You know when it’s baking and the heat is just bouncing off everything, you step in the shadows and the temperature instantly drops ten degrees? It ain’t sticking around, just bouncing right back. Anyway, I withstood this onslaught for ten minutes at London Bridge station before cramming into a train full of half-cut sweaty football fans and heading home. As the train meandred between the rooftops of Bermondsey, I caught sight of, for no more than half a second, a seagull nesting in a chimney stack and we made eye contact. My first impulse was to grab my phone but it was too fleeting – a blink and she was gone. Then I looked around the steaming, packed carriage to see if anyone else had seen her there but everyone else was either engaged in some semi-drunken lurid cackling and bantering or else deeply engrossed in something on their phones to avoid the cackling and bantering. So it was my secret. Until now. And now you too know about the seagull nesting in the chimney in Bermondsey.

I’m incredibly sorry it’s been so long since my last. Every single day I beg the great Cthulu for just half an hour to sit and read and write and it ignores my pleas. Well, here finally are five things I thought about so you didn’t have to.

Five Things

1. I don’t know enough about biotech

Behind the bluster of AI have been some massive advances in biotech. Eirini Malliarki has written some useful feedback from SynBioBetaa 2025 where there’s a bunch of stuff going on including trillion-token AI models, enzyme platforms for waste valorization, and universal flu vaccines but no good way of getting it into the world. ChinaTalk have written about the lack of strategy basically anywhere but while China is putting $55bn and the US $212bn into it, China are steaming ahead because of looser regulation and the lack of any dominant players in the US (like TSMC or ASML are for chips, even though neither are actually in the US). ProGen3 was launched trained on 3.4 billion sequences and showing a high degree of effectiveness at least as long as scaling laws hold for biology. And here are AI-designed genes effectively controlling mammalian cells.

So what? This was just stuff from this week. My spidey-sense is that in the next year or two will be some significant breakthrough. The problem with bio, at least as I’ve always understood it, it doesn’t scale or replicate in the same way as ‘hard stuff’ like software and hardware. Wetware is… damp and sticky and changes shape all the time. Maybe that’s the thing that gets solved or supply chains adapt to damp, sticky stuff because the advances are too powerful to ignore.

2. Careless People

I clawed my way through Careless People, the inside Facebook exposé from Sarah Wynn Williams the other week. The main takeaway for me is that, for the author, the world is just filled with people who work in hotels, bars and restaurants ready to wink knowingly at a senior Facebook executive who’s made a workplace goof. Pretty sure about a third of the chapters end with a night shift worker winking sympathetically at her after an argument with Sheryl Sandberg.

It’s also written and edited as a profoundly one-sided hero’s journey. She’s entirely convinced that she has right on her side and is up against the world. It’s undoubtable that she’s faced significant adversity, particularly in regards to her health but you know, she’s still an executive at one of the world’s most influential companies with enormous opportunity to influence change. Some of the stories are shocking and interesting but might have been more useful described journalistically rather than with the constant ‘you have no idea how hard it was for me’ refrain without any conscious acknowledgement of the structural and systemic effects she was replicating.

Also, I’m not sure who the editor was but they had absolutely no qualms about stacking up exclamation marks to make a point. Look, it’s worth reading but it’s mostly going to make you a bit annoyed at Williams rather than any more shocked or illuminated about how crass, thoughtless and irresponsible Facebook are/were.

So what? Being banned in the US is as much a hype thing as anything else. I picked it up at an airport and did finish the thing, which isn’t true of all books I’m annoyed by but it’s a shame that many people’s encounter with systemic and structural failures of capitalism to rein in the worst impulses of puerile tech leaders is so poorly written, edited and simplistic.

3. Not releasing a thing

Jony Ive, he of the chicken in the limousine fame (IYKYK), has teamed up with all round top guy Sam Altman to release something, who knows what. As many, perhaps Ed Zitron in his idiosyncratic way has best pointed out, we have no idea what it is or why it exists but it’s something to do with a stock deal Jony has.

This pattern of teaming up to not release something isn’t even new for Altman and Open AI. Last year Sam teamed up with Arianna Huffington to not release something and continue not releasing something to do with health. Now he’s not releasing something with Jony to do with ‘hardware.’

