New episode of Bad Takes is out, about the temptation to engage in way-too-early 2024 prognostication.
How America will collapse (by 2025)
Four scenarios that could spell the end of the United States as we know it -- in the very near future
A year into the wreckage and salvage
It’s coming up on been a year, somehow, since I started this website/micro-studio/space to think in. What a wild choice that was, setting out in October of 2024, eyes on the horizon! We’d hoped things would turn out differently. The research and thinking I came
The Expert Trap and the Next War
what forecasting failure tells us about the future
John Battelle's Search Blog Predictions 2024: It’s All About The Data
Let’s talk 2024. 2023 was a down year on the predictions front, but at least I’ve learned to sidestep distractions like Trump, crypto, and Musk. If I can avoid talking about the joys of…
2026 Idea Dump
AF just went on its annual summer break in June, and I spent the most glorious two weeks up north for some much needed, off-the-grid time.
2022, A Look Back
In just 7 minutes, Vox takes a visual look back at the biggest events of 2022, including Ukraine, inflation, Musk/Twitter, tech layoffs, Serena retires, TikTok,
This is a thread of my thoughts and feelings about the actions that led to FTX’s bankruptcy, and the enormous harm that was caused as a result, involving the likely loss of many thousands of innocent people’s savings.
This is a thread of my thoughts and feelings about the actions that led to FTX’s bankruptcy, and the enormous harm that was caused as a result, involving the likely loss of many thousands of innocent people’s savings.— William MacAskill (@willmacaskill) November 11, 2022
The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)
This is the way the world ends. Again. Three terrible …
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
Even if you don’t think it’s likely, it’s always best to be prepared.
Endings FourHundredAndNinetySeven on Twitter / X
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:October 6th, 2026OpenAI Releases the Final Ten Minutes of 500 Previously Unreleased Films, Ushering in a New Era of Movie Watching pic.twitter.com/mjBRcg1StT— Endings FourHundredAndNinetySeven (@Endings500) October 6, 2026
The best sci-fi and fantasy books of 2023
It’s been a stellar year in speculative fiction
Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View (Published 2022)
There's plenty of bad news. But thanks to real progress, we're headed toward a less apocalyptic future.
What if failure is the plan? | danah boyd | apophenia
I’ve been thinking a lot about failure lately. Failure comes in many forms, but I’m especially interested in situations in which people *perceive* something as failing (or about to fail) and the contestations over failure that often arise in such situations. Given this, it’s hard not to be fascinated by all that’s unfolding around Twitter. At this point in the story of Musk’s takeover, there’s a spectrum of perspectives about Twitter’s pending doom (or lack thereof). But there’s more to failure than the binary question of “will Twitter fail or won’t it?” Here’s some thoughts on how I’m thinking about the failure question…
End Times Fascism
The far right is on the march again – but this time it’s different from anything we’ve seen before. A new, apocalyptic alliance of religious fundamentalists, billionaire Silicon Valley tech kings and ethno-nationalists is on the move. They’re united in their belief that some kind of cleansing cataclysm is coming, and they welcome a future of shocks, scarcity and collapse, convinced they’ll be among the saved on the other side. This is the world of End Times Fascism. In this blistering reckoning with our age, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor take us deep into this man-made Armageddon complex – and show us how to resist it. Around the globe, they investigate how those who are making our world unliveable through climate chaos and job-consuming AI are preparing to protect themselves from the fallout, whether it’s by repairing to luxurious private islands for the super-rich, rocketing off to Mars or bunkering nations against a dehumanized ‘other’. But, Klein and Taylor reveal, the new supremacist survivalists are far from impregnable. They have no vision of a shared future. All they offer are remixes of a bygone past: the nihilistic, sadistic pleasures of domination. If we’re to meet this critical moment and defend what’s left of democracy before it’s smashed up beyond repair, we must break the doom loop, and find a new way of living together, rooted in our existence on this earth, in the here and now. A story not of end times – but of better times. This book shows us how.
