36 predictions about culture in 2026

28:36Hey, this is Trevor McFedres. I guess I'm an entrepreneur, an artist, a recording artist, and an engineer, a software engineer. I think one of the more contrarian predictions I have for 2026 is you're going to start to see a real dollar premium for folks, especially those in the culture industry, who have a real point of view and a, you know, for lack of a better word, taste that is meaningfully differentiated. and that's largely because the LMs and the large models and the model companies have mostly seen their models flatlining, at least experientially, for folks who've been using ChessDBT 4.0.

29:14They probably didn't feel a major difference to 5.1 or 5.2 in the more subjective arenas. If you're coding or doing math or anything that has verifiable outputs, you see meaningful jumps. And that's for a lot of reasons, but in particular because you can generate synthetic data that is verifiable. You can generate off code and if it compiles, you can use it as training data. It's hard to generate a lot of synthetic data for poetry or music reviews or writing or whatever it is and actually determine whether it's good or bad at scale. And so I think you're going to start to see real dollar premium for creative people that can, you know, A, generate takes and determine whether this stuff is good or bad, create benchmarks these models can hill climb towards.

29:51But also I think the proliferation, a lot of these code gen tools and the lowering of the bar there is going to mean a lot of people with great ideas who would have had to pay a meaningful premium to engage an engineer or developer are going to be able to create things on their own. And we're going to see a proliferation of what I call like low TAM or low total adjustable market software that has really high pain points. And people will be able to chart accordingly for those things. So this idea that you could offset has probably been a depreciating skill set with this emergent, very high value ability to have good ideas and to then implement them with AI tooling means that it could be a really different future for those of us who felt marginalized by technology for a long time.

30:37Maybe a bit rose-colored, but that's how I see things playing out. As far as, and you can plug, I don't know, my DJ Yo Soft, S-O-F-T-T, and you can always follow me on Twitter at what.c-d-w-h-a-t-d-o-t-c-d. Thanks for having me. Hi, I'm Carly Busta, a co-founder of New Models, and this is my prediction for 2026. The internet as we've known it is once again under major reconstruction. Yes, media is always evolving. But in 2026, we will likely feel a fundamental phase shift that will cause us to relate to digital space in a profoundly different way. In part, this is because the internet as we've known it isn't really for us anymore.

31:22It doesn't really need us anymore. The internet as a place where we all go to dip into some shared sea of culture, however algorithmically siloed the pathways, however asynchronous our activity, is simply now just no longer working. In 2024, bot traffic for the first time exceeded human traffic online, and AI-generated articles outnumbered those written by actual people. This is possible in part because the majority of quote-unquote content doesn't need to deliver critical information anymore. It only needs to elicit interaction. And that interaction doesn't have to be human. But we humans still need information, and we still need a form of media that allows us to communicate amphitheatrically, meaning from one to many, at scale.

32:09I predict that in 2026, oral forms of communication will dominate, YouTube will be bigger than ever, and podcasting and streaming will remain strong. Meanwhile, the legacy internet will become ever more janky, ever more overgrown. By the end of 2025, ChatTPT clocked nearly a billion weekly users, a more than 200 % increase from the year before. AI agents will more and more be our intrepid scout, wading into the flaming landfills of informational dreck to procure for us kernels of what we will accept as facts, what we will believe to be the truth. The opportunity here is in creating a new media scaffolding that takes us as baseline, that assumes a new division of labor.

32:53On the one hand, bots and AI agents who do the reading and writing, sometimes even creating and performing. And on the other hand, neo-oral humans, scanning and sensing, prompting and selecting, and ultimately deciding what therein has true meaning. Thank you and wishing you and all of your AI agents a great 2026. You want it, you got it. Media.

33:43But I think 2026 is the year that all but the most hardened addicts are completely run off of the site and it no longer in any meaningful way shapes or drives culture. My other grim prediction, unfortunately, is that the New York Knicks will win the NBA final. This is Mike Pepe, a writer based in New York. First off, you're going to start to see options to turn off AI-generated content on different platforms and websites. because people are basically tired of slop and they're going to have to respond to user feedback. In the same token, you're going to see at least one media property and or organization institute a robust no AI pledge for the content that they receive and publish.