Anyway, Sam and Jony had a love-in which is packed full of all the hallmarks of AI bumpf; first step fallacies, statement of inevitability, invention of use and so on and had the presumably desired effect of 48 hours of news wondering what the hell they’re building. Basically, the takeaway is; ‘We’re going to ask for money and get some money and that will definitely, literally make everyone happy and change the world.’ It’s hardly worth commenting on. What is worth commenting on is that, similar to companies demanding that users figure out what technology is for so that those companies can make money, it seems to be a new rhetoric phenomena particular to AI to announce nothing at all; to parlay purely on the capital of the people talking and the buzzwords being used. Even Mesmer promised long-life and a cure to all ills, Jony and Sam say nothing at all, just ‘hardware’ and ‘better’ a lot. It’s an amusing extension of how Apple’s latest device is always launched with ‘best screen ever’ or ‘best processor we’ve ever installed’ as if the fact of novelty itself is enough.

So what? But it is, that’s precisely the point, as Belk et al., write; novelty is a driver of enchantment and enchantment demands novelty. Newness is enough to attract attention and with enough credence, to be enchanting. So wheeling out a succession of Web 1.0 billionaires to lend credibility to your chatbot is a good way to secure enchantment. You don’t need a product or even the suggestion of a product, just the essence of novelty. There used to be a twitter bot that generated Louis Theroux documentaries. It was at once ludicrous but with just enough believability that you could read them in Theroux’s voice and imagine him really saying them despite the obvious and very real lack of substance to any of them; the form, the essence was enough. This stuff is just a digital hype bot shooting out variations on a theme to keep the views (and stock options for Jony) flowing. Next up; Jack Dorsey and Sam Altman collab on next generation agentic AI to solve homelessness. Why not?

4. Where is better?

It’s likely that at some point I’ve talked about the idea, loosely cribbed from The Image of the Future that the notion of ‘better’ has sort of moved around amongst different imaginaries in human history. First, in reglion, the eschatological ‘better’ found in the afterlife, to the colonial ‘better’ of ‘over there’ to the future ‘better’ of the ‘-isms’ of the 19th and 20th century which invoked a future better but one achieved through social change of which new technologies are symptoms rather than causes. It’s only in the post-war period that the western world has been attempting to invoke better futures with technology as the vehicle; the driver of change rather than a symptom.

My feeling – and if we were to look at this as a megatrend it would be the techlash maybe – is that this brief period of attempting to invoke a better future through ‘technological progress’ is coming to an end; that there’s a general profound lack of faith that ‘better’ is going to come through some utopian technological breakthrough. Now sure, yes, greater wealth, specific advances in fields like climate and medicine but I don’t get the sense that people see big tech as the harbingers of a general social elevation and, if the rate at which they’re dropping progressive commitments, neither do they. You’ve also likely heard me loudly insist that so-called AI is not any sort of paradigm shift but a deepening acceleration of the last 150 years of extractavism. Prosaic to say but just to be clear. And then, similar to the techlash, the foreclosure of futures over the last fifty years has gradually diminished hope that the future will be better for most. Ok, it’s hardly an Earth-shattering insight but it has been making me think about where ‘better’ will be next.

So, if the better future isn’t being invoked through technology, and if we’re assuming that ‘better’ is a sort of social consensus project when viewed at megascale, where is it? This is where regenerative design (which is a paradigm shift in the proper sense of a reordering of the sociotechnical regime) comes in. I’m no expert, in fact I struggle with the epistemology of the thing which is why I think it is a paradigm shift, because I can’t bend my head around the implications. But it certainly removes focus from both technology and futures.

Regenerative design, no matter which stripe you subscribe to, would argue that it’s about better noticing. Less of an orientation to the future and more of a situation in the present. It suggests noticing and strengthening relationships between people and other beings and things. Rather than disruption and innovation, it’s care and maintenance. These ideas are sort of hard to work with because they’re so anathema to our sociotechnical regime (again, actual paradigm shift) so it can be hard to make these sort of ideas tangible.

