I keep thinking about the first few minutes of RoboCop.

Paul Verhoeven gives us a world through formats that already know how to carry a world: television news, public tone, violent absurdity, product promises, and commercials that feel ridiculous until they start to feel familiar. The film does not need a long explanatory preface. The news anchor cadence, the cutaway advertisements, the corporate voice, the banality of the presentation of what we, the viewer, would consider odd, or uncomfortable, are all part of the worldbuilding. We chuckle, somewhat uncomfortably, at the vertices of this gradually expanding surface that defines the world we are about to enter into. The ads are not decoration — they are contours.

That is why I find advertising not only a compelling form, but also why I see it as so useful for Design Fiction.

Advertising is vernacular visual culture. It is the ordinary public language of desire, status, anxiety, discounting, convenience, safety, taste, and belonging. Storefront signs, supermarket flyers, classifieds, broadsheet full-spreads announcing furniture warehouse sales, posters ads on the subway, product label art, warranty language, and weird in-world commercials all tell us what a culture is trying to make normal.

This week’s Near Future Laboratory newsletter follows that thread through Verhoeven’s RoboCop, my own OMATA Annual Report From The Future, AI farming, and a short summary of last Friday’s Office Hours conversation where Alex shared his work about neurodivergent futures of work.

What I’ve learned — and taught — is this: speculative prototyping works best when it gives people something tangible to encounter. A receipt. A label. A public notice. A sales flyer. A customer-support transcript. An annual report from a company that is finding its meaning or product advertisement for a new concept that is still imagined. These things help possible futures become available for thought, feeling, disagreement, and decision.

RoboCop is still instructive because its worldbuilding understands that ordinary media surfaces can be more powerful than explanation. The advertisement is not decoration. It is one of the ways the world speaks.

Read the full issue:

Week 24 Year 26: RoboCop and the Vernacular Visual Culture of The Advertisement

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