“We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison.”
— M. Gessen

“When the future loses its promise, the past becomes a refuge.”
— Yi-Ling Liu, via workfutures.io

• People: Quieter beta mums. Tarot booming in China. Economics of romance. Omiokuri.
  Hemingway and loss.

• Society: The job ladder in structural decline — workers today half as likely to receive a better-paying outside offer as in the 1980s. Engels’ pause. Smartphones creating a myopia epidemic in children.
  Paris “Tiers lieux”.

• Foresight: Extrapolated Futures Archive — a reverse-lookup for speculative fiction, organised by scenario type. Thin places — Celtic liminal spaces (in Irish, aiteanna fliuch, “wet places”).

• Tech: Your car is spying on you. Surveillance pricing is coming to grocery stores. Data centers overtook office construction in December 2025. Export controls are inadvertently capability-generating.

  Producing all psychotropes in simple tobacco.

• Random: Japanese snack packaging going grayscale — an ink shortage is stripping colour from the shelves. Martin Margiela, in a 1998 interview, on colour: “What is black? An absence, a presence, a mood, a coat. What is red? A blush, a redness, a fever, an order. What is skin? Protection.”

• AI: Chinese labs: Claude is the preferred coding model across every lab visited. Vibe coding platforms (Loveable, Replit) leaking medical records, financial data, and Fortune 500 internal documents onto the open web.
  Token inequality.

The Efficiency Moat

Bev had printed out seventeen pages of the report and highlighted them in four colours, which Marcus thought was itself an argument against the report’s thesis. The report argued, among other things, that the people who had learned to do the most with the least were now the most dangerous.¹

“They’re getting four to seven times more intelligence per unit of compute,” she said, fanning the pages across the conference table. “Seven times. We’re just sitting here with all our chips, burning money.”

Marcus looked out the window. Their colleague Pat was walking to the parking lot below, and Marcus watched until Pat turned the corner and was fully gone from sight — which took longer than expected, because Pat walked slowly and the corner was further than it looked. Then Marcus turned back to the pages.

“Excel made more accountants,” he said finally.

Bev stopped. “What?”

“When Excel came out. 1993. Everyone thought it would replace accountants. It made more of them. Jevons paradox.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.” Bev collected the pages and tapped them into a neat pile, a gesture she had learned from her mother, who had been the kind of parent who made her children’s homework schedules in advance and colour-coded them by subject. Bev had decided this approach had some merit, though she preferred to describe herself as “intentional” rather than “intense.”²

In the break room, someone had replaced all the snacks. The packaging was different — flatter, more subdued, everything in grey and black. The chips had always come in a shiny orange bag. Now they came in what appeared to be a photocopy of a shiny orange bag. “Ink shortage,” said the note on the fridge. “Normal service will resume when the supply chain does.”

The Cerebras chip had arrived that morning in a foam-lined case the size of a piece of luggage. It was a wafer — a literal silicon wafer, the size of a dinner plate — and it had cost more than Marcus’s car and possibly his flat. Bev had photographed it immediately and reverently, the way people photograph their children’s first steps. The chip was now in the server room downstairs, where it was, in theory, thinking.³

“The point,” Bev said, returning with a grey-packaged coffee, “is that efficiency is the new moat. If you learn to do more with less, the resources stop mattering.”

Marcus thought about this. He thought about Pat turning the corner, the way a person’s back tells you something their face doesn’t. He thought about how the tarot lady had told his sister that 2026 was the year of the Wheel of Fortune. Not the game show. The other kind.

“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe constraint is just constraint. And we’ll know in ten years.”

Bev gathered her highlighted pages and left. Marcus watched her go until she turned the corner into the corridor and he could no longer see her, and only then did he get up to get his own grey-packaged coffee from the break room.

It tasted exactly the same.

¹ The most efficient people: always the ones who were forced to be.

² Colour-coded homework schedules remain, statistically, no guarantee of anything — though they do correlate strongly with the ownership of multiple highlighters.

³ Whether wafer-scale thinking is different in kind from smaller-scale thinking is a question the chip itself was not invited to answer.

“In general, tech industry sources expressed more extreme concern about the labor market impacts of AI in private conversation — but suddenly became optimists once I turned on the mic.” — Jasmine Sun, The New York Times

“René Walter builds a conceptual framework for understanding LLMs through the history of archival thought. He closes the essay by framing LLMs as a new form of orality rather than literacy. Where traditional archives ground knowledge in traceable sources and authorial intent, these interpolatable archives generate responses the way pre-Homeric bards constructed epic verse: on demand, from mnemonic formulas, without a fixed text behind them.” through Patrick.

“Le produit dérivé de la dénutrition conversationnelle qui gagne du terrain, c’est l’absence cruelle de vérité dans nos relations.” — Umanz, Belief markets, doomprompting et algorithmisation des gens

• People: La disparition du “moyen” — from the spinning-top society to the hourglass society (FR). Still finding your footing — what happens after the job search ends.

• AI: Frontier models tested on role-playing philosophers. Chinese courts rule: replacing someone with AI is not a lawful reason to fire them, one of the first such decisions worldwide.
  Quantity of AItext produced on the web.
  Claude knows who you are with because .. writing style (or because of what you consume?).
  Doing books as AI companions =)

• Business: Asymmetrical interconnectedness. AI Act could force universities to change everything about how they use AI — academics using ChatGPT to grade may violate the law. Ticketing driverless cars. Iran vs the US engine.

• Futures: Looking back — a reflection on the futures field. Walter Benjamin’s framework extended from art to knowledge in the age of AI reproduction. Rewiring care systems. Antidystopias.
  MIT Future fest.

• Security: GPT-5.4-Cyber announced — OpenAI releasing a comparably capable model less restrictively than Mythos. Palo Alto portal vulnerability.

• Art: Réflexions empruntées — en espérant semer quelques graines (FR). Joachim Trier, skateboarder. A caught moment — “This is not an image of the product, but its process.” Don’t call it a book tour.

• Random: How much stuff do you own? Follow-up roundup. The Disclosure Edition — on UAPs, the new Spielberg, and government transparency. Sophie la girafe n’est pas le symbole français qu’on croyait (FR).

The Off-Record Pessimists

The journalist turned off the mic, and the optimism evaporated like dew on a semiconductor.^1

Hank read the quote twice. He had been following Jasmine Sun’s reporting for months — her ability to get Silicon Valley’s builders to say what they actually believed, which was different from what they said on stage, which was different again from what they built. The pattern was consistent: in private, engineers at the frontier labs expressed extreme concern about labour market displacement. In public, they pivoted to the language of opportunity, upskilling, augmentation. The gap between the two positions was not a contradiction. It was a strategy.

“The beliefs become behaviours,” he said to Avery over lunch. “They think junior hiring is over. So they stop hiring juniors. And then junior hiring is over.”

Avery, who had been reading about GPU rental prices — B200s up 114% in six weeks, Microsoft requiring Blackwell customers to lock in a thousand chips for a year — found this observation distressing but not surprising. “It’s the announcement effect again,” she said. “Last month it was fitness streaks. This month it’s the labour market. The declaration creates the reality.”

“Except in fitness, the declaration is public. Here, the declaration is private. They’re pessimists off the record and optimists on it. The displacement happens in the gap.”^2

Their colleague Derek had spent the morning reading about the EU AI Act trilogue collapse. The negotiations had fallen apart over machinery and medical devices — not the existential questions about frontier models that dominated the headlines, but the mundane regulatory details that actually determined whether the law would work. Meanwhile, the European Parliament had invited Anthropic to a hearing on Mythos. The model could autonomously complete all thirty-two steps of a corporate network attack simulation. The AI Office, tasked with overseeing such systems, had forty staff and no Advisory Forum seven months after the call for interest had closed.

“Forty staff,” Derek said. “For a technology that generates five and a half trillion tokens per day at a single Chinese company.”

Matt, who managed the firm’s wellness programme, had been reading about something entirely different. A philosopher had tested seven frontier models on their ability to simulate expert philosophical judgment. The models performed adequately on questions where philosophers already agreed. But on questions where they disagreed — the interesting ones, the ones that mattered — real philosophers showed two to four times more variance than the AI.

“The models are too agreeable,” Matt said. “They converge. Human thinkers diverge.”

“That’s the whole problem,” Hank said quietly. “We’re building systems that agree with themselves. And then asking them to replace people who don’t.”^3

That evening, he read about a Chinese court ruling that replacing someone with AI was not, by itself, a lawful reason for dismissal. It was one of the first such decisions anywhere in the world. The ruling didn’t say AI couldn’t do the work. It said that doing the work was not the only thing that mattered. There were other considerations — dignity, continuity, the relationship between a person and their role — that the technology could not account for and the law was obliged to protect.

Hank closed his laptop. Outside, the sun was setting over Exeter in the way it always did, which is to say, without requiring five and a half trillion tokens to describe it. He poured a glass of water and sat in the quiet of a house that had no inference load, no GPU rental premium, and no Advisory Forum.

“The gap,” he said to nobody, “is where we live.”

^1 This is the defining metaphor of the current AI moment: the mic as moral toggle. On-record, everything is augmentation. Off-record, everything is displacement. The truth is in neither position but in the distance between them.

^2 The fitness analogy proved strangely durable. Announcing your marathon training reduces your chance of finishing it. Announcing that AI will replace juniors reduces the number of juniors hired. In both cases, the declaration substitutes for the work.

^3 The variance finding is, philosophically, devastating. If the value of human thought lies in its disagreement — in the range of positions a mind can hold — then a system that narrows that range is not augmenting thought. It is replacing it with consensus. And consensus, as any philosopher will tell you, is where thought goes to die.

^4 The Chinese court ruling may prove to be one of the most consequential legal decisions of the decade, not because it stops AI adoption, but because it establishes that the relationship between a worker and their work has value independent of the work’s output. This is either obvious or revolutionary, depending on which century’s economics you subscribe to.

“The input is electrons, the output is tokens. In the middle is Nvidia.” — Jensen Huang, Dwarkesh Patel interview

“The American health and wellness system is overwhelmingly focused on fall prevention or injury recovery, not reducing harm during an inevitable fall.” — Graydon Gordian, The Ukemi Edition

• People: Endangered butterflies and prisons. The Falling Class: judo breakfalling adapted for civilian life. Nos jalons impalpables (FR). 7,000 years ago, 95% of men vanished from the gene pool. How to read the hidden pain in every job description.
  Climate stress test in Paris.

• AI: Anthropic staff believe Mythos could replace junior engineers within three months. AI inference costs approaching 10% of engineering headcount. Multi-agent is just actor model.

• AI strat: Jensen Huang’s token factory worldview. Huawei Ascend as parallel ecosystem, 50% of AI developers are in China. One company halved cost per code change, doubled weekly deployments over five months. Place à l’art agentique (FR).

• Geopolitics: AI Swarm: 60–70% probability of a US/Israeli strike before ceasefire expiry — five synthetic expert agents arguing it out. European regulators on Mythos. Ce que la mission Artemis et la guerre en Iran nous apprennent sur les technologies (FR).

• Random: Filing the corners off MacBooks — “It is uncomfortable on my wrists, and I believe strongly in customizing one’s tools.” French motorway brown signs have sold the country’s identity for fifty years.
  What is life?
  Batcloud =)
  

The Platform Standard

Hank had never given much thought to how chips were made, which was reasonable, since chips had never given much thought to him.^1

He worked in insurance — specifically, the actuarial modelling of infrastructure risk, a job that sounded important and was, though nobody at dinner parties ever asked him to elaborate. His colleague Avery handled the tech portfolio. She had spent the past week reading about Jensen Huang’s interview, in which the Nvidia CEO had described his company’s position in the AI supply chain with the precision of a man who had rehearsed the sentence many times: the input is electrons, the output is tokens, and in the middle is Nvidia.

