Once a week I have a one-on-one with my oldest nephew, Jackson, freshly 21, star basketballer, and college student.

So..something..happened. It suffices to say that Jackson is a giver — the guy who gets the gang together. The details are not important, but the shape of the “event” led to the an opportunity for an avuncular lesson folded into a story.

This week’s learning opportunity was to a lesson about givers and takers — something relevant for the kind of person who is eager to start and build collectives of human potential: a company, a team, a pick-up game, a club, a game night, or any of the infinity of ways of getting people together for some kind of collaborative endeavor.

Some will find themselves being the person who gets the gang together — the charismatic who enjoys fostering collaboration community teams collectives, etc.

Over the years I’ve built projects and communities where the real work isn’t the “big idea” — it’s the steady, unglamorous work: initiating, inviting, editing, following through.

When you’re that person, you’ll meet a familiar situation: someone benefits from the momentum you created but doesn’t naturally contribute back into the effort.

Just to be clear — this is not a callout. It has happend — and it’s a pattern. It's life, and the value in it happening is that you understand the kinds of things that can happen when humans interact.

How does one manage the general dynamic of, you know — humans interacting?

So the practice is simple: make your expectations explicit early, invite contribution directly and with clarity, reward the helpers, and reduce exposure to chronic non-contributors — and do so calmly, cleanly, and avoid carrying the freight of resentment.

You definitely do not want to get in a position where you disregulate and villainize anyone. Just choose your collaborations and your collaborators with eyes open.

And then remember that at the edge case, one is not obligated to interact with everyone just because they want to, particularly if they jam things up.

Check?

Stay tuned for the next episode of “Yo, Unc?!”

Dario Amodei of Anthropic takes a stand, current White House AI strategy while others in tech play nice. His bold moves put him at odds with the White House, forging a path few dare to tread.

AI's rapid rise is shifting from sci-fi dreams to public reality. As capabilities grow, so do the risks, sparking global discussions about our future with AI.

Online gamblers on platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket are rivaling professional economists in forecasting economic trends, thanks to the crowd's wisdom and financial incentives.

Job hunting feels like shouting into a void—upload your resume, answer the same questions, and maybe (but probably not) get a reply. It's exhausting and discouraging, and plenty of people are feeling burned out by the whole impersonal process.

Hi! Welcome. Thanks for reading. In case you're new here and wondering -- I'm Julian Bleecker. I help leaders and strategy teams navigate uncertainty through strategic prototyping -- working backward from plausible near futures to make today's choices clearer.

I use an approach I pioneered called Design Fiction. You see some of it here in the newsletter and definitely over on my site over at Near Future Laboratory.

I create tangible artifacts and narrative experiences that turn abstract foresight into concrete strategic options, alignment, and action. My practice spans engineering (BSEE, MSEng/HCI) and the social sciences/humanities (PhD), so the work holds up technically and lands with cultural relevance and it's grounded and tangible.

Near Future Laboratory can bring decades of experience, expertise, and an extensive network of similarly talented professionals -- and I'm available for commissions, facilitated workshops, seminars, talks, embedded engagements, and leadership roles.

1/ We started with a delightfully petty but real point: type still matters — ligatures, kerning, captions, and all the micro-choices that keep “the future” from looking like a ransom note.

2/ A provocation landed hard: if voice becomes the default interface, do we drift into a post-literature society — and what do we lose (or weirdly regain) in memory, attention, and agency when “reading” gets replaced by listening?

3/ The “Lab for Radical Museum Futures” showed a practical move: take a design fiction kit and tune it to a sector by swapping in its native voices and values (plain language, academic, journalistic, children’s museum, care/collaboration). Lab for Radical Museum Futures (a futures lab for museum workers to reimagine museums).

4/ We kicked around the idea of “exhibit-ising” anything — turning content into an immersive, walk-around experience — with a live reference: a VR re-presentation of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ kinetic text world. VR re-presentation (immersive kinetic type based on YHCHI), plus the source work LOTUS BLOSSOM (M+ collection note on the Flash-era piece).

5/ A recurring vibe: “dream logic” as a useful lens — not as mysticism, but as a way to let associative jumps do sensemaking work, turning artifacts into a kind of navigable “complexity wall.”

