Our Unnamed Burdens

ZINE commissioned YouGov to survey over a thousand Americans about stigma — how often people hide parts of themselves from others, what they’re most uncomfortable discussing, what they wish society was more open to discussing, and to what extent should organizations be playing a role in helping de-stigmatize taboos?

We examined mental health, finances, sexuality, porn, politics, career setbacks, family conflict, addiction, body image, loneliness, and religion.

Unfortunately, the results don’t reveal a society at ease — I mean, look around... who’d suspect that? Rather, we see a society caught between personal discomfort and the desires for themselves and others to overcome shame.

Let’s start with the fact that out of fear of being judged, 83% of Americans concealed some part of themselves from those close to them in the past year. For nearly every taboo measured, Americans report they want more societal openness around it.

But one topic has broken through, revealing some hope: mental health. As a private burden, we’re tired of struggling in silence. Today, only 19% of Americans feel uncomfortable discussing mental health, while 70% want society to be more open discussing it. That 51-point gap is the largest of any measured taboo, representing progress. Decades of mental health destigmatization has made mental health a subject deemed worthy and necessary to talk openly about. But compare that preference for openness (70%) to family conflict (42%) or personal finances (28%) — much fewer want open conversations about these taboos, despite higher rates of discomfort around them.

These gaps between distress and desire for more comfort is an insight in itself.

Is there value to private shame despite shared suffering? What holds people back from wanting a world where it’s easier for them to discuss what plagues them? And what prevents us from creating the cultures which permit these discussions that we say we want?

Age

Gen Z is the most shame-burdened cohort across nearly every taboo measured – despite being the youngest surveyed and those deemed most “open.” But 40% of Gen Z hide parts of their lives from people close to them “often” or “very often” vs. 27% of Millennials, 22% of Gen X, and 11% of Boomers. The hypothesis is supported: the older you get, the less fucks you have to give.

When it comes to discomfort around discussing taboos, Gen Z leads every other generation on almost every topic — sexuality (32% discomfort), mental health (31%), body image (27%), loneliness (24%), and political beliefs (22%). For religion (20%), Gen Z is nearly twice as uncomfortable discussing their beliefs than any other generation. The one topic where they’re actually less burdened than older cohorts is personal finances (21%) vs. Boomers (31%). Boomers are the most ashamed of personal finances and the least interested in destigmatizing it. Or put another way, Boomers carry the most discomfort and want the least done about it. As for Gen Z, perhaps their lack of discomfort around finances says more about shared, grim economic outlooks than the stigma of “money” itself.

Gender

Women (28%) are more likely than men (18%) to report that they conceal parts of themselves from those close to them. Men are also more likely to report that they’re comfortable discussing more taboos than women. But is it that men are really less likely to carry shame, or less willing to name and admit it?

Across all ages, one of women’s most uncomfortable topics to openly discuss is personal finances (29%) vs. men (23%). One of men’s most uncomfortable topics to discuss openly is mental health (19%) – the same prevalence of women’s discomfort.

A more revealing gender story, however, is where private burden and public advocacy split.

On the taboo of body image, 18% of women report discomfort — just slightly above men’s discomfort (15%). But women’s desire for more societal openness for body image discussions is at 50%, vs. men at 40%. Nearly identical private experiences produce a 10-point difference in advocacy.

Politics as a taboo inverts this dynamic. Men and women report nearly identical political discussion discomfort (16% and 18% respectively). But their desire for social acceptance is a different story: 40% of men want more openness while 31% of women do. This is one of the few topics where men outpace women on public advocacy.

Porn

Porn is the only taboo in the entire study where personal discomfort is higher than one’s desire for more openness. Said differently, 40% of Americans report discomfort discussing porn, yet only 18% want more openness to discuss it. (Note: Revealing your kinks is different than discussing porn as a social concept, but seemingly it’s all off the table.) Every taboo bends toward destigmatization. But porn doesn’t. Porn is the single most uncomfortable topic for every demographic (nearly 2x more uncomfortable than every measured taboo), and the taboo where people report the least amount of support for more openness.

Gen Z is most uncomfortable discussing porn (53%), yet is the most likely to be consumers according to Pornhub’s own traffic data. Similarly, while women are more uncomfortable discussing porn (42%) than men (38%), according to Pornhub’s data, 38% of all traffic is now driven by women, up from 24% in 2015.

Across all gender and age cuts, the only thing we all have in common is how uncomfortable we are talking about porn. And when it comes to reports of wanting to change this, we’d rather not... or perhaps, have no idea how.

A Contradiction

Which comes first: shame or advocacy?

Self-reported “Very Liberal” Americans are the most self-concealing cohort (27% conceal “often” or “very often”) and also the biggest advocates for destigmatization across nearly every taboo. Those carrying the more private burden – more frequently concealing themselves – are the strongest proponents for openness. This finding is supported in the other direction as well. Self-reported “Very Conservative” Americans conceal themselves the least (12% “often” or “very often”, and 26% report “never”). They’re also the least likely to desire social openness on every topic measured.

You’d think that those who claim to be the most comfortable would also want others to be as comfortable as they are by desiring more social openness. But, no, this is not the case.

There are a few explanations to this strange finding.

First: Most obviously, personal shame is what drives advocacy. You fight loudest for the conversations you need to have. Second: Advocacy may contribute to shame. The more your community enshrines vulnerability as a value, the higher the stakes and the stress around your own openness. Third: Being more conscious of stigma, being more accepting, and having more language to identify and navigate shame, can make one more attuned to their own vulnerabilities and therefore more likely (and comfortable) to report these feelings. Fourth: Perhaps we should pay more attention to the desire for openness as the true signal of social comfort. Actively opposing others’ comfort contradicts one’s claim that they feel no discomfort themselves. Ease doesn’t resist. And fifth: Asking about concealment may not be an accurate measurement of discomfort when discussing these personal matters openly as this isn’t a pre-existing norm in some cultures. For this question, one isn’t technically “concealing” if no one discusses these topics in your community in the first place.

Seeking Support?

Across every demographic cut, the pattern holds: the more shame a group holds, the more open they are to organizations playing a role in helping topple taboos. For generations, Gen Z conceals most (40% “often” or “very often”) and supports brand involvement the most (42%). Compare that to Boomers who conceal the least (11%) and support brand advocacy the least (25%). Women conceal more than men, and also report higher levels of brand support. Politically, “Very Liberals” report the highest concealment rates and also the highest rates for brand support (49%).

A third of Americans agree that brands should play a constructive role in destigmatizing culture. And while this reads like a soft plea, only 20% actively oppose organizational support. The remaining 80% are somewhere between supportive, uncertain and open — which is not a wall as much as an invitation for organizations to explore this role.

To go back to where we started... While 83% of Americans have concealed some part of themselves from those close to them in the past year out of fear of being judged, when then asked which topics make them uncomfortable, nearly 1-in-3 Americans (30%) report “none of the above.” These people report absolutely zero shame across all eleven taboos. Perhaps admitting discomfort and probing deeper is a taboo in itself... even via an anonymous survey.

Ultimately, this tension between personal discomfort and the desire for social openness leaves us waiting for others to begin the conversation. But when they don’t, and we don’t, the conversations just never happen. Instead, millions of people remain isolated without resolve, all but quietly hoping for something to finally change.

It just takes one person — or organization — to begin the conversation that so many are quietly waiting to have.

Ideally, this analysis can act as just one conversation starter.

Read more

Preface:

In a series of essays in partnership with Squarespace, we’re making sense of our relationship with reality and how culture is constructed.

Making it real is now an act of rebellion, a middle finger to the paralysis brought on by consensus collapse. The line between fact and fantasy continues to blur, but when reality is this negotiable, the soil for preferred futures is fertile. You can just do things. What’s the future you want to see? Making reclaims agency amidst lost meaning. So, don’t escape this reality — design the one you want. We desperately need your alternatives.

Literally make anything real with -10% off any site. I’ve been using Squarespace for 15 years, and cannot recommend them enough.

Build a better reality, then charge admission. With member-only areas, e-commerce and content monetization, create your space away from the noise. Decide a price and monetize products, services, courses, or any exclusive content. Make, sell, repeat. Fund your preferred future. No design experience required. Just the will to make something real.

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The following piece is a collaboration between Matt Klein + Gray Broderick

Gray Broderick is a cultural insights writer and strategic advisor, helping brands understand emerging human values and translate them into emotionally and culturally intelligent strategy.

Don’t Fall In

Amidst the unease of the Uncanny Valley – the haunting phenomenon when synthetic life just nearly matches organic life – another chasm has opened up...

Under shadows created by the Cloud’s cast, there’s another world of déjà vu, one where now the physical world lacks any sense of organic life. It’s a dissonance felt in our lives away from the keyboard – something logically gives life, but lacks any sense of the living.