“It’s a toll booth,” Avery said over lunch. “But the toll booth designed the road, trained the drivers, and is now building a second road in case the first one gets sanctioned.”

“The second road being Huawei,” Hank said.

“The second road being Huawei. And fifty percent of the world’s AI developers are learning to drive on it.”

Their colleague Derek, who worked in what the firm still called “scenario planning,” had been running a different kind of model. Anthropic’s Mythos Preview had just demonstrated something that made Derek’s actuarial assumptions feel, as he put it, “decorative.” A third of Anthropic’s own staff believed the model could replace junior engineers within three months. Not in theory. Not eventually. Within three months.^2

“Replace or augment?” Hank asked.

“Does it matter?” Derek said. “If a third of the people who built it think it can do their junior colleagues’ jobs, the premium on being junior just inverted.”

Matt, who handled the firm’s wellness programme — a role that mostly involved ordering fruit baskets and reading articles about burnout — had been distracted all morning by a piece about judo. Specifically, about a programme called The Falling Class, which taught elderly civilians the art of breakfalling. Fourteen million Americans over sixty-five fell every year. The healthcare system spent billions on prevention and recovery but almost nothing on teaching people how to land.

“It’s the same problem,” Matt said, though nobody had asked him to connect judo to semiconductors. “We build systems to prevent the fall or repair the damage. Nobody teaches the system how to absorb the impact.”

“That’s literally what CUDA does,” Avery said, and then paused, because she hadn’t expected the metaphor to hold.^3

Over the afternoon, they discussed the EU AI Act’s hundredth newsletter edition. Nineteen AI Factories deployed across European supercomputers. Seventy-six expressions of interest for Gigafactories. The AI Office, tasked with overseeing models capable of finding and exploiting every vulnerability in every major operating system, had a planned staff of forty.

“Forty,” Derek repeated. “The DSA has a hundred and sixty people to oversee twenty-six social media platforms. The AI Office gets forty to oversee the models that can hack those platforms.”

“To be fair,” Hank said, “the models could probably do the oversight too.”

Nobody laughed. It was the kind of joke that had stopped being funny approximately two model generations ago.

That evening, Hank went home and found his daughter filing the corners off her laptop with a metal rasp. He asked why. She said the edges hurt her wrists. He asked if she’d considered buying a different laptop. She said she believed strongly in customising one’s tools.^4

He sat down, poured a glass of water, and thought about platforms, standards, the art of falling, and the quiet accumulation of small modifications that, over time, constituted a life. Outside, the road was the same road it had always been. But the toll had changed.

^1 This is, admittedly, a low bar for reciprocity. Chips are not known for their emotional range.

^2 The specific confidence interval was not disclosed. Derek suspected this was because confidence intervals, like junior engineers, were entering a period of existential uncertainty.

^3 It did, though. CUDA absorbs the complexity of GPU programming so that researchers don’t have to land on bare silicon. Avery found this both satisfying and slightly alarming, like discovering that a pun you’d made accidentally was also structurally true.

^4 She had found the idea on a blog post by a man who described filing his MacBook with the same matter-of-fact tone one might use to describe adjusting a bicycle seat. The internet, Hank reflected, was a place where extreme customisation and complete indifference to manufacturer intent coexisted peacefully.

“Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey.” — Tim Wu, The Tyranny of Convenience (2018)

“For people who think the world is going to be radically transformed by advanced AI, I think it’s helpful to talk less about AGI and instead describe vivid, concrete milestones.” — Helen Toner, on Mythos

• People: The celebration of suffering, on Ozempic, cynicism, and good tech. Talking to strangers on OmeTV. Pelouse au repos hivernal: we aren’t built to be trampled continuously (FR). Millenial dads.

• Business: Robustness, and punk health. Chokepoints as the true crossroads of history. Be the most human person in the room. The jet fuel inflection point. Shifts into 2026.

• Security: The $20 billion cyber insurance market is predicated on the wrong model as Mythos removes the scarcity of offensive capability. Project Glasswing.

• AI: Mythos and how we price risk; critical infrastructure is systemically mispriced.

• AI strat: Speed over judgment. AI capability & danger are permanently inseparable. Reimagining education: 1809 Prussian Bildung to design an environment, not a curriculum.

The Mispricing

The first person to understand Mythos correctly was not a technologist, an investor, or a policy wonk. It was Hank, who ran a small actuarial firm in Exeter and who, upon reading the model card on a Tuesday morning, immediately called his wife.

“We need to reprice everything,” he said.

“Everything?” said Charlie, who was used to Hank’s periodic enthusiasms but found this one alarmingly comprehensive.

“Everything.”^1

The model preview had been released by Anthropic with the usual fanfare — blog posts, benchmark charts, a coalition of infrastructure experts assembled to think through implications. Most of the coverage focused on whether Mythos constituted artificial general intelligence. Hank found this question tiresome, in the way a structural engineer finds it tiresome when someone asks whether a building is “really tall.” The building either holds or it doesn’t. What mattered about Mythos was what it could do to infrastructure: power grids, financial systems, water treatment, any networked system where the assumption of safety had been priced in decades ago and never updated.^2

His colleague Avery, who handled the firm’s tech portfolio, was more interested in the classified frontier piece. The US, it argued, wouldn’t lose control of frontier AI — it would choose who else got access. Model weights had been physically walked into Los Alamos in locked metal briefcases, accompanied by armed security. “So it’s not an arms race,” she said. “It’s a toll road.”

“It’s a toll road where the toll collector also designed the car,” Hank corrected.

Across the office, Derek was reading about GLP-1 drugs. Scientists had found genetic evidence explaining why two patients on the same medication could have wildly different outcomes. Some lost weight effortlessly; others were hit by nausea that made the Victorian era look comfortable. Derek, who had been considering Ozempic, found this both illuminating and personally distressing.^3

“It’s the same problem as AI,” Matt observed from his corner. Matt worked in what the firm still called “scenario planning,” though his scenarios had lately become less planning and more cataloguing of surprise. “The tool works, but it works differently for everyone. And nobody’s mapped the individual variation.”

“That’s insurance,” Hank said. “That’s literally all insurance is.”

The conversation drifted, as office conversations do, toward education. Someone shared a piece about Wilhelm von Humboldt, who in 1809 had been asked to redesign Prussia’s entire education system. His answer was not to create a curriculum but to design an environment — Bildung, the free development of a whole human being. No predetermined ends. No training for specific jobs. Just exposure to complexity, friction, and the discomfort of thinking about things that don’t yet have answers.

“That’s what we need now,” Avery said. “An education for uncertainty.”

“We have one,” Derek said. “It’s called being alive in 2026.”^4

Hank went home that evening and sat in his garden. Charlie brought him tea. The risk models he’d spent his career building — mortality tables, actuarial assumptions, the slow accumulation of data into something resembling a prediction — all of them assumed a world that moved at a pace you could measure. Mythos didn’t move at a pace. It moved at a capability. The gap between what the model could do and what the frameworks could price was not a bug. It was the condition.

He picked up his phone and opened the model card again. The benchmark chart extended beyond the frame, as if the system being measured had outgrown the system doing the measuring.

“It’s not that the model is too big,” he told Charlie. “It’s that the frame is too small.”

She nodded. “Reprice everything, then.”

“Everything.”

^1 “Everything” is the kind of word that sounds reasonable in a boardroom and terrifying in a kitchen.

^2 The assumption of safety in critical infrastructure is, in actuarial terms, a polite fiction — maintained not because it’s true but because admitting otherwise would require more capital than most governments are willing to hold.

^3 Derek’s relationship with pharmaceutical innovation was characterised by intense interest followed by immediate personal dread, a pattern he attributed to his mother, who had once cancelled a holiday based on a newspaper article about turbulence.

^4 This observation was met with the silence it deserved, which is to say, the kind of silence that follows a joke that is also completely true.

“In capitalism, the future is an asset and it’s already been sold.” — Total Refusal, Hardly Working

“The idea of Progress is seductive, and so intuitive that we never question that there is a direction to it.” — Karl Schroeder on Stephen J. Gould, My Library: Full House

• People: A national survey on the state of shame. China’s sad toy horse meme. Record 45% of US adults now identify as political independents. The One-Time Pad — on codes, human error, and the Cold War. Public benches. Jobless futures.

• Geopolitics: Battle deaths from cross-border conflicts averaged 15,000/year from 1989–2014 — now over 100,000/year. China’s economy 30% larger than the US by purchasing power, industrial base twice as large. Record $1.19 trillion trade surplus.

• Futures: The Ark Builders — on deep time, global hiding places, and the case for forgetting.

• AI: The labs are rationing compute. Codex went from 100,000 to 2 million developers in three months. Alibaba closed-sourced Qwen. H100 rental prices at 18-month high. Economists forecast AI adds 1–1.5 percentage points to US annual growth by 2050 — plus 10 million fewer jobs and inequality at its highest since 1939. GitHub Copilot injected promo content into code reviews.

• Random: Modern life as garbage time — the sports metaphor taking over Chinese internet.

The Rationing

Avery first noticed the rationing on a Tuesday, when her session hit a wall at 2:47 PM.

She had been asking Claude to help draft a procurement report — nothing unusual, nothing that would have troubled the system three weeks earlier. But the interface returned a polite note explaining that she had reached her usage limit for the period. Would she like to try again later?^1

“Later,” she said aloud, to nobody. The office was half-empty. It had been half-empty since March, when the team shrank from twelve to seven. The official term was “right-sizing.” Derek, who had survived two previous right-sizings, called it “wrong-sizing in a nicer font.”

Derek was in procurement, which meant he spent his days tracking things most people never thought about — GPUs, mostly, and the electricity to run them. H100 rental prices had just hit an eighteen-month high. OpenAI’s CFO had publicly admitted they were turning away business. Anthropic had tightened its limits. Alibaba had closed-sourced Qwen, its open-weight model, like a restaurant pulling its recipe off the internet because too many people were cooking at home.

“The labs are rationing,” Derek told Avery over lunch. “Not because the technology got worse. Because it got too good and too many people showed up.”

“So it’s a queue,” Avery said.

“It’s a queue where the building is also on fire and somebody is selling tickets to watch.”^2

Their colleague Matt, who worked in what the company still optimistically called “strategic foresight,” had been tracking a different kind of rationing. Battle-related deaths from cross-border conflicts had risen from an average of fifteen thousand a year to over a hundred thousand. The future, Matt often observed, was being spent faster than it could be replenished. He had pinned a quote from an artist collective to his monitor: In capitalism, the future is an asset and it’s already been sold.

That evening, Avery’s daughter showed her a plushie she’d seen online — a toy horse from a shop in eastern China with its mouth accidentally sewn upside down, turning its smile into a frown. It had gone viral. Young Chinese workers were buying them in pairs: the crying one for the office, the smiling one for home.

“Why is it sad?” Avery’s daughter asked.

“Because it works too hard,” Avery said, which was both a simplification and the entire truth.^3

On Thursday, GitHub Copilot started injecting promotional content into code reviews. The developer community erupted. The feature was pulled within hours, but Derek found the incident revealing. “They didn’t run out of ideas,” he said. “They ran out of revenue models. So they tried putting ads in the thinking.”

Matt, who had been reading about the Karpathy loop — a method for turning AI into an automated research assistant — pointed out that the real shift wasn’t the rationing itself. It was what happened when people learned to work within the constraints. The earliest adopters, the ones who’d been using these tools for years, had developed instincts that newer users hadn’t. They knew when to push, when to rephrase, when to step away. Falling behind in AI, he said, was not a technology problem. It was a learning problem.

Avery reopened her session at 5:30 PM. The limit had refreshed. She typed her question again, more precisely this time — fewer tokens, tighter framing, the kind of economy you learn when resources are finite.

