looking towards 2026

This coincides with another well-documented trend: rising narcissism, or at least rising narcissistic traits. The self has become the central moral reference point. Personal truth has replaced shared truth. Authenticity is prized over accountability. Subjective feeling over objective reality.

Within this worldview, relationships exist to validate... See more

2026 will be a struggle. The legacy institutions and tech platforms are consolidating, and this gives them more power. It’s reassuring to see how poorly they exercise that power—churning out reboots and retreads. (If they were smarter, the culture would suffer even more.) Their mistakes offer an opportunity for the outsider.

And the next new thing... See more

LLMs will raise the standards for our trend research. Machine and human sense-making operating in tandem, expanding what’s possible and helping us break free from our filter bubbles.

AI offers breadth - it aids me in cross-referencing unprecedented amounts of disparate information sources and millions of data points. With Sublime’s ‘Chat’ function,... See more

We can keep reaching for metaphors of the past - tools, assistants, minds, intelligences - and keep getting the politics they encode.

Or we can choose terms that encode the politics we want: human agency, collective benefit, individual sovereignty, honest assessment of what this is and isn’t.

Fork. Construct. Ansible. Daemon. Symbiont. Cognitive... See more

The words that stick are borrowed, not invented. They come from fields where they already do work - software, biology, science fiction, political economy - and get reapplied to open up new ways of thinking. The best borrowed words don’t just describe; they import entire frameworks of understanding, entire sets of questions, entire ways of thinking... See more

In AI, we have something genuinely new - a category of technology that doesn’t fit our existing frames - and we’re trying to describe it with words inherited from the past. Every term we reach for either undersells the thing or oversells it.

“Assistant” makes it sound like a slightly upgraded Clippy. “Tool” makes it sound like a hammer.... See more

The sting of sorrow and loss will whiplash us back into ourselves. Irregardless of how fast and omnipotent AI systems become, we will continue to wither away. It is here that we might learn catch the deepest insight that will help us to be responsive in our tech-filled future.

We cannot become more disembodied in an age of technological expansion. In fact, we must become more embodied. Here, we leverage all the modalities of movement that allow us to connect with the core of our being. We also harness our social and emotional wellbeing by becoming more astute at processing how we feel and how others feel.