34:27The floor on the whole agentic AI hype train completely falls out. We're going to start to see that it's a fancy marketing term for unreliably calling an API and the use cases for having an AI agent really don't pan out economically because they're simply not able to scale and they lack context on what actual people and humans are doing. Developers are going to realize that it's kind of just what software has always been doing. So you'll start to hear that term a lot less. Twitter will have a new chief product officer. Barry Weiss will be out at CBS News. Substack growth will stall as it becomes pretty obvious that people are paying more for less in terms of their subscriptions and will generally start to see people pining for the media models of old, or as me and some other folks have said, the yearning for institutions.

35:16Democrats are going to find increasing success in using the Mamdani messaging framework. AIPAC campaign support is a huge burden now, and Democrats will start to take a long and hard look if it's worth it. And lastly, Brad Lander will beat Dan Goldman for the congressional seat in New York. Hi, my name's Anthony Demiri. I am a filmmaker based in New York. I just made my first indie movie called Love New York. My second one's coming out called Romance Never Dies. I also am behind the scenes on lots of very viral videos you've seen, the show Subway Takes, and our mayor, Zoran, who we've been making videos for for five and a half years.

35:57my thinking is that we're going to reach a peak saturation with all things terrible ai slop low quality low effort content scroll saturation you know people asking each other like what their style inspiration is or washington square park that's going to be done there's too many we've reached the limits short form content done let's stop let's move on let's sit down let's be patient. Let's watch a movie. What's back? 13-hour films, three-and-a-half-hour short abbreviated stories, novels, long-form content, sitting in a theater with people, engaging with humans in real life, being human again, hanging out, getting to know people, deleting apps.

36:47This is what's going to happen, obviously. This is what's happening. I mean, yeah. What else could happen, please.

37:22Republicans are going to take heavy losses, and those losses are going to reverberate through the rest of culture. In big media, places like CBS, which had really invested in lining itself with the Trump administration, I don't think you're going to see ratings return under somebody like Barry Weiss. I think TV is going to struggle like it's going to struggle, and now people are going to be angrier because you insulted their intelligence. But at the same time, in the creator economy, you're also going to see a lot of solo creators continue to struggle with the economics of going it alone. Individual subscriptions are not very competitive for consumers, so consumers would be more worn out.

38:02You're going to see more creators banding together, either for group subscriptions or in collectives or co-ops or for shared services. Anything that makes life as a solo content farmer just a little bit easier to live on. I also think that the turn to visual media is going to generate some backlash. Not everyone is going to want every podcast on YouTube. Also, visual creators are going to have to increasingly compete with AI-generated content, not just because AI-generated video is getting really good, but because they're going to figure out how to integrate AI into just regular social media consumption in a way, and that is going to make an already competitive creator market even harder to compete in.

38:45So that backlash is going to keep some people with text in some form, though I don't know if that form is going to be what all of us expect it to be. I know just for myself, I'm reading a lot more novels, but I don't think I would have counted on that if you were telling me that the future was going to be made of AI. What's up, Cujo? First time, long time. This is Harry Krinsky, co-host of the Nothing But Respect podcast. and my prediction other than the Houston Rockets winning the NBA championship is I think 2026 is going to be the year of the stunt I think that a sort of emerging meta that you're you're kind of already beginning to see with digital marketing and kind of savvy independent creators is to do like the only way to kind of hijack any sort of monoculture is via a stunt and you know the the Marty Supreme rollout has really kind of been one stunt after the other.

39:42But the particular stunt I want to direct your listeners' attention to is this funny phenomenon of like doing things that are explicitly sort of like anti-memetic, but knowing that they are going to be photographed, and then that photograph or that image or the idea of the stunt is memetic. Like a very obvious example is this like a 24 marriage ad in the Boston Globe, right? Like that's print media. It's dead. You know, a person is sort of cartoonishly anti-memetic. But everybody knew obviously it was going to get a picture. Can you believe they did this? And the can you believe they did this became the meme.

