week 9 / 2026: intentions and inversions
Reading round-up: what the Citrini scenario tells us about the tremendous power (and danger) of fictional futures; why the best novel of the Culture might actually be the most overlooked of the set.
politics
week 7 / 2026: timelines and mailbags
Reading round-up: the straightening of time by Victorian science and philosophy; the formation of the earliest international communications infrastructures; and the ironic-in-hindsight interventionism of Iain M Banks's Look to Windward.
week 5 / 2026: pots and kettles
Reading round-up: exploring what might happen when Medicare meets de-fi and prediction markets; why “innovation” culture would benefit from a more sincere engagement with the darker end of science fiction; and narrative techniques for simultaneous explanation and estrangement.
week 01 / 2026: the medium is the maxxage
Reading round-up: the (temporary?) end of completion; the four laws of media; the failure of USian political science; and the end-game paths of the risk-maxxing paradigm.
week 32 / 2025: conspiracy culture
There's nothing like looking at the disposable popular culture of three decades previous for reminding you that there's nothing new under the sun, and that history moves in waves rather than an arc.
week 31 / 2025: churches of futurity
What can we learn about futures from thinking about them as if they were faiths or fandoms? Quite a lot, if you ask me...
nowhere to go but further in: a hypothesis of fandom intensity
The differences in dynamic between the fandoms of primary- and secondary-world media can tell us a lot about the micropolitics of future imaginaries.