I once purchased a tweet from Kim Kardashian. 
Admitting I bought a forgettable endorsement from a forgettable person on a forgettable platform hardly seems like an appropriate story to share in a book co-authored by some of the world’s foremost thinkers on the future. But it points to a seeming contradiction in my interests: For someone who has spent most of his professional life trying to not-so-gently nudge companies and leaders back toward embracing their humanity, I have an unusual fascination with fake things.
I attribute this interest to my experiences working in advertising for the first decade of my career, before I shifted my focus toward trying to predict and describe the future. While I was developing creative persuasion strategies to sell everything from orange juice to cloud computing, I became a student of human behavior.
The team I used to lead would regularly talk to people and pore over reports from global analytics firms to develop consumer insights. Our goal was to create “personas” that would neatly describe large categories of people in terms of their beliefs, passions, and motivations—no matter how mundane or unexpected.
Why do people pick up the second magazine from the rack instead of the first? Why do they worry about climate change yet still buy bottled water? And why do they mistakenly place so much trust in false information, manipulated media, and fabricated celebrities?
It was this last question that fascinated me most: In a world of near-perfect information, why do certain people hold such power to influence us despite sometimes being demonstrably fake? We trust and follow people who are famous simply for being famous, or believe in the experiences of perfect strangers who post product and experience reviews online. We get duped over and over again by self-serving politicians and fame-chasing celebrities.
Thanks to the internet, we have plenty of resources that should allow us to instantly debunk any half-truth or anyone peddling half-truths. Fact-checking is at our fingertips. Despite this easy access to information, somehow people continue to be easily and deeply manipulated on a daily basis.
This invisible force is a potent fixture of our culture, but it isn’t new. Writers have been exploring and imagining its effect for much of the past century.
In 1928, in his seminal book Propaganda, Edward Bernays described the “conscious and intelligent manipulation” of the masses by governments, mostly achieved through imperceptible methods of persuasion designed to keep citizens in line.
Nearly a quarter-century later, noted science fiction luminary Frederick Pohl imagined a future where advertising agencies manipulated public perceptions and capitalism ruled the world in his dystopian novel Space Merchants. Both believed outside entities like governments or organizations shaped what we believe to further their own ends.
In 1970, Alvin Toffler extended this idea to suggest individuals were influencing us, too. He used the term “vicarious people,” such as artists, television personalities, and even fictional characters, to describe the outsized effect that both people and fictional characters were having on our identities and personalities. We model our behavior after theirs and increasingly use their examples to moderate our own beliefs and shape who we are.
As politicians preach more xenophobia, online influencers chase views, and the media curates sensationalism, we the people get assaulted by the fake all around us. And sometimes we reflexively create it ourselves through what we share online.
How can we live in a future where we might overcome—or at least better manage—this parade of fake personalities to become better versions of ourselves instead of indulging our darker impulses? To start, we will need to more deeply understand the nuances behind it. I have spent considerable time trying to do exactly that, usually by doing something that most futurists are loathe to do: focusing primarily on the present.
Nearly ten years ago, I began taking the stories I had read, interviews I had conducted, and conversations I had had over the course of months, and curating them into a collection of trend predictions. The focus for my exploration of each was a single year. At the start of each year, I would work with my team to publish the annual “Non-Obvious Trend Report,” covering 15 predictions that described what I deemed “non-obvious” trends in culture, media, economics, and technology. In other words, trends that most businesspeople weren’t yet talking about… but would be within the coming year.
When everyone was talking about Big Data invasively collected by big companies, I focused on a trend we described as Small Data, referring to data that was self-collected and owned by the consumer rather than the corporation. As cultural experts bemoaned the rise of self-centered youth and vilified them for their love of the selfie, I wrote about Selfie Confidence and how those seemingly narcissistic posts were actually an example of the natural desire for young people to define themselves.
Through every one of the nine years that the trend report was published, the continual aim was to try to think differently by remaining a student of the accelerating present. When asked, I would describe my “haystack method” in terms of reversing the commonly known idiom of finding a “needle in a haystack.”
Instead, I would often say, my method involves spending an entire year gathering the “hay” (stories, interviews, conversations, research) and then aggregating it into a story, into the middle of which I can place the “needle” (trend prediction) to assign meaning to and make sense of those individually curated sources.
The year 2020 will be the tenth year of this report, and the library of trends in that time has grown to well over 100 predictions. Because of the speed of publication and intentionally limited scope of these trends, I have always been hesitant to call myself a futurist. The term feels like an overstatement for what my team and I try to do—help brands and leaders understand the accelerating present.
And then there’s the reality of rethinking predictions every year instead of making a few long-term predictions and sticking to them. When you publish such transient trends, the natural question people ask is, are these predictions truly “trends” if they expire after one year? Even though we publish them annually, their scope is rarely limited to a single year. In fact, if a trend is well predicted, I often explain, it continues to be relevant over time.
If it is extremely well predicted, it might just become obvious instead of non-obvious.
So every year along with new predictions, we “grade” the old ones according to how relevant they continue to be. After a decade of following this process, some broader shifts in the evolution of these trends have begun to emerge.
One is the recurring theme of manipulation, influence, and the nature of how we shape our identities.
As the flood of streaming media offers us on-demand diversions for every moment, we are continuously bombarded with examples of how to act in every situation. Every theory for how to date, collaborate, compete, or achieve can be dissected, packaged, and delivered in real time.
