The META Trending Trends: 02024
An Analysis of 70+ Global Trend Forecasts → 14 Most Reported Social Shifts
On Doing Hard Things
02024’s Prologue
Stalling to complete this annual meta-analysis of the most reported cultural trends, I decided to go back in time and flip through some old 2018 reports. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much time traveling. Those reports, now published over half a decade ago, read eerily similar to what’s being forecasted for 2024.
Perhaps this was just some lingering bitterness after spending a year speaking on how trends have lost all meaning.
To test my perception, I created a simple quiz: 2018 or 2024? “Can you tell when each of the following trends were published?” To make it even easier, I clustered four trends and their descriptions together, which were all 2018, or all 2024.
Before starting the assessment, the nearly 200 global cultural research and strategy professionals rated their confidence in this task a solid 6.5 out of 10.
However, after finishing the quiz, but before seeing their results, when asked again, that average confidence dropped -27%.
They felt what I did.
Turns out you were better off guessing 50/50 than genuinely attempting to determine if a trend was published in 2018 or 2024.
What’s happening?
01. On one hand, maybe this isn’t a knock against trend regurgitation, but a mark against our own patience. Trends aren’t meant to have a 365-day shelf life. It takes time for change to gestate. Also, the topics forecasted in 2018 (ex. new family structures, fondness for the physical, and mainstreaming psychedelics) are still budding today, and therefore still legitimate to report on. Expecting new movements and norms to track at the same pace as our memes and headlines is unrealistic.
02. On the other hand, maybe culture really is stuck. Our media and creative industries, mirrors of culture at large, are experiencing a stasis. Other researchers are dubbing this phenomenon Stuck Culture, The Age of Average, and Cultural Flattening. Franchises hog the box office while nostalgia is our only shared feeling left. The homogeneity is suffocating. Artists and creators, meant to inspire, find themselves captured by algorithms, metrics and financial incentives. Our new obsession, AI, isn’t intelligent as much as it is incredible at guessing what should come next based upon the past. It’s a tool to usher in our future, yet built upon the average. How symbolic.
Perhaps both hypotheses can simultaneously be true. We’re impatient and cultural change is stagnant. I was fine accepting these explanations until one more experiment...
In partnership with scenarioDNA, a cultural research and advisory firm, we inputted seven years of trend report executive summaries and reported trends into their patented Culture Mapping tool — a semiotic and linguistic system to quantify and map phrases into one of four language quadrants:
1. Residual (ubiquitous, but fading)
2. Dominant (accepted, now expanding)
3. Emergent (rising experimentation)
4. Disruptive (agitating expected norms)
After analyzing thousands of pages of text, we learned that every year since 2018, the overwhelming majority of trend reports’ language fell into either the Dominant or Residual quadrants. Only a few individual reports found their way into Emergent or Disruptive quadrants.
* Wouldn’t that mean the META Report is also dusty... therefore useless? Not necessarily. The tension of the META Report is summarization... but also elevation. As a result, after inputting seven years of META Report language into scenarioDNA’s tool, we found a +62.4% increase in Emergent language and +256.7% increase in Disruptive language when compared to the original reports’ content.
META is an effective balance for distillation and provocation.
An Unfortunate Reality
Bad news: The foremost experts in cultural analysis are reporting concepts and phrases which are statistically commonplace.
Even if we are unfairly impatient, organizations which are proclaiming to be able to identify and analyze change are, semantically, just discussing the past. Fantastic.
We’ve lost sight of what it means to be brave.
It feels like our facilities for riskiness and imagination have atrophied.
The pandemic was a global pause to re-think our future and innovate. Instead, we just grasped harder onto the familiar.
In an attempt to recalibrate, I drafted five strategies to ignite some audacity. How may we overcome this plague of timidness at the risk of an eternal present?
01. Consider the limitations of market research
Data can only take you so far. Over-intellectualization is a curse. Instead: Make culture by partnering with and augmenting existing communities’ efforts. Foresight as Activism. The market research market cap exceeded +$81B last year and is rapidly still growing. Confidence via analysis is justified, but there’s the risk of over-analysis paralysis. Stop relying upon the old for answers to the new. We can post-rationalize many more good ideas than we can pre-rationalize. By considering yourself as an observer of culture, you neglect your responsibility as a critical contributor. Accept that you too are a part of the system. Get off the sidelines.
