How To Read for Trends

And about artificial intelligence, rivers, Matthew Perry, and shark COVID.

Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.

And one of those ways is to show you how to spot trends, a fundamental skill of professional futurists.

Short update before the main thing for today: (1) Tuesday’s elections outcomes were good news for Democrats going into 2024. They don’t allow us to do any point prediction about which party or candidates will win in 2024 but they do suggest that the United States continues to slowly trend bluer. (2) I continue to suspect that the New York Times/Sienna poll from last weekend that indicated that Trump leads Biden in four of five swing states is a bad poll or a blip. It disagrees with most other polls and is a single data point. It’s not a trend yet. The folks who watch for trends in polling haven’t changed their minds yet based on this poll. If and when they do you’ll start to see changes in their forecasts which you can find here on 270towin. (If you want to play with the map, you can do so here.)

So I said the country continues to slowly trend bluer and that this poll is a single data point rather than a trend.

Here’s what a trend is and how to read for them. Even if you’re not interested in that, then consider this: this is going to reduce your information overload almost immediately.

• Note: This newsletter expands on a section in my overview on how to predict the future. This newsletter will help explain almost all the other newsletters I’ve written — and most that I will write in the future. I’ve been writing about trends within particular layers of change.

WHAT IS A TREND? AND WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH LIZARD LICK, NORTH CAROLINA?

A trend is simply a pattern over time.

• Futurists look for what is increasing, decreasing, emerging, and transforming in a society, industry, religion, and the like.

• They also look for what may enable or constrain what is increasing, decreasing, emerging, and transforming.

• Futurists begin with identifying trends from outside of the client they’re forecasting for (exogenous factors) rather than within their client’s locus of control (endogenous factors). Why? Because no client is big enough to control the forces that affect it. I once heard about a futurist who was approached by a very large organization to create forecasts of the future of that organization. The futurist refused and said they could hire him to forecasts futures of their industry instead. The executives balked and scoffed and asked why. The futurist said I can do Futures of the Aerospace Industry but not Futures of Boeing because, no matter how large you are or whether you’re an industry leader, Boeing is not the determinant of the future of the aerospace industry. Boeing may make things that fly in the air but it does not control the movement of the air. (Boeing wasn’t the real organization in this story; I changed it to Boeing to help make the point.) This is why I never do Futures of Lizard Lick Baptist Church; I do Futures of the Greater Lizard Lick, North Carolina Metropolitan Area. (Lizard Lick is a real place in NC but it’s so small that if you stop for gas and linger for a minute you may be elected mayor.)

AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION TO MAKE

Most everyone I know is worried about bias in media and the overall quality of mainstream media. Most folks, when they think of “mainstream media,” think of cable news and the political media ecosystems of the Left and Right rather than about most working journalists. There is a world of difference.

HOW TO SHAPE YOUR MEDIA DIET TO LOOK FOR TRENDS

First, turn off cable news and leave it off except during actual emergencies or on election night.

• My wife and I canceled our cable package a few years ago and I activated a YouTube TV subscription briefly in November 2020 to watch Election Night (Week) coverage and then again to watch the January 6 Capitol Riot unfold. As a futurist I haven’t needed it otherwise.

• When I watch news on TV I tend to watch PBS NewsHour though all three major networks and BBC America’s evening broadcasts are still very good.

Second, every six months I recalibrate my media diet by looking at Ad Fontes’ Interactive Media Bias Chart. Most of the news sources I rely on are in the chart’s top middle box: straight news sources with minimal bias — Reuters, Associated Press, NPR, and a few others. I read a few news sources that also provide analysis and identify the levers within particular systems — The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Fast Company, WIRED, and occasionally outlets like Motley Fool and Hollywood Reporter.

Third, mainstream media is actually really good most of the time. If you remove the political-screaming “news” sources, we’re actually neck-deep in very good journalism these days. A great deal of what you’ll need as a futurist is already being covered. Journalists and researchers and academics and government reports already tell me about 80% of what I need as a futurist; they already spit it out. In public. And it’s already as reliable as any normal person could ask for. They’re not spewing crap, they’re telling the deepest truth they can from what they can substantiate. Futurists don’t have lots of secret sources of trend information most of the time; futurists’ real “secrets” are in how to read for trends and how they put information together into forecasts.

