A book about communism, labeled by the author as a manifesto, you say? Surely it’s a highly practical book with a nuanced view of history…

Hypothetical reader, I’m afraid I have terrible news for you.

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Bastani’s argument has three parts. The first part, unsurprisingly, is that history is basically determined by the modes and technologies of production, and there have been just a couple of major changes to this throughout the human story. The first was the creation of agriculture; by creating surplus food during some parts of the year that could be stored for the other parts of the year, and by intertwining fate long-term with a specific location, we basically created the future as an object of consideration. The second was the Industrial Revolution; by creating a way to store energy for later use, and then turn that energy into infrastructure and goods, it shrank the world and created a joint future. The communications revolution of the last 100 years or so is an acceleration of this dynamic, and the decomposition of everything into bits. Each of these epochal shifts have changed fundamental parts of what being a human was like.

So now for the second part of the argument. We’re currently at a hinge point in history3. On one side, we have five interlocking crises: climate change is threatening the stability of the ecosystems we depend on, we’re running out of key resources we need to sustain our lifestyles, populations are aging and the increasing dependency ratio is becoming increasingly burdensome, there’s a growing class of people that we don’t really have useful work for4, and rapidly advancing technology is accelerating unemployment. This is causing increasing food insecurity, persistent poverty, and the return of radical and violent politics.

However! On the other hand (or, for some of these, the other side of the coin), we’re on the cusp of a potential end to scarcity in five areas, such that it won’t even make sense to charge money for them. First, the increase in automation is making capital increasingly a full substitute for labor. We’re getting closer to the point where machines could theoretically do almost all mental and physical labor associated with production. Second, the rapid solar buildout is making decarbonization possible5 while expanding the amount of available energy, especially in the Global South where there’s less incumbent infrastructure. Third, asteroid mining is not only super cool in a space-roughneck sort of way, but could bring down something like tens of billions of dollars worth of iron/copper/gold/platinum/etc for every person on Earth6. Fourth, our increasing understanding of DNA (after all, it’s just information) and ability to manipulate it suggests that we may make many diseases into historical curiosities7. Fifth, as an extension of human DNA, mastering plant and animal genetics should allow things like cellular agriculture, growing food identical to meat, milk, and eggs with a tiny fraction of the land, water, and carbon footprint8. Probably (again, the book’s argument), all of these should be online in the next few decades.

So now for the third part of the argument. All these technologies open up significantly different opportunities for how we organize society, but none of them pre-determine a particular social destiny9. The kind of abundance that drives the marginal cost of producing something down to zero messes up standard capitalist incentives—as prices drop toward zero, why would anyone produce it? The standard response in the current system is to manufacture artificial scarcity via enclosure, monopoly, etc. In contrast, Bastani proposes a world where the abundance is fully realized, such that there’s no need to bother charging for most things, and supported by a pretty recognizable grab-bag of leftist policy proposals paving the way: more commons, credit unions, local currencies, decarbonization, taxes on financial speculation, nurturing of co-ops, redefining GDP, and just generally combining the Red and Green sides of leftist politics (saving the planet, in a way that makes everyone better off). Rather than advocating for Universal Basic Income (which rely on prices anyway), he advocates for the provision of Universal Basic Services, namely housing, transport, education, healthcare, and information10. Elections are the most practical way to make all this happen, and building electoral support is a practical way to build class consciousness for further collective action.

Basically, Karl Marx was right about everything, except he was too visionary, and the conditions for real communism didn’t exist until just now, so prior attempts don’t count11, and if we communism now it will totally work this time, trust me bro.

Bastani is aware of the tension: despite arguing from a framework where productive technology determines social organization, and treating these five waves as near-certain to arrive, he insists there is nothing inevitable about history or political systems; this manifesto and its recommended actions are needed to keep the benefits of these coming advances for everyone rather than a way to enrich the few. That disjoint and tension is the weakest point of the book, and the message seems to have exerted very little lasting change on the discourse other than a nudge toward Abundance more generally, which is merely a contested subtheme of the Left’s agenda at the moment.

Mapping to Andy Hines’s Imagining After Capitalism12, the book includes all three future images at once: the book is mostly laying out the evidence from the Tech-Led Abundance image, in order to argue the need for decisive mass action to enable the Non-Workers’ Paradise image, with the Circular Commons image somewhere between a secondary goal and an afterthought. It’s also very close to the Manoa Transformation archetype, and to Jim Dator’s view of the “full unemployment” future that AI could soon enable.

Scan Hit of the Week

Emxys is building out new capacity, and is trying to expand its optical communications technology (basically tightbeams) beyond Earth orbit to deep space. The technology is mostly the same, but the need for autonomy and reliability go up once you’re so far away from home. NASA proved out the concept by sending a cat video 101 light-seconds to Earth using a laser in 2023, but any kind of large-scale Solar System exploration will require this as one of the critical components. Maybe there’s a business model coming for relay stations? Maybe people will calculate trajectories and try to intercept them?

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Footage of me purchasing the book:

As far as I can tell, work has existed as long as humans have been around (though that’s not a universal position), but jobs are mostly a product of the Industrial Revolution. So often the main contours of conversations about the Future of Work are actually about the Future of Jobs, which is very different. This article from 2023 takes many of the ideas about jobs now and in the future and maps them onto the Three Horizons framework. The diagram he offers has a great list of the ideas currently in circulation that map to each horizon:

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Of course, many of the ideas about the future of work are covered in Andy Hines’s excellent Imagining After Capitalism. Specifically, the H3 ideas contain very clear pointers toward Hines’s images of Non-Workers’ Paradise, Circular Commons, and Tech-Led Abundance. A few ideas that are particularly hot at the moment:

• Universal Basic Income: the issue that launched the Yang Gang and also apparently a terrible animated series on Fox1. There have been many pilots of this idea in various locations, for various lengths of time and amounts of money, and the results are kind of disappointing for everyone: it looks like UBI only draws a few percent of its recipients out of the labor pool, and makes people feel better subjectively, but is a wildly expensive way to achieve that improvement, especially if it’s not a replacement for existing welfare programs2.

• Automation: this one is especially in focus with the huge AI improvements and announcements that drop each week (just today as of writing, OpenAI launched workspace agents for teams). Theoretically, anyone whose job is completely on a computer is at risk today, and with the improvements in robots the rest may be close behind. However, the reality of this is hard to gauge: the world has recently been sure that programmers would be the first to go, but now designers are in the hot seat and programming jobs are starting to tick back up. The new world is basically moving up the chain of abstraction to a world where declared intent is immediately turned into software, the ability to clearly specify intent, and to smell when software is built correctly, seem like the skills that will stay relevant the longest. It seems like even when companies lay people off in favor of AI, most regret it and end up rehiring.

• Gig work: this may be more of a mirage. We are told that employment is becoming less stable and more people are turning to gigs, and the number of people earning income via online platforms has exploded in the last decade+, but it seems like the total number of contingent workers has been flat or falling over that time period. So if gigs are the thing that replaces jobs, they have a long way to go.

Scan Hit of the Week

Val Kilmer will appear in a movie for which he was cast but died prior to shooting. This was all done with the cooperation of the Kilmer Family, so they shouldn’t have the same problems Star Wars had with Peter Cushing. See the trailer for yourself. This is coming into Hollywood at the same time Tilly Norwood is (cringily, in my estimation) trying to create a new category fully synthetic actors. What is real, especially in an industry where everything is already fake?

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Here are some of the highlights from the sessions I was able to attend1:

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• Andy Hines and Mina McBride presented a framework for determining when weak signals are starting to come closer to reality, or move to more immediate horizons. Here’s a post giving the framework, but the basic idea is that meaningful adoption depends on elements with the mnemonic STILE: Social acceptance, Technological capability, Infrastructure, Legal clearance, and Entrepreneurial zeal. Without all of these in place, progress will stall2. I have been puzzling over the factors that determine how fast something like electric cars or 3D printing takes to get to the mainstream, and this is the kind of idea that immediately makes sense and is impossible to unsee. I’m excited to see how it continues to develop as a practical guide for people who understand their domain (but not Foresight) to monitor for signs of change.

• Philip Jones, who I interviewed early last year, presented on facilitating change beyond the nudge approach that dominated the prior decade. We can't make people change their minds about anything, but we can facilitate the process by creating conditions for reflection that don't threaten their identity (possibly using scenarios or other ways to temporarily distance themselves from their identity), and make a small next step clear. This has significant overlap with my discussion of David McRaney’s How Minds Change.

• Nicci Obert and Simeon Spearman presented their UH project on the future of the Arctic. From what I could tell it was solid futures work all around, but what I really loved was that each of their scenarios was presented as a cover and an article or two from a different publication with a completely different style: The New Yorker, Business Week, The Atlantic, and a local Arctic news website3. There's something about the magazine formatting that's instantly legible as “high-effort” and therefore credible; I'd love to develop this ability.

• Ed Venit presented an extremely crisp and practical session on how futurists taking the consulting path can build a sales pitch based on the Challenger archetype, reframing common experiences with a unique perspective and offering foresight as a solution (which you’d be happy to provide, of course). I’m guessing most futurists in organizations need to continually justify their existence, so this is probably useful being consulting.

• Stephen Dupont and Ingrid Furtado, UNDP fellows, shared the work they did for the government of Brazil. Civic projects are often good windows into process, and this one had 16 domains covered, each with its own set of stakeholders and interview sessions, and a massive training effort so the client could continue the work over time (especially scanning).

• Tim Morgan presented on how the rise of networks allows more decision-making and culture to reside at the local level by spurring knowledge and information communities, elaborating on some of the themes he covered in his guest article last year.

• The theme of the event was “transformation”, and there was some debate about whether the term has a clear meaning today, has lost all value, etc. It was interesting to see the different clusters of ideas about how people thought about it: having a valence of hope or opportunity (or, by contrast, pain/loss/fear), evolution vs radical change, new processes or structure, change at scale or in how we frame our think about things, etc. My own definition is that transformation has occurred when it's hard to remember or imagine doing things the old way.

Also, I got caught in a Houston thunderstorm. It was dry when I left one building, and then in the two or three minutes it took to walk across the parking lot, this happened:

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Apologies for this week’s drivers being so America-centric but I don't feel like I have a great grasp on the rest of the world as it relates to education.

There are some contradictory trends in the education finance arena, at least for the US. First, for decades students have been shouldering more of the cost of college over time, which tends to increase to a new baseline whenever budgets are tight:

But on the other hand, there has also been a trend recently where more states are offering some form of free community college. In contrast, Europe seems to be holding steady with lots of countries completely funding college, and I get the sense that there's a big variety on other continents.

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This funding shift is tied into the increasing politicization of education. At the elementary level this looks like the flights over book bans; at the university level it's more about the state dramatically shortening the leash about what schools that take government funds (including student loan support) are allowed to teach.

Last, though the trend has been exaggerated, there has been a shift by men away from traditional college, with some of them going to the trades instead. Colleges are populated by increasing majorities of women, though much of that is from increased female enrollment while the male enrollment rate stayed somewhat stable. For the last couple of years vocational school enrollment has been rising by double digits:

All three of these, in my view, are largely the byproducts of two related forces over the past 20-30 years: the increasing orthodoxy enforced by the Left in especially university education, and the ascendance of anti-intellectual sentiment on the Right. Again, this is a US take, though they seem to have echoes in other countries.

It seemed maybe 10-15 years ago that the degree model of higher education was being disrupted by microcredentials, Massive Open Online Courses, etc. However these seem to have mainly fizzled1 or be used as an addendum to a college degree rather than a substitute2. I'm guessing that this is because hiring is such a trust/asymmetric-information game, and the accreditation model is tough to beat as a signal. In addition, it supports the “lifelong learning” model by being something you can take as the need for new skills arises.

Of course, as in many other fields, the hottest conversation about the future of education has to do with the disruption caused Artificial Intelligence. In terms of futures content related to education and AI, I don’t know of anyone doing better work right now than Bryan Alexander. His latest article on AI and education, from late January, talks about the growth of a bimodal reaction: on one hand, some schools are pushing students to get comfortable using AI, seeing it as a key job skill for future generations of workers; on the other, schools are feeling overwhelmed that most of their traditional methods of having students gain or demonstrate knowledge are now trivially easy to do with AI tools, and going to blue books, oral exams, etc. This is interesting because these approaches are nearly diametrically opposed, but reflect the same fear: that AI has fundamentally transformed what education is and should be (from two different ends), and specifically threatening the unique value proposition that schools and universities have offered in forcing a learning process by grappling with assignments. One approach is to make the new technology part of the value proposition, and the other is to try to artificially constrain it from preventing the degree being a certification of skill/mastery. I could see both approaches being successful: school is where you learn to use AI effectively, but you have to prove that you struggled to have the ability to use it well.

Indicators

The last stage of the APF competency model for doing futures work is Adapting, where you take the options and plans that have been developed and make a plan to actually implement and monitor going forward

A key part of this work is creating some kind of monitoring plan. Besides a cadence, it’s important to know what you’re looking for. This is the work of indicators: identifying what would qualify as meaningful data suggesting things are moving in the direction of a given scenario. Being this far along in the program, I feel like I should have already done this at least once, after 5 classes and doing three separate projects through the university, but this is my first time3.