The net effect is that we now shape our personalities through more consumption of outside influences than perhaps ever before. And the question we must ask is whether this is a good thing.
To further explore this dilemma, and the nature of influence, itself, I thought it fitting to share a single trend from each of the past five years of the Non-Obvious Trend Report and examine how each played a part in shaping our cultural understanding of ourselves over that time:
Everyday Stardom (2015) – The growing expectation of personalization leads more consumers to expect celebrity-level treatment and a sort of reverence that far outpaces their actual influence in real life.
Personality Mapping (2016) – As behavioral metrics explicitly map our personalities, organizations use this data to customize experiences to make them better (and/or more profitable).
Authentic Fameseekers (2017) – A new generation of creators leverage social media to amass fans, build personal brands, and make authentically sharing the mundanity of everyday life a monetizable product.
Manipulated Outrage (2018) – Media, data analytics, and advertising combine forces to strategically create content that is intended to incite rage as a way to drive deeper (and more toxic) engagement.
Artificial Influence (2019) – Creators, corporations, and governments use virtual creations to shift public perception, sell products, and even help us live vicariously by turning fantasy into reality.
Let’s look at these trends more closely.
In the early years of this decade, companies increasingly invested time and resources into data to deliver more personalized experiences to consumers. The result was an explosion of technological advances in hyperlocal commerce, facial tracking, predictive modeling, and artificial intelligence. All of them promised to deliver a truly differentiated experience for every customer.
Having grown accustomed to personalized experiences, by 2015 people focused just on them, expecting to be treated like superstars both online and off. Compounding this expectation of Everyday Stardom were the growing ranks of people experiencing their own 15 seconds of fame through content they shared online garnering likes, follows, and views.
The year after, many companies started to build sophisticated Personality Mapping models of their customers’ motivations, so they could deliver messages and products based on customers’ emotions or moods rather than on outdated demographic measures.
An unintended side effect of this overreliance on algorithms was that more content creators, in their quest to stand out, discovered a predictable formula behind virality—sex, shock, or comedy, for example. These content creators began to rise in popularity based partially on what they shared and partially on their willingness to share it with a level of casual transparency that sometimes seemed to treat privacy as a relic of the past.
These Authentic Fameseekers, as we called them, were sometimes famous for being “authentic” and willing to share the most intimate parts of their lives with their online audience. To some degree, this trend explained the popularity of a celebrity like Kim Kardashian—and motivated my client, at the time, to direct my team and me to purchase that tweet from her.
It was perhaps only a matter of time before content creators with ulterior motives began to use the same principles for their own ends. And so, 2018 became the banner year for what was one of the most popular trends we ever published: Manipulated Outrage.
The trend seemed to perfectly describe the polarized world of media and politics globally. Manipulation was everywhere and it was being used disturbingly effectively for everything from selling medications to winning elections in multiple countries around the globe. In a world where manipulation equals engagement, the cost of our learned indifference suddenly became steep. The outrage was impossible to ignore.
Finally, this past year, I introduced the latest trend in the evolution of influence, which we called Artificial Influence. Our growing understanding of media, data, influencers, and the nature of engagement has been leading some companies to manufacture their own ideal and sometimes artificial (digitally created) “virtual” influencers.
We are now officially in a world where vicariously created people (both real and fake) shape our perceptions of ourselves, offer us role models to emulate, and shift how we understand influence itself. In other words, exactly the sort of vicarious people Alvin Toffler predicted.
When I consider what it all means, my thoughts invariably turn back to that tweet-buying moment years ago when I felt like I was wasting far too much of someone else’s money buying something that seemed frivolous. Yet the truth about that supposedly short-sighted 140-character paid promotion is that it undeniably worked. Tens of thousands of fans cared about our client’s brand because of Kim Kardashian’s purchased endorsement.
It took me years to realize that perhaps this was exactly the point.
No matter whether we look backward or we consider the future, the incontrovertible truth seems to be that we are compelled to give our attention to those who master the art of capturing it.
We can’t help being vicariously influenced by these people, fake or real. And perhaps we always will be.
Rohit Bhargava is the WSJ bestselling author of six books on topics as wide ranging as how to build a brand with personality and how to see what others miss. His signature book, Non-Obvious, is a ten year project to curate and publish the trends affecting our culture, business, and behaviors. The book was shortlisted for the AMA Berry Prize and has won nine international book awards. The latest edition of this annual book is called Non-Obvious Megatrends, published in January, 2020. Rohit is the founder of Ideapress Publishing and Chief Trend Curator at the Non-Obvious Company. Prior to starting his companies, he spent 15 years advising global brands on strategy in leadership roles at Ogilvy and Leo Burnett. As a sought-after keynote speaker, he has been invited to deliver non-boring talks in 32 countries around the world and his signature workshops have been used by the World Bank, NASA, Intel, Disney, Colgate, Swissotel, Coca-Cola, Schwab, Under Armour, NBC Universal, American Express, and hundreds of others. Rohit is a popular Adjunct Professor of Storytelling and Marketing at Georgetown University and also writes a monthly column for GQ magazine in Brazil. He believes in listening before talking and his friends (and clients!) always describe him as a nice guy. To see his full list of 100+ past trend predictions, visit www.nonobvious.com/trends or to learn more about Rohit visit www.rohitbhargava.com.