Read more

A Toast

For over a decade, we’ve operated under Dashboard Culture — a tyranny of metrics, an optimization for spectacle, and a sacrifice of substance for visibility. We’ve been conditioned: if it doesn’t register on the dashboard, it doesn’t exist.

“If you are not loud, you do not exist culturally, politically, or socially. In the age of the algorithm, cultural value becomes synonymous with measurability. Dashboards don’t give a shit about merit, substance or even truth.”

The result? A boring and exhausting arms race for loudness. Victims to this cacophony, many have retreated — and continue to retreat. We go camouflage. Group chats, paywalled Substacks, three-hour podcasts, niche subreddits, and yes, actual dinner parties.

We seek off-the-grid spaces that resist algorithmic and audience capture. Rooms you can’t just buy your way into or shout your way to relevance. Respite. Secrecy. Avoidances of performance.

But organizations are not conditioned for these environments. (If you’re brainstorming “What’s our Substack strategy?” you’re four years too late...) Orgs are conditioned to use megaphones, track reach in spreadsheets and posture — or really contort — for everybody all at once. They optimize for attention over meaning.

Brands are in new environments with old playbooks.

Culture’s a dinner party.

And orgs' etiquette sucks.

You don’t bring a playbook to a party.

Every cultural space, whether that be a community, conference, creator’s content or philanthropic cause, operates like a dinner party with unspoken codes. And organizations which ignore these conventions become the guest that everyone barely tolerates until they leave. And the moment they’re gone — there’s a sigh of relief. Finally, the real party begins.

They say “brand” is what people say when you’re not in the room, but the best brands are the ones invited into the room.

For any organization seeking to resonate today, they must learn how to become better dinner party guests. How?

Read more

On Agency
02026’s Prologue

You’re not insane. This is insane.

We typically analyze the overlooked here. And while what’s unfolding in Minnesota and around the world is anything but latent, it still feels under-discussed relative to its gravity. It’s worth clarifying — in repetition lies permission for more discussion.

The U.S. government is maliciously dividing and lying to its citizens, and those who dissent are indicted, intimidated, arrested, and brutally murdered in broad daylight. This manipulative social rupture — this fascism — inflicts psychic damage and disorientation to all. It’s by design. Federal employees cosplay as the Gestapo and the Stasi while our most powerful leaders gaslight their citizens fearlessly. Our values are never not under attack, but they’re increasingly so now.

We lack accountability — and the bravery and conviction that are the prerequisites for it.

There’s a line:

“They lie to us.

We know they’re lying.

They know we know they’re lying.

But they keep lying anyway.”

Unfortunately, there’s a storied history to its origin.

Alexei Yurchak coined the term ‘hypernormalization’ in 2005 while Adam Curtis popularized it with his documentary a decade later. The phrase described the phenomenon in Soviet Russia when its citizens carried on as normal while government and institution collapsed. Despite profound dysfunction, life remained humdrum and citizens repeated lies about what was going on that they knew weren’t true. But, collectively deluded, there were no other alternative futures to consider.

Hypernormalization implies a terminal condition. One where people know the lie they’re being fed is a lie, yet perform the belief anyway because imaginations are atrophied. It’s absolute cynicism.

I refuse to believe we’re amidst hypernormalization. That requires surrender — people who’ve stopped believing change is possible. Instead, I see people still processing and drafting an alternative — slowly, privately and without all the language quite yet.

ZINE asked over 100 senior researchers around the world — experts with 10+ years experience analyzing culture — “What is the most defining word of our moment?”

The most reported answers were ‘Anxiety’ and ‘Overwhelm.’

Untreated, these maladies produce paralysis — the conditions for hypernormalization. We shut down not because of numbness, but because of too much all at once. Understanding this effect helps us prevent inaction, becoming victims. If we keep moving, metabolizing, talking and channeling energy productively, the paralysis won’t take over. Meanwhile, terms like ‘Apathy,’ ‘Cynicism’ or ‘Boredom,’ which illustrate the full effects of hypernormalization, score low.

There’s a power in naming these emotions and what’s unfolding here, because at a minimum, they help us feel less alone. Less shell-shocked.

There are some reframes to hypernormalization that may also be beneficial. Like Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the interregnum — a transitional crisis where an old, established order is dying with morbid symptoms, but a new one cannot be born. Perhaps we’re mid-blink — a society flinching, still determining what it’s seeing and how to react. Or call it narrative lag — our events have outpaced the stories and terms available.

We may lack the words, but not the foresight...

As heinous as today’s actions are, they’re anything but unprecedented. “Gaslighting” was Merriam-Webster’s 2022 word of the year. We’ve been living through (and thinking about) these conditions for years: truth wars, surveillance states, cravings for new religion, revoked inclusion, the symbolic disinterest in collaborative environmentalism, the collapse of constructive conversations, burnout on the future, the optimization of spectacle, and entrance into Dark Mode.

Most recently, we’ve dissected the collapse of consensus through the lenses of: manipulation, attention wars, loss of senses, and how stripping away friction strips away our shared reality.

An oversight may have been framing these futuristically as ‘trends,’ when in reality, they’re already fully metastasized facets of our society.

In the prologue to META Trends three years ago, I shared the idea of ‘Discordianism’ — a claim that chaos and disharmony are essential to our reality, just as other religions claim harmony and order are. As I wrote,

“Disorientation is now our norm – we’re chronically dazed, drowning in unpredictability. For many, fictional explanations were (and remain) more believable than truth itself. Reality is too strange to be this real.

[But] accepting chaos does not mean forfeiting control. We often forget that we maintain control over our systems and culture. Nothing is fixed.

In the face of overwhelming Discordianism, ‘Meliorism’ is our antidote: in between optimism and pessimism, it declares that our world can only improve with human effort.”

I still believe this... which then raises the question, “Well, what do we do now?”

There are plenty of proposals, but I’ll offer a few personal, evergreen additions:

• Find grounding, embodiment and community — real community with physical presence and eye contact.

• Place passion into something. Energy needs a home and catharsis.

• Keep living. This isn’t ignorance, but maintaining (remaining) stability. Newspapers still have a sports section despite what’s on the front page.

• Remain present. Instead of getting caught up in the future — which can’t exist without this exact moment — can we come back to this second?

• Metabolize however you need to and don’t let anyone else tell you the “right” or “wrong” way to process the moment. For as long as there’s awareness and reflection, metabolize uniquely to model and make room for others to do the same — ideally together.

Our overwhelm isn’t ceasing. We look down the barrel of utter environmental collapse, an isolation crisis, more wars, and AI, which we’re told will destabilize our economies and intuition itself. Meanwhile, AI dredges up our past, making it even harder to imagine anything that hasn’t existed.

Symbolically, both hypernormalization and AI struggle to generate radically new futures.

Hypernormalization is one possible future. As is one where all decision-making, companionship and entertainment is outsourced to an enshittified chatbot. But neither are fully here, and neither have to fully arrive. If we get to author our preferred futures, then we best start thinking what’s next.

As always, rather than seeing trends as an answer key to mindlessly copy or relinquish control to, can we reclaim the pen and begin blueprinting the worlds we wish to see instead?

Intolerance saves us. And agency remains available.

We should use it while it’s still ours.

Q: WTF are META Trends?

A: META Trends are an annual and manual distillation of the industry’s most frequently reported trends, answering “What’s most repeated across 70+ trend forecasts?”

Why in the world would you read all these reports and not just throw them into AI? AI doesn’t work here.

For this task, human intuition far exceeds even the most advanced AI models. Cultural intelligence and sensemaking cannot be wholly outsourced to something that isn’t living what it’s reporting on.

The intent from my first META Report in 2017 was that we can leverage reliability (all available reports) as a proxy for trend forecast accuracy. But over the years, I’ve found significant systemic flaws in these reports (ex. lack of methodologies, geographical and commercial biases, hyper-positivity, fear of risk, and perpetuated hype.) In further analysis, the vast majority of reports reveal “Dominant” or “Residual” language — i.e. well-established nomenclature... despite their task of reporting on the exact opposite.

“Accuracy” now has an asterisk.

But then why keep going?

The META Report still provides significant value, exposing the collective’s outlook (with a ~3YR horizon). META Trends must not be considered the final answer key, but just the beginning of a strategy.

So... Three ways to approach The META Trends Report:

• Consider all that’s reported as table stakes – catch up

• Interrogate what’s presented — consider all other angles

• Use this report as a filter — consider what’s not discussed

Or, bring it to life, discussing the nuances, changes in META Trends over the last decade, and tailored implications to your organization or clients...