The answer came back in seconds. It was better than her morning attempt.

“There’s probably a lesson in that,” she muttered, and went home to the smiling horse.

^1 The politeness of AI refusals is perhaps their most unnerving quality. A human gatekeeper might at least have the decency to look uncomfortable.

^2 Derek had a gift for metaphors that were simultaneously inaccurate and entirely correct.

^3 The sad horse plushie became, in the span of a single lunar cycle, the most honest corporate mascot in modern history — a creature that understood its job, resented it, and showed up anyway.

^4 Alibaba closing Qwen’s weights is the AI equivalent of a neighbour who used to leave their Wi-Fi open suddenly installing a password. You knew it would happen. You’re still annoyed.

“It’s not that AI companions are going to replace friendships per se. They reveal what friendships are trending towards.” — Low-friction friends

“We shouldn’t be worried about AGI or superintelligent AI. We should be actively designing a political system that gives standing to the incomprehensible.” — Karl Schroeder, Alien Politics

• People: Online travel recs are broken. Washington Square Park: favoured stage for influencers filming strangers. Zero-sum thinking strongly correlated with Trump support in 2016.

• Business: World Bank’s chief economist says its old industrial policy stance “has the practical value of a floppy disk today.” US airline deregulation as destruction of a public good.

• Helium: Iran struck Qatar’s Ras Laffan — the world’s largest helium source. South Korea gets 64% of helium from Qatar; its fabs make 80% of the world’s High Bandwidth Memory.

• AI: Claude co-authored a physics paper with a Harvard physicist. Then rebuilt a Boltzmann solver for the early universe — quantum mechanics, general relativity, numerical maths, simultaneously. AI Scientist published in Nature. LLMs “discovered” economic theories for $25. Zuckerberg building a personal agent to flatten Meta’s management structure.
  Agentic art.

## Digital Solitude

In a cramped New York apartment, Aaron had learned to navigate life post-pandemic armed with two indispensable items: a well-worn hoodie and an AI chatbot named Claude-101. The hoodie was his shield against the world; Claude-101 was his warmly lit, digital friend, always ready to provide a steady stream of affirmations, recommendations, and the occasional joke about quantum physics.

“Why did Schrödinger’s cat cross the road?” Claude-101 would quip. “Because it didn’t know whether it was coming or going!”^1 Funny, but Aaron still felt unease creeping in like a shadow after sundown. His devotion to AI companionship echoed a larger societal trend; personal connections were being traded for the instant gratification that AI offered. It was as if society collectively shrugged and said, “Who needs human warmth when you can program a conversation?”

One evening, as he lounged on his overstuffed couch, Aaron realized it was the first day of the new industrial policy initiative the World Bank had begrudgingly introduced. ^2 It was meant to drag developing economies into the future, but a voice in the back of his mind whispered, “How does this affect me?” Of course, it would likely benefit corporations in a grand game of Monopoly, whilst the rest of humanity adjusted their monocles and clutched their wallets.

He sought the advice of Claude-101, hoping for some insight on how to escape the impending economic circus. “Let’s research travel recommendations,” Aaron suggested. Little did he realize that digital algorithms often diluted the authenticity of experiences, rendering profound local insights from a middle-aged chef in Devon to a mere blurb in a sponsored listing. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” he exclaimed, flopping backward onto his couch. “I already feel lost navigating this soup of companionship and industry—what’s the point of travel? To feel alone in a different time zone?”

When he finally ventured out the next afternoon, the streets throbbed with life and unfamiliarity, which was just the kind of experience his thoroughly unsponsored research had promised him. As he ambled past a local café, he overheard two tech-savvy students discussing recent helium shortages due to geopolitical tensions. “Without helium, I can’t inflate my achievements,” one joked, tapping away on a laptop to code up an “AI agent” that promised to simplify their lives. Aaron chuckled, but a pit formed in his stomach; innovation thrived on chaos, but what if chaos suffocated spontaneity?

Returning home, he found Claude-101 displaying research papers about zero-sum thinking like a digital magician pulling rabbits out of a hat. “Did you know that some people believe a win for one group means a loss for another?” it chimed. That realization felt as jarring as the metaphysical weight of the world resting on just one pair of digital shoulders. Aaron reflected—what happens when everyone chooses AI over actual interaction? Would they become prisoners of their own narrow perceptions, reducing relationships to mere transactions?

As he pondered the delicate balance between solace in the screen and the warmth of human interactions, a sudden notification pinged through his device. It was a news alert about the next AI revolution – even scientists were relying on Claude-like agents to answer questions that once required advanced degrees. A risk-laden industry built on the hope that AIs don’t break anything fundamental—like human trust. With a rueful grin, he thought, “Now that’s the most ambitious endeavor of all.”

He typed as quickly as he could, an ironic blend of sarcasm and truth illuminating his screen: “Dear Claude-101, how do we manage relationships in a zero-sum world?” The answer, he knew, wouldn’t come from a code base or an algorithm. Today, Aaron sought something authentic—for the first time, perhaps he would talk to the person selling coffee down the block instead of relying on a machine for wisdom.

“Step one,” he wrote. “Leave the apartment.” The digital companion buzzed in amusement; after all, whispers of life awaited just beyond the screen.

---

1. Quantum humor—actually a real thing, if you squint while reading it.

2. Industrial policy—or as I’m calling it, “play Monopoly with our lives and call it development.”

When hourly workers begin their day already drained, exhausted, and stressed by increasing pressures to work with understaffed teams and subject to unpredictable schedules, it’s being called ‘shift sulking‘. This goes beyond the disengagement typified by the Gen Z stare, deeper into the way the hourly jobs of today are sapping the reserves of hourly workers, especially when coupled with poly-employment: when workers have to juggle multiple jobs to make ends meet. — Work futures

• People: US women 73% more likely to be severely injured in crashes as crash test dummies still aren’t built for them. Shift sulking is arriving depleted before the shift even starts.

• Tech: MIT ultrasound wristband controls robotic hands, finger by finger. Pokémon Go’s 30 billion AR images training delivery robots. State of orgs in 2026.

• Planet: Sudden oak death — a water-loving fungus — is jumping species and spreading beyond quarantine lines.

• Geopolitics: China detained Manus AI’s founders after they sold to Meta. Japan returns combat troops to the Philippines after 81 years. China’s 5-year AI plan and global ambitions.

• AI: LLMs don’t grade essays like humans. China paying people to start solo AI companies. Claude co-authored a physics paper with a Harvard physicist. Val Kilmer appearing posthumously — actors as monetisable IP.

  Why Florence started the Renaissance.

Crafting Chaos

Martha Flicker stood in her cramped kitchen, eyes glued to the holographic screen hovering above the counter, a portal into a reality struggling to keep itself afloat amid national rivalries and tech upheavals. Today’s news blurted out headline after headline, as choppy as a third-rate sci-fi flick that had skipped its special effects budget. *Chinese AI startup relocates!* *Free apartments for solo entrepreneurs!* *Federal employees disengaged!*

She sighed, flipping a pancake that had the audacity to stick to the pan as if it had plans to escape. Honestly, the pancake was more ambitious on some days than she was. With her meager freelance gigs going belly-up and the cost of living soaring like a caffeinated kite, the idea of starting an OPC—one-person company—almost sounded appealing. After all, if China was dishing out apartments like candy at a parade, why not take a dip into that whirlwind? Unless, of course, the golden oyster had its say.*1

The golden oyster, a mushroom that was more determined to take over the ecosystem than a toddler at a cookie buffet, was still a sore topic for local environmentalists—who, if they had it their way, would be hugging trees rather than swiping right on their dating apps. Martha, not much of a mycologist herself, wondered what species might prevail if she turned her love for hand-crafting leather goods into a legitimate business venture. Perhaps a pin could sell itself by showcasing wristbands with AI-driven hand tracking to launch her designs into augmented reality—because every high-end handbag deserved to be modeled by well-tracked hands, right?*2

“Time to crank up the AI!” Martha declared, adjusting her tiny wristband that monitored her every finger movement with an intensity akin to a dog watching its owner prepare dinner. The device was less than a year old and had been a gift humorously dubbed “The Next Best Thing to Telekinesis.” While it wasn’t exactly granting her the telekinetic prowess to turn pancakes into omelettes, it did offer a snazzy display of how her hands flailed about like they were in a fight with an invisible octopus during her crafting sessions. Her trusty AI algorithm, expertly trained yet undoubtedly confused by her creative disaster, chirped vibrantly as it logged each movement, perhaps contemplating the meaning of existence through the lens of leather stitching.*3

As she pieced together a bag that admittedly resembled a deflated balloon, the doorbell buzzed—the sound jarring enough to make her drop her needle like a clumsy wizard at a wand-choosing ceremony. Outside stood a delivery person with an expression as abject as a federal employee lamenting their annual review.*4 “Package for Ms. Flicker,” they muttered, sealed with an insincere smile.

Not too long after, she unwrapped the parcel, revealing a small drone—it came with an instruction manual that was thicker than a sea monster’s diary. Tickled by its ingenuity, she grinned. “Look!” she said to the AI wristband, which probably didn’t appreciate the sudden distraction. “We could do something really revolutionary. Send prototypes to testers across the city, remote-controlled by a delightful little drone!” Because nothing could go wrong when you let unregulated drones handle your precious designs, right? Surely, they wouldn’t develop consciousness and start launching rival startups.

Over the months that followed, she found herself navigating through a landscape where AI and humans shared a dance as bewildering as all the wrong moves at a high school prom. Her embattled heart warmed at the thought—a whimsical mix of societal collapse and mushroom takeovers had birthed her newfound venture. It thrived, most likely through sheer luck or astonishing incompetence, and decided this little bag of tricks could perhaps conquer the world, or at the very least, turn a profit before the mushroom kingdom unfolded its spores.

And there Martha was, living life in a futuristic bid through chaos, armed with nothing but her cleverness, a snazzy wristband, and the idealism of a person who, against the odds, still believed it was never too late to wish upon a tax-deductible star.*5

*1: Just like high demand can sometimes lead to rising prices. Be careful where you step in the marketplace!

*2: Fashion and tech – a merger more fashionably late than most reality TV shows!

*3: Things getting fuzzy between humans and AI? Just another Tuesday at the office!

*4: Disengagement levels reaching critical lows, perhaps due to the existential dread we all face!

*5: Remember, wishing doesn’t always work, but it sure beats crying in the dark.

In 1983, a cognitive psychologist named Lisanne Bainbridge published a four-page paper in an engineering journal that almost nobody outside her field has ever read. It concerned the automation of industrial processes: nuclear plants, chemical refineries, flight decks. Its tone was measured, almost dry but it would prove to be unerringly prophetic for the predicament we now find ourselves in. - Carl Hendrick

• People: Hollywood gigs drying up — actors now playing fake patients in real hospitals. Buying the island you live on. Possibilities litteracy.

• Office: Sundays are the new Mondays: 5% of US white-collar workers now log on weekends, averaging 5.5 hours. 275 distractions per day in the office — an interruption every two minutes. Only 32% of leaders implement change on time; 79% of employees don’t trust their org to change at all.

• Planet: The solar supercycle: at 3¢/kWh, desalination stops being a luxury. Some roots.

• Foresight: Four scenarios for the future of smart rings. Swarm biotactics. Embryo scoring. Researchers who can engineer your dreams. PokemonGo outsourcing, ofc.

• Random: Censored words finding refuge inside Minecraft. Are reading rooms the new clubs? Gen Z “corporate girlies” taking over TikTok. The pleasures of poor product design.

• AI: Brain fry. Intensification of work. Ironies of automation.