6/ We named the psychological edge case too: extended assistant immersion can tip into obsessive loops, delusional reinforcement, or just plain cognitive overheating — the “go outside and touch snow” moment. AI psychosis (Psychology Today on chatbots amplifying delusional beliefs).

7/ The conversation widened into writing: AI-authored (or AI-co-written) books aren’t the end of writing, but they do force a new argument about craft, ownership, and what “authorship” even means after tools become collaborators. Sympathy Tower Tokyo (publisher page for Rie Qudan’s novel) and NYT on AI romance books (gift/unlocked link about Claude + rapid romance production).

8/ We pulled in adjacent references that sharpen the frame: Track Changes (a literary history of word processing), and Borges’ “Pierre Menard” as the canonical mind-bender about identical text becoming a different work when context shifts. Pierre Menard (PDF/ (public-domain scan).

9/ We touched concrete poetry and “reinforced concrete poetry” as a name for the moment: constraints + machinery producing new forms, not just new content, with Claude artifacts as a shareable medium. Claude concrete poem artifact (public Claude artifact) and What are Artifacts? (Claude support explainer).

10/ The “museum/experience” thread got concrete via exemplars: Local Projects (experience + exhibition design studio), Daily tous les jours (collective interactive experiences for public space), and teamLab (immersive digital art environments) — all case studies for what it looks like when information becomes a place you can inhabit.

Set in 1999 just at the edge of the millineium (the film released in 1991), a woman gets into a car accident with a pair of bumblingly kind bank robbers, who enlist her help to take the stolen money to a drop in Paris. On the way, she runs into another fugitive from the law, an American who's being chased by the CIA. He claims the charges are false. The authorities want to confiscate a device his father invented which allows anyone to record their dreams and vision. On the run from both the bank robbers and the CIA, the couple span the globe, ending up in Australia at his father's research facility, where they hope to play back the recordings made for his blind mother.

All the while there is the shadow of calamity: a damaged Indian nuclear satellite crashing to Earth might cause the end of civilization.

This was one of the first films I studied while in grad school as an example of how visual story telling could immerse one in the visions of a near future. Noted for its collaboration with Sony on the production design — the various recording technology and, at the time, the promise of "HDTV" which, for you Gen-Z'rs — was the next big thing after VHS and LaserDisc. The film is a kind of time capsule of the early 90s vision of the near future, with a mix of optimism and anxiety about technology, globalization, and the end of the millennium.

(p.s. You may find yourself challenged to find the original theatrical release version — I had it on 2 VHS tapes — so, warning! Wem Wender's director’s cut from Criterion is an interminable and aggrevating nearly 5 hours (WTF WW..) Avoid that if at all possible unless you are exceptionally patient.)

Opportunities, Calls, Announcements

🚀 Faculty Search: Bridging Statistics, Data Science, & HCI at MBZUAI 📊

MBZUAI is looking for qualified academics to work on bridging Statistics & Data Science with Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

Seeking a scholar whose work sits at the critical intersection of computational statistics and human cognition—someone dedicated to Visualization, Sense-Making, and Reasoning with Data.

Open Call: Actors, Improvisors & Collaborators

The EU Policy Lab at the European Commission, in collaboration with theatre director Orion Maxted (Center Leo Apostel, VUB, and the Imaginary Institute), are investigating strategic foresight methodologies through theatre and play.

Teresa de Lauretis, a pioneering figure in feminist theory and cultural studies, passed away earlier this month at the age of 88. Born in Italy, de Lauretis made significant contributions to the fields of semiotics, psychoanalysis, and film theory.

Teresa was one of my mentors during my PhD studies in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz. It was a true pleasure to work under her guidance, and be challenged by her to push into a practice, discipline, literature and canon that was beyond new to me.

She accepted this odd guy coming from engineering, encouraging my confused studies of video games as narrative and cultural artifacts, and pushing me to find the right language to theorize and make sense of these peculiar and fangled visual story forms. She was a brilliant thinker, a generous mentor, and a kind soul.

On to your next adventure, Teresa! Thank you. 🫡💜