“[A]s you get older, you’ll need youth spies that will keep you abreast of new music that nobody your age has heard of yet or body-piercing mutilations that are becoming all the rage—even budding sexually transmitted diseases you should go to any length to avoid.” - John Waters’ Make Trouble
Business: Public tech companies added $2.4 trillion to their market capitalization in 2023 as tech firms laid off over 260,000 workers in the space of a year.
Weird tech: Vibrating plates as learning systems. Controlling mice by making them hallucinate.
People: Best practice communication - 5-paragraph Operation Order / OPORDs (PDF - Ranger). Bonding to digital places.
Change through TheWeek or DeepTimeWalks.Futures: Harnessing fiction for Futures work. Verge’s (/ethnographic futures framework) Futures framework. PPEPSIII replacing PESTLE? An interesting Neil Stephenson’s prediction.
AI: Piracy as a business model?
Security: Research hardware and robots aren’t secured. How spies shaped US tourism (guides). GenAI worms.
Random: Subsidiarity. Jean Diable (FR, book 1, and book 2) - no links to Vanden Plas ;)
The revolutions of the future will appear in forms we don’t even recognise—in a language we can’t read. We will be looking out for twists on the old themes but not noticing that there are whole new conversations taking place. Just imagine if all the things about which we now get so heated meant nothing to those who follow us—as mysteriously irrelevant as the nuanced distinctions between anarcho-syndicalism and communist anarchism. At least we can hope for that. As the cybernetician Stafford Beer once said to me: “If we can understand our children, we’re all screwed.” So revel in your mystification and read it as a sign of a healthy future.
Whatever happens next, it won’t be what you expected. If it is what you expected, it isn’t what’s happening next.