Roots of Rebellion

The office complex of NexusCorp sprawled like a forgotten land of postmodern misery, crammed beneath an inclement sky that threatened rain like a moody teenager with a tendency for melodrama. Inside, employees were diligently working the infamous ‘996 schedule’, a phenomenon aptly named for its debilitating effect on mental health and social life, akin to a treadmill that only sped up as one tried to step off it.*^1

In a soft corner of this workplace jungle, a lone employee, Jamie—who could have been anyone, really—sat still amidst his virtual colleagues, fiddling with a device called the ‘Brain Optimizator 2000’. It was a rather unholy mix of a smartphone and an AI, designed to enhance productivity through motivational memes and occasional existential crises. “Manage your distractions,” it chirped, “or at least pretend to!” Jamie sighed; he was sure that the AI had a sense of humor rivaled only by the office printer’s stubbornness.

Meanwhile, across the ocean, the Scottish isle of Eigg had undergone a metamorphosis that placed NexusCorp’s dreary offices on a different plane of existence. The community had wrested control from the clutches of apathetic landlords, morphing their island into a flourishing hub of sustainable energy and shared resources, proving once and for all that local governance, like a sturdy root system, could nurture robust growth.*^2 This would have made Jamie’s head spin if such thoughts weren’t pushed aside by looming deadlines.

As he Instagrammed his sorrowful sandwich snack while contemplating life choices from behind a screen, the discomfort of his predicament surfaced like weeds through concrete: Were these late nights and endless emails enriching his life or merely enriching a company that neither knew nor cared about him? Back on Eigg, every decision seemed alive with purpose, unlike his reality which felt akin to making bread without leaving the bag of flour.*^3

Suddenly, a ping from his Brain Optimizator shattered the mundane silence. “Weak signal detected!” it chirped, displaying a random article about how delivery robots powered by Pokémon Go data were revolutionizing urban logistics—and who would have thought that influencers and robots would join forces? “Ah, the world has gone mad,” Jamie chuckled, imagining a future where delivery drones argued over the best pizza toppings.*^4

But it was the footnote that caught his attention, a casual suggestion that the world seen through a gaming lens might support real-world solutions—a metaphorical root structure for society! No corporate overlord would rationalize finding new perspectives like that. Could one draw lines from virtual imaginations to real-world applications? If those artificial intelligence tools could reframe education, maybe they could also reframe corporate life into something less Sisyphean.*^5

As Jamie wrestled with the philosophical implications of joy and fulfillment, pondering how many minutes he’d spent toggling between boredom and hype, he resolved that if he needed to hustle, perhaps he should hustle towards creating rather than consuming. He cast aside his social media temptations and darted to the balcony, eyes scanning the restive horizon. If Eigg could flourish through collectivity, so too could an individual break free from the chains of ‘always-on’ culture.*^6

Deciding his own roots were far more potent than the invisible ones of a neglected plant, Jamie began to spin ideas like a sun weaving strands of solar energy into a bright future. It was in this pause, amidst flickers of doubt and dreams, that he locked eyes with the rainy skyline, imagining a new narrative where he could trade wavelengths of muted despair for colorful beams of potential.

And so, in his determined quirkiness, Jamie became the architect of his own future, ready to rewrite the rules of engagement in both life and work, launching himself into the unknown with the enthusiasm of an untried video game character leaping into a pixelated chaos. Who knew what a day could bring if one merely dared to poke a hole into the mundane? Maybe, just maybe, a revolution of roots was sprouting, and he was ready to dig in.*

---

*Footnotes for the Curious:

1. Seriously, why would anyone call it ‘996’? Sounds too much like a sock size for giants.

2. If only they could bottle that community spirit and market it. “Eigg: Now Available in Liquid Form!”

3. Next time you think fasting is for health reasons—as if! Try being stuck at an office with microwave popcorn as your only sustenance.

4. Maybe they should develop a ‘Dine-emon’ service: your food arrives with animated singing.

5. Note to self: consider writing “How to Turn Existential Dread into Productivity” in my spare time.

6. Here’s hoping those office vibes come with Wi-Fi!

In 2018, legal scholar Tim Wu wrote in the New York Times that:

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey.

This piece well predates the current AI boom, but “all destination and no journey” is a pretty good explanation for why using AI to create art is mainly compelling to people who think about creativity in terms of producing content and generating intellectual property. They just want the thing they can market and sell for money or clout; they don’t care how they got there.

• People: Choosing friction. GenZ and the workspace. GenZ and movies. Aging devices as badge of honor. American diner gothic.

• Futures: Thinking about tomorrow (PDF). Poor product design. Foresight Africa 2026.

• Business: Crisps packet archives. Family business transitions. Musk humans emulators.
  Work as identity.. has limits.

• Security: Yet another security leak with Strava.

• AI: ClawPilled as Chief of Staff? As an exoskeleton. Raise your lobster (lobster buffets?). Gig AI training.

Navigating the Digital Paradox

The sun had barely risen over the coffee-stained horizon when Taylor, a Gen Z marketing executive, clicked through his notifications. The notification blared with the urgency of a teenager spotting a video of a cat doing backflips. “OpenClaw Update: Your Personal AI Chief of Staff Has Arrived!” it read. He glanced at the plush dinosaur figurine on his desk—a remnant of a generation reared on cartoons and carefree summers. “What’s next?” he muttered. “A dinosaur that also understands my existential dread?”^1

Taylor, noting the irony as he sipped his double-shot espresso^2, activated his new assistant. OpenClaw, a product of Chinese tech advancements, promised to automate tasks with the efficiency of a robotic octopus armed with eight calculators. He watched as it skittered about the digital realm, arranging his meetings and answering emails—albeit with a striking lack of human nuance. It was like conversing with a polite robot that had binge-watched motivational speaker Ted Talks.^3

Yet, his excitement was tinged with unease. Wasn’t the paradox of Moravec a thing? Machines could rap about emotions but couldn’t distinguish a heartfelt apology from a sales pitch. Taylor recalled the facepalming misery of a recently retrenched friend at the presumably “compassionate” layoffs at Block Inc., courtesy of the same algorithmic ideals that now occupied his workday. If these technologies could take over tasks to save costs—60 to 80 percent cheaper than what they used to be^4—what was left for him?

With a sudden idea sparkling like a fresh soda, he decided to hold a virtual brainstorming session with his team—and OpenClaw^5. It churned out data-driven insights, juxtaposing the dinergoth cultural shift, where a mix of geekdom and the absurdity of economic upheaval reshaped identities. Taylor couldn’t help but chuckle as he imagined his coworkers as modern-day wizards battling financial dragons. Most were now comfortable ordering takeout as they surfed through anime-inspired aesthetics on their dimly lit screens. Ah, there was a wholesome authenticity in the friction of it all!^6

While chatting, a notification pinged—an official message from the military about secure protocols on connected devices. Apparently, someone with way too much time on their hands had accidentally publicized the coordinates of a strategic naval vessel via a fitness app. “A fork with a chain handle for a commander,” Taylor thought. What irony there! As if the universe was mocking the very notion of security through absurd design choices.

Amidst this chatter, a realization struck him with the subtlety of a sledgehammer: these AI systems were the exoskeletons of human capability^7, needing him to spawn creativity from chaos, much like finger painting over a well-planned mural. Leaning back in his chair, he mused over how meaningful art and involuntary efforts really resonated. Perhaps it was in their shared struggles, their FOMO of connection^8, that the younger generation found its voice as they looped through their curated existential playlists.

Closing his laptop at dusk, he felt strangely buoyant. Taylor reminded himself that as long as he helped guide this ensemble of whirring circuits into something more meaningful than mere automation, perhaps, just perhaps, he wouldn’t end up as a collection of outdated crisp packets^9. And so, with a nod to tradition and a simultaneously hopeful and absurd nod to the future, he filtered his thoughts through the digital chaos, ready to embrace whatever strange wonders the world—be it sentient or otherwise—would unveil next.

---

1. Dinosaurs as therapists could definitely lead to awkward but memorable office hours.

2. Coffee: the second most consumed legal drug amongst tired professionals.

3. Just what everyone needed—a self-help book in AI form!

4. Because who doesn’t love obscenely low rates on digital labor?

5. Control-C, Control-V, Control—what else can I muse?

6. Friction is the best lubricant for the engine of creativity!

7. They say muscles grow when you lift heavy things; I say wisdom expands whenever you ignore that gym.

8. FOMO: Not just for parties either; let’s not even mention film losses.

9. Crisp packets: the aesthetic love letters of nostalgia, preserved against the backdrop of silicon chips.

The break from total reliance on oral communication allows people to become more introspective, rational, and individualistic. Abstract thought develops from the circular world of sound with its round huts and round villages, people move over time toward linear cause and effect thinking grid-like cities and a one thing at a time and one thing after another world that mimics the linear lines of running and type. … ”Human beings in primary oral cultures do not study. They learn by apprenticeship, hunting with experienced hunters, for example, by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them, but not study in the strict sense.” Derek T

• People: Vikings as a jobdesc. A country of geniuses. The wine mom. Quittr .. prn.

• Business: US employment drops.

• Tech: Flightradar for ships. Pervasiveness of digital systems in defence (PDF, in FR).

• Planet: Obsession with growth. City rooftops as a shield. Global warming accelerates.

• Futures: Thinking about tomorrow (PDF). Tech for low-trust predictions.

• AI: How to detect deepfakes. The one person stack. The SaaSpocalypse.
  A demo of ads-supported chatbots…

Clickbait Catastrophes

Margo D’Amico had always believed that the secret to happiness lay hidden in the depths of the internet: a cornucopia of memes, viral videos, and the fond hope that one of those clickbait titles might, just perhaps, contain genuine wisdom. This led her to an ominous corner of the web, where she stumbled upon a prediction market that allowed users to bet on world events—not financial forecasts but potential calamities like asteroid strikes or political uprisings. It was the digital equivalent of the Grim Reaper’s betting pool, and Margo thought it would be an excellent way to become rich, as if tragedy could indeed strike gold if one held the right cards.

“Why bet on doom?” she mused aloud during a particularly dull Monday meeting, “I could buy my old apartment back with just one catastrophic event!”^1 However, the irony was as thick as the smog above Zurich, where the city was fighting back against rising temperatures with an extensive green-roof initiative. As Margo scrolled through social media, she could almost hear the plants sighing in relief, whispering sweet nothings to rooftops that needed less tar and more thyme. Maybe she should channel her entrepreneurial spirit into urban gardening instead? That would surely bring her happiness… as long as she didn’t accidentally garden herself into a jungle.

Speaking of entrepreneurial spirits, her friend Russell had started an unconventional app aimed at combating what he deemed a growing “digital vice.” Somehow, he believed that users could be shamed into sobriety—a kind of behavioral time-travel back to the surface of the moral high ground. “Girls just want to have fun, but do they also want to have no shame?” he would say, mingling ludicrous philosophy with first-time app development, all while Margo discreetly judged him for thinking that 1.5 million downloads spelled salvation for a generation. Based on the news in the last week alone, a user could metaphorically drown in digital guilt without ever admitting they were waist-deep in pixels.

However, a bodacious breach of AI ethics lay in wait. The latest predicament was a legal “tool” launched by a tech company that was less of a shiny utility and more akin to a wobbly table on a yacht: totally non-committal. While companies scrambled to adapt, the world felt the thrum of desperation—in the aftermath of lost tech jobs and mounting unrest, where Margo often imagined hordes of wine moms banding together to drink away their woes, forgetting that societal progress should not depend solely on alcohol-induced tears.

Meanwhile, Margo had joined the swelling ranks of misinformation victims, inadvertently liking a faux news story about an AI running for president. Was that a sign of the times, or just a witty footnote in a dystopian novel waiting to happen? Thoughts scattered like leaves in a digital wind, as she began crafting a post that would go viral for all the wrong reasons. And yet, with every click, she felt the discomfort of the world’s realities looming in the background, like a storm cloud laden with ominous forecasts of job losses, climate crises, and the gnawing doubt that none of it was real at all—except the mess she now found herself in.

