Digital Waves — Pop Culture Collaborative (PCC)

Overview

In partnership with the Pop Culture Collaborative (PCC), we launched Digital Waves, a time-bound learning journey and digital bulletin designed to guide pop culture narrative change leaders and philanthropic partners through the rapidly shifting currents of digital communities and culture. This initiative supports the field in creating and strengthening expansive, resilient, and pluralist digital environments where millions of people can safely imagine, organize, and make meaning every day. 

Through Digital Waves, we've provided ongoing narrative intelligence to help field leaders navigate complex trends, including fandom formation, digital safety, and the rapid decay of digital platforms. Most recently, we translated these insights into a focused four-part research series on the best strategies for funding digital creators.

Strategy

Digital Waves marked a deliberate break from conventional consulting models. We knew that a static PDF trend report—however rigorous—carries a high cognitive load and rarely matches the attention capacities of exhausted field practitioners. So we let go of the "heavy report" format entirely and built something that could move at the speed of the field itself:

  • Responsive Digital Dispatch Model: We built the project as a living, evolving learning journey hosted on Substack. As a bi-weekly digital bulletin, it functioned as a kind of knowledge nerve center—letting the research evolve dynamically alongside the fast-moving shifts in digital culture, rather than freezing a moment in time.

  • Comprehensive Narrative Landscape Analysis: Led by Jeff Yang and Tracy Van Slyke, our research team mapped the ecosystem by tracking the rise of pro-authoritarian, white Christian nationalist, and manospherist movements — closely analyzing how these groups were weaponizing pop culture fandoms and video games to fracture democracy, years before these dynamics were widely recognized in the 2024 election.

  • Futurist Writers' Rooms & Strategy Workshops: Over six months, Robert Sinclair, Evan Walsh, and Aisha Shillingford (in collaboration with Yancey Consulting) facilitated systems-change strategy workshops and Futurist Writers' Rooms, bringing together PCC's staff, activist organizations, and philanthropic partners to co-create a new theory of change.

  • Counter-Visualization: Rather than only tracking toxic trends, we asked participants to counter-visualize—to imagine what kind of narrative infrastructure, what "oceans," would be needed to advance ecosystems centered on pluralism and justice instead.

Key Insights

Living Research Beats the Static Report: A traditional PDF report carries a cognitive load that doesn't match the learning rhythms of exhausted field practitioners. So for Digital Waves, we built a responsive, real-time dispatch model instead — a kind of ongoing knowledge nerve center that traces conversations and emergent futures as they shift, rather than freezing a single moment in time.

Impact

The living, Substack-based format proved to be far more than a delivery mechanism — it made complex futures learning accessible and genuinely exciting for the field. Instead of reading a static document once and setting it aside, funders and program officers engaged with the research in real time, telling us this ongoing storytelling directly shifted how they approach grantmaking and strategic planning. It worked so well that it's become a prototype for how we approach research projects.