Needless to say, this is like a gamified spin on a strategist’s work. Tracing back consumer choices to the person that made them.

A room is an amazing representation of someone’s most intimate, intuitive choices — a material psychogram.

It’s usually not that difficult to spot an early-20s room. They barely have to be representative and can be a brutally honest display about what matters to the person living there. They’re spaces to exist, dream, and build an identity before crushing responsibilities come rushing in.

One such room inspected on the show was a dorm room in Halle an der Saale. Not Berlin. Halle. A midsize student town an hour’s train ride away from Berlin.

A microwave, a stack of magazines neatly collected on a shelf that came with the room. Someone trying to assert a personality even though still living out of quite spartan, almost monastic quarters. But on the nightstand, a Comme des Garçons Man Perfume and Aesop cream. Next to Dune by Frank Herbert and a little yellow Suhrkamp Classic and a chunky white candle in a terracotta pot.

The signature rounded CDG flacon stands out against the plywood backdrop — a niche perfume retailing around 130€. Maybe a Christmas present, maybe something that took this student months to save up for. It’s a considered, non-obvious choice, a status symbol emanating taste, sophistication and intellectual seasoning. We don’t know if the person actually possesses all these attributes — but we know they want to be seen as such.

A 2023 Business Insider study found that over 70% of Gen Zers regularly buy dupes. The generation with the lowest spending power cares deeply about signaling their taste yet they have to be discerning about where they spend.

We already knew they love vintage. But they also land on dupes, which still functions as a taste indicator: you have to know the real thing before you can find the right copy. The dupe logic breaks down at fragrance.

The student in Halle is obviously giving performative male — a trope that emerged post-Covid of cis male individuals starting to perform taste and softness for the female gaze, in times when sheer dominance and having 1.5 showers a week isn’t really magically securing you a girlfriend anymore. Young men have to try a little harder. (Shocking.)

But apart from performing outwardly, a fragrance you wear all day also communicates to yourself. Since you will likely smell it the most, it is only fair to consider yourself the primary audience. You are creating an unconscious feedback loop mirroring back the person you want to be until you become it.

The word aura in common use is essentially the biggest compliment you can give — indicating someone has an amazing personality, something that only shows once you intimately know them. The term was most famously coined by Walter Benjamin like 100 years ago, when he wrote about the “aura” of an artwork — that quality of presence that evaporates the moment you reproduce it. A photograph of a painting is not the painting. The mechanical copy is always missing something, and that something is precisely what made the original worth copying.

After the monogram mania of the 2010s, logos seem almost tacky. Silhouettes, materials, colorways can be reproduced and reinterpreted without going right to the source.

There is of course a vastly growing market of fragrance dupes — but the CDG flacon on the nightstand tells a different story. You can make yourself smell nice to the outside with a dupe, but you will be telling yourself a different story. You won’t be validating yourself in quite the same way.

Fragrance is aura as product. Perfumes interact with the wearer’s individual skin chemistry — pH, oils, body temperature — which is why the same fragrance can smell quite differently depending on who is wearing it. Some niche perfumes consciously work on exactly that principle. What you are buying becomes an irreproducible experience. Your own aura.

Another indicator that niche fragrance is an extremely resilient category: it’s paying the rent.

Walk through Berlin Mitte. The density of niche fragrance retail is striking — within just a few hundred meters there’s Diptyque, Byredo, Le Labo, Aesop, plus several multi-brand stores within walking distance, occupying some of the most expensive real estate in the city.

None of them is surviving on viral moments, they don’t have huge marketing campaigns. The IRL experience is part of the marketing — trying something on your skin before making a considered purchase.

The mindfulness of it all makes those stores more independent of the algorithm dependency brands are facing these days, because the product itself is removed from the visual language that feeds run on. And that in itself is a status symbol — operating in an entirely different sensory register. One that is structurally harder to commodify.

Our olfactory sense is extremely powerful at creating emotions. Smell is the only sense with a direct pathway to the amygdala and hippocampus, where our emotions and memory sit — bypassing the areas that process cognitive thought. research

Proust described this before the research was out. You don’t have to know about neuroscience to get it. In the early 1900s he wrote about how small cakes dipped in tea catapulted him back into the emotional realm of his childhood. Time traveling simply on smell. That’s what fragrance does.

So yeah. There is some neuroscientific data behind the chokehold that smells have on us — but at the same time they retain a little mystery. They live outside the feed and in our deepest subconscious, and so you have to meet them where they are. They encounter us in physical stores or through people that pass us by on the street, leaving us wondering what the hell they are wearing. No wonder the niche fragrance market makes even early 20s students drop 130€ on a bottle — they want to emit that powerful aura of sophisticated mystery. Not something that the eye immediately clocks and copies.

Tech Narratives put back in their place
Art leaking out of the white cube Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV‘s first encyclical on AI (May 2026), warns against AI in warfare and a future shaped solely by “the invisible hand of the market.“ What matters isn‘t whether it changes policy. But who‘s talking. The loudest spiritual language around AI has come from the people building it. The pope is putting humanity back at the center, against the people who‘ve been trying to replace it.

Art leaking out of the white cube
This year, Venice Biennale, Milan Design Week, and Art Basel surfaced in everyday feeds more than they have in recent memory. Florentina Holzinger‘s work and the German Pavilion by Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu leaked across platforms normally not associated with contemporary art. So did Björk‘s DJ set and the surrounding protests against art-washing a genocide. Koyo Kouoh‘s curatorial premise for the Biennale framed it directly. In Minor Keys was a deliberate move away from speed and spectacle.

A desire for presence

There are already plenty of people finding names for this „Friction-maxxing” being a popular one in circulation. Deliberately choosing the harder, slower, less convenient option, on principle. This idea has already made it from substack essays to a marketing buzzword. The signals are scattered, but they rhyme.

• Hyper local fashion icons
  The new TikTok fashion icons everyone is suddenly obsessed with aren‘t coming out of the usual western capitals but out of Lagos (Rachel Ojuromi) and Mumbai (Diya Joukani) Their confidence and specificity is deeply felt against the backdrop of their hyper local environments. No retouching, no moodboard, just personal aura.
  

• The return of custom websites
  Neal Agarwal created Wiki Spy: an endless visual collage of objects cut from Wikipedia, searchable by color or concept. Essentially as a digital wunderkammer: a cabinet of curiosities built from the shared archive of human knowledge. A great example of many code savvy creatives building their own websites and leaving algorithmically optimized platforms.
  

• Care as resistance in fashion
  The quality of physical presence is making a return to the luxury space. Items that carry the evidence of time have become desirable again. Mended clothing has become a signal of care rather than poverty. The Amsterdam vintage showroom nhogirl, pairs hand-mended pieces with Hermès and Balenciaga, and built a following on exactly this instinct.
  

  

• Post optimized beauty
  Pamela Anderson, Sandra Hüller, Gillian Anderson. A different kind of woman is being looked at with real desire, not despite their age but because of their aura, intellect and experience shown on their faces.
  

• Radical thinking is hot again
  Vogue Adria put 76-year-old philosopher Slavoj Žižek on its cover, framed around a single question: is real change still possible, and only through collective action.
  

Embrace tradition reject modernity
There‘s a real array of memes rejecting digital performance logic and idealizing a much more traditional life. Italian nonnas, Balkan uncles, Greek yiayias represent a way of life, that‘s much more grounded within a shared rhythm, established rituals and belonging. The universality of this urge is illustrated by influencer Iris Law‘s recent trip to Japan to pick sencha tea. It signals a desire for belonging earned through time and attention.

The signals are not coordinated but they point in the same direction. People are reaching for the same thing: presence over polish, specificity over optimization, time, place and texture over the smooth, ageless, placeless surface that algorithmic culture has been selling for the past decade.

Strategic directives

What follows is not a list of campaign ideas. It’s a set of stances for creative directors, brand leads, and cultural institutions who actually have the budget and the platform to change how this plays out. We are able to create the change we want to see.

1. Inspire - don’t copy

Diagnosis:
The brand logic of the last two decades has been built on the premise to understand your audience and meet them where they are. The result is a culture full of mirrors. Brands have become extraordinarily skilled at absorbing the codes of their communities and reflecting them back with high production value.

Actionable shift:
A point of view, held with full conviction, creates its own audience. A mirror never does.

Reference point:
Paloma Wool has built a brand on female-centric, experimental creativity: AW25 shot in the founder‘s own house, inspired by the mess of motherhood; a collab with Fumiko Imano; stuffed animals in handbags; and a store opening film written and starred in by vetriloquist Sophie Becker.

2. Thinking is a brand value

Diagnosis:
The most underleveraged resource in any organization is genuine intellectual curiosity. Not thought leadership. Not content strategy. Actual thinking — the kind that doesn’t know where it’s going yet.

