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Earlier this year Sarah DaVanzo and I published the fifth annual 2022 META Trend analysis, a distillation of 40+ industry trend reports to ultimately identify the most frequently reported (i.e. noteworthy) trends for the year. Fourteen (meta) trends were identified to represent what the entire trends industry was collectively forecasting.During this time we also announced that for the first year, we’d quantify each of these META Trends to more precisely size and evaluate their cultural influence. It’s been a moment, but we finally crunched the data...To get here though, we first had to answer a series of very thorny questions: How do we define the criteria or “borders” of each META Trend, which sources of data should be leveraged to score each, should we study these trends’ influence within a U.S. or global data set, how do we even collect and analyze this data at scale, and how do we complete this exercise without adding any human interference, tipping the scales of objectivity?Once answering those could we then shine light on the larger questions at hand:* By leveraging cultural data, would AI rank the META Trends differently than how the humans did?* Left on its own, could AI identify similar or different (perhaps missing, overlooked) META Trends?* And conclusively, what are the best tasks and roles for humans versus AI in order to develop a successfully orchestrated cultural intelligence system?While asking ourselves all of these questions, we formed a partnership with the team at NWO.ai. The NWO.ai platform, which was amongst the finalists for LVMH's Innovation award, and an Industry Cloud partner of SAP, was formed in 2020 to identify consumer signals before they become exponential. Its AI algorithms learned over the last 2.5 years, and now boasts statistical trend prediction accuracy. They effectively quantify culture. With Sarah’s previous experience collaborating with them earlier this year, we determined their platform would be the perfect tool for our quantitative META Trend analysis.Experiment 01.2022 META Trend Scoring & Ranking_ Humans vs. AIAs for our first question: If AI was to collect cultural data against each of the META Trends and then score their importance to rank each of them, would the AI ranking match or produce different results from the original human rank?Answer: Different.As a reminder, our “human ranking” was completed by Sarah and myself manually counting the frequency of similar trend mentions throughout the 40+ industry reports. For example, sustainability trends received the most attention and real estate across the analyzed 2022 reports, and hence the “Eco- Everything” META Trend was born and ranked in the top spot.So, to more precisely size and rank these META Trends, NWO.ai’s AI calculated a series of keyword “portfolios” of each trend. These portfolios were essentially groupings of keywords and phrases (i.e. booleans) representing each of the 14 META Trends. Sarah and I authored these portfolios ourselves, but to curb any subjectivity, we only leveraged the language used from the original reports’ descriptions. To be clear, Sarah and I did not forecast these 14 META Trends – these were simply the most talked about concepts throughout the industry.NWO.ai then measured the cultural importance of each META Trend via its portfolio of keywords. Consumer interest was quantified using a variety of data sources spanning: social, news publications, search, investments, patents, scientific journals, e-commerce data, and even film scripts. Ultimately, an AI-derived “Impact Score” was calculated by aggregating: volume (quantity of these signals across sources), frequency (volume over day), reach (distribution of publications), etc. These scores were finally normalized on a 0-100 scale to fairly pit each of the META Trends against one another and create our official AI ranking.This AI ranking from the cultural data behind each of this year’s 14 META Trends revealed that the convenience economy (Now! Now! NOW!) is dominating culture by a magnitude of more than double that of some other META Trends. In other words, Now! Now! NOW! or the endless demands of innovation surrounding online shopping, has a cultural impact more than 3x the size of the META Trend xX~VIBES~Xx, which is our desire to tune in, drop out, and create spaces or purchase products to fulfill and focus.With these AI scores, we then (re-)ranked each META Trend from the human approach.This is where things got interesting.We had rank discrepancies.While the human ranking process (i.e. mention count) identified Eco- Everything as the most prevalent META Trend... according to Eco- Everything’s portfolio of AI scored keywords, it is in fact the 9th most culturally impactful META Trend globally. Meanwhile Now! Now! NOW! received the highest Impact Score from the AI. Originally, it was only identified as the 10th most important META Trend. But according to the AI it is in fact #1.Perhaps unfortunately we’re engaging in some wishful thinking here:According to millions of cultural data points scraped and analyzed, consumerism beats out industry trend reports’ hype of sustainable innovation.Experiment 02.2022 META Trend Scoring & Ranking_ U.S. vs. GlobalWhen the first differentiation of rankings came back, we were only using a U.S. data set, achieved by geo-fencing our analyzed cultural data to North America.We wondered if there would still be discrepancies in the ranking if we created a new, specific global rank by opening up our aperture, sources and data.Was there a difference?Answer: Not really.The META Trend rankings by the AI are by and large the same globally vs. U.S., statistically reinforcing America’s cultural influence. In other words, META Trends’ impact in the U.S. reflects similar impact globally.Therefore, this scoring suggests that U.S. trends can be proxies for global trends as they ultimately ripple outwards from the states.But more importantly, because we tested the scoring twice (for the U.S. and globally), it reveals that AI data-driven trend scoring