Fourth, everything that follows here relates to how I look for trends that affect the lives of regular folks. I normally monitor general interest media for general interest trends for general interest forecasting. But when I start working on a forecast on a specific topic, place, or industry I add the major news outlets for that topic, place, or industry. For starters.

Fifth, for the moment I am not going to talk about other newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, etc. as news/trend sources because right now I’m revisiting my media diet in that regard. I’ll update you on that in a future newsletter.

• Related: I’m terrified I’m going to have to start using Twitter/X again. If so, I’ll first watch Mississippi Burning twice, burn nine pounds of sage, pray not just to Jesus but to Southern Jesus, and then I will try to remember my password. I will fail. Because of Southern Jesus.

THERE ARE THREE KINDS OF NEWS. IGNORE THE FIRST TWO. YOU’LL GET YOUR SANITY BACK.

There are three kinds of news, according to Gerald Celente in his excellent book Trend Tracking (which was one of the books we used as texts as students in the futures program at the University of Houston back in the day). Celente says the three kinds are headline news (news that’s only important for a day or two), junk news (human interest stories that has no trend information in it), and real news. Most of the time, only the real news matters. It usually looks kinda boring but that’s the stuff that really matters to the future of something. Usually it’s scientific studies, new government reports, news about breakthroughs, explanatory writing (oftentimes hidden in the Opinion section) and long form journalism on the workings of an issue, industry, societal or religious domain, etc. Here’s a trick: Picture that ONE person you know who you think is a mature, smart, responsible person you respect. If that person would read a particular news thing, then it’s probably real news.

• Here’s another trick: Back in the days of yore before I started a project on futures for the Charlotte, North Carolina metro area so I bought each issue of The Charlotte Observer (hard copy, no website yet) for a full month and put them face down in a stack in my office. I ignored the stack. Then when I began the research phase I got that stack, flipped the entire thing over so it was face up in chronological order, and I read down through the stack in one or two long afternoons. The headline news stories were glaringly irrelevant by that point so I was able to skip those stories. The junk news stories? Skipped them, too. The real news stories jumped out at me: they were stories (and good data) on how the area was growing, what decisions were ahead for the region, what industries were growing and changing in the area, and the like. It was the best crash course on Charlotte and its trends that I could have asked for. But reading that stack that way also showed me who the savviest reporter at the Observer was when it came to noticing and tracking trends in the region: one of the Observer’s lead real estate reporters. So I interviewed him. How long did all this take? Three days. All of this is far simpler now with the Internet but the principle remains the same.

• If you want to reduce your information overload immediately, read only for real news.

• But reading the news this way means you’ll miss some stuff. For example I tend to miss most celebrity gossip and sports shtuff. Yes, yes, I am aware that Taylor Swift is dating some professional Sportsball player. I am not oblivious. And yes, I love Sportsball — watch it all the time.

WHAT QUESTIONS I ASK WHEN I READ

When I read the news or analyses on any system, region, industry, or topic I have a set of questions in mind:

• What is changing? How is it changing? What is increasing, decreasing, emerging, or transforming into something else?

• Why is it changing? And why now?

• What decision points or crossroads are ahead that could steer what’s changing into creating very different futures?

• What lenses or paradigms are being used to understand this change?

• Where — according to each and every lens/paradigm — should I point my attention for early warnings of new change or for which decision/direction the thing will go next?

CHANGE HAPPENS IN LAYERS

Look for deep-running trends rather than surface trends. One major change or trend in a deeper layer yields a hundred changes and trends in each layer above. The surface layers move and change quickly; the deeper layers change more slowly and profoundly. Trends in the deeper layers are the undercurrents; trends in the higher layers are the white caps. Look for the undercurrents; ignore the flash and bang of the white caps.

This graphic from The Long Now Foundation depicts it best:

• (I’ll write more on The Long Now Foundation early next year. I am a fan.)

From the start of this newsletter — and if you want to go back through the archive — I’ve been writing on futurist methods and perspectives and on topics that hit one or more of these layers. I’ll start with the bottom layer and move up:

NATURE: I don’t write about this layer hardly at all because I’m not qualified to, but the main trends at this level are climate change, sea level rise, population, migration, water supply, and the like. They’re all extremely important to anyone concerned about the future but my brain isn’t built to accurately grok those things enough to forecast about them.