Actionable shift:
Pick one format. Start small. Resist the urge to immediately turn it into marketing collateral. The value is in the thinking itself, not in what can be extracted from it afterward.

Reference:
Fondazione Prada is a permanent institution funded by a fashion brand with zero direct product connection. Their 2026 program runs a multidisciplinary neuroscience project promoting dialogue between international scholars, alongside Mona Hatoum and Arthur Jafa. Not creating a cultural partnership, but infrastructure for thinking.

3. Patronage as infrastructure

Diagnosis:
Art collecting and institutional partnerships exist, but they‘ve largely been absorbed into brand-adjacency logic. Sponsored residencies to produce content, a collection that functions as a asset. This is extraction disguised as patronage.

Actionable shift:
Before funding anything cultural, ask whether the money is going toward an object that appreciates in value, or toward a space that lets someone keep working. Only one of those is patronage.

Formats:
Invest in artistic production rather than artistic products. Studio spaces and residency programs are ways to enable art production instead of just reaping its fruits. To build spaces, not collections.

4. Take a stance — or become irrelevant

Diagnosis:
The era of pink-washing, green-washing, and seasonal allyship is over. The problems young people are carrying now are too large to be addressed by a rainbow logo for one month a year. Authoritarian drift, the climate, the erosion of basic rights — in times of radical injustice neutrality becomes suspicious.

Actionable shift:
People want to know, whether an institution is one of the good guys or one of the bad ones — not through a statement, but through action.

Reference:
The Ordinary created Markup Marché, a fake supermarket that sold fruit for insane prices, like a “100% Glow-Enhancing Vitality orb“/avocado for $305, exposing how inflated marketing language justifies inflated prices

The Middle Ages didn‘t last forever, and the Renaissance didn‘t arrive overnight

They arrived with a slow accumulation of signals that something was changing.

What we materially create has an impact on our collective beliefs, the stories we tell and who gets to tell them.

Everything’s medEVIL: The world has a trillionaire now, a defense-tech CEO talks publicly about the Antichrist, a small room of neo-feudal overlords owns the digital infrastructure the rest of us need to plow our fields and earn our silver shillings on.

The authority of scientific institutions and the written word has been replaced by digital market-square shouters. And insanely enough, people choose to follow the guy with the biggest bank account, the squarest jaw and the widest biceps.

Some of this seems quite removed from logic and maybe that‘s exactly the point. Some of it has to do with the disappointment in so-called global soft powers, with liberal democracy, and cultural shifts significant chunks of society just would not attune to. A dog-eat-dog world is maybe actually easier to understand than the sophisticated mechanisms humans have built to maintain complex power structures.

Whatever this is, it seems far from over: strongman politics, land-grab colonialism, cultural decay, narrative crisis, economic extremes. The question is: what comes after this? Do we even have an impact on the outcome, or are we cooked?

We are certainly not at a point of relief. But there are cluster-forming signals worth noting. We first want to look at the structural framework of our current cultural and economic production, give an idea of what a Re-Renaissance might actually require, and look at signals already pointing toward an increased thirst for something different. Based on this analysis we want to derive concrete and actionable strategies on how creative producers, decision makers, and asset managers can re-establish a reality of cultural production instead of cultural extraction.

The Beauty and the Capital

The way culture operates currently is shaped by the material conditions of life and production.

The system as is isn’t very good at improving at quality of life for the many. The money is still there but it keeps piling up in the one place.

The product of the banking sector, as economist Michael Hudson argues, is essentially the creation of debt itself. 92% of US corporate profits are now spent on dividends to shareholders or stock buybacks intended to inflate share price. Only eight percent goes toward actually expanding the means of production. The pandemic only accelerated the pattern. By 2025, the top 1% of Americans owned nearly half of the entire stock market and the concentration keeps climbing. Globally it’s starker still: at the moment this report is written, the world’s twelve richest individuals now hold a combined $2.6 trillion, more than the poorest half of humanity (roughly four billion people).

June 2026, this economy gave birth to its first trillionaire: a man who craves praise from online gaming communities, uses one of his children as a living prop on public occasions, and has publicly declared another dead for transitioning. A man whose fortune was built largely on government contracts and subsidies, who took a literal chainsaw to funding for the most vulnerable, sucked up the sensitive data of millions of citizens, and dismantled a system of checks and balances with the focused energy of a hormonal teenager. A guy that was never elected by anyone. Maybe not even the worst of its kind but a good representation of where the priorities of the most powerful elites lie these days.

The ultra-wealthy have developed their own relationship to culture, and it looks like one of extraction.

Zuckerberg is front row at Prada, Palantir dropping a hypebeast style chore jacket as merch, Meta‘s launching surveillance hardware

disguised as a fashion accessory with Kylie Jenner, Polymarket fronting Rick Rubin as face of their world cup ad, Bezos rubbing shoulders with Anna Wintour and hosting the Met Gala.

Wealth buying cultural legitimacy is nothing new, but it seems novel how little of value is being produced in return.

The Medici understood something different. Cosimo and his heirs were merchant bankers, new money, politically precarious in a republic that could in theory turn on them. Naked wealth wasn‘t enough. They needed something that converted money into authority, because they understood accumulation alone leaves you exposed to scrutiny.

Patronage was that means to an end for them. So they funded libraries, hospitals, art and public building. The transaction left behind: something others could walk into, be moved by and return to (until this day).

The Renaissance produced the rise of the individually named artist, no longer an anonymous craftsman but a recognized genius whose name itself carried value. It produced a new liberal arts curriculum that gave Europe its vocabulary for “republicanism”, “liberty” and “reason of state”, a dictionary of responsibility still in use today, even if the regimes using it didn‘t always practice what they preached.

That’s the crucial difference:The Medici needed cultural legitimacy because raw economic power, on its own, was not yet considered a sufficient basis for rule. That obligation seems to have disappeared.

Today’s wealth no longer feels it needs to justify itself through what it leaves behind. It justifies itself through the number on the screen and just uses culture to feel less pathetic.

The Cost of Extraction

After a small growth dip in recent years, 2025 has marked a combeback for the auction market. This increase was driven almost entirely by a wave of record prices at the very top of the market, amounting to combined public and private sales of $24.8 billion.
Private sales, by contrast actually declined by 5%. So the volume of transactions actually didn’t change much. The market didn’t get busier. It got more concentrated.
(Art Basel & UBS Global Art Market Report 2026)

Three recent sales in particular tell this story of what kind of transactions move the market:

1. Jackson Pollock’s Number 7A, 1948 (unseen publicly since 1977) sold for $181,185,000, nearly tripling the artist’s previous auction record and becoming the fourth most expensive artwork ever.

2. Mark Rothko’s No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) fetched $98,385,000

3. Constantin Brâncuși’s Danaïde went for $107,585,000.

(All three sold at Christie’s New York, 2026)

Dead artists have been doing very well this year
In periods of uncertainty, capital becomes nostalgic. Mining the cultural achievements of the past is to seek refuge in established value.

This same sentiment is felt elsewhere too:

Nine of the ten highest-grossing films at the US box office in 2025 were sequels, remakes, or extensions of existing franchises.

This same sentiment is felt elsewhere too. Nine of the ten highest-grossing films at the US box office in 2025 were sequels, remakes, or extensions of existing franchises.

Capital isn’t funding emerging artists and new ideas anymore - yet it is willing to spend unprecedented sums on names that have already secured their place in history. Established brands that guarantee shareholder returns.

On the production of contemporary artists

Another relevant angle on the art market today is who gets to produce it.
A February 2026 study by Karol Jan Borowiecki, an economist at the University of Southern Denmark, used US census data going back to 1850 to compare the socioeconomic backgrounds of people who identify as artists, musicians, authors, and other creative professionals against everyone else. The finding: every additional $10,000 in family income makes a person roughly two percent more likely to enter a creative occupation. A household earning $100,000 is twice as likely to produce an artist as one earning $50,000. A household earning $1 million a year is ten times more likely to have a family member enter the arts than one earning $100,000.

This is US data, of course. Things are likely less extreme in Europe; it would be surprising if the direction were different, though. The bottleneck to art-making is not talent, it’s a background of money and network. So as much as the parents of the next generation of nepo babies would like to state that their children had to work just as hard as everyone else (if not harder, to shed their parents’ name) the numbers tell a different story.

Another symptom of this time is the rise of the celebrity artist.

Critics call it “Red Chip” art, made for a buyer Annie Armstrong described in Artnet News as the “Cybertruck-driving, crypto-checking, Joe Rogan-queuing collector who‘s ‚gaining more traction in the art world.” Jack White debuted as a sculptor in May 2026 at Damien Hirst‘s gallery, after twenty years quietly building furniture and assemblage from salvaged materials. Adrien Brody‘s “Made in America” filled a Madison Avenue gallery with collaged Mickey Mouses and Marilyn Monroes; one painting sold for $425,000 at a Cannes gala the same week critics called the work “Horrendous.”