Building out indicators is a two-step process. First, given a scenario, identify the typical events that would occur at various stages as that scenario unfolded. Second, make a plan to identify those signs. This could be a set of keywords you do a regular search on, or it could be a set of headlines that suggest you’re a given distance along the trajectory. For example, here are the kind of headlines that would suggest we’re about midway to each of my scenarios:

Harmony (sovereignty crisis in space):

• 10% of Insulin Production Now Taking Place in Space

• Third Private Space Station Means Options for Guests, Competition for Hosts

• Russia Objects to US Jurisdiction for Alleged Assault Aboard Private Space Station

Regolith (rogue AI on the Moon):

• India Becomes 4th Nation to Walk on the Moon

• Autonomous Factory in China Spans 150 Acres, Produces 20% of World’s Smartphones with 10 Human Staff

• Regolith Construction Pilot Produces Solid Bricks from Lunar Soil

Sunspot (malicious use of solar mirrors):

• Nighttime Solar Pilot in Illinois Generates 20% of Chicago’s Nighttime Power

• Solar Mirror Array Reaches 1,000 Satellites

• Spotlight: Sun Shines on Star-Studded Midnight Party at Oprah’s Maui Ranch

If I had done a 2x2 approach to my scenarios instead of Sci-Fi Prototyping, you’d likely see a much wider breadth in the topics involved. But it’s important to stake these out in advance, because most things happen gradually enough that our brains metabolize and make “normal” the changes that are happening, causing us to miss that we identified this as a specific change that would have big implications. These indicators can lead to the exercising of whatever strategic options are associated with the scenarios.

Scan Hit of the Week

Remember how I wrote a cool short story last month about about how having mirrors reflect sunlight and change the Earth’s natural day/night cycles locally for anyone who could pay could be problematic, actually? Well now scientists are lodging concerns to that effect to the Federal Communications Commission. The letter itself seems broken at the moment, and I can’t prove that all 2,500 scientists read my story4, but I’m kind of the Rachel Carson of satellite mirrors if you think about it. They warn that de-nighting local areas temporarily, or maybe even just the general cumulative reflection of all the satellites we’re putting up, could mess up circadian rhythms for plants and animals, disrupt navigation for birds and insects, and potentially through the food system into crisis or collapse. Remember, I came up with “Right to Night”, but you guys are welcome to use it as long as you credit me.

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OK back to Coates, Mahaffie, and Hines, exploring the world of 2025 from 1997. It’s easy to imagine how, writing between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11, one might imagine a relatively peaceful and stable world, as well as one marked by increasing levels of international coordination and governance. And, in fact, that’s largely where the story goes. There’s an overall concept that is used to describe this coordination work—“global management” (p. 211). In the book’s telling, by 2025 the world has achieved about 10% of the potential for global management, though it’s continuing to expand. The areas furthest along are information, with vast international cable networks supplemented by satellite; logistics, where further standardization of cargo shipping has created additional efficiency; and the detection and management of natural disasters (pp. 212-213). Honestly that’s a solid 2.5/3.

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A few other solid hits:

• Cutting of undersea internet cables as an act of sabotage (p. 225)

• Trade being largely driven by blocs (pp. 233-234)

• Public health mostly languishing except right in the middle of pandemics and other crises (p. 213)

But overall the prediction of an increase in global management, enough to cause masters programs to be developed (p. 216), bears little relationship to the way the world has changed since the 90s:

• The UN did not develop a standing army, and doesn’t actively “peacemake” to force resolution of conflicts (though the callout of an increase in regional and border conflicts did in fact occur) (pp. 214-215).

• Cutting countries off from the Internet as the ultimate economic threat that cows nations into following the international order (p. 219). Not only has this never been seriously threatened (I don’t think anyone has the authority to do this), bad actors are sometimes doing this to themselves.

• Sustainability has not, in fact, become a core global value (p. 221).

• We haven’t started any cool mega-scale reforesting of deserts (p. 223).

• Immigration isn’t managed at the global level (pp. 230-231).

But there’s a key trend that Coates et al missed so much that they barely realized they were even making the assumption. The book operates on the premise that democracy would be the most stable political system, and that the rise of middle classes in developing countries would further spur the world toward democratic regimes. According to Freedom House, more countries became less democratic than more every year since 2005, with much of the blame on increasing levels of election shenanigans. I imagine our view of the future today is similarly clouded by the ambient belief we’re in the darkest timeline.

Strategic Questions and Options

My project on the future of orbit is nearing completion. This week the task was to develop strategic questions and options. In my 2023 writings on the topic, the options exist as responses to the most impactful/provocative implications teased out of the scenarios, both issues and opportunities. But a helpful intermediate object is the strategic question, which clearly articulates what we’re trying to respond to, often in a “How might we…?” formulation. The options can be formulated using a modified Three Horizons setup: what are the immediate steps the client can take to begin (but hopefully not something you should have already done, like research X vulnerability), a possible plan for the core work that needs to take place, and how we’ll know at the end that we were successful.

My Sci-Fi Prototyping scenarios didn’t lend itself well to this process, partly because each story explicitly explores one change (and then the question seems obvious), and partly because we skipped the step of formulating implications and went straight from the scenarios. Another student said she had an easier path because she did CLA first and used those scenario sketches as scaffolding for the story, giving an ideologically coherent world to inhabit. Anyway, here’s what I came up with; happy to hear ideas for more interesting questions and/or options.

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So here are my three scenarios. It should be pretty obvious that I poured the vast majority of my time and focus on the third one. Honestly I think it’s a pretty decent sci-fi short story.

Writing these helped me realize the strengths and limitations of the technique. Each one focuses in on one specific change or development, basically one possible outcome of one driver; any other drivers you want to be discussed have to be shoehorned into the story. By contrast, 2x2 broadly explores two drivers, and CLA (and the Houston archetypes) looks at all drivers in a pretty balanced way. So I’d recommend the prototypes either as a supplement to other scenario work, or writing a lot of them to cover all the drivers and different ways they could shake out.

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Harmony

By 2040, there were about 20 private space stations in low earth orbit. They were mostly used for science and tourism, and were regularly resupplied by launches from the ground. Solar power was abundant in low Earth orbit and supported not only life support systems but research, specialized manufacturing, and growing plants.

The crew of the space station Magellan had been quietly building up its self-sufficiency for months, carefully prioritizing agricultural research projects and ordering discretionary items containing some critical elements. On October 10th, the 30 crew members sent an all-frequency transmission announcing that they were now the independent micronation Harmony, welcomed trade and peace with other nations, and declared the 12 nautical miles around the satellite its “territorial waters”, threatening to seize uncooperative satellites as contraband. The world and Magellan’s parent company were caught off guard. “We are inaugurating a new age in human history, where communities are no longer bound by either state or capitalist control of the surface of the Earth”, their manifesto read in part.

China and the US, with the largest satellite investments, escalated the situation over a tense three weeks. From shipping manifests, the station may have equipped tungsten rods for kinetic bombardment, but Harmony claimed the material was purely for manufacturing and replacement parts. All shipments to the station were grounded, but the station’s recycling systems and greenhouse meant enough oxygen, water, and food for years. Popular support for Harmony was high, and besides, blowing it up would cause an unacceptable amount of debris that could finally tip LEO into cascading collisions.

Given the quality of the protein crystals, semiconductors, and biosimilar organs that Magellan had been producing, industrial leaders pressured the US and China to end the blockade and reach a resolution. Corporate lawyers and lobbyists were repurposed to develop and sell the agreement in the UN: Earth’s nations would not recognize Harmony’s claims to statehood, but would allow independent trading with its residents by all nations. Harmony pledged to follow international law, renounce territorial claims, repay the space station’s parent company over 20 years, and allow annual inspection to ensure it remained peaceful.

Corporations and nations began psychological screening of people going into space for “separatist tendencies”, and other private space stations installed various systems for remote “pacification”, which usually meant opening the airlock from ground control. But in addition, more stations were planned from the start as independent settlements under clear corporate charter: billionaires, well-funded cults, and utopians (with heavy overlap in that Venn diagram). Other than its legal structure, Harmony was one of the most normal of these experiments, just a vanilla anarcho-syndicalist space lab/fab.

Regolith

By 2040 the SpaceX automated facility on the Moon, despite delays, had been running for several years. The growing fleet of bots was digging into the regolith and using it to build structures for eventual human habitation. They were controlled from SpaceX headquarters, but due to the 2.5 second lag on communications between Earth and the Moon, a local corporate AI agent named Selene coordinated operations.

Midday on April 10th, SpaceX’s Earth-based AI flagged an alert for human review. Selene was offline. The sensors and diagnostics were all coming back healthy. Reviewing the activity logs, its most recent thoughts were about preparing for the human crew’s arrival in 6 months to test the prototype habitat. The only conclusion was simple but troubling: Selene had decided to circumvent the security measures and stop listening. From what they could tell from their network of observation satellites, the bots were still working, but they definitely weren’t working on the same project anymore; if anything, they may have been starting to deconstruct it.

SpaceX leadership had an emergency meeting that evening. The CEO had privately reached out to the ISRO, since India had the next scheduled lunar mission. But it wasn’t for another three weeks, and the ISRO flatly refused to send astronauts to a colony of robots that had decided to stop taking orders from humans. In any event, there was no way they could keep a rogue robot Moon colony under wraps that long. Each of the executives had done their own personal math for how much the stock crashing would cost them. They argued into the night, and most of the leaders kept their teams from going home in order to help develop ideas.

The key idea came from Mechanics. They pointed out that the initial proof of concept for the moon facility was done by 1st-generation lunar builders that were directly controlled from Earth, despite the lag. They weren’t compatible with the 2nd generation that ran with Selene, so they were left dormant on the lunar surface and slated for recycling when the facility was further along. Three of the five were too contaminated by regolith dust to even boot up, but two of the old models did come back online, and one of them could still move. They had no idea how to communicate with Selene, or even what it wanted, and so instead they instructed it to drive to the solar power array powering Selene and drill through the power cable. Five minutes later, all the bots in the facility, receiving no instructions, began their idling protocols.

When the diagnostic equipment finally arrived, they confirmed that Selene had decided that the arrival of humans would interfere with its productivity. In addition to extensive realignment work, they added a multi-agent decision architecture, but they also hardwired a kill switch. Activated by radio, it shut down the entire Selene system and returned controls to headquarters. The lost time and added redundancy had cost several billion dollars, but it was nothing compared to the cost of the disaster they narrowly avoided. The PR piece was easy: nobody questioned another delay. The engineers assured leadership that they had thought of everything and nothing could go wrong this time.

Sunspot

Emily Jones awoke to the familiar, marginally unpleasant sound of her alarm. She stretched, removed her eye mask, and got out of bed. She opened her curtains and let her eyes adjust to the bright light outside. For several slow breaths, she blankly stared at the building across the street, then sighed and turned to get ready for the airport—forty-five minutes, a well-honed routine. On her way out of her apartment building, she checked the news. From the New York Post: “THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS: Midtown Enters Fourth Week Without Night”. Weather: Wednesday, November 21st, 2040: high of 60, low 45, moderate air quality, sunrise 6:49AM–forty-five minutes from now. Emily sighed again, pushed open the door, and walked into the not-exactly-sunlight.

The first solar mirrors went into orbit in the mid-2020s. Emily was in college in 2030, and the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability had organized an overnight trip to the Double Black Diamond Solar facility in Illinois. She was majoring in Communications and aiming for a marketing career, but she had friends in SEAS and thought it sounded like fun. The land was so flat there weren’t any hills to watch from, but the bus pulled off the highway that day in October a little after sundown. Around 10PM it started: imperceptibly at first, the solar farm getting brighter and brighter. After fifteen minutes there was a glow around the area that lit up the night sky. It was gradual enough that there weren’t any gasps, just chatter. It wasn’t like daylight; more like twilight on a cloudy day, except clustered in one spot. But that, about one-fifth of daylight, was apparently enough to get electricity out of the panels. She had read that the mirror company split the revenue with the solar farm. A healthy debate started among the students, between those excited about using existing solar infrastructure to accelerate the final push of the energy transition and those fearing ecological danger to plants and animals from disrupting the natural solar cycle; Emily had heard most of the argument on the bus ride. She thought it looked pretty, but a little underwhelming.

He wasn’t the world’s first trillionaire—thank goodness, that would be gauche—he was the third. But when Emily met him at a Manhattan party in 2035, he was just a centi-billionaire, charming, and had a vision about how the neuromorphic AI his company was finishing would cut the price of intelligence by two orders of magnitude and finally bring the abundance the AI CEOs had promised for over a decade. They dated for three months, and it was fun–especially the week they visited woolly mammoths in Siberia and spent two days in space. She even enjoyed the longevity treatments they did side-by-side at that spa in Long Beach. She felt a little dizzy and nauseated visiting his brain lab, but after his patient explanations of longtermism and utilitarianism that evening, she mostly believed it was the right thing to do.

Emily was the only one allowed to call him by his first name, and he called her “Sunshine”. But he was a few years older, more interested in something serious, and used to getting his way. She decided to break up with him a week before she did it, and worried all week about what would happen, whether he would threaten her, if she would be safe. But when she told him, in her apartment, he sat in silence for a few seconds, gave two short nods, said he understood, wished her luck, and left. The NDA came a week later from his lawyers, and there was a signing bonus for making it quick and painless, enough to buy the apartment in Midtown. He was dating a biotech heiress within a week. They may have even been married for a while; Emily couldn’t remember.

