Forecast is trendy with a chance of tech.
February 3, 2023
The Latest
Hello! Is this thing on? Looks for mic, taps keyboard instead.
Welcome to a very special edition of Part and Summaries. (Yes, that’s this email’s official name when not being referred to as just “newsletter.”) We’re coming at you on a typically non-newsletter week with something we’re very excited about.
Before that though, we want to say thanks – truly. If you’re like us you have an inbox with multiple digit unreads and a crash-threatening amount of tabs open, so we appreciate the time you spend with us both IRL & URL.
We wrote a future-of-tech forecast!
Have you read **Hyped or Slumped 2023?** We’re totally biased but it’s really quite good ;)
Produced in partnership with Garbage Day, an internet & tech culture newsletter par excellence, our first ever future-of-tech forecast nose dives into which trends are saying hiiiii and which are saying sayonara. If you didn’t click the link in last week’s ‘sletter, all you got was a tease of all the fascinating discoveries we made in talking tech with Garbage Day’s audience of trend deniers, dark internet skeptics, and Figmaphobes. Today, we want to spend a sec focusing on 3 of our favorite insights:
- No matter how many trillions of hours the red streamer tells us we’re watching Stranger Things and Wednesday, Netflix shows are so 2000-and-late. The old thing is the new thing because the old thing was never really broken. It’s satisfying to obsess over what’s going to happen on the next episode of the shows we’re loving. We need something to chat about with each other and who has hours to discuss the minutiae of an entire season? Catch us waiting for the next The Last of Us episode – long live the water cooler!
- Lifestyle influencers have lost their … influence. We’re looking for the niche and the personal, even if it means following a virtual avatar. What comes first: the algorithm or consumer demand? Creators often blame algorithms for putting them “in a box” and only rewarding certain types of content, but it appears that the box is also built by their followers. And the only thing most of us aspire to be these days is ourselves. We want to see “real” people using products they actually know, use, and love. So focus on building longer term relationships with fewer, more specific, creators who make sense for your brand and not just the ones across everyone’s For You pages.
- For all the sound and the fury that the metaverse, NFTs, Web3, and virtual reality kicked up over the past few years, they’ve become decidedly old news before they ever even started. The wild west of generative AI has *Wizard of Oz-*dropped-a-house on all of that in favor of a technology that actually has the potential to change our lives and whose repercussions we’re only starting to understand. Unsolicited advice: it’s good practice to only jump on a tech’s bandwagon if your business can bring new and unique value using that tool, rather than just riding the wave of a trend that may extinguish rapidly and leave you looking silly.
And before you go…
Here’s Hyped or Slumped again if you missed the link up top or just use the QR code below. (We promise it isn’t a scam.)
You can bet your bottom dollar that we’ll be back soon with other forecasts and lots o’ insights. Stay warm in the meantime!
