Codes of Culture | Issue 106
Are POV shopping videos a risk for luxury?
Welcome back to Codes of Culture. I’m Ashumi Sanghvi.
The news is finally out. Future+ will be hosting Startup Safari UK for 15 of India’s best and brightest tech founders in partnership with Startup Policy Forum India. You can read more about the announcement here. We are excited to build bridges across the UK-India tech, innovation and investment corridor.
This week, we are still unpacking all the major launch updates from Google’s I/O conference. This video with Sundar Pichai is a great interview for understanding what this shift means for creators, engineers, and everyday users, touching on everything from YouTube to agentic coding, and why today’s AI will look like a flip phone in three years.
Also, in case you missed it, it’s interesting to see CharlieXCX as the newest face (and investor) at Nothing. We are big fans, and it’s a great example of a culture-forward tech brand partnership.
If you are new here, or want to catch up on the best of Codes of Culture, we’d recommend you start here and remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights, podcast and global events.
Google is becoming the interface for how we search, shop, and decide.
Martha Stewart pivots to AI home management.
Are POV shopping videos a risk for luxury?
SpaceX is capitalism on rocket fuel.
Personal exoskeletons are bringing AI into physical movement.
1. SEARCH, COMMERCE AND PLATFORM POWER
Google is becoming the interface for how we search, shop, and decide.
What’s happening: At I/O 2026, Google presented an AI search and agent ecosystem built to sit across discovery, shopping, and everyday digital tasks. Its new Universal Cart will roll out in the United States from summer 2026 across Search and Gemini first, with YouTube and Gmail to follow, giving users one cross-platform cart and a more continuous shopping journey. Google is also introducing information agents, Gemini Spark, and Daily Brief: a system of always-on assistants operating in the background across its products. The underlying shift is more consequential than any individual feature. Search is moving away from a link-based map of the web toward a mediated experience in which more consumer intent is resolved before a user ever leaves Google.
TLDR:
Universal Cart is not just a checkout tool. It is an agentic hub for shopping, bringing Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail into one commerce flow.
Google is pairing that commerce layer with a wider consumer agent stack. Information agents will run in the background, while Gemini Spark and Daily Brief extend the model into personal organisation and ongoing task management.
This changes the role of Search itself. Google is moving from directing people to websites toward answering, filtering, and personalising the experience inside its own interface.
For brands, product metadata and inventory accuracy now sit much closer to the point of decision. Backend product fields and real-time stock visibility are becoming increasingly important to whether a brand is surfaced and selected.
The pressure on the open web is structural, not cosmetic. As AI answers absorb more discovery and comparison, more of the decision gets made before a click ever happens.
Why it matters: For luxury brands, retail operators, and publishers with meaningful digital exposure, Google is not refining search or adding a shopping feature. It is building an interface layer that can observe, filter, and act on a user’s behalf across commerce and everyday digital life. That raises the value of structured data, operational accuracy, and direct brand memory. For merchants and publishers, the more fundamental question is what the business looks like when the gateway to the web is also where the decision gets made.
2. CULTURE, HOME AND AI
Martha Stewart pivots to AI home management.
What’s happening: Martha Stewart has co-founded Hint, an AI home management startup that raised $10 million in seed funding led by Slow Ventures. The platform asks for a user’s address, pulls in public property and environmental data, and lets homeowners upload inspection reports, warranties, utility bills, and insurance documents. Hint is expected to launch on desktop and iOS this summer, with a proposition centred on maintenance, insurance, repairs, and the ongoing economics of running a home.
TLDR:
Hint treats the home as an information problem, bringing documents, maintenance signals, and environmental data into one operating layer.
Martha Stewart is a co-founder, not a campaign face, which gives the company a deeper layer of authority in a category built on trust and judgment.
The company raised $10 million led by Slow Ventures, with Montauk Capital, Tusk Venture Partners, Amplo, Energy Impact Partners, Hannah Grey, and Brian Kelly also participating.
The service enters a fragmented market where homeowners manage expensive assets with scattered paperwork and little strategic visibility.
The broader signal is that lifestyle expertise is being rebuilt as software, with taste and utility now living inside the same interface.
Why it matters: Domestic life is as much a trust category as a product category, and the strongest consumer software in trust-dependent markets tends to arrive with pre-existing authority attached. Stewart brings editorial legitimacy accumulated over decades; AI gives that authority a scalable operating model. The more transferable insight for cultural and luxury operators is that category-defining expertise is increasingly the moat, not the product.
