Barely a week ago, OpenClaw stumbled into our imaginaries. There was nothing entirely new there from a purely technical perspective, but the implications of seeing the agentic future happen faster than real-time — like a sped up preview of what-could-be — was like seeing the world becoming its own future in an instant was profoundly strange.

What we do here in the Near Future Laboratory is to try to make sense of the present by treating it as a live design fiction. We look for the signals, the traces, the glitches, the failures that matter before they become headlines. We try to understand what they reveal about our strategy, our future thinking and our infrastructure. And we try to use that understanding to help us all — whether an individual practitioner, or a product team and forward-thinking leadership — navigate uncertainty and complexity.

And that's what we'll be doing in the next General Seminar session. So join me as we wander into a possible/plausible/preferable future where OpenClaw is here, and the agentic future is now.

February 18th at 10am PT (UTC-8) and February 24th at 10am PT (UTC-8).

p.s. If you want to get a head start on the themes and questions we’ll be exploring, check out the Design Fiction Dispatch I wrote about the OpenClaw moment.

p.p.s. Wondering, like..WTF is OpenClaw? Check out the discussion; it's as good as anything else..