and ranking is impressively consistent.So to zoom back out, the rank difference between the AI and human methods shows glaring variation. This should make us all think — perhaps even question — the subjectivity and accuracy of the industry’s reported trends. After all, we were scoring what the humans (the most experienced trend forecasters, no less) originally published.How valid are these concepts if millions of data points and AI couldn’t mirror our collectively proclaimed importance of them?Or conversely, maybe these were in fact the most worthy trends to score and we’re just splitting hairs between the most important of the important. Or again on the other hand, just perhaps, there are trends out there with higher Impact Scores just never identified by the experts...In any case... The AI scoring revealed that Now! Now! NOW!, Home Hubs and Radical Inclusivity are the top three META Trends of 2022, from both a U.S. and global perspective. This suggests that no matter one’s vertical, these three META Trends are both qualitatively (human-identified) and quantitatively (AI-scored) important.Whether you’re national or global, strategically double down in these spaces.Experiment 03.AI Deconstructs The Anatomy of Trends_ Identifying DriversIn exploring NWO.ai’s platform, we noticed the AI could do something the human process could never — it allowed us to dig deeper and uncover the keywords (i.e. signals, concepts, trends, etc.) beneath the META Trend’s surface. In other words, what is driving each META Trend forward? If you recall, because we originally created portfolios of keywords for each META Trend to score them, we had the opportunity to score each META Trend’s DNA strands to determine which specific elements are having the most influence. Knowing what is driving a trend by ranking its most important components (i.e. keywords) can help us envision how it will evolve over time.NWO.ai granted us the ability to plot each META Trend’s portfolio of keywords on a 2x2 matrix and rank them by their current growth, speed, tone and forecast. Essentially answering the question: which explicit keywords are growing or declining in volume, and is this change exponential or momentarily still?Conclusion:AI Trend Scoring, Ranking & Driver Identification Is Superior to HumansBy leveraging AI to score each of the META Trends, not only did we create a more accurate prioritization with a U.S. vs. global nuance — something which humans could never achieve — but the AI also allowed us to reach a granularity and inspect the anatomy of each META Trend. We learned which components are most significantly influencing its growth.But from these experiments, we also have a warning:An AI data-driven system can prioritize completely different trends than us humans.While AI can confidently unlock insight humans can only dream of, its results are so divergent from a human approach that healthy questioning is required: for the emerging software, but also primarily, the human’s “expert” input.The AI declared that what we humans thought was most important was not actually the case.This begged our next question:What does the AI find most important?Complete Series:Part I: Using AI To Quantify & Size META TrendsPart II: How To Spot Trends with AIPart III: A_Framework_To: Find Overlooked & De-bias Trends This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zine.kleinkleinklein.com/subscribe

I remember the first video I watched on YouTube. It was also the first I saved to my Favorites playlist.“Muffins” is an absurdist ad for a bakery, who’s long list of muffin flavors descended into bird, fire and blood. I was 13 and it was the funniest thing I ever watched. That was of course before I came across Charlie the Unicorn.YouTube became a home where I collected countless creations. I’d later share these discoveries with friends at sleepovers, watching their faces, awaiting cackles of approval. We’d then go off to look for more. It was entertainment, but also opportunity for pure connection.Over the years, my compilation of favorited videos grew. OkGo music videos, a Soul Train dance line, viral ad analyses, a Reggie Watts performance, song mashups, and random clips lived amongst even more nonsensical skits like The Landlord and Unbelievable Dinner. As SNL’s Digital Shorts hit YouTube, Laser Cats and pushed me well over 100 saved videos. I continued exploring and curating into high school and college, frequently spending nights traveling in its time machine and rewatching the best of the bests.The playlist became a library reflecting my passions, tastes and sense of humor of the time  —  an archive of nostalgia  —  but it wasn’t just a mirror. It was literally me in videos. A meticulously curated self-portrait. A personal collage of URLs formed over the years. From 2007 to March 2021.The morning YouTube emailed me that my entire playlist was deleted, 14 years of favoriting accumulated to over 2,000 videos.Now they were all gone.As I skimmed the notice during my morning email routine in bed, my heart sunk and fury burned. I tried to grasp their rationale.YouTube claimed my playlist  —  and I  —  violated their community guidelines, specifically their child safety policy. “Because it’s the first offense, your account isn’t affected.” Yet my playlist was permanently deleted. I was unsure how this was a “warning.” Nothing made sense.A video must have been flagged, and instead of taking down just that piece of content, my playlist of thousands of other acceptable videos got wiped along with it. But even that felt unlikely as I couldn’t imagine favoriting a video that would violate their guidelines, let alone child safety. I don’t have a traffic ticket to my name and here YouTube was convicting me of peddling content which “sexualized, endangered or inflicted emotional distress on minors.” That YouTube didn’t even specify what video in my playlist led to their decision made the email even colder.In my appeal, my only hope of salvation, I constructed and deconstructed my defense for close to an hour so it could fit within their character