Brad Pitt’s ceramic and bronze pieces, made in the wake of his divorce, debuted in a Finnish museum in 2022.

If the art world‘s version of extraction is buying a dead Rothko or “A Pitt“ instead of funding a living unknown, the broader culture industry runs the same logic at street level.

Third spaces are closing. Independent clubs are being evicted from cities that no longer have room for anything that doesn’t generate rent. Magazines and creative agencies have been consolidated into a handful of holding companies, until what used to be dozens of distinct editorial voices answers to the same three boardrooms.

Even film, the most visible mass-cultural form, is eating its own past: nine of the ten highest-grossing movies at the US box office in 2025 were sequels, remakes, or extensions of franchises already decades old.

Even the studios that brand themselves as the alternative aren’t, quite — A24, built on the promise of filmmaker-first risk-taking, is now backed by the venture firm of Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared Kushner, at a $3.5 billion valuation.

And whenever someone new does manage to emerge, in a basement, a group chat, a city nobody in fashion was paying attention to, it generally won‘t be long before it get‘s mined for „cool“ codes, and fed directly into a moodboard. From there it‘s only a short way into the fast-fashion pipeline, stripped of everything except the look.

This is what extraction looks like when it runs out of physical resources to take. It starts taking the social fabric instead. All those are examples of the same mechanism operating, where the raw material being mined is culture itself.

So what’s the point of all this cultural pessimism?

It is worth remembering that wealth hasn’t always behaved this way. Even at its most extractive, it used to give something back

• Jakob Fugger, the richest man of his age, built subsidized housing for Augsburg’s poor in 1516. The Fuggerei still stands, and people still live in it, paying the same symbolic rent five centuries later.

• The Victorians, who extracted more ruthlessly than almost anyone before them, still built ornate hospitals, civic parks modeled on palace gardens, and entire model villages: Saltaire, Bournville, Port Sunlight. A material gesture for the workers whose labor funded them.

• Andrew Carnegie, who broke strikes and crushed unions on his way to becoming one of the richest men alive, still funded over 2,500 public libraries across the world — buildings that had nothing to do with steel and everything to do with the belief that even his workers deserved somewhere to read.

• The Italian Renaissance produced a vast amount of cultural artifacts, mainly funded by a few families, most notably the Medici. Italy holds more UNESCO World Heritage inscriptions than any other country on Earth, and a disproportionate share of that legacy was produced in a few decades, in a handful of city-states.

None of this was altruism. It kept a workforce healthy enough to keep exploiting, and grateful enough not to revolt. But the patronage still produced something real: buildings people could walk into, parks people could sit in, libraries people could read in. Durable and beautiful, and much of it still standing.

This is only part 1 of our RE-RENAISSANCE report. Part 2 will contain the early RE-RENAISSANCE signals and strategic directives

All Global Urgent Trends reports are available as PDF download on globalurgenttrends.com

Walter Benjamin wrote about aura in 1935. It’s a quality of presence that can only be experienced in the physical encounter with an original artifact. This spiritual charge, he argued, gets drained the moment something becomes endlessly reproducible. For him, after lithography and photography in the 19th century, film was the latest technology removing the viewer even further from the work of art. We have since fully recognized that these mediums can move us in genuine ways, but it also isn’t quite the same as standing in front of an original artwork that has absorbed the mental and physical imprint of an artist.

Here we are now, ninety years later, in the content economy of 2026, where machines churn out higher-quality slop each day. Where people doomscroll through infinite stacks of short-form video, instantly replacing the thing they just saw with the next. Where even content made by humans is being challenged by synthetic slop. An infinite perception loop created by machines (AI), to move machines (algorithms).

Reading that the advent of film must have felt similarly disruptive is, honestly, a little soothing. But it simultaneously not remotely comparable. Film is a medium in which art is absolutely possible. Can the same be said for content? Maybe, very generously, on the margins. Can AI ever produce art? I would say absolutely not. Art is a human category, with a spiritual, societal, and philosophical purpose. It is a by-product of human consciousness. It goes back to the first flicker of human spirit, to when we still coexisted with Neanderthals — the traces left in the caves of Chauvet and Lascaux are witnesses to what it meant to differ from other mammals. Art has always survived, and has made it through the grimmest moments of human history. It has survived famines, wars, and mega-galleries. But it could absolutely use a little more care and respect these days.

The term “tasteslop,” currently circulating, sounds like the outcry of a distinguished avant-garde condemning the results of the democratization of cultural codes. But kitsch and vulgar imitations of high taste have existed for as long as there has been a working class — a class equally haunted by the fear of being conflated with simple peasants and driven by the desire to be noticed by the upper classes. Taste has always been a vehicle to assert your position on the economic ladder. To point fingers and call out those who “quote incorrectly” is itself a deeply middle-class notion — and, in that sense, symptomatic of an economic reality in which the middle class is being dismantled in favor of the increasingly concentrated spending power of the top ten percent.

To put tasteslop into perspective, I like to use the example of the Renaissance. Fifteenth-century Florence was mad for classical antiquity. Greek philosophy, Roman proportion, humanist ideals. Many antique texts had survived the Middle Ages through copies made in monasteries, but the remnants of classical art; sculpture, pottery and monuments had only survived in fragments. The Renaissance was fascinated by white marble, and masters like Michelangelo and da Vinci emulated this aesthetic in their own work; the look of these white sculptures is still deeply ingrained in the collective image of Eurocentric art.

At the same time they didn’t know the statues and buildings were originally painted in bright colors and patterns. You could argue the quote was incorrect: that the Renaissance was, in fact, tasteslop.

The truth is, it doesn’t really matter. They turned a nostalgic obsession into artistic production. They let themselves be genuinely moved by something, and created something new in the process, something with a life of its own, something that inspired centuries of artists to follow.

Which raises the more interesting question: are we actually creating something right now? Culture has always synthesized the new out of processing the old in contemporary ways. That’s not the problem. The problem is the absence of genuine commitment to creating something new. The inability to sit with something long enough for an interesting thought to arrive, and a social conservatism too scared of sending the wrong codes.

So the real question is: are we only extracting at this point, or are we still producing anything of value?

The Renaissance didn’t ask whether it was extracting or producing. It just made things. The fact that we’re asking the question might already be the answer.

It does feel pretty historic to have a Pope release a 42,000-word encyclical on Artificial Intelligence, while a co-founder of Anthropic stands right next to him — respectfully listening and chiming in that AI needs more critical voices putting it in its place. It reads a little too good to be true.

It’s not as pure or hopeful as we first want it to look, but it’s still something.

Behind closed doors, representatives from Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic spent months meeting with Vatican officials. Anthropic has even integrated elements of the Vatican’s ethical framing into its models.

So this is obviously not pure humanism. It’s strategic positioning.

That does not take away from the fact that the text itself, Magnifica Humanitas, delivers a structural critique that Big Tech desperately needs and humanity deserves. It states clearly that technology is never neutral — it inherits the character, biases, and motives of the humans who fund and build it. (Mostly white men.) The text urges developers to shift their focus to the poor and the environment, who will bear the heaviest costs of rapid displacement.

This is exactly what the Church is supposed to do. And that in itself is the most powerful aspect here.

Staying within the metaphor of David Foster Wallace’s famous This Is Water speech — the story of two young fish swimming along who have no idea what “water” even is because they are completely submerged in it.

For decades, technology has been our water. It filled a vacuum in our collective belief infrastructure, promising purity, transcendence, and frictionless progress like some kind of sanctimonious escape plan. Literally promising to colonize new planets (for some) instead of facing human reality on this planet. Tech operated as a secular belief system that refused to call itself one. It doesn’t take a doctorate in psychology to see what kind of men have been (and still are) running the ship here. You would probably look somewhere else if you needed a role model for what a introspective, well adjusted and kind adult looks like — that’s the kind of guys we’ve let play god here.

But reality has somewhat caught up with us. The fish are starting to notice the water again. It’s wet.

As AI labs face commercial and geopolitical pressures they openly admit they cannot resist, they are looking outward for boundaries. Anthropic’s Olah noted in his response to the Magnifica Humanitas: labs need external critics because internal incentives cannot bend.

There’s another element the Magnifica Humanitas correctly acknowledges. The conversation around AI and its impact on civilization tends to collapse into one question: how many people will lose their jobs to the machine. It’s a real question. But the Pope makes a more fundamental point, that labor is not the sole content of a human life. We don’t live to work.

If the nature of certain tasks changes, if goods and services are produced differently, then there is a responsibility to imagine a dignified life in which labor, in its historic form, means something else entirely.

Of course it would be foolish to trust a tech company. Even if it tries to be a bit less of a cartoonish level of evil.

