looking towards 2026

trends to look out for

Agalia Tan

Lore Oxford • The egostack

luxury is primarily consumed through screens.

Luxury’s Overexposure Is Biting

luxury consumed through screens, products consumed as image-first

the driver towards more analogue culture

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

Research as a form of pattern disruption

They also get to join the order of skilled workers pushing back against the disposability of modern consumer culture. Trying to get anything serviced these days can bring on feelings of loss and frustration—or, worse, resignation. Just buy new shoes, or a new toaster, or a new car. At times it can feel like we’re all riding an absurd carousel,... See more

Rolex Opened a College—and It’s as Selective as Harvard

rejection of disposability > grandma hobbies

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

Zoe Scaman • The Naming of Things

Part of why people are unsure of where to walk is that AI is severing the deepest identity loop in the Western world: who you are equals what you do for money.

The Protestant work ethic was a load-bearing wall for the Western psyche. We are dismantling it without a blueprint for what comes next.

For centuries, the equation was simple. You work. You... See more

Tom White • Rick Rubin Is the Future of Work

Philosopher Martin Buber speaks of two types of relationships with the world around us. There is ‘I and Thou’, where we encounter other beings as connected, interwoven and relational to our own lives. Then there’s ‘I and It’, where beings are othered as objects, detached from ourselves and something to be used for our own ends. The voyeuristic... See more

Noah Lipschitz • Late-stage Voyeurism

this speaks so well to the numbness we feel, and passivity that prediction markets make us feel in relation to events. It becomes a gamble, something made separate from human and feelings

why no one thinks anymore: how to become a person

instagram.com

where’s emotion?

When survival and gain become the only legible orientations, the common world - as Arendt calls it - goes untended.