• If you want to forecast futures for any low-lying coastal American city like, say, New Orleans, climate change and sea level rise are one of THE major trends for the future of that area because most of the city may soon be literally under water and then the city may poison the region as a result. Thank goodness we don’t have many low-lying coastal cities like that that are major economic, industrial, financial, or cultural centers that contain maybe a third of the American economy. Or where millions of people live. Because that would be really bad. Wait — WHAT?

• Special Note: Agriculture and famine actually are also features of the Governance, Infrastructure, and Commerce levels. The reason we haven’t had another Dust Bowl, for example, is because of a series of U.S. Government actions at the Governance, Infrastructure, and Commerce levels — actions that still help us all today, both domestically and abroad. Good Governance means fewer Dust Bowls which, if you’re a farmer, you care about. Or a human.

What I’ve written on within this layer: Again, really, nothing at all.

What do I read to find trends at this layer? Scientific American, Washington Post…. and I’m not sure where else. If you have good ideas for this, please let me know. This is part of my media consumption calibration I was talking about.

CULTURE: This layer’s province is that of a society’s or civilization’s orienting narratives and myths about itself, its perception of itself and who it’s people are, and what its mission is (or missions are) — those sorts of things. Religion and current theological emphases also reside at this level. All of those things change slowly but they do change.

• For example, Americans have always believed in freedom, democracy, governance of, by, and for the people — that itself hasn’t changed. What’s changed over the past three centuries is that Americans have slowly changed their mind about who should be free, from what, and why, and who counts as the people who should have a voice and vote in governance should include. If you’re not white and male or male and white you know what I’m referring to.

What I’ve written on within this layer: Here I talk about a slow shift from zerosum “Knight” thinking to nonzerosum “Gardener” thinking globally, and here I talk about how a major strain of American Christianity has been turning toxic — and sometimes deadly — over the past few decades and how that trend can be reversed. I’ve also written on whether/how America is becoming more secular. Sections of my scenarios for Futures of American Democracy contain Culture layer material.

What do I read to find trends at this layer? Woof, I’m not sure any more. Again: reevaluating. Mostly I keep a close eye on anything from Robert P. Jones and the Public Religion Research Institute and Pew Research Center, particularly its religion page. Otherwise for larger cultural debates and change I read The Atlantic, Washington Post, and sometimes the New York Times.

• Writings on what’s happening at this layer — the analysis moreso than the data — tend to be reflections of the analyst’s own paradigms or ideological or theological biases. So, for example, one of the best books on changes happening related to American churches is in The Great Dechurching by Jim Davis and Michael Graham. Their study is good; their reckoning with what that data means, why those changes are happening, and what may happen as a result I had some different thoughts about.

GOVERNANCE: This layer is just what it sounds like — but it’s not necessarily about politics per se. It’s about the orienting vision of the role of government, mission of government, how that government is structured, to what degree it is rooted in the rule of law, some version of supremacism, totalitarianism, etc., how competent and skilled it is, how honest or corrupt it is (in reality rather than how it may appear), how well it functions, and the rest. When I write on politics I am not writing to be partisan; I’m writing as a futurist who is looking at futures of American governance.

• Special Note: All geopolitical vision and strategy happens in this layer.

What I’ve written on within this layer: I’ve already done one large look at futures of American democracy and I repeatedly look at trends that may impact elections and thus would impact American governance. (Here’s a recent one.)

Why is Governance on a deeper layer than Infrastructure? Mostly because governments create infrastructure for all; markets and companies create infrastructure for themselves. Infrastructure for all creates countries; infrastructure for companies creates banana republics.

• Side note as we move into talking about the infrastructure layer: As a futurist I always look for which leaders (or candidates) talk about infrastructure and what capacities they are trying to create — the goals behind each project.