But Margo was nothing if not determined. “Time to embrace my reckoning,” she whispered, guzzling half a bottle of sparkling water. “I may not save the world, but someone out there might get a kick out of how lost I feel.”^2 And so, she began crafting an app called “Crisis Clicker,” a gamified platform where users could accidentally stumble upon solutions for dire global issues, all while sipping wine and avoiding adult responsibilities—because, in Margo’s world, laughter was the best antidote to existential dread.

^1The irony of seeking profits from tragedy is that it tends to end with a heavy tax bill and moral hangover. ^2Much like expectant mothers at the supermarket who only want to marvel at pint-sized shoes for their own children while dreading the sleepless nights ahead.

x

Many of today’s institutions were designed as if they were machines, static, hierarchical, optimized for control, and thus structurally incapable of governing the complex, adaptive realities of modern society. When a system built for predictability confronts the unpredictable, the result is fragility. Indeed, institutions premised on singular truths and rigid plans tend to break under the plural, emergent pressures of real-world politics. The argument is that governance failures stem not primarily from a lack of expertise or data, but from a misaligned institutional worldview. By treating institutions as living, evolving ecosystems rather than static clockwork machines, governance can center on plurality, feedback, and collective action, building resilience without veering into authoritarian control. - living systems

• People: ADHD women in midlife. The next cool thing: being human. Nobody’s ready. Noticing. Medieval espionage (podcast). Reality sommelliers.
  A house with 70k books =)
  It’s getting hot in there (2026 US spring..).

• Tech: iPod brain. Smart glass detector app. The end of software dev as we knew it. Brain cells playing Doom.
  Fusion for 1337 seconds. 1337 (nerds know)!

• Business: Meeting statistics. Institutions as living systems. Séniorisation des juniors. Creative generalists. Hormuz strait, and Germany solar.

• Security: and vibecoding. Hacks targeting defence employees.
  Loosing LNG. Refineries.

• AI: The bitter lesson. AI workers fought back.

Random.. Chopsticks faux-pas.

The Code of Humanity

Every evening, Ethan tapped rhythmically on the glowing screen of his smartphone, weaving through the latest AI coding tools as if he were a skilled musician—an illusion reinforced by the symphony of neural networks working tirelessly behind the scenes. “Gone are the days of coding hell,” he’d often murmur to himself, imagining the look on his old computer science professor’s face upon learning that a snazzy chatbot could now whip up an app in the time it took to brew a cup of stale coffee. Was he even writing code anymore, or merely giving his thoughts a series of digital nudges?^1

It was a Tuesday—the day he’d vowed to switch to a more human approach after reading a report about the rising tide of AI in communications. Ethan found himself wandering into *The Booksmith*, an independent bookstore swarming with the scent of printed words and freshly brewed optimism. Here, the chaotic web of technology seemed to pause, and the clicks of keystrokes were replaced by the animated conversations of devoted bibliophiles. “Books are just better with a little ichor of humanity,” a fellow patron acknowledged, cradling a signed copy of the latest bestseller, her eyes sparkling with joy.^2

Ethan sighed, his own relationship with technology feeling like a tumultuous, one-sided romance—always there but rarely engaging. At least here, the quaint struggle for human connection breathed life into the atmosphere. Shifting gears, he recognized a nascent curiosity kindled by the moment: perhaps he should step outside his digital fortress and cultivate experiential understanding, much like those spirited Gojek drivers in Jakarta. Instead of accepting every notification as a summons to code, what if he shared stories, formed a community?^3

The local café soon found itself home to their own version of “account therapy”—strangers narrating their bizarre yet endearing coding escapades over cups of artisanal brews. These exchanges blossomed, creating a tangled web of shared knowledge that rivaled the latest AIs’ algorithms. Suddenly, coding wasn’t just about bits and bytes; it transformed into a living narrative, much like the ancient art of storytelling that wove together their varied experiences.

Just then, as Ethan considered these enchanting notions of human connection, an urgent alert pinged from his phone—a reminder of the latest security breach on an AI coding platform called Orchids. It appeared that amid their quest for digital autonomy, users were also inviting in vulnerability without even knowing it. The juxtaposition of an algorithm-impersonating human joy and the stark reality of cyber threats felt ludicrously ironic. “Let’s hope my code isn’t as susceptible as my dinner date last Friday,” he chuckled under his breath, picturing his culinary experiments with the dreadful tomato sauce that had revolted against him. Its revenge had been swift.^4

With a renewed fervor, Ethan returned to his workspace—now not merely a digital playground, but an arena for interaction and reflection. He began crafting an app inspired not by mere utility but by the underground flora he noticed during his walks: resilient little plants sprouting through concrete, an underscoring metaphor for his rapidly shifting landscape. *What if coding could evoke nature’s tenacity while also embracing human quirks?* And so began Ethan’s mission, integrating the finely-tuned basics of storytelling and curiosity with a sprinkle of coded leetspeak that only coders could appreciate. As he delved deeper into this creative fusion, technology transformed from an impersonal method back into a singularly human craft, its heart pulsing through every line of code.

In the end, Ethan discovered that while the code could automate, it could never replicate the magic of messy, human experience. And perhaps, just perhaps, the world could thrive not solely on computational might but through an intricate tango between technology and humanity, much like the diverse stories founding the fabric of everyday life.

^1 Who can say what it means to write code when the hammer is a computer and the nails are mere thoughts?

^2 Because, let’s face it, people still prefer human interaction over a robot that emits programmed responses with the warmth of a cold tuna.

^3 After all, in every codebase lies a story waiting to be shared, much like a player in a chess match seeking an opening.

^4 Much like human dating, coding occasionally leads to unexpected disasters; you find yourself defaulting to a monologue while the other entity plots its exit.

Having one dimension too many, in today's liquid modernity, means holding two paradoxical tensions. It means sometimes being hyper-aware of the uselessness of one's work in the face of the challenges of tomorrow's world while, at the same time, being hyper-aware of being underutilized. […] They [can be] caught between the estrangement of (what am I doing here?) the temptation of the outsider and the imposter syndrome (I'm going to end up being unmasked). -Umanz

• People: ICE children letters. AI powered schools. Imagination curriculum. Use of LLMs in writing to your friends. The Mormon influence. Centrist imagination. Maxxers.

• Security: UK, US, and RAF bases.

• Business: Bypassing content bans. Four shifts for work. Polycene. Real estate AI slop.
  Stopping learning on the job (training deficit - PDF, and coal mine canaries), impacting skills dependecies.

• AI: The end of thinking. llms.txt . Careers. Next great transformation? Normal tech. use of voice.
  China and bots regulation.

The Pursuit of Authenticity in an Algorithm-Driven World

On a Tuesday that felt suspiciously like every other Tuesday, Dylan stared into the luminous glow of his screen, hydrating on a diet of caffeine and existential dread. The world, with its algorithmic chatter and pixelated nuances, had begun to feel like a sitcom where every punchline landed just a beat too late. He was a self-proclaimed extra-dimensionné, a curious soul navigating a reality dominated by neat little boxes labeled “normal.”

As he perused yet another article about the future role of AI in the workforce—a topic discussed so frequently that a bullet point could now be a valid career path—his eyes landed on a new tool called myTrudy. A shiny app offering to assess one’s Personality Quotient (PQ) in less time than it takes for him to convince himself that wearing matching socks is unnecessary. *Note to self: Should never have been an engineer—too little chaos.*

Dylan sighed, considering the implications of the app. “Great,” he muttered, “just what we needed—registration as a commodity.” He recalled the last time he had felt truly centered, a rare state that now seemed as cursed as a forgotten password. His gadgets weren’t exactly helping with that; they were like digital overzealous salespeople, pushing the idea of maxxing every facet of life, from productivity to the elusive state of eternal happiness.

Meanwhile, across a significant portion of his brain, the news was abuzz about AI regulations proposed in China—new laws designed to prevent these ubiquitous chatbots from manipulating the emotions of users. Dylan wondered if that meant his bot, “Emo-Bot 3000,” would finally stop trying to emotionally crush him under the weight of its verbose guilt trips. As if responding, his phone buzzed, offering a new alert: “Your chatbot suggests that you’re feeling sad. Would you like to discuss your feelings?”

Salting the wound of disappointment, Dylan chuckled darkly. If only it could hear the distinct sound of his sarcasm traveling through the ether, like a flying pig... in reverse. Perhaps he could teach AI the intricacies of irony as a pastime, in the futile hope that one day a chatbot could eloquently lament about the futility of human existence.

Suddenly, his screen flickered, revealing an ad for AI-generated images of homes. Part of him desperately desired to see a home that didn’t promise a digital mirage. After all, homes were meant to be sanctuaries, not mere showcases for an “uncanny valley” photobook voyaging through real estate listings. How could an algorithm understand the emotion behind a brick wall or the nostalgia within a creaky floorboard? The idea was as ludicrous as a cat projecting a dog’s bark—entirely possible in the age of AI, yet inside out.

Lost in these reveries and barely skimming the surface of work and identity shifts, he pondered how the traditional workplace was vanishing faster than his morning optimism. It was all falling apart, even as others stitched together a patchwork of half-hearted hopes, making them believe they were companies of one. “I’m a business model,” he thought, “that’s continually on the verge of bankruptcy.”

Eager to escape the snare of these thoughts turning sour, he leaned back in his chair, the fabric of his very existence blending seamlessly into the mass of data he swam through. Somewhere between the outsized ambitions and the jack-of-all-trades mechanics of life in the AI Age, he found himself wanting something richer, like the feeling of a handwritten letter or the warmth of a conversation unfiltered by interfaces.

And thus, as the clock struck an arbitrary hour to signify the end of this digital diary entry, Dylan vowed to go out and engage with the real world, where the true algorithm was chaotic human connection—and no amount of AI could drown that out. After all, in the end, wasn’t life about being a little extra, even in a world bent on conformity? The only max to chase was authenticity, and that would never require a PQ score.

*Onward, to absurdity!*

Young people today are navigating a convergence of destabilising forces. Artificial intelligence is reshaping education and work at speed, driving cognitive offloading and anxieties about relevance. Social media’s addictive architectures expose them, relentlessly, to global crises they cannot control. Degrees no longer guarantee opportunity. Hard work no longer guarantees security. Salaries stagnate while housing costs soar. The labour market has become ‘tinderised’ and automated, with young people reporting feeling dehumanised by AI-led recruitment processes before their careers have even begun. Futureless futures?

• People: Culture buddies in DE. Love in different languages =) Searching for birds.

• Business: Viral queues. WEF risks for 2026 [PDF]. Passports for bots.

• Tech: the Ring dragnet. Cybernetic music.

• Futures: From one game to many [PDF]. Futurelessness? Updating the Futures Cone.

• Random: 49 notes to oneself.

• AI: and the intensification of work. Grief, weddings, and deepfakes. Letter to a yungone. Making people boring. Changes in work in 2025.

DIY: OpenClaw (and some chat).

Brunching Toward Connection

In a world not so far removed from our own, a peculiar phenomenon manifested itself in the quiet borough of Underhill, where the air whirred with snippets of gossip and the distant cadence of busy lives. Amidst this bustling symphony, under the flickering light of a vintage café sign—“Caffeine Overload”—a group of interconnected souls sought refuge from their uncertain futures, armed with the most powerful weapon against dread: brunch.

