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| Borges. Foucault. Organizational Imagination. And some curious signals about the future of work, thirsty AI plays baseball too (what would we do without water,
beer, ai, burgers and baseball?), how to do the work you love and, speaking of doing the work you love, you should tune into our Info Session for the forthcoming workshop Pitch, Picture, Prototype. Links and stuff below. But first, a longish note on why organizational imagination matters and how a capacity to speculate gets you there. | When Borges referred to a certain Dr. Franz Kuhn and his mention of a peculiar and
distant Chinese encyclopedia — the “Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge” — he was demonstrating the power of speculative world building to rearrange perception and challenge our assumptions about order, classification, and meaning. Let me explain, at risk of further obscuring
my point by saying that I returned to this reference but not directly. Rather as it was written by Michel Foucault in the preface to what is, in my mind, his most readable and impactful book, “The Order of Things.” In the preface to the book Foucault admits to being
“shattered with laughter” when he first read this Borges passage and, it seems, this is what inspired him sufficiently to pen the book itself. You could be easily forgiven for either missing this passage (in the preface, which is not always read when one is reading a book) or, just
as much so, never having read “The Order of Things”. So, here's the passage that Borges attributes to this obscure and entirely speculative Chinese encyclopedia: “..[t]hese ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly
Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those
that at a distance resemble flies.” That “shattering” evokes this sense of a breaking or a fracturing of a whole. The kind of unexpected interruption in one's sense of things that is so profound that one cannot help but laugh. What brought me to all of this (and thank you for reading to here) was upon the occasion of my trying to find a conclusion to a short commissioned book for a client who requested a reflection on what I had mentioned in passing: “Organizational Imagination” and how to build that capacity within a company. I wanted to find a way to talk about the value of speculation and speculative prototyping as a means to push at the walls of the box — the one we've been told for eons to “think outside of..” (I'll note that this is ultimately nearly impossible to do as no matter how far outside you get from the box, the culture/epistemology of the org is baked into those trying to get out their thinking outside of that box. Which is why these practices that are fully internalized never get outside the box. You need a hoolie or sledge in the form of someone whose DNA isn't already
baked from the organizational culture.) The underlying thesis of this commissioned book is to make a compelling argument for why a speculative prototyping capability is a critical part of any meaningful innovation and product development capability. The book is meant to be a
practical guide for how to build that capability within an organization, but I wanted to find a way to talk about the value of that work in a way that was more evocative than just describing the process and the outcomes. That shattering laughter? It matters to this point. It is not
the laughter of dismissal — it is the laughter that comes when the categories one had relied upon fail all at once. When the ‘order of things' one had been born into and one has inherited, and was and always has been as natural as butter on toast and as common as the sense we say we all share commonly — when that suddenly reveals itself to be only one order among others and perhaps not even a particularly durable one..it's kinda funny to realize that the way we have been taught to classify and
understand the world is just one of many ways to do so, and that it can be so easily disrupted by a different set of assumptions about how things are ordered and classified. That is the part I keep wondering into when working with clients to integrate an Organizational Imagination
capability. Companies and institutions run on categories. They sort the world into markets, users, products, risks, forecasts, and strategic priorities. Those systems are useful until they become blinding. They keep the present intelligible, but they can also make an emerging
possibility look awkward, unserious, or something to be riduclued, which is the opposite of what you want to do when you're trying to make sense of what's going on in some new emerging terrain. See, what Borges is doing here is fabricating a taxonomy so alien, so orthogonal to the
way we coordinate and categorize things that one's sense-making apparatus — that weird vascularized piece of meat in our skulls — is forced to notice its own furniture. One suddenly becomes aware that order is made, not given. Categories are historical, contingent, local and what seems to belong together may only have been, at one point, taught to belong together sufficiently that it went from weird to unconsciously normal, ordinary, everyday knowledge. That curious “commone sense.” This has a lot to do, at least for me, with speculative prototyping. I
have been trying, in one place or another, and in one register or another or another, to make the case that speculative prototypes matter because they do something more than illustrate a possibility or report on a trend. In the idiom we are working in right here, they disturb the taxonomies by which an organization knows what counts as serious, fundable, strategic, real, probable, worthwhile. They introduce into the room an object, a fragment from a field of possibilities, a demo, a scene from
an adjacent space or near future, and by doing so they put a useful kind of pressure on the categories already in circulation. The effect of this is sometimes subtle, sometimes comic, sometimes disorienting. (I tend towards
the comic, perhaps for the same reason Borges does.) But that subtlety is precisely the point. The artifact does not fit, and in not fitting, it reveals that we are only seeing very partially the possibilities and, conversely, we recognize the limited frame around which we peer into the world. The team doing the work is unhindered by this frame because they are told to see outside of it. This is their function, and their immense value. There
is some pleasure in the abstraction of this philosophical argument for this function in a commercial context. But it is tangled up with a much more immediate concern, which is that I am trying to make this work legible as a role, a function, a job to be done and as necessary as any other vital function. I am trying to describe why an organization might need someone whose practice sits somewhere between prototyping and proposing, or that is able to fit an emerging trend inside of an artifact.