Book a Bespoke Briefing

META Methodology

1. Read 70+ 2026 global reports and parsed 400+ trends in Excel 1

2. Analyzed trend descriptions to manually identify themes

3. Named 9 META Trends (i.e. largest themes or “trending trends”)

4. Analyzed original text to ID most common words per META Trend 2

5. Analyzed keywords to quantify size (per META Trend)

6. Used proprietary AI with Growth Protocol to score each collection of keywords: 3

   • “Human Rank” = published reports’ trend mention frequency

   • “Data Rank” = measurement of keyword volume across sources

7. Interrogated and elevated each META Trend beyond clichés

The 9 02026 META Trends:

01. Goosebumps 👋🏽

Unflattened, imperfect human characteristics warm us amidst frigid glass screens, AI, and division

Human Rank: 1/9 4
Data Rank: 7/9

Vocab: Somatic, Smudge Value, Analog Alternative, Flesh vs. Feed, Embodiment, Humanness, Unflattening

Biggest Keywords: real, touch, body, creator, personal, analog, sensory, quirky, playful, ambiguity

Drivers: AI & Bots, Starved Senses, Loneliness
Human Needs: Presence, Humanity, Nuance

To Resonate:

• Reveal imperfect seams. Proof of craft, production and effort become invaluable demonstrations of humanity.

• Design for ambiguity. Not everything needs an explanation. The opportunity for interpretation invites participation.

• Let taste reign. Allow souls, not algos, to make the edit. Bet on POVs.

• Elevate vulnerability as a value. Admit uncertainty and acknowledge limits. Build for trust over perfection.

Become a paid subscriber to access the full report.

Join Hundreds & Subscribe to Unlock:

• 🔓 All 9 ‘26 META Trends & Strategies

• 📂 All 9 years of META reports

• 🔑 Full ZINE archive access (+120 analyses)

  • Deep dives to understand cultural contexts

  • Guides on trend-forecasting

• 📬 Future supporter-only ZINE pieces

• 🎤 Best rate on META briefing workshops

• 🏷️ Discounts on special projects, events and seminars

• 🤗 That warm feeling from funding things you enjoy

• ❤️ My deep appreciation for supporting this passion

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Preface:

In a series of essays in partnership with Squarespace, we’re making sense of our relationship with reality and how culture is constructed.

Making it real is now an act of rebellion, a middle finger to the paralysis brought on by consensus collapse. The line between fact and fantasy continues to blur, but when reality is this negotiable, the soil for preferred futures is fertile. You can just do things. What’s the future you want to see? Making reclaims agency amidst lost meaning. So, don’t escape this reality — design the one you want. We desperately need your alternatives.

Literally make anything real with -10% off any site. I’ve been using Squarespace for 15 years, and cannot recommend them enough.

Claim your name and build your world. With built-in domain services, secure your corner of the web then bring your vision to life with the award-winning templates and simple drag-and-drop editing. A preferred future starts with a URL. No design experience required. Just the will to make something real.

Get Started

The following piece is a collaboration between Matt Klein + Brian Lange.

Brian Lange is the co-founder of Future Commerce, an independent research and media organization focused on commerce, technology, and culture, where he writes about commerce as a cultural and media system. His work examines how markets blur boundaries between business and culture, media and retail, and lived experience and abstraction.

Hors d’oeuvre

As organizations, it’s not easy to navigate a disintegration of reality, a prioritization of visibility over depth, and a media environment which is fueled by polarization and utter distrust toward institutions’ messaging.

So it feels like all you can do is just jump on the trend train – activate upon the loudest, widely accepted signal of the moment – and then just jump again at the next, right moment. Squeeze your brand inside a palatable vessel of any meme or moment.

Sustaining this game of trend train jumping requires scale (i.e. an abundance of talent, money, infrastructure, etc.) and extreme commitment. You have to be “always on.” But, as many know, this has psychic consequences, and few can maintain this pace without becoming damaged. Companies which build out this capability can theoretically overcome this challenge, but when it comes to responding, those resources get in the way.

As an alternative, many are inclined to uphold “radical authenticity” as their strategy for resonance. Rather than chasing, stay the course. Never posture. Tell it as it is. But this approach is also problematic. If you adamantly believe in “radical authenticity,” you’ve likely built a business on a mimetic cycle – your business took off when people assumed each other’s desires as a collective and toward a viewpoint an organization already held. Perhaps you may have even inspired this cycle. Or maybe you just got lucky. But if we know anything about memetic cycles, desires flip eventually.

And so, if you’re going to take this posture of “authenticity,” then you must have the appetite to refuse growth when growth makes itself available. This requires a stiff backbone, and most, if not all of businesses that take this route stay small or crash hard.

So what’s an organization to do? Either chase what’s hot indefinitely until burnout, or nobly reject growth and sustained relevance on a doomed quest for authenticity?

There’s a secret third posture:

Propriety.

Read more

Preface:

In a series of essays in partnership with Squarespace, we’re making sense of our relationship with reality and how culture is constructed.

Making it real is now an act of rebellion, a middle finger to the paralysis brought on by consensus collapse. The line between fact and fantasy continues to blur, but when reality is this negotiable, the soil for preferred futures is fertile. You can just do things. What’s the future you want to see? Making reclaims agency amidst lost meaning. So, don’t escape this reality — design the one you want. We desperately need your alternatives.

Literally make anything real with -10% off any site. I’ve been using Squarespace for 15 years, and cannot recommend them enough.

A website makes it real. Design your world and then get discovered this new year. With built-in tools for SEO and visibility, ensure your vision is discoverable. Track attribution with advanced analytics to learn how or where your audience is coming from. Build a future and find your people.

Get Started

The following piece is a collaboration between Matt Klein + Nick Susi.

Nick Susi is a writer and strategy executive, exploring the technological, societal and psychological forces that shape our identity, perception and culture. He has led strategy for dotdotdash, Complex, The FADER and Jay Z’s former media brand Life+Times. His research and writing can be found in Business Of Fashion, Metalabel, Dirt, Boys Club and Joshua Citarella’s Do Not Research.

ATTEN-TION!

Why are you here?

We are at war.

An attention war.

And right now, soldier, we’re losing on all fronts.

In the 5th century BCE, Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War. It’s the oldest known military treatise in the world. It’s a collection of numbered maxims on how to understand and win battles. Now, in our modern attention war, perhaps there are some amendments to be made to his principles for surviving a battlefield where our own minds are under siege every waking second.

And make no mistake. If you don’t learn to command your attention, soldier, someone else sure as hell will.

01.

THE PATH TO THE INFINITE IS THE PATH TO MADNESS

For thousands of years, across ancient history to modern culture, a mythic archetype continues to be repeated.

Take Odin, the one-eyed old warhorse of Norse legend. He’s often depicted with an eye patch or an empty socket. But what happened to poor old Odin’s eye? In his obsessive hunt for wisdom, he discovered Mimir’s Well, a sacred spring rumored to hold infinite knowledge. But it came at a terrible price. Odin gouged out his own eye, ripped it clean out of his skull, and tossed it into the well for a single drink. With that sip, infinite knowledge flooded into him. He traded partial blindness for a different form of perception. But even with all this knowledge, Odin was the god of war, frenzy and madness.

In 1942, Jorge Luis Borges told the story of “Funes The Memorious,” who, after a horseback riding accident, gained perfect, total, infinite memory. But what seemed like a gift quickly became a curse. Infinite information utterly overwhelmed him. He couldn’t think, speak or live normally. The infinite didn’t expand his world. It crushed him.

In 1964, X-Men introduced Cerebro, a supercomputer that connects the mind of the user to every single mutant on Earth all at once. But this is lethal to the untrained mind. It instantly invites infinite noise directly into the user’s brain, causing extreme psychic overload, even coma or death.

In every myth, the lesson is the same: The path to the infinite is the path to madness.

And yet, we still gouge out our eyes. We plug our untrained minds into the infinite machines – our smartphones, our social media, our Oura rings, our prediction markets, and our AIs. And as a result, we are going mad.

02.

THE MIND THAT ENTERS LIMITLESS TERRAIN WITH LIMITED CAPACITY INVITES DEFEAT

William James, one of the fathers of psychology, once wrote,

“Attention is the taking possession by the mind.”

So what, exactly, are we allowing to take possession of our minds?

We are not built for the infinite. The human brain is powerful, but finite. And our attentional capacity is a limited resource. Nelson Cowan, a leading researcher on working memory, tells us the Magic Number is 4±1. Meaning, we can only focus our attention on three to five meaningful chunks of information before our cognitive capacity overflows. Now, how does that compare to the number of tabs you have open right now? The number of TikToks you’ve scrolled today? The number of unread emails sitting in your inbox?

When we exceed the Magic Number, we risk ego depletion. When our cognitive load becomes too high, our self-control depletes. We become a soft target – more impulsive, more predisposed to reach for short-term gratification, distractions, rage bait, junk food, gambling and buying more things we don’t actually need.

But what about paying constant attention to the things that really matter? Global crises, suffering, injustice? Isn’t it our duty to care for our brethren?

