In the published report, the line was changed to “balanced, sustainable healthy diets acknowledging nutritional needs,” skirting a direct mention of beef and dairy, what a sustainable diet actually looks like, or any reference to the Western and largely wealthy countries that should most urgently start eating less meat.
While Monday’s IPCC report was the result of synthesizing years of research, Brazil and Argentina have been diligently pushing to delete references to “plant-based diets,” meat as a “high-carbon” food, and “Meatless Mondays” for years, according to a previous draft leaked in 2021 and analyzed by Unearthed, Greenpeace’s investigative outlet.
“Very wealthy people, they’re very, very risk-averse,” Surak said. “They’re kind of paranoid. They have a lot of money, and they’ll do a lot to keep it safe — a second citizenship, a third citizenship, a backup Plan B, a backup Plan C, a backup Plan D. … You’re getting more and more ‘Armageddon Americans’: Either [President Joe] Biden ‘the communist’ is going to take over America, or the fascists are going to take over.”
Now that old-world glamour is having a revival via the relaunch of the Waldorf Astoria, which was the world’s largest and tallest hotel when it opened in 1931. An immaculate restoration has added condominiums above the 375 hotel rooms, and “The Towers of the Waldorf Astoria” (where apartments are for sale from $1.8mn, through Knight Frank and Douglas Elliman) have already attracted more than 12,000 inquiries.
There is a distinction between uncertainty and ambiguity. We live in ambiguous times, not uncertain times. There is relevant information available for us to better understand the possible future ahead. The key to robust foresight is the ability to effectively combine distinct analysis tools to clarify the details of social change.
Central to the toolkit I teach to students and use with clients is a method of applied semiotics called Culture Mapping. Culture Mapping allows us to analyze language as patterns of social change. It provides a matrix to measure the way language migrates in meaning as it is used to express our affirmation or dissent from established societal codes.
Other tools are useful in providing additional context to establish hypotheses for analysis. For example, Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions allows us to establish benchmarks of distinct contextual meaning from county to country. This is particularly useful when determining how social language might affirm or deviate from norms in a country.
The foundation of these cultural dimensions is very useful for discourse analysis. The key is to see how the emerging language is deviating from certain norms. The signifiers of these deviations provide taxonomies that indicate the dynamics of change within that country. Evaluation of the distinction between probable and possible futures is determined by that taxonomy more than any other factor.
In the examples, here, I propose how EV adoption might differ in China vs. the USA. The language in the commercials provides examples of linguistic differences that confirm the hypothesis established by the cultural dimensions. How EV adoption evolves in each country will reflect the expressed synergy of dissonance in each cultural power system. How well each country trusts or mistrusts the social order they are in. USA: https://lnkd.in/dH-kc3kK China: https://lnkd.in/dvzdXwe7
How South Korea emerged as the center of the beauty industry is another interesting case study of cultural dimensions related to the semiotics of everyday life. Beauty in South Korea has become an expression of the tension of cultural dimensions. The innovation in the category has a lot to do with the dynamics of rapid socio-economic growth, rigid competitiveness, perfection, and an emerging desire to break away from all that and be relaxed and comfortable in one’s own decisions.
The ideological framework of “far away” has been used as a luxury signifier over the last few decades as externalities around it have changed. Its meaning has implied a sense of “global access” and “entitlement”. The water category is a prime example to see how these signifiers have evolved over the decades and face new challenges today as the idea of “far away” creates new cultural dissonance. Changes began to take hold after the recession in 2008 as a shift to guilt and localism began to replace global as having a more potent social currency for luxury.
Today that idea of global access and entitlement has more complicated problems. Growing inequality and the pandemic have made the idea of “far away” more complicated. We see luxury signifiers shifting to a more “escape pod” ideological framework. From space tourism to luxury bunkers and the metaverse as well.
A student in Analyzing Trends pointed to the Space Perspective package being sold, so you can be a passenger on a balloon-borne pressurized capsule scheduled to make its first test flights early next year. A $125,000 temporary escape pod.
Dystopias often share a common feature: Amusement, in their skewed worlds, becomes a means of captivity rather than escape. George Orwell’s 1984 had the telescreen, a Ring-like device that surveilled and broadcast at the same time. The totalitarian regime of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 burned books, yet encouraged the watching of television. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World described the “feelies”—movies that, embracing the tactile as well as the visual, were “far more real than reality.” In 1992, Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Snow Crash imagined a form of virtual entertainment so immersive that it would allow people, essentially, to live within it. He named it the metaverse.
a range of subjects: the invasion of Ukraine, abortion restrictions, fog, the Winter Olympics, illegal airfields in the Amazon, monsoons and the midterm elections…
The Visual Decolonization of Futures is a proposal to liberate the legacies of coloniality that have been sustained through the use of images in the field of Futures Studies. It is a project that confronts and disassociates images about futures from the hegemonic perspective of the Global North. It seeks inclusion, respect, and autonomy not only for individuals, but also for groups and social movements, such as feminism, the black movement, the ecological movement, the LGBTqia+ movement, etc.
Martin Karaffa and Divya Susan Varkey talk about Consumer Culture Intelligence (CCI), a tool by Hofstede Insights that helps marketing professionals make data-driven decisions.
Analyzing Trends with Tim Stock 