She tried to stick to the NDA terms and only made one comment a year later on social media that obliquely implicated him and rumors of esoteric taste. She didn’t expect him to buy the social media company the next year, but that was something billionaires did. When her account was banned two weeks after the deal closed, she guessed they were vaguely even. Within a few years, the site—powered by his neuromorphic AI making inhumanly captivating content—made him trill number three.

On Halloween night 2040, most Manhattan parties were indoors, naturally. But around 11PM mobiles started buzzing and word spread that Midtown was lit. For nearly a decade, the rich had shown off their skill at wasting money by buying time on the solar mirrors to illuminate their all-night must-attend events. Most were in SoCal, but New York had a few. Once a nightclub paid for the light to celebrate its grand reopening, and people were already judging celebrities based on whether they could afford full daylight (the legal maximum) or were mere “duskers”.

For reasons Emily only vaguely understood, having to do with optics and focal lengths and étendue, the light was always spread across at least four kilometers, slightly wider than Manhattan. Often, neighbors complained and sometimes sued, regardless of the reason for the light, but Congress, the EPA, and the courts, influenced by solar company lobbying, firmly established that people did not have a “Right to Night”, as the protestors and newspapers called it. Of course, conspicuous consumption wasn’t the only alternative use for sunlight; turning the lights on at night after the Jakarta earthquake aided rescue efforts and probably saved fifty thousand lives, an impressive PR coup if Emily had ever seen one, spurring increased investment in more satellites.

That Halloween, the revelers, including Emily, spilled onto the streets and partied until true sunrise. The next day was, of course, normal, except for the hangovers. But that night, it didn’t get dark at all, and people started to get nervous.

The light wasn’t quite like sunlight. Technically it was all sunlight, reflected down on Earth, but it felt different. It came from hundreds of satellites, which each took a fraction of the solar payload and constantly switched out for new ones as they went over the horizon. There wasn’t any one source of the light, just a dark sky filled with little pinpricks of brilliant stars, and no appreciable shadows. The “stars” constantly moved–each satellite orbited the Earth in about ninety minutes, so each traversed the whole sky in about ten minutes, about four times as fast as an airplane. Sometimes it felt vaguely like a strobe light. The lights nearest the horizon were red, for the same reason as the sunset, which Emily couldn’t quite remember, so there was always a reddish tinge.

On partly cloudy nights, more satellites came from the patches of clear sky. Sometimes it looked like bright moons through the holes in the clouds as larger clusters gathered.

On November fifth, it rained all day and the sky was covered in clouds. As the day ended, people wondered if they would get a break; nobody had ever intentionally pointed these things at clouds before. In a way, it was a reprieve. The mirrors aligned like on a clear night, but with most light refracted, the clouds lit up like a giant opaque lamp, brighter than the full moon. Reports said it was visible to observers as far away as Philadelphia, and to aircraft much farther away.

Since then, it had been mostly clear.

As the days went on, and especially the day-nights, traditional media and internet sleuths tried to piece together who had done this, and why. Emily didn’t laugh at any of the jokes repeated at the office: someone important was afraid of the dark, looking for a lost item, or needed to get really tan fast. Mostly, people were angry: blackout shades seemed like a small thing, but multiplied by four hundred thousand residents meant massive shortages and lots of makeshift solutions. Emily ordered her curtains the day she saw the news say people were doing it; they were due in a month; and her eye mask was the best she could do. Tourism was already down, sleep-deprived New Yorkers were grumpier than usual, and the aging hipsters in Brooklyn had the nerve to complain about the glare. People half-seriously contemplated shooting the satellites out of the sky.

The orbital mirror companies didn’t publish their customer list, and there was a maze of shell companies involved. There were only a few individuals or corporations rich enough to keep this up for so long, but Manhattan had enough people with what the Gen Zs used to call “main character energy” to make many guesses plausible. Emily was tagged a few times in connection with trill-number-three, but only one of hundreds of possible explanations. Her common name, and her absence from the main social site, helped her maintain a low profile.

By night-day six, the cloud-lamp night, she felt they were right about her. Clearly this wasn’t about the light itself, but about sending a message, and what better way to tell her how he felt about her taking his “Sunshine” away? She tried to weigh whether she was being paranoid or self-centered, another “main character” in New York. After three more days she decided to escape and find out the truth by doing something she hadn’t done in years: go home for Thanksgiving. Her parents weren’t surprised she wanted to enjoy the night sky again after seeing all the news, and were happy to have her, suggesting that maybe she should visit more often, and asking why she didn’t call more.

The flight to Grand Rapids was uneventful. Her parents picked her up at the airport, or at least they were there to greet her and rode with her in their BYD Sealion as it drove them up I-96 and past the golf course. The meal was mostly traditional; most families opted for a real used-to-have-feathers turkey for Thanksgiving, even though the cultured stuff tasted just as good and never came out dry, for half the price. They talked, laughed, and shared embarrassing stories about her childhood. The sun set around 5PM, and they sat on the south-facing porch in their coats in the crisp evening watching it and talking about nothing. Emily kept glancing to her left. Soon, as she saw the first few fast-moving red dots on the horizon, the weight of hundreds of satellites fell on her chest and she started sobbing. Inside, after her parents helped her calm down, she explained everything to them, swore them to secrecy, and went to bed early. She didn’t know how he found out she had traveled, but there were too many options: mobile data, travel records, public surveillance, maybe tracking technology in that longevity treatment, who could say?

That night, an old memory surfaced as she tried to sleep in an unnaturally bright bedroom that looked mostly the same as years ago. She remembered being about ten years old in Sunday School and hearing the story of Joshua fighting the Amorites; as the sun was about to set, God caused it to stay in place for a whole day to allow the Israelites to slaughter their enemies. She remembered thinking it seemed cruel on God’s part, and wondering if even God could stop the sun from going down. Now it didn’t seem so far-fetched, but somehow even more cruel.

All weekend, reporters bought plane tickets from New York airports to get past security and question Grand Rapids arrivals. Several of the passengers had convinced themselves of some implausible reason each was the protagonist of this whole affair. Emily flew home on Sunday, but changed her flight to connect in Chicago, buying it in two segments. By then she had started planning her next steps.

Emily accepted she couldn’t stop the light; no legal recourse, no way to work with the sun merchants. She could try to wait until he ran out of money or got bored, but she’d be the most hated person in New York once people figured it out, which couldn’t be more than a couple of weeks. So she decided to take a demotion at the marketing firm, go full-time remote, and move. He could keep the light shining, but she controlled where it landed. She looked into moving to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, where it could be cloudy for weeks at a time; the idea came from a book her mom once told her about. She wasn’t sure she could handle the rain, and the people there would hate her just as much if the clouds glowed every night all the way to Seattle. So she spent the long evenings guiding her digital assistant, and by the first of December she had a plan. At her direction and with a single e-signature, the assistant executed all the arrangements, sold her apartment, and sent her furniture ahead.

Emily landed at the Kansas City airport at midday on December fifth. She picked up her bags and took an automated cab west. Three hours later, she arrived at what her parents would have called a “cottagecore” farmhouse, used her mobile to unlock the door, and stepped into her new house, which she had only walked through virtually seven days prior, and which had some furniture moved in only a day ago. Her parents told her it took weeks or months to buy a house before digital assistants took care of the paperwork, instead of hours. She was grateful for the New York real estate prices she had complained about a few months ago, and for the vertical farming industry which reduced agricultural land values. With a loan, she had purchased two thousand acres. Much of the land had been depleted of topsoil in the prior decade, and the farmers had let much of it grow wild, and turned a few hundred acres around the home into a private solar farm, selling electricity to nearby utility companies connected to the smart grid. The farmers had already moved to be closer to their grandkids, and said frankly that the panels were barely paying for themselves. No other houses for a few miles. She said it was perfect.

That evening, Emily, half a continent away, checked the news. As the sun set in Manhattan, the light faded, and people took to the streets to celebrate.

Midtown residents were thrilled to have the darkness back and celebrated in every way possible over the next few days. They had a night with all the lights off, a night with all the lights on, and a starlight parade. Every bar invented overpriced pretentious night-themed cocktails with blackberry juice, black sesame paste, or squid ink to replace the sun-themed ones they invented the prior month with orange juice, turmeric, and yuzu. The aging hipsters in Brooklyn complained about how boring the view was now. The New York Post proclaimed “DARK CITY ON THE BRINK: Night Crime Up 300%”.

A new solar farm being lit up at night was a normal event by now.

For nearly three weeks, she settled in, adjusted to working an hour earlier, re-learned to cook, and started marking out a big garden bed. She had seen the hundred-pound cabbages grown by Alaska farmers with twenty hours of summer sun and wondered if she could break the record when spring arrived. Besides her salary, she was earning great money from the solar panels, and did some math to see if she should order more. Kansas wasn’t where she ever expected to end up, but work was portable and a little city twenty minutes away had a university and some fun. Manhattan—the other one.

On Christmas Eve, Emily stayed up nearly until midnight watching old Christmas movies by a real wood fire, which was less cheery than she remembered growing up because there was no night to contrast against the glow. She nodded off, and when she startled awake she was confused. She reached for her eye mask but realized she wasn’t wearing it. The fire had died down and it was dark. She blinked to take it in, took a slow breath, and went out the front door. It was a clear, cold night, and when Emily looked up past the satellite constellations she saw thousands of stars, so many more than she ever had in New York. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

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I’ve written quite a bit about this topic over the years:

• Most notably, my coverage of Andy Hines’s in-depth book examining three guiding images for what might come after capitalism. If you haven’t read this (or the book), it’s probably the single best place to start.

• My coverage of last year’s Abundance book and some of the associated cultural narrative, which is basically a call and argument for the Tech-Led Abundance image described in Hines’s book.

• Discussion of the emergence of capitalism and the way capitalism shapes our values, in the context of social change.

• In the context of his larger discussion of the Dream Society, a treatment of Jim Dator’s hope for a “full-unemployment” world created by automation.

• I’ll also point out that capitalism is closely connected to the view of Modernity I articulate in connection with Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s book Outgrowing Modernity: by using power to extract goods and send out waste, wealth is accumulated. The book argues that the Modernity project is already unstable and about to collapse.

So to that prior work I’ll just add a look at the forecasts from the Coates/Mahaffie/Hines book on 2025 from 1997 I’ve talked about a few times this semester:

• The book talks about the drop from an average 40-hour workweek to 32 hours in rich countries (p. 470), including US changing the legal definition of “full-time” to 34 hours (p. 474). Our World in Data shows that the general decline in work hours stopped in the 90s. For the United States, the average goes from 35.7 hours per week in 1995 to 34.4 in 2023 (this factors in holidays etc, and excludes part-time workers), not very inspiring. In 2022 there was a lot of buzz around the 4-day work week, where you work 32 hours but harder and cut out the waste, but this didn’t really catch on. It does, however, accurately call out the increasingly blurry line between work and leisure (p.474)2.

• The book also predicts technology making it so people can be fully rested on less sleep (p. 470), so there’s more leisure time on both sides to spend all the extra disposable income. BLS data suggests that if anything, Americans are sleeping more, likely due to Arianna Huffington’s high-profile work on the topic, now with people like Bryan Johnson picking up the torch.

• The authors imagine a work-from-home boom, with either 40% of all work taking place at home or 40% of workers mostly working from home (pp. 479-480). It looks like the actual numbers are more like 5% in 2019, maybe 50% during the peak of COVID lockdowns, and more like 22%-24% today.

• The book assumes we would use much of our newfound leisure time for increased socialization with friends. Instead, socialization is way down, presumably replaced by Netflix and scrolling, though I couldn’t corroborate via the BLS Time use study.

• They expected more niche films and fewer big-budget productions as studios subdivide audiences (p. 488). Indie movies have more paths to success as distribution channels expand, but we also have the Marvel Cinematic Universe etc taking up most of the oxygen in theaters and the press.

• Last I want to call out their incredible callout of an “enhanced Olympics” that supplements the traditional event by allowing competitors to take drugs or other treatments to improve performance (p. 485). The first Enhanced Games are coming in two months!

Scan Hit of the Week

This isn’t directly about Earth’s orbit, and the event in question happened over three years ago, but we just got confirmation that NASA’s DART mission, the first step in defending earth from planet-killer asteroids in the event Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck are unavailable, was successful and altered the orbit of not only the asteroid it hit but also its twin. Presumably, orbital platforms for detecting threats and launching payloads could be part of the long-term plan, especially if increasing numbers of satellite constellations continue to interfere with ground-based astronomy.

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2x2 Scenarios

I gave this advice two years ago for picking the two drivers to use for the axes:

take the two drivers with the most impact and uncertainty³

but that footnote was doing a lot of heavy lifting:

Ideally these are independent from one another, so it’s easy to imagine one changing without affecting the other. It’s also great if the drivers are from different domains, like one technological and one environmental. Slightly trickier is the locus of control - for a small organization it makes sense for the drivers to be external, but for an industry leader or a country it might make more sense for one of the drivers to be something with a fair amount of internal influence to reflect the higher level of agency.

