Clik here to view.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
I’ve been writing here at Futurismic for well over five years, now. It feels like longer, somehow, but it also feels like I only just started. I’ve learned a lot of things, not least of which is the...
View ArticleA chat with Eric Drexler
Not over coffee and cakes, sadly, but you take what you can get in this crazy world, AMIRITEZ? So when I got the chance to email Eric Drexler – yup, the nanotech guy – with some follow-up questions...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Future Always Wins
Soooooo, yeah – I’ve been busy. Did you miss me? New job, Masters degree… doesn’t leave a lot of spare time, so it doesn’t. But it’s been quiet here too long, so it’s time to dust down the soapbox and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Censorship: I’m guilty as charged
So, I stand accused of censorship by someone whose comment I declined to approve on this post. I figure anyone willing to throw around accusations of censorship is probably a big fan of radical...
View ArticleThe only way to change your past is to steal someone else’s
I get a fairly regular flow of emails about independent film projects. Most of them, to be honest, bounce straight off me – which says less about their quality than it does about my own taste in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Science fiction and science, part I: you’re doing it wrong
*blows dust off microphone* I’ve been absent from here for a while because I’ve been working on other things, but those things are very much related to Futurismic as a project, both in terms of what it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Science fiction and science, part II: smashing the crystal ball
So, last week saw me take the train down to London in order to give a presentation on science fiction narratives as strategic planning tools to the Strategic Special Interest Group of the British...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The (contested) street, finding new uses for things
From a photo-essay/collection thingybob at The Atlantic: Syrian rebel fighters and their homebrew military hardware. There are lots of shots of chaps lathing mortar shells, as well as crude hand-welded...
View ArticleConsequences
I do keep saying that futurism isn’t about making predictions, don’t I? Well, that’s because I really believe it. Prediction — in the sense of declaring with great certainty that [x] will come to...
View ArticleImproving Reality
Improving Reality… that’s an ambitious title, no? I’d expect nothing less than ambition from Honor Harger and her crew at Lighthouse, though; this year’s IR (Thurday 5th September, Brighton UK; map...
View ArticleThe death of the cool: fan-fiction futurism
Part [x] in an ongoing and probably endless series of examples of why it might be that, outwith the futurism community and the managerial class, hardly anyone takes the word “futurist” seriously....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Wrist-deep in the grab-bag of the quotidian
Atemporality, eh? [Spotted by the freshly deracinated Tim Maughan, currently on foot patrol in NYC, who noted that both of those futures -- and, implicitly, all futures -- are in the past tense.]...
View ArticleA Viridian post-mortem, plus the rhetorics of futurity
“Three things make a post,” the saying used to go — so here’s three things. First up, my first solo paper (“The future’s four quarters: Proposing a quadrant methodology for strategic prototyping in...
View ArticleIf it works, it’s obsolete
There are some elephants in the room that Chairman Bruce would like to show to us. [Opening ceremony speech from transmediale2014] Follow Futurismic on Twitter for more nuggets of near-future fun and...
View ArticleThe role of utopian narratives in urban futurism
So here’s a brief thing from Ramez Naam at Slate, where he argues in favour of dystopian futures as a valid counterbalance to the more purposefully utopian offerings contained in Neal Stephenson’s new...
View ArticleContainers
Staying untypically on-topic, the good folk at Rhizome are doing a series of future fictions under the banner Dystopia Everyday, using the software-dev format of the “user story”. The latest one is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Make technological utopia easier with this one weird trick
Kevin Kelly’s “desirable-future haikus” thing on Medium is a great example of what I believe to be the standard blindspot of ICT-focussed futurists, in that they’ve forgotten that anything other than...
View Article