The discourse however is finally happening in the places it actually belongs. This is a positive. Remaining skeptically hopeful feels like a legitimate place to stand.

The FAITH report is a deep dive into how technology began acting like a religious institution (and why the directive is to stay with the dirt).
You can download the full PDF at globalurgenttrends.com

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

Gen Z is visually highly trained and socially very conservative: they know exactly how far they can push the envelope while profiting from the valor of cultural subversion, without risking real economic opportunity.

Rebellion has been replaced by moodboard capitalism. Choose your fighter.

From Dark Academia to Tarot Mystic, Fasting Ascetic to Blue Collar Cosplay — your algorithm suggests an array of personas to adopt. You can live out the fantasy of a subversive identity, while keeping it surface-level enough to remain employable.

Essentially, this is postmodern capitalism doing what it does best: hollowing out working-class resistance until it no longer poses a threat.

Postmodernity references itself.
It absorbs every critique and re-packages it as a new aspirational trend cycle.

Capitalism no longer suppresses subcultures — it scouts them. To extract their aesthetics and put them into a language of brand positioning. This effectively neutralizes all efforts of cultural subversion.

Examples:

• “Rebellious” fashion becomes Zara-ready in three weeks.

• Luxury sells “distress” and industrial workwear (see recent collections by Prada).

• Art school functions as an economic filter.

• Subcultures arrive pre-packaged on Pinterest.
  

Fisher’s concept of “depressive hedonia” feels like an apt description of GenZs compulsice pursuit of pleasure. There are more aesthetic options than ever before, while offering less sense of meaning than many generations before.

Reinventing compliance

Capitalism does not persist because people love it.
It persists because every generation invents a new way to live inside it.

Different generations have developed different coping mechanisms that make participation within the system feel meaningful.

Boomers → institutional ambition
Climb. Accumulate. Stabilize.

Gen X → irony
Detach. Mock. Survive culturally.

Millennials → hope + hustle
Optimize. Personal brand. Side-project salvation.

Gen Z → aesthetic resistance + algorithmic fluency
Signal critique. Stay employable. Curate dissent.

The difference Punk proposes is refusal.
It refuses to mold itself to a problematic framework — it dares to refuse.

Somehow we have pushed these coping mechanisms so far that it feels almost impossible to refuse the system at large.

We all carry the mini surveillance computer in our pocket.
We all have to remain employable in cities that grow increasingly expensive.

Optimization has become the default setting.

But sometimes we have to remind ourselves: it is not the only option.

The perfect symbol of this reawakening of resistance is the fictional character Bartleby in Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville.

Bartleby works as a copyist on Wall Street, reduced to a human machine.
Faced with a system that strips him of his humanity, he begins to refuse it.

He simply says:
“I would prefer not to.”

His quiet withdrawal becomes a form of non-violent resistance against societal expectations and economic conformity. The sentence was later echoed in movements like Occupy Wall Street, proving that resistance does not have to be loud or spectacular. It can begin with quiet refusal.

This is the difference between identity performance and actual resistance.

Bartleby’s refusal was quiet. But he clearly took a stance against something. That clarity feels almost radical today. The pressure to perform under the constant public gaze of social media has made it much more difficult to stand with your true values. It creates a climate that is much more prone to personal attacks, corrections and unolicited advice than any face-to-face interaction.

We have adopted ironic distance as self-protection, afraid of appearing cringe or naïve.

Even worse: both the center-left establishment and the right have framed the term “radical” as irresponsible, naïve, and destructive.

When in fact it simply means thinking problems from their root — as symptoms of the systems that gave birth to them.

In times of foggy economic prospects, the rise of global fascism and feudal lords owning the infrastructure we live and work within, being perceived as radical can carry real economic and physical consequences.

The result is that no one says what they really think anymore. It’s just vibes.
But maybe we can’t afford that escapism anymore.
Maybe the situation is too grim to put on your €90 vintage worker’s uniform and harvest the vibes.

Maybe the missing step is not a new look.
but a real moral stance.

We are all Hipsters

The Hipster is maybe the most hated cultural archetype of the 21st century. But the disdain we feel for him makes it hard to grasp how deeply he has shaped modern consumption — and how much we have all, despite ourselves, followed in his footsteps.

The Hipster, a typically white, cis male, urban, millennial figure, has essentially created the postmodern lifestyle economy we take for granted today. He has single-handedly created an enormous range of diversity in the beverage market, shifted our need for purpose into clickbait-activism, streamlined all our daily chores through apps and gentrified our more deprived neighborhoods. No wonder we hate him — but as the world before the Hipster slips more and more out of reach, we have all become him.

The reason this model of modern living has proven so extraordinarily successful and is very hard to shake is rooted in how we form identity. Georg Simmel argued in 1908 that identity is shaped between two polar human needs: belonging and distinction. We all navigate society along those two basic drives — we want to fit in, and we want to stand out. How much we lean toward one or the other is a matter of personal temperament, but everyone needs both.

Postmodern consumption gives you the ability to constantly negotiate your identity between those two poles. To morally and aesthetically signal which group you belong to — while finding small, specific touches that mark you as an individual within it. To add your particular flavor to the latte you just got off Pinterest.

Even when we can see through it — even when we know that the moral weight of consumption has been strategically shifted onto the individual consumer, in a world where a person in the top 0.1% can emit more carbon in a single day than someone in the poorest 50% emits in an entire year (Oxfam, 2025) — breaking out of the hipster mold remains extraordinarily difficult. Because it is bound to identity. To stop consuming in this way feels like dropping out of the conversation entirely. Like ceasing to exist socially.

So how, in these grim times, do we break out of the hipster habitus? How do we develop something like genuine resilience? The location for this existential question is not in the store, not in the media we consume, or in how we encounter technology — but in the way we face ourselves every day.

It starts with becoming sensitive to our own automatisms. To noticing the choices that feel safe, and make us seem interestingly unique. This might be the most important territory to apply all that mindfulness we have been practicing — not to optimize ourselves, but to honestly examine how complicit we have become, while still signaling that we are cool.

And then. Breathe in for 4, hold — release for 8, slowly — pause.

Critical thinking is still within us. But it requires refusing our conditioning, or at least trying. You don’t have to lurch into the opposite extreme. You don’t have to quit your job or crash the car you’re in. But you can find critical awareness again.

In times of crisis, most people retreat into rigid ideological frameworks — they offer orientation when everything feels unstable. Pure dogmatism is obviously a philosophical trap. But so is total freedom.

The punk exercise is something harder and more subtle than either: to stay with the dirt. To sit with the contradictions that our liberal consumer systems have so carefully constructed for us — and to refuse to look away.

PUNK as Strategy

So if HIPSTER subversion is:

_moral consumption

_taste culture

_irony

_moodboard subversion

_algorithm-friendly edginess

then PUNK values must be harder to commodify:

1 — Staying with the Dirt The refusal to resolve complexity into clean answers or comfortable positions. An acceptance that the contradictions in our systems are real, and that sitting with them honestly is the necessary starting point — for critical thinking, for resistance, for anything that follows.

2 — Deconstruction The habit of questioning frameworks before working within them. An interest in who built the system, who it serves, and what it silently normalizes. Punk subversion operates at the level of structure, not just aesthetics. It begins where hipster irony ends — at the point where observation becomes interrogation.

3 — Self-Determination The discipline of autonomy: knowing what you actually think, separate from what the algorithm rewards. And then acting on it — DIY not as an aesthetic but as a practice of building from that position without waiting for permission or institutional validation. Not individualism, but the capacity to operate from a place that isn’t simply a reaction to social feedback or market logic.

4 — The Cost of Conviction Active resistance as a choice with real material consequences — not a mood, not an aesthetic. The willingness to prioritize authentic position over market value, to hold a legible stance on something that matters even when strategic ambiguity would be more comfortable. A recognition that something real is always at stake, and that this is precisely the point.

What’s next?

What feels powerful again is not louder signaling — it is material conviction. Not aesthetic rebellion, but practiced integrity. Not the performance of a stance, but the willingness to hold one when it costs something.

Holding a position even when it is socially inconvenient.

Process over performance.

Care that persists when no one is watching.

Active resistance rather than ironic disengagement.

Actual organizing and conversation instead of click-based activism.

The courage to displease.

This is not about optimization. It is not about personal branding dressed as conscience. It is about moral survival inside systems that reward neutrality and spectacle in equal measure.

Is the spirit of punk dead? No, but it has been in a state of managed sedation for some time. Kept alive enough to be referenced, not alive enough to threaten anything. To actually revive it requires something the current cultural moment has made genuinely difficult: the willingness to risk something. To ask uncomfortable questions without already knowing which answer is safe.

Whatever comes next cannot be another moodboard.

