the right to refuse
This is a response to “The Right to be Wrong”, Zoe Scaman’s recent piece on technology criticism.
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week 4 / 2026: baleen and blubber
Reading round-up: seeing monsters in the (geo)political mirror; the paradoxical essence of “community”; the enantiodromia of a far-right Euro-federalism; Melville's Moby Dick considered as science fiction.
week 3 / 2026: pulp and pith
Reading round-up: the long game of fashion brand narratives; hints of a revivalist Romanticism; the magickal power of naming things; and the creation of history through the storying of the dead.
week 2 / 2026: ... and the circus leaves town
Reading round-up: Rodney Brooks reassesses his own AI predictions; Dan Wang holds forth on China (and everything else); Bruce Sterling reports from the depths of the multitool rabbit-hole; an anthology of stories in homage to J G Ballard.
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 52 / 2025: minimum viable
Bare bones from the skeleton crew.
week 51 / 2025: tearing away the caul
Reading round-up: the performative shaming of “performative reading”; the post is the product; the illusion of inevitability; and maximalist manga-monster steampunk-fantasy strangeness.
week 49 / 2025: against the supposedly inevitable
Reading round-up: the end of The Line; socially constructed technological inevitability; the crusade against empathy; the Noughties as the Before Times... and the attentional friction of poetry.
week 48 / 2025: walking in the shadows
Reading round-up: dead media theory revisited; the quantified self, Victorian style; two takes on a rising China; and Aleister Crowley’s proto-pomo mental hygiene routines.
week 47 / 2025: snowblower
The end of the year is within sight, which means an early shift into reflective thinking...
week 46 / 2025: eyes on the street
So, you’re writing a short story that’s meant to explore a future. What’s the first and most crucial step in the process of getting your imagined world onto the page? It’s not what you might think...
week 45 / 2025: ten theses on “the future”
The moment to change a mental model is the moment at which it becomes an obstacle to understanding rather than a scaffold for it.
week 44 / 2025: hermit walks the dunes
I'm running a three-day course on fiction-for-futures in January! In-person, on-site, and strictly limited to no more than ten participants...
week 43 / 2025: l'esprit de l'ascenseur
Marketing 101 advises that you hone your elevator pitch. I'm increasingly convinced that simplifying problems this way just makes them worse in the long run.