Vol. II · No. 207
Established 2025

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Sunday, July 26, 2026
168 writers in the library
Tech · 2 shelves
TechCulture

Sentiers.

Signals of change and better futures in technology, society, and culture.

Recent essays

30 of 33

The looting of science fiction ⊗ We’ve been here before

No.412 — Techno-negativity ⊗ Billionaire derangement ⊗ The march to Stop the AI Race ⊗ Losing the ability to discover ⊗ How to talk about “AI” ⊗ Underwater kites

Ordinary engineers, not heroic inventors ⊗ Umyazu

No.411 — Stacking spaces ⊗ Why Leonardo was a saboteur ⊗ Futuring through discomfort ⊗ Imagining a new digital commons for creative AI ⊗ Project Circle ⊗ Umberto Eco library opens in Bologna

Becoming our unconscious ⊗ Energy and the matter problem

No.410 — Solar abundance ⊗ Matter Battle ⊗ A Glossary for Other Worlds ⊗ Scarcity is driving AI innovation ⊗ Chock full of incredible animals ⊗ Big Think’s 5 favorite nonfiction books

The no-human future ⊗ The cult of optimisation

No.409 — The golden age of Bond villains ⊗ Predictions Volume 1 ⊗ GLM-5.2 is a step change ⊗ Earth’s underground fungus network ⊗ Huge collections of Leonardo’s codexes

(One) good AI is here ⊗ Taste as interface behaviour

No.408 — Futures studies as a mosaic 2 ⊗ Digital Colonialism ⊗ How the Squamish built Senakw ⊗ Extreme dynamic symmetry

We may be entering a second Axial Age ⊗ Radical abundance

No.407 — The frame vs. the framer ⊗ The formula won ⊗ Google’s AI Overviews are Google’s own ⊗ World Without End ⊗ It hunts using its shadow

On metanarratives ⊗ Do not resign from life

No.406 — Sensing the third horizon ⊗ The public should own half of the big AI companies ⊗ Cities that lost the economic development plot ⊗ The illuminated windows of NYC

Holding the human line as cyborgs ⊗ A framework for action

No.405 — Big Tech’s anti-labor playbook ⊗ Evidence for the future? ⊗ Māori data sovereignty ⊗ Superhot rock holds the energy of the future ⊗ Britain tries a new solution: beavers

The skeleton library ⊗ Could humans become “Sun-eaters”?

No.404 — Le mal du siècle, bis ⊗ AI Resist List and the Luddite Lab ⊗ Microcosm Industries ⊗ Narrative inheritance ⊗ Books in an age of AI ⊗ The near-term future of climate adaptation ⊗ The Neanderthal dentist

Building a solidarity ecosystem for AI ⊗ Dawn of the electric world order

No.403 — Being harvested by the future ⊗ The impact of AI-generated text ⊗ Paris staged a huge stress test for extreme heat ⊗ Mesmerizing cat-5 super typhoon

Anti-dystopia ⊗ Our horizon of possibilities

No.402 — AI learns language from skewed sources ⊗ We can always do something about the future ⊗ The hidden Sungemite archipelago ⊗ Where Europe’s population is shrinking ⊗ Rogue One: The Andor Cut

Hopkins on the power of imagination ⊗ Feral thought experiments

No.401 — Why are London’s top galleries full of laptops? ⊗ This is how we get moral AI companies ⊗ Space to Breathe ⊗ The zero-days are numbered ⊗ A complete guide to the AMOC ⊗ The GDT Nature Photographer of the Year

Scenario planning for the “jobless future” ⊗ Software brains & statistical engines

No.400 — Extrapolated futures archive ⊗ The dissonance is expanding ⊗ South Korea to spur a renewables revolution ⊗ Eye contact with a humpback whale

Civilizational optionality ⊗ The social edge of intelligence

No.399 — The term “AGI” is almost useless at this point ⊗ Frugal AI ⊗ Design futures in infrastructure ⊗ The AI revolution in math has arrived ⊗ First Indigenous Group to ban data centers from its land ⊗ A macro array of colorful slime molds

A peculiar mixture of omniscience and impotence ⊗ Electrostates & physics

No.398 — A scathing LLM YouTuber ⊗ “We ran a business LARP” ⊗ Making Sense of Slow AI ⊗ Solar power and chili peppers ⊗ Skeleton of Three Musketeers hero d’Artagnan

Geist in the machine ⊗ The prospect of Butlerian Jihad

No.397 — Ending the AI arms race ⊗ Insight and future-fit decisions ⊗ Better AI creative collaborators ⊗ Progressive Paris ⊗ The asteroid ryugu and the building blocks of life

We’re all living in the “Mirror World” now ⊗ The AI boom is a polycrisis

No.396 — Tough week for Zuck ⊗ Learning in Motion ⊗ The people pushing back on AI ⊗ A wind-powered tumbleweed ⊗ Books, plants and playgrounds

Why science fiction can’t predict the future ⊗ The straw, the siphon, and the sieve

No.388 — The Field Guide to Design Futures ⊗ Mozilla recruits partners to take