The punk spirit was never about a sound, a look, or an era. It was about the refusal to make peace with what is unacceptable. That refusal is still available. It just requires choosing it.

The full PUNK report is available on globalugenttrends.com

These are not only aesthetic preferences, they signal a much deeper emotional truth:care is in extremely rare supply in a world running on a logic of extraction. Social security is being dismantled, wars are being started, media is running on polarization. An abandoning of causality, nuance and history seem to be the tenor of global politics. The only thing that seems to remain intact is the marketing funnel.

Markets have been optimized to make items either feel obsolete and out of style by the next season or they fade away rapidly and turn into garbage in front of our eyes. The perfect specimen for the consumer economy is anxious, worried to miss out, desperate to fit in and stand out. Their sense of identity depends on a never-ending feedback loop of scroll, purchase, shame.

Even luxury brands have followed the same social-media logic for the past decade: high visibility, viral moments, engineered desire. The anxiety of missing out has been the product as much as the object itself. But the mood is shifting. What feels rare now is not another hot drop of some limited edition, but serenity.

Having to mend your clothing and wear it for a long time used to be an indicator for poverty. Now it has become a luxury code.

What’s desirable is to care about your items, like you would want to be cared about yourself. To be cherished and maintained like a treasure, but not to be put on a pedestal. To be allowed to live life and to collect scratches and wrinkles along the way. Not to make you ready for replacement but to make you even richer and more beautiful.

Social media has lifted us into a flat and slick world, where cleanness became aspirational. Now to be able to afford some resistance to consumer culture has become the true status symbol. Acts of care and tenderness have become rebellion. Resisting the funnel signals autonomy in a world that is designed for conversions.

This mirrors Melville’s Bartleby’s quiet refusal: ‘I would prefer not to’ — a gentle yet firm withdrawal from a system that demands participation.

Aging is one of the few things where texture comes as a process, not a finish. Even Prada handcrafting frayed lapels can’t replicate the real thing. The craving for texture is also legible in recent runway castings, where we saw an influx of models over 50 presenting the collections of Gucci, Chanel and Miu Miu.

The chicest thing you can be right now is someone who is committed to something enough to fix it, when it’s broken and values it despite its imperfections.

(This piece draws on observations from the GUT reports FAITH and PUNK, available at globalurgenttrends.com)

The Trump presidency is an amazing illustration of this: the message is no longer primarily constructed through language. Not even necessarily through argument. For the first couple of years of this decade-long unfortunate presence, this still felt like a glitch, even funny (gosh, I miss those days). But by now we’ve become numb enough to still be occasionally bewildered by what slop he produces, however it’s not funny or surprising anymore. We have given up on causality. We have even given up on coherent ideology. Nothing can be trusted. Everything is vibe. The image no longer supports the message. It has replaced it.

The 24-hour news cycle, reality TV and social media have fundamentally reshaped our relationship to logic (his and ours). The fact that our current system seems so irreplaceable, so inescapable, has flattened ideology into a marketplace of vibes. What circulates are only surfaces: the aesthetics of power, of subversion, of moral positioning. We may still disagree on what we see, but we are no longer engaging with it through structured argument. Our exchange with reality has been flattened to a neurochemical response to headlines, to hooks on reels… to images.

They say a picture says more than a thousand words. To imagine translating all the images we consume daily back into words might actually exceed our human processing capacity. So instead, we don’t translate. We scroll. Absorbing vibes instead of actual information we have agency over. Wars, ads, jokes… all smushed into algorithmic vibes.

This is not just a byproduct of technological change. It also serves a political function. The strategy of “flooding the zone” operates through excess. The constant production of stimuli is designed to overwhelm our ability to distinguish, prioritize, or follow through on anything. Under these conditions, attention fragments and escapism starts to look really attractive.

Images are extremely efficient at generating affect, but they are structurally limited. They cannot build an argument over time, they cannot hold contradiction in a stable way, and they cannot guide someone from one position to another through reasoning.

Language can. Our brains have not been built to consume as many images as we do, we have been built for stories. We have the ability to follow something from premise to conclusion and to stay with it long enough to understand its implications. We are built for linear thought. We have literally been poisoned by images to erode our most basic cognitive tool. Language. And the world is burning.

This makes returning to reading and writing much more than a nostalgic gesture. It is an active form of resistance.

So consider this a call to whip that book out, to start thinking in sentences again. It honestly might be one of the more radical things to do right now.

What happens when human belief seeps into the private and unconscious? Worship today it is no longer held by shared structures, but has become individualized to a point where we no longer share language and practices to negotiate collective morality.

Religions may hold less power in the Western world today, but belief has not disappeared, it has only migrated. Late capitalism has created peak-segmentation — turning belief more into a matter of identity-based consumption, divided into ever-narrower target groups and messaging matrices. Amazing for markets, bad for society. Unexamined belief has frayed the social fabric and created fertile ground for the most aggressive, cruel, and narcissistic forms of leadership which offers direction while refusing responsibility.

Given that non-belief is a condition humans are simply incapable of, he have to ask, how is belief organized today? And how might recognizing its narrative structures help us rebuild forms of shared meaning that reconnect us laterally, rather than hierarchically?

In 2005, David Foster Wallace delivered a commencement speech at Kenyon College that would later become known as This Is Water. At its core is a deceptively simple idea: the most important realities are often the hardest to see, precisely because they are everywhere.

Wallace argues that a real education is not about what to think, but about learning how to think (or more precisely, learning how to notice). Once the structure of education falls away and adult life sets in, we are all left alone with routines, frustrations, boredom, and desire. In those moments, our default setting quietly takes over.

That default setting is belief.

Wallace’s most radical claim is not spiritual in a traditional sense, but existential: belief is not optional. Humans cannot not believe. Our consciousness requires orientation — a way to assign meaning, value, and importance to experience. If belief remains unconscious, it collapses inward. The self becomes the center of the universe. Certainty hardens. Others become obstacles, abstractions, or instruments.

Blind certainty and dogmatism are not failures of intelligence, but failures of awareness.

Religion has historically offered one way of making belief visible — externalizing it through ritual, story, moral constraint, and community. But this capacity is not exclusive to religion. Atheist, secular, and philosophical frameworks can do the same work — if they remain conscious, shared, and ethically grounded.

No one stands outside belief.
The only question is: do we recognize the water we swim in or do we make it all about ourselves?

About Religion

Belief was not imposed on humans.
It emerged from us as a consequence of being able to feel more than we can bear.

Long before religion became institution, doctrine, or power structure, humans were already confronted with the same unavoidable facts that define life today: bodies decay, children are born into uncertainty, seasons change, loved ones fall ill, and everyone, without exception, will disappear again. Belief systems arose not as an escape from this condition, but as a way to live inside it.

Across cultures and centuries, belief systems co-evolved with human societies as shared tools of orientation. They offered narratives that did not deny suffering, but placed it in relation to something larger than the individual. In doing so, they transformed private pain into something collective and aesthetic.

Belief always was more embodied practice and ritual than intellectual narrative. It encompassed fasting and feasting, healing, mourning and celebrating. It acknowledged that no life was exceptional since we’re all born into the same frail body. We all share the same dirt.

Artists like Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch were brilliant in translating their faith aesthetically with intellectual sincerity as well as humor and levity. Their paintings do not present heaven and hell as abstract fantasies imposed by faith, but as mirrors of human existence itself: labor and leisure, excess and punishment, beauty and grotesqueness, birth and decay unfolding side by side.

Historically, belief systems acted as a form of social infrastructure that structured suffering without pretending it could be eliminated. They placed ethical boundaries around desire, accumulation, and domination. Shame, taboo, and commandments were imperfect and often abused, but they served a stabilizing function: they limited how far power could stretch before it had to answer to something even bigger. Crucially, belief also acted as an equalizer. People still suffered inequal amounts, but everyone was supject to the same fate as long as they walked the earth.

This insistence on shared consequence was never morally pure, but it mattered. When it eroded, it did so in recognizable ways. One of the clearest historical examples is the late medieval Catholic Church, where moral accountability began to fracture along economic lines. The sale of indulgences effectively allowed the wealthy to purchase relief from punishment for themselves and their families. Salvation became a transaction. Morality became tiered.

Martin Luther’s theses were a protest against a moral economy in which money had begun to override shared consequence. What was at stake was not doctrine alone, but dignity: the idea that no one, regardless of wealth or power, could exempt themselves from guilt, finitude, or ethical responsibility.

The parallel to the present moment is uncomfortable but precise. Once again, we are living with a system in which consequence is unevenly distributed — not only economically, but morally. Those at the top emit more, extract more, exploit more, and increasingly answer to less. Climate damage, social erosion, and political instability are treated as externalities, while exemption is framed as success.

