Ian Miller

Brand strategy is—for all its math and data, pomp and circumstance—just a decision that a brand makes about its direction and thus a judgment about the future. It’s a wager, much like an investment in the stock market. Many brands position themselves for the future that will be, rather than for the Other to come.

Brand functions as both signifier (tangible) and signified (conceptual), which is where, I think, the mysticism enters. The brands that command belief do so from some other place.

Intelligence is directional. It’s also intersectional, relational, and communal. It belongs to dyads and triads. It cannot be individualized. It happens between things, like an electrical crack when live wires meet. And if intelligence is directional and my robot is an intelligent machine, but without the autonomy of a self or a soul, then what guides the direction of its robotic intelligence? More importantly, what does this guiding force want?