Category: Futures

  • a paradoxical solace that follows from the realization that we are fucked

    I’m a bit all over the place as regards my information channel management*, so I can’t credit whoever it was that caused me to see this long review-essay at the European Review of Books… but I can tell you that the challenge was less finding a piece of it to pull-quote, and more deciding which…

  • cards on the table

    Little box o’ tricks from the Near Future Lab just made their way here over the Atlantic. Good timing, too—got some workshops coming up where these might be just the ticket.

  • indigestible lumps of technical explanation in the guise of purported dialogue

    That invigorating yet frustrating thing where someone smarter than you with a bigger audience makes a fairly neat version of an argument you’ve been trying to peddle for a decade or more. Henry ‘Crooked Timber’ Farrell has been reading Cory Doctorow’s latest, and uses it as a foil for talking about what most sf types…

  • our sweaty, bumbling, warm humanity

    Irina Dumitrescu: Lately I look at the way people around me accept technology without question and worry that I’m becoming a reactionary. I don’t want to be that person — the one who grumbles about cell phones in children’s hands and social media and the polished bilge of ChatGPT substituting for the writing people make,…

  • making them seem insurmountable

    A new Laleh Khalili joint at NOEMA: … what if infrastructure is designed, financed and adopted into the habits of everyday lives of its users in such a way that it is not a harbinger of apocalypse? I fear that thinking of infrastructures in a generalized and totalizing way, as always only girding the structures…