Near Future Laboratory Newsletter

Date: August 6, 2025

Summary: The future is not a forecast, but a bargaining chip to negotiate the kind of world we're willing to fight for, or against. However, our collective imagination has stalled in a cul-de-sac of recycled aesthetics, making it more important than ever to imagine alternative futures.

Essentially: The future is a complex and multifaceted concept that has become increasingly important in today's world. However, our ability to imagine alternative futures has stalled, and it's time to rethink the way we approach this concept.

But why? The importance of imagining alternative futures cannot be overstated. With the world facing numerous challenges, it's crucial that we develop new ways of thinking about the future and how to shape it. This email highlights the need for a more nuanced and creative approach to thinking about the future, which is why understanding New Future Archetypes (NFAs) is essential.

The Future.

Everyone carries a version of it. Personal, political, utopian, apocalyptic. Almost always tech-saturated.

But "the future" isn't a forecast. It's more like a bargaining chip.

It's a way to negotiate the kind of world we're willing to fight for, or against.

The trouble is: we've stalled.

Our collective imagination feels stuck in a cul-de-sac of recycled aesthetics. Half Hollywood, half corporate demo reel. We're streaming Lego Captain America vs The Smurfs all the while drones cosplay as flying cars, like ticking off a 1950s sci-fi checklist that is mean to count as progress.

I wrote about this in my last book, It's Time To Imagine Harder, and it feels more relevant than ever.

It makes more and more sense to describe the world we live in as some one else's future — someone else's idea of the world we should be inhabiting.

The decimation of our ability to imagine alternative futures is a real thing. And it's not just the futures thing — it's the impositions against creativity, the expressions of our existentially vital capability to imagine; it feels like these are systematically being eroded.

Futures?

We've got no shortage of futures.

We've got a shortage of imaginative futures.

That's where New Future Archetypes (NFAs) come in, and the work the gang at N O R M A L S is doing.

Think of them as "futures in a box," or maybe a speculative cinematic universe without a script.

They're not predictions.

They're provocations.

NFAs let us live inside alternative futures, not just to be wowed, but to rehearse, rethink, and redesign.

NFAs don't just ask "what if?" They help us inhabit the answer long enough to ask better questions.

Tune in to the podcast episode (N°100!) where I hang out with the gang at N O R M A L S and we get into it: the limitations of traditional futurism tropes like cyberpunk and the need for new archetypes that foster innovation and public engagement.

Please support the podcast by subscribing, rating, and sharing it with your friends — and become a patron over on Patreon to help support the production of the podcast and other projects.

Office Hours The Side Projects Edition

Share your creativity

The happy, optimistic side of all that is that we do still have this functioning weird bit of vascularized meat in our head that has this remarkable ability to imagine and create.
So..as long as we do, let's get together and feast.
Every week we get together for Office Hours on Zoom. Three folks sign up to share a Side Project. Casual. Informal. More like a dinner salon and definitely not a pitch fest.
Short, sharp, casual 10 minute shares followed by 20 minutes of generative, supportive, encouraging discussion and reflection.
Two slots are still open for this Friday.
Got something you want to share? Don't be shy. Sign up now.
Past Side Projects Episodes are up available! Episode N°270 was a banger!.

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The Sublimated AI Interface

Some reflections from my AI + Designed Fictions Research Studio

I was putting together some top-level thinking, notes and reflections based on some of the awesome feedback I've gotten from folks who have been beta testing the web edition of Vibewriter. Most of it was entirely positive and in most cases quite generative of possible trajectories.
One theme I should emphasize is that this is positively not meant to be a replacement for your favorite writing instrument or context.
It is first of all a rapid prototype of an interface concept that comes from instinct more than anything else.
Secondly, it is, as I say, more like crossfit or kettle bells — it is an exercise. Just as you wouldn't take your kettle bells to work, please don't think that Vibewriter is a replacement for Microsoft Word or Google Docs. It's a game, not a document editor.
And it is its ludic — ludicrous almost — ham-fisted genres for the principle exercise allows one to get away with not expecting some superlative writing outcome. It's like playing pong or Wii Tennis, which should not be confused or expected to obtain to the same challenges as, you know — tennis.