Noble, yes, but there’s a paradox here. The more suffering we try to absorb, the less we’re able to act. This is called psychic numbing. Compassion fatigue. It’s a defense mechanism where empathy and the ability to respond collapses as the scale of tragedy increases. The mind can’t metabolize the infinite, so it shuts down. This is why a single person’s story can sometimes move millions more effectively than statistics of mass suffering. Even Mother Teresa, the saint herself, has said,

“If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

It’s not that we don’t or shouldn’t care, but because the infinite exceeds the limits of human capacity.

03.

THE FIELD OF ATTENTION IS THE FIELD OF REALITY

Our attention deserves protection, because our attention is our reality.

Remember the Invisible Gorilla Test? People watch a video of players passing a basketball and are told to count the passes. While they’re focused on counting, a person in a gorilla suit walks through the scene. Afterward, when asked, “Did you catch the gorilla?” most people never noticed it. The test reveals how easily our visual field and perception fail based on how and where we pay attention.

Attention is our field of view – the small slice of the world that our mind chooses to look at.

That field of view becomes our reality tunnel – a narrow corridor carved by what holds our focus, shaping what we notice and, equally, what we miss. That reality tunnel becomes our perceived reality – the world we believe we’re in, simply because it’s the only world we’re seeing. And our perceived reality becomes our lived action – it dictates how we move, what we choose, who we become.

We must strategically protect and take aim with our attention, not just because it’s the lens through which we see, but because it’s the architecture of our reality.

04.

KNOW THY ENEMY: A 24/7 CULTURE WITHOUT REST

How did we even get here? How did we begin to desire and attempt to pay attention to the infinite, which consistently defeats us?

Much of the current discourse would blame our collapse of attention, and with it, shared reality, on modern technologies – smartphones, social media, algorithms, AI. But the attention war began long before any of that.

Art critic Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7 explores how we entered a culture that battles against rest and time itself. A nonstop 24/7 culture that never turns off. If attention is finite, a 24/7 society fights to expand the surface area of waking time to capture more of it.

Reed Hastings has famously stated that Netflix’s main competition isn’t other media or entertainment companies. It’s sleep.

This acceleration really took off with cable news and the birth of CNN in 1980. TV news and programming stopped ending with nightly sign-offs. It stopped syncing with the rhythms of our sleep cycles. Media became an infinite loop of endless, real-time information.

There have been even stranger attempts to literally extend our daylight. In 1993, Russia’s Znamya project sent mirrored satellites into orbit to try to reflect sunlight back onto Earth to increase the time and attention available for productivity.

Our culture tempts us to strive for an aspirational identity rooted in infinite information and the illusion of potential mastery over it.

But there is no endpoint, only an ever-growing stream of content. We face a nonstop 24/7 loop of madness.

05.

THAT WHICH SEEKS ATTENTION CANNOT BE DEFEATED BY GIVING IT ATTENTION

Information expands to fill the space available, and in our 24/7 culture and modern media environment, the space available is infinite. This means there are now more news stories than there is actual news. W. David Marx calls this the Parkinson’s Law of Media.

Marx argues that ad-driven platforms financially incentivize all media – and at this point, nearly every company and person is media – to endlessly react and reproduce more media on anything that trends. The tiniest spark of a story can quickly explode into what feels like a full-blown cultural atomic bomb.

Further, Marx explains that the aspirational identity around media literacy has drifted toward a belief that we must remain fluent in every single thing online – high culture, low culture, things we love, things we hate. This traps us in an endless chase to consume every. single. narrative.

But by the time we’re arguing about whether something is real or fake, good or bad, important or meaningless, the battle is already lost. The attention war itself won, and we are the spoils.

Personalities, products, and subcultures win simply by demanding attention, even from their haters. This creates a hyperstitious loop. Debate and critique disproportionately amplify the very thing we hope to squash, pushing it further into existence and significance through repetition.

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote,

“Do not swallow bait offered by the enemy.”

We cannot defeat that which seeks attention by any means necessary by giving it attention. This is the paradox at the heart of the attention war.

06.

THE DIGITAL REALM APPEARS INFINITE TO THE EYE BUT IS FINITE IN DEPTH

Modern technology makes it feel like we possess infinite knowledge at our fingertips. But that’s not true.

Our online environments only appear infinite. The deepest, most nuanced knowledge still lives beyond any device. Everything we see through search, social media, or AI is limited to what has already been indexed, posted or trained. For example, Google may index hundreds of billions of web pages, yet that still accounts for <5% of the internet. The rest sits in the deep web – private information, profiles, messages and spaces locked behind passwords, paywalls and encryption – unreachable. Also consider all knowledge that’s never been coded, or cannot be coded by a machine.

So both things are true at once: the internet is both too large for any one person to fully grasp in their lifetime, and yet that internet is still nowhere close to a true reflection of all our human knowledge.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean these technological gateways aren’t extraordinary. They expand our minds in ways no past generation could ever have imagined. But reality can’t be fully understood without curiously wandering beyond a feed and paying attention to the physical world, to people, places and knowledge uncaptured by the internet.

Randonautica is a viral app with a cult-like following that launched in 2020 (h/t Ruby Justice Thelot). Users set an intention, and the app generates random nearby coordinates for them to explore in the physical world. The idea is to alter one’s reality by breaking out of their existing reality tunnel and pushing them into unexpected experiences. The app became infamous after some people stumbled into unsettling situations, including one case in Seattle where teens found human remains near a Randonautica location.

But does the app actually alter reality? Or is it that once users set an intention, enter a new environment, and tune their attention, they simply notice different patterns and assign new meaning to what was always there? Much like the gorilla and basketballs, what we notice depends on what we’re primed to see. “Touch grass” isn’t just a cute meme. It’s a reminder to break the 24/7 infinite loop and widen our aperture of attention so our field of reality expands.

07.

TO MISTAKE THE STAGE FOR THE WORLD IS BE TO CONQUERED

Even within the limited reflection of the physical world that we see online, there’s no guarantee that any of it is real. As Sun Tzu says,

“All warfare is based on deception.”

The idea that people perform for each other isn’t new. In 1956, half a century before the launch of Facebook, sociologist Erving Goffman pioneered the dramaturgical approach to viewing social life as theater. He viewed each of us as actors, playing roles on a public front stage to shape how others perceive us, and then retreating to the backstage of our private lives. In our current social media era, we’re more aware than ever that everyone is performing. Yet this awareness doesn’t seem to make us any less susceptible to staged performance, or curbs us for performing ourselves. Even authenticity is now a performance and manufactured aesthetic.

Much of the current discourse is panic about reality collapsing every time a photorealistic image generated by Nano Banana goes viral. But the challenge of discerning what’s real online has existed for far longer than debates about generative AI or the authenticity of images.

Even those who preach media literacy and cultural fluency still fall for these traps. They believe information is staged when it isn’t, like the claim that HBO engineered “the mob-wife aesthetic” trend as a psyop for the 25th anniversary of The Sopranos. They in fact did not. And they believe information is real that is actually staged, like Charli XCX joining Substack to journal about the realities of being a pop star, which in reality is a professional entertainer being paid to strategically use the aesthetics of raw confessionals as an ad for both the platform and her upcoming album.

None of this would matter if we treated the online as an entertainment stage, a series of magic tricks, a dreamworld. Charli herself acknowledges the fun in blurring the lines between truth and performance. But reality becomes strange when we continuously mistake performance for truth and pass it around as insightful cultural signal. Much of today’s commentary now looks less like real cultural analysis and more like white collar fan fiction and conspiracy theories about what’s happening “backstage.”

At the end of the day, we’re all putting on a front stage performance that’s shaping real life decisions, but many are forgetting it’s all just an act. As a result, even among people who claim to defend media literacy, we’re losing our grip on what’s real and what’s a performance.

08.

REALITY IS NOT COLLAPSING, BUT CONSTANTLY RECOMPOSING

Our shared sense of reality is always shifting. It has always gone through cycles of breaking apart and coming back together in new forms.

Venkatesh Rao argues that we don’t live in one “real world,” but in near infinite overlapping belief-worlds – different religions, fandoms, economic theories, political ideologies. The “real world” is simply the dozen or so belief-worlds that are most consequential at a given moment. Only a few meaningful stories shape history, and even those rise and fall as collective belief changes. Power, wealth, popularity, or even truth don’t guarantee that a world matters. Only consequentiality does. As Anaïs Nin said,

“We do not see the world as it is, but as we are.”

Rao gives the example of Galileo vs. the Catholic Church. In the 17th century, Galileo was right that the sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth as the center of the universe, but the Church’s constructed world was more dominant and consequential than his truth. Galileo’s true world didn’t become consequential until many centuries and technological developments later. It wasn’t until about 350 years later in 1992 that the Vatican formally acknowledged the Catholic Church’s error in condemning Galileo. Oops.

So what we call the “real world,” our shared social reality, is really just a temporary construction which lasts only as long as enough people believe in it. Reality is in constant negotiations. When belief fades, that world dissolves and a new one forms. Today, for example, we can see the neoliberal world losing consequentiality, while the worlds of Trump, mysticism and the accelerating AI arms race rise.

