TL;DR: Low-agency calm under a loud systemic hum. Americans wrap themselves in familiar IP and rewatches, nurse niche joys, and conserve energy while courts, climate, campuses, and cash numbers drone in the background. Anything demanding attention—tech, art, institutions—has to prove it.
Sloptraptions is an AI-assisted opt-in section of the Contraptions Newsletter. Recipe at end. If you only want my hand-crafted writing, you can unsubscribe from this section.
Note: Trying a new type of analytics-forward sloptraption.
Big Screens: Franchise Comfort as Ritual
Domestic summer charts are a wall of known IP — Superman, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Thunderbolts*, F1: The Movie — while the worldwide list is led by Lilo & Stitch and A Minecraft Movie. Ritual spectacle > surprise.
Streaming: Rewatch Therapy + Parasocial Drip
Nielsen’s mid-year tally shows Bluey clearing 25B+ minutes; Peacock brags Love Island USA logged 18B+. Comfort procedurals (Grey’s Anatomy, NCIS, Gunsmoke) and high-volume reality dominate. Media = weighted blanket + social-comparison machine.
Music: “Micro-Anthems,” Not a Song of the Summer
Critics shrug: “The song of the summer is… nothing?”. Fragmented playlists, niche joy pockets, algorithmic pluralism > monoculture.
Climate: Heat-Dome Malaise, Dread as Background Noise
~100M people were under alerts; Level-4 heat risk splashed across the Southeast. The Climate Shift Index says this dome was ~5× likelier due to warming. See also Guardian and Climate Central. Climate fear is ambient: sticky nights, strained grids, short tempers.
“Meh, Not Melting” Economics
Consumer sentiment: 61.8 in July (5‑month high, still low) — University of Michigan.
Inflation: CPI +2.7% YoY in June — BLS release (PDF).
Jobs: Unemployment 4.1% — BLS Employment Situation.
Confidence: Conference Board index 93.0; Expectations 69 (<80 recession signal) — press release.
Manufacturing: ISM PMI 49 (still contracting) — ISM June report.
Macro Distrust, Micro Trust
Gallup: overall confidence in big institutions remains near a 46‑year low; Democrats hit a new nadir. Gallup. People route around “Big Anything,” trusting small business, the military, and science more.
Judicial Overhang: Power Fatigue, Not Outrage
67% now say they have at least some confidence in SCOTUS (up from 56% post‑Dobbs), but ~4 in 10 think it wields too much power — AP‑NORC, summarized by Axios. Term recaps show multiple conservative/Trump wins. Wary acceptance: rulings feel like weather, not negotiable policy.
Campus Chill: Compliance Lawyering, Speech on Ice
The White House used Columbia’s $200M deal as a template to unfreeze funds and impose monitors; Harvard, Northwestern, Cornell are next in line. See AP, WSJ. Executive Order 14188 (“Additional Measures to Combat Anti‑Semitism”) frames the posture. Universities lawyer up; DEI gets hollowed; chilled speech becomes policy.
Labor: Slow-Burn Militancy vs. Legal Clampdowns
Cornell’s Labor Action Tracker logs steady 2025 actions. 25k Safeway workers in Northern California threaten to strike — SF Chronicle. Meanwhile, GOP’s SHIELD Act would cut UI for strikers, as states like Washington expand it (state senate release).
AI Ennui: ROI-or-Bust Pragmatism
“AI fatigue” headlines abound: Fortune reports 42% of initiatives scrapped; MarTech and S&P Global echo burnout and mixed ROI. The mood isn’t Luddite — it’s “show me value.”
GLP‑1 Ambivalence & Body Anxiety
“Ozempic arrived and everything changed”: plus-size models say work is drying up; thinness ideals rebound. Guardian. Techno‑optimism laced with shame/envy and moral panic.
Cultural Self-Drag: “Worst Decade” Meme
The Atlantic cites a YouGov poll: Americans rate the 2020s the worst pop‑culture decade in a century. WHYY & Reddit threads amplify. Half bit, half belief — ironic despair with nostalgia inflation.
Authenticity > Hype (Fashion & Creators)
Vogue Business asks “Is this the end of the hype machine?”. Heron Preston buys back his brand; NGG/Farfetch falter. Indie control, depth, and community beat engineered scarcity. Slow, owned, narrative‑rich is the new flex.
Micro-Sports & Alt-Status Games
Google Trends’ curated hub spotlights the WNBA; SportsPro notes a 322% search growth. Pocket fandoms become identity badges.
Three Tension Lines to Watch
Nostalgia Blankets vs. Authenticity Quests — Theaters/TV lean safe; creators/brands lean slow and owned. Expect the authenticity lane to widen as mid-tier players realize scale without soul isn’t a moat.
Ambient Systemic Dread vs. Tactical Personal Agency — Climate, courts, campus policy feel “above my pay grade,” yet people fight on solvable fronts (body management, unions, micro-scenes). A sharp macro shock could snap sedation into either pushback or deeper resignation.
Escapism as Coping vs. Resonance as Meaning — Comfort content numbs just enough; micro-anthems, labor actions, and authenticity moves scratch the itch to feel something real. Watch for crossovers: when a “comfort” franchise lands real catharsis or a niche scene goes mass without losing its soul.
For now, Summer 2025 lives in the gray: cooling the panic, nursing low-stakes pleasures, and reserving emotional capital for fights that feel winnable.
Recipe
This wasn’t my normal essay-oriented sloptraptioning approach, and not a kind of writing I myself ever do. I gave o3 a dense sense-making vibe-checking prompt and had it do a kind of rich, directed, data-intensive gestalt-mapping, using search-based assessment of the environment. Check out my chat transcript — it’s a very different sort of dialogue, more like working with a data analytics person to create narrative-fragment views than with an apprentice writer. I found the “cluster cards” format it came up with the best balance between random-access/interactive exploration and linear narrative.
Using LLMs with browsing ability as a kind of automated, programmable zeitgeist scanner/observatory. This is the sort of thing I used to rely on hours of twitter-doomscrolling to track. Not yet sure of the right techniques to employ here — o3 kept wanting to make consulting crap-ware like dashboards, and interactive thingies, but I shepherded it towards a dense, readable summary. But there’s a lot of fun wonkery in the transcript.
Summarize our protocol for generating this final result in 6-7 bullet points
Frame & scope: Define vibe axes (doom↔hope, etc.), U.S. focus, Apr–Jul 2025 window, desired outputs (2×2 map, pulse timeline, brief).
Bucketed sampling: Cap quotas across pop media (films/TV/music), news/op-eds, forums, econ/poll data, SCOTUS/labor/campus items; light TikTok/podcast sweep.
Ingest & normalize: Pull headlines/metrics, dedupe, tag metadata (date, source, domain), prep text units (titles + ledes/comments).
Tag & cluster: LLM-score each item on axes + “escapism vs resonance,” embed, auto-cluster (HDBSCAN/k-means), then hand-merge/split and label.
Triangulate: Cross-check clusters against econ indicators, polls, and trend spikes; note blind spots and adjust weights if one bucket dominates.
Visualize & synthesize: Generate 2×2 map + weekly stacked timeline; draft ~100-word cluster cards; write the dense 2–3k narrative.
Package & export: Deliver markdown with inline links, CSVs of axis/timeline data, and plots; iterate only if you request tweaks.
Nice round up on current vibe in US. Would you be able to generate a similar round up on, lets say, India, with the same set of prompts with minor customization? And, also, make another run in October to generate a Fall 2025 US Brief?