Five Trends to Track: Antonia Ward - Stylus's Chief Futurist

Published 28 August 2026

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We’re prepping, proving we’re not AI, and revelling in the boring, the visual and the speculative in this issue of the newsletter. As ever, it’s a mix of weak signals and evolving mainstream trends, this time with added muppets.

As Stylus’s Chief Futurist, I’m professionally obliged to notice things. Each quarter I send a fast flick through five of them, plus some extras I noticed anyway.

Proof of Life

We’re tracking humans being humans in the age of AI: idiosyncratic behaviours and idiopathic communications. If you’re watching all your media on 1.5x speed like the young people do, Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma festival has explored feature film showings at this speed. More or less annoying than typing being replaced by whispering in the workplace? Look out for more self-consciously human email signoffs, too: “All errors are sign of life” or my favourite, “If I owe you an email imagine what I owe myself”. For more like this, read Harriet Armstrong’s beautiful little essay on the use of ‘lol’ in text messages.

Ain’t Gotta Get Ready

In the month LinkedIn sent a targeted email about “staying competitive and relevant as you age” (thanks, I guess?) I’m thinking about preparedness: casual prepping workshops about everyday resilience. ‘Peri-prepper’ women coolly staring down midlife. Death doulas moving from fringe to mainstream. And @askastrid’s ‘sovereign hobbies’ matrix has all sorts of sticky ideas about the preparation (and permission) needed to enjoy ourselves. Then a client used the word ‘primed’ just as I was reading C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score, on how scoring systems guide us into new ways of seeing, and why “what's easily measurable is rarely the same as what's really valuable.” I’d love a LinkedIn course about that.