40:19Another example would be like buying one billboard. But then like that one billboard is only get so many things. But then, you know, an image of or a picture of that billboard could then have 70x the impressions of that billboard. And there's something about the kind of inverting the memetic, anti-memetic, online, offline thing that people are already doing. But I think it's going to be like every marketing, digital marketing agency in the world is going to like hitch ideas like that. And we are going to see a kind of cacophony of this kind of stunt. And that is my prediction. Excited to hear what the rest of the folks have to say.

40:56Hey guys, Ben Dietz here, publisher of SICK, the newsletter on Substack, and also co-host of Hip Replacement, the weekly podcast covering generations X, Y, and Z. So I really think that 2026 is going to be the year that we rediscover ephemera as a marketing platform. What's happened over the last five years or so is that the merchification of everything has proven that there's this incipient desire to mark moments of experience with physical goods, right? The collectible t-shirt, daddy's favorite meatball, so on and so forth. But what's largely gone under leverage is this power of free, low-cost, creatively formidable collateral that young consumers can collect.

41:36We're talking about zines, stickers, campaign lookbooks, pins, buttons, maybe even promo CDs and cassettes. Done right, those things deliver discovery and introduction and also shareability, collectability, and potentially even future retail value, right? There are widely accessible tools that make creation easy and inexpensive. And then free distribution through retail and IRL, social environments, bars, galleries, co-working spaces, creates holistic value. The publisher or the producer gets in the hands of an audience. The venue adds attraction for foot traffic. In other words, people are coming in for these things.

42:18and then spending money elsewhere. And consumers get a cool item to tell friends about. It's not a new strategy by any means, but I think it's poised to have a big couple of years. Production value is less important than the idea, so inspired distribution is the thing that wins over limited edition. Hello, my name is Teddy Brown. I write under T.M. Brown for the New Yorker, GQ, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and a bunch of other places. I also write the sub-sec, and it's supposed to look like that, which is ostensibly about visual culture, but it sort of merged or morphed into something a little more all-encompassing on the things we see and how they impact the world.

42:54Anyways, my predictions for 2026 kind of follow on something that I have talked about and recognized this year is that there is going to be this moment where institutional media is going to have to figure out what the relationship with individual journalists on staff are. Given this is sort of the second go-round pivot to video, and we're seeing a lot more investment from everyone from the New Yorker, the Times, the Atlantic, investing in making their journalists viable on screen, on video, for social media, you know, everything TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, as well as their own native video sites.

43:29I think there's going to be this evolution in how institutional media organizations have to deal with how they create stars and what happens when an individual contributor on staff ends up becoming a sort of a makeable video star and what happens is the relationship between themselves, both as a journalist and as an employee of an organization X, Y, and Z. Related to that is that I think we're going to see, and this is sort of countervailing to what I think a lot of the predictions have been for 2016 for this independent media and how that's going to look like, I think that we might see a realization that going independent is actually not a terribly frequent financial decision for a lot of journalists, even in the shadow of a crumbling social media because of interest in general.

44:22I think that you're seeing, you know, sort of the success stories in the subject are actually the exceptions rather than the rule, and that you're going to see people jump ship but not actually create any sort of sustainable income, and that there might be a return to safe harbors, relative safe harbors of institutional ecosystems that are realizing they can sort of give people their own platforms and also provide them a stable income, as well as an organizational support that doesn't exist on any of the platforms. I could go on and on about platforms and institutions. There's a great book by Mike Peppy here this year that goes into certain detail, But I do think that we lose quite a lot, ironically, by going independent, especially when it's in the service of a platform.

45:09So that is my general prediction for 2026. And thank you for putting me. Hello, this is Joshua Rivera, entertainment journalist and essayist and friend to the Culture Journalist podcast, as well as you, if you're cool. So in the coming year, I think newsletters will cease to be cool. I think they are now a vital part of the information ecosystem, the media world, and they are now on their way to becoming a new institution. Very happy for them. However, that is not where cool things happen. Cool things happen elsewhere. And I think in 2026, that will be zines. That will be thumb drives passed around bars.