limit. No amount of space could fit my resentment and desperation. Could I trick the machine or convince the human to give me my playlist back?No. Sincerely, no-reply@youtube.comI’m still processing the loss.According to research, over 8,000 Facebook users die each day and by 2060 there will be hundreds of millions of dead users. By the end of the century: two billion. One day they’ll be more dead users than active ones on today’s most popular platforms. What does an online, global graveyard look like?My content grievance is difficult to describe. After all, it’s a new human condition. And while the loss could be trivialized to a list of videos, it feels so much more than that. The death of my playlist feels like losing progress, or something cherished, but also feels as if I lost a piece of myself.Because content is so intertwined with identity  —  we are what we tweet  —  we can’t solely focus on how we treat human death online. We also need to focus on content death online.We lie to ourselves when we believe personal creations online will never decay, fade, rust or go missing. They’d be secure in the elusive cloud. Indefinitely pristine. But not only are we wrong about their longevity, we never consider they could be murdered. Not by villainous criminals, but by the platforms that we trusted to host our personal artifacts.To make sense of my experience I spoke with Katie Gach, a Ph.D Candidate of Technology, Media & Society at the University of Colorado Boulder, expert on digital death and researcher with Facebook’s Memorialization team.“The lack of tangible, tactile reality that our data has lets us imagine it in these really spiritual, ethereal, eternal ways,” says Gach.“When we don’t see where these things are, we expect them to be everywhere all the time.”After all, only some are privy to the fact our data is housed in a very material server rack in a cold, humming room.It’s this disconnect between presumption and reality  —  a confusion between virtual and physical  —  that obfuscates our ability to see issues like digital death so clearly.We’re also wrong to believe that our information superhighways won’t crumble. Much like our bridges and roads offline, the foundational infrastructure to our online experiences also requires planning and maintenance. When sites and apps go down nowadays, frustration is met with shock. How could this ever happen?Dr. Elaine Kasket, author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: Illusions of Immortality in the Digital Age, warns us,“You cannot trust corporations to safeguard your data.”They won’t last forever. Data should always be under our control. Dr. Kasket’s invaluable advice runs counter to another widely-held false presumption: it’s the platform which owns or regulates our data. Not as long as we also maintain a copy...This blurred responsibility is disconcerting as it implies a tension between us and the platform. “We presume a level of control and agency in our technology, because we made it,” says Gach. “It’s for us.”So then how is it that we built and live with technology which doesn’t entirely work on our behalf? That’s the question I keep coming back to when thinking about my deleted playlist. While I commend YouTube’s intent to clean up its platform, another fellow human actively designed the system  —  or rather overlooked a part of that system  —  which inflicted my pain. Substitute “inflict pain” for “create echo chambers”, “spread misinformation”, “catalyze violence” or “addict via dopamine” and we get all the fuel for today’s techlash. How could we do this to ourselves?My loss feels traumatic for multiple reasons. The sudden and unexpectedness of the deletion didn’t allow for any preparation. The deletion hurt, but it felt more barbaric at the hands of a friend, a platform I revered and devoted hours to for over a decade. My loyalty and goodwill wasn’t considered. Despite my smiling avatar, I was a faceless violator. This facelessness also went the other way. Because YouTube is a faceless hundred-billion dollar corporation, there is no one person to blame. For this reason, it’s easy to understand why Wojcicki, YouTube’s former CEO was so often a target  —  she was the only one that could be named and held accountable no matter the dilemma. Further, there’s no ritual to memorialize this type of loss. It’s difficult to wake up to an automated email and just carry on. And lastly, I have no closure. I crave just one employee responsible for this design or decision to personally voice understanding. Mourning without empathy or recognition is achingly isolating.I don’t want offenders spoiling the platform I loved, but I also don’t want to be wrongly labeled an offender in an unwieldy effort to clean up a mess YouTube created itself. More than anything else, I don’t want anyone else to experience what I did.While we optimistically wait for YouTube to insert more “human” into their process, or wait for the systems to improve from their unbearable and nearly unforgivable state, for now, the burden seemingly falls on us  —  the user.“Doing things at a community level is the intervention that I have come to,” shares Gach.“Where you make sure that people have their stuff backed up and have their stuff preserved. If your friend is making something that’s meaningful to you, save it for them.”As we depend upon today’s platforms, we need to be aware of the possibility of loss and willing to perform the maintenance. Unlike offline death, this loss is preventable.Gach continues,“I want people to be more prepared about what their data can be beyond themselves. It also gives people permission to say, ‘Hey, the attachment I feel to this data, isn’t stupid.’ It makes sense that you feel attached to this thing that you created, or this person who made this thing.”When it comes to legacy, I won’t be able to pass down or let my YouTube playlist represent me after I pass. But at least I’ll have this piece to memorialize its importance in my life. And it will be printed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zine.kleinkleinklein.com/subscribe