Prologue It’s the 60s. Amidst a backdrop of psychedelic tripping — voluntary and involuntary — the Vietnam War, moon landing, nuke preparations, and JFK assassination rip a hole through our collective reality. What is even real? Then comes Manson, dialing it all to 11…

What’s the hardest part of the META Report? Outside of the reading and parsing, which is incredibly taxing — “chain smoking trends” — the real difficulty is the balance of the write ups. From how I see it: half the value of the META Trend output is the…

Each year, for the last five years, I’ve read every single available trend report to arrive at the Meta Trends. What were the trending trends for the year? Now after half a decade of this exercise, I’ve partnered with Sarah DaVanzo of Curious Futures…

Ascolta ora (11 min) | Earlier this year Sarah DaVanzo and I published the fifth annual 2022 Meta Trend analysis, a distillation of 40+ industry trend reports to ultimately identify the most frequently reported (i.e. noteworthy) trends for the year. Fourteen (meta) trends were identified to represent what the entire trends industry was collectively forecasting…

Listen now (9 min) | The Meta Trends are invaluable in identifying where the collective, trend forecaster psyche is at. But as we learned in a five year look back: biases thrive, agendas direct, risk is feared, quantification is scarce and toxic optimism influences. Deeper, as we learned in a series of exercises with AI: analyzed cultural data reveals what we hum…

Ascolta ora (10 min) | After Sarah DaVanzo and I leveraged NWO.ai’s invaluable AI to score and re-rank the Meta Trends, we were left stuck with one finding: Both the global and U.S. AI data-driven ranks were significantly different from the original human rank. The AI declared that what we humans thought was most important was not actually the case…

Originally published via WARC There is no doubt that we’re living in an era of intense, complex cultural dynamics. Not only does culture seem to be accelerating faster and faster, but so much of it is now spawned and remixed in online spaces, convoluting dynamics further. Additionally, with heated socio-political issues ranging from mental health and DEI …