45:59I think it will be the year of security throughout security where people are doing and saying interesting, transgressive, and maybe a little fucked up things, but in places where they will not be easily found, but evidence of them will be shared online. 85 of the right people will shell out 15 to 25 dollars for the right zine from the right person so long as they are seen as cool do i think this is great i don't know but it is interesting and i do think it might happen and i kind of think it's already happening so keep a lookout for that and you know what even better magazine uh make a deck of tarot cards do something cool that you can pass around to people and look for stuff that people are passing around.

46:51These algorithms and these AI programs are, you know, moving us away from the local and into a world of nonsense. And I think that people are tired of being isolated and corralled. But that's just what I think. Either way, I hope you have a wonderful end of year. It's pretty bad out there, but you don't have to be. be good or else I'll know, you know? So watch out. Peace. I'm John Herman, the tech columnist for New York Magazine. Over the last 10 years, at least, gambling has completely consumed and reshaped sports media and sports in general. This isn't entirely new or unexpected. Gambling has been a part of sports forever, and the way that sports media sort of first rejected online gambling was really, I think, a sign of how much everyone knew that it would take over when it was finally allowed to.

47:46And this is like a sad development in some ways. Sports is this great common subject that you can talk about across political lines, class lines, and now it is sort of like infused constantly with talk about bets, money, and corruption related to bets and money. My gut for the last year has been telling me that this is about to happen to political media in a way that is even more profound and that will happen, I think, even faster. And that's because of prediction markets like Calci and Polymarket. Calci and Polymarket were major subjects during the last presidential election. They were major features of the last New York City mayoral election.

48:29And while everyone sort of associates gambling with sports for obvious reasons, I weirdly think that sports media had more immunity and more capability for dealing with gambling than political media will. Political media is impossibly craven, drawn to new sources of attention and engagement. It's sort of financially precarious. I feel like everything is sort of lined up for prediction markets to completely transform coverage, to be a part of coverage constantly, to sort of gamify and like re-monetize political coverage in ways that are going to be rapid, total, and shocking. And once it sort of takes over political media, it's not too hard to imagine how it can start to directly influence politics itself.

49:19That's it. That's my prediction. That prediction markets are going to completely eat politics. And now, society. Hi, this is Stephen Phillips Horst, reporting live from Edinburgh, Scotland. I'm a cultural commentator, global philanthropist and actress and I am here to give you my predictions for 2025. My number one thing that I think is going to continue in 2026 and actually get worse but also become more of a hop-on political issue is lighting. Right now our streets are bathed in a horrible white blue halogen effect that is hospital-like and inhuman and makes driving at night awful especially with all the massive SUVs and their huge halogen bowls sort of blaring in your face.

50:04I think our domestic interiors tend to also have this awful white fluorescent lighting. Restaurant interiors, hospitality spaces, just it's become the default. And we all know what's happened with LED versus incandescent. LED, of course, can take on any hue, but so often the hue it takes on is one that is like five, six thousand K. I think there will continue to be a political movement for lighting to be more yellow, to be warmer, to be under 2 ,700K, under 2 ,500K, quite frankly. However, this movement, as it becomes more prominent, we're not actually going to see the effects of that in society.

50:40I think lighting is going to only remain warm in what I would call indie gentrified corridors. So, you know, Brooklyn Brownstone Apartments with, you know, the paper sphere lanterns, we're going to see it in, you know, chic hotels, but not that chic hotels. A lot of hotels are going to go for that default, you know, either a 4000 LED or just something more awful and white and new Renault's. And here's the thing is the super rich, right? The Elon Musk's, the selling sunset kind of houses, they're going to continue to do the hospital lighting. And that's really, I think, where this movement dies is the elites don't know about it or care.

51:21It's the cheapest thing. You know, the poors and society at large are going to be festooned, mutilated. by this bright white lighting. And so warm lighting is going to continue to remain few and far between despite the political movement in favor of it. Okay, that's one topic. I think the second topic that I think is going to be big in 2026 is medium-sized captions on Instagram. Not super long, but not super short either. I think the ages of both of those captions are over and it's going to be medium town. And everything is going to kind of settle into this non-specific space, culture in general.