This is not simply inequality. It is moral apartheid: a condition in which shared rules still apply, but only to some

If you want to know more read our full FAITH report on globalurgenttrends.com

Romantic Rebellion

Things are pretty grim. Dystopian politics, tech fascism, AI takeover, aggressive consumerism, environmental anxiety — the cultural atmosphere is heavy. And yet, beneath all of that, something else is stirring.

From fairycore aesthetics to esoteric obsessions, nostalgic fashion, the rise of fantasy literature, and the coquette and ballerina-core aesthetics, a legible hunger is becoming apparent. It is a desire for softness, sincerity, and something that feels emotionally real.

6 in 10 Gen Z report feeling overwhelmed by news and events happening in their community, their country, and the world at large. — UNICEF, 2025

People are mourning the decay of a different way of living — a time that feels gentler or more human, even if it exists only in collective imagination. Call it regression-core: a retreat into emotional interiors, nostalgic dreams, and anachronistic aesthetics. A craving for beauty, mystery, and texture in a world that feels cooked.

The pace of production keeps rising. Burnout has become ordinary. The veil of moral motivation within our governments has been yanked off quite harshly for those who hadn’t already questioned it. Irony and nihilism have become means of self-protection and dominate the cultural mood. Many feel helpless in the face of rising fascism, collapsing social structures, and increasingly tense gender relations — especially young people who were children only a few years ago and who came of age during the isolation of Covid.

We all search for safety, belonging, and the freedom to express ourselves without fear of ridicule or rejection. And as overwhelming as this moment feels, it is not entirely new. History shows that when societies become too rational, too controlled, emotion begins to push back. When reality becomes too tight, people resort to fantasy.

Historic Precedents

History tends to repeat itself.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Europe was changing fast. The Enlightenment had crowned reason as truth. The Industrial Revolution pulled people from rural rhythms into factory schedules. Cities were expanding at a rapid pace, and the rhythm of life accelerated to levels never experienced before.

Romanticism rose as a cultural counter-movement, born from a spirit of protest. It wasn’t overtly political — it played out instead in the personal and emotional side of life. It pushed back against the dominance of logic and productiveness through the power of intuition and imagination. Artists and writers turned inward, reclaiming dreams, mysticism, and nature as sources of meaning.

Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther made romantic passion tragic and contagious — spreading like a virus among young people. Caspar David Friedrich painted figures dwarfed by vast landscapes, implying the human need to surrender to the natural world. Beethoven’s symphonies thundered with longing. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein warned of what happens when ambition outruns empathy — a story that feels strangely current in the age of AI.

Romanticism was a soft rebellion, and it bears a striking resemblance to the present day. When culture worships slickness, efficiency, and order, people inevitably reach for more texture, slower rhythms, stranger stories. Things that feel more human.

Bedrotting — A social media term describing the practice of staying in bed for extended periods as a form of rest, emotional recovery, or quiet protest against productivity culture. Often linked to burnout and mental fatigue, it reflects a broader generational rejection of constant self-optimization — and mirrors historical patterns of retreat during periods of social and economic pressure. The Victorians, for what it’s worth, loved it too.

The Japan Parallel

A similar pattern unfolded in Japan mid-20th century. Amid economic miracles and rigid social norms, kawaii culture emerged as a soft counter to hard modernity and rapid technological change.

Kawaii means “cute,” but it carried emotional weight. It made space for vulnerability in a society obsessed with discipline. Characters like Hello Kitty and Sanrio’s pastel worlds offered comfort and playfulness. Cuteness became a quiet rebellion — a way to feel in a world that valued performance.

The same impulse echoes today. Fairycore, coquette, and “little treat” culture all tap into that desire to escape optimization through softness. Under constant digital pressure, young people build pastel refuges and nostalgic worlds that feel safer than reality.

Across time and place, the pattern repeats: when progress hardens life, people turn to tenderness. When the future feels hostile, fantasy becomes home.

Romantic Micro-Trends: Escaping to Elsewhere

The longing that once moved poets and painters now plays out across screens. It doesn’t appear as a unified movement, but as fragments scattered through online life — each with its own internet-specific shelf life. But read together, they tell one story. They all offer a version of the same dream: that life could feel slower, deeper, or somehow more real.

Fantasy-Based Niche Aesthetics

Cottagecore, Fairycore, Witchcore, Goblincore, Medievalcore. Set in little huts in the forest, kitchens filled with herbs, candle-lit rooms shared through phone screens. These subcultures center around imagined worlds rooted partly in gaming culture, partly in folklore, partly in a kind of pre-industrial nostalgia.

What they promise is simple: that life could be tender, analogue, and connected to something older. That you are guided by nature and traditions instead of algorithms. They blend folklore with the aesthetics of computer games — merging tradition and technology into something both nostalgic and new.

Japanese Obsession

The global fascination with Japanese culture plays out in many ways. Many current trends loosely reference kawaii aesthetics, while others are more direct adaptations — the matcha cult, Studio Ghibli filters, the collectible character universe of Sanrio and Labubu. Japanese culture has become a reference point for the disillusioned Western youth, offering an alternative modernity that feels warmer than the one they grew up in.

BookTok and Fantasy Fiction

Books have been trending for a few years now. More specifically, fantasy fiction has returned to the centre of youth culture. On BookTok, readers share novels about magical kingdoms, tragic love, and moral awakening. Reading becomes an act of intimacy. It slows time, restores imagination, and allows emotion to exist without irony.

Brands like Miu Miu have tapped into this through their “sexy bookworm” aesthetic — embodying the manic pixie dream girl archetype and launching their own book club and curated summer reading list.

Y2K and Vintage Hype

First the 90s, then Y2K — the 80s are next. Gen Z loves nothing more than trying to escape the current timeline in search of moments that seem lighter, less anxious, possibly more human. Having less environmental impact may have been a motivation at the beginning of the thrift-core craze, but in the age of Vinted hauls and curated vintage stores, it has also just become another form of consumerism.

Offline as Status Symbol

Wired headphones, flip phones, and digital cameras have made a comeback. Beyond fashion and media, anything that resists speed is trending: film photography, journaling, collecting vinyl. Even the ritual of baking or handwriting letters carries meaning again.

Being offline is the new status symbol. Having time — and not being hooked to your phone — has become genuinely attractive to young people. Like the Romantics once did, people are trying to reassert texture, to prove that attention itself can still be an act of love.

A note on curation vs. authenticity

Much of today’s social status is tied to personal branding online. Gen Z pulls from an aesthetic archive that stretches back to the beginning of recorded culture, which makes their creative expression less about innovation and more about precise curation. They are, in many ways, cosplaying identity.

From coastal grandmother to indie sleaze to dark academia, the internet offers endless miniature worlds to patch together a sense of “uniqueness.” But this freedom is deceptive. Gen Z’s value system often orbits around taste, refined consumption, and performed individuality — impulses that can read as deeply conformist, even conservative. The stakes of self-presentation are high, and the social anxiety around getting it wrong is omnipresent.

If you curate everything, the authentic slips out of reach.

Whatever Happened to True Romance?

The Decline of Desire

Young people are having less sex, reporting less interest, and turning increasingly toward solo pleasure and digital intimacy. AI companions, parasocial attachments, and algorithmically curated arousal offer safe, predictable alternatives to the chaos of human connection. The body becomes another interface. The erotic becomes mechanical. Approaching another person romantically has become fraught, risky, or simply too exhausting. It’s easier to desire from afar than to feel vulnerable up close.

Nearly half of Gen Z American men report not dating at all. — American Research Center, 2024

Goon Caves — Online slang for digital spaces (often physical home setups) where men spend extended periods in immersive solo sexual activity, usually involving multiple screens and constant stimulation. The term reflects a hyper-digital, depersonalized form of pleasure that replaces human intimacy with algorithmic arousal loops — a symptom of both sexual exhaustion and emotional withdrawal in the post-dating era.

Dating Apps and the Erosion of Intimacy

For a generation raised on digital connection, intimacy has never felt more distant. Dating apps have turned interpersonal connection into a field of performance, ideology, and transaction. When swiping becomes a business model, it’s not surprising that sticking with one person becomes harder. Choice is endless, attention spans microscopic. We are being crushed by the need to compare, optimize, and streamline our personal brand. Meanwhile, the yearning for something real is everywhere — but harder than ever to locate.

Identity Fatigue

Romance used to begin with mystery. Now it begins with disclaimers. Pronouns, gender, sexuality, politics — everything has to be declared, defined, and categorized before desire can even enter the room. For some, this visibility is liberating. For others, it’s exhausting. People fear saying the wrong thing, liking the wrong person, or being seen through the wrong lens. The result is a strange paralysis: everyone talking about love, yet fewer and fewer daring to truly risk it. Romance, after all, often comes with a set of contradictions that only unfold once we let it happen.