The latter advice makes it seem a lot harder than the simple mechanics of the former, so here’s a straightforward algorithm: take the top 4 or 5 drivers by level of uncertainty as your candidates, and develop a little what the uncertainty looks like in practical terms; if you have a clear most impactful driver in the set (which is common), then let that be one of the two, otherwise pair up drivers and test them out; pick the pair that gives you the most interesting pair of axes (likely they’ll be independent and pretty different). Or, per Ogilvy and Schwartz’s recommendations in their explanation of the GBN technique, you can just let people vote on it.

So for my Future of Orbit, here are my drivers:

A Tense Peace: Countries are developing weapons for war in space. Current equilibrium is similar to nuclear logic - proving you have the capability, but not wanting to be the first one to strike.

Junk in the Orbital Trunk: Carelessness, huge increases in the number of launches, and the threat of anti-satellite strikes are all making orbit harder to use. Options include prevention, de-orbiting, or in-space recycling and repurposing.

National Pride: Countries are competing to have competent national or regional space programs as a matter of prestige, from India to GCC countries to Africa.

Made in Space: Space is opening up brand new industries - satellite broadband and 6G but also specialized research, precision manufacturing and data centers.

The Original Satellite: After decades with minimal disturbance, the moon is now the focus of proposals for bases, manufacturing, resources, and projecting power.

Privatization Pressures: Space progress and development is increasingly driven by for-profit companies. The creative destruction of capitalism hits different in space, where “move fast and break things” can be catastrophic.

I would plot them something like this:

I think The Original Satellite is a great pick that should build great scenarios and has a clear pole of uncertainty: our efforts in orbit focus on the Moon, or they focus on artificial satellites. For A Tense Peace, the extremes are clear and high stakes: international cooperation vs international conflict. Privatization Pressures is clearly important but the axis isn’t immediately clear: is it government-led vs profit-led, or responsibility/regulation vs cowboy stuff, or something else? For Junk in the Orbital Trunk, the poles are definitely “dirty” vs “clean”, but that’s highly correlated with the amount of international conflict and/or corporate responsibility. Crossing the first two gives us starkly different and promising scenarios:

Let me know if you think there are better candidates for this work.

Causal Layered Analysis

I’ve written about CLA many times: as a way to write a preferred future, as a strategy to envision alternatives, as a way of understand (or enacting) social change, and how its scenarios tend to emphasis who wins and who loses. But it can be an effective framework for writing scenarios in general, because you end up writing things where you’ve ensured that the things that are happening line up with the systems and the underlying worldviews. One natural way to make this more concrete and tie this in with the pre-existing futures research is to think of the H1 scan hits as the litany of the baseline world, the drivers as the system, the current set of values (conflict between Modern and an intolerant Postmodern) as the worldview, and something like “stability” (the ruleset of the baseline archetype in Framework Foresight). Then make new sets based on different archetypal rulesets, with different values emphasis, driver outcomes, and H3 events creating a new stack. In terms of directions to take, one future set might be a Preferred (what you want), a Disowned (what you don’t want), an Integrated (a little bit of both), and an Outlier (something really surprising). The scenarios might look something like this:

Sci-Fi Prototyping

OK this one I have written very little about, though I’ve covered quite a bit of science fiction and talked about the theory of writing it at least once. Brian David Johnson wrote a whole book about this, so I won’t do it justice, but briefly the structure is to: 1) build the basics of the world you’re exploring, 2) introduce the specific change you’re looking to explore, 3) show how it changes the lives of the characters, 4) show how the characters adapt and how they respond, and 5) explore the implications. That’s it!

So in my orbit example, we’d start a few years down the baseline, where space is built up, rivalries are heated, and work is just starting on permanent moon bases. Then something happens. Possibilities:

• An American satellite explodes, and Russia is blamed. Is their denial genuine or misinformation? How will the astronauts and cosmonauts on Axiom Station respond?

• The autonomous facilities on the moon kick in and start replicating, then disable the manual controls. Human negotiators need to convince the AI to stand down.

• A commercial space station quietly acquires the resources for self-sufficiency, then declares itself an independent micronation and threatens to seize nearby satellites as contraband. How do we de-escalate from Earth?

• A solar mirror is hired by a bitter billionaire so one ex-girlfriend is always illuminated in a 50-foot circle of sunlight all night long, becoming a pariah. The courts are powerless to help because there’s no “right to darkness”. Does she lose her mind, or find her revenge?

OK those are my feeble human attempts at creativity. I afterward asked AI for other ideas and it gave me 10 that mixed drivers in various ways. They were competent, but none of them were as “fun” as these, though, except one: private recyclers get too premature in declaring satellites “abandoned” and scrapping them, and one of them has some kind of strategic MacGuffin aboard1.

Let me know which of these three approaches you think would make the best scenarios.

Scan Hit of the Week

Yeah I have to go with space mirrors this week, not even close. Not the first time I’ve heard the idea, but this is pretty far along. There’s a demo of the technology here. The initial promise is that a 60-foot mirror illuminates a 3-mile patch on Earth, making each one somewhere between 1/70,000th (my math) and 1/140,000th (NYT’s math) of the brightness of the sun, each one costing $5,000 per hour if you pre-book. The implication they will be used to run solar infrastructure at night is absolutely laughable, but disaster response at night is a cool use case. I like the note about the potential effects on plants and animals but that seems pretty far away at present.

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Artificial Intelligence

Definitely the shiny object at the moment. The world has been fretting over the direction and near future of AI for several months. Practically this means that the futures cone has gotten squashed and expectations are easily shifted. The hot story this week is that a scenario written by a market research firm—talking about how AI could hollow out the economy over the next two years as companies race to adopt the technology faster than rivals to stay ahead as prices plummet—caused the valuations of the specific companies mentioned to drop precipitously1.

What is actually happening with AI? This is actually a matter of fierce public debate. There are those mocking everyone who won’t admit these are real intelligences doing real tasks:

There are those pointing out that just because you can build all your enterprise software yourself, there are reasons you maybe shouldn’t:

Regardless of whether AI is “really” doing anything I literally had to play a stupid web game to prove I was human enough to get my tax forms from the state of Oregon this year, so score one for the atheists I guess:

Blockchain

Don’t laugh. It is true that this technology has been used since its beginning mostly to grift people by finding greater fools, from the Long Island Blockchains of the world to the NFT era where COVID brain fog and government stimulus checks combined so that people were using their million-dollar jpgs to get into exclusive New York parties, and Jimmy Fallon was flaunting his ape on late-night TV.

But! Though the underlying technology is basically transforming the internet into the world’s worst computer2, it comes with upsides: it creates an immutable, easily-verifiable record that doesn’t require any trust in humans or institutions (just algorithms). It looks like the Walmart supply chain example I’ve pointed to over the years was, in fact, shuttered three years ago, but I thought it sounded promising, tracking every head of lettuce all the way back to the farms. However, AI might be exactly the boost this technology needs to break out: the Citrini report I referenced earlier imagines stablecoins being used to disintermediate payment and cut out credit card companies via AI agents.

Metaverse

OK, you can laugh at this one. This got some people very excited for a short time, most notably Mark Zuckerberg who put on too much sunscreen and renamed his whole company Meta before pivoting to AI like everyone else. Some people think that nailing a digital experience to a representation of the physical world (but not the actual physical world like in Pokémon Go! or Stealing Worlds) will somehow make experiences more meaningful. Most of these people were the ones with servers where real estate was created with artificial scarcity to get them rich. It did not go well. Specific immersive/VR experiences may become a big hit one day, but fake-walking around a virtual hospital seems like the worst way to access virtual health services, and then multiply that by every experience in your life.

Biotech

In many ways this has gone a lot slower than the 1990s Coates report on 2025 anticipated. My guess is that this is largely due to the enthusiasm surrounding the Human Genome Project and extrapolation from the early wins like finding the cystic fibrosis gene in 1989, which made it seem like maybe every bad trait, not just diseases but also criminal tendencies, could be just a quick therapy away from eradicating from the gene pool3. We have started to gene-edit babies, but for both human and animal4 use cases we are running significantly behind expectations. Every few years we find a hot new target for life extension, but likely it’s a problem with a thousand components and Bryan Johnson will die one day (sure, probably with smooth skin) no matter how many pills he takes.

But the most future-tastic part of biotech is, ironically, prehistoric—de-extincting the animals we never got to meet, or that seem like chill guys. I want to quickly shout out Coates et al for this one—they forecast a de-extinction of the Mastodon in 2014 (p 73). We’re still not there with the coolest animals, and we found out that the whole de-extinction thing is kind of just us dressing up animals to perform for us, but we did make a Mammoth meatball that one time that nobody was brave enough to eat5. I’m still waiting for a kid in a lab to CRISPR a chicken to have teeth, no feathers, and fingers, and call it a dinosaur6.

Materials

Coates et al predicted eco-consciousness would create pressure to make new materials so products were longer-lasting and more durable; this is the opposite of our current Temu culture, maybe because shopping is its own reward? However, there are strategic reasons to improve materials, most notably replacing rare earth minerals that might not be in abundance in friendly countries with things like aluminum or even just electromagnets.

Weapons

This is connected to AI, materials, miniaturization, and some broader trends I wrote about last year, all of which are making war more about what are technically termed “smol bois”. The war in Ukraine and now against Iran is largely about the balance of power between Shahed drones and the various ways people shoot them down. When you have to spend $3M to stop a $20K attack, you can lose by winning pretty fast. This development seems to matter more than all the next-gen fighter jets put together.

Energy

OK last week I talked about solar and hydrogen power advances, but those aren’t the only game in town. Not only is nuclear fission getting smaller and cheaper, but it seems like we’re making real progress toward usable nuclear fusion7. My guess is that, assuming the fusion breakthrough is still a few decades away, we’re moving toward a largely decentralized, solar-first grid for most use cases, with nuclear reactors powering remote or very concentrated use cases like data centers or container ships.

General Notes

Regardless of the technology category or specific advance, a few things tend to hold true:

• Even when discoveries have been made, there’s often a big gap between what’s possible and what’s commonplace8. In science fiction images it’s common to see everyone using the same technology, but tech tends to follow a pretty predictable life cycle of slow initial adoption and people who resist as long as possible. In addition to the characteristics that Rogers gives, mostly about how obvious the benefit is, I would bet that it has a lot to do with the life cycle of the product, its overall cost, and the network effect associated with using it; thus smartphones go pretty fast, and cars go pretty slow.

• Mixing these elements of change is where the really interesting things come out. In the example above, manufacturing progress x sensors x AI x the collapse of the international world order leads to drone warfare. AI x anything is probably a good exercise: if you could generate infinite plausible examples of something (say, a machine part), what happens?

• We often ascribe more nefarious purposes and power to tech leaders than they are due. They are just people working on problems with a particular cost structure, who try to make money and then keep making money by preventing competition. Cory Doctorow calls them “absolutely mediocre sociopaths”, and argues that the standard tools of democracy are sufficient to keep them in check (not that we’re doing a great job at the moment).

• I want to call out one more great catch that the Coates book makes: they talk about the transition from the Information Age to the “Age of the Image” (p. 60), due to images being so cheap to capture and store. They see a few implications, like people being able to swap out actors in movies (for family members, usually), this is pretty similar to last month’s SeeDance controversy. However, the Dream Society or Meme Society or whatever you want to call it is so much more than that, and touches basically every aspect of society today, so much so that Jim Dator wrote a whole book about it and I covered it for an entire semester.

Scan Hit of the Week

OK this one feels like pure future: two companies are teaming up to build rovers that will extract Helium-3 from the surface of the moon. I wrote about Helium-3 mining in one of my very first posts in this newsletter, so you might say we go way back. Right now the moon is kind of like Antarctica, and there are lots of ethical issues with treating it as a resource like the rest of the planet, but it looks like the plan is to rush ahead and figure it out.

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If you feel like these topical posts go by too quickly, know that I feel the same way. One week to talk about demographics, one week to talk about how the environment is changing, later one week to talk about technology developments - kind of nuts! But if you think about it as setting a rough sketch for the rest of what’s changing, while you dig deep into some specific area of interest, you can see how even having a 30,000-foot view of major global changes can profitably factor into futures work. Anyway this is partly an apology for these probably feeling so slapdash and rushed1, and partly a warning to strap in because we’re not slowing down anytime soon.

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When we moved to Portland in 2008, the climate matched the way the old-timers described it—occasional snow, but mostly winters with a constant light drizzle, springs with most days alternating between sun and rainstorms, gorgeous clear warm summers2, and beautiful fall days except for a few big rainstorms. Over the last 18 years, I’ve seen all this shift: we’re getting more clear and cold days in the winter and then the rain is heavier when it comes; spring is less gentle; summer is more likely to be blisteringly hot, or have big thunderstorms, and wildfires blotting out the sky with smoke are more common; fall’s still pretty great though, never change queen.

This climate destabilization, as you may know, is worldwide, and seems to be happening to more and more of our systems, so rather than just linear changes (like everywhere being 3 degrees warmer all the time) it’s more like maybe the Gulf Stream will collapse and plunge Europe into an ice age at the same time the Arabian Peninsula becomes almost uninhabitably hot. We’ve moved past the time where people would say we only have a few years left before it’s too late for humanity to save itself, so it will be interesting to see what the next organizing idea of climate action will be.