Understanding reality isn’t about infinitely chasing truth with our finite attention. It’s about understanding which worlds are becoming more or less consequential.

Perhaps part of why we experience reality collapse is that 24/7 media and infinite access to information allow us see more of these worlds rising, falling, and recomposing. The churn was always happening. We just couldn’t access it in real time... until now.

09.

VICTORY BELONGS TO HE WHO KNOWS LIMITED ATTENTION IS NOT A WEAKNESS BUT A STRENGTH

Sun Tzu himself wrote,

“If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.”

Even Sun Tzu understood that finite resources must be spent wisely. The same law governs the attention war. Survival isn’t just about what you focus on. It’s about what you deliberately refuse to focus on.

Restraint is a winning strategy.

Limiting our attention is not a weakness. It’s how we maintain mental fortitude.

Move on.

10.

MASTERY BEGINS WITH TRIAGING WHAT CAN BE CONTROLLED AND WHAT IS DISTRACTION

So how does a soldier navigate the battlefield of attention?

It begins with a system of triage.

Looking at the work of psychologist Julian Rotter, we must ask, what is in our locus of control? I.e. What can I directly act on right now? What is in our locus of influence. I.e. What can I not control, but can affect over time? What is in our locus of concern? I.e. What are the things I deeply care about, but cannot meaningfully change? And what is in our zone to ignore? I.e. What is everything outside my knowledge and reach, which I must accept I don’t and can’t fully know?

In our current 24/7 culture and relationship with media, we’ve become so disembodied from our physical surroundings. In a weightless state, it’s become much harder to discern what is actually within our control or influence, our inner locus, and what’s actually materially consequential to our lives.

Instead, so many of us get stuck endlessly in the outer locus of concern – the areas far outside our control or influence – expending scarce attention on things we dislike, can’t meaningfully affect, or don’t even need to have an opinion on. We form opinions about everything, unable to have an informed opinion about anything.

Francis Bacon warned that when we have no clear “prenotion or perception of what we are seeking, we seek and toil and wander aimlessly, as if in infinite space. Whereas, if we have a particular prenotion, infinity is at once interrupted.” When our attention narrows, we can move forward with purpose.

Nietzsche, in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, argued that active selective forgetting is essential for life itself. That without the ability to let go of the infinite, action becomes impossible. He warns that the infinite overwhelms the present and weakens vitality, and that every living being needs a limited horizon.

To be very clear, this is not about anti-technology or anti-ambition. It is pro-focus, pro-intention, and pro-discernment in how we understand broader historical contexts and apply the affordances of modern technology and media to our own ambitions. This is a call to reclaim our attention as a finite, precious resource.

11.

STRATEGIC FOCUS IS NOT STRATEGIC IGNORANCE

Now, to be clear, there is a dark side in shifting from the infinite to the finite.

We risk an overcorrection to an overcorrection. We can turn too far inward, toward isolation, narcissism, echo chambers, tribalism, xenophobia, and authoritarian nationalism. We’re already feeling these worlds gaining consequentiality today.

But strategic focus is not the same as strategic ignorance. In The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules The World, sociologist Linsey McGoey warns about ostrich instruction, dissociating and claiming ignorance to absolve one’s self of responsibility, like the myth of an ostrich burying its head in the sand.

The flood of infinite information leaves us overwhelmed, manipulated, and exhausted. It’s a lot. Limiting what we take in defends us – but only if we retain self-awareness and humility of what we don’t know, and stay curious and humble enough to learn from perspectives outside our immediate field of view. There is much that we don’t know and can’t affect.

This is permission to find comfort in knowing that we cannot, and will not, know or change everything.

Good luck out there, soldier.

As your eyes wander from here to the next patch of digital terrain, will you march forward with intention, tighten your grip on your attention, and ask yourself, why are you here?

Now, move out and on.

Preface:

In a series of essays in partnership with Squarespace, we’re making sense of our relationship with reality and how culture is constructed.

Making it real is now an act of rebellion, a middle finger to the paralysis brought on by consensus collapse. The line between fact and fantasy continues to blur, but when reality is this negotiable, the soil for preferred futures is fertile. You can just do things. What’s the future you want to see? Making reclaims agency amidst lost meaning. So, don’t escape this reality — design the one you want. We desperately need your alternatives.

Literally make anything real with -10% off any site. I’ve been using Squarespace for 15 years, and cannot recommend them enough.

Build a better reality, then charge admission. With member-only areas, e-commerce and content monetization, create your space away from the noise. Decide a price and monetize products, services, courses, or any exclusive content. Make, sell, repeat. Fund your preferred future. No design experience required. Just the will to make something real.

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The following piece is a collaboration between Matt Klein + Ruby Justice Thelot.

Ruby Justice Thelot is a designer, cyberethnographer and artist based in New York. He is a professor of Design and Media Theory at New York University.

There’s something odd about getting into a Waymo.

After a couple phone taps, the vehicle slowly glides to the curb with perfectly controlled movement, as if fixed on invisible tram-rails etched into the road for its robotic wheels. The white Jaguar moves with the elegance of a prima ballerina, with none of the emotion. All control. Perfect precision. No mistakes. The interior of the self-driving cocoon is comfortable. Supple leather, still new. It talks with a meticulously paced digital intonation. Ambient lo-fi music eases you in.

The whole affair reeks of violent convenience.

Convenience is the mind killer.

Read more

Preface:

In a series of essays in partnership with Squarespace, we’re making sense of our relationship with reality and how culture is constructed.

Making it real is now an act of rebellion, a middle finger to the paralysis brought on by consensus collapse. The line between fact and fantasy continues to blur, but when reality is this negotiable, the soil for preferred futures is fertile. You can just do things. What’s the future you want to see? Making reclaims agency amidst lost meaning. So, don’t escape this reality — design the one you want. We desperately need your alternatives.

Literally make anything real with -10% off any site. I’ve been using Squarespace for 15 years, and cannot recommend them enough.

Claim your name and build your world. With built-in domain services, secure your corner of the web then bring your vision to life with the award-winning templates and simple drag-and-drop editing. A preferred future starts with a URL. No design experience required. Just the will to make something real.

Get Started

The Launch

In 1989 Susan Klein launched Preferred Dining Service. She was profiled by local newspapers. No one ever heard of such an idea.

Customers would call her office with their food order. Preferred Dining Service would then place that order with a restaurant, pick it up and then bring it to the customer.

Suddenly, restaurants in New Jersey could increase their business without having to accommodate more people in their dining room. And suddenly, residents in New Jersey could eat from their favorite restaurants without ever putting on pants.

My grandma helped usher in what we now call “food delivery.”

Pizzerias and Chinese restaurants were only just introducing us to delivery in the 60s and 70s, but they were operating logistics themselves, independently. Other cuisine delivery wasn’t on anyone’s radar until the 80s and 90s... and a third party bundling all local restaurants together? Unheard of.

Preferred Dining’s delivery men and women dressed as waitstaff and hand delivered fresh restaurant food to late working businessmen and busy housewives in New Jersey... two and a half decades before DoorDash did in Palo Alto.

But as prescient as my grandma is, the Kleins aren’t billionaires.

Preferred Dining Service delivered over 5,000 meals before shutting down in less than two years.

Is it a Fit?

Preferred Dining reveals the importance of Product Market Fit.

An idea is just that — an idea. Unless the market demand and the technical environment are ready for whatever you’ve got... better luck later.

Preferred Dining launched when there were no smartphones, no digital payment systems, no mobile GPS for drivers, and no online restaurant menus or reviews to scroll through.

These conditions prevented Preferred Dining from ever really taking off.

But while Product Market Fit makes or breaks upstarts, there’s another more nuanced condition: Product Culture Fit.

If Product Market Fit is about existing infrastructure ensuring blast off, Product Culture Fit signals that culture is ready for new meanings, symbols, and narratives. Does this idea align with social or individual values? Does this story make sense? Is this behavior socially acceptable?

Preferred Dining exploded... but to an extent. The pitch was at odds with inconducive cultural narratives at the time. Outsourcing a home meal to a restaurant could make one feel lazy. Such uncommon indulgence triggered class anxiety. And dining out was a public performance and opportunity for socialization. At the time, ordering in could feel like a rip off. Same food prices but without the social proof. Turns out over-worked blue-collar workers were Preferred Dining Services’ core customer base — they couldn’t care less about being seen out.

But the most critical cultural narrative that Preferred Dining ran up against was “scale.”

“The margins were too small.” My grandma still remembers,

“The only way this idea could have made sense financially was if we had a bajillion consumers, a bajillion restaurants and a bajillion delivery workers.”

That... and if she was willing to take a larger cut herself and rip off her delivery workforce. Some nights when the phones were lighting up, my grandma hopped in the car to deliver meals herself.