52:02And that's what I think. Good luck. My name is Carolina Miranda. I'm an independent culture writer based in L.A. And I write for publications like The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books. And this year I did a series on the aesthetics of the Trump era for The Washington Post. My prediction, I think, is less a prediction than something we should simply be on the lookout for. And I call it the trollification of governance. And by trollification, I mean as in Internet trolls, you know, those bullies who rage bait online all the time. In 2025, the Trump administration has essentially turned government social media feeds for the White House, for agencies such as ICE, into what are basically right-wing troll accounts.

52:47You know, ICE has posted fake ASMR videos set to the sounds of chained immigrants. In the White House, Trump recently put up a series of plaques, some of which demean previous presidents like Obama and Biden. It's a style of communication that is cruel, relentless, immature. And other politicians, including Democratic ones, have picked up on the style. You have California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has used his social media channels to troll Trump. He's not trolling immigrants. He's trolling Trump. But the Democratic Party has also taken to posting such videos. You can find them on platforms like TikTok.

53:29Which leads me to ask if 2026 is the year in which we, the electorate, simply become a bunch of stans who cheer on the guy who can make the meanest put down. Zoran Mamdani's campaign for mayor in New York showed that it was possible to respond to attacks while remaining generally positive and focused on policy. It's going to be interesting to see which of these communication styles is the one that wins out. Trolls, unfortunately, have a way of sucking all the air out of a room. Hi, my name is Devin. I'm a writer in Montreal. all. I have a substat called Pericosm, and I wrote an essay called The Great Process Squeeze, which I talked about on an episode of The Culture Journalist earlier this year.

54:15And I sometimes release music under the name Persuasion. My prediction for 2026 is that Tom Holland and Zendaya are going to be hitting their Saturn return next year. So I think we're going to be seeing some strain on that relationship. And if we hear about it, then I'm definitely right. And if we don't hear about it, then it's probably even worse. So I'm still right. Just kidding. I'm not an astrologer and I'm not crazy about making predictions. But one thing I will be watching closely is how our usual social categories and cultural categories, like on the scale from, you know, rational atheist skeptic to like agnostic to spiritual and woo woo and religious.

55:02I think these categories are going to get kind of shaken up a bit in a similar way that a lot of other social and cultural categories have been shaken up over the years. There's already been some coverage of an uptick of interest in religion among Gen Z, but I also think even among millennials, especially older millennials, we're going to see some unusual developments or trends in that area. Like people you wouldn't usually consider to be spiritual or religious might be entertaining or speaking more openly about these ideas. or they might even become trendy in circles you wouldn't usually expect.

55:34I feel like this is a natural progression of the interest in the paranormal and the occult that seems to be happening through the whole like A24 phenomenon and its interest in these things. There's a very popular like million plus subscriber atheist YouTuber named Alex O 'Connor who I've been following for a while and it's been really interesting seeing him sort of soften up to Christianity over time and get more and more interested in esoteric Christianity and even the occults and, you know, start to identify more as an agnostic than an atheist and seems to be going in an interesting direction.

56:10And I don't know that because he's so popular and he has such a huge kind of hyper-rational like atheist following and he sort of debates with and has discussions with some of the biggest like figures in atheism. I think that might be a bellwether of something. I don't know. But I will be following this pretty closely personally, and I will probably be writing about it. And I think it's interesting. And Happy New Year. Hey, Emily and Andrea. This is Kieran Press-Reynolds calling in. I do a weekly column called Rabbit Hold for Pitchfork. I have a little grab bag of predictions. One of them is that legacy media in some form will start or like continue experimenting with live streaming.

56:53Maybe they'll hire dedicated live streamers. My number two is that there will be some sort of sit down or interview or confrontation between Nick Fuentes and Donald Trump. And number three, Jeff Probst will announce his retirement from hosting Survivor after the 50th season airs this spring. I'm Kevin Munger, a political scientist at the European University Institute in Florence. My research is about the internet and generations. And I think that 2026 is going to be the year in which this latent discourse and discontent which has been circulating around children, around fertility, and around the internet really takes center stage.

