Here’s your call log — top-lines, elevated edicts, notable notes and questionably hashed highlights from the Near Future Laboratory’s Weekly Office Hours. It was Episode N°291 last Friday Dec 26, 2025.
1) A screening of BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions kicked off a discussion around “containers” for media. Like..treating film like an album, or an album like a video in a box with an mp3 player and then let the meaning wash over you, so we wondered about how one might rethink how experience is packaged and received.
2) A “Super Drop” idea came up: some kinda recurring drop/subscription model where the Rick’s bookstore becomes the fulfillment engine for suitably unexpected/weird, collaborative creative goods, with a deliberately “blind box” trust-the-taste vibe.
3) Shipping and fulfillment were treated as a real design constraint (not an afterthought), including how packaging and volume decisions shape what’s even possible.
4) “Ethical scaling” (“it isn’t about follower count; it’s about meaningful community”) wasn’t framed as a moral footnote but rather/also as an operating constraint baked into the model so that the notion of (huge) scale doesn’t interfere with decisions about what to create.
5) “Releases as ZIP files??” versus the felt reality that digital goods are easy to lose, forget, or have vanish behind broken links and platform drift, making physical artifacts a more reliable memory anchor.
6) Call it “breadcrumb publishing” where you scatter small signals across media so people follow threads the way they used to through bookstores/records/films—worlds opening into worlds.
7) A “graph mindset” was proposed for curating culture: map the network, find the maximum traversal distances, and intentionally stitch the farthest nodes together to create adjacency and collaboration.
8) Small, tactile proof-points matter. Things like stamps, marks, and physical signals can function as authenticity and presence thusly keeping “a pinky finger” in the physical even when distribution gets hybrid (analog/digital; physical/digital).
9) Link me the links
“movie as music video” — Lucky People Center International
One-shot/permadeath game — One Single Life
Resn / NZTA Flash Driving Game (Vimeo)
timebanking primer
Chick Tracts
FABx (Fab Lab gathering)
Love Hultén
Tom Sachs x Helinox J.Chair.
Say, if you want to be in the room for this kind of wide-band, high-signal wandering, sharing, reflecting, and laughing then you should definitely join and support my Patreon and show up for the next Office Hours!
It’s light, fun, smooth sharing, discussing, networking, and riffing on all things near future, speculative design, technology, culture, and whatever else comes up. (No politics, I promise.) See you there!
Oh, p.s. — we also do Side Project Shares where folks get to share what they’re working on. It’s a great way to get feedback and encouragement from a friendly, curious, and supportive group of technologists, graphic designers, writers, futures-y sorts, and many indescribables.
See Also