Define Success

In light of Product Culture Fit, what actually changed socially that my grandma failed and DoorDash “succeeded?”

Well, DoorDash ignored the limitations of scale and ignored shit margins. For over a decade, DoorDash ran at staggering losses, only finally reaching profitability in 2024 — 11 full years after it was founded. It spent $5.9B in venture funding to condition us that 24/7 delivery was possible. DoorDash alone spent over $50M of roughly $200M, lobbying for Prop 22 in California, reshaping labor law to avoid classifying delivery workers as employees.

DoorDash didn’t wait for Product Culture Fit. They didn’t wait for Americans to believe that $32 burrito limos or exploited, heavily surveilled labor made sense. They didn’t create a business, they created a culture. No meticulously timing trends or leveraging existing cultural norms. They bought them.

DoorDash’s biggest success was effectively conditioning millions to see massive delivery fees, fucked up orders and never leaving your home as normal.

So maybe it wasn’t that my grandma was ahead of her time. After all her “failure” was that she was too successful to maintain quality.

Rather, my grandma’s “failure” was that she didn’t spend billions manufacturing a world around her business. DoorDash did. My grandma couldn’t afford to subsidize every single delivery transaction until the behavior became habit, the habit became the culture, and the culture became accepted.

We talk about Product Culture Fit or “culture not being ready for an idea” as if it’s something outside our control.

But culture is made by us.

DoorDash didn’t “succeed” because 2013 was the “right time” and 1989 was “too early.” DoorDash took off because it had enough capital to create the right time.

Yet such sheer force also has consequences. DoorDash has been sued countless times over deceptive business practices, anti-competitive practices, deceptive pricing practices, tip payouts, and driver expense compensation. While culture mutates, it also has an immune response.

DoorDash proved that culture — and reality — is adaptable, negotiable and merely constructed.

But what exactly are we building towards?

Rules of Reality

Preferred Dining vs. DoorDash reveals how reality operates:

1. Culture is written by each of us. Norms are whatever narratives win. Sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. But they’re our own making. Reality isn’t “truth” winning out. Culture just bends toward whoever shows up. This should empower and motivate us as much as terrify us.

2. You can just do things. You can just create food delivery. My grandma did. Your ideas are not enough, though. You literally have to roll up your sleeves, dig the dirt and seed your ideas. Put your preferred futures into the world. They’ll grow in ways you’d never expected. Commit. Toil. And sweat. Pollinate responsibly.

3. The Klein family isn’t worth billions because my grandma learned what DoorDash didn’t. Some ideas are not meant to scale so far and wide. $5.9B to validate an idea with exploitation still as an outcome maybe just isn’t a good idea. I don’t know. The unit economics are nightmarish, the logistics are exhausting, and somehow orders are still consistently late, wrong and cold. DoorDash didn’t spend billions to invent a new idea — food delivery already existed. They spent it on trying to make math work. Fun.

My grandma learned that reality is writable, but just because you can make reality and that ideas can scale, it doesn’t mean they always should. Thinking on a community-level rather than global one is sometimes necessary. There are harsh tradeoffs to scale: quality, dignity and ethics. This realization and lack of sacrifice, in my eyes, makes my grandma the real successful one here.

At the end of the day, you don’t need billions to make or positively influence culture, and spending that much to try to do so likely isn’t a great start.

Instead, you just need the awareness that you too can write any future you want.

Change anything.

Compromise nothing.

“It’s like people only do things because they get paid. And that’s really sad.” — Garth

ZINE has its first sponsor.

As I think about media dynamics and business strategy for a living, I’d be a hypocrite to bury the lede or pretend this doesn’t warrant some public reflection.

So here’s a piece about creator corporate sponsorship brought to you by a corporate sponsor. (Our project will be in your inbox later this month. And if you ever want to jam on a special project like them, reach out.)

The creator economy promised financial freedom through lowered barriers to entry and democratized tools. What it delivered instead was a trap: algorithmic serfdom dressed up as creative independence. We traded bosses for metrics and now obsess over the dashboard. We’ve been captured by audiences, which now puppeteer our behaviors both consciously and unconsciously. And we now pray to an algorithm, starving for organic reach.

Platforms change the rules mid-game, shadow-ban without explanation, and treat creators as free content machines.

Substack isn’t concerned with my success as a creative… they’re only concerned with my success as an entrepreneur, handing over a bigger and bigger cut of my payout.

Historically, “selling out” meant abandoning one’s values for the paycheck. A musical artist would produce music they knew would sell better — even if it wasn’t their style or wasn’t what they wanted to put out into the world. It was a compromise. A dilution of integrity. Creative pollution. Major labels would take on creative control to help maximize sales, turning the artist into the real product.

But this “sell out” framing belongs to an era when artists had a bit more infrastructure or at least other options. There once were indie labels, advances, grants, public funding, residencies, physical media sales, public broadcasting, non-PhD university teaching gigs, media and arts journalism gigs, and cheaper rent, tuition and health insurance, all allowing for bigger bets on oneself.

Now? That infrastructure is gone and the working class artist is nearly extinct. The starving artist is a malnourished skeleton. Not because we’re any less creative — a separate convo — but because those resources are dried up, cut and de-funded. Today, the proportion of working-class actors, musicians and writers has shrunk by half since the 1970s. At the onset of COVID-19, the arts economy shrank nearly 2x vs. the overall U.S. rate of decline. Over 600,000 arts jobs vanished since.

Selling out was once an icky short cut because there were other lush paths or support. But today, corporate injection is one of the few remaining routes left for creative stability and sustainability. Sponsorships, reaching the top percentile of paid followership, full-time employment subsidies or good ole nepotism are what’s left.

Today, unlike previous generations, corporate support isn’t the enemy. The absence of any support is.

Now, taking money from a brand that aligns with your work isn’t exactly selling out. It’s survival. And honestly? Kind of a flex.

So the script has flipped.

“Sell Out” is no longer a slur.

Look at celebs. The famous are no longer just lending their faces to products, they’re manufacturing their own. And, most evident of this shift, they’re standing up their own agencies. Ryan Reynolds, Reese Witherspoon, Tony Hawk, Jimmy Fallon, Pitbull, Kevin Hart, Kristen Bell, Michael B. Jordan, and Kendrick Lamar all cosplay as Don Draper. Look no further for a signal that advertising, celebrity and the arts have all melted into one another.

Michelangelo had the Pope. Shakespeare had patrons. The Medicis funded the Renaissance. Noble obscurity is also a respectable path.

As Will Cady puts it,

“Whether creatives entered the house of brands because we wanted to or we had to, the fact is we are here.”

As a result, “Selling In” is now the move.

Read more

The following piece is a collaboration between Matt Klein + Rémi Carlioz.

Rémi Carlioz is creative director and cultural strategist. He’s the Founding Partner of La War Room, a global information warfare agency, and founder of Studio Paname, a creative and cultural strategy studio. Carlioz works with governments, brands, and Fortune 500 companies to buil…

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In the five years writing ZINE, I haven’t published a reflection on the endeavor. So, here’s a check in.

Firstly, ZINE was never meant to be what it is today.

It was — and remains — a personal blog. The proof is that I would have never named it ZINE had I known it would have grown this large.

ZINE was never intended to become a brand or “publication”... bu…

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The following piece is a collaboration between Matt Klein + Brooks Miller.

Brooks Miller is EVP of Creator Marketing at Edelman and United Entertainment Group. Prior, Brooks spent nearly eight years at Twitter, where she helped build their creator marketing discipline from the ground up, partnering with creators and brands across every platform and vertical. Brooks started her career at 72andSunny and Barrett Hofherr. Her work has won at Cannes, The One Show, The Clios, The Shorty Awards and has been recognized in AdWeek and Ad Age.

Over the last decade, creator marketing has exploded.

In 2017, the creator industry was estimated to be worth $1.7B and by 2020 an estimated 50M were considered “creators.”

Today, Goldman Sachs predicts the creator industry will swell to $500,000,000,000 by 2027. That’s right. $500 billion with a ‘b.’ We’re witnessing industry staples like Cannes Lions widely embrace creators, holding companies like Publicis acquire influencer agencies for upwards of $500M a pop, and major consumer conglomerates like Unilever pledge half their ad budget to individual creators.

But amid this creator hype, what’s not considered however is that the workhorses powering this “revolution” are collapsing under the weight of their own success.

Read more

Charlie Shackleton (CS) is one my favorite creative minds.

Shackleton is a British filmmaker, multimedia artist, and film critic, whose work I’d come across before, but never connected the dots, realizing all these projects I stumbled across and loved were by the same person.

At SXSW 2025, still unaware of Shackleton's name, I caught a late night screenin…

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The following piece is a collaboration between Dr. Emily Cook + Matt Klein + Will Cady.

