PEOPLE AT PLAY X Q ELEMENTS OF CULTURE
Three Cultural Shifts Inviting Us to Reconnect with Enduring Human Values
By Camilo La Cruz, Chief Innovation Officer – sparks & honey
With trillions of dollars in investment and extraordinary consumer adoption, AI now dominates the cultural and economic conversation. What was once a niche topic is now the fastest-growing technology platform in history, fueling public debate over safety, jobs, capability, and pace of development. Whether we welcome it or not, AI is now woven into everyday life in ways that are extremely hard to escape. For those of us who study culture, this moment demands a close look at how our values are shifting to protect, evolve, and redefine human connection.
At sparks & honey, we’ve spent the past decade building tools to make cultural change visible. Our trend taxonomy, The Elements of Culture, helps us make cultural change visible. As we enter the next phase of AI-driven change, three new Elements: Gatekeeping, Camo Culture, and Social Fitness, stand out to illuminate how the culture is evolving in conversation with changes in technology and media.
1. Gatekeeping: Connection Moves Behind Closed Doors
As digital spaces grow more chaotic, people are retreating behind private walls. Messaging apps now serve 4.23 billion users globally; WhatsApp processes over 100 billion messages a day. Discord reached 200 million monthly users, with brands like Uber, Netflix, and Samsung building highly active communities.
Signals point to a cultural retreat. By 2025, half of consumers expect to reduce or abandon public social media due to misinformation and toxicity, opting instead for private messaging apps and closed communities. The shift toward “Posting Zero” is accelerated by a perfect storm of AI Slop flooding the internet while creators are burning out on creativity.
Gatekeeping culture is showing up offline, too. Members-only clubs continue to grow across major U.S. cities. Younger adults are abandoning dating apps in favor of community-based ways of meeting, from reading parties to bird-watching groups and running clubs. Small community-driven gatherings are gaining steam.
Gatekeeping challenges current approaches to engagement. Dark social spaces like Discord are hard to penetrate, and subcultures often resist brand intrusion. Fragmentation slows engagement and makes it more labor-intensive than automated media models encourage.
But it also creates openings. When brands connect with the communities that matter, invest in them, and align budgets with the work, new, more authentic brand behaviors emerge.
3. Camo Culture: Strategic Incomprehension as Resistance
A linguistic form of Gatekeeping involves intentional confusion as pushback from a generation that feels exposed. “Brain rot,” Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year, reflects both cultural decay and refusal. Italian Brain Rot’s surrealist, AI-assisted videos earned 55 million TikTok views by leaning into absurdity. The “6-7” meme means nothing, and that’s the point.
This chaos serves a function. Researchers studying youth activism have documented “hidden, under-the-radar tactics” in response to surveillance, particularly among African American youth using “performance and camouflage online” to resist policing.
By turning language into a moving target, Gen Z and Gen Alpha have built a generational firewall that stands out for being disorienting and a bit of a narcotic at the same time. Understanding their internal language exhausts humans and algorithms alike. As one Gen Z writer explains about brain-rot humor: “We can either cry or laugh, and we have chosen to laugh.”
Brands don’t need to participate in camo culture, but they do need to understand the “why” behind it. A generation that feels exposed, economically shortchanged, and blocked from independence and middle-class access is building modes of evasion. The question is not how to integrate but how to mitigate the conditions that created it.
4. Social Fitness: Waking Up to Broken Links
The WHO’s first-ever Commission on Social Connection reached consensus: loneliness increases premature death risk by 26-32%. Nearly one in four people worldwide report feeling lonely regularly. Loneliness has been linked to increased burnout, declining productivity, and rising attrition—costing U.S. companies up to $154 billion a year.
Companionship is one of the top use cases for generative AI. AI romantic partners now sit at the center of the AI safety debate. And in a dramatic reversal, young people now report higher loneliness than their elders.
All of these points point to a cultural shift: people are beginning to approach friendships and community with the same intentionality as diet or exercise. Early signs include social fitness workouts, friendship apps, and social prescription pilots. Given what’s at stake, social fitness may soon develop the same sophistication we associate with physical fitness—complete with training methods, tools, and shared vocabulary.
Brands should take note. As life spans lengthen, marriage declines, childbearing shifts, and retirement norms dissolve, people will need new structures for connection. Social fitness will become everyone’s business. Brands can help by designing intergenerational spaces, rethinking retail as community-driven “fourth spaces,” and conducting research that fuels new forms of social health.
An Invitation to Reflect on Enduring Human Values
Even amid breathtaking technological change, our human operating system remains stable. These cultural shifts converge around enduring values: connection, belonging, purpose, and well-being. They illuminate how people adapt when the world speeds up and threatens to leave us behind.
The organizations that thrive this year will be the ones that understand how to build real community, read between generational lines, and treat social health with the same seriousness as financial performance.