This issue reflects on “the joy of being a capitalist (sort of),” arguing that small-scale, independent creative work is a form of capitalism rooted in meaning, dignity, and exchange rather than extraction. It traces this lineage through your own studio practice, the founding and sale of OMATA, your mother’s small businesses, and your grandfather’s work as a tobacco farmer. From there the issue expands into a set of adjacent signals: the announcement of your new course *What’s After...

This issue explores *hyperstition* — which is the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit's peculiar notion that fiction can become real through circulation—and reframes it as a precursor and companion to Design Fiction. The essay weaves through CCRU lore, Mark Fisher’s cultural theory, and Julian’s own early academic encounters with ideology, technology, and media. It argues that Design Fiction is a practical way to operationalize hyperstitional dynamics inside organizations by turning ideas into artifacts that behave *as if* they arrived...

This issue opens from Dubai, where I’m split between the Dubai Future Forum and MBZUAI’s “The Future of Being Human” symposium, and uses Hal Foster’s *The Anti-Aesthetic* and DOGMA 95 as lenses on generative AI. The lead essay argues for an AI Anti-Aesthetic: a way of working with machine image-making that keeps the seams visible, foregrounds intention and judgment, and restores the interval between prompt and picture as the place where thinking happens. From there, the newsletter moves...

No summary available.

A visit to Harvard-Westlake’s student-run “NextGen” Future Day becomes the anchor of this issue. I was invited to sit on a panel about AI — but the real story wasn’t the panel at all; it was the students themselves. Their earnestness, curiosity, and initiative offered a welcome reminder that hope often comes from the people actually building the future, not the ones forecasting it. From there the issue wanders outward: the Dubai Future Forum; ComfyUI meetups and the...

No summary available.