NOTE: Due human error, this episode was not properly uploaded to Spotify and Apple. I am re-uploading it now, along with episode 61 with Sean Josh Lekach.
People call him trend forecaster but this is wrong. Sean Monahan, like Brad Troemel, is artist-as-analyst. He thinks like an agency strategist, but he’s rejected the longhouse. This has led him to a strange sort of celebrity among culturenauts. He keeps naming zeitgeists—Vibe Shift, Normcore—and making gorgeous PDFs, but PDFs do not an artist make. What makes Sean an artist is his absolute refusal to play ball; the extreme stubbornness that original thinkers must insist on in order to batter away the stem cell AI people who want to turn us into more common organs.
62. Sean Monahan