Although we can be quite optimistic about the future of technology, we often use science fiction as a way to explore the potential consequences of emerging technologies, to warn us about the dangers of certain paths, and to inspire us toward better outcomes. But these stories are also little fascinating tales that somehow effect the ways the technologists’ mindset absorbs and processes the possibilities of the future. They can be read as blueprints for what to build, rather than just cautionary tales about what to avoid.

While I appreciate the literary value of science fiction as a form of a kind of mirror onto the present, we should be careful about our expectations that it will be read in that way. We should also be careful about the ways in which we use it as a tool for thinking about the future. It can be a powerful tool for imagining possible futures, but it can also be a trap that...

Weekly Office Hours are held every Friday at 9am PST / 5pm UTC. Sign up for the newsletter to get notified so you can join us for open discussion on design fiction, speculative design, critical futures, and near future laboratory projects. This week we some of the discussions included the latest developments in generative AI, exploring ethical considerations, design fiction applications, and the evolving landscape of human-AI collaboration. We also shared updates on our ongoing projects and discussed upcoming events in the design fiction community.

When the logic of the future is already here, but not quite, we find ourselves in a strange liminal space where the fictional and the real are intertwined. This is the agentic logic of late capitalism, where the seeds of the future are already being sown in the present, and where the future is already shaping our present in ways that are both exciting and unsettling.

The “Hub” is a repository of agentic "skills" that represent the hopes, fears, dreams, desires, and dreads of the present. It is a cultural artifact that reflects back the agentic logic of late capitalism in all its glory and antagonizing contradictions. Finding evidence of the future in the present is a practice that connects the dots between the present and possible futures, allowing us to see how the seeds of the future are already being sown in the present and how the future is already shaping our present.

A Design Fiction Dispatch exploring the implications of a hypothetical 12% surge in global inference demand, revealing systemic fragility and the invisible supply chains of compute, data, and human attention that underpin our AI-driven world. The dispatch serves as a strategy artifact to help teams and leaders interrogate the ambiguity of why things happen, not just how to fix them, in the context of infrastructure debates and emerging sensor layers.

A report out from General Seminar S07 E02, where we explored the idea that strategy is a form of science fiction — a way to prototype futures into existence through storytelling and rehearsal. We discussed ambiguity as a feature, strategy as a spell, and how the weirdness of prototypes can reveal hidden organizational truths.

If you think of a screwdriver and imagine it as a tool that is meant to loosen, tighten, maybe pry things open, you might be missing the point of the screwdriver. A screwdriver builds worlds, and those worlds change the inhabitants, and the inhabitants change the worlds, and the screwdriver is the medium that makes all of that possible. If AI is not just a better screwdriver, but a worldmaking medium that reshapes the very ground we walk on, then how do we design our relationship to it before the relationship designs us?

OpenCLAW (formerly Clawdbot / Moltbot) feels like a glitch in the calendar: one week it’s a clever demo, the next it’s a social and economic actor — running errands in our browsers, operating our tools, booking meetings, moving files, touching credentials, and quietly turning “software” into your weird whacky drunkard uncle at the family holiday party. The elation is real. The curiosity is felt..and so is the sense of perverse fascination and existential dread.

Join me for General Seminar S07 / E03, where we’ll treat the moment we are currently inhabiting like a live science-fiction action spectacular event: not “what do we believe,” but “what do we do when this becomes normal?”

Weekly Office Hours are held every Friday at 9am PST / 5pm UTC. Sign up for the newsletter to get notified so you can join us for open discussion on design fiction, speculative design, critical futures, and near future laboratory projects. This week we covered various topics including project updates, community engagement, and upcoming events.

Last week we discussed "own your stack" strategies, self-hosted tools, privacy practices, and web preservation techniques. We also explored creative workflows like personal typeface creation and planned a June Denver “f/unconference” festival focused on software for personal practices, tiny projects, letterpress and typesetting — and more!

In this episode of General Seminar, we explore the intersection of strategy and science fiction. Strategy is often seen as a data-driven discipline, but at its core, it is about envisioning and acting upon imagined futures. Design Fiction serves as a powerful tool to make these futures tangible, allowing organizations to "feel into" possibilities long before they can be measured. This episode gets into how Design Fiction can help surface implicit assumptions in strategic planning and foster more generative discussions about the future.