Radical Gender Scripts

In the vacuum of tenderness, ideology has rushed in. The manosphere sells dominance as masculinity. Tradwives brand submission as the only authentic expression of femininity. Pro-natalists frame reproduction as a form of national duty. Relationships are being reframed through the logic of biology, hierarchy, and content creation.

Manosphere — An online network of blogs, forums, and influencers promoting male-centric ideologies, often focused on masculinity, dating, and gender dynamics. While parts of it discuss men’s issues, it is largely associated with misogynistic, anti-feminist, and reactionary movements that frame gender equality as a threat to male identity.

Pro-natalist — Describes individuals or movements that advocate for higher birth rates, often tied to conservative, nationalist, or techno-libertarian ideologies. Figures like Elon Musk have popularized a techno-futurist version, warning of “population collapse” while promoting reproduction as a means to secure civilization’s future.

On the other end of the spectrum, “performative males” — soft boys with Labubus on their totes and painted nails — perform for the female gaze to be perceived as non-threatening allies. Yet both are reactions to the same anxiety: no one knows what romance is supposed to look like anymore.

Performative Male — Men who consciously craft their persona through aesthetics, vulnerability, or irony to align with the female gaze or internet ideals of “softness.” Often a response to toxic masculinity, but one that can slip into performance rather than authenticity — emotional depth turned into a brand.

Romance, at its core, depends on the courage to imagine a shared future. But what happens when that future feels uncertain, or dark? Without the promise of a shared horizon, relationships risk becoming transactional — reduced to exchange rather than creation. The tech industry and content farms have done their part in teaching us to think about romance as another form of consumption.

The quiet tragedy of this moment is that imagination no longer shapes material reality. It retreats into fantasy instead — a safer realm where hope can still exist, even if it has nowhere tangible to land.

Beneath the Irony and Fatigue

This collective pull toward softness, nostalgia, and fantasy is more than escapism. It is a response to a culture that has fetishized efficiency. And much like in the Romantic era of the 19th century, it has sparked a deep yearning for truth, poetry, beauty, and connection.

It’s a craving to rise above the daily struggle to function and optimize — to momentarily forget the world’s cruelty and greed and instead feel immersed in tenderness. Perhaps these micro-trends are not only ways of coping with the present, but also quiet attempts to shape what comes next. Imagination is the first gesture toward the future, though for now, many of these visions remain trapped inside our phones and our heads.

If we can learn to hope again, it will be nothing short of a radical act.

This piece is an excerpt from our full report on Romantic Rebellion, available to download at globalurgenttrends.com

To look at the subject of milk is to map how culture is constantly looking for narratives – desperate for coherence and yet fractured into tribal codes.

Each mammal’s life begins with milk. Milk has served as one of humanity’s most fundamental yet culturally transformed substances. We need it, and that’s why we cannot help but ascribe meaning to it. It carries innate associations with maternal care and survival, yet human cultures consistently recast it into spiritual and social registers.

Across time and culture, milk has been a substance of power: spiritual, female and symbolic. We want to trace how milk of other mammals was first consumed by humans — fermented in nomadic steppes, offered in ancient rites, or moralized in monastic Europe, milk has always carried more than nutritional value. It’s a vehicle for belief systems, narratives and mythologies to enter our daily life.

The messaging around milk is caught between nostalgia and rejection, purity and performance, nature and control. It tracks shifting moral codes, political anxieties, and the endless search for identity through consumption.

Milk alternatives like oat, almond, soy or rice are each offering a cleaner conscience and a new soft signal about identity: ethical, educated, climate-aware. We have gotten used to the idea that an oat milk flat white isn’t just a beverage; it is a subtle alignment with a worldview. By the time your boss and your mom were on board, it had ceased to be subversive. It was just a quiet ubiquity of habit.

And then, predictably, the backlash arrived in the form of raw milk. Unpasteurized, unregulated, and loudly unprocessed, it emerged as a health trend during the COVID-pandemic for everyone that became frustrated by government regulations and industrial systems. An expression of autonomy and resistance against perceived encroachments on individual liberty.

What’s interesting isn’t the left vs. right framing. It’s that everyone seems to have lost interest in the middle. Pasteurized milk once was the fuel that kept Western civilizations running: from the nuclear family to Big Milk. Now anything mainstream reads as highly sus.

Milk itself remained the same. What changed was us. This issue explores milk not as a beverage, but as a site where the constant need for new ideologies ultimately fractures society along the most banal elements of life: our day-to-day consumer choices.

In an economy obsessed with speed and novelty, we rarely get the chance to pause and take a deeper look at the narratives that orbit our everyday lives.

Most choices we make daily are run on autopilot. The ideal product offers a frictionless experience to blend into our productive workflow. Our impulses and product availability likely are the most important factors (Kahneman). And yet, every so often, a product manages to act as a stand-in for something deeper. Takeout coffee becomes a political statement. Your oat-milk latte is a form of voting. Your Whole Foods receipt is a Myers-Briggs test. A splash of milk in a cup becomes a miniature manifesto.

But what consumption has increasingly replaced is connection. Remaining divided and alienated from the natural world makes us much better targets for the solutions offered by brands. Overconsumption and societal division seem to be inextricably linked, and have both seemingly grown at the same pace over the past years.

This deep-dive is meant as a reminder that beneath the relentless churn of trend cycles and optimized funnels — there is more. We feel like it is a good time to address a deeper hunger for context and meaning (especially amongst Gen Z, who have only consciously lived through the more recent stages of so-called late capitalism).

We live in the aftermath of two decades of hyper-segmentation, where every longing, every collective impulse, was sorted into airtight ecosystems and turned into a target audience.

But as cracks appear in the cultural consensus, the logic of branding as identity is beginning to fray. Trends like nostalgia feel less like aesthetic choices and more like signs of uncertainty — indicators that the path ahead is increasingly unclear. The rise of AI is flooding us with possible futures, many of them dystopian, and raising real questions about the role and value of human creativity. At the same time, the growing appeal of proto-fascist ideologies is putting pressure on legal foundations we once considered stable: freedom, equality, the separation of powers. It feels like a good moment to zoom out — to take a more macro view of where things are headed, and what meaning lies beneath individual micro trends.

And weirdly, milk seems like the perfect object to trace the outlines of our cultural crisis: it’s simultaneously banal and overloaded. An everyday substance, primal in origin but highly politicized. A white liquid refracted through market logic, moral panics, and identity performance.

This report makes no claim to totality. Instead, it offers a multi-perspective exploration of a single object that holds more cultural charge than it first appears. This is a forensic unboxing of a single, over-indexed commodity. Through that lens, we hope to create a space for deeper insight — not just into milk, but into the current condition itself.

From Body to Morals

Milk predates civilization. Milk is older than language, older than cultivation. It wasn’t invented by humans — if anything, it helped invent us.
For all mammals, it’s the first thing we taste, connecting us to our mothers’ bodies once we have left the womb. Milk is our first experience of care.

But while milk originates as a biological category, it didn’t stay there for long. Across time and place, it has become a carrier of culture, ideology, and belief. Across millennia, it has borne the weight of gods, morals, and political orders, transforming from mother’s juice to a cultural product, and a vessel for ideology. In this chapter, we want to trace back how milk’s meaning changed over the course of human history.

Neolithical Revolution and Ancient Societies

Humans first began domesticating animals for milk production around 9,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, starting with goats and sheep, followed by cattle in regions of modern-day Turkey, Iran, and Iraq.

In most early agrarian and pastoral societies, fresh milk was often avoided. Without refrigeration, raw milk spoiled rapidly in warm climates, making fermentation a practical necessity. In the earliest human societies, milk was rarely consumed fresh. Instead, it was cultured and transformed — usually into yogurt, kefir, butter, or cheese. Fermentation was more than preservation. It reflected a worldview in which food was alive, responsive, and part of a wider ecological rhythm.

In Egypt, milk featured in rites to Hathor, a cow goddess associated with fertility, motherhood, and care. In the Indus Valley and early Vedic culture, dairy was tied to ritual offerings and cosmological order. Nomadic tribes fermented mare’s milk into kumis, believing it could strengthen the body and restore balance. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, dairy had a subtle place — cautiously used, never central, always considered in relation to the body’s inner climate.

Milk was regarded as something nourishing, healing, and powerful. But power, in these systems, required intention. It wasn’t a neutral food. It had properties that were to be consumed with agency. Drinking milk was to engage with something sacred, something to be enjoyed in moderation.

Middle Ages

Medieval Christian Europe is where milk’s meaning shifts into something we still recognize today. In monastic traditions, it became associated with asceticism. Unlike the ferments more commonly consumed around this time, raw milk was plain, unseasoned and untreated. It fit well within a theology that emphasized bodily restraint, where simplicity wasn’t just a virtue, but also a form of spiritual alignment.

