Scored monthly from 17 trend reports, 16 interpreter feeds, 40 market instruments · ◇ directional ◆ measured · how to read a dial
How to read a dial: the headline is the condition word, and the now line names what the read is made of — the systems and topics in frequent discussion right now. The needle behind it is a 0-100 position on a fixed scale specific to that dial (number and scale printed in each card's method line), scored monthly by the analyst from the full sweep: 17 trend reports, 16 interpreter feeds, 40 market instruments. It is directional synthesis, not a computed metric — treat ±5 as reader noise and ±15 as a real move. Where the feeds carry live counts, a measured tag marks that separately computed layer. Key: ◇ directional · ◆ measured — full guide in About.
Flow
sources → ingest (scheduled) → normalize to Signal schema → store (Supabase + Notion mirror) → Scan engine (fan-out) → outputs → viz
The migration lens
The scoring core: a signal live upstream (Tier 1) but absent from the interpreters (Tier 2) is early. That gap is the product, not any single source.
Hard evidence rule
No row enters a brief without a primary-source link or an explicit recirculation flag. Structural, not manual (Scan-01's own critique).
Cadence
Daily lightweight upstream skim plus a weekly full Scan. Tier 3 fetched on publication and always tagged lagging.
What needs a person, not automation
Credentials (Reddit app, YouTube key, Supabase writes), money calls (TikTok access path, Tier 4 subscriptions), and the niche-trained FYP itself: the one Tier 1 source no automation replaces.
A conscientious self-portrait of the cultural climate — a mirror you are standing inside, not a dashboard pointed at other people.
Why this exists
The social rules people live inside are mostly invisible to the people inside them. Everyone reads the cloth — the trend, the vibe, the take. The cultural climate reads the machine underneath: which threads are moving, which tensions are building, which rules are settling into place. The reading is handed to the people inside the culture, not only to the marketers watching them.
The test every line here must pass: it should read as here is what we are all inside of, never as look what these people are doing.
What the weave shows
Time runs left to right. The woven cord on the left is the settled past: every domain's threads, braided tight, because the arguing is over — that is what makes it history. At NOW — the woven globe — the cord unbraids: each domain's live threads splay into the open field on the right, because the present is not settled yet, and we are watching alongside you, not above you. A thread is one cultural move inside its domain; its weight is volume × resonance — thicker thread, louder move.
The domain marks
Directional readings are an analyst's monthly synthesis of the full sweep — 17 trend reports, 16 interpreter feeds, 40 market instruments — scored on a fixed printed scale. Treat ±5 as reader noise and ±15 as a real move. Measured readings are computed live from our own feeds: deviations from baseline, spoken in plain language on the surface, with the exact figure one hover away.
Where our sources disagree, we show the disagreement instead of smoothing it. Every score carries its confidence and its n, so a thin reading reads as thin.
The full method is published at /method/: the harvest counted by kind, the wiring drawn, the scoring stated, the cadences and limits named. The per-feed counts live at /receipts/.
We may write plain language instead of quoting a variance. We may not write "we think" where we mean twelve of seventeen sources. Every reading carries its date, its scale, and its provenance — and nothing here ticks in real time, because a reading is a considered thing, not a stock price.
The cultural climate is a live, present-tense instrument: a mirror you are standing inside, reading the climate as it forms — not a dashboard pointed at other people.