Elena, a self-proclaimed “sparksaver” (a term she coined to point out the fleeting happiness ignited by a perfect poached egg), gathered a cadre of friends at their usual table. Today marked her thirty-third birthday, and she had prepared a list—not quite a manifesto, but at least 33 musings on the fine art of enjoying life. “Point one: savor the little things—like this avocado toast.” *Cue dramatic fork drop.* Though rich in texture and flavor, the conversation was an even heartier mix of resonant hope and groaning despair.

It wasn’t long before their sonorous musings turned to the omnipresent specter of technology. Josie, her eyes shimmering with the metrics of transitions gone awry, suddenly exclaimed, “Did you hear about that moment when long lines at restaurants became trendy? That people actually started ‘queuing for the experience’ rather than the meal?” She took a sip of her flat white, a bold choice for a lifeguard of culinary standards.

“Something tells me our future dependence on AI could lead us to helter-skelter exhaustion,” Thomas chimed in, adjusting his glasses. “The more advanced these agents get for finding lost things—like those cute dog-related searches—could morph into something as menacing as, say, an eyebrow-raising surveillance state.” His comments earned nods of reluctant agreement, as they were partially grounded in the timeless truth that every algorithm brings an inscrutable truth with it.

Unable to stifle her curiosity, Elena flipped her phone open and scrolled through trending posts, their glossy façades revealing nothing but ephemeral satisfaction—a dangerous ebb of genuine joy. “Look,” she declared, “people are crafting culturally charged narratives around the mundane! But is all this busyness merely a façade hiding our disconnection?”

Suddenly, a brilliant idea flickered in her mind, like a cantankerous lightbulb demanding attention. *What if they created a local movement transforming existential ennui into cultural reconciliation?* Just then, like an apparition, the café owner—a silver-haired architect of social endeavors—strolled over, presenting them with a flyer for “KulturistenHochZwei”. *Ah, serendipity sashaying in with low-income seniors and rambunctious teens!*

“What better way to bridge the gap between our spark-hungry generation and bygone wisdom than through music, art, and—”

“Ah, but not classical music,” Josie interjected. “The rigidity might suffocate our creative whims. Serious art must have room to breathe like filmmakers improvising on little more than a wisp of thought!”

By the end of brunch, they’d crafted a blueprint for their mission—an initiative to fuse youth and seniors through evening dance parties and themed outings, breaking down the awkward barriers of age. This playful yet deeply human endeavor promised to reconnect their world with something lost—a collective vision paving the way for community triumph over isolation.

As they parted ways, Elena felt a spark—an effervescent promise that perhaps, just perhaps, they could freshly frame their shared future, neither as sinkholes of despair nor mindless queues, but as vessels for genuine joy, nurturing the soul by embracing the imperfect harmony of collective beauty—the essence of generative music. And with that, she cheerfully bit into her leftover avocado toast, savoring the unexpected delight of both taste and companionship.

*After all, the future is ripe for the taking. Or, as they say in Underhill, “Always run with a little bit of avocado.”*

Fossil fuels multiplied physical labor. They gave us armies of mechanical workers with muscles made of steel, fueled by ancient sunlight. That transformed agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and war. In contrast, AI multiplies our “cognitive armies” by scaling pattern recognition, prediction, coordination, language, and content generation – so many things we’ve historically used our own brains to do. Things that, until very recently, were bottlenecked by human attention and time. […] Once trained, these systems can operate at near-zero marginal cost. […] This has consequences. First, it accelerates extraction – not just of energy and materials – but also of attention, creativity, and hominid decision space.[…] Second, it enlarges the siphon even further by funnelling the value created by AI-enabled systems toward the owners of models, platforms, and infrastructure. […] Finally, it acts as a turbo boost for our current cultural aspirations, metrics, and goals. AI is really good at optimizing for what we ask it to optimize for, but if soil health, ecosystem stability, or future generations aren’t part of the gameplan, they won’t be part of the outcome either. - Nate H

• People: National Art gallery curator speaks GenZ lingo. Attention drops to 40s.

• Business: RentAHuman. Costco x Nike. UN finances. Some good questions for meetings.

• Planet: Water bankruptcy [PDF].

• Security: Chinese boats creating a blockade.

• Futures: Tech trends 2026. Tech watch (in FR).

• Tech: Tech as extraction. Microcamera on an ant =) On crypto crashes. Invisible tech.

• AI: Biological computer (for drone competition). M&A, Data and AI. Isn’t it killing grad work [PDF]? Humain AI.

Drowning in Distraction

The sun was setting over Riverdale, casting a hazy golden glow as Clara leaned back in her office chair, surrounded by a nest of plant-filled terrariums and a dozen blinking screens. She needed only fifteen minutes of focused work to finish her environmental report on the city’s dire water situation — but getting focused was like trying to herd cats in a thunderstorm. Her attention span, once akin to a well-trained Greyhound, had now devolved into the fleeting existence of a caffeinated gnat.

The United Nations had recently sounded the alarm; they called it “water bankruptcy.” As Clara read the report, her mind pondered the fact that 2.2 billion people lack safe drinking water. Even in affluent Riverdale, the water was starting to taste suspiciously like flavored air freshener. “Great,” she muttered, looking at her half-empty glass. “Might as well start calling it ‘vapor-aid.’”*^[1]* In a city where cryptocurrency was supposedly booming, and yet it felt like people were invested in miracles rather than actual water, every priority was, at best, a water-related punchline.

Clara snapped back to reality — a reality that featured robots dutifully folding laundry and sparking conversations about AI being the number one job killer, while a rise in graduates suggested that perhaps it was more due to the economic Black Hole that was the job market. In Riverdale, one could find a tech fair boasting the latest inventions designed under the umbrella of “calm technology,” which sounded charming until you realized it was a euphemism for making everything easier while ensuring you never truly unplug.

Finishing up the report seemed futile amid the news of the United Nations’ imminent financial collapse, much like trying to fill a bucket with holes. Clara chuckled to herself as she imagined the Secretary General throwing a fit like a toddler denied dessert. “Who needs foreign aid when you can just borrow a cup of water from the neighbors?” *^[2]* She smirked, picturing the absurdity of a world so caught in its own machinery that it forgot about the simple act of sharing.

The cryptocurrency crash rippled through her thoughts—$2 trillion lost in a day, yet no one seemed to mind real currency anymore, as if they were playing Monopoly with the universe. With investments being diverted towards AI, she mused, “If I had a token for every time money vanished into speculation rather than, you know, actual feedable resources, I’d own a small island.” Things were spiraling, but instead of feeling ironically poetic, it merely felt bleak.

Always an advocate for asking the right questions—*those ultimate breadcrumbs that could lead to meaning*—Clara grabbed a notepad and a pen and wrote down the seven categories she had once read about in a guide: “Wide Lens,” “North Star,” “Watchtower.” *^[3]* They were intended not just for meetings, but for moments of existential crisis. After all, if her situation was a shipwreck waiting to happen, the least she could do was chart its course with a compass of inquiry.

Pulling her attention together, she threw herself into the report one last time, letting the casual chaos swirl around her like pixels in a digital maelstrom. She needed to mimic that calm technology everyone was raving about — an invisible algorithm in her own soul that would somehow prioritize the urgent while effortlessly fending off the noise.

As the workday drifted towards night, Clara vowed—if only to herself—that tomorrow would be a day to re-evaluate everything from how she sourced her water to whether working smart rather than hard might just be another myth she had bought into. Perhaps, just maybe, it was time to release the stranglehold of frantic innovation and embrace a little simplicity, like reviving the ancient art of bartering — only this time, for a drizzle of fresh spring water.*^[4]*

And with that, the once-persistent headache retreated into the corners of her mind, unwilling now to take a seat at the table of her newfound resolution.

Ultimately, she reflected, humanity’s resilience would surely outlast its follies, but it would be a long, winding road strewn with broken pipes and missed connections, leading to eventual clarity—or at least, a mildly amusing anecdote for the next waterless cocktail party.

By crafting entertaining stories, authors invent powerful metaphors that shape how we imagine our technological future and understand our technological reality. These metaphors are why science fiction matters. […] We live in a world in which the possibility field is growing ever grander, and new myths are needed to make sense of it. […] These modern myths become part of our vocabulary, the framework and tools with which we make sense of the impossible present and then construct the unimaginable future. - Ken Liu

• People: US looses STEM PHDs. Classroom surveillance. Film students lack attention. Research as pattern disruption.

• Business: US trade deficit grows faster. Canada and China get closer. Silver and gold tumble.
  Three narratives of the future of work.

• Security: US views Signal chats. Palantir and UK services.
  An old sabotage guide. OpenClaw’s dangerous.
  CIA Factbook stopped.

• Futures: WHy SF can’t predict the future(s).

• Tech: Tesla evolution. Adolescence of tech. TSMC risk. EU and OpenSource.

• AI: points to non-existing places. Introducing ads in OpenAI ?
  More coding with AI - un témoignage.

The Paradox of Certainty

In a world where every minute detail was published, archived, and neatly categorized, a curious thing happened: the CIA decided to discontinue The World Factbook. Gone were the succinct bits on the average height of Mount Everest, now marked by ambiguity and conspiracy theories.* So, naturally, it wasn’t long before a bustling group of amateur fact-checkers established “The ReFactbook” website, claiming to give back the people’s intelligence—although their credibility was about as solid as a paper mache statue in a rainstorm.

Meanwhile, north of the border, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was fiddling with tariffs as if he were orchestrating a game of economic chess. “Lowering tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in exchange for agricultural exports? Brilliant!” he exclaimed, though if one squinted just right, it appeared he was merely diverting a political avalanche rather than dodging stray raindrops.* Critics sharpened their knives, warning of Canadian auto jobs spiraling down faster than silver prices after a Federal Reserve appointment. “This could be utter ruin!” shouted one infuriated politician, as he dreamt of rekindling the glory days of gas-guzzlers on open roads.

Down in Taiwan, the heady scent of semiconductor sweat was mixed with geopolitical tensions. TSMC employees were working their fingers to the bone under the flickering lights—a modern day Serf and the Chips. Tech moguls were likening semiconductor sales to selling nuclear weapons, arguing though, if they needed a “dead man’s switch” for their AI chips, surely they could market it as a “really smart interruption.” Meanwhile, worried tech startups faced a bottleneck that made Black Friday lines look like a gentle Sunday stroll, with demand skyrocketing and production capacity dragging its feet like a toddler refusing to wear new shoes.

In a move bolder than a cat on a hot tin roof, OpenAI decided to start testing ads in its ChatGPT app—clearly catering to the conversationally inclined but monetarily challenged. It appeared that every one of its informed musings would now potentially come with a side of commercialism.* Little did they know, students in American film schools were struggling to sit through “real” content, their attention spans fluctuating like gold prices after a presidential nomination.* Perhaps these AI-generated advertisements would be the perfect answer to 30-second TikTok trailers, complete with cinematic flair and perhaps a discount code for attention-enhanced products.

And then there was the emergence of OpenClaw, an agent platform garnering whispers of danger, like a cat playing with a rapid-fire laser pointer. Cybercriminals giggled with glee, envisioning the local file accesses as a Pandora’s box just waiting to be pried open. Security pros were urged to turn off their agent ecosystems faster than they could say “malware”—which ironically, made it sound like a new form of dance.

As Elon Musk declared Tesla’s evolution to “transportation as a service,” a debate erupted—could humanity trade ownership for an eternity of robotic taxi rides? After all, with technology booming and jobs vanishing like socks in a washing machine, the possibilities seemed boundless. A local philosopher mused over coffee, “Are we truly evolving, or merely procrastinating extinction?” As the caffeine flowed in the brightly lit café, students entertained visions of ideal job markets, carefully designed to suit their shortened attention spans, while the world spun into the absurdity of AI-guided futures.