What do I read to find trends at this layer? The Washington Post is best source for trends that could impact American governance (for obvious reasons) but when I need to pay even closer attention — like when I’m trying to forecast whether we’ll have a federal government shutdown — I’ll read the morning reports and analysis from Punchbowl News, The Hill, and (to a lesser degree) Politico. During campaign seasons I’ll keep a close eye on 270towin’s Pundit Forecasts (which I mentioned earlier), Rachel Bitecofer and whoever she recommends, 538 (sorta) and a few others. There are more good sources but those are my quick go-to’s. For geopolitical vision and strategy, Foreign Affairs and the lighter Foreign Policy are great — and readable. Then I go to the thinktanks. Because they’re actually good. And smart.

Special Note: Two publications consider themselves custodians of the American Experiment and take that mission very seriously — The Atlantic (which was established before the Civil War as a voice for the abolition of slavery) and the Washington Post. Both publications provide excellent general-interest reporting and oftentimes great explanatory writing on trends that impact the United States and the world more broadly. And both will lay out the levers within systems within the United States that trends under way may impinge on, allowing us to forecast changes in that system. If you only get paid subscriptions to two websites, get those two.

After those, subscribe to your local newspaper or hyperlocal news source. They still do important work and news blindness can prove deadly.

• My hyperlocal news source broke the story early during lockdown of a rip-through of COVID through a local retirement community — and the mistreatment of residents by staff by locking them into their rooms for weeks to months — and helped local health authorities discover that some staff worked at several retirement communities in the area and had been unwittingly spreading COVID among them, killing residents and making that zip code the state’s deadliest for a while during the pandemic. Local and state elected officials and health officials subsequently went officially ripshit. Some places are now “under new management.” And half the stories about shady stuff going on? They’re not found by investigative reporters at the big news outlets; they’re found by local and regional news outlets. News matters. Local news matters.

INFRASTRUCTURE: Again, this is just what it sounds like — roads, water, schools, Internet, food safety, zoning, and the rest, the tangible things on which a society and an economy sit. Governments create most infrastructure and maintain it.

Infrastructure creates or enables economic engines to emerge. By watching what infrastructure is being built, where, and for what purpose you can forecast what markets are apt to emerge, what cities will boom (or bust), and more.

A couple of stories:

• President Eisenhower and a lot of lawmakers back in the early 1950s wanted to create a top-quality interstate system of highways across the country for commerce expansion/economic growth reasons but couldn’t convince enough lawmakers to pass the bill (they thought it wouldn’t bring enough bang for the buck) until Ike basically said “I could not have won World War II without the Autobahn.” That argument won the day and we got the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, otherwise known as the Interstate Highway System. Ike knew — and now every businessman in the world knows — that that highway system enabled every American industry that has to ship anything anywhere for any reason to boom. The Interstate is an economic engine that enabled many other economic engines in the United States.

• What could be the next boom in shipping and a new engine-of-economic-engines? Rivers. Not drones or high-tech anything. Rivers. An old protectionist law, the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, requires all domestic water-borne commerce be carried by a U.S. ship with an American crew, often ships of the U.S. Merchant Marines. The Act (otherwise referred to as “the Jones Act”) was well-intentioned but it created a choke point so bad that it became financially unjustifiable to ship by water and so a great deal of domestic shipping was driven off the water onto land… onto roads… into trucks… eventually onto the Interstates. If the Jones Act were to be repealed (which may or may not be a good idea) then either (1) we’ll have fewer trucks on the highway or (2) the same number will be on the roads but we’ll have even more and cheaper shipping on the water in addition to that. And what happens to some of those old riverstop towns that died off when river transit did? Do they come back? Or where would river shipping depots and ports be built instead? My point isn’t to advocate or not for the repeal of the Jones Act; my point is that if it were then the future of many American industries may become very different than the present. (Where did I learn about this first? The Atlantic, which Ad Fontes’ chart depicts as somewhat left-leaning, published a Cato Institute’s writer’s argument for the abolishment of the Jones Act. Again, The Atlantic both as a custodian of the American Experiment but also as a place to spot deep change and deep levers within systems of, say, domestic transit.)

What I’ve written on within this layer: Not much yet but I will as I get deeper into my Futures of What’s In Your Pockets series which I began here. As soon as I start talking about futures of what’s on your keychain — car key, house key — we’ll be diving fast into futures of urban planning, houses, and, you know, gas stations.

What do I read to find trends at this layer? The Washington Post, The Atlantic, CityLab and WIRED are my main go-to’s. (As American politics quiets down over the next few years I will probably spend more of my time and attention on CityLab’s coverage.)

