Wondering about what it is to be a futurist and recounting my own varied reluctance to claim the term over the years, I decided that being tough on the term itself was missing the point. Instead, maybe we should look to people who embody the essence of futurism through their work and impact rather than their credentials or self-presentation. There is a certain kind of braggadocio that can adhere around the term that, sure..that can be off-putting or seem shallow or thin. But, ultimately, I’ve resolved to accpet that the future needs more people who care about it, whatever you think about the term. So rather than gatekeeping the term or debating its legitimacy, we should focus on the actual practice of futures work and the tangible contributions people make to shaping what’s possible. Maybe actually..everyone should be a futurist. Imagine if we all took an active stake in what comes next, change, and imagining the world otherwise?

Somehow, in the age of tech bros playing at being sci-fi visionaries, the deeper, subversive power of science fiction is getting lost. From Tokyo’s neon-lit streets to the avant-garde sounds of SOPHIE and Oneohtrix Point Never, it’s clear we need to reclaim sci-fi’s radical imagination to shape futures that truly matter. This was a post that has been severely broken (TLS issues that cannot be worked-around) on Protein.xyz and so purely for the sake of avoiding link-rot I am reposting it here. This post from Protein.xyz explores why sci-fi literacy is more crucial than ever, urging us to look beyond the spectacle and engage with the genre’s rich tapestry of ideas that challenge, inspire, and envision better worlds.

Pussy Weevil — a "proto-Tex-Avery" animated character with a malleable and virtually indestructible form. A vile, reactive persona that mutates, spits, and glitches. Exhibited at Bitforms Gallery May 15–June 19, 2003, and Ars Electronica 2003. Pussy Weevil is an individual software animated character that responds to the viewer’s distance or proximity. The piece involves choreography in space and deals with subject / object relationships vis-a-vis the viewer. Pussy Weevil ignores you, outrageously derides you, tries to scare you but it runs away in fright if you get too close. Pussy Weevil questions how digital characters can be affected by interactions in analog spaces and examines the relationship between the real and computer made worlds.

A review I wrote of Incorporations (Zone Books, 1992) back while in the masters program in the Engineering School at the University of Washington, Seattle and figuring out my voice in the whole..postmodern aesthetics + critical theory (or whatever..) idiom.

The volume is a pretty awesome multidisciplinary anthology exploring the intersections of technology, culture, and humanity at the close of the twentieth century. Edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, the book examines how advancements in biotechnology, surveillance, and artificial intelligence have reshaped the body and societal consciousness.

Includes contributions from fields such as philosophy, architecture, and science, essays by Judith Barry, J.G. Ballard, and Donna Haraway critique the commodification of life and the evolving relationship between humans and technology. Incorporations challenges readers to reflect on modernity’s impact and the cultural frameworks shaping the future.

I have been wondering about the ways in which an “index” page on a website could be reimagined such that it harkens back to when the index on a website was more like an indexical representation of a body of work, rather than the more contemporary approach in which the page needs to be more optimized for search, SEO, and algorithmic discovery. In that context I set out to prototype and experiment with what this might be without overthinking things. This prototype is an exploration of what an “index” page is as a series of “cards” that represent different content pieces. The metaphor of cards looms large in my mind as I really used ot love going to the Princeton Public Library and, when I could, the Firestone Library at Princeton Univeristy and browing the card catalog, mor invested in the exploration and serendipity of discovery, and anxious about the fragility of these paper cards (wondering how losing one could result in an...

A week or two back, I was talking with a young musician wondering what it means to make music now, in the age of AI. They paused mid-sentence, sort of rolling around some notes it seemed they had prepared pre-call. I thought maybe they were waiting for some insight, or just for someone like me to make sense of the noise and confusion that surrounded their sense of their own future as a creative artist. What followed was an extemporaneous story about a design fiction project involving a box of artifacts (that felt as if they had come) from the 1980s that served as a "record album" in a non-traditional format. What I think I intended was for this tale to highlight the importance of refusing default containers and embracing audacity in creative expression. Later that week, I saw Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions, a film that challenges traditional narrative structures and invites viewers to experience it as a sonic album. This...

In this episode my friend Tom Guarriello joins me to unpack a deceptively simple question—why do some things matter more than others? How is it that “brands” are rarely just products. Tom describes how they’re meaning-machines: coffee cups, clothes, grocery aisles, and the everyday objects we carry through life are the things that quietly scaffold identity, aspiration, and sense of belonging. Choice arrives instantly; explanation comes later. Tom’s “meaning stack” helps us understand the rise of culture brands those brands that don’t just sell products, but stage worlds: concerts, exhibitions, lifestyles, and point-of-view. We discuss Tom's new book which gets into all of this and more. Check it out: ”The Meaning of Branded Objects” available now.

Annual studio reviews with several students from Liam Young's Entertainment & Media studio at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. I had a great time sitting with students, discussing their work, and providing feedback on their projects. The creativity and innovation displayed by the students were such that it kinda made me want to join in — and reminded me of the vibrancy that one feels sitting in a studio type environment, although Sartre did say that “hell is other people” imagining a resonance of action, activity, sharing, creativity and even the occasional micro-antagonism had me feeling back to such times. Or maybe I am wondering about the feelings I have working solo in the studio here. In any case, it was inspiring to see how they are exploring the perimeters and boundaries of design, technology and a kind of storytelling in the context of entertainment and media. Good stuff. Always an easy “yes” when Liam invites me over.

Organizations often ask people with a generalist, orienting sensibility to behave like delivery specialists — and then interpret the resulting friction as a personal or performance problem. The essay that went out in the email newsletter last week (and appeared as well on the other various endpoints like Substack, Patreon, and LinkedIn) generated a good amount of reader mail. The questions were less about the theme of “misalignment” and more about the undergirding principles of the specialists and the generalist, and how their various approaches, ways of working, deliverables and — overall — ontologies can be distinguised and the consequences of these differences to organizations. Now, I recognize that these are somewhat broad schematic categories and that in practice, people are more complex and nuanced than these labels suggest. Still, I think there is value in clarifying the differences in order to better understand how they can collaborate effectively. Some of this comes from the confusion I had several years ago when I was...