Latest writing

Recent notes, dispatches, and essays from Near Future Laboratory.

A current point of entry into the writing, research, and speculative prototyping work that runs alongside commissioned projects.

Most recent / Jun 08, 2026

Paul Verhoeven World Building in RoboCop

Advertising, television news, and the vernacular visual culture of possible worlds

RoboCop is useful for Design Fiction because its world arrives through ordinary media forms: television news, commercials, public tone, product promises, and the vernacular visual culture people already know how to read. It's an approach Paul Verhoeven has used in many of his films, and it is a powerful way to build possible worlds that feel familiar enough to be thought about, argued with, and felt into. This note is a companion to the Near Future Laboratory newsletter Week 24 Year 26, which follows that thread through RoboCop, the OMATA Annual Report From The Future, AI stand-ins, AI farming, and an Office Hours conversation about neurodivergent futures of work.

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May 30, 2026

Past, Present, and Future of Art+Tech

Week 23 Year 26 follows a thread through the history of art+tech, from MoMA's Talk to Me catalogue and Matt Webb's Poem/1 clock to local human-powered AI, civic futures work in Italy, and a speculative impacts role from an adjacent now. The issue is about how the meaning of art+tech changes as the surrounding world changes, and why small objects, catalogs, civic processes, and job descriptions can all become useful materials for thinking with possible futures.

May 22, 2026

Office Hours N°310

Office Hours N°310 moved through simulation as a useful lie, design tuned to context, AI-made tools and the validation problem, research with children, parenting and surveillance, owning your social stack, agentic editorial infrastructure, vibe coding discipline, radio as a testbed for taste, and Rick's relational citation riff.