📡 reporting from RADAR .006

our bi-weekly discord digest

Welcome to 📡 reporting from RADAR. Every other week, community curators will surface the best of the best — from the cultural constellations we’re watching emerge to behind-the-scenes build updates as we embark on our journey to discover, incubate, and deliver better futures.

Wavelength is a space for updates, member articles, ponderings & wanderings, fun experiments and — of course — more signals. So subscribe below to keep up with our signature brain massaging magic, straight to your inbox. 🔮💜 

Signals Spotlight

1_Feeling the Feels
spotted in #relationships, #mental-health, #fashion

This week, after the excitement of thinking all the thinks in the supercuration process, we made space for feeling all the feels: which is now apparently a minimum requirement in the dating scene, because “emotional maturity is the new sexy”, according to a Kinsey Institute study. Hinge is helping singles find less unhinged partners with prompts that reveal their self-care practices, and if that’s not enough of a filter, Feeld offers the “emotionally mature” an alternative hookup app. Hopefully that helps you avoid joining the ranks of women who are whispering “therapy” into their boyfriend’s phones — to manipulate the algorithm into targeting them with ads for mental health support.

It’s not just dating apps that want you to get in tune with your feelings: Manchester City is making a scarf with a biosensor “to get a better understanding of the emotion at the heart of the world’s beautiful game” - talk about wearing your heart on your sleeve!

While we’re glad to see the stigma around mental health being removed, we also pondered its dark side: an over reliance on therapy, or “therapy-sounding advice in bitesize infographics”.

🔮💭 What might a future full of feels… feel like? Are there unchecked biases and privileges behind this focus on feelings? How can mental health care practices be made accessible to more?

2_Chaotic, But to What End?
spotted in #ideology, #aesthetics, #self, #general-chat

Perhaps such strong emotional grounding is a necessary counterweight to the maelstrom of chaos we find ourselves caught up in: the only way through is to lean into the messiness. We took comfort in cluttercore as an aesthetic and its unabashedly maximalist displays that represent unique individual interests: no two clutters have the same aesthetic. In the same vein of ‘chaotic goodness’, we amused ourselves over the gentleminions’ antics and even wondered if RADAR’s alignment was chaotic good (you should have seen our server before we introduced threads).

Lore’s essay pulled together many, many more examples of our chaotic response to the end times, and summed up the intention behind it as such: “Chaos can be used as a way to stick a middle finger up to the establishment, one-upping one brand of absurdity with another.” The subversive intent reminded us of the spirit of punk, where declarations of intent were established via manifestos, and this permissionless spirit seems to have been co-opted by web3 everything-punk visions for a better future. 

But in the internet’s culture of remix and recycle, reality can be confused with parafiction. An ironic remix of a right-wing politician’s speech into a catchy bop can propel her towards an election. We discuss how world-building “lore” is becoming the next iteration of narrative and storytelling — but to what end will this lead when we’re playing with the fabric of reality itself?

🔮💭 Is chaotic good an oxymoron? Is a better future necessarily permissionless? How do we guard against the malicious intents of bad actors - or is the point just to enjoy the ride anyway?

3_Same Time, Same Page?
spotted in #in-sync-community-chat, #entertainment-and-culture, #labour, #social-media, #water-cooler

The frenetic energy of chaos certainly reflects the accelerating fragmentation of society, as the process of social atomization spreads. Perhaps it’s comforting to learn that despite the universe’s tendency towards entropy, chaotic systems can synchronize (it’s science!). As we start to dive into our first research topic, we’re starting to unpack the various meanings of being in sync.

One of the first aspects of it we explored was the immediate sense of being together, in time. Perhaps as a reaction to everything being available anytime, anywhere, we’re seeing a desire to experience things at the same time, all over: from the synchronized ⚠️Be Real ⚠️alerts, to Tumblr’s collective rediscovery of the classic 1897 novel Dracula as daily dispatches in their inbox. 

Of course, it’s not all play: getting scattered workers back in sync is one of the biggest challenges of remote work, even as we contemplate new office rituals that could enable synchronicity out of time. The challenge of such async communication puts much of the burden of understanding on the receiver, making it necessary to put your meaning out there with more care.

🔮💭 This is just one aspect of a research topic we’ll be digging deep into over the next few weeks. How has remote work changed your comfort with synchronicity? Can there be a viable alternative to an experience shared in time?

The Best of The Rest

We’ve been exploring unknown unknowns, diving deep on UFOs, investigating the mystical potential for Spirit Tech, and questioning the end point of death. We’ve also been getting let down by celebrity climate criminals (Oprah? Really?) — but at least these charts look good? We got our history on, going down the Rebellious Women rabbit hole. And also wondered whether home is a place, or something ~less permanent~. We went deep on involution — fact checking Fortune with this more accurate interpretation. And finally, we got our nostalgia on: from Goomie Beans giving us Sillybandz and Crazy Bones vibes, to checking back in on Neopets, the OG metaverse in our hearts.

Pulse Check

• Focus this Week: If you spend just one hour with RADAR this week, jump into the #in-sync threads to bring your own threads, thoughts, and rabbit holes into RADAR’s first Futures Report process!

• Squad Updates:

  • Over in Research Squad…After a successful and energizing SuperCuration process where we narrowed down 1000+ signals to 1 constellation, we’re now all engines go bringing to life our first futures report: the project team is activated, supported by a project squad and the entire community getting involved on a daily basis.
    
    Yesterday, 19 members even shared their own personal focus areas and will now go tumbling down their rabbit holes of choice!
    
    With the project team meeting weekly in Campfire Sessions, each week will bring new community tasks and opportunities to get involved — and it’s easier than ever to record your contributions through our new /contribute bot!
    

  • Governance passed the Research Brief Proposal x Scope with 46 votes in 48 hours — A new record for the community and ~27% of its members turned out.
    

  • In our newly launched MX squad, we’ve been exploring the idea of badges: conducting interviews and refining the cultural & professional criteria we want to serve as the basis for our community badges. These will be used to signal reputation, belonging, influence and identity within the RADAR community. Stay tuned for more of our thoughts on these critical community motivators 👀.
    

  • We’ve just formed a Data Squad to help Diamond DAO build out our futures protocol. Highly async, this group is leveraging our members’ deep industry expertise and experience with the pitfalls and challenges of existing trend tools.
    

  • And last but not least, over in Product Squad, we’ve been launching products every few days, from our new bookmark bots with filtering for the futures report, to our signal threads platform and daily signal platforms (with a splash of DALLE-2)
    
    We’re now heading back to reimagine our Signals Extension which we paused so stay tuned for what's next.
    

• Upcoming Events:

  • Next week we’ll be using our signals session for a deep work Signal Session; an hour of collective research exploring the internet. So get ready for chilled beats and energized minds.

  • Keep an eye on the #announcements and #events for squads meeting where relevant!

This week’s 📡 reporting from radar was curated by @ampersandrea — with so much gratitude to everyone who inspired the content with their amazing contributions including @victoriafutures, @alpal768, @kianga, @EHB, @sarahsarahowen, @brianmark, @olgashaeva, @dwayne‘thejock’ronson, @amphiboly, @aarenarchive, and anyone else we may have forgotten.

Not a part of RADAR just yet, but feeling the FOMO? Join us here.