A fabricated thing can produce a real epistemic effect — the “shattering” reframes a product thesis or shift market categories. A false encyclopedia can rearrange perception. In a similar way, a speculative prototype, if it is any good and done with expertise and experience, can do
something similar inside an organization. It can make the familiar order flicker a bit — perhaps just a glitch — that reveals something not noticed before. It can make another ‘order of things' now suddenly appear for the chance to wonder about. | |
| Food For Thought
Section
| From the digest-this-🥓 Channel DEPARTMENT OF Futures of Work | shared by telegram-bridge A curious new idiom — “microshifting” describing a different kind of shape of work where there are focused bursts of activity rather than sticking to a rigid 9-to-5 schedule.
Supposedly this boosts productivity and enhances creativity because you get to recharge between tasks. Perhaps a practice that the pandemic signaled together with the move towards more remote work environments.
Read more →
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| From the digest-this-🥓 Channel DEPARTMENT OF Underemployment Futures | shared by telegram-bridge Well, it's no surprise to say that Gen Z is stepping into a challenging job market, facing issues like limited job openings, high costs of living, and aggrevating and antagonizing
A.I.-induced uncertainties. In a candid discussion, 12 young professionals reflect on their job search struggles, the unexpected realities of the workforce, and the emotional impact of underemployment. It's useful to contrast the on-the-ground experiences and musings with the Anthropic report.
$ Read more →
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| From the digest-this-🥓 Channel DEPARTMENT OF Data Labeling Futures | shared by telegram-bridge As Kenyan data labelers toil behind the scenes to train AI systems, they face severe underpayment and mental health strains from their demanding roles. Michael Geoffrey Asia, a former labeler, now spearheads the Data Labelers Association, fighting for fair wages and better
conditions. This struggle highlights the overlooked human cost behind AI's success and the need for equitable treatment of these essential workers. Also see the reference I made to the film “Humans in the Loop” in newsletter issue
w18-y25. Read more →
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| From the digest-this-🥓 Channel DEPARTMENT OF Secrets LLMs Leak | shared by telegram-bridge
 Whether or not this is a system glitch or, like..some inadvertent transmutation of internal metadata, I find this discussion on Reddit fascinating as people speculate about what may have caused
Claude to emanate what it referred to as a “Human Secret”. Some folks in the thread speculate that this could be a sign of an emergent inner monologue, a glimpse into the AI's internal thought processes. Others suggest it might be a glitch or an unintended consequence of the training data. Others suspect
it is meant to flag and elevate the chat for human review as it contains content related to medication or potentially self-harm. Regardless of the cause, and, honestly, regardless of the veracity of the post, the moment is full of ways to wander and wonder about the nature of AI consciousness and
self-awareness, and the ways it may participate in our own engagements. Also, this idea of a human in the loop of conversations is fascinating to reflect upon, particularly with the story above about the Data Labelers. Read more →
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| From the digest-this-🥓 Channel DEPARTMENT OF Thirsty Data Hungry Human Futures | shared by telegram-futures-bridge
 Like you, I feel into these stories about AI's thirst for water and I wonder how much of that is because, you know — we want to find wedges into justifying anger/frustration/confusion through such things as obscene amounts of water usage, data center
ruses, etc., etc. Sure. AI does uses water in quantities I cannot even relate to, and perhaps it may be the case that you feel that AI is bad and so using any water for a bad thing is, you know..“bad”. I'm sure I'm truthful when I say that data centers — and the things that happen in data centers —
consume millions of gallons annually. Heck. I may be off by an order of magnitude. But, either way — that sounds about right, right? So it makes sense that as AI workloads expand, their water use is projected to rise dramatically. Some estimates say potentially reaching 45 billion gallons by 2030 for
