At 8am on Tuesday 27th February, MediaEvolution Malmö are launching the book which is the result of their latest community foresight cycle, which took as its topic “the futures of digital work”.

The book contains five fictions by yours truly—storified versions of the five scenarios that the core contributors came up with across four days of workshop activities late last year

Why not sign up and come along if you’re in the area? I’ll be reading from one of the stories, experts will be pontificating… and if I know the Media Evolution crew, there’ll be damned good coffee and pastries.

The topic was chosen as a container for the then-ongoing discourse around “AI”, as well as a more general notion of digital platforms and softwares-as-services, and it was remarkable (for me at least) how easily those two categories became conflated with one another, as well as how said discourse was an uncanny replications of discourses I have lived through before, going right back to the “paperless office!” discourse that underpinned the curriculum of my Computer Studies GCSE circa 1990. As such, I had a bunch of my own thoughts’n’feels around the topic, but my job here was to build human-scale fictions out of the scenario outlines generated in the workshops—in other words, while it was understood that my own feelings and perspectives would enter any story so produced, I also had to do my best to honour the work and ideas of others.

It was an interesting challenge, and different to the usually very solo practice of writing fiction… and it’s not a spoiler to say that I enjoyed it quite a lot, and that the good people at Media Evolution liked the results enough that they’ve asked me back to do it again for the next foresight cycle, which begins later this week.

(I’ll have more to say about the stories and the workshops and the whole making-of process in the weeks ahead.)

I believe there will be free-to-air PDF versions of the book available. There will definitely be very handsome printed versions, available from ME’s headquarters in Västra Hamnen, and also by mail order. I’m also assuming I’ll get a handful of contributor copies, so if you’re nowhere near Malmö and would like to see one, drop me a note and let me know; I can’t promise you can all have one, but I’ll do what I can!