Brand cosmogony

The problem with theories is their inherent lack of evidence. In more than 100 years of social science research, the list of laws discovered is embarrassingly short, and that's a polite way of putting it. More critically minded spirits would claim that not a single law has been revealed. Brands pose the opposite problem: there is an indisputable amount of evidence without theory. Think ING. Think iPod. Think Virgin. Think Coke. Think Google.

The problem is, to paraphrase Nassim Taleb, that the minds of the gods cannot be read by witnessing their deeds. The generator of reality is different from this reality itself. What we see on shelves in supermarkets as brands is not what went into the making of them. Similarly, truth does not reside somehow inside things but in knowledge we harbour about those things. This begs some questions: How do we know about brands? How do we think of brands? What does our cosmogony of brands look like?

The story of Menocchio sheds some light, albeit a strobe light, on these questions. Menocchio was born in the small hill town of Montereale, located in the Friuli region of north-eastern Italy. On 28 September 1583, when Menocchio was 52 years old, he was accused by the Holy Office of heresy. At the heart of the allegation was Menocchio's strange cosmogony.