57:35So it is increasingly recognized that essentially all of the countries around the world are experiencing a decline in fertility, particularly countries in the developed world now are well below replacement fertility rates. But this is an issue which a lot of liberal commenters have a difficult time with. Conservatives have leaned into a kind of nationalist, pro-Natalist rhetoric that ties in with themes of racial purity. But I think that this is a genuine issue, both for economies and how they will be able to continue to grow given a shrinking population, and for a lot of the central social functions in society.

58:18The fact that grandparents have far fewer grandchildren, the fact that extended families continue to shrink leads to the intensification of atomization that we've already been seeing. And I think, maybe most acutely, for young people that do have parents, we're experiencing the spillovers that other parents' decisions, the decisions by the state or by tech companies have on your children. So where once, and as is the rhetoric coming from conservative circles that families should have total control over the spaces. Parents should be able to decide what's best for their children. Now, the fact that technology infiltrates every aspect of our life means that the scope of that control has to expand considerably.

59:01It's no longer enough to be able to have physical control over a certain interior of your house, but the potential exposure to various types of ideas or to the simple fact of screens and phones and algorithms is a first-order concern for a lot of young parents. And we're coming to realize that we no longer have control, that, in fact, the decisions made by all other people affect what decisions we have and are the choices our children might be able to take in the future. And this is going to lead to some kind of reckoning, that the narrative of individual choice, which has been paramount for the adoption of technology, is revealed to no longer be functioning.

59:43And the question of how to promote healthier childhoods and then hopefully more childhoods, as more people have more children, is going to be a first order concern in politics and culture. This is Douglas Rushkoff, host of Team Human. I don't like to make predictions, not just because it's wrong or I'm going to be wrong, but I don't know, I'm trying to be here now. But if I had to make a prediction, I'd say that things are going to get weird. And I mean weird in a good way, that people are going to start to realize that reality is a bit more plastic than we thought. and that those of us who recognize the quite unnatural origins of the constructed world in which we live, we're no longer going to be considered the crazy ones.

1:00:44I think we're going to find each other and more and more people are going to start denaturalizing the power structures and the way they've embedded themselves into our society. And that's going to be a little traumatic, but ultimately a whole lot of fun. I'm Gideon Jacobs, a writer and artist based in New York City whose work is often about our species' relationship to images. Sometimes I feel like our species is that addict friend who you can just feel is craving rock bottom, like aching for the event that forces the issue. And, well, I think 2026 is going to be the rock bottom we seem to want.

1:01:37Maybe China invades Taiwan, Russia assassinates Zelensky, and Trump finally crosses the Rubicon he's so openly flirted with about using lethal force on protesters. It's so dark. It's going to hurt. It's going to hurt. But rock bottom is necessary for change sometimes, as folks in the program will say. Hey, it's Luke from Welcome to Hell World and my new book, We Had It Coming, which you should check out. Here's my prediction for 2026. It is going to happen this year. You know what I mean by that. God's will. Naturally, of course. No need to come knocking on my door. I'm chilling at home, and I'll just be chilling at home when it happens.

1:02:25Before I go running out into the streets, that is. Shaking the mailman's hand. Kissing nurses and shit. All of a sudden there's a drumline and a mariachi band and breakdancers and fucking... David Guetta is DJing on a rooftop. If David Guetta is still alive. Maybe we'll even get to watch it live on TV. See the first flicker that something is really wrong. slowing it down and rewinding it after like when Lisa broke Ralph's heart. The realization in his eyes. The first single moment of self-awareness in 80 years. Like a flailing, panicked deer you've crashed your car into on the side of a snowy mountain pass.

1:03:06Eyes flittering back and forth. Surely this can't have been it. Perhaps a brief bargaining with God. God saying he's going to pass on the deal. Do not agree to your terms, sir. It's going to be like the Will Smith summertime video out there. Everywhere. People cleaning their cars and shit in the driveway. We're all going to get fired from our jobs for posting. It'll be 100 % unemployment. One single good day.

1:03:43This episode of The Culture Journalist was produced and edited by Emily Friedlander and me, Andrea Dominic. To check out more, head to our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. And if you like what you're hearing, leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.