Current and Future Trends I'm Calling

Regarding Personhood, AI, Tech Backlash, Social Media, Physical and Tangible Media

I’ve been a trend caller for years. It has become deliberate but mostly always unconscious in the way I come to understand and see them. Back when I worked in hospitality and was responsible for designing event posters and collateral, I would often create something months in advance that later appeared in mainstream campaigns. Six to twelve months after designing a visual system my boss would hand me marketing from another company or a fashion house, or another venue, and ask how I had anticipated the look. The honest answer was that I didn’t really know exactly how.

What I do know is this: I am chronically online, but I approach it less as endless doom scroll and more as constant observation. There is a real difference between mindlessly consuming content and absorbing it, between passively glancing and actively noticing. I have a strong visual memory (sometimes photographic), which allows me to take in visual culture, remix it internally, and often land ahead of the cycle. It’s more than seeing, it’s observing and cataloguing mentally. And of course saving, my Pinterest is huge, my instagram saves are all in folders and I have so, many, screenshots.

I remember I posted the “in and out” idea on TikTok six months before it exploded. I didn’t create the trend or claim ownership, but it was striking to see an idea I had casually played with become mainstream- a silly idea that I thought was funny at the time. That pattern of early noticing has repeated enough times that this year, I’ve started publishing more of these calls directly on Instagram rather than hiding them in disappearing stories.

One that has landed especially well: the resurgence of zines and physical media. Late last year, I predicted that physical formats would come back strongly. Zines, zine fairs, and workshops have surged in popularity, validating that forecast - especially in Brisbane. This is part of a larger movement: a return to craft, tangible experiences, and physical culture.

Even though my wheelhouse is visual culture, that is not siloed; visual culture is part of larger societal culture too, and I noticed the changes and shifts on a broader spectrum as well, so here are some additional trend calls that I predict. These trends will not happen immediately, some will be extremely gradual and some of these shifts are already visible in early stages. But the seed of today is the tree of tomorrow, and I can see them being sown.

Personal Autonomy as a Cultural Shift

I’ve been noticing cultural shifts at the level of personhood. A growing trend is the movement toward autonomy and self-trust. Many people are beginning to listen more closely to their intuition, learning to identify their own inner voice rather than outsourcing every decision to authority figures, algorithms, or social consensus.

This isn’t new, but the pace is accelerating. For decades, the dominant narrative has been that expertise and authority sit outside of the individual. While expertise remains valuable, the trend I see forming is people moving away from victimhood or diagnosis-framed identities, toward agency. The reframing is subtle but important: instead of being “at the mercy” of circumstances, more individuals are asking how to work with them, adapt, or transform them.

I can absolutely see spirituality becoming more pronounced, as people start viewing themselves as whole and not fragmented - if the view that the body and mind become more integrated in a broader sense, then holistic health and spiritual guidance will gain a larger reach. At this point, there is a clearer delineation between “science” and “spirituality” when in a lot of ways, they’re saying the same things simply with different language.

Large Organisations like Educational Facilities

With technology moving at such an increasingly rapid pace then educational facilities that are large and slow (such as universities) will have little choice but to quicken their pace to match technological advancements, or risk becoming obsolete. Due to their size, agility becomes their achilles heel, coupled with a lack of enthusiasm about speaking directly to industry to update content and close the gap between formal education and the real world, both graduates and industry will suffer. Because of this, I see smaller colleges, learning institutions, core skills schools, mentoring / mentorships and apprenticeships thriving in smaller, more localised environments where the gap between what is and what will be will narrow.

Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurial Journalism, Self Publishing and the Rise of the Individual

Entrepreneurship has been glamourised heavily in the past decade, “grindset” “hustle culture” and celebritised identities have shaped business ownership heavily to being something more appealing than the truth of it really is. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone - right now - but the tenets and mindsets that enable an anti-fragile personality, grit, resilience and the ability to fail without attaching immense shame to the outcome will become incredibly useful, and they can be cultivated.

As AI slop rages through all online platforms, authenticity, personality and genuine storytelling will become even more valued. The rise of self publishing, creating personal platforms within platforms like here on Substack, newsletters attached to a website domain, subscription based services like patreon will become even more popular as consumers and clients want to feel actually connected to creators’ outputs. Persistent and meaningless AI slop and social media’s insistent advertising interrupting creator feeds with drive consumers away from screens slowly but eventually.

AI, Tech Backlash, and Tangibility

The rise of the current version of AI has created resistance, particularly from artists and independent creators. There are valid ethical critiques (especially of visual scraping) but there is also a gap between perception and reality. People who don’t use AI often assume it is more powerful than it actually is, while those who do use it tend to understand its limitations.

AI as a revolutionary movement has begun and will not go away, integration is key - with ethical and legal frameworks to fix the current issues. Having said that, if more work across the internet is produced by AI, it means newer models are increasingly trained on synthetic data, effectively scraping and recycling their own outputs, which leads to homogenised and lower-quality results.

The backlash against technology is not only about AI, however. Social media platforms have become increasingly saturated with advertising and becoming a creative wasteland; blogger, journalist, and science fiction author Cory Doctorow has termed this “enshittification.” As platforms become less enjoyable, people will begin to spend more time offline. This creates more space, time and energy for the revival / return of physical media and for in-person events, panels, conferences, talk shops and workshops.

Nostalgia and Compressed Trend Cycles

We are currently in a nostalgic 1990s revival, soon to be followed by cycles of the 1980s and early 2010s. Cultural aesthetics used to be defined within entire decades, but the compression of trend cycles now makes it difficult to identify much of anything substantial anymore. What was even the “look” of the 2020s? Instead of long, rich arcs, cultural memory risks collapsing into memes.

This accelerated cycle may be another reason people are turning back to physicality: it offers a way of physical permanence in a culture of constant flux.

A Return to Local

Finally, I see signs of a return to smaller, localised collectives. In Brisbane, for example, the music scene has struggled due to last-minute ticket buying attitudes and the high costs of touring amongst other factors. Larger acts increasingly bypass the city in favour of Melbourne or Sydney. In response, the future may hold stronger emphasis on smaller groups, local initiatives, and grassroots collectives, mirroring the pre-social media era when people simply printed flyers, handed them out, and hoped strangers would show up to shows. This happens to a degree already, but it would not be surprising in the least to me to see whole collectives start to occur without any online presence at all; IYKYK.

Closing Thoughts

These are, of course, evolving and intersecting themes rather than isolated movements. They are observations based on patterns I’ve noticed across design, technology, and culture. From autonomy and self-trust, to the return of physical media, to the backlash against algorithmic enshittification, these movements suggest a desire for permanence, connection, and human-scale interaction in a rapidly shifting world. If you’d like to discuss any of the above please leave a comment!