COMMERCE: This layer is the domain of the economy and all economic indicators (which are nearly impossible to forecast, especially these days) and changes within industries (which are far easier to forecast).

Wait — why aren’t technological breakthroughs one of the layers? Isn’t being a futurist all about telling us we’ll be living in the world of The Jetsons? Tech breakthroughs belong in the Commerce layer until Governance is convinced to enact policy to create Infrastructure that yields transformational change. And medical insurance policy change. Which is how you get the Internet. And polio vaccines. And any vaccines. After that, technologies like operating systems and social media platforms become ersatz parts of the Governance layer and aspects of human governance.

• You know your uncle who keeps getting put in Facebook jail for advocating violence against whoever and keeps complaining that Facebook is violating his free speech? First, Facebook is not the government, it’s a company. The First Amendment prevents the government from curbing your free speech, it doesn’t prevent Facebook from doing it. Second, tell your uncle to learn the difference between the Constitution and a Terms of Service agreement. But the mistake he’s making? It’s because some companies have become Governance-level, Governance-layer institutions.

So artificial intelligence will start in the Commerce layer by the end of this decade, will settle down into some aspects of the Infrastructure layer by the end of the next decade, and down into some aspects of the Governance layer by the decade after. And we should be very careful about how we let it settle down, down, down.

And some medical breakthroughs (like mRNA) enable other breakthroughs and industries. So what I watch for are forms of technology and companies capable of yielding governance and/or enabling zillions of smaller tools. And creating new kinds of workers and enabling people to ask new kinds of questions. After all, as some wit once witted: The greatest product of the mines was the miner.

What I’ve written on within this layer: So far probably just this post but far, far more to come on this — again, as features of the Futures of What’s In Your Pockets series.

What do I read to find trends at this layer? There is no shortage of good sources for trends related to the Commerce layer but, Good Lord, Wall Street Journal, WIRED, Fast Company, Motley Fool sometimes, The Economist, CNET, even and especially The Hollywood Reporter — the business section of any major news outlet or the wire services, really. Lots of great coverage.

FASHION: This layer is mostly about surface stuff — what’s hot, what’s not, whatever’s ripping across TikTok this week, will we be dressing like Eskimos next season, celebrity news, whatever. I barely pay attention to this layer.

What do I read to find trends at this layer? I really, really don’t pay attention. There’s almost never any real trend information on this layer. I pay attention to news regarding my hobbies, of course, but I don’t spend much professional bandwidth on this.

Except that Matthew Perry died. That’s real news to me.

OK, last word:

BONUS: BUT WILL READING THE NEWS THIS WAY JUST DESTROY ALL HOPE I SHOULD HAVE ABOUT THE FUTURE?

No. No. No. You’ll gain hope.

When you start reading the news this way you might become deeply discouraged at first. Because you start finding out and realizing how bad our current problems are and how deep those problems go.

Then.

Then you start finding out that for every problem that you THOUGHT no one was working on there are at least one hundred stupidly brilliant people working on it already. And each of those one hundred have very smart friends. And you had no idea any of them were out there. This applies to every problem you can think of. Even the seemingly small ones.

• Here’s how I once reminded myself that none of us are alone on problem solving: I live in the Washington, DC metro area. This summer when we were at our neighborhood pool my small son asked me whether sharks can get COVID and die and he was afraid. And I didn’t know the answer. But the DC area being the DC area, and because of the worry on my son’s face, I walked to the edge of the pool and shouted HEY! ANYONE HERE A MARINE BIOLOGIST WHO KNOWS ANYTHING ABOUT SHARK DISEASE? And at the far end of the pool one hand went up.

My point is this: Anything you’re worried about? There’s a lot of people smarter than us working on it right now, they’ve been working on it for years, and they put their cleats on a long time ago and showed up to play. And when you read the news this way? You start finding out about all of those people and about all the work they’ve already been doing and that oftentimes they’re already succeeding. We just hadn’t noticed yet because we’re doomscrolling or TikTok-ing.

That’s a big part of why despite everything I am an optimist. And you should be, too.

And you should vote for the world you want to live in.

And if you can’t buy any of that yet, then hang onto this: sharks can’t get COVID. Instead…