"The Taylor Swift Effect" is what David Shapiro nicknames one of the four demand types he outlines in his 20th September 2026 white paper "Most jobs are going away". He writes: "There is only one Taylor Swift and she, like RDJ, is nonfungible."
More on Taylor Swift later.
David Shapiro references RDJ - Robert Downey Jr. when explaining essential demand: "Consider RDJ as Tony Stark. Why does he sell movies? Couldn’t they just animate it with CGI or AI? Yes, but fans want to see RDJ specifically...The essence of RDJ is nonfungible."
Speaking of CGI...
On September 27, 2026, in 'The Cost Collapse', Nye Warburton begins by writing about his career making movies. He writes: "Previsualization (known as 'previs' for short) is the rough draft of a film, built in 3D before anyone builds anything real...Every big movie on my resume...went through a version of itself that looked like a video game from 1998. The measure was speed not quality. In finals, a visual effects artist might get weeks on one shot. In previs you're doing at least shot a day, often times, many more."
He ends his article by talking about brand names: "The people getting squeezed are the brand names in the middle, the ones who thought the name on the box was the business. Whoever keeps the people who know how to build the next thing gets to build the next thing...The next thing is never cheap, because nobody has learned it yet...the value moves to whoever people trust to pick the shot. The taste. The judgment. The name on the box, only if you've earned it."
In case you haven't yet, you can read my article 'Crypto adoption, verb brands and values'
"What counts as moat in the age of AI" is the title of Peter Diamandis' 24th September 2026 article. He ends it by writing about the three moats that survive, with one of them being 'brand': "Brand still holds up at the high end, because a luxury brand is a signal of the buyer’s wealth, and no AI can clone what a Hermès bag says about the person carrying it." He urges us to note what is missing from the list: " Patents. Code. Features. Distribution. Everything that can be described can be copied, and AI can describe anything."
Now, back to Taylor Swift. On September 24th 2026, Laura Molloy's article on Paste Magazine informed us that "Taylor Swift's lawyers call 'Life of a Showgirl' lawsuit 'nonsensical'". Molloy wrote: "Swift was sued for trademark infringement back in March by real-life Las Vegas showgirl Maren Wade." Wade's column had become "a live show, a touring production, a book, a podcast, and her trademark."
According to the World Intellectual Property Organization: "Trademarks are central to the fashion industry, serving as key assets in establishing and protecting brand identity. Logos, brand names, distinctive packaging, and even signature design elements, such as patterns, color combinations can function as trademarks when they signify the source of goods and acquire distinctiveness."
On 15th September, I created an A.I. song inspired by my 'frankensteined' dress that was put together in January 2026 from parts of my niece's old outfit and with the help of a talented tailor. I didn't know what the end result of my fashion experiment was going to be but luckily, tailor and I were both happy with the outcome.
Part of my prompt for the A.I. song inspired by the dress was: "Chorus lyrics: 'Black lace, black stripes, colourful, African-patterned sleeves'. A song about African women fetching water from the river, in style."
The A.I. tool generated the verse lyrics and some of my favourite lines include:
From the first verse:
"Clay vessels balanced on crowned heads"
"Daughters carrying old centuries"
From the second verse:
Skeletons of queens walk beside us
Braided hair bound with silver cord
We do not bow to the drying heat
We wear the crest of survival
Two lines seem to me to be out of place:
From verse 1
"Gothic iron frames draped in silk"
From verse 2
"Iron boots crush dried thorn blossom"
However, I was generally happy with the song and very, very, very happy with the chorus!
The background of this project is that earlier in the month, I came across a great A.I. fashion tool that had a Try-on feature. I did 'try-on' the frankensteined dress on several images from pexels.com and I loved the results. I wanted to share them and that is when I wondered what the sharing policy was. I read the terms and conditions and was disappointed to learn that I had to have written permission from the organization if I wanted to share the try-ons. I decided to go with a more frictionless A.I tool and the result is the following video. Check it out: "Black Lace, Black Stripes, Colourful African-Patterned Sleeves - A.I. Fashion Show Music Video"
I will end by quoting Mladen Vukmir's 2020 'Sailing beyond Paris and Berne'. He wrote that, over 140 years ago, "Paris and Berne conventions were conceived to shape the authors' rights and industrial property systems in an attempt to harness the value of human creativity, unlike the ways that the historical societies knew...intangible assets created by harnessing and harvesting humongous amounts of data by human and machine efforts are becoming a form of the asset as valuable as intellectual property and energy ever were...Law grew complex to the border of inherent inner contradictions, its original role of providing guidance at odds with its growing complexity, inconsistency, and slow pace of its application."
(PS: It is interesting to note that the Berne Convention took place in 1886, not too long after the Berlin Conference. The Berlin Conference took place in 1884 and 1885.)
