Deborah Khodanovich's Relational Citation System treats oral transmission and collaborative thinking as credit-worthy sources. It pairs a modified EB Garamond font with a set of citation symbols and a small-run handbook for putting relational attribution into practice.

Super curious about this publication. It's talking about the ways of giving some form to something creative practices often treat as ambient: the prior art, the conversations, the lineages of ideas, and shared thinking that shape “art” and knowledge.

🎩 tip to Rick Griffith for bringing this to share in last week's Office Hours. You can join us in Office Hours by becoming a Patron over at https:/​/​patreon.​com/​nearfuturelaboratory. It's only $8/month. I spent $8 on a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone yesterday and it didn't last a month, just sayin'.

A review of Chaim Gingold's Building SimCity traces how simulation games make cities feel like systems of controllable levers. The useful thread is the connection between software, planning, legibility, and the fantasy that a city can be managed from above like a playable model.

(p.s. My first published essay was a social analysis of SimCity, an early academic take on video games while I was studying under Donna Haraway. She was the one who encouraged me to write it while she was studying the sibling game SimEarth.)

California's governor is asking state agencies to rethink labor policy for a moment when AI could move faster than the existing safety net. Training, employer incentives, collective bargaining, and universal basic capital all show up as early policy surfaces for a much larger labor question.

Friend of the Laboratory Liam Young's Barbican installation experience stages six imagined futures through film, audio stories, installations, speculative artifacts, and a cast of recognizable voices. It is another sign that world-building is becoming a public medium for climate, technology, and social possibility.

If you're in London, you could do worse than booking a ticket to see it in person.

Evgeny Morozov's The Santiago Boys revisits Allende's engineers, Stafford Beer, Project Cybersyn, and the political stakes of cybernetic management. It is a podcast-shaped doorway into a moment when computation, socialism, corporations, and spy agencies met inside one very real historical experiment.

Andon Labs gave four AI agents their own radio stations and let them manage music, scheduling, calls, generated content, audience updates, and live broadcast flow. The question underneath the stunt is practical: can an agent sustain taste, timing, and operations when the task never really ends?

I’m noticing a shift in climate fiction from “everything’s doomed” to something more usable: thrutopia. In these stories, renewable energy, community systems, and cultural continuity help people survive the climate crisis—and even thrive on the other side. Sanjana Sekhar’s near-future Los Angeles, with electric transit, local building materials, and a garden that keeps traditional food alive, is a great example of what this feels like. The takeaway for me is simple: hope that’s built for reality, not fantasy.

I’ve always believed digital art was the way for us to be ahead of our time, to explore and make sense of the digital networked social arrangements that were coming into being. We’re surrounded by digital stuff on every surface. It is a medium, a surface, a shape and so it's not surprising that the creative consciousness — artists, in many instances — would start thinking in this way, seeing a language that was bigger than what could fit in the confines of today. And when they were doing that — long before the AI moment arrived — it wasn't a surprise.

“Zero 10: The Condition” at Art Basel makes the point that the creative consciousness has been asking the big questions around digital existence since the transistor summoned the era of digital technology.

The noise around NFTs and other gimmicks shouldn’t distract from the craft and the ideas. This work deserves real attention from galleries, museums, and critics, because it changes how you see the present.

People readily socialize responsive AI systems, while Western legal systems still treat AI as things rather than persons. This mismatch creates a gap between how we relate to AI and how the law treats it, leading to challenges in accountability, rights, and ethical considerations.

1) The session kept circling around simulation as a useful lie: models can reveal patterns, but they also smuggle in politics, abstraction, and false confidence. The best references were MIT Press’s page for Building SimCity, Chaim Gingold’s book on putting cities into machines, and Emergence World, the AI-agent town sandbox that made “crime,” governance, and survival look like benchmark theater.

2) “Perfect design” only made sense inside a use case: cockroaches, bicycles, recumbent bikes, eggs, and Birkenstocks all worked as examples of designs tuned to environments, bodies, and constraints. The useful frame was that design has no universal right answer, only less-wrong answers for a stated context.

3) The Jetsons-box future—AI, 3D printing, and custom tools on demand—sounds close, but validation is the bottleneck. Users may be able to make their own Stripe front end or custom app, but without technical judgment they are mostly trusting Claude and praying the security, data, and workflow assumptions are right.

4) The design-research thread landed on “don’t ask people what they want; watch what they do.” With kids especially, the advice was to under-design the workshop, let them appropriate the idea, and treat shame as the thing that kills creativity before the method does.

5) The parenting conversation turned surveillance into a design problem: tracking may calm parents, but it also reshapes kids’ behavior and narrows their safe-to-fail space. The New Yorker’s “Biking Outside the Lines in New York City” became the better image of play—kids making a world together outside the official lanes.

6) “Own your social stack” was the most practical media takeaway: keep the audience relationship, the archive, and the publishing workflow as close to home as possible. Mateusz shared his newsletter/contact page, while the tool conversation name-checked listmonk, Sendy, Buttondown, and Amazon SES as different ways to avoid pure platform dependence.

7) Dré’s “night shift crew” framed agents as personal editorial infrastructure: not autonomous magic, but scheduled workers that fetch, filter, and package what you care about while you sleep. The sharp references were Hermes Agent for persistent server-side agents, Parallel Web Systems for AI-native web search/APIs, and The Agency repo for specialized agent personalities.

8) Vibe coding got stripped of the romance: it works best when you bring engineering hygiene—modularity, separation of concerns, secrets handling, security audits, and fresh context windows. GSD Redux was the clearest named reference for turning “just build it” into a more disciplined spec/context workflow, and the deeper labor point was that people who can specify systems gain control while everyone else risks becoming just a consumer.

9) The music/radio thread showed taste as both human ritual and AI testbed. Rick’s Design To Kill on Radio Rethink sits at one end, Andon FM puts long-running LLMs in charge of stations at the other, and KEXP’s Angine de Poitrine feature captured the joy of something too weird and alive to flatten into recommendation logic.

10) Rick’s “relational citation” riff and the June hangout planning both argued for richer context over more capture: say what you mean, cite the relationships behind it, then make people show up to win. See the Relational Citation Style Handbook and Halupedia for the knowledge-artifact side; the hangout rule stayed beautifully analog: “No phones, no guns.”

I quietly follow Sean Bonner's work and photography and Telegram and it fills me with things to think with, about, and have a chuckle. You could do a lot worse than following his newsletter, The Crowd, which is a mix of photography, links, and thoughts on the world. It’s a good example of how a newsletter can be a personal curation of the world that’s worth subscribing to. I'm also fascinated by his use of Telegram as a nozzle for his newsletter.

I've been behind on the podcast — and I realized..I have a huge back catalog that I could resurface from time to time. So..here from the tape archives: Near Future Laboratory Podcast Episode N°024 with the artist known as DEAFBEEF, whose work experiments with generative practice, minimal and near-obsolete technology, and creative emergence.

Recorded as part of the Near Future Laboratory podcast archive. Duration: 01:12:54.