Spotify Made a Rule About Faces
The AI Persona badge classifies identity and leaves the music alone
Analyzing Trends
Cultural intelligence from scenarioDNA founders Tim Stock and Marie Lena Tupot, using semiotics, futures research, and AI to analyze cultural change.
Latest episodes
Where Literacy Went
Reading did not stop. It moved, and it took your brand's job with it.
Mess Is the New Status Symbol
Why the culture of imperfection is more controlled than it looks
The Dating App Is Escaping the Phone
Singles are returning to bars, dinners, and pottery classes. The platforms are following them there.
Culture Is Not Your Audience
Terence McKenna warned people about culture. Companies inherited the warning and the blind spot with it.
The B Movie Was a Risk Model
Studios used to finance uncertainty. Now they increasingly buy it after someone else proves it.
The Standardized Self
As machines enter hiring, applicants learn to speak in the categories the system already knows.
The Last Private Room
The automobile was once a place to disappear. Connected vehicles are making that privacy harder to preserve.
The Process Around the Model
Why cultural research needs more than a better prompt
Wittgenstein’s Lion in the Model
How cultural research mistakes fluent representation for understanding
The Girlboss Is Dead Again
Female ambition has not disappeared. It is now rewarded when the work stays out of view.
The Limits of Brand Consistency
Fizzion can enforce Coca-Cola’s rules. It cannot model the associations forming outside them.
Designing for Intuition
What a synthesizer can teach us about intelligence work
When Archives Limit Cognition
Oral history reveals the blind spots not included in written archives.
The Year Data Centers Became Nuclear
The backlash is about what happens when the deployment of data centers outruns the institutions built to govern it.
After the Experience Economy
Recognition is starting to do the work spectacle used to do.
The System Behind the Pint
The Van Leeuwen ruling shows why the process behind an identity can matter as much as the finished package.
Maine’s Narrative Prior
How one surprising election hardened into a rule about the future.
The Scale Problem in Intelligence
Good Intelligence Must Reflect on Unit of Analysis
The Collapse of the Shared World
We Lost the Plot of Stewardship