What happens when a marketplace decides that raw truth is a liability?

In this episode of Performance & Props, marketing researcher Rahul Devinder Malik takes you back to the year 1770 on a rugged hilltop in the English Lake District. There, wealthy aristocrats engaged in a highly bizarre ritual: turning their backs on real sunsets to gaze at reality through a small, smoke-colored convex mirror called a Claude Glass. They didn’t want the raw, unrefined truth of nature; they craved an edited, curated "atmosphere".

Fast forward to the modern Identity Economy, where that physical pocket mirror has migrated directly into the real-time processing core of our smartphones. We have violently transitioned from passive colour adjustments to highly sophisticated AI beauty filters that rewrite pixels instantly. In a  ...