Date: March 30, 2026

Summary: The word of the week is "Brain Fry," a term capturing the mental exhaustion from information overload and cognitive strain. This edition introduces a new feature, "Signals," aimed at fostering strategic thinking about the future through short workbooks. Readers are encouraged to participate in the upcoming workshop, "Pitch, Picture, Prototype," designed to help materialize ideas and practices. The newsletter also reflects on the author's ongoing project, which has evolved into a book-like artifact that explores the integration of futures practice within organizations. A review of "The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist" highlights its engaging exploration of AI's current transformative state. Strategic imagination exercises are presented, encouraging readers to create tangible artifacts from story seeds, emphasizing the importance of organizational imagination. Insights from a National Bureau of Economic Research paper reveal a complex narrative around AI's impact on productivity and employment, suggesting a shift in job roles rather than outright losses. The newsletter concludes with discussions on the cognitive overload caused by AI tools and the implications of productivity metrics on worker well-being.

Essentially: Embrace strategic imagination as a core organizational function to navigate the complexities of AI and productivity, turning insights into tangible actions.

But why? Organizations that harness strategic imagination will better adapt to the evolving landscape shaped by AI, ensuring they remain competitive and innovative in their approaches.

This Is Your Brain on AI...

Apocaloptimism

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The word of the week is...“Brain Fry”!

Described in the context of using AI like in...Claude Code or Codex or even just ChatGPT I suppose, but seemingly associated mostly with the whole Token Maxxing phenomenon. A weak signal growing stronger!

And a new feature (I think? Have I done one of these before?) — Signals — where I take something I found from research and observation and create a kind of short-sharp workbook entry for strategic thinking and sensemaking about the future. Think of it like a strategy prompt and actually give it a go — share back to me any fun artifacts you create from it!

Don't forget about our workshop — Pitch, Picture, Prototype — where we’ll walk you through this approach to imagining into and materializing your ideas, your practice, your next great thing.

Plus I got a whole catering truck of Food For Thought and an advertisement from the future.

All that and more below the fold, as they used to say when news came on paper that could be folded.

Well, the last, like..maybe months? I've been responding to a light request from a friend who asked me to describe to them what it is that I do.

What should've been just an explanation has turned into another book, but a book that I'm not sure I'm going to publish, so does that make it not a book?

What I mean is — it'll exist, and it'll be manufactured, but I do not think it's for everyone. I think it gives lots of insight into the practice, but maybe too much, if that even makes sense.

When I started responding to this “ask” it wasn't a book project — it was an explanation that was tucking itself into what I imagined would be a internal commissioned keynote of some description. And then I recalled that it was also a kind of pitch for the work that I do, the practice that I run, the way that I think about the future and the kinds of things that I make and the kinds of engagements that I do with organizations and people who are interested in that work.

And that's when that thing that happens to me happened: this 16x9 container that we call “a deck” just couldn't contain the story. It needed more space to come into view in a different way. The view of how an organization could integrate this kind of futures practice was askew and incomplete. That's the same thing that happened when I couldn't fit the OMATA business pitch inside of the trad pitch deck (16x9..slides..) — so I ended up creating this as an artifact that has come from the future of the company. You've heard this before — the Annual Report from the Future.

I say all of this because it's on my mind as the galley's are expected to arrive this week (if the Gods of Global Logistics have it in their hearts to do so) but also because I'm truly looking forward to the workshop I'm co-hosting next month in which we will be walking you through this approach to imagining into and materializing you and your practice, your new ideas, your next great thing.

That's Pitch Picture Prototype.

If you haven't checked out the info session, now's a great time to do so — as the week is getting started — to plan and plot and prototype your path to making your ideas real, to taking the next steps on the things you want to bring into the world, the things you want to make, the things you want to explore and experiment with.

Movie of the Week Example sponsorLabel

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

We went to a screening of this over at USC last week. I found it to be suitably twisting and layered with just the right amount of exploration and unanswered questions suited for this moment where AI is molten and shape-shifting. Definitely worth a watch. I'd see it again but mostly for the exquisite animations — most of which (all?) were practical effects, not CG. Lovely. Remarkable. Plus those guys show up, Sam and Dario, which is also remarkable. I'm not sure what they said mattered, but there they were.

IMDB →

🏋🏽‍♂️ Strategic Imagination Exercises AI + Productivity Futures

Signals have been gathered from an irregular and phase-shifting resonance field in the quantum entanglement I set up behind the studio here in Venice Beach, which has always been a bit of a peculiar geographic coordinate, which explains the weirdness of the Venice Beach Boardwalk.

This section is where I gather implications of today's rituals, ruminations, recriminations, reflections, and other patterns of behavior and do a bit of a work-out activity, digging these out of the sediment in some near future to imagine how they play out. This activity has real strategic value — the ability to make sense of today as it might become tomorrow is a kind of organizational imagination that is a proper function, not just a parlor trick or a fun exercise.

(Even if it is actually a bit of magic that needs practice to master. And it is actually also a fun exercise. Way more fun than reading a PDF.)

Try it out: each day this week, turn one of those story seeds I left you and conjure it as a Design Fiction artifact. Make something that embodies that seed — a prop, a mock-up, a storyboard, a short script, a visual artifact, a speculative product spec — whatever helps you make that story tangible and explore the implications of that near-future scenario in a concrete way.

SIGNALS FROM AN ADJACENT NOW

Token Maxxing AI Productivity Labor Brain Fry

AI Boosts Productivity, Shifts Jobs: NBER Executive Evidence

Equal Rights? Access To Compute & Inference

I keep seeing AI treated like a single, uniform productivity story — but now it seems that CEOs are telling a messier one, somewhat in confidence cause, like..markets and analysts..