Dr. Emily Cook is an organizational psychologist and dream researcher applying psychological science to workplace strategy through her work with the Center for Organizational Dreaming. She holds a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of London and is a member of the American Psychological Association, British Psychological Society, and International Association for the Study of Dreams.

Will Cady walks the threshold between cultures online, offline, and out of line. Cady recently released his book, Which Way Is North: A Creative Compass for Makers, Marketers, and Mystics to explore methods of meaning-making in media and their relationship to our cultural well-being borne from his experience launching Reddit’s internal creative strategy agency, KarmaLab. His latest venture, HEAL MVMNT, supports human creativity in a world gone AI.

AI is no longer confined to the realms of technology, business or our everyday discourse. It’s infiltrated our unconscious.

In partnership with ZINE, Dr. Emily Cook recently analyzed +5,000 publicly shared AI-related dreams from the last 15 years, revealing the nuanced and unconscious ways AI is emerging as an omnipotent force, a companion and second self. The dreams represent a symbolic negotiation of adaptation, mapping the emotional terrain of disruption and disclosing the trajectory of our relationship with technology.

As Carl Jung, the psychiatrist and psychologist who founded analytical psychology — a pioneer in unconscious theory — put it,

“Dreams are the facts from which we must proceed... impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will.”

And for Montague Ullman, a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and founder of the Dream Laboratory in New York,

“Dreams are letters to ourselves that we write every night but seldom take the time to read.”

So, let us study these letters as unbiased data.

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H.B. 1181 101

Texas’ H.B. 1181, an online age verification law, makes complete sense on its surface. It’s designed to prevent children from accessing pornography by requiring proof of age prior to entering an adult site. I mean, who wouldn’t support this?

But what’s unique about this law is that it places the onus on any website that is one-third “adult content” to conduct the ID check. The technical prowess, costs, privacy implications and visitor fears profoundly complicate the law.

The 2025 Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton case, which reached the Supreme Court, debated whether or not the act of requiring a government ID to access material on the internet infringed upon free speech and our access to information. As argued, the protection of children has unintentionally chilling effects on the rest of the population attempting to just browse the internet.

Last week, the Supreme Court upheld the law, deciding that using age verification “to prevent children from accessing sexually explicit content” is within a state’s authority.

What this means...

Firstly, what’s noteworthy about this decision is that it departed from previous similar case decisions. In 1997's Reno v. ACLU and 2004's Ashcroft v. ACLU, the Court struck down laws that restricted access to sexual content online. They ruled that making "indecent" or "offensive" speech a crime — just because minors might see it — violated the First Amendment.

In such cases, the Supreme Court historically ruled that laws burdening adults’ access to speech required the highest level of review in the context of the First Amendment (AKA “strict scrutiny.”) This type of scrutiny means a law must be “narrowly tailored” or the least speech-restrictive.

For decades, the legal principle was clear: you cannot burden adults' constitutional rights in the name of protecting children.

But in light of the most recent 2025 Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton case, this is now no longer the case.

Their new ruling outlines: no person — adult or child — has a First Amendment right to access speech that is inappropriate to minors without first submitting proof of age.

According to the Court, the modern internet has made access to adult material too easy. We therefore require new precedent.

The reaction...

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the leading nonprofit org defending civil liberties online, explained,

“[The court’s decision] ignores the many ways in which verifying age online is significantly more burdensome and invasive than doing so in person.”

Checking an ID for beer at a store is ephemeral and incomparable to uploading an ID on the internet, which can be associated with one’s online activity and ultimately can create trackable, hackable, and commodifiable records of private desires, which futures are uncertain.

Also, buying alcohol is not a protected right in the United States Constitution, while the right to access protected speech as an adult is.

The EFF continues,

“This Supreme Court broke a fundamental agreement between internet users and the state that has existed since its inception: the government will not stand in the way of people accessing First Amendment-protected material.

There is no question that multiple states will now introduce similar laws to Texas.”

Two dozen states across the U.S. have already proposed similar laws. And at least three states “have no limit on the percentage of material required before the law applies.”

In some states and countries you can skip handing over an ID by alternatively conducting a biometric facial scan or giving up your banking information before accessing an adult website.

With these occurrences in mind, Supreme Court Justice Kagan stated in her dissent,

“In today’s opinion, speech rights are pushed to the sidelines, or entirely off the field.”

“Many reasonable people, after all, view the speech at issue here as ugly and harmful for any audience. But the First Amendment protects those sexually explicit materials, for every adult. So a State cannot target that expression, as Texas has here, any more than is necessary to prevent it from reaching children.”

Or as the more eloquent saying goes,

“Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.”

This ruling isn't just legal precedent, it's an artifact symbolizing our moment's anxiety about tech-mediated sexuality, paternalism and privacy online.

Context on obscenity...

Obscenity has a supporting role here, a historical stratagem for censorship.

In 1973’s Miller v. California Supreme Court case, it was determined that obscene material falls outside First Amendment protection. In other words, anything “obscene” is not protected. But the issue then is how obscenity is legally defined. According to The Miller Test for Obscenity, obscene content must meet the following three criteria:

1. Appeals to prurient interest when judged by contemporary community standards

   • Note: “Community” here is meaningless as a kink community has different standards than a church community. Community standards are subjective...

2. Depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way as defined by state law

   • Note: Similarly, what is “obviously” offensive to one may not be offensive to another. Offense is also inherently subjective...

3. Lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value when taken as a whole

   • Note: Art is human expression, therefore anything that is expressive can be considered art and therefore valuable...

Conclusively, obscenity is not black and white, but a grey, amorphous, culturally subjective Rorschach test. This ambiguity wasn't a bug, but a feature, helping set a high bar for what can be deemed obscene and therefore censorable.

But today’s age verification laws are designed to now lower this bar.

Age verification laws don't require material to meet the Miller Test. Now, material only needs to be deemed “harmful to minors.” And as we know, many have a field day labeling anything they personally dislike as “harmful.”

Elementary school books notwithstanding.

Meanwhile, the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA) is currently looking to redefine the definition of obscenity by updating the second part of the Miller Test to:

“Depicts, describes, or represents, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact”

Such a wide scope and loose subjectivity is inevitably prone to weaponization.

The implications...

Anything a government now deems “sexual” or “harmful” may now require one to hand over their passport, biometric data or banking information. More concerning, such laws may now require this personal information to access platforms, which may only have some amount of “sexual material.”

How do you even define “sexual material?”

Definitions can and will effortlessly stretch beyond porn — which in itself does not have a clear definition. Targeted content could include any form of sexual education, sexual health, medical material, dating advice, support communities, LGBTQ+ resources, classic literature with sexual themes, or artistic photography or films.

And how exactly will one measure a breakdown of “one-third adult content” on a site? Couldn’t a platform also bloat their library with G-Rated AI fluff to dilute their “adult percentage?”

Regardless, many sites cannot and will not implement effective age check verifications due to either technical or financial limitations. Those unable or unwilling to comply will soon be inaccessible or prone to five-figure fines per violation.

One woman is already suing for millions for “psychological distress” on behalf of her son who cunningly used her laptop to access porn... despite age check laws already in effect in her state. (Goes to show you how effective they are...) Pornhub has pulled out of states and countries requiring age check verifications — not because of disinterest in safety, but because of the impossible costs, claims of ineffectiveness, and data privacy burdens.

This also has harmful implications for diverse, indie creators, as these requirements perversely favor Big Porn — the most able to comply.

As you can imagine, many internet users are considering the potential nightmares of intertwining government identification, internet activity and sexual preferences. Millions are not game handing over a driver’s license or selfie to a porn site... even if they’re directed to a third party.

Fears are legitimate with real scar tissue. In 2015 there was a 60GB data breach of Ashley Madison, the extramarital affair platform, because hackers “didn’t approve” of its existence. Fallout included suicides and a $567M class-action lawsuit.

As you can guess, these laws and memories will not curb the desire for adult content...

In only four hours after Florida’s HB 3 age check law came into effect, VPN usage spiked 1,150%.

Further, when adults are deterred from accessing lawful content, they’re nudged towards smaller, darker platforms which have no problem not complying.

In a study by researchers at New York University's Center for Social Media & Politics and Stanford University's Polarization & Social Change Lab, they found that while traffic to Pornhub dropped in states where the platform pulled out, there was a +48% increase in searches for another large noncompliant platform.

These laws curb traffic to compliant sites and drive users to VPNs and noncompliant sites.

With unfortunate experience, laws like FOSTA/SESTA, financial de-platforming, book bans, shadow banning LGBTQ+ content and reproductive restrictions do not measurably help the public, but actively endanger select communities.

The deeper story...

This isn't about pornography, it's about “performative protection.”

Texas legislators know this law won't actually comprehensively protect children because kids aren't just getting their sexual scripts from porn, but from all across the internet, social media, TV and film where sexual socialization is happening on a much larger scale. We also know when there’s a will, there’s a way...

We are in the theater of moral action — posturing and appearance is more applaudable than actual safety and humanity.

