Speculative Technologies is a nonprofit resarch organization unlocking new materials and manufacturing technologies
Calm Technology
The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.
100 years of whatever this will be
What if all these weird tech trends actually add up to something? Last time, we explored why various bits of trendy technology are, in my o...
Rediscovering The Spark
The last few years have been hard as someone who is not only very much engaged with technologies, their applications, damages and affordances as well as their politics. We’ve been moving through hype cycle after hype cycle with increasing promises at increasing speeds. Which is somewhat natural of course: Being built not around something material, […]
The Invisible Protocol Thesis: Tomorrow's Crypto Unicorns
Following the introduction of any new disruptive innovation, there is always a speculative phase to a technology cycle as the market tries to size and time the market opportunity.
Disruption is not a strategy
I was at a research lab to talk about commercialization. The presenter put up a slide of some exciting new technologies. The slide’s tagline said these technologies would “disrupt the b…
What’s the best technology that doesn’t exist yet?
We analyzed 100+ conversations and essays on positive futures to find out
Publications
(Re)envisioning and creating just and sustainable futures for information technologies.
Technological Metamodernism (Sep 2024)
Technological Metamodernism A four-week course with Stephen Reid and special guests Telegram group: https://t.me/+4CC9lfZMBN04ZTdk Substack post announcing the open-sourcing of the notes: https://stephenreid.substack.com/p/technological-metamodernism-course This work is licensed under Cre...
other futures: tech, resistance & imagining otherwise
big tech wants to control our future, but there are other paths we can choose instead. on "other futures" we bring together leading tech researchers, organizers, critics, and storytellers to help us imagine what more liberatory and human-centered tech futures could look like—and how we can build them together. brought to you by DAIR and the All Tomorrows Institute.
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transform…
Silicon Valley, disruption, and the end of uncertainty
This paper reflects on the relationship between high-tech disruption narratives and uncertainty. My main argument is that an economic sociology of the future is incomplete without addressing the ‘d...
Technology without Industry
A home for poorly researched ideas that I find myself repeating a lot anyway
Ali Alkhatib: On techno-optimism
I’ve got a longer draft in the works, but I don’t think that’s going to become a blog post, so I figure it might be useful to publish something here and solicit feedback, or just plant a flag in the ground that this was a thing I did. Last week Several weeks ago I gave a talk at Wayne State University titled “the uncanny pessimism of techno-optimism”. In this post I’m going to breeze through some of the stuff I talked about and give a sense of what’ll be coming. Eventually.
If you’re an AT Proto enthusiast, do yourself a favour and read @yanisvaroufakis.bsky.social ‘s “Technofeudalism”. I swear you’ll have an eureka moment of understanding the real potential of AT Proto within society.
