THE END OF TRENDS

Emily, a founder of Nemesis, argues that trend forecasting has become unreliable in an age after trends, when unexpected connections are constant rather than rare and early adopters no longer reliably lead to the next trend. She draws on Justin Pickard's 2012 Gonzo Futurist Manifesto, which mapped sensitivity to weak signals onto the OODA loop, but says the Observe stage is now compromised by contaminated, overloaded media. Her talk, given at FWB FEST 2025, also recalls the GPT-3-generated DOOM Report from five years earlier, whose prediction of "the end of trends" she describes as prescient.