Read in Spanish here.
Welcome to 📡 reporting from RADAR. In this series, community curators 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. Subscribe below to keep up with our signature brain massaging magic, straight to your inbox. 🔮💜
Signals Spotlight
1_The aesthetization of permacrisis
spotted in #aesthetics #community-culture #fashion-beauty #music #socialmedia
You know we can’t stop talking about Goblin Mode, and neither can anyone else. But there’s competition for the word that captured 2022’s zeitgeist: Collins Dictionary is giving Oxford a run for their money with, “permacrisis”.
War, climate emergency, recession, a pandemic that refuses to end, nuclear threats: everything seems to throw us into a state of ongoing deep uncertainty. Cultural signals point to the early effects of permacrisis – the dissociative pout (a dead-eyed expression that dominated feeds everywhere) and a rise in dissociative music. These subconscious behaviors helped put a barrier between us and a chaotic world, but with no end in sight, our subtleties are shifting overt. On socials, we’re watching muted emotional detachment be replaced with more explicit codes: Just take “Crying Girl” makeup, a trend that’s blowing up on TikTok. We’re feeling more and more need to externally express our feelings, and channeling them into a highly aestheticized and romantic form.
IRL, too, apocalypse imagery is everywhere. Ever trend-setters, fashion has been early to lean into the end times: From Balenciaga’s “mud runway” in Paris and clothes explicitly designed to face a climate crisis to dystopian vibes from once-sunny Marc Jacobs, we’re seeing armageddon on runways everywhere. Musicians and artists are joining this wave, too, as “apocalypse pop” climbs the charts. Permacrisis might be newly coined, but its influence has already been aestheticized across multiple creative forms – perhaps our attempts to exorcize the threat, by turning it into something much more relatable and familiar.
🔮 Are you feeling drawn to the gloom, too? In a world where the crisis is certainly, very real, how can we take our response beyond aesthetics and create material improvements? Do these expressions help us overcome negative feelings, or simply make them more omnipresent?
2_The rebirth of communal living
spotted in #community-culture #relationships
Co-living is back – and it's not the hippie commune your parents reminisce about.
Though it's been practiced in various forms by indigenous peoples for eons, our modern conception of communal living was popularized in Western countries in the late 60s & early 70s. Spurred on by the rise of counterculture and 1968 protests, people began sharing necessities and resources – and cohabitation emerged as one of the primary reactions against the institution of traditional family and an expression of proto-environmentalism.
Today, things look a little different. People are choosing cohabitation not for ideological reasons, but to cope with very concrete problems: The growing sense of isolation experienced in large cities, the high price of houses, the struggles a single parent has to face everyday. As our needs and arrangements change, new architectural models that support these ideas are emerging, too, hinting at more than just a passing fad. For many, co-living can provide a more balanced and rewarding lifestyle - because sharing a place is also sharing duties, expenses, and having support when you need it. It’s something that people, especially in the wake of the pandemic, are valuing more and more.
🔮Could co-living be part of our solution set for a more sustainable future? If this is a response to the apparently unstoppable gentrification of large cities, how do we make a supportive, sharing philosophy a key part of fighting back?
3_Wealth is on the menu
spotted in #money #media-pop culture
Spend a few hours on film twitter, and you might notice a common theme: In many of the year’s most hotly debated releases, wealth is a key trait for many characters. No spoilers, but it's not exactly a flattering portrayal.
Turn on Triangle of Sadness, Bodies Bodies Bodies, The White Lotus, Not Okay or Glass Onion, and you’re immediately invited to despise these characters - snobbish, empty, and detached from reality (it’s a trope we’re all too familiar with). They say one is a fact, two a coincidence, three a trend… and in recent memory we’re counting at least five (may we add The Menu to the list?).
As Tom Beckman recently wrote, examining how villains are represented in pop culture provides a strong indicator for the current fears and anxieties in society. Take franchises like James Bond or Rambo: their villains range from communist organizations and muslim terrorists, to drug lords, unscrupulous tech companies, and gangsters wearing Asian masks – all according to the dominant panic of the moment. With recession looming and inequalities only expanding, we’re not surprised that wealth-hoarding is the newest way to portray the enemy. And who could blame us for a little bit of catharsis? At the moment, living vicariously through content might be the closest we get to eating the rich.
🔮Can anti-capitalist satire go beyond the screen for a more valuable, changemaking purpose? Is this a narrative capable of affecting public opinion, or is it just for laughs?
The Best of The Rest
Platonic life partnerships are gradually becoming more mainstream, while making friends in adulthood is feeling both less simple and less easy, especially for men. If you’re in the market for new squad members, maybe take a look at these tips, or follow this guide. As we think about what (or who) we need to add to our lives, we might also focus on appreciating what we have right in front of us – because as it turns out, “romanticizing your life” can be a legit form of mindfulness and even help us live a happier life. In other mental health news, there are new frontiers ahead thanks to new research on hallucinogens, which are giving birth to a “psychedelic renaissance” – a space we’re certainly keeping an eye on.
Pulse Check
Updates from inside RADAR.
Focus this week: Over in Research Squad, we’re kicking off Supercuration for our next report – for those who may need a refresher, Supercuration is a key part of the RADAR research process (you can deep-dive into V1 here) that begins to crystalize and sensemake signal-driven themes, interconnecting them from far corners of the discord. We’re bringing both AFIS-seasoned Supercurators as well as fresh eyes in on this cycle, and can’t wait to see how the dots start getting connected.
For 2023, we’ll be producing three futures reports (if you haven’t read last year’s A Future In Sync, we think you’ll like it) each investigating a different theme. With each theme we’ll run the RADAR research process, investigating what that better future might look like and producing a vision of it we think is uniquely positioned to be a good bet.
And (drumroll please) we’re starting with a more playful future. It’s a thread we’ve been pulling on across the server for a while now, and we’re excited to throw the full weight of RADAR behind it. As for the other two themes – you’re just going to have to watch this space to find out (now might be a good time to subscribe to this newsletter, if you haven’t already).
Other content from the RADARverse you might want to read or listen to:
In case you missed it, earlier this month saw the release of RADAR Resolutions. Call it our contribution to the EOY trend cycle, but with a bit of a twist. You’ll have to read it to find out.
And, we did a Twitter space on it! Featuring @keels223, @oryzae, @squid, @joecarpita, @petahm, @emmanuelle, @akash.das, @caitlincaitwin and @mattweatherall, it’s a conversation that left us buzzing with inspiration for the future. You can listen to the recording here.
We also launched the first piece in our Member Spotlight series, featuring the one and only @Squid talking all things generative AI (his prompting syntax is a huge unlock, in our opinion). Read it here.
This week’s 📡 reporting from RADAR was curated by @gbrln — with so much gratitude to everyone who inspired the content with their community contributions: @oryzae @StuartEvans, @alpal768, @keels223, @Victoriafutures, @jayemsey, @akash.das, @EHB ✨, @AndreaC, @robertcain, @ampersandrea and anyone else we may have forgotten.
Not a part of RADAR just yet, but feeling the FOMO? join us here.