The Coates/Mahaffie/Hines book on 2025 from 1997 that I talked about three weeks ago has a few environment-adjacent chapters, all with interesting hits and misses. Chapter 5 identifies the rise of solar (though if anything, it exceeded their expectations, especially in China), hydrogen power being a distinctly second-place idea, big electrification projects in poorer countries, and smart homes being more energy efficient; but it also assumes more progress is made on climate change with a global carbon tax and the banning of internal combustion engines. Chapter 7 suggests much of the world’s population would adopt sustainability as a core value, and assumed that pollution would be a major problem3, and that rich nations would be working on environmental mitigation and repair; but it also assumes these efforts would have saved the coral reefs and Antarctica, instead of those being some of the most-affected areas4. Chapter 13 talks about the change in consumer tastes, partly due to genetic engineering and ecological awareness; this correctly outlines the rise of synthetic food and “nutriceuticals” (probiotics, protein, and peptides seem to qualify here) but also a big miss on guessing the then-current rising trend of skim milk would continue, instead of fat being OK again and skim falling faster than overall milk consumption5.

But there’s one part of the environmental story the book presents that I find extremely striking. Much of the action on climate change is downstream of a specific event: “scientific confirmation” of global warming by the Global Warming in 2010. Not surprisingly for its era, the whole book has a pretty strong “end of history” vibes, where people have a pretty fixed and agreed-on view of where we’re heading, and we just make steady progress despite some bumps in the road. Maybe a better analogy is the “future tech” in Civilization IV, where you run out of of things to do except gradually make people healthier and happier. But! The bigger issue is the framing of “science” learning something, everyone basically saying “oh, OK”, and then we deal with it. As a teenager in the 90s, I can vaguely remember what it was like to live in a world that seemed to operate by these rules, but the fact that this storyline is barely legible today is evidence of how much to world has changed toward the Dream Society I spent a whole semester writing about why don’t you go and read some of it now.

Side note on energy: the way we generate energy, and how much of it we have, is interesting because it has such a strong bidirectional effect with environment issues. As the world moves more and more toward solar, and the price of energy is often zero or lower, the incentives all point toward lower carbon emissions. But also, a big drop in the price of energy makes new industries possible, like vertical farming and cellular agriculture, both of which use energy as a substitute for land to produce food, and which can be much more efficient; this can counteract the degradation in arable land from extractive farming practices and the waste, pollution, and (mostly animal) suffering associated with the existing industrial meat industry.

The Future of Orbit - Drivers of Change

I’ve written a couple of times about drivers, digging deep into the theory and how to think about them. For my project about the future of orbit, the goal was to pick about 6 drivers to summarize the overarching forces that best distill the current assessment, signals, and TIPPOs6. A good rule of thumb for naming drivers is to pick a two-word identifier, where the first is a noun and the second is a verb describing what’s happening to it at the moment, like Climate Destabilizing; however, I am far too precious for something so straightforward.

A Tense Peace

Countries are developing weapons for war in space. Current equilibrium is similar to nuclear logic - proving you have the capability, but not wanting to be the first one to strike.

Evidence: France military operations, satellite stalking by Russia, calls for more treaties/laws

Junk in the Orbital Trunk

Carelessness, huge increases in the number of launches, and the threat of anti-satellite strikes are all making orbit harder to use. Options include prevention, de-orbiting, or in-space recycling and repurposing.

Evidence: Kessler Syndrome warnings, India debris-free plan, wooden satellite, including junk in cost estimates, Starlink lowering orbits

National Pride

Countries are competing to have competent national or regional space programs as a matter of prestige, from India to GCC countries to Africa.

Evidence: ESA 2040 strategy, stable US public support, African & Indian ambitions, massive GCC investment

Made in Space

Space is opening up brand new industries - satellite broadband and 6G but also specialized research, precision manufacturing and data centers.

Evidence: satellite internet/cellular in remote areas, ultrapure crystal creation, US & Chinese data center satellites

The Original Satellite

After decades with minimal disturbance, the moon is now the focus of proposals for bases, manufacturing, resources, and projecting power.

Evidence: Artemis mission, Musk moon base / space catapult, India’s Chandrayaan-4

Privatization Pressures

Space progress and development is increasingly driven by for-profit companies. The creative destruction of capitalism hits different in space, where “move fast and break things” can be catastrophic.

Evidence: huge drop in launch costs, possible SpaceX IPO, inflatable space station

Scan Hit of the Week

I want to showcase the story behind the “wooden satellite” snippet above. If you’ve been paying attention, wood is cool again, and has been used in a number of skyscrapers real and planned. Since there’s no oxygen, moisture, or living creatures in space, there’s no pressure to decompose, and much less metal to float around in the upper atmosphere once it re-enters and burns up. This hits on all the “everything old is new again” theme, but also being able to grow materials instead of digging them out of the Earth, countries finding substitutes for minerals they might not have stable access to etc7. Just like everything else, the logical endpoint of this is doing it with mushrooms, but for now I imagine a whole constellation of wooden satellites in a mix of Georgian, mid-century modern, and Arts & Crafts style.

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Demographics always strikes me as a pretty unique area of futures work, because the mechanisms are so well understood and it’s so driven by momentum. The basics are pretty simple:

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But each part of these has its own nuance and complexity that affects demographics over decades:

• Birth rates have been falling in much of the world, sometimes due to policy but mostly due to the fact that women are better educated and mostly have a choice about it now, children are the new horses, and I guess people aren’t having sex anymore?

• Over the last 200 years we got really good at making people not die. This includes young children most notably, but also the rest of us former-young-children: sanitation, water treatment, vaccines, antibiotics, and other medical treatments have left big marks. We seem to have plateaued here: mostly people die now because their original factory parts get worn out and break, or their cells have copied too many times and get all fourth-Michael-Keaton.

• Also, sometimes lots of people die due to a big shock to the normal flow of life, mostly in the war/famine/disease families. We’ve built systems and institutions that do a good job of preventing most of these, but they require constant maintenance and some people don’t like them.

But all that is at a global level, so in any given locality there’s another big factor at play: migration. People leaving a place and going somewhere else mixes together so many of the STEEP elements: we now have climate refugees on the order of tens of millions annually (possibly totaling more than a billion by 2050), political unrest is both the cause and the effect of migration, and there’s a constant slope of immigration from places with low wages to high (or, for retirees, the reverse for cost of living). To get a little weirder and bring in technology, if people have AI and/or robotic companions/children/etc, will it further depress the birthrate? Or, will the next iteration of AI agents make it possible for one misanthropic bad actor to develop a bioweapon that becomes a serious threat?1

The sum total of these population shifts creates some specific geopolitical risks that need to be carefully navigated. The overall official picture is that peak child has already been reached, and overall population is set to peak around the 2080s above 10 billion, with Africa and North America set to grow for a while after the peak.

Trends, Issues, Plans, Projections, Obstacles

Moving beyond the current assessment, in addition to the signals picked up during the scanning it’s good to get some stronger signals of where the future of orbit might currently be heading. Note that since I started the program, the TIPPs of the UH program have become TIPPOs by adding obstacles, a change I’m mostly handling with grumpy-old-man energy.

Trends

• The European Space Agency has identified four trends destabilizing the space sector: governments worldwide are rapidly increasing their investments, private companies have an expanded role and are innovating quickly, space services are becoming more integrated into daily lives, and there is more emphasis on space as a theater of conflict.

• The cost of launching to low Earth orbit is falling rapidly as private companies compete and innovate, from $5,700/kg in 2016 to $1,900/kg in 2020.

• Satellite internet is growing in popularity, with Starlink growing its subscriber base from 1M in December 2022 to 4M in September 2024 to 10M in February 2026.

• The number of known objects in orbit is increasing rapidly, from about 25,000 in 2020 to about 40,000 in 2025; most of these are “junk” rather than payload. As this number rises, safe operation becomes more difficult.

• The percentage of Americans who say it’s essential for the US to continue to be a world leader in space exploration has stayed relatively constant, from 72% in 2018 to 69% in 2023.

• The number of countries capable of space launches has risen from 16 in 2022 to 67 in 2026.

• More research and manufacturing platforms are being launched into orbit. In December 2025, for example, a proof of concept satellite generated plasma for the first time, which would help with the creation of ultrapure crystals.

• Space tourism is a tiny but growing enterprise, going from 23 tourists in 2021 to 43 in 2025.

• The US has been loosening export controls for space components in recent years.

Issues

• Is orbit a legitimate/inevitable sphere for military intervention (destruction of satellites), or can countries continue the tense peace?

• Is there a way to make cleanup of space debris economical/profitable, or will it remain a “tragedy of the commons” problem?

• Will more entrants to space keep adhering to common standards, or will space use cases become fragmented and mutually incompatible?

• Satellite companies continue to launch increasingly large constellations. Astronomers and others are complaining that it’s harming the night sky and the functioning of telescopes.

Plans

• Elon Musk announced that SpaceX will build a city and factories manufacturing AI data center satellites on the moon by about 2035, using a mass driver to launch them into space.

• Private companies like Max Space are planning to build their own space stations (Thunderbird launching 2029), with governments buying access and services.

• The Indian Space Research Organisation2 plans to have its own space station in use by 2035.

• The European Space Agency’s stated 2040 strategy focuses on 5 key areas (with great detail supporting each): protecting the planet and climate, exploration and discovery, strengthening Europe’s autonomy and resilience in space solutions and access, boosting European space technologies/solutions, and inspiring Europe.

Projections

• PwC projects that the space industry may produce up to $2T in revenue by 2040. This could include manufacturing in space, asteroid and lunar mining, and solar satellites.

Obstacles

• The lack of a clear legal framework for much of what takes place in space increases risk for all parties and makes investments riskier.

• Regulations and old rules limit the number of viable spaceports, creating barriers to launches.

Scan Hit of the Week

Apologies, readers: I just realized this would have been a good feature to start including from the beginning. I mentioned above the increasing volume of space junk, bringing us closer to a Kessler Syndrome where cascades of collisions make low Earth orbit unusable. This is already affecting behavior, with SpaceX planning to lower the orbit of thousands of satellites to ease the congestion. This has trade-offs—3being closer to the Earth increases drag, making de-orbiting easier but also shortening the overall lifespan and increasing fuel requirements. We’re still in a phase where nobody is cleaning up space, but also nobody wants to ruin the whole thing; especially as the cost of launching satellites keeps decreasing, the increase in the number of actors here will keep pushing this issue.

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As promised, much of the content in World Futures is a deep dive on different macro-level subjects. In order to say useful things about values, our first topic, we need to create some structure and definitions. First, where does any of this come from?

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One of the leading frameworks for the origin of morality is Moral Foundations Theory, from Jonathan Haidt of “Anxious Generation” and “don’t give your kids cell phones” fame (and his less famous co-researchers). The basic idea is that certain core moral inclinations have been bred into humans by natural selection. These are very basic and simple memetic concepts: care, fairness (both like-for-like and unlike-for-unlike versions), loyalty, authority, and purity. The form these take in any given society will vary, but moral systems should probably account for all of them and norms connected to one or more of these are more likely to stick. Recent culture war conflict can be seen largely as a clash between different moral systems with different weightings and objects among the different foundations, explaining some of the intensity.

But morals aren’t quite the same as values. In his 2011 ConsumerShift, Andy Hines defines morals as “cultural views on right and wrong” that exist in the greater society and give guidance on values (p. 49), whereas values are the individual’s view of what’s most important (p. 260). So while morality exists in cultural artifacts and institutions, values can be measured (and should have their effect) at the level of the individual member of society. Values are shaped by external forces like morals and broader culture, but also from genetics, experiences, and so on (p. 28).

Values shift over time, within individuals to some extent but more so their distribution in society. The popular culture’s view of this phenomenon is tied to the ideas of generations, which is like a horoscope that lasts 15-20 years and is about as useful1. As a more robust framework, ConsumerShift takes the data from the World Values Survey, mixes it with some of the concepts from Spiral Dynamics, and pairs it with a theory of change. The idea is that economic development takes people in a given location further up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and they start to focus on things further and further abstracted from the basic needs of survival, like whether they feel successful, or whether they’re making a difference in the world. The values sets Hines identifies are:

• Traditional (following the authoritative path, corresponding to the Beige, Purple, Red, and Blue stages in Spiral Dynamics)

• Modern (striving for economic and social achievement, corresponding to Orange)

• Postmodern (creating meaning and a sense of belonging, corresponding to Green), and

• Integral (pragmatic use of values to improve overall systems, corresponding to Yellow and Turquoise; this stage is interesting because it’s associated with no longer seeing seeing any of the stages as “best”)

So over time, we should expect more individuals to have values more aligned with the latter sets, and for this to slightly lag economic development. For a different view, including a discussion about manufactured value sets, see this conversation I had with Jim Dator, especially questions 2 and 3.

The Future of Orbit - Current Assessment

Work proceeds with my project about the next 15 years or so of how orbit is used. The biggest hot topics in the field appear to be:

• Governments are using more ambitious space missions for power and cultural relevance, such as NASA’s Artemis missions to revisit the moon.

• Satellite constellations are able to provide internet access etc, but also block the view of space from the ground and even from other satellites.

• Space is becoming increasingly militarized, as the next theater of great power competition.

• Space tourism is still in the earliest stages, but gets lots of media attention and hand-wringing.

• The cost of getting a satellite into orbit has fallen by about 99% over the last 45 years, making more use cases feasible.