It’s late-stage moral legislation, designed not to solve problems, but to manage anxieties about problems that we can more effectively address ourselves with self-reflection and accountability — not by sacrificing privacy and speech.

Mind you, all this time, there have been proposed alternatives including:

1. Age verification on the device, browser or app store level (which would not subject individual sites to vulnerabilities),

2. Reformed sexual education and porn literacy programs like Cindy Gallop and Erika Lust’s efforts (preparing families and children for the inevitable),

3. Better family-controlled site and device filtering solutions (or a willingness to engage with existing adequate features),

4. Using confirmed email addresses to triangulate age from associated data (vs. more sensitive documents), and

5. An increased competence and confidence empowering parents to have uncomfortable conversations with their children about these topics.

These are rarely considered.

Instead, the recent legal ruling normalizes the idea that certain types of content requires government intervention, verification and potential tracking. It’s the domestication of a surveillance state through panic. We're creating a generation of digital natives who will understand privacy as conditional, sexuality as inherently suspicious, and government oversight as the natural price of adult desire. You can believe these things and also want to protect children.

There are solutions to protect children and speech. This is not a binary trade off.

It’s all a part of the plan...

The evil genius of this strategy lies in its procedural invisibility. Unlike heavy-handed content bans of previous panics, age verification works through what appears to be neutral friction. It's not censorship, it's just age verification. This is far more insidious than traditional censorship because it masquerades as iron-clad common sense.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to think this is some devious political plot to control what content is accessible on the internet.

Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, admitted on hidden camera that these age verification laws are the “back door” — gotta love the Freudian pun — to achieve a broader porn ban that conservatives wouldn’t be able to otherwise implement directly.

The question isn't whether this will protect children — it won't. Curiosity and sexuality are imminent.

Rather, the question is whether we're comfortable living in an online environment where curiosity is surveilled and sexual desire is demonized.

The internet's original promise was radical disintermediation and the democratization of information — indifferent to whether you personally enjoyed or approved of all that material.

As sociology professor Hannah Wohl put it in The Hill,

“We may not all want to defend porn. But if we care about free speech and digital privacy, we must. Because what starts with porn rarely ends there.”

Where we go from here...

Are you willing to accept the documentation of desire as the price of digital citizenship?

I know I’m not.

What this then means is that we require a refreshed energy and comfort to talk openly about the taboo. Yet the taboo isn’t porn or sexuality — it’s the complex, nuanced conversation about human agency and tolerance.

Government and parental concerns are grave — but so are the shortcomings and the overreach of this approach.

When we refuse to openly discuss stigma, we keep it swept under the rug where it festers and we surrender privacy and speech to those who exploit discomfort for political gain.

We’ve ironically sacrificed free speech because we’re uncomfortable discussing the most shameful aspects of it.

Again, this is not about porn, but about long ignored questions we must now face: How should sexual autonomy look in digital environments? How do we balance child protection with adult privacy? And how do we effectively address real harms vs. imaginary ones used to justify control?

Greetings from Brooklyn as I’m back home after a couple weeks in Europe. First a stint at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and then a decompression in København for some incredible grub, the longest day of the year (~11PM sunset!) and a hang at The Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies.

This was my first Cannes, and while I went in with zero expectations, it was very clear this is not as much a festival of creativity but a gathering of “corporate creativity.” There is in fact a difference and the latter, corporate creativity, can be argued to be an oxymoron. I won’t now...

Incredible nonetheless, Cannes is an exhausting experience. Imagine Tough Mudder as a conference. There’s the mental expense of being on, thinking and socializing. This I expected. But then there’s the physical aspect. This I was not prepared for. Humid, oppressive heat, a sun that roasted relentlessly and daily step counts consistently in the five digits. Sweat-soaked shirts. Blisters. Sunburn. Dehydration. Pants.

Shade, AC and cheap, low-powered, branded portable battery fans were currency. Hoard.

This privileged suffering is all then compounded by calorie deficients due to passed Hors-d'Oeuvres for dinner and minimal sleep due to early morning programming, meetings and meet ups, and late night dinners (more finger food), invite only celeb-spotted parties, and corporate card fueled debauchery. This, of course, I have absolutely no experience in... Promise.

I share this to say, the ad industry is impeccably effective at overlooking any glaring sore spots and reframing physical pain as the most special time of the year. Nothing but joyous celebration.

It’s professional cognitive dissonance that only an industry of propagandists can pull off.

Hats off and bravo to all.

It’s a naturally inhospitable environment, but with either decades of industry experience, a robust network or expense report authorization, it all becomes much more welcoming. Regardless, Cannes was a fascinating petri dish to study: media dynamics, personalities and the state of an industry forever unsure of what comes next.

Here are my takeaways, observations and hot takes from Cannes and Euro travels...

• Cannes gives marketers a taste of their own medicine. As businesses try to get people to their happy hours, meetings, or panels, we learn that flashy activations and mere email reminders are simply not enough. Even a boat ride, a free cocktail or a celebrity (often out of their depth) on a panel, can’t cut it. Chairs remain empty and marketers continue talking to themselves. It’s the same treatment they give to their own consumers. At Cannes, business can learn firsthand that their audience here — and back home — are flaky, forgetful, confused, tired and juggling six other choices at once. You are not the most important thing and never will be. Humility is the ultimate lesson.

• I was interviewed for Cannes LIONS Advisory “State of Creativity” report. When asked, “What’s plaguing creativity?” My answer was easy: Confidence. A shockingly low 13% of creative marketers are taking a “risk-friendly” approach to their comms, while 29% admit to being “highly risk-averse.” Meanwhile, 51% of orgs rate their ability to develop high-quality insights as “poor or very poor.” We’re petrified with low investment in our efforts to seek out insightful inspiration. This is corporate self-sabotage. Which is driving which? The paralysis or the fear? F around. Find out. The results will quickly break this doom cycle.

• At a luncheon roundtable I moderated on the “future of digital,” between TikTok, Pinterest, Forrester, eMarketer, Sky and others, it wasn’t until the 55min mark that I noted that not once has the word “brand” come up at this creative advertising gathering. This would be a subtle takeaway, except for the fact that La Croisette, the famed boulevard, was no longer lined with prestigious creative agencies, but now by tech players, big and small. Optimization is pillaging creativity while the creative work up for the awards are locked in the basement of the Palais. I don’t think that we’re suffering from a lack of creativity, but we’re suffering from a lack of curiosity. Creativity is predicated upon risk. And given the cultural, workplace, financial or geopolitical environments, the appetite for the uncertain is just not there. That said, it’s now easier than ever to stand out. I’m sorry, but with love and respect, Duolingo and Liquid Death are not profoundly creative brands, they’re just not doing what everyone else is. We admire them because they have the confidence (and permission) to zag.

  

• “Creators” were a topic of discussion at Cannes. But I noticed one angle is nearly always missing. If individuals become the means of distribution, entertainment and trust, hundreds of thousands of people are stepping into celeb-adjacent roles. More specifically, we’re not discussing the implications of privacy and prying audiences, public pressures, parasocial relationships, mental health, burnout, financial instability, etc. If corps are going to leverage individuals as broadcast channels, what else do they/we owe these creators? Think: media training, financial planning, legal counseling, mentorship networking, exit strategy planning. Or what about established standard rates, working conditions and group insurance? If such resources are not coming from the advertisers, then who’s offering such needed support? Twenty-three year old “Rachel” just upended cable news. But how do we ensure Rachel doesn’t collapse under the pressures of her new expectations?

• We’re not asking a simple question enough: Are you in service of culture and people, or are you in service of corporations? Ironically, doing the former helps all parties. Helping the latter, often harms all parties. Ask this question each morning before you start the day. Remember the human.

Those were five. The 13 remaining bits are for paid supporters as a ‘Thank You.’ Consider upgrading to access the rest of the debrief + all other ZINE pieces.

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The following piece is a collaboration between Matt Klein + Sacha Judd.

Sacha Judd is a writer based in Aotearoa, New Zealand. She’s spent the last decade speaking about the intersection of the tech sector and fan communities at conferences like Velocity, Webstock, and Beyond Tellerrand. She has written on these topics for Letterboxd’s Journal, The Spino…

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“What advice do you have for emerging strategists or researchers interested in culture? Or what do you believe now that you wish you heard much earlier in your career?”

Every week my answer is a little different, but I finally gathered, edited and organized all those answers together. This.

Take what works. Leave what doesn’t...

Here are +10 years, +2.5k words, five themes, and tactical instructions for how to think about thinking. I’ll continue to update this as a living doc.

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“How important is branding for fast-food chains?”

Earlier this year I was asked this question.

It’s one of those that the more you think about, the more you can’t stop thinking about it. (Or maybe that’s just me?)

Sure, you may have a taste preference for a McDonald’s burger over a Burger King burger, but if I asked you to describe what McDonald’s represen…

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