THE END OF TRENDS
Emily's talk at FWB FEST 2025
Earlier this month Emily gave a talk at FWB FEST 2025, titled End of Trends. You can watch the video above or read the edited transcript below. FEST was again awesome – thanks for the invite FWB!
Hi everyone. Thank you so much for being here. Today I’m going to talk about a vexed topic that’s close to my heart: trend forecasting, and specifically trend forecasting after the end of trends.’m one of the founders of Nemesis, which helps ambitious founders and organizations design for cultural complexity.
Sometimes that complexity involves a rapidly approaching, uncertain future – what we often call trend forecasting. I’ve been a “trend forecaster” for a long time now, and it has become an increasingly complicated role to perform. Trends have become more popular yet less legible. It almost feels like meaning itself is being drained from the concept of a trend.
Our first articulation of “the end of trends” came from a report we wrote five years ago using GPT-3 – which, at this point, feels quaint. It had just been released, and we could only access it through a friend with special credentials.
We interviewed and surveyed many people about their changing experience of time during COVID. Everyone seemed to be saying that time felt slowed down, sped up, or broken apart. We fed these responses into GPT-3, using it as a kind of demonic autocomplete. The AI promptly renamed our organization “DOOM!!” – and the report became The DOOM Report.
One of the machine’s predictions was:
“The fractal property of trends and prediction implies a meta-fractal perspective that made a few respondents uncomfortable. We may be witnessing the end of trends in general. Even what appears to be a new trend or paradigm may actually be a higher-order statistical cluster within a collapsing paradigm.”
That prediction turned out to be prescient. I’ll return to the DOOM Report later – but first, I want to go further back in time.
In Canto 20 of Dante’s Inferno, Dante and Virgil visit the circle of hell reserved for astrologers and soothsayers. Their punishment for trying to see too far ahead in life is that their heads are twisted backward. Their hair runs down their fronts. They stumble forward while always looking behind them.
Dante breaks the fourth wall here: he says it’s wrong to pity anyone in hell, but he can’t help pitying the soothsayers. I think many of us are in a similar predicament now – trying to move forward while constantly looking backward.
While preparing for this talk, I revisited one of my earliest and most influential inputs as a trend forecaster: Justin Pickard’s Gonzo Futurist Manifesto, a PDF circulated online in 2012.
It argued that you could face an uncertain, volatile, filter-bubbled world by cultivating sensitivity to weak signals and unexpected links. The manifesto drew inspiration from Cayce Pollard, the protagonist of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition – a “cool hunter” who knows, without knowing why, whether something will succeed commercially.
The literary theorist Lauren Berlant called Cayce Pollard, an empress of the amygdala, because she's governed by her fear. She’s incredibly sought after and effective; a cool hunter who knows without knowing why, whether something will work or not in a commercial setting.
Pollard’s intuition is linked to her traumatic allergy to brands and logos. Her biggest trigger is the Michelin Man.
This is an early version of the character, inspired by a stack of tires the Michelin brothers saw at the 1894 Great Exhibition in Lyon. They imagined the tires as a kind of mummy-like figure, which became Bibendum, whose slogan was “Now is the time to drink.” The character linked Michelin tires not just to driving, but to the emerging culture of automotive leisure: eating, drinking, and traveling by car.
So in this spooky pile of tires we find a whole chain of associations — the car to the tire, the tire to the body, the body to leisure, commerce, and the future. It makes sense that Cayce would be traumatized by him: he’s frightening in appearance, but also frightening in how he embodies the transformation of one form of commerce into another.
Something especially interesting about Pattern Recognition is that it’s a sci-fi novel without a visible piece of “novum” technology. The novum is Cayce’s brain itself. Her ability to intuit the wisdom of crowds “better than random” is the futuristic element.
This idea — that the human mind could be trained to process more-than-human amounts of cultural information while still being human — was incredibly inspiring to me when I was working on K-Hole, the trend forecasting collective I co-founded around 2010.
The Gonzo Futurist Manifesto mapped this way of thinking onto the OODA loop — Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It suggested that if you trusted your gut, tuned in to pre-conscious signals, and combined new information with lived experience, you could become a kind of human novum.
But what’s changed today is that the Observe stage itself has become compromised. Our media environment is so contaminated and overloaded that what you personally see and connect matters less and less.
The manifesto encouraged trusting your gut – the “unknown unknowns” – and blending new information with lived experience. I still value that. But “unexpected synergies” are no longer rare; they’re constant. That shift forces us to rethink trend forecasting in an age after trends.
Why Do We Care About Trends?
Let’s step back and ask: why do people care about trends at all?
To plan investments of time, money, energy, or attention.
To front-run other people — to be early.
To feel part of the cultural moment — or to consciously reject it.
The dictionary definition of a trend combines all these senses: a tendency, a direction, a fad.
Professional trend forecasters often define it as “the direction or vector along which forces of change travel.” Martin Raymond of The Future Laboratory — who literally delivered trend reports in a lab coat — put it this way. Indeed, trend forecasting has always been somewhat camp, because there is something performative, almost unbelievable, about claiming to know the future.
And knowing the future, as Dante reminds us, might land you in hell with your head on backwards.
Modern trend forecasting has long operated in the shadow of Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations model (1962). This is the model that gave us the terms “early adopter” and “crossing the chasm.”
The backstory is that Rogers grew up on a farm in Iowa. His father embraced mechanical innovations but resisted planting new genetically engineered corn — and his crops failed. Rogers became fascinated with how and why people adopt innovations.
For decades, trend forecasters treated “early adopters” as almost spiritual carriers of early-ness. If you found them in one domain, they would lead you to the next.
But that correlation is breaking down. Today you can be early to one thing and hopelessly late to another, with no consistency.
The word trend comes from a root meaning “to roll, turn, or revolve” – implying cycles. We can think of trends as:
VECTOR
CURVE
LOOP
CYCLE
KNOT
Today, many of us are caught in the knot – our observation powers hindered by corrupted, overloaded information streams, and now facing AI systems that do pattern recognition faster and more opaquely than we can.
In the past, incongruous things often signaled importance. Now, incongruity is everywhere. Anomalous change is constant.
Trends have become temporary inefficiencies – spikes in value bound for correction. “Being early” is giving way to catching people off-sides or betting on a return to the mean.
Lately, I’ve been researching remote viewing, a practice developed by Ingo Swann for U.S. military intelligence, where practitioners gather information about inaccessible targets using only their minds.
I’m not suggesting we remote-view Saddam Hussein for cultural analysis, but I am interested in how we might expand consciousness beyond the limits of individual observation.
Back to the DOOM Report. GPT-3 surfaced the idea of Quantum Koinonia, from the Greek word for fellowship or shared participation. The concept: small groups whose minds are bound together at a quantum or collective level.
It also imagined distributed autonomous minds – connected devices and people forming a global intelligence. Both ideas now feel less like sci-fi and more like near-term realities.
I often think of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, in which a group of “Foretellers” pool consciousness to answer questions they could not access individually. The weaver in the group maintains tension in the pattern until it breaks, revealing the answer.
And I think of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s caution:
“You must not talk about the future. The future is a con. The tarot is a language that talks about the present. If you use it to see the future, you become a charlatan. … Everything is linked, but nothing is a matter of probability.”
In an age surrounded by probability machines, this perspective is grounding. So I leave you with this: Will you become a novum – a machine-like thinker, a better-than-chance oracle in a human body? Or will you focus on enriching the present, making it better in the moment?
Thanks!