In a survey of nearly 750 of these executives, AI adoption is already widespread in some firms, while many smaller companies are only beginning. Productivity gains are positive and likely to strengthen in 2026, especially in high-skill services and finance, yet measured gains lag what people feel—suggesting the payoff hits revenue later. Employment impacts look muted in the aggregate, but the work itself is being reshuffled: routine clerical tasks decline as demand for skilled technical roles rises.

Source Digest Summary

A National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper, based on a survey of nearly 750 corporate executives, finds that more than half of firms have already invested in AI, but adoption is uneven, with many smaller companies still in early stages. Firms report positive labor productivity gains, with stronger expected effects in 2026 concentrated in high-skill services and finance.

The gains appear less driven by additional capital and more associated with working smarter and producing product/services that the market actually wants. That seems to suggest that just using AI won't do the trick (which raises the question about the whole Token Maxxing / Leaderboard stuff below in FFT. Having more sneakers doesn't make you run faster, kinda thing.)

The paper highlights a “productivity paradox,” where perceived productivity improvements exceed measured ones, plausibly because revenue-linked benefits arrive later. On employment, there is little evidence of aggregate job losses in the near term, though larger firms anticipate workforce reductions while smaller firms expect modest growth; the chief labor story is reallocation, with routine clerical roles projected to shrink and skilled technical roles becoming relatively more important, including an index ranking job functions most negatively affected by AI.

Story Seeds

• Token quotas? What if jobs require a minimum amount of tokens be used by employees in order to maintain their positions?

• Good tokens / Crap tokens? What if some tokens are “good” for productivity / output / revenue and others are “crap” tokens that run on old hardware and ancient LLMs — and good earners get the good tokens while those who are lower performers or in less critical roles get stuck with the crap tokens, creating a bifurcated productivity / output / revenue landscape inside the firm?

• Charity Events/Donations? Imagine if formal policy and informal social incentives (e.g., appearing at red carpet charity events, tax write-offs, good press) had civic organizations, NGOs, non-profits donating access to high-grade compute, inference, and facilities like that to those in need of, you know..the good compute and high-grade tokens.

• Consider the debates about model performances that rage on Reddit — Opus vs. GPT, etc. When compute and inference become high-value commodities generally, would there be a caste/class system where some get the good inference/compute and others get stuck with crappy inference/compute (or less performant/throttled/limited) inference, creating a stratified social hierarchy?

• Black Markets? Valuable compute or access to AGI tokens that are regulated could create black markets where people trade or sell access to these high-value resources outside of official/legal channels, potentially creating a shadow economy around compute / inference / AGI token access.

• Burn Tokens? What if there were mechanisms where tokens could be “burned” — i.e., intentionally destroyed or consumed in order to create scarcity, drive value, or otherwise influence the internal token economy inside firms or across the compute / inference / AGI token ecosystem?

• Brain Fry! What might you see as a PSA (public service advertisement) or a resource center or 'church meeting' or new policy/regulation/agency that concerns itself with the deliterious cognitive / mental / attention / health effects of overexposure to high-intensity compute / inference / AGI token usage on employees, knowledge workers, or society more broadly?

Strategy Questions

• What decision in the next 6–12 months is most exposed to this signal?

• Where could this signal create asymmetric advantage or existential risk?

• What must be true for this signal to materially impact your organization’s strategy? (Don't assume it won't..your organizational imagination has to dream broadly.)

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Design & Critical Thinking

A recorded discussion reflecting on the 2026 State and Future of Design submissions and the provocations they surfaced.

State and Future of Design 2026

Design & Critical Thinking on YouTube

After a week of community-led publishing and reflection, Kevin Richard hosts this session that gathers the D&CT community reflections on the themes, challenges, and provocations that surfaced across the 2026 “State of Design” submissions. It works as a concise bridge between where the field stands now and where designers, researchers, and critical thinkers might want to push it next. Super important work. Very insightful and evocative thinking. You'll want to check out the essays (I've got one below in the FFT section) as well as watch this recap tape recording! Thanks Kevin for your leadership and facilitation! 🪨&🥖

Watch →

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.

Your elevator pitch may be the thing you literally say to someone while sitting in an elevator. Or it may be the thing you say when someone asks you “so..what's your story?” — that moment when someone wants to know who you are, what you do, and why it matters. That’s the kind of story this workshop is designed to help you clarify and articulate.

Whether you're literally asking yourself in some inner monologue, “what am I doing?”, or you want to clarify your role in your organization, or you have a fun side project that is about fun, and perhaps also the start of something new and independent, our workshop — Pitch, Picture, Prototype — is designed to help you get clear on your value and your story so that you can articulate it in a way that lands with others, before someone else defines it for you.

In a couple of weeks, on April 17th, we'll be hosting that workshop. There are a couple of spots left.

If you missed the info session we had a couple of weeks ago, I've got the tape recording of it up on the blog here: Pitch, Picture, Prototype Info Session.

If you are wondering if this is right for you, drop a line to us and we'll be happy to chat about whether this workshop would be a good fit for you.

Watch the info session"

Food For Thought Section

From the 🙈-mail-jester Channel

DEPARTMENT OF Futures | shared by telegram-bridge

My Prodigal Brainchild: Reflections on the Latest Death of the Metaverse

Neal Stephenson is back with sharp reflections on the so-called 'death' of the Metaverse—a term he coined that's now survived countless cycles of hype and disappointment. He cuts through the noise with personal insight and a bit of wry humor, reminding us why big ideas in tech just won't stay buried, and what that says about how we chase the next big thing. If you're tired of headlines declaring the rise and fall of the Metaverse, you'll appreciate Neal's take on why this story keeps repeating.

(p.s. that image? a ‘near fine’ $6500 rare hardback)