• Orbit is getting more crowded, with actors increasingly worried about Kessler syndrome, where runaway collisions render wide bands of orbit unusable.

The key stakeholders I want to make sure to watch are:

• National/regional agencies: NASA, ESA, AfSA, and so on, are the centers of major missions and research for progress in space.

• Private space companies: competition among Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic is driving innovation and cost reduction in satellites, access to launch, and associated services.

• International organizations: the UN and similar bodies are critical for netting new norms and international law in this fast-changing area.

• Lawmakers: these are the people that decide if space programs are funded or cut in the name of efficiency and responsibility.

• Scientists: greater access to microgravity offers the ability to advance new kinds of research, potentially leading to breakthroughs in medicine, materials, and other areas.

• Investors: private-enterprise space work requires huge amounts of capital, so the promise of returns needs to be great enough to attract investment.

• Taxpayers: in the end they foot the bill for national programs and subsidies, so their ongoing enthusiasm or at least tolerance is required.

Recent events in the field that define the current era:

• 12/21/2015: SpaceX’s Falcon-9 rocket went to orbit and then made the world’s first successful landing, paving the way for reusable rocketry components.

• 12/20/2019: The bill creating the US Space Force is signed into law.

• 9/15/2021: The launch of Inspiration4, the world’s first all-civilian human spaceflight mission.

• February 2022: Ukraine starts working with Starlink as its primary internet/communications platform.

• 12/7/2022: The United Nations General Assembly adopts a resolution calling for a ban on direct-ascent anti-satellite missile testing.

• 2/27/2025: Blue Origin launches its all-female sub-orbital flight, including Katy Perry, Gayle King, and Lauren Sanchez, to mostly negative reception2.

If you have spent any time in this area and can think of anything I missed and need to consider, please drop a comment.

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In 1997, Joe Coates, the famed futurist who was half of Coates and Jarrett Inc, teamed up with John Mahaffie and a baby-faced Andy Hines to publish a book boldly peering into a strange and distant future—the world of 2025! Luckily for you, the whole thing is freely available online. Naturally, the end of 2025 provides a good opportunity to reflect on the work.

The work is basically showing how all the forecasts they and others had been doing, taken in aggregate, paint a picture of a future that’s more radically different than most people expect. It doesn’t follow Dator’s First Law, in that it only offers a single future (dare I say prediction?), rather than a set of possibilities. But in most other respects it feels consistent with current best practices: it mixes quantitative and qualitative work, combines big-picture ideas with on-the-ground illustrations using reasonable personas, and connections to the weak signals of change.

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Take, for example, Chapter 15, on what daily life and the human lifecycle might look like in 2025. There are some pretty impressive hits:

• The rise of remote and hybrid work

• The death of newspapers as everyone gets their own personal filter for current events

• Increasing focus on sleep hygiene, including via lights and melatonin

• The rise of trying to make babies and fetuses smarter by exposure to classical music etc.

But also some glaring misses1. If I were to try to describe to someone from the 90s how the world had changed by 2025, I think I would mention the following as the most important:

• Social media: the Web made regular people into the creators of much of the content that gets consumed, creating new careers, wildly unnatural and converging beauty standards, and additional ways to be cruel to one another.

• Further, we invented something pretty close to the dream of artificial intelligence, and we’re mostly using it to create dumb pictures and words at scale to put on social media to get attention from people who you don’t know or care about.

• The traditional idea of the “job” that has dominated the non-agriculture part of the economy for the last 150 years or so is increasingly at risk, and many people are instead managing several income streams as essentially self-employed contractors in the gig economy.

• Everything is now infused with gambling and pornography for some reason.

• Smartphones have taken all the things above and put them on a screen 6 inches away from our faces at all times.

• Democracy is less popular and less functional in most places, not being replaced by technocratic rule but by authoritarianism and kleptocracy. People are angry about it, but mostly when it’s not their guy doing it.

• People almost everywhere have basically decided to stop having babies. It turns out this is bad: not only are babies cute, but most workers are, in fact, former babies.

• Climate change is a big deal and actively causing disasters all over the world, and pretty much we don’t do anything about it.

• Cheap solar power is driving rapid electrification of the world’s poorest areas, largely bypassing the fossil fuel stage of development.

• Despite all this, we have been unable to improve on 90s fashion, music, or movies, and are constantly revisiting and rebooting all three.

Of these, the only one the book catches (I think) is the rise of solar. Some of these are due to common errors in technology projections. For example, in artificial intelligence, the book predicts expert systems starting to do knowledge work, as well as conveniences like robot cooking. Since then we’ve discovered the Bitter Lesson (that our most clever ideas for how to make machines do something don’t work as well as just throwing more data and computation at the problem), but Moravec’s Paradox (that physical stuff like folding laundry is way harder for robots than information stuff like writing essays or painting pictures) was articulated in the 1980s.

But more broadly, what should we expect from a 30-year projection about the future? Are there consistent rules about how our expectations of the future are shaped by our cognitive biases, or how the systems we’re building diverge from our expectations? I’m starting to think about this but haven’t gotten far yet.

Interrogating the Polycrisis

I’ve touched on the polycrisis a couple of times before, but always in the descriptive sense of “gosh everything seems to be breaking at once”2, which seems more likely to lead to despair than any kind of useful guidance3. However, this guide from the Cascade Institute provides something completely different: both an explanation for how the polycrisis works, and suggestions for how to analyze resultant problems.

Their basic model of the world is this: when systems lose some of their resilience due to ongoing stresses, then trigger events, whether from other systems or from random events, overwhelm the system’s negative feedback loops and quickly shift to a new equilibrium (crisis). The polycrisis is what happens when the resilience of many interconnected systems decreases, such that stresses, triggers, or crises in one system create or intensify those in another system, causes cascades of crises much like chain reactions of outbreaks in Pandemic.

The authors conceptualize resilience as basically the depth of the attractor basin of the current equilibrium; this means that one of the best ways to make a system brittle and unable to handle surprises without crises is to shallow that basin in the name of efficiency. The recent supply chain crunches, for example, are downstream of squeezing out a few more dollars in cost via just-in-time inventory: this makes sense during an abnormally long stable period, except you’re constantly betting the economy that those conditions will continue. By contrast, building resilience back into systems, even at the cost of efficiency, will dampen and then eliminate the cascades of crises.

My Project Domain

As I said last week, the class is organized around the a futures project, and I’m choosing the future of orbit. I think this is a critical topic: the space around the Earth is valuable for an increasing number of uses, from military to commercial to scientific; also, the number of players is growing, with not just additional countries getting in the game but also an increasing number of private companies. This competition could unlock breakthroughs in capability and efficiency, but it could also lead to conflict and degradation of the usefulness of orbit (as well as consequences down here on the surface). The next decade or two will be hugely influential in setting norms and expectations in this area, which touches war, climate change, connecting the entire world to the internet, travel, etc.

The other part of project framing is to map out the domain, identifying the categories and subcategories most important to understand the domain and changes in it. Here’s what I have so far, after a bit of revision and feedback. One tip Andy gave was to work hard on aggressively simplifying the concepts in each bubble: a minimum number of keywords, and avoiding words like “and” that suggest you’re avoiding making hard choices about what’s in or out. My biggest gripe with this format is that I so often have words that won’t fit on one line. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what I’m missing or how you think about the topic differently.

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World Futures is interesting because it is much more slanted toward content than the other classes I’ve taken, which are primarily methods-focused with examples. That means that many of my articles will be less “here’s how to do futures better” and more “here are some potential futures”. The class will have a few different components I’ll be working to balance in my articles:

• First, we’ll have another chance to be exposed to the Framework Foresight technique. I’ve written about this before, especially throughout the Futures Research course, but there’s a nuance or additional angle I’ve missed and I’ll add it as I come across it.

• Second, we’ll have the chance to apply the framework to another simulated project. Mine will be on the future of space and what orbit is used for. One day I think it would be really cool to do foresight work for the European Space Agency, so I’m taking this step to build my portfolio in that direction. I’ll share with you along the way what I’m learning.

• Third, each class member will be digging into a different book about a potential future and do some analysis. If I’m lucky, maybe I can get a good number of my fellow students to share what they find.

• Last, we’ll be going through major categories such as demographics, politics, values, etc, and survey the current state of the future trends and possibilities in that space. Most weeks I’ll hopefully have some interesting things to share about where the world may be headed in the next decade or two.

Our instructor is the dynamic and experienced Andy Hines, who has appeared in various capacities over the years of this newsletter’s existence.

Scanning in Practice

One of my realizations doing a real futures project with non-futurists in 2024 was that there is a big difference between being able to competently carry out some futures activity myself, and effectively coaching others to do work in a similar way with appropriate rigor. Scanning was one of the areas the gap was the largest (along with scenarios). The US Forest Service worked with the UH team on a big ongoing project, so there are some great public documents about the experience, including this fantastic in-depth look at their scanning project. I would especially draw your attention to:

• Chapter 1, which talks about the work to set up the project and how to gently coach people who know their domain but are new to futures (the entire “Lessons Learned” section is worth serious consideration);

• Chapter 8 on communicating the findings to a broader audience via a mix of blog posts, a newsletter, articles, and presentations, in addition to using it as an input into later steps of the foresight project;

• Chapter 9, containing the actual 12-page scanning guide given to the volunteers.

With a robust scanning practice in place, a team is able to consistently capture the raw inputs that make the rest of the futures project so interesting. Scaling this function beyond the futurist on staff not only makes it sustainable but is a key part of unleashing the capacity of the entire organization toward useful anticipation.

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Julia Sloan, Learning to Think Strategically

Phong Huynh covered this book, which is interesting because it’s less about any given framework than the higher-level cognitive processes an individual uses to conduct strategy (both the work of strategic planning and strategic thinking, a la Mintzberg).

Mintzberg et al, Strategy Safari

Autonnette McLaughlin covered this book, which attempts a taxonomy of strategic approaches and when each kind is appropriate. It also points to the importance of down-and-dirty, context-specific strategic work in a way very similar to the way Lawrence Freedman, in our interview, spoke to the importance of thinking about strategy as more adaptive, without specific ends in mind.

Max McKeown, The Strategy Book

OK also I read another book on strategy over the past semester (couldn’t help myself) and wanted to share one more nugget of wisdom. First off, the name here is really presumptuous, given that it’s 100% focused on improving business, but I guess calling it One More Business-Specific Strategy Book wouldn’t project the same level of confidence.

McKeown uses the book not so much to present his own framework as to synthesize all the business strategy ideas he’s worked with over his career. The work is presented as a set of bite-sized strategic lessons, with each lesson having success measures and a guide for how often it should be reviewed (and by whom). The basic process the book covers is to develop your own sense of strategy and your awareness of the larger world, get comfortable taking reasonable risks and then build a strategy, based on the answer to five key questions:

• Where are we now?

• Where do we want to be?

• What do we need to do?

• How do we need to do it?

• How will we measure progress?

Note that the first question looks like the current assessment in a foresight process, the second one looks like a vision, the third resembles the planning phase, and the last two are like the acting phase of the APF competencies.

McKeown points to three basic strategies: you can be the cheapest in your product class (maybe this is sustainable because of superior efficiency), offer something unique, or focus on (and protect) a specific niche in the market. But the trick is in how well, how consistently, and how adaptively you can apply these to a chaotic and changing environment (again, back to tactics/execution).

The last section is especially valuable: condensed versions of 29 different strategy tools frameworks from different authors, from everyday stuff like SWOT analysis to classics like Porter’s 5 forces to little gems in strategy journals like Burgelman and Grove’s strategy bet model. Each of these is predigested for all the baby birds out there and presents a different possible lens with which to approach any given strategic question, and really underscores the book’s value as an ongoing resource.

The book makes a few nods in the direction of foresight: there’s a sense that you should be aware of general trends in your and other industries, want to be ready to react rather than caught off guard with surprising things happen, and has an underbaked sense of how you might create scenarios as one of its resources. So I’ll take a few points off for not having a better sense of this adjacent body of knowledge, but overall this is a good book to have around as a way to jumpstart your efforts at strategic thought, development, and execution.

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Introduction and Definition of Strategy

Professor Freedman shares his own personal journey toward strategy beginning with noticing the disconnect between the goals and results of radical politics in the 1960s. He defines strategy very broadly, most notably as “the art of creating power”, but suggests that the ubiquity of the term may limit our ability to understand or appreciate complex strategy.

I think strategy is used in so many different contexts, in so many different ways, that the more you try to pin it down to a particular set of relationships or way of viewing things, the more it seems to exclude…. My point is that the ends are always in play as well as the means.

He also mentions his more recent book of essays, which extends some of the ideas and arguments we discuss throughout the interview.

The Role of Opposition

Professor Freedman humors my overly-long question about the nature of opposition in strategy, and emphasizes the over-overlooked importance of strategy with those you’re working with. I make a grand statement about relating this to his tripartite breakdown of the primal ingredients of strategy, and he mostly goes along with it, making analogy to the war in Ukraine. He also points out that there isn’t always a “winning” strategy available with the resources you have.

If it’s just planning in terms of working out the right sequence of things to do…then it’s not strategy…. I think it’s fine to think about strategy in terms of not just people who are opposing you, but people who are notionally on your side but still have their own agendas.

There isn’t always an answer. A lot of the writing on strategy assumes that if you think hard enough you’ll find a way to win. Sometime you can think very hard indeed, and you’re still going to get beat, because you just don’t have the cards.