U.S. operations alone. How much water is that in tangible terms I have no idea, but..Yesh! Right? Or..yesh, is that a lot? I honestly don't know, but someone wanted to help me relate. I don't know the guy who created this tool to visualize this data nor their motivations. (They are an adherent to that
whole EA thing and I know some of those EA folks are felonious hamsters, but let's not obsess on this.) So, this tool may be wrong — and the feller even admits that some of the data may be wrong, but still..sorta curious to play with. Here's a set I conjured: comparing AI-based and general data center water consumption to the water used for growing corn (to feed cows/grow hamburgers, I presume), all US golf courses, watering California's
lawns, and cooling data centers and that sort of thing. Read more →
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| From the 🙈-mail-jester Channel DEPARTMENT OF What's Not To Love | shared by telegram-bridge Ever feel trapped doing work you love in an industry that's gone off the rails? I get it — you got your health insurance bills, your bill-bills, and the fear of starting over are real. Mike Monteiro lays it out bluntly: sometimes the
only way forward is to build your own space to do what you love, even if it means rethinking everything. His story of leaving the tech grind to create a company that actually worked for him is both tough love and a reminder that we don't have to accept a broken system. You're not alone if you're questioning it all right now. If this is you, read Mike's latest email newsletter but also — you should join me, Carl and Lisa for our Pitch, Picture, Prototype workshop which is the palliative, hands-on action-item for that feeling you may have after reading it. Read more →
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| From the digest-this-🥓 Channel DEPARTMENT OF Futuristic Baseball | shared by telegram-bridge Baseball is stepping into the future with the introduction of robot umpires this spring training. These automated systems
will be calling balls and strikes in all major league games, aiming to eliminate the inconsistencies that human umpires sometimes bring to the field. It's a move driven by pivotal missed calls, like the one by Mark Wegner in the 2025 NLDS, which left a lasting impression on players and fans alike. With the ABS system, MLB hopes to enhance the accuracy of the game while preserving its integrity. Speaking of sports futures..you'll want to check out Winning Formula, the newspaper from the future of sports we did back in 2014(!) that predicted things of this sort, even before AI was a thing. Check it out here. $ Read more →
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| From the 🙈-mail-jester Channel DEPARTMENT OF Octavia Butler's Got Futures | shared by telegram-bridge After a year of developing the Somatic Futures method, Rodney realized he'd unintentionally created a new way to read speculative
fiction—one that focuses on how bodies and movement are depicted on the page. This discovery led to his “Strange in the Right Way”, a three-week online course where participants read Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild together, using the Somatic Futures lens for a deeper, more embodied experience. The course is capped at two small cohorts of 25, encouraging slow, thoughtful reading and unexpected explorations. Interested readers are invited to join, subscribe to the Substack, or connect for a chat
about futures and embodiment. Read more →
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| From the digest-this-🥓 Channel DEPARTMENT OF Labor Had A Market | shared by telegram-bridge A curious study with a new measure meant to assess AI's impact on the labor market. According to this report, perhaps with the intent to de-escalate the rhetoric over AI-induced job loss — despite AI's immense theoretical potential, its
real-world influence on jobs hasn't been as significant as feared. Occupations with higher AI exposure, often involving older and more educated workers, are expected to ‘grow less'. Curiously, accoding to the report, there's no significant rise in unemployment among these groups, although there is a hint of slower hiring for younger workers. This approach lays the groundwork for understanding AI's nuanced role in reshaping employment landscapes, but may miss the on-the-ground experiences and
something more than the analytic aspects going on here. Read more →
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|
What's Your Next Big Thing? Workshop
| Pitch Picture Prototype A workshop for clarifying your value and your story, before someone else defines them for you.
