Curated strategy read from ZINE’s META Trends 2025: https://zine.kleinkleinklein.com/p/meta-trends-2025
THIS ‘AINT INSIGHT. IT’S CONTENT.
Most trend reports today aren’t designed to reveal anything. They’re designed to look like they do. They’re fast, curated theatre—content that signals expertise without offering any. But that’s only half the problem.
The other half is the audience.
In a fractured media landscape full of niche echo chambers and existential noise, people are hungry for narrative. Anynarrative. Certainty becomes a product. And those selling it, regardless of depth or data, find a ready market. This is narrative bias at work: the tendency to believe a coherent story, even if it’s wrong, over a complex truth that feels uncertain.
So we have a supply of performative publishers. And a demand fuelled by narrative-starved readers. Grifters with snake oil, welcomed by willing marks.
Matt Klein’s META Trends 2025 breaks that loop. It exposes the incentives, language, and repetition behind our current trend infrastructure—and asks: what exactly are we buying when we buy into trends?
ACT I – THIS MESS WE’RE IN
There are over 250 trend reports published each year. None of them seem to help.
Klein’s analysis shows that most trend reports aren’t built to inform. They’re built to perform. Reports are increasingly created as content products, not strategic tools. They’re designed to signal that the publisher—brand, agency, influencer—is culturally literate. “We know what’s next.” But often, they’re stitched together from other trend reports, devoid of fieldwork, tension, or point of view.
They serve the optics of insight. But not the substance.
Klein fed eight years of trend reports into a semiotic and linguistic analysis tool. The result? Most language falls into dominant or residual categories—meaning it’s not new. It’s either already common, or already fading.
The language of change hasn’t changed.
ACT II – NO SURPRISES
Klein identifies three causes:
1. Echo chambers in ten cities. Ninety percent of trend reports come from the same global hubs. The worldview shrinks. The signals stay the same.
2. Trend curation as clout. Most reports don’t analyse—they collect. Curated from elsewhere, speed-written, and decorated. A flex, not a framework.
3. Trend laundering. Small ideas get seeded in niche media, amplified by bigger platforms, and then codified as “insight.” It’s performative repetition with the illusion of consensus.
But perhaps the most dangerous factor? Narrative bias. Audiences crave clarity, especially in chaos. A clean story, even if incorrect, feels safer than an ambiguous truth. Trend reports become comforting myths. And when both publisher and reader want the illusion, the loop locks in.
ACT III – WHO’LL STOP THE RAIN
Klein offers a way out. But it requires strategy, not aesthetics:
1. Talk to others. Especially not like you. Insight lives in tension. Not in echo chambers. Not in slides. Talk to the overlooked. Talk to those who disagree.
2. Stop hoarding data points. Start telling stories. As Grant McCracken (from Cultureby) said: “We want a theory of change.” Data points (nodes) aren’t enough. Meaning lives in the narrative connections (edges).
3. Seed futures with intent. Publishing trends means influencing them. This is foresight as activism. Don’t just report. Consider your responsibility. Don’t replicate noise. Pollinate deliberately.
REFERENCES
- Klein, M. (2025). The META Trending Trends: 02025. ZINE. https://zine.kleinkleinklein.com
- scenarioDNA. (2025). Culture Mapping and Language Quadrants. scenarioDNA Research.
- Barthes, R. (1957). Mythologies. Éditions du Seuil.
- Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations (5th ed.). Free Press.
- IDEO. (2010). T-Shaped People and Innovation. IDEO Labs.
- McCracken, G. (2009). Chief Culture Officer. Basic Books.
- Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- UNESCO. (2021). Futures Literacy: A Capability for the 21st Century. UNESCO Publishing.
