We went to Agadir this Summer and hit the souk, looking for the Morocco I remembered from my last visit about 20 years ago. Last time we returned with a haul of lovely handmade pieces — jewellery, some little pots, and an art piece we will never speak of.

This time, what we found was Temu via Morocco.

Stall after stall of vaguely Moroccan objects, if you squint. Everything just Moroccan enough to pass at a glance. All of it unremarkable — not interesting enough to spark joy, never mind a purchase. It felt like walking through a physical Temu: superficially relevant, instantly available, from nowhere. Which made us feel like we were nowhere. That, and the endless stalls of fakes — Stüssy logos and Pull&Bear labels.

We saw the same thing in Egypt. The hand is disappearing from the craft.

Here’s the twist, though. Moroccan craft isn’t dying. The great work still exists. Somebody, somewhere, is still making it beautifully.

We just couldn’t find it.

You already know this feeling

It’s the Netflix scroll. An infinite catalogue, forty minutes of browsing, and nothing watched. It’s the search result with ten plausible answers but not one you really trust. It’s two hundred applicants for one job, every CV polished, not one that stands out.

The cost of making has collapsed. The cost of finding what’s valuable has exploded.

That’s the real story of this decade: an abundance of stuff you don’t want or need, hiding the stuff you do.

The gate is broken

The stalls in Agadir aren’t better for the people who shop them. There are just more of them.

The vendor’s test isn’t “is this good enough for someone to love?” It’s “is this cheap enough for someone to risk?” When production gets cheap and distribution gets frictionless, almost anything is worth listing. The producer doesn’t need most people to want it. One sale justifies its existence.

AI applies the same economics to everything else. Twenty articles, two hundred logos, two thousand product variants, generated in an afternoon and thrown into the market. They don’t need to be good. They need to look plausible long enough to earn a click.

Making something used to require enough time, skill or money to force an opinion.

The result isn’t abundant quality. It’s just abundance.

The signals have drowned

Here’s what abundance actually destroys — not quality, but the signals we used to find it.

Polish used to mean effort. Reviews used to mean real buyers. A confident opinion used to mean someone cared.

Now the bar isn’t “this is great”. It’s “that will do”.

You can watch it happen in real numbers. A UCLA analysis of the freelance market from 2021 to 2026 found that in AI-exposed categories, the weight buyers gave to credentials, reputation and self-presentation fell by around 10%,  while price grew more important and work shifted to cheaper providers.

Buyers didn’t stop caring about quality. They stopped being able to see it.

Which leaves exactly one signal that can’t be faked cheaply: consistent behaviour over time. You can generate two hundred logos this afternoon. You can’t generate having kept the same promise for fifteen years.

A brand is a decision someone doesn’t have to make again

Strip away the language of the industry and a brand is outsourced judgement. Every purchase is a consumer delegating the filtering. They don’t re-evaluate the category at the shelf.

They reach for the thing that has already earned the right not to be questioned.

That asset just got repriced. When finding gets harder, the pre-made decision gets more valuable. The sea of sameness isn’t a threat to strong brands. It’s the strongest argument for them.

Want proof that people pay for filtering? Trader Joe’s carries around 4,000 products; a typical supermarket carries many times that. Its buyers hunt, every candidate faces a tasting panel and anything that doesn’t earn its shelf space goes. The value isn’t what the shop stocks. It’s everything it has already refused.

Shoppers aren’t paying for choice. They’re paying to be spared it.

The shop that switched off its filter

And if you want proof of what it costs to stop filtering, look at John Lewis.

I love John Lewis. Or at least I love what John Lewis was, and the idea of what it should be. For 97 years, “Never Knowingly Undersold” meant the judgement was done for you: shop here and you never need to check anywhere else.

In 2022 they scrapped it. At exactly the moment choice was becoming unbearable, they stepped away from the one role they could play better than anyone: not the shop with everything, but the shop with the right things, a short, gold-standard range at a few price points, chosen by people you trust, backed by proper service.

Instead, online, it began to feel like a marketplace. Amazon with less choice at higher prices. The more it offered, the less its name guaranteed.

I felt it that Christmas. I unexpectedly needed a new TV, and what I’d have paid a premium for wasn’t the television itself. It was John Lewis having already decided which one was worth buying. That John Lewis didn’t seem to exist any more.

Two years later they brought the pledge back — extended online, matched against 25 named competitors, backed by software that checks prices every minute of every day. Strictly, that’s a pricing policy, not a return to curation. The catalogue is still growing, through a platform that lets brands ship direct.

But notice how they describe that platform: “hand-picked” labels and “carefully chosen” brands. Even the expansion has to borrow the language of selection, because that’s what the John Lewis name is actually worth. People don’t go there for everything. They go for the edit — and the business knows it, even when the strategy forgets.

The volume trap

Now look at how most brands are responding to the flood.

They’re adding to it. More content, more variants, more channels, more everything — AI-assisted volume as strategy. Activity as evidence of progress.

But every plausible, authorless thing you ship spends the trust that makes you worth reaching for. Each one teaches the customer that your name on something guarantees nothing.

You can’t be the lighthouse and the fog.

Filter or filtered

In a market where anyone can make anything, there are only two positions left. You’re the filter — the name that means someone looked at everything possible and said not that, not that, this. Or you’re in the pile being filtered, competing on price with things that only needed to be cheap enough to list.

Somewhere in Agadir, behind the stalls, the real thing is still being made. The tragedy isn’t that great work is gone. It’s that finding it has become the expensive part.

That’s the job now for anyone whose name is meant to mean something.

Not to add to the pile. To make the choice.

Not that. Not that. This.