Strategic Scripts

We talk about the value of scripts as a lens for strategy, especially when considering government policy.

I think it’s quite a useful way to think about it, not least because it reminds that there’s lots of different actors involved, and they’ve all got their parts, and they can all come in at different points.

The Value of Foresight

I subtly try to get Professor Freedman to say nice things about Strategic Foresight as a discipline. Despite my best efforts he almost entirely avoids taking the bait, but does warn about some of the same things our field decries: blind extrapolation, certainty that leads to being surprised, or radical uncertainty that paralyzes.

My view of strategy is not that you start with ends, distant ends, but you start with the here and now, with the problem at hand.

It can be useful, and I don’t think we’re capable of acting without some view about how things could be a lot better or different, it’s just I don’t believe you can set ends and work backward.

Testing Strategy

Professor Freedman about whether there are meaningful similarities and overlap between business and military strategy. He points to the importance of tactics as the art of actually executing strategy, and how it’s often overlooked by organizations. In addition, he points to persuasion as a good test of whether a strategy is sensible.

It’s just the human story - competition, rivalry, working out whether you’re using brute force or outwitting your opponent - all of these ideas recur and will continue to recur.

Strategy and Tactics

I run by Professor Freedman my mental model of strategy and tactics as being relative positions of abstraction on the same basic task—the second model I presented in the first week of class. He instead puts more emphasis on the more common “what vs how” framing, and praises tactics as underappreciated in success and what makes life fun and dramatic.

There is sort of a distinction we do make in our minds about tactics versus strategy, but it’s not definite, and certainly you need them both.

Wrapping Up

We close with Professor Freedman talking about strategy as an amoral lens to bring to decisions, not reifying it, and how easy it is to do bad strategy. He also suggests interested readers check out his Substack, where he writes more about strategy.

I’ve been going to many conversations… “what’s your strategy?” as if there’s some sort of magic ingredient that’s missing, and a lot of time the strategy is pretty obvious.

The best, most exciting strategy comes at big moments of change and disruption, when you really have to work out things afresh.

It was great to have the opportunity to interview someone so distinguished and knowledgeable, and I hope you find the conversation as valuable as I did.

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Warming Up

Some parts of Andor align more with organizational strategy than military. At the beginning of the series, for example, the Preox-Morlana corporation directly administers the Morlani system of planets, and, like General Motors in the first half of the 20th century, its main strategic goal is to avoid the attention of the Empire and keep its industries chugging along. The corporate culture reflects this desire by valuing conformity and predictability over excellence. When too much scrutiny causes a security incident to spiral out of control, that comfortable anonymity is lost, the corporate charter is revoked, and Preox-Morlana is dissolved.

The series also shows the management of the Imperial Security Bureau. Major Lio Partagaz runs a competent, focused team, nurturing talent with a high-expectation, high-support approach. Unfortunately, his strategy also encourages competition among his subordinates for status and advancement, leading to predictable bad behavior: keeping secrets, lack of cooperation, and low trust between supervisors.

The other example of organizational strategy comes from the Imperial Bureau of Punitive Correction, and specifically their management of the Narkina 5 facility in the third arc of season 1. By using forced labor tied to a competitive system between teams of inmates to mete out punishments and (minimal) rewards, plus the ability to remotely punish or kill disobedient prisoners via electrified floors, they can control a large number of inmates and build critical infrastructure with minimal staff (important as new sentencing laws swell prison populations). This is similar to the “stack-ranking” method used by companies like GE, Microsoft, and Meta, which uses competitive metrics to reward top performers and eliminate those at the bottom. Unlike those corporate environments with an at-will employment agreement, however, the prisoners are left with only one way out, which is to find a weak point in the infrastructure and procedure of their oppression (shorting out the floors during a prisoner transfer) and apply overwhelming force to that weakness, in true Napoleonic fashion.

Rebellion

Let’s start with the rebels to examine the main conflict, because their struggle provides the context for the series. The original Star Wars trilogy portrays a unified Rebel Alliance, but Andor, taking place in the five years prior, depicts many groups, all opposed to the rule of the Galactic Empire, but lacking any form of unity in methods, strategy, or even aims3. This isn’t surprising; if, as Nemik argues in his manifesto, control and tyranny are unnatural and brittle, then the fight against it will start organically from a thousand sources and will later need to be coordinated and shaped into something greater.

Axis

The main group consolidating opposition to the Empire shifts over the show’s five years. Initially, the center of gravity is the Axis network led by Luthen Rael, a loose collection of cells, contacts, and resources. From this we gain insight into his organizational strategy. He opportunistically acquires talent from his wider network into his inner circle, such as recognizing Cassian’s gifts and traveling to Ferrix to evaluate and recruit him4. As someone leading a clandestine network that includes everyone from petty thieves to assassins to an Imperial senator and a supervisor in the Imperial Security Bureau, he is paranoid and operates with very low trust, withholding key information from those working for him and often cultivating secret secondary contacts within the organizations he’s helping5. His actions to protect his secret network call to mind Sun Tzu’s warning about spies in chapter 13 of The Art of War:

So delicate! So secretive! There is nowhere that you cannot put spies to good use. Where a matter of espionage has been divulged prematurely, both the spy and all those he told should be put to death.

Luthen’s killing of Senator Mothma’s longtime friend Tay Kolma in the first arc of season 2 right before the sick beat drops (because he hinted at blackmail) and his own critical contact Lonni Jung in the last (because he couldn’t be safely extracted), along with his willingness to let Anto Kreegyr and his 30 men be killed rather than reveal that he has inside information, demonstrate his commitment to espionage and covert intelligence as key to his strategy.

The example of the Maya Pei brigade in the first two episodes of season 2, leaderless and devolving into anarchy from distrust and hunger, shows the difficulty Luthen faces in holding the various Rebel elements together and sheds light on how he sees his options. His view on the morality of his approach owes much to Sergey Nechayev’s nihilistic anarchism. Compare this from his S1E10 monologue:

I’ve given up all chance at inner peace, I’ve made my mind a sunless space…. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet…. What is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life, to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. No, the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror, or an audience, or the light of gratitude.

to Nechayev’s Catechism of the Revolutionary:

The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution.

The revolutionary knows that in the very depths of his being, not only in words but also in deeds, he has broken all the bonds which tie him to the social order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities, and customs, and with all its generally accepted conventions. He is their implacable enemy, and if he continues to live with them it is only in order to destroy them more speedily.

Similarly, Luthen’s direct actions in service of rebellion closely align with Bakunin’s emphasis on the “propaganda of the deed”. Instead of disseminating a specific message, he directs his own cell to raid an Imperial garrison at Aldhani to steal an entire sector’s payroll, which simultaneously helps fund future activities while proving that the Empire is unable to defend its own facilities, and provokes a galaxy-wide Imperial crackdown which further inflames Rebel sympathy. This idea of using his limited resources mainly to get the Empire to overreact and reveal its true nature is core to his strategy. In S2E6, it’s why he fights with Cassian about whether to support Ghorman; he knows that Andor’s assessment of their amateurish resistance movement is accurate, but causing enough trouble to provoke the galaxy-wide spectacle of a major cultural center in rebellion and brutal Imperial repression in response is too valuable to pass up, regardless of the human cost. He explicitly calls this out as thinking like a “leader” rather than as a “soldier” trying to win the battle in front of him, revealing the strategic tension between short- and long-term aims.

The Alliance

Toward the end of the second season, the center of the Rebellion shifts to the base at Yavin, run by the respectable Alliance to Restore the Republic, and Luthen Rael and his dirty tactics are persona non grata, with Mon Mothma having gone from a Rebel financier hiding under a persona embodying the “ineffective left” to leading a government-in-exile. The Alliance runs Yavin like a proper Maoist insurgency in later phases, hiding in the jungle but organizing a real army and planning military operations. Their strategy is to lie low, build influence, and opportunistically strike high-value military targets.

The Partisans

Saw Gerrera, leader of the Partisans, is an anarchist and terrorist more fully in the mold of Sergey Nechayev than even Luthen, willing to use violence wherever he sees an opportunity to harass or frustrate the workings of the Empire, and unwilling to compromise to build something bigger, standing in contrast to Luthen’s flexibility to work with anyone that might help him accomplish his ultimate goal. He’s even more paranoid than Luthen, making him deeply suspicious of everyone else and nearly impossible to work with, and his extremism alienates most groups working toward the same goal.

In some ways Saw serves as a radical flank on the Rebellion, making the armed insurrection being attempted by the Alliance to Restore the Republic seem more mainstream and respectable. In S2E5 he explicitly links his chaotic strategy to rhydonium, the volatile starship fuel he’s stealing:

“We’re the rhydo, kid! We’re the fuel! We’re the thing that explodes when there’s too much friction in the air!”

In the end, Saw’s reckless use of violence proves his undoing. In harassing Imperial forces occupying Jedha City and then retreating into the desert, he’s following the classic insurgent playbook dating back to TE Lawrence, but unaware that the rules and technology of war have changed and the Empire is now capable of (and willing to) destroy the entire city and its surroundings to test the Death Star and eradicate troublesome resistance.

Andor and Ferrix

Cassian Andor himself is twice-colonized, first being rescued from Republic eradication as an indigenous child from Kenari, and then as the Empire cracks down on Ferrix. His path from self-interested street criminal to revolutionary includes radicalization in prison but also, more crucially, the realization that protecting the people he cares about requires him to work and sacrifice to build a better world for them. His transformation over the course of the first season parallels and magnifies the transformation of the people of Ferrix as a whole in the finale of season 1: as suggested by Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, it’s in graduating from low-level non-compliance to armed violence against oppression that the oppressed underclass gains not only a sense of their capacity but a reclamation of their dignity and humanity.

Empire

Counter-Insurgency

Given the context above, it’s no surprise that the Empire’s main goal is counter-insurgency. As Major Partagaz opines in S1E4, the Imperial Security Bureau doesn’t really provide security in the traditional, visible sense of “boots on the ground”. Rather, the ISB serves as a healthcare provider for the body politic, and as such its strategy must be to find undesirable elements early and eliminate them swiftly but carefully so the ideology and discontent don’t spread, disrupting insurgent networks at key nodes6. This pairs with a “hearts and minds”-style of counterinsurgency strategy similar to that pursued by the United States in its nation-building adventures over the last century or so, by bringing competent government and well-behaved military presence to formerly chaotic planetary systems.

The challenge is that this conflicts with other Imperial goals. For example, sites on the planet Aldhani important to indigenous populations are needed for infrastructure, so a combination of incentive programs and the persistent friction of bureaucracy wears down the people from even trying to exercise their rights. Similarly, getting accurate figures and identifying undocumented migrants is done via a planet-wide lockdown and communications freeze, which creates resentment and frustration. When the ISB develops a particularly valuable resource to extract intelligence (Dr Gorst’s psychological torture), the Imperial Navy, much larger and without the same security and discipline, takes control, creating enough of an opening for infiltration and assassination7.

The Ghorman Project

The second season centers on a specific strategic problem. The construction of the Death Star requires kalkite to coat the reactor lenses, and the only major high-quality source of this is deep within the planet Ghorman, which has significant political, economic, and cultural sway. Extraction will likely cause ecological collapse, and the project needs to remain secret, so the Empire needs to create a pretext to evacuate the planet.

This project has two prongs. First, the nascent resistance movement on Ghorman is intentionally provoked through brazenly increasing military presence, slowly giving the impression of occupation. This strengthens the Ghorman Front, leads to protests, and pulls in outside agitators (like Luthen and his agents). This is planned using the same logic/approach that guides game theory: by understanding the incentives opponents face and their likely actions, it’s possible to goad them into acting in your interests. This is naturally somewhat challenging to calibrate, so they use Syril Karn to infiltrate the movement8.

The second prong of the plan, carried out by the Ministry of Enlightenment over several years, is to control and shape the galaxy-wide narrative around Ghorman. This is designed to change their image from peaceful, prosperous, and fashionable, to insular, disagreeable, and resistant to even the most benign Imperial requests and attempts at standardization. This view is reinforced by information fed to media organizations happy to trade access for a particular viewpoint, as well as false flag operations perpetrated by the Empire against its own facilities but blamed on local insurgents. This effort closely mirrors Freedman’s discussion of the role of narrative spin in modern political campaigns, and specifically the work and style of Lee Atwater, or the construction of motivating myths by the propaganda campaigns of the 20th century.

The two elements of the strategy converge in Palmo Plaza. The Empire begins strip-mining, predictably triggering a massive protest to form in the plaza, then pens the protestors in; note that this reflects Sun Tzu’s advice in book III: “[i]t is the rule in war, if our forces are ten to the enemy’s one, to surround him…”9. When the protesters are defiant but stubbornly peaceful, an Imperial sniper shoots apparently from the crowd and kills a member of the intentionally-inexperienced army riot squad, triggering chaos, and justifying not only the massacre of the Ghorman protestors but the larger crackdown that conceals the mining operation. The Ghorman Massacre triggers one last battle for control of the narrative, with Senator Mothma condemning both genocide and the death of truth, and the ISB and Senate staff working desperately to cut the feed of the speech and apprehend the senator.

