Culture Isn't Coded

Matt Klein, Head of Foresight at Reddit and founder of ZINE, spends months each year manually sifting through global trend reports to get a feel for how culture is actually moving. Reading more than 70 forecasts side by side, he looks for the patterns, tensions and contradictions that machines tend to smooth over. In conversation with Protein XYZ editor John Sunyer, Klein reflects on what emerges when you slow down and read culture by hand – and why intuition, ambiguity and lived experience still matter in an age of dashboards, metrics and AI.

Protein This year's META Report feels unusually deep and intentional – almost archaeological in how it’s put together. Can you outline the process a bit? How long does something like this actually take? How many people are involved? 

Matt Klein It’s just me, however each year I have a friend lend a mind to ensure I’m not off base. It’s roughly a three-month process and it usually starts around mid-November, when all the annual reports begin to drop. From there, it’s about gathering everything and reading through it all.

I’ve definitely gotten faster over time – I know which reports are garbage and which are actually worth digging into. I won’t name names, but anyone who’s been doing this work long enough knows which ones are empty calories.

From there, it’s extremely manual. I parse out individual trends from each report, capture how they’re described, and then do that over and over again. Eventually I start colour-coding: okay, green themes feel connected; these pink ones are circling around something about overstimulation; these others are about slowing down or re-orienting life.

Just by sitting with all of that text, you start seeing connections – this links to that, that echoes this. And the important thing is I don’t want to just dump this into AI and have it spit out themes. I keep trying and it doesn’t work. This is about developing a pulse for what people are actually talking about. You can’t outsource that to a machine, which isn’t experiencing culture.

Culture isn’t coded – it’s lived. Pattern recognition here is a practice. And it’s also longitudinal: how do these ideas mutate year after year? That immersion gives you something no AI can replicate.

Once everything’s clustered, I’ll use AI in a very specific way – pulling representative keywords from each cluster of trend description and scoring them by social listening across media, film scripts, white papers, etc. That’s how we end up with two rankings: a human rank (how often something is mentioned) and a data rank (how much it’s actually showing up and growing in the world).

Protein And the discrepancies between those two? When those diverge, how do you think about that? Do you trust one more than the other, or is it really the relationship between them that matters?

Matt Klein There’s always discrepancy, which is valuable intel. You have to use both rankings. I don’t think debating which one is “better” is useful – it’s not a binary choice where we have to pick one. Each has blind spots; together they create nuance.

Here’s something I’ve never really shared publicly. You can map human rank against data rank, and then add a third dimension – growth velocity over the last few years. Suddenly you have a prioritisation matrix.

For example, two years ago, the META Trend “AI Colonisation” scored high across the board: human rank, data rank, growth. Fast forward to now, and that trend has sunk – not because it was wrong, but because it fully matured. AI has permeated any and everything.

Another example: environmentalism. A few years ago – high human rank, high data rank, high growth. This year? Not a single environmental META Trend. That disappearance tells you something important.

When you combine these lenses, you get insight you’d never get from intuition alone or data alone.

Protein Fascinating. Would you be open to sharing that framework with us?

Matt Klein Yeah – I can share that graph.

Another layer I look at is discrepancy rank – where human attention and data reality are misaligned. Take hyper-convenient shopping: low human rank, higher data rank. People don’t love talking about it, but behaviourally, and according to the data, it’s massive.

Then compare that to “Environmental Everything”: very high human rank, but lower data rank. Which raises a bigger question – are trend reports documenting reality, or are they trying to will preferred futures into existence?

I don’t have an answer. But I think that tension – between aspiration and observation – is where things get ethically interesting and question what are the purposes of these documents. Seed preferred futures or perpetuate hype?

Protein This connects to something Protein has been thinking about recently. A report on chaos versus control uncovers how brands are splitting between hyper-controlled, tightly managed identities and others that openly embrace chaos. It made me think about what you’ve said before about discordianism – chaos not as a breakdown of reality, but as a feature of it.

Do you think we’ve crossed a cultural threshold where chaos is no longer something people instinctively resist? Or is this just another oscillation that will eventually swing back?

Matt Klein That’s the question. Do you want your communications, branding and entertainment to mirror the chaos of the world – or to provide relief from it?

I don’t think it’s either/or. It oscillates. Right now, you see surreal, chaotic male comedians like Tim Robinson, Nathan Fielder, Connor O’Malley and Eric André having a real moment. They’re metabolising chaos through absurdism. They’re translating chaos into something that’s laughable.