3. LUXURY, RETAIL AND DISTRIBUTION
Are POV shopping videos a risk for luxury?
What’s happening: Point-of-view shopping videos, often filmed discreetly inside luxury stores through Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, are going viral across TikTok and Instagram. One Patek Philippe visit, filmed by creator Sami Varelli, drew 50 million views after staff asked him to remove his glasses or leave, and the comments quickly turned into a public debate about service and elitism. Similar clips from Gucci and Loro Piana show how easily a boutique interaction shifts from a private-client moment to a mass online spectacle.
TLDR:
Meta sold 7 million smart glasses in 2025, which has made recording more ambient, more discreet, and harder for boutiques to manage.
These videos work because they feel unmediated. The audience experiences the store through the creator’s eyes, which gives luxury retail a new voyeuristic quality online.
The upside is still real. A store experience people want to secretly document still carries mystique and cultural pull.
The larger pressure sits in sentiment risk. A sales interaction that reads as cold, exclusive, or dismissive can become a reputational issue at platform scale.
“No filming” policies are not enough. The stronger response is staff training, store awareness, and service behaviour designed for an environment where the camera may already be on.
Why it matters: The boutique is no longer only a controlled setting for conversion and clienteling. It is also a stage where brand behaviour gets captured, interpreted, and redistributed in real time. The operators who respond well will move beyond policy signage toward staff readiness and a more camera-native model of hospitality. The store remains one of the most valuable stages in luxury. The audience around it is now much larger than the one inside it.
4. CAPITAL, INFRASTRUCTURE AND SPACE
SpaceX is capitalism on rocket fuel.
What’s happening: SpaceX has filed for an IPO targeting roughly $75 billion in proceeds at a valuation of about $1.75 trillion, a scale that would make it the largest stock market flotation on record. The company now reads as an integrated infrastructure platform spanning rockets, satellites, communications, and adjacent AI-era ambitions. The filing brings one of the world’s most consequential private infrastructure businesses into the logic of public capital.
TLDR:
SpaceX now reads as an integrated infrastructure platform spanning rockets, satellites, communications, and adjacent AI-era ambitions.
The target raise and valuation place it in a category of its own. Public markets are being asked to price frontier infrastructure at a planetary scale.
Much of the company’s strategic power comes from vertical integration, with control of the stack becoming part of the valuation story.
The IPO turns space from a visionary narrative into a mainstream capital allocation question for institutions, investors, and governments.
The broader message is that hard infrastructure is back at the centre of tech value creation.
Why it matters: SpaceX translates conviction built over more than a decade into an event that reframes physical infrastructure as a defining financial story of this cycle. Investors are pricing businesses that own the stack: launch, satellites, communications, and the downstream services that run on them. The rockets are the narrative. The infrastructure dependency is the position.
5. CONSUMER TECHNOLOGY AND WELLNESS
Personal exoskeletons are bringing AI into physical movement.
What’s happening: Hypershell’s $1,999 X Ultra S is part of a new class of hip-based personal exoskeletons designed for hiking, cycling, training, and assisted outdoor movement. Once associated with the military, heavy industry, and rehabilitation, these systems are now being sold to consumers as performance and endurance tools. In practice, the device can make climbs feel markedly easier and movement more powerful, even if the category still carries awkwardness, safety trade-offs, and visible social theatre.
TLDR:
Personal exoskeletons are entering the consumer market at prices starting around $900, with Hypershell positioning the category around outdoor performance and endurance.
The system uses a waistband, thigh braces, and AI software to interpret movement and deliver support across walking, climbing, and cycling.
The product promise is not only accessibility. It also speaks to augmentation: letting users feel stronger, faster, and more capable in everyday physical settings.
The category remains early. Rocky terrain, downhill control, battery dependence, and the risks of active robotic components still shape the experience.
Robotics is moving from specialist use cases into lifestyle, fitness, and recreation, where aesthetics and behavioural trust will matter as much as function.
Why it matters: The next generation of embodied technology will sit across ageing, performance, and outdoor leisure, not only as a medical category. The companies that define this space will need design fluency, social acceptability, and a category language that makes augmentation feel desirable. The mechanics are solved enough. The cultural frame is still open.