Category: Futures

  • bear discovers fire: on the erroneous over-estimation of generative systems

    bear discovers fire: on the erroneous over-estimation of generative systems

    Oh god, OK—yes, I’m sorry, more “#AI” discourse, and believe me, no one finds my repeated returns to the topic more wearing and ironic than I do, but we are living in A Moment, and I have been wrestling with that moment on the personal and artistic front, but I have also been looking at…

  • divestor storytime: reading “Village People”at Media Evolution

    divestor storytime: reading “Village People”at Media Evolution

    I keep promising an in-depth post about the Media Evolution collaborative foresight cycle I was involved with late last year. Apologies, but this is not that in-depth post—partly because I’m currently very busy working on the next collaborative foresight cycle (of which ME do three each year), among various other client-facing things. But this post…

  • preludes to enantiodromia

    I’m seeing enough of them, now, and discussing the concept with enough people online and off, that I think it’s time to start clipping examples of people pointing at harbingers of enantiodromia—the sudden inversion of a paradigm into its complete opposite. Here’s yer man Dougald Hine—a far better-known and more widely read Brit-who-fled-to-Sweden—in a longer…

  • the parts of the shadows that didn’t exactly reflect the numbers became problems

    Many people loved the installment of Dorothy Gambrell’s Cat & Girl webcomic in which Gambrell confronted her feelings about being one of a few thousand early webcomics people listed as having had their work used as training material for generative models. I loved it too. I haven’t been following C&G since the start, but for…

  • fyra år i Malmö

    I rolled into this town four years ago today. This is a rather less notable or triumphant anniversary than that of Cory Doctorow’s establishment of Pluralistic, which was four years ago yesterday—but I dare say he too ends up saying to people “you know, the week when the Covid pandemic really became a thing?”, or…