Protein America is leading the way in cultural unpredictability and chaos right now. 

Matt Klein Yeah, totally. It’s fascinating because you’d assume that in moments like this, people would seek stability and comfort in their media. Instead, you see the opposite: let’s dial that shit up. It’s not always about escape. So sometimes it’s about translation – making the chaos palatable, survivable. 

Protein You’ve asked consultants and strategists what the defining word of our moment is – nostalgia, belonging, performative and boredom all came up, which Protein has explored through SEEDs over the past year. If you turned that question inward, what are the two or three words that feel most true to you right now?

Matt Klein Hyper-convenient. Impatient. Black-and-white. Closed-minded. Timid.

What we desperately need right now are the inverses of those words: friction, patience, ambiguity, curiosity, openness. These are all matters of nuance. Those are the prerequisites for a civil society. And we’re lacking in these skills and attributes.

They’re upstream of everything – communication, media literacy, cooperation, vision, empathy. And we’re flailing.

Protein What strikes me is that those qualities – patience, ambiguity, nuance, curiosity– are often very quiet. They’re not performative. They’re not rewarded by metrics or visibility in the workplace or in most social settings. It feels like we live in a culture that actively disincentivises them.

Matt Klein Totally. We’re hypnotised by dashboards – by metrics, outrage, visibility. Spectacle. In a crowded media environment, we’re rewarded for speaking louder, not listening better.

Quiet confidence – the ability to sit back, observe, hold an opinion without broadcasting it – that muscle is atrophied. Can you have a thought without documenting it? Can you sit with yourself for 30 seconds without needing to post the thoughts that emerged? That sounds small, but it’s harder than it should be.

Protein Recently we published a SEED titled Ambiguity Maxing. Do you think it ties into what you were just saying – about people consciously stepping back for a moment? Or is it something else? Because I also think when a lot of people now go on Instagram, say, everything is becoming so polished. There are so many content creators now. People feel like they can’t post anything anymore, that it’s too crap. Do you think it’s a bit of both? Or do you think ambiguity maxing and “camouflage culture”, which you’ve written about before, is happening for another reason? Are people just getting sick of social media? And: are they really? It’s easy to say we are, of course, but for me, the reality is very different. People love to complain. They aren’t logging off. 

Matt Klein It’s easy to say we’re over it, yet we still participate. We want to step away, but we can’t. We want to use the dumb phone… 

Protein None of my friends have a dumb phone. I’ve never seen one. 

Matt Klein Exactly. But I’m proud of my home screen. It’s hard but, right now, I only have a few apps. I try to live that way, but I know it’s difficult – basically impossible – to go back to ambiguity. I often go back to entertainment because it’s a good crystallisation of this.

Take Severance, for example. I think about ambiguity in that context. People might say David Lynch or Twin Peaks would never survive today because of how strange, ambiguous and open-ended it is. And yet, Severance is pretty ambiguous, and there’s a cult following of people forming communities around it, theorising because it doesn’t make immediate sense.

So yes, there’s definitely an appetite for this. If you build it, they will come. Make a weird show that doesn’t make sense, and people will engage with it, dive into Easter eggs, analyse it obsessively. If Twin Peaks came out today, there’d be subreddits and sleuths doing exactly that.

The problem is that our entertainment industry is timid. They’re beholden to dashboards and metrics, so they don’t make opportunities that don’t make sense on paper. Yet when a show defies that logic – like Nathan Fielder’s Rehearsal, a Tim Robinson sketch, or Severance – people show up and love it.

It comes down to the difference between post-rationalising and pre-rationalising. Right now, we live in a moment of pre-rationalising: we won’t commit to anything unless we can justify it in advance. “Do I have the dashboard? The metric? The deck? The support?” If the data doesn’t say yes, nothing happens. Post-rationalising is the opposite: you throw spaghetti against the wall and figure out why it worked after the fact.

This is much harder to do today. Yet when you create something that seems nonsensical on paper – like Heated Rivalry, a low-budget gay hockey show in Canada – it can be loved and embraced once it exists.

The question for clients, advertisers and entertainment organisations becomes: how do you build tolerance for post-rationalisation when numbers can’t always, or shouldn’t always guide you? Numbers can be a trap – they hinder us creatively. I don’t have the answer on how to overcome our fear and resistance here, but that’s what I’m obsessed with.