02. Value the process
Feeding trend reports into a GPT as if it’s a crystal ball is virtuous. But don’t expect it to yield anything more valuable than a curious human capable of sensemaking. Can ≠ Should. AI augmentation is a future requirement, but remain mindful of what’s outsourced. Going forward, we need more demanding journeys than we do mindless shortcuts. Shortcuts rarely yield fun, stories or lessons. If it's easy, it likely isn’t worthwhile.
03. Get over being wrong
Over a decade of digital footprints hang over us as if we can’t change. Remember: We can. Trend reports play it safe pumping existing hype with business on the line. But foresight isn’t about prediction, and it’s more than preparation. It’s choice. Instead of predicting and being wrong, more valuable: imagine what you want to see. You can’t be wrong in that. After all, a good futurist provokes and admits that they don’t have the answer. Manifest. Possibility > Probability.
04. Be willing to have your most fundamental beliefs challenged
Better, be eager and question them yourself. For YouTuber Josh Otten of Ordinary Things,
“The real danger of modern times isn’t that we’ll fail to tell the fake world from the real one, but it’s that we’ll know the world is fake and choose to live in that one anyway because it’s comfortable.”
How ironic. We finally have access to all the information in the world, yet so many today choose to avoid hard truths, contradictions and disagreements. Only two out of 50 trend reports acknowledge their previous work. We have to reflect if we’re to grow.
05. Get weird
At a moment of algorithmic-recommendations, bumper sticker takes, and AI re-generated averages, the atypical sets us free. AI is often programmed to play a normie. Its hallucinations are the feature, not the bug. Soon, proof of humanity will be a zag. Zagging breaks us out of the recursion loop of reporting on what’s already trending, comments about comments, franchises about franchises, and AI speaking to AI. We’ve begun to deprive ourselves of the novel, idiosyncratic and interesting. Zag. Please.
All these things are hard.
But if we’re to see change in our trend reports, culture at large, and most importantly, our own lives, doing the hard thing has never been more necessary.
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 forecast reports?”
No ChatGPT. Just three months and coffee.
This META report is a reflection on the most frequently reported trends, and commentary on the practice of trend forecasting itself.
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. “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 product, but the beginning to strategy.
So... Three ways to approach The META Trends Reports:
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
META Methodology
Read 70+ 2024 global reports and parsed 550+ trends in Excel 1
Analyzed each trend description and manually identified themes
Named 14 META Trends (i.e. largest themes or “trending trends”)
Designated keywords to represent each of the 14 META Trends
Used NWO.ai to score each collection of keywords for a ranking
“Corp Rank” = published reports’ trend mention frequency vs.
“NWO.ai Rank” = NWO’s proprietary score for keywords 2
Analyzed keywords to quantify biggest and fastest growing
Determined media breakdown based upon keywords’ presence online
Applied The Overlooked Framework to interrogate each META Trend:
Outside = What is an outsider’s POV or experience?
Other Side = What is the inverse or contradictory tension?
Dark Side = What is the malicious or distressing angle?
Back Side = What is the devious or stigmatized twist?
Quiet Side = What is not being talked about?
Long Side = What are the long-term implications or effects?
Inside = What is the internal or personal impact?
Old Side = What are the historical roots or deeper origins?
Input META Trend write-ups into Stable Diffusion for spec art
AI’s Intro
“Imagine the world is like a big, busy playground.
There are a lot of different games going on, but all the rules keep changing, which can be both confusing and exciting.
Countries and organizations are like the older kids on the playground who decide what games to play and how we should play them. But now, even they’re finding it hard because the playground is changing so much.
Some parts of the playground now are getting too hot or too wet because we haven't been taking good care of it. Everyone is starting to play in their own way and a new toy this year is distracting everyone.
At the end of the day, those older kids need to start thinking carefully about how to make the playground fun and safe for everyone.”
— All report executive intro’s summarized and explained to a 5-year-old
The 14 02024 META Trends:
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