Space the Nation's discussion of RoboCop (1987), as a capitalism critique about corporate malfeasance, carceral systems, and the way markets reach into bodily autonomy.

One of the things I learned from Paul Verhoeven is in the first few minutes of the film where the worldbuilding is done through a typical (1990s style) evening news cast. The tone is satirical above the surface, but the ways Verhoeven masterfully braids the world into that format really tickled my brain. The news cast is a mix of the absurd and the plausible, and interspesed with in-world advertisement. It's a brilliant way to worldbuild and to set the tone for the rest of the film. Way better than didactic title cards explaining the world.

(p.s. Similar worldbuilding that makes me professional jealous — I would've loved to be in the writers' room for this — is “For All Man Kind”. If you know, you know. If you don't watch this.)

Digest: 06022026_123606_digest-this. Signal: 74e949437cc4. Source captured June 2, 2026.

This project came up in a couple of conversations last week so I thought I would share it here. I look at this as strategy fiction even as I made it initially to have one container — a book — that represetned the future vision of the company I started in 2015. During Covid times I was at a loss as to how to talk about the company and its future vision in a way that was engaging and legible. I had been doing a lot of work with prototypes, but they were mostly for internal use. I wanted something that could be shared with investors that was more expansive than a 16x9 pitch deck, but that was also more engaging and legible than a spreadsheet or a business plan.

The idea of an annual report from the future came to me as a way to use the familiar format of an annual report to create a narrative about the future of the company. It works in two ways: one, it provided a broader surface upon which I could work through the ideas I had; and two, it provided a familiar format that is legible in a way that a pitch deck or a spreadsheet is not.

The report is a mix of fact and fiction, with the fiction being the future vision of the company and the fact being the current state of the company. It's also a mix of narrative and data, with the narrative being the story of the company and the data being the metrics and outcomes that I wanted to highlight. The report is also a mix of text and images, with the text being the story and the images being the artifacts that I created to illustrate the story.

Alondra Nelson argues that advanced AI is becoming a question for social science in three ways at once: as a force reshaping labor, governance, knowledge, and culture; as an object of study in its own right; and as a research tool that can distort inquiry if researchers treat opaque automated power as neutral infrastructure.

The digest frames the essay as a call for renewed social theory around algorithmic systems, with attention to inequality, accountability, opacity, and the distribution of opportunity and risk.

This NYT piece on AI stand-ins feels like a real-world cousin to my design fiction in The Adjacency, Meta Renames Itself “Mark”: a world where availability, judgment, and executive presence become interfaces that other people are expected to talk to.

Fascinating photo-rich essay about how AI has entered farming through the most curious of robots: laser weeders with self-calibration discipline, drones that turn soil and moisture into analytics and insights,robotic milkers that learn each cow, and (of course..) farmerless tractors.

My material granddaddy was a tobacco farmer. I was never old enough to directly appreciate the hard work of farming but in retrospect it is easy to imagine that it was incredibly hard. But, I also like to imagine that the value was in the satisfaction of doing the work and seeing the fruits of that labor.

Without nostalogizing the farmers way of life, I find it curious to imagine how that crucial element — the association of work and satisfaction — might change when the work is done by an algorithm.

p.s. See the speculative provocation in a previous issue of Tomorrow's News Today: Heritage Produce AI Standard Farming. I mention this to highlight the way that speculative prototyping can help provide an angle into the social shape of emerging practices and technologies (the two are the same, but that's being a bit pedantic) allowing us to innovate into possibility instead of just reacting to signals. So I'm not, like your run of the mill futures oriented person, claiming prescience or prognostic feats of perception; just emphasizing the diagnostic value of prototyping through speculation.

1. Denver opened the session as a field note on old theaters, print-shop machinery, a Lyons farm, and 26-year-old mead; the useful bit was how much futures work starts in weirdly specific objects and the people who keep them alive. The chat’s Wikipedia flip-top explainer is the quick reference for the Grolsch-style bottle aside.

2. Alex Bernatzky shared Neurospicy Futures of Work, a participatory speculative design project asking what future workplaces look like when designed with and for neurodivergent people, especially people with ADHD. The Fraunhofer ISI project page frames it as speculative prototyping with concrete artifacts, not another inclusion retrofit.

3. The core map was time × agency: Blurry Bites, Sticky Gelatin, Sparkling Flux, and Expanding Fiber. The sharp insight was that these are not fixed identities; people drift around the map depending on sleep, food, meds, notifications, deadlines, and the day’s friction.

4. The food metaphor worked because it moved the work out of abstract foresight language and into taste, texture, packaging, ritual, and appetite. The strongest suggestion was to stop saying “it’s like food” and actually make the thing food: chips, jelly babies, sourdough, sports drinks, ingredient labels, bus shelter ads, or a fake pharma-meets-Red Bull commercial.

5. There was a good critique of foresight’s default furniture: 2×2s, cones, decks, and scenario descriptions. Alex wants the project to become an invitation to play again, and it is headed toward Festival der Zukunft 2026, whose page frames the Munich event as a mix of technology, science, creativity, interactive experience, and community.

6. The group got into the dangerous edge of “ADHD as superpower”: yes, divergent minds can connect things other people miss, but turning that into a hiring fad is just another form of extraction. The better provocation was a job description that requires neurodivergence because the organization genuinely needs minds comfortable wandering off the path; the broader reference was re:publica, the digital society festival where these future-of-work conversations circulate.