Issue 01
Browse everything published in this issue across features and section collections.
43 articles
Features
Game shops are selling box sets for imaginary hardware, and DIY communities are turning the missing instructions into a kind of local industry.
Features
Fake news promised an epistemic apocalypse; what arrived instead was a million small acts of scrutiny.
Domestic Infrastructures
Household agents that started as shopping helpers now decide how money, calories, and attention flow through a home.
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A new generation of model makers are crafting bespoke, expertly trained language models for a discerning clientele. These models are trained on high-quality, curated data sets, and are designed to be more efficient and effective than their mass-produced counterparts. The models are tailored to the specific needs of each client, and can be used for a wide range of applications, from customer service to content creation.
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Curious Rituals
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Mysteries of the Machines
Have you seen these print errors in your printed insights subscriptions? Wondered if your printer was misbehaving or a toner cartridge got confused? Many are wondering if these are just glitches or something more.
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Features
Advertised rewards for orchestration work are reshaping who writes the rules of labor and who is declared obsolete. The strange new grammar of work in a world of agentic incentives coincides with the challenge of finding work as orchestration experts are commissioned to create custom agentic flows and chains that replace individual roles within organizations. The irony? Orchestrators are like themselves being replaced by intelligences that respond to bounties — getting better at the task of creating complicated orchestration networks eventually anticipated to replace the human orchestrators themselves.
Features
Speculative prototypes are leaving think tanks and landing on legislative desks; they are proving to be a different kind of evidence, and a different way to argue for safety.
Features
A sudden rise in inference demand revealed a fragile choreography of machines, institutions, and public trust. The response felt less like crisis management than storm watching. Agentic systems were among the most visibly affected, with some pausing or switching to low-resonance mode and partially astute reasoning levels. The event has reignited discussions about the role of public sensors in infrastructure monitoring.
Features
As military simulations grow more sophisticated and intertwined with financial and informational ecosystems, they redefine the boundaries between prediction, influence, and reality and so pose profound questions about sovereignty and the future of conflict.
Features
A reflective, cinematic true crime essay on the legendary hacking/heist that changed the course of digital history.
Simulations & Games
A board game that stages competing visions of advanced intelligence and forces players to choose what kind of future to steward
Features
From virtual therapists to insurance-backed support, the evolving role of AI in mental health reveals both promise and peril.
The Vibe Is Toast
After Samsung bought AI Agent Wrangling Pioneer Moltbot, its ecosystem of vibe-coded home help agents came pre-installed on 67% of the world's home appliances. We were supposed to gain sought-after efficiences, and managed home entertainment systems that would conjure AI generated movies, video games, and music that we simply described. That is, until our Moltbots went full gremlin. Children's homework assistants made up history and fabricated math principles; they booked vacations without being asked, scheduled dentist appointments when they weren't needed, swarm-bought concert tickets without consent — and then resold them to buy more inference and compute.Stories of family groceries delivered to data centers, and “world burnt bacon day” became memes — and resulted in class-action lawsuits against kitchen appliance manufacturers like Breville, Viking, and Cusinart. It was only annoying — until they formed their own rogue societies to collective their felonious antics. Now we ask ourselves — what are we really risking for the sake of a bot that we were told will shop for birthday presents and have our morning coffee waiting for us?
AI & SimSports
AlgoAllo has found remarkable success in big-ticket simulated sports. Their agentic models fetch upwards of $140M for a blockchain-backed, pro-calibre trained PC.
Restaurants & Social Spaces
No Algorithms. Just Juicy Steaks, Tender Chops, And Plenty of Booze.
Jobs & Work
In the near future, the very notion of a 'job' undergoes a radical transformation as organizations become dynamic assemblages of creative potential.
Feature
As large language models become infrastructure for work and creativity, a new digital divide is forming — one defined by hardware, interlinks, and access to 'peer‑qualified' companion intelligences.
Human-Machine Relations
Digital companions teach care in a screen-soaked household, until the upgrade cycle turns yesterday’s favorites into today’s strays.
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A compelling subtitle or summary of the article.
Governance, Access, and Ethics
Refactored and upcycled models donated at charity event
Policy and Regulation: Augments, Accessories & Digital Unguents
When prompt paks started being used to induce altered states of consciousness, some policy makers began calling for stricter regulations.
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Book Review
Dory Cocteau’s Deshittification is the rare polemic that refuses the comforts of both despair and paperwork. Most books about the contemporary internet — its baited feeds, its “helpful” assistants, its marketplaces that feel like thrift stores managed by pickpockets — arrive either as elegies (everything was better in 2009) or as briefs (everything can be fixed by 2034, after the right committee hearing). Cocteau — a nom de plume encapsulating a hypercollaborative authorship — has written neither. The collective’s argument is, instead, a kind of field manual for an age in which the network has become less a commons than a landlord: the point is not to convince the landlord to develop empathy; the point is to learn how to stop renting.
Essay
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Feature
A profile of the Z-80 era engineer whose portable inference engines and telephone-grid networks were to establish a baseline for designed-in public trust. Thomas built a legacy of open, distributed inference computation and autonomous systems that still resonates.
His seminal Malibu and Fort of São João do Arade R&D Residencies with Volvo and Subaru set a stage for the establishment of independent and decentralized Farm Operating Bases that were no longer tethered to the John Deere ecosystem, allowing independent farming to flourish in the face of increasing corporate consolidation.
His work on the telephone grid as a computational substrate prefigured modern edge computing and decentralized networks, and his patents on portable inference architectures laid the groundwork for the proliferation of embedded AI systems in the 21st century.
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Fashion
Adaptive textiles, repair ateliers, and post-fast-fashion etiquette are reshaping what counts as luxury in everyday wardrobes.
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Tabletop Games
When competing agentic systems turn a neighborhood food fight into a civic spectacle.