📡 reporting from RADAR .016
our semi-regular discord digest
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
01_Religion remixed
Spotted in #aesthetics #religion-spirituality #ideology #community-culture
Folklore is getting freaky. If Catholicism was the belief du jour last year — as memes abounded and downtown cool girls flocked to the pews — now, it might be Paganism's turn. The nature-centric faith and its symbology are having a renaissance in Britain, where we see it popping up in everything from the occult zine Hellebore and folk-inspired raves, all the way to the rampant speculation that buzzed online around potentially pagan symbolism at King Charles’ recent coronation.
But in an ultra-memetic, post-post-irony world, who’s to say what’s a LARP and what’s genuine (plus, once the internet grabs hold does the difference even matter)? Reactionary or real, return to faith is on the rise among young people, and we’re watching its manifestations take profoundly modern forms, from emerging digital neo-spiritualism to new belief systems around technology like crypto and – you guessed it – artificial intelligence.
Whatever’s driving this return to tradition, faith, and symbolism, it's clear that we're in the midst of a great cultural yearning for....something. It's easy to write some of these shifts off as mere memeification, but the benefits of even something 'faith-like' are clearly in demand today. Sure, it could be irony, all for the aesthetic – but might we also be turning to trad for its predictability in unprecedented times? Or perhaps in a world that’s increasingly mid (read on to see what we mean), the ceremony and drama of religion is getting a meaningful new sparkle (call it the vernacular architecture of everyday being)? Or maybe it's something deeper, a very human recognition that as we need the underpinnings of belief — not just its trappings — to root and connect us, together.
🔮As new forms of faith continue to shift and take shape – from emerging technology to post-ironic renaissances – how might we build belief systems rooted in benefit and connection?
02_Body double
Spotted in #lifestages-psychgraphics #fashion-beauty #health-wellness #ideology
You know that saying, that life’s only constants are death and taxes? America’s ultra-wealthy have long made a game of dodging the latter – and now they’re taking a crack at the former. A new class of drugs, treatments, and protocols is on the rise with a very specific aim: Outrunning time.
Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson made headlines earlier this year for his multi-million dollar longevity-extension routine – even taking things into Mad Max territory, and offering Twitter the Hinge profile from hell – while Sam Altman’s taking bets on reserve aging tech, and the crypto class is addicted to bio-hacking. The drugs that will more than double our lifespans are already on their way. On the less extreme end, health gurus like Andrew Huberman have gained cult status, offering implementable, science-backed protocols for everyday wellbeing – and as much as we love ideas like radical data and queering the quantified self, we’re still not sure self-optimization is all it’s cracked up to be.
It’s no secret that we’re living in the age of the dupe: From TikTok to Temu, not only can we no longer discern real from fake but often, we don't really care to. But as flashy status symbols shift to less visible ones, those still in the business of flaunting wealth might be turning to a kind of investment that’s harder to fake: Themselves. Body as currency is by no means new, but as thinness returned with a vengeance this year – from fashion week runways to the explosive entrance of ozempic into the mainstream – an ever-more unrealistic standard is being set, and it doesn’t come cheap.
While America’s population ages and with it, the drastic, punitive health outcomes of our widening wealth gap become increasingly clear, living longer with more of our youth intact might be shaping up to be the ultimate status symbol – at what cost?
🔮For all the progress made by recent movements around body acceptance and rejecting hustle culture, the rise of expensive self-optimization feels like a step backwards. How might we shift our wellness focus towards balance, instead of extremes? Or invest in everyone’s longevity, not just a privileged few?
03_Medium cool
Spotted in #aesthetics #placemaking-migration #ideology #technology
Pick an address in Brooklyn (or east side LA, Chicago off the blue line, or just about any hip area in the American city of your choice) and you are, blessedly, unlikely to be more than a few blocks from your favorite spicy condiment, hot girl snack, or alcohol-free apertif. Where you’ll find them? At the shoppy shop, of course.
Coined by TikTok creator Neil Shankar, a shoppy shop is a specific genre of market that, in an effort to set themselves apart as small, boutique, and artisanal, have all started to carry precisely identical stuff. And it’s not just limited to food: Do you have it too, this sinking sort of feeling that everything is just, the same now? Like, if every store you go into has the same candles, are they still as cute? You know the ones.
“Today’s culture is algorithmically optimized for mass appeal” writes Günseli Yalcinkaya for Dazed, and oof, we felt that (remember Instagram face? It’s like that, but now it’s for everything). From the beige-ing of children’s toys to the dreaded gray laminate flooring, the algorithmic playlists, the endless sequels, prequels, and spinoffs, it’s feeling increasingly difficult to find anything new or just, good (not to mention the tsunami of SEO-optimized, AI-generated, search-clogging content whose floodwaters are just beginning to rise).
Maybe it’s the microtrends and named aesthetics of TikTok, fitting what once was unique expression into an easily recognizable and replicable box. Maybe it’s moneyball-for-everything, distilling creativity into datapoints. Maybe it’s not even that homogenous at all, and it’s just the algorithm making us think so – keeping us in little bubbles of Wassily chairs and tiny tattoos until we’re massaged by the for-you feed into believing that these relative rarities are in fact, universal and thus, no longer interesting.
The other day, a chic Brooklynite friend of mine said she didn’t know what Dimes Square was, and that felt nice (she deleted Instagram a couple years ago). Maybe the answer is just touching a bit more grass.
🔮In the age of premiocre, how might we seek depth, originality, and craft? Or, on the other hand – what if instead we got comfier with being regular and embraced our uncool? (And as a bonus, normalness now comes with more aesthetically pleasing branding).
Best of the rest
Everything may be the same, but aliens are real and that’s definitely interesting? The metaverse might be real too, but also probably not. Today in dystopia, influencers are off to make war seem less bad, the men are weaponizing Taylor Swift, capitalism gets the cheerleader literally no one asked for, and to top off, it even turns out we forgot how to smile. AI is still everywhere, prompting questions we never thought we’d ask like: Is it still cheating, if they’re a robot? But it’s not all bad – we’re obsessed with trends in urban fishing and guerrilla gardening, to no one’s surprise drugs are actually good and, just a little reminder that life is literally astonishing (and the mf mitochondria is still the powerhouse of the cell, baby).
We will admit that this Reporting From RADAR may be a bit on the depressing side (sorry about that, the writer is a bit overcaffeinated today and maybe needs to go for a walk). At least if Earth isn’t your jam anymore, the moon might be?
Pulse Check
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This week’s 📡 reporting from RADAR was curated by @oryzae — with so much gratitude to everyone who inspired the content with their community contributions: @victoriafutures @kairon @noelle @ehb @aarenarchive @samaritural @idlegaze @robertcain @moshner @shahtaj @squid @dwayne “the jock” ronson @caitlin @andreac @sheshallconquer @emmanuelle and anyone else we may have missed.
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