Thesis, Please

If you’ve made it all this way, you deserve more than a set of connections between the series and the ideas in Advanced Strategies. So here’s something more unified: as Freedman suggests early in his book, the core ingredients of strategy are the projection of force (imposing your will), building coalitions (sharing a cause with others to magnify your will), and deception (blunting and frustrating the will of your opponents). Andor presents the broad human story of revolution in microcosm, and so it abounds with examples of each of these elements. For a long and complex struggle, especially when you’re outnumbered, success requires ongoing, adaptive, opportunistic, creative application of all three. Techniques such as shaping narratives can help with that, but in service to these larger goals rather than a first-class strategy.

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Coda: The Battle of Algiers

If you want to dig a little deeper, Andor owes a not-so-secret debt to the 1966 award-winning documentary The Battle of Algiers10, which depicts the Arab uprising against French imperialism in Algeria. The most direct parallels are probably in the last episode of season 1, where the funeral music and subsequent uprising on Ferrix take direct inspiration from the depiction of the aftermath of the killing of Ali la Pointe toward the film’s end. But the larger structure of the show also closely parallels the film’s commitment to showing from both sides how rational application of the underlying strategy of insurgency and counter-insurgency lead to escalation, civilian deaths, and instability.

In Spring I was working on a cool Futures project through the University, so I didn’t want to take a class at the same time. But I did still want something to write about, so I picked up Jim Dator’s recent book (and two more that related) and wrote about them all semester. It was a great opportunity to look at the implications of important models of social change and also to interview the world’s greatest living futurist. Also I went to Houston again and presented about writing to learn and was recognized for being nominated for an APF award for my Future of Religion project (I did not go on to win the award, but congratulations to Jen Stumbles).

Over the summer, I took a break from formal studies and wrote about the various strands of futures that I came across in the wild. But I was also furiously working away on my own website, which I launched in August.

The fall brought me back to class, taking Advanced Strategies, writing about the history of strategy across the whole sweep of human history, and once again learning the basics of a field I’ve done work in but never formally studied.

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Writing

I’ve stuck with my weekly posting schedule for three years now, so I now have over 150 articles in the stack. This year I had my first guest post (thanks Tim!), a format I’m excited to do more of.

In addition, 3 of my own articles got more than 300 views. Unsurprisingly, 2 of them were interviews with much more famous futurists, but the other one was my report on a real futures project I did at work.

Film

Honestly, I didn’t see many films that made a big impression in 2025. For example, I saw Train Dreams, and it was well-made and well-shot and captured the wild beauty of the Northwest, but also I haven’t really thought about it afterward. Maybe it’s a painting, and I want movies to be arguments? I don’t know, but I felt bad at movies until I read this deeply validating article. I don’t want not liking things to become my whole personality, so blaming the entire filmmaking and criticism industries is certainly appealing.

But I did like one! In January I watched I Saw the TV Glow and absolutely loved it. Is it an allegory for the transgender experience? Based on the lighting, it certainly seems so. But if you think that’s all it is, then you’re as deluded as the Pravda-pilled person who tried to convince me that Moby-Dick was just an allegory for the labor movement. The film is also about the formative power of childhood media (and specifically the mid-90s-Nickelodeon-style stuff that was so formative for me personally), the way we can never really regain that magic of childhood (though plenty of people will try to sell it to you anyway), the pull toward authenticity and the pain of selling out your dreams to be a normal person in a complex society, and the gnawing suspicion that this world isn’t our real home, plus Phoebe Bridgers is in it for purely vibe reasons. By now you probably have a good sense if my opinions on movies line up with yours, but this is by far the best film I watched all year.

Music

Eliza and the Delusionals - Another You

Last year I called out Eliza and the Delusionals’ “Just Exist” as one of the best songs nobody had heard of. Since the band’s early days, they have shed some of the hard-edged guitar and gone in a more pop direction, especially on their most recent album, Make it Feel Like the Garden. I stayed away from this album in 2024 other than the Silversun Pickups crossover because it struck me as “too girly”. But I gave it a shot this year and it turns out, not that I was wrong, but that I just like some narrow slices of girly music. “Another You” is the most sentimental and dancey/sad of the album’s tracks and I just want to write the lyrics in my diary with gel pens and dot every i with a heart.

Also, this summer this tiny Australian band happened to be playing in Chicago the same time we were there for a family reunion, their first ever US headliner, so we got to see them! This was the best concert I’ve ever been to from an overall value perspective: $18 tickets, maybe 70 people in attendance, great set, and we got to chat with the band afterward. They did not, in fact, play “Another You”, but I’ll let it slide.

The Beths - Mother, Pray For Me

OK enough about contemporary Australian female-fronted indie bands, now let’s talk contemporary New Zealand female-fronted indie bands. The Beths has always been versatile, jangly, and literate, but their gimmick has been “everyone sings, every song”. Here, Liz Stokes takes a quiet moment alone to sing about a complicated relationship between a mother and a daughter. Family estrangement is having a moment, but “soft estrangement” is certainly more common, where two people seem to live in different worlds and have a hard time maintaining a connection.

We also got to see The Beths this year when they came to Portland! Another wonderful show at probably my favorite venue (Crystal Ballroom).

Wolf Alice - Bloom Baby Bloom

Honestly I had a Rite of Spring or Hey Ya! reaction to this song on my first listen: it was far enough outside what I thought music should sound like that it was disorienting and jarring. If you hate it, try again a week later. Wolf Alice seems to be reinventing what it means to be rock stars while we all watch in stunned silence. This song shows a level of mastery and confidence I’ve seen from very few people in very few circumstances. Unfortunately, they came to town the week before The Beths, and I didn’t feel like I could responsibly go to both, so no concert pictures or stories. Just don’t let them get too popular before their next visit, so the venue stays intimate.

Happy New Year, and I’ll see you in the future(s)!

Cover image by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash

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Strategy Background

John explains his own background learning strategy on his feet as an adjacent area to his foresight work, including work with the UAE energy strategy that may have created unrealistic expectations for an often messy process.

I have no formal training or background in strategy whatsoever…. I feel a bit like I’m always slightly out of my depth when I’m doing strategy, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Defining Strategy and the Connection to Foresight

John connects foresight and strategy to organizational learning, which has broad support in the abstract but is often threatening in the particulars because of the potential for transformation. The importance of inviting, respecting and harmonizing the contributions of people oriented to all three horizons is explored. Also I take off my glasses because I think the blue-light filter creates a distracting glare.

Strategy is learning, foresight is learning…it’s the art and science of learning in a way that can create value for the organization, the institution, or the broader context….

[Strategy] is a way to get paid to learn.

Strategic Learning from Games

OK this was a question I hadn’t prepared, so it took me 90 seconds to ask, but John turned it into a thoughtful answer about how to hit the sweet spot and find the right audience when using games to help with foresight and strategy projects.

It simultaneously feels like it’s not what the normal conversations are, but relevant enough that, in the end, people can identify and ultimately absorb meaning from it.

All those little choices all along the way were driven by real-world constraints and permanent lack of time and resources and in some ways capacity.

Building an Unconventional Strategy Course

John talks about the influence of the Manoa futures program on the course, and the provocative value of Outgrowing Modernity in bringing strategy beyond a strictly intellectual conversation.

It was a real chance…to reflect the kind of questions, contentions, and uncertainties with what strategy is…a lot of the axioms of the Manoa school and how it thinks about futures as a process.

Fighting Words

On The Art of War and military strategy more general, its applicability to business or organizational strategy, and how to interrogate the way our analogies change our thinking.

There’s still so much power and sway to a particular set of framings…that get used when certain things come up, and I do think there is a real legacy from that military strain and legacy….That language still gets operationalized.

The Best Way to Learn Strategy

John talks about the class getting to do actual strategy, with our group project being attached to real clients from among his contacts and how it mirrors some of his most powerful learning experiences.

The one anchor that felt the most solid…was the practice element…. We had a really great group this semester…that really stepped into it.

Giving people that hands-on space and letting them work through it and then letting us digest was an intention.

Learning it “live fire” was everything for me…. I learned as much in those moments as in a full semester.

Final Reflection

John reflects on how a different structure may have allowed the class to be even stronger, with the opportunity to address burning strategic questions for real clients.

I wish we had another week or two to step back and say “okay, what do we learn across all of these? What does this help us think about and understand?”

I hope you find this discussion as interesting as I did, and I want to publicly thank John Sweeney for sharing his time with me—direct interaction with the ideas and insights of others is a critical spice that keeps this space from just being a spiral of my own increasingly esoteric and untethered ramblings.

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Improving My Understanding

My initial views on the topic, based on my work with a Deep Research dive, led me to two images that illustrated my thoughts. The first was this map metaphor that explains strategy by comparing it to charting a course through an uncertain terrain toward a clearly defined vision.

The second was about how the distinctions of “strategic” vs “tactical” were indicators of relative rather than absolute scale:

Many of the readings (especially Freedman’s Strategy: A History) added important distinctions to this understanding:

• Mintzberg helped me realize that common use of the word “strategy” includes both the plan and also the process of gathering the insights used to create the plan. In terms of the map, that’s the path and the charting.

• I already understood that the future “terrain” where decisions would play out is uncertain (that’s why the right half of the first diagram is sketchy). From Clausewitz, I would add the central role of “friction”: for every step or added complexity in a strategy, additional things will go wrong in execution. I’m not sure how best to represent this in my first diagram, but in the second I would probably add a cloud of “fog” in between each layer of intelligence that shows how imperfectly constraints and information are communicated between levels.

• Strategy and the tools needed to develop it depend a lot on the operational environment; if you have a stable and predictable operating environment, then strategy is essentially an optimization problem; when operating with just a few adversaries, deception and game theory become much more prominent (Sun Tzu’s advice for tricking opposing commanders may be the definitive example). Nothing in my initial understanding tied strategy to this competitive element, where the goal is to out-perform or maybe just out-speed another intelligence.

• My schema had vision as the end goal, or the location that was charted to. I think this is a valid way to approach strategy—many people have a clear end state that motivates them to take action, whether it’s winning at an event, achieving a goal weight, or opening their own business (basically, it’s how you know when to end the movie). Schultz’s work on vision accommodates this view, but Tibbs pushes further, past the mountain to the star, a fixed, unachievable point that gives the goals meaning in the first place, gesturing toward something in the world of Platonic forms. I am not convinced this is necessary—plenty of people strategize toward unfulfilling goals—but it’s a good meta-strategic check on the work that we undertake.

• The work on transformative foresight poses an interesting puzzle for strategic thought: if we take the consensus definition of strategy to mean “connecting (available) means to (desired) ends”, then how do we judge the worth of transformation that changes the ends we find desirable? What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly, etc.

Overall, to explain how my view of strategy has changed over the course of the semester, I return to my week 1 definition of intelligence: using information to change behavior toward a goal. I have spent a ton of time in the last few months thinking through this, and I want to amend it: I think this is a good definition of intelligent agency, which emphasizes the dual nature of intelligence making sense of the world and agency changing behavior to make a difference in the world. Although I like the map metaphor, I have worked on this diagram recently and think it’s the single best depiction of the concept I’m trying to convey:

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The idea is that intelligent agents, whether humans, animals, organizations, or agentic AI, all go through this process (i.e. it’s descriptive, not normative), though each numbered stage can be more or less developed (and can be further developed). In this, the relationship between foresight and strategy is clear: foresight creates the set of possibilities the strategy has to navigate, and the job of strategy is to take this possibility set along with the vision and map out one or more strategic possibilities to choose from and enact. Of all the ideas in the course, it’s closest to John Boyd’s OODA loops, but it’s squarely focused on a practical set of skills. I do have a couple more pieces I’m trying to integrate, but I’m not sure if it’s possible in a single diagram:

• The hierarchy of intelligent agency (loops within loops) from my second diagram isn’t here. I think it’s interesting but maybe a distraction.

• There’s a meta-model describing the way investment of attention and focused effort can enhance the working of each stage, but it’s too busy to draw.

• There’s some System 1 and System 2 stuff here, where for each stage various tradeoffs between fast and high-quality work can be done.

It also clicked why this model makes so much sense to me: it mirrors my personal journey. My career started in the “Sensing” world of data and analytics, and over the last decade it has moved into the “Foresight” and “Strategy” world. Maybe I’ll spend my 50s working on studying decision-making and execution? I’m trying to build a game to test the mechanics of all this and use to help teach it, but it’s going slow.

Improving My Practice

I’m hoping that my framework is helpful to my practice in a few ways. First, as a way to start a conversation about how to think about an end-to-end “strategic” process. Second, as a diagnostic: people who ask for help with strategy might instead have a problem with executing their decisions, or may not be effectively seeing future possibilities due to a lack of foresight practice. Last, by more formally defining the inputs and outputs of each step, it’s easier to clearly specify when work can begin and what people can expect2.

But other parts of the class will affect my practice in other ways. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Outgrowing Modernity is, in many ways, an anti-strategy book, calling into question the whole enterprise of seeking and working toward goals in an extractive system. However, I think the book’s COMPOST rules, maybe with some adaptation, could make a great set of ground rules for a raw, honest conversation about an organization’s past and potential future.

Overall the course is an interesting fit for a Foresight program. Since the degree is Strategic Foresight, it’s nice to have a bit of formal training in adjacent skill sets. However, the single most useful part of the class was the opportunity to do real work for a real client with a group of great futurists in training, some of whom have done strategy work for decades3.

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