A week into 2026, and I’m still betting on things getting smaller, more intentional and weirder. Monoculture declined at hyperspeed over the past decade, placing us at this unique moment of culture against a background of technological, geopolitical and intergenerational shifts. In layperson’s terms, shit’s weird and we all know it.

I predict continued leaning into the weird — micro-cultures extending tendrils deeper into IRL, ongoing disenchantment and defection from the cult of Big Tech, greater emphasis on curation and individualism, and the omnipresence of monetization guiding projects into businesses or decidedly un-capitalist practices. We’ll see more forking (Hi, polzarization! You’ve really made yourself at home since 2020!) and more fragmentation as people peel off in various directions in terms of tastes, habits and spending. Yet it’s not doom and gloom! The heat, pressure and fractures of systems crack to reveal new material, like tectonic plates pushing at faults or magma inevitability bubbling through the dried and trodden ground.

We’re in a year of invention in all the ways. As a perpetual optimist, I see the potential of this expansiveness — it’s simply more surface area to build better outcomes as a society and individuals.

Data, inspo and references

Creating a full syllabus of resources that lead me to this predictions (convictions?) is a fool’s errand — I’m chronically online and in at least 4 deep rabbit holes at any point in time. But here’s a shortlist of things I read, studied, listened to and sat with that lodged in my brain like informational chewing gum that flavored my list of Ins & Outs:

1. Pinterest Predicts 2026

2. Connection Grift

3. Kel Rakowski’s Everything I Learned in 2025

4. The Last Days of Mass Social Media

5. YouTube Global Culture & Trends Report

6. Ecosystem, Not Empire

7. How We Smuggle Big Questions Into Small Spaces

8. Let it Burn: Toasting Marshmallows Over Adland

9. What Do You Measure When the Metrics Don’t Matter

10. Make Culture Weird Again

11. Death of a Knowledge System

12. Attention As Currency

13. Severance x the Kafkaesque