| 
| The other day Carl, Lisa and I
presented a 60 minute info session for our forthcoming worksho Pitch, Picture, Prototype. If you missed the info session, I got the tape recording of it up on the blog here: Pitch, Picture, Prototype Info Session. With all of the hoopla around the future of work and even the future of value. This workshop seems more timely than ever. To come away having workshopped your own value and your own story — sure, call it an
“elevator pitch” — is a powerful outcome, and one that can be applied in a variety of contexts, from starting your own independent practice, to clarifying your value within your organization, to preparing for a job interview, to just having a clearer sense of your own story and how you want to show up in the world. We're going to keep this lean and tight, and so we'll be a small group to ensure that everyone gets the attention and opportunity to workshop their own story. Check out the Info Session and if this all resonates, be sure to sign up for the workshop to be held on April 17th. | Watch the info session"
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| Office Hours
N°303 Recap
|  1) Mateusz shared 0x42616e20526179, a fast-moving culture-jamming project aimed at pushing back
on always-on AI glasses, starting with a sticker campaign and a simple public-facing manifesto. The real point wasn’t merch; it was making these devices feel socially unacceptable in everyday shared spaces. 2) The group quickly pushed the project beyond stickers and into a distributed
toolkit: printable PDFs, button designs, stencils, QR-code variants, laser-cut templates, and even PCB or NFC-tagged versions. That turned the conversation into a practical lesson in distribution—don’t just ship objects, ship instructions people can reproduce locally. 3) A strong thread
ran through the whole discussion: the real problem is not photography in public by itself, but where the data goes and who gets to mine it. Meta’s glasses became the stand-in for a broader anxiety about consumer devices that quietly turn ordinary social life into extractive infrastructure. 4)
Several people surfaced tactical countermeasures, from detection apps to adversarial fashion to image-jamming ideas that make capture less useful or less trustworthy. Useful references included a Hackaday write-up on detecting smart glasses, a 404 Media piece on an app that warns you when they’re nearby, and examples of smart-glasses
detection, warning apps, and adversarial fashion. 5) The sharpest turn in the conversation came when people started asking what resistance should look like once these devices are normalized: shaming, petitions, design interventions, or legal constraints. The answer that kept resurfacing was that social convention matters as much as law—people have to feel that wearing surveillance on your face is rude, not inevitable. 6) The accessibility question complicated things in exactly the right way. Everyone could see that assistive uses are real, but also that companies will happily use disability as the moral wedge that gets mass-market surveillance devices through the door. 7) That led to a more interesting distinction: maybe genuinely assistive versions should be regulated like medical devices, while the mainstream consumer versions should be treated as something else entirely. In other words, don’t let “helpful for some” become cover for “extractive for everyone.” 8) There was also a useful reframing away from individual bad actors and toward the shaping of public commons. Once glasses, rings, cameras, and ambient sensors become normal, the issue is not just who is filming but whose perspective gets archived, modeled, and used to build the future. 9) The discussion kept bouncing between activism and design fiction, which is why it worked so well: what began as a sticker project opened onto questions about protocol, etiquette, technical sabotage, public signage, and face-level consent systems. One especially apt reference was the old
Image Fulgurator, a device that fought photography by projecting back into the image itself. 10)
Julian had to leave early for an info session for the upcoming workshop with Carl and Lisa, but the conversation had already done its job. A small tactical artifact cracked open a much larger question: what kind of public life do we want when seeing, recording, identifying, and monetizing start collapsing into the same gesture? Join the Patreon & Join Office Hours →
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