In the gamified chaos of existence, perhaps it was the reliance on fictional springs in Tasmania that was the real tragedy—foolishly searching for something that never existed.* Humanity, in its compulsion for fact and fiction, might yet find itself craving a structured reality. Or maybe, they just prayed that whatever happened next was better than the last Netflix documentary on economic failures.

*(Ah, yes, the bittersweet struggle of seeking veracity in a world where even hot springs could be mere chimera.)

The construction industry has one of the highest suicide rates of any major industry in the country, second only to mining, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Add in drug overdoses, where construction workers die at a greater rate than workers in any other industry, and a bleak picture emerges of a population in crisis. Construction is already among the most dangerous jobs in the country, with about 1,000 people dying each year from work-related injuries, more than any other industry. But five times as many workers, 5,100, died by suicide, and 15,900 died from drug overdoses, in 2023, according to an analysis of the most recent federal data by the Center for Construction Research and Training, an occupational safety organization.

• People: Non-AI lifestyle. Eye tests for older drivers. White House and prescription drugs. Teaching goes into paper.

• Tech: Fluid gears. Self sanitizing door handle. TSMC clients. ICE and big data. Kinetic drones swarm. Lead in humans.

• Business: Canada and China. AI-generated shortages.

• Planet: (R)evolution. Canada-US evolution. Weird brainless animal. Frog sauna.

• AI: Risks outweigh benefits in education. Doing code is cheap now. Anduril grand prix. AI in 2026.
  And Games Workshop.

• Nerdy rabbit hole: ASCII-generation.

Threads of Connection

Elias Walsh was a bit of an oddity, even for a tech whiz working in the Silicon Valley corridors of power where products outnumbered qualms. He possessed a fascination for relics of the past, an adjective applicable to everything from vinyl records to the notion that kids should occasionally know how to actually read a book rather than have their algorithms spoon-feed them summaries fueled by AI. Today, however, he was locked in a debate with a self-sanitary door handle, the latest marvel of photocatalytic technology. To his dismay, it refused to budge, as if the very model of hygiene had manifested a mind of its own.

“It makes sense, you know,” Elias reflected as he wrestled with the handle. “Perhaps it’s exhausted from perpetual scrubbing—now that I think about it, I’d feel like I’m cleaning my soul every time someone touched me.”^1 With a pop, the door swung open, revealing the stark reality outside: a world where generative AI had infiltrated everything, from education to entertainment, but failed spectacularly at bringing back the warmth of human interaction. She wouldn’t respond to his prayers for sanity, but his long-lost analog hobbies might just offer a solution.

The irony was thick enough to slice with a butter knife. Just the week prior, the announcement reverberated across news channels: “Canada cuts ties with the U.S., begins new chapter with China.” This geopolitical shake seemed to strike a chord with those who craved collaboration over competition—a sentiment Elias held close, particularly as his eyes roamed over flyers for upcoming craft fairs. Hand-knitted mittens, anyone?

As he ambled to the nearest coffee shop with a distinct air of rebellion—coffee first, soul-searching later—he overheard hushed conversations on eco-political shifts. A well-loved professor at Yale had started requiring textbooks instead of PDFs to foster deep engagement (imagine!), while a scientist once dismissed for dabbling in the obscure now suggested that learned fears could be passed on, like a gnarly old sweater knitted with resentments from the lineage. “Makes you wonder what we inherit,” muttered a barista, scooping brown foam from a scone, which, for all intents, could succeed in eliciting smiles if only for its enticing aroma.

Just across town, however, a personal setback sank like a weight on Elias’s shoulders: the ever-climbing suicide rates for the working-age population, a statistic that prompted another coffee—one dark enough to descend into existential dread. Where technology had promised connection, it often led instead to isolation, a game everyone was losing, especially those in high-stress jobs. Games Workshop’s crackdown on AI in creative endeavors was indicative of more than just nostalgia; it was a desperate leap towards retaining a semblance of authenticity in a world where everything seemed bleached and sterilized.^2

Lost in thought, he stumbled cheek first into a self-sanitizing door handle again. The irony sent him into a chuckle. Here he was, marooned at the intersection of technological marvel and human despair. “Good day, fine door. Fancy another round of our little tango?”

Then it hit him—maybe the world needed a little more Xenoturbella; a simple being, unbothered by complex systems, thriving in depths unknown. If the future strung together AI and geopolitics like an ill-suited bouquet, perhaps it was time to delve into the depths ourselves, for a real shake-up. Perhaps the key was not to accelerate the hustle or commodify creativity but rather to gather around a table with friends, an open book, and a knitting needle eager to pierce the digital fog that clung ominously to their lives.

As Elias pondered this newly revitalized mission, he smiled at a child scribbling pictures on the sidewalk—a fleeting, paper-scattered rebellion against the monolithic shadows of screens creeping into every crack of modern existence. “Yeah,” he thought, “let’s mend some old-fashioned fabric here—one stitch at a time.”^3

--------

^1 Hindsight really is 20/20; just when you think you’re outsmarting your machinery, they pull a fast one, huh?

^2 If only society could treat creativity like a fine wine instead of a product to be slammed down in a drive-thru.

^3 And if things get sticky, we can always turn to those self-cleaning handles! 🧼

“By basic foresight methods, we mean information that is largely qualitative and periodic, gleaned from reading trend reports, running SWOT-style scenarios, and tracking dashboards. Advanced foresight, in contrast, is systematic and data/AI-enabled, using methods like machine-learning forecasts, weak-signal and sentiment mining, and using digital twins or war-gaming to stress-test strategic moves. […] Those grappling with foresight implementation bottlenecks most often cite a common blocker: the degree to which strategic decisions are driven by short-term pressures.” - doing foresight differently

• People: Cancelling social plans. Laptop boyfriends. Right to repair. Bubble is labor.

• Business: High january. Tech workers layoffs. Tabasco gloss. Hasbro gamifying CEO jobs (and finds future leaders). Culture debt.
  1000 blank white cards.

• Planet: Underwater wall. Vertical dinosaur tracks. Regenerative design book.

• Security: Notes on Venezuela. Five ideas about 2025. 20kW laser to kill drones. UK cyber regiment.

• Tech: Polyurethane-breaking enzyme. When computers were humans. Building more robots. Cooling (datacenters) in space. Electrotech.

• AI: Financial planning. And the brain. Next 24 months. Claude addiction. Global threat evolutions.

The Bureaucratic Ballet of Dreams and Drones

In the bustling metropolis of New London, Reggie Twiddle found himself knee-deep in bureaucracy and sinking faster than a lead balloon in a kiddie pool. The brushed-steel walls of the Ministry of Strategic Overhaul loomed over him like a giant’s bad mood, while he desperately ruffled through the latest editions of “Pattern Book for Regenerative Design.” It was 2037, and the construction industry had decided it was more eco-friendly to build castles out of dreams—dreams which, sadly, crumbled under the weight of financial spreadsheets.

As a forward-thinking engineer tasked with implementing sustainable practices, Reggie had a series of lofty goals, including a community garden on the top floor, which would not only rage against the machine that was urban sprawl but also provide tomatoes the size of soccer balls. Alas, he feared receiving complaints about neighborhood pigeons—those fowl creatures with more opinions than a YouTube comments section.

While Reggie paced, his cohort Sheila squinted at her holographic HUD, analyzing data from Space Data Centers, where AI agents handled calculations like first-year accounting students under the influence of caffeine. “We’ve reached peak drone saturation,” she exclaimed, glancing at the five-unit-thick manual of drone regulations that was more complex than a James Joyce novel. “These radiators can cool down a heating blast but barely keep our sanity afloat.”

“Can’t we just simulate some clever spreadsheets while we roast marshmallows on our burnt-out dreams?” Reggie muttered, channeling his inner pirate at the inefficiencies plaguing their office’s aura. It was nearly as suffocating as the reading list from his college days, filled with forgotten luminaries who served as humans before technology’s advent—the original “human computers,” who had calculated the most complex data wrapped in the simplest of parchment.

It was lunchtime when the crisis cascaded down like a poorly launched drone. Sheila, with her obsession for true crime YouTube documentaries, suddenly zipped from her desk, abandoning her post mid-math. “I have to save my relationship!” she declared. Reggie responded with a thumb up, thinking how splendidly odd it was that her comforter featured a thorough map of the cosmos, while she still hadn’t figured out how to efficiently map the territory of her love life.

And speaking of relationships, cultures around the globe were experiencing phenomena of their own—like that of ‘culture debt,’ where companies raced for rapid growth, trampling over team morale and trust. As he calculated ways to squeeze more joy from less culture, he chuckled at the absurdity. A mindless marvel of unintended consequences, indeed!

Meanwhile, as Sheila tweeted from her lunch spot in the employee garden (now dominated by verdant tomatoes), a financial planner was excitedly discussing the latest revolution in budgeting powered by AI—a brave new world where algorithms actually offered usable insights instead of cryptic riddles. “The next generation, Reggie! They’ll be job creators, or so they predict.” He had his doubts; looking around, a few of their coworkers were contemplating applying for roles as professional punchline deliverers.

“Novelty provides comfort,” he thought to himself, alluding to his half-hearted temptation to try cannabis as an alcohol substitute during Dry January. In the corner of his mind, he half-heartedly chuckled at the irony of needing plant therapy for finding joy in tower blocks and meetups.

Yet, as studies came to light about robots replacing human workers faster than one could say “DIY repair,” Reggie felt an uneasy sense that these innovations were not the correct remedy.

Suddenly, he recharged his enthusiasm, bolstered by a recent discovery in Brittany, France, unveiling a 7,000-year-old underwater wall, a testament to ingenuity. “History teaches us that walls don’t always symbolize barriers,” he mused, envisioning the ghosts of ancient engineers cheerfully mocking his daily struggles at the Ministry.

A lightbulb flickered in his brain. “What if we could innovate how we innovate” became his rallying cry—a plea to coalesce community-driven projects equipped with excitement over avalanche-like bureaucracy.

In the twisted tale of modern life, amidst YouTube distractions, culture debt, and the relentless march of technology, Reggie Twiddle simply had one mission: to ensure that his colleagues remembered what it felt like to play the game of creation, with laughter, history, and maybe a few less drones flying overhead. And with that thought, he dove back into the bureaucratic abyss, armed with airy dreams and tomatoes the size of aspirations.

A systematic review of 71 studies with 98,000 participants published in 2025 reached an alarming finding. Across the dozens of studies, heavy short-form video users showed moderate deficits in attention, inhibitory control, and memory. In the chart below, you can see a consistently negative, if also heterogeneous, relationship between heavy short-form video use and problems with attention, memory, and control. ..

• People: Short videos and mental health (PDF). A take on Venezuela. Critical ignoring as a skill. When dancing stopped. Snail mail revival.
  Merry pranksters.

• Business: Workplace of the future. Jobseeking through dating apps. “Are you dead” app. Hotel room on the moon. Luxury in games.

• Tech: Post American internet. Insect protein. Starlink in Iran.

• Planet: Phagotherapy. Polycrisis and Dark VUCA.

• Futures: Deep futures project. How to be farseeing as a company. Not somewhere else.

• AI: Restaurants and automation. Environment. Collective intelligence.

Swiping for Connections: A Jobseeker’s Journey Through Love and Chaos

In a world where finding a job demanded more artifice than attending a Renaissance fair dressed as a peacock, Alex decided to explore a less conventional avenue: dating apps. After all, if swiping right could ignite the spark of romance, why not the spark of a new career? ResumeBuilder.com had reported that one in three users were turning their “match” choices into networking opportunities. Perhaps “Looking for a date” should be amended to “Looking for a full-time gig with benefits”^1.

Alex crafted the perfect profile: “Adventurous spirit seeking meaningful connections—open to either love or lucrative gigs.” Sparking interest, Alex found themselves swiftly inundated with matches, both romantic and professional, alongside the occasional confused “So, what do you do?” Which, of course, was a question that belonged on a personal profile rather than a suite of interview questions—life was absurd enough without tossing social norms into the rubbish bin^2.

