideoLAN doesn’t need a mission statement. The product is the story: open-source, no ads, plays basically any video file. That commitment to simply working, for free, for everyone, for decades, is what has helped it endure.

Craigslist and VLC survive by doing one thing consistently well. These products have had a long Shelf-Life because they were built with commitment to a core function in people’s lives.

Your Product is Your Brand 🤝 Your Brand is Your Platform

Are.na operates on similar principles as Craigslist and VLC, but in a slightly different flavor. It’s a platform for organizing research and ideas without chasing engagement metrics or gamified participation. No algorithm pushing content you didn’t ask for. No pivot to AI features every six months. Just a tool that respects how people actually think and work. The product quality creates initial Shelf-Life, but the distinct point of view (research tools that should be calm, intentional, user-controlled) is what attracts people who share that belief. Users create public channels, reference each other’s research, and develop their own tools with Are.na. The community that’s formed around that shared belief became the platform. The platform extended the product’s Shelf-Life beyond what the tool alone could do.

Shopify spent years building infrastructure that lets people sell things online. Solving mundane problems like inventory management and payment processing has helped Shopify transcend product status into a platform. Their commitment to boring reliability attracted merchants and developers who wanted tools that worked. Those merchants built stores, exchanged knowledge, and created an ecosystem. “Make commerce better for everyone,” Shopify’s brand promise, only means something because the software actually works when you need it to, and because thousands of people have proven they can build businesses on top of it. The product created the conditions → community created the platform → the platform reinforced the brand.

We tend to think of platforms as pieces of technology: infrastructure, APIs, network effects, etc. But the platforms are actually brands augmented by technology. The brand is the belief system, the shared point of view about how something should work. The technology is what lets people who share that belief act on it together and prove it out. Are.na isn’t a platform because it has channels and blocks. It’s a platform because it presents a belief (using product design) about research being calm and intentional, and the technology lets people who are committed to that belief learn together. Shopify is a platform because it represents a belief that commerce should be accessible and merchant-first, not because it has checkout APIs and an app ecosystem. The technology enables thousands of merchants to prove that belief every single day.

Product quality builds Shelf-Life. A distinct point of view attracts community. Technology enables that community to act in trust. The community proves the belief. The proof becomes the brand. The brand becomes the platform. This only works if the product keeps holding up its end. The cycle reinforces itself, but it collapses the moment the product stops being good. You can’t platform your way out of a bad product. You can’t community your way past broken tools. The product has to work first. Everything else follows from that.

You can wrap a product in brand narrative, you can manufacture hype, you can fake it for a quarter or two. But time reveals what’s actually there. The products that last are the ones that were good all along.