“Every engineering decision is now a cultural act. Every narrative choice carries technical consequence. The stakes have risen beyond business or tech to configuring the operating system of human attention itself. […] The irony is that as soon as anything is observed or acknowledged, it’ll be modeled. It’s the inverse of the “tree falls in forest” parable — not whether it happened unseen, but whether it still matters once seen by all. […] The renaissance mind returns not as dilettante but as armed philosopher, wielding systems fluency and cultural intelligence equally. The requisites: IQ, EQ, agency, taste — and a will to brute-force your way into the frame. The media-machine singularity will give us some of the most iconic, hybrid artists we’ve seen.” — media & machines
Business: More about food delivery riders.
People: Uncertainty and risks. The case for heavy digital things. Hyperreality.
Life: Communicating w/ dolphins. Cities for families.
Tech: Ruina montium. Health data sent to linkedin. Fixing Voyager1 spacecraft remotely.
Futures: Usable futures.
Random: Viable system model.
AI: Photo licensing on the brink of collapse. Klarna hires again. Radiologist. Shopping agent. Netflix AI ads. “LLMs are making me dumber” - and brain drain. Coercitive interrogation AI. Hallucinations which lead to penal cases.
OpenAI might keep logs.
Threads of Optimism in a Digital Storm
Samantha had always been a curious soul, drawn to the nettlesome details of life—the sort of person who would wonder about the implications of a LinkedIn privacy breach while waiting in line for a cold brew. "I suppose if you’ve shared your health data, your social media bio soon reads, ‘Samantha: Asthma sufferer, with a penchant for obscure mountain-wrecking techniques.' *Footnote 1: Catchy, but definitely not a Tinder bios masterpiece.*"
She halfheartedly scrolled through a feed crowded with ephemeral memes, their lightness clashing with the weighty topics she preferred. "What’s with all this pixelated fluff?” she muttered, recalling an article that had called for more ‘heavy creations’ over fleeting trends. “Everytime I dabble in these light creations, I feel as substantial as a hiccup in a windstorm.”
Meanwhile, her mind looped through the implications of AI—this modern-day oracle promising efficiency but threatening to unwittingly groom a generation of cognitive couch potatoes. *Footnote 2: A future where common sense is as rare as a horse-drawn carriage in the express lane.* She imagined, increasingly, how her dependence on AI was akin to relying on a butler who hadn’t read the owner’s manual.
Still lost in thought, she stumbled upon the Viable System Model and contemplated its layers of complexity, each segment like a minion in a kingdom of productivity. Would her eccentric little assembly—consisting of her, her cat, and too many houseplants—qualify as a viable model? She laughed, picturing it as a startup focused on rebranding cactus care.
And as she mulled over the balance between resilience and chaos, she couldn't help but think of the dolphins—the clever marine mammals communicating in sonic waves, much like her sporadic bursts of insight during solitary e-bike deliveries in South Beach. A hum of vibrancy thrummed through the air, yet the flicker of uncertainty loomed larger—genuine dialogue was hard to muster amid the insipid comforts of algorithm-driven interactions. “Who knew the real treasure lay underwater, beneath a tsunami of hashtags?” *Footnote 3: Piranhas would be proud of the feeding frenzy; social media is a petri dish of hyperreality, with amplified versions of ourselves swimming about like confused fish.*
That evening, encapsulated in her musings, Samantha stood atop her balcony, sipping tea infused with optimism. “It’s creativity that will rally against despair,” she affirmed, recalling the narrative on climate change's societal twist. She envisioned a world where art trickled like a freshwater spring into the desert of hopelessness—a beacon guiding the lost. Creative possibilities danced like a mirage, shimmering on the horizon of tomorrow.
Yet as she stewed, she felt a pang of weighty contemplation. Wasn't optimism a luxury? As a tidal wave of sinister AI loomed, would society even recognize the thin line between a genuine human connection and a byte-sized interaction engineered to mirror emotion? Would her little empire of succulents survive the AI uprising?
The warmth of twilight cloaked her thoughts, and she smiled, “Miracles, after all, rise among wrecked mountains.” *Footnote 4: Just like that time Aunt Marge's meatloaf caught fire, and the resulting chaos ironically led to a great neighborhood cook-off.*
Armed with fragments of imagination, the scent of potentiality wrapped around her like a worn quilt. Tomorrow, she would pen her story: the tangled interconnections of humanity, technology, and creativity. And just maybe, she'd coax a little optimism into her urban reality—one cactus at a time.