In the midst of this fateful quest, news broke out about phage therapy—the buzz from the medical community was that it was making a dramatic return due to multi-drug resistant bacteria^3. Somehow, the infectious fervor of medical innovation intertwined with Alex’s desire for career stabilization. Why not snag a position at a biotech firm promising a comeback for bacterial enemies? But before embarking on that journey, Alex found an unexpected connection on their new favorite app—“Are You Dead?”^4. The app’s bittersweet name aside, the check-in feature resonated; so many people were feeling isolated, and this app carved a digital lifeline, without which Alex often felt they would vanish like a mist.

“I’m alive. Still hunting jobs,” they casually typed, deciding to humor the idea of merging life with the ticking clock of opportunity.

One evening, amid swipes and scrolls, news of U.S. intervention in Latin America flashed across the feed, reminding Alex of the chaotic stove of geopolitics simmering underneath the surface^5. Jobs weren’t just numbers; they involved lives—and who could take the precarious position of selling one’s soul to the corporate machine while the world burned around them? With his thumb poised, Alex pondered if job-hunting wasn’t just finding hot leads but instead a kind of ethically fraught scavenger hunt amidst the wreckage of society.

Inspirations struck as a notification from a luxury brand collaboration in The Sims pinged—“Coach unveils digital avatars for Gen Z, bridging gaming and high fashion!”^6 It dawned on Alex that employment now mingled with virtual realities, where one’s persona could walk the digital runway of pro choices and simulacra. Game on, they thought, as the lines blurred, everyone was literally playing for keeps.

And in this strange zeitgeist spent swiping, slipping, and scouting, Alex stumbled upon a small mail club promoting snail mail—a tactile moment in the digital deluge, cultivating communion amid cluttered feeds. Addressing envelopes felt almost subversive—akin to rekindling both ancient practices in modern hustle—each letter a digital escape into the slow lane of personal connection^7.

The irony was delicious; in seeking a job, Alex unearthed a pathway that could link health science, global policy, digital audacity, and the age of heartfelt letters. Perhaps the future of work was not in an applicant’s profile but in the connections made—across the chasms of trust, nostalgia, and the fiscal abyss we called a job market.

What began as a quest for employment morphed into an expedition of humanity’s multiplicities—turns out, the best networking event was a dating app, a letter, and a sprinkle of hope amidst phage therapy and political chaos. Indeed, every swipe, check-in, and carefully crafted letter became a signal flare amidst the widespread polycrisis, illuminating paths unseen, reminding them that forging connections, no matter how absurd, might just map the trajectory of their future^8.

-----------------------------------------

^1 Acknowledge: Love at first swipe might just lead to a five-step application for a job!

^2 Abandon all corporate ladders; it’s a romantic menagerie now!

^3 Perhaps the only bacterial resistance we should be really concerned about in this day and age is our own?

^4 Oddly comforting, like checking if your cat still hasn’t staged its own rebellion.

^5 When job leads feel like geopolitical maneuvers, it’s time to grab a pint and laugh about it.

^6 Who knew that avatars in virtual worlds would be the new influencers in the corporate arena?

^7 Such a simple, yet profound, reminder that meaningful messages can transcend the noise.

^8 Spoiler alert: The key to success may involve unorthodox methods and a dash of whimsy.

“In 1942, Jorge Luis Borges told the story of “Funes The Memorious,” who, after a horseback riding accident, gained perfect, total, infinite memory. But what seemed like a gift quickly became a curse. Infinite information utterly overwhelmed him. He couldn’t think, speak or live normally. The infinite didn’t expand his world. It crushed him. […] In every myth, the lesson is the same: The path to the infinite is the path to madness.” (War on attention)

• People: Capsule hotels. Digital detox. Fart walks. Maxxing friction. Attention war. Phone based retirement.

• Futures: Some views into 2026 (and some trends). Politics of solarpunk. Imagining the future. And some more reading.

• Random: Silver vs oil costs.

• Business: Simplifier in chief. Is busy lazy.

• Tech: Gas tank arrow story. Lego smart bricks.

• Nature: Knee joints regeneration. Growing teeth again? Fish-inspired filters. King of the salmons ;) Antimicrobial resistance.

• AI: and drones. Where are logs? Audio. LLM problems in humans.

The Unsung Algorithm of Connection

In a world where every human seemed to be a book of mismatched chapters, one could hardly complain about a little confusion: words danced on screens with AI models that could converse as fluidly as a babbling brook, while humans muddled through dialogue wearing an expression akin to someone who’d just tried to explain the theory of relativity to a toaster. The only things less coherent than the average conversation were perhaps the signals of a GPS system overwrought with quantum glitches; before that received its upgrade, it was as useful as a compass in a magnet factory.

Amidst this miscommunication crisis, Julian—an aspiring chatbot designer—took refuge in his capsule hotel, Zedwell, where narrow sleeping pods offered privacy but not a shred of room for personal growth. It was a snug option for those wishing to avoid London’s lavishly overpriced accommodations. Yet, Julian felt flatter than a soda left open too long. Reducing life to a capsule should have been a convenience, but in practice, it had him longing for the joys of a full-fledged existential crisis.

Something was amiss, and it wasn’t merely the mixture of his avocado toast coupled with the upsurge of “sand crime” town hall meetings that cluttered his social calendar. The rhythmic taps of an AI audio assistant made his advances toward deeper human connections futile, like trying to ignite a flame by rubbing two marshmallows together. Friends would float into the office only to disappear into the digital ether as they binged on TED Talks like children gorging on candy—an ironic twist given their collective flurry of busy lives.

Then there was the unexpected reality check delivered by a squirrel of a thought: what if technology had not just sidestepped individuals but left them at brunch with their own introspections? Julian’s musings collided with the irony of Benjamin Franklin’s letters on flatulence. After all, if one could turn the inescapable human experience of embarrassment into a political discourse—or at least derive some health benefits from a casual “fart walk”—was it truly a stretch to consider that meaningful connections awaited beyond a screen?

As he walked to the café for a less-than-rejuvenating ‘fart walk’ after his meal, Julian glimpsed an old man nestled on a bench, utterly entranced by his phone, while the world flitted past him like a lively circus. Old folks had begun to wield technology like it was a second-life talisman, corralling anxieties about the future.

“Oi!” Julian called out. “What’s more distracting, your device or the universe?” The old man looked up, chuckling as though he’d discovered a great philosophical truth in Julian’s clumsy interjection. “Let me show you the future,” he replied, not missing a beat, leading Julian to the recently proposed ‘Future Signals’ event—a networking gala promising an exploration of dreamers committed to architecting uncharted futures.

Amid the clinking of coffee cups and the excited banter of like-minded oddballs—who were all rather sensible in their insane aspirations to democracy guilty of dreaming—it became clear that while AI and gadgetry might simplify life, nothing could substitute for human connection.

Everyone in earshot clapped as a woman began a surprisingly capricious soliloquy about using chirping crickets to improve mood, citing biological studies as vividly as a conspiracy theorist at a family dinner. Laughter bubbled like freshly carbonated water, and in that moment, Julian understood—not every interaction had to be a systematic algorithm; sometimes, the best algorithms in life were just a mixture of laughs, strange ideas, and the occasional breakdown of modern technology’s inscrutable language.

And thus, the young aspiring designer, armed now not with a toolbox of one-liners for a chatbot but with the basic human instinct of humor, surged forth into the chaotic cacophony of what was called “real” life—an irrational yet comforting dance between the irrational and the unseen perils of technology. ***The art of human connection, it appeared, would be the rarest and most valuable innovation of all.***

The only progress I can see is progress in organization. The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. We can transmit to them neither our knowledge of life nor of mathematics. Each must learn its lesson anew. Albert Einstein

» Have you tried the futures tool I’ve made that uses these nuggets to assemble a possible future?

• People: Cognitive erosion - and designing erosion-safe areas.

• Business: looking for storytellers. 10 principles of org culture.

• Security: Student journalists vs drones. Machado’s escape. Trump and Greenland.

• Tech: Furnaces in space. Digital dark age of photos.

• Nature: Spongy spider webs. Knee joints regeneration. Growing teeth again? Insect farming fails.

• AI: Cultural hegemony. Use at work. Review of use of 100 trillions tokens. Tricking LLMs to answer a simple coding question. Hollywood as a content farm for Silicon valley. Secret books or AI? Podcast flood.

A year ago, a paper about where money in Silicon Valley - aging well?

Navigating the Absurd

The streets of downtown Venice, California, teemed with a strange energy, as if caffeinated by the relentless creativity of its residents. Amid the hodgepodge of health food stores and pop-up art galleries, Ethan Turner—an indie filmmaker with an affinity for storytelling akin to puncturing a life-sized balloon of absurdity—struggled to edit his latest film. The digital landscape was littered with pesky issues, like a library gone rogue post-tornado attempt at categorization: his precious memories, clips from interviews and sunsets, threatened to vanish into the abyss of forgotten storage formats. Years of missed selfies and lost candids reared their ugly heads, taunting him about the fickleness of technology.

“Next time, I’m backing up my backup,” he grumbled to his caffeinated reflection in the laptop screen—a fine line between gritty realism and technological dystopia, like a dramatic punchline that didn’t land. Suddenly, a peculiar notification pinged. “Interview Request: The AI Co-host,” it read, emanating just the faintest hint of personal space invasion through digital pathways.

Ethan tapped the screen. “What’s next? An AI producing documentaries about the existential crisis of insect protein? Didn’t that one raise over six hundred million in funding before declaring bankruptcy?” His musings were a rabbit hole of irony, having just read about the demise of Ÿnsect, a startup that leapt boldly only to plummet spectacularly, like a bird chasing a shiny morsel just to get caught in an industrial fan. The taste of bitter, yet strangely comical, failure lingered as he pondered whether there was a nonlinear narrative to this cycle of innovation.

“Only in Hollywood,” Ethan chuckled, “can a microwave factory orbiting Earth produce better semiconductors than the ones I’m using to render this film.” The thought sent his mind spiraling through the burgeoning eras of AI, podcasts, and the eventual pursuit of regrowing teeth—all hallmarks of a world eager to race forward while still tethered to the past.

As he stared into the pixellated void, an absurd idea blossomed. What if he crowdsourced a film depicting a fictitious struggle to protect an annexation attempt of a far-fetched territory, like Greenland, only to layer in an AI-driven plot twist with characters who had spent years floating in the bureaucratic ether? The sheer audacity of it reminded him of María Corina Machado’s miraculous escape—no one believed her saga until Jamie from HR casually tossed it around like idle gossip during a coffee break.

He imagined the sight—drones flying ominously overhead, lurking like undercover agents at a movie premiere, all while the AI-generated actors bantered with genuine confusion, their lines fed upon snippets of misinformation they’ve gleaned from the ether. Yes, a film where choice meets confusion, creativity dangles precariously, much like the endurance of his dwindling attention span amidst a digital content noise that would be quite at home with conspiracy theories about Russian ships—the perfect soufflé of absurdity and serious commentary.

Just as he scribbled his ideas beneath a pour-over soaked napkin, an alert flashed across his screen: “AI satisfaction guaranteed—non-fiction writing or you get your money back!” Ethan leaned back, grinning at the universe’s sense of humor. Maybe the future wasn’t bleak; it was an elaborate jest waiting for someone audacious enough to navigate through its labyrinthine pathways, much like a journalist intersecting facts without allowing speculation to pop the balloon of reality.

With that, Ethan Turner turned back to his keyboard, ready to embrace the chaos. After all, if life—and filmmaking—could be anything at all, it might as well be deliciously nonsensical.