To consume milk was to submit to a life of discipline. Not indulgent, not worldly — but humble, clean, and close to God. The chastity of medieval monks is where milk’s attributions of purity originate.

This framework influenced folk medicine too. Milk was prescribed for illness and emotional disturbance. It was seen as softening, healing, tempering. Less a food, more a medium of purification.

Puritanism

The monastic ideal of purity and restraint didn’t disappear with the Middle Ages. Instead it evolved and became the heart of a new ideology. Ascetic Christian values merged with the emerging ethos of Protestantism and early capitalism, milk retained its symbolic charge. What began as a spiritual discipline was re-coded into a secular morality of purity and self-control.

In this way, milk became not just a food, but a moral substance that quietly carried an ideology that would be exported out into the world: through colonialism, industrialization, and the expanding capitalist world order.

This symbolic transformation set the stage for what would follow: the moralization of health and family.

Those Protestant belief systems are at the heart of North American culture. Much like in medieval monasteries, milk was embedded in a worldview that saw bodily control as an expression of divine order.

The less contaminated something was, the closer it came to moral perfection. Much of our system’s integral narratives are built around this logic. Family, education, public health, and eventually industrial food systems represent those ideological structures.

By the late 19th century, this moral coding had filtered into the thriving American consumer economy. Cereal was invented as a functional, almost medicinal food. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a Seventh-day Adventist and health reformer, believed that a bland, plant-based diet could suppress impure desires (masturbation). The product he created is a brilliant example of how products, narratives, and religious beliefs can blend together: corn flakes are not just about nutrition, but restraint. Milk had been well established as a chaste and pure liquid and fit perfectly with this ideological product. Poured cold over a bowl of cornflakes, this image is very representative of the vision America has painted of itself.

It’s remarkable how long this framing has lasted. Even as public attitudes around food have shifted, milk has remained morally coded. Campaigns like “Got Milk?” in the 1990s leaned heavily on wholesomeness, tradition, and family values. Images of white mustaches and suburban kitchens reinforced the idea of milk as both nourishing and norm-preserving.

Postmodern Milk

With the end of the Cold War, capitalism no longer needed to define itself in opposition to another system. Communism had collapsed — and with it, the illusion of ideological duality. In its place, late capitalism began generating endless options within itself. Liberal capitalism succeeded in presenting itself as a system offering a range of ideals and lifestyles under one roof.

Corporations and marketers became adept at targeting every new subversive ideology with its own branded alternative. Identity, once collective and often oppositional, became increasingly individualized, fragmented, and absorbed into consumer choice.

Under the broad umbrella of liberalism, capitalism began offering ideological variation as product diversity — and nowhere is this clearer than in the rise of alternative milks.

By the early 2000s, plant milk had begun to signal more than dietary restriction. Soy milk first carved out space as a niche product for vegans and the lactose intolerant. Then came almond milk, which surged in popularity by 2011, outpacing soy just as wellness culture peaked. Dairy was recast as inflammatory, unnatural, vaguely suspect. Plant milk stepped in as the virtuous alternative.

Oatly’s 2016 U.S. launch marked a turning point: oat milk wasn’t just functional — it was fashionable. Suddenly, plant-based milk was a lifestyle marker, more than a moral or dietary choice.

The COVID pandemic accelerated a breakdown of institutional trust and triggered a wave of ideological rifts. What began as a public health debate quickly unraveled into something deeper: a full-spectrum backlash against liberal modernity. Anti-vaxxers, tradwives, wellness influencers, conspiracy theorists, and masculine revivalists have left a lasting mark on contemporary society — including its food systems.

In this climate, raw milk re-emerged as a symbolic trend. Once marginalized as risky or unregulated, it was suddenly framed as real, natural, uncorrupted. Social media algorithms, engineered to amplify radical fragmentation, quickly latched onto these currents.

Consuming raw milk became an act of resistance: not just nostalgic, but regressive. A rebellion against the so-called “woke milk virus.”

Alongside its economic aftershocks, inflation and deepening cultural division, plant milk’s progressive aesthetics began to look performative, even elitist. Its symbolism no longer held up in a world intent on questioning the status quo. Hipster culture, thoroughly absorbed by corporations, lost its cultural authority under the scrutiny of a fractured society.

Milk, at this point, has completed a full ideological 360: back to medieval values of purity and pre-Enlightenment beliefs.
The only question now is: what the hell will happen next?

Milk, Market, Meaning

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
— Mark Fisher

Turning every identity crisis, ideological rift, and cultural anxiety into a shopping category is what capitalism does best. Our economic systems profit from fractures that divide societies. The more splintered we are ideologically, the more space there is to sell us curated fixes. That’s why products no longer simply have to perform. They have to narrate.

Brands offer us direction in a hyper-complex world and act as signals to our surroundings: who we are, or at least, who we’d like to be. Milk, in that sense, is a perfect case study. It’s no longer just a liquid from mammalian glands, but a code. Even the so-called neutral “normal milk” isn’t really neutral anymore. Depending on your algorithm, it reads as nostalgic, nationalist, or normcore.

The brand economy is built on novelty. So how do you re-introduce a product that has been around since the dawn of human evolution? What new need or problem do you solve — one that the system itself has likely created? It’s no coincidence that the Boston Consulting Group coined the term “cash cow” — meaning a product that generates large, consistent profits. Milk has proven to be a canvas for reimagining brand narratives again and again.

But this reveals a deeper truth: while raw milk might pose as a radical rejection of modernity, and plant milk might be the “woke” choice, both operate within the same logic — a rejection of the status quo that’s already been anticipated, framed, and sold back to us. Marketing strategies don’t just meet needs; they create feedback loops that productize even the backlash. There is no outside. There is no escape.

In a culture that no longer believes in the center, Big Milk is losing narrative traction. And even though parts of society are regressing, most people don’t actually want to go back. What we crave is a future worth living for. But the question remains: is our current system truly capable of transformation — or are we just constantly shifting the goalposts?

Milk and Gender

“Species interdependence is the name of the worldling game on earth, and that game must be one of response and respect. That is the play of companion species learning to pay attention.”
— Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet, p. 19

It might sound obvious, but it’s worth saying: without female bodies, civilization wouldn’t exist. And yet, in a world built on patriarchal norms, this truth is often ignored. Female bodies are the center of life, but our culture, politics, and capitalism do everything they can to make sure we don’t fully see or honor that.

Milk is one of the ways this plays out. For centuries, it has been a symbol of family-centered morality: the idea that women exist to bear children and nurture them, and the ideal of the “perfect mother.” This concept was marketed and sold to women — that their bodies were meant solely for the needs of others. Somehow, this idea does not seem to sit well with modern women.

As gender norms continue to evolve and fracture, the notion that women are just vessels for reproduction and caretaking is crumbling. The rise of raw milk and the ‘trad wife’ movement might look like a return to patriarchal ideals, but it’s also an overcompensation — an attempt to reclaim control over women’s bodies in response to changing gender dynamics and the slow collapse of old power structures.

What’s fascinating is how this control over female bodies mirrors the way non-human female bodies are treated. The exploitation of both human women and cows is central to the engine of capitalism.

Yet, the connection between these two struggles is rarely talked about. The idea that the oppression of women and cows is linked maybe a though that could unravel the the foundations of capitalism itself. It’s a perspective Donna Haraway explores deeply in her work on human and animal relationships, but this concept of solidarity remains largely on the fringe.

It seems our current system thrives on dividing us — not just dividing people but also separating us from our shared experiences, from our collective understanding of life and labor. The link between milk and gender, and the exploitation of female bodies, human and animal, reminds us of an uncomfortable truth: that postmodern life is not a natural experience.

Milk didn’t change. We did.

Once a primal, bodily bond with our mothers, milk was grounding. Natural. Now this product of female bodies has become a product — and an ideological battleground. Every version comes loaded and reloaded with subtext. Dietary preference becomes identity. Purchase becomes performance. In the scramble for meaning, milk has become a perfect vessel for narratives, gender politics, purity myths, and class signals.
The more “choice” we’re given, the more fractured we become.

This isn’t really about milk. It’s about how our economies thrive on compartmentalization — on offering moral distinction in product form. Each carton its own flag. Each preference, a proxy war.

And that’s the point: there is no neutral consumption.
So maybe the most powerful thing we can do is step back and see the scaffolding for what it is. The ideological divides have become too severe to ignore. Or to simply continue milking that cash cow.

Have we reached the peak of cultural compartmentalization?
Is society ready to be weaned?

When even the most basic substances of life get pulled into the cultural crossfire, the absurdity becomes hard to ignore. And with that, a small shift becomes possible: by understanding how meaning has been manufactured, we can begin to release it.

In a world so invested in keeping us divided, creating shared, embodied experiences might just be the most radical thing left to do.