If ‘better’ isn’t a steady state but really a kind of transition/network effect, how the hell do you make that real for people? If I can only just about hold onto the words, how is anyone supposed to make this real

Reading Silvio Larusso always makes me feel deeply seen but it’s always good. this is from the second part of his series on late futurism.

Somewhat enigmatically, Castoriadis defines the new as the emergence of figures. I must admit that I struggled quite a bit to construct a mental image of this idea until I came across, through the work of Donna Haraway, a perfect analogy: the game of cat’s cradle. It consists of the interweaving of threads pulled by two or more hands, with each finger pulling a different thread in a constant transformation of the web produced. At first what we see is just the combination of an indistinct texture, but all of a sudden something unexpected happens: the formless web takes on the appearance of an animal, a plant, a star. A figure has emerged. 
In the cat’s cradle, there is no linear development, or rather there is, but only if we get fixated on an atomized view of history as a swarming domino of micro-events in succession, thereby, however, losing the deeper meaning of the analogy. The new is produced by the interaction between different actors who, while related to each other, act more or less autonomously without knowing to the full what figure they are helping to create

So what? I think there’s a category of things to be built here as examples. Ways that ‘better’ has been achieved through relationships. How building, maintaining and caring for relationships between things has actually resulted in ‘better’ that might otherwise have been promised by a new gizmo or gadget. And some apophatic reasoning; how would doing it any other way have been more destructive?

5. PhD update

Ok bit of a cheat of a thing but it does occupy most of my thinking time and is why this whole shindig is invariably late. I’m about halfway through the last case study (in contents order, there are still three more to write) which is about the Replika update of 2024 in which the erotic capabilities of the app were suddenly removed. I’ve written far too much and now I need to trim it all back down.

Shorts

• Enjoy the friendly back and forth between Julian and Silvio on that article above who, to be fair are both brilliant but almost scientifically polar opposite in attitude. I suppose there’s something in between that yes, a lot of the LinkedIn hucksterism stinks but also does have a genuine ‘impact’ in swaying the decision-making of people with real power to shape lives and so is worth grappling with.
• Only 11% of the American public think AI will meaningfully improve their lives. Versus 76% of ‘experts.’
• Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor on end-times accelerationism and fascism.
• Indy Johar on a move away from single-point optimisation in design. If we’ve spoken about design for more than twenty minutes recently then I’ve likely ground my teeth about the suitability of industrial mindsets for post-industrial problems. I’ve just been invited to write a chapter about this for a forthcoming book so useful to pull together some stuff.
• Google search fell for the first time in Safari for 22 years.
• Lead very briefly turned into gold.
• Most of the books on the Chicago Times’ recommended summer reads don’t actually exist.
• 50% recovery of energy in reversible computing from Vaire.
• 47% of young Britons would rather grow up in a world without the Internet.
• Rest of World on how people are trafficked into scam jobs deploying deepfakes via Facebook and Telegram ads.
• The new pope seems to be taking the side of workers in AI discourse.
• Are US student loans the next sub-prime credit crisis? No probably not but it’s still interesting.
• And with an ageing population comes a boom in HEAL (Health, Education, Administration, Literacy) jobs.
• Zombie cicadas as if the horror and beauty of the world was not already enough.

Recents

• I was interviewed by the Re-Pete Project about sustainability. I talked about some of our Arup work but then embarrassingly it all veered into fashion and I just repeated ‘black’ over and over again. They were very kind in letting me do it by voice note so that explains the rambling and unstructured answers.
• I also had a little witter and a chatter about AI and design and futures at Arup with Maria Luce‘s lot here. It was interesting for me because it was one of the first times I really tried to articulate the feedback between non-Arup and Arup work for me, roles that I normally keep bifurcated for efficiency.
• Here’s a talk I gave about the PhD work with TU Dresden the other day.

Listening

C. Tangana’s wonderful revolving door series of guest musicians for his Tiny Desk.

Ok that’s it. This blog was 100% written without AI FYI which is why it takes so long. There was a suggestion that we should always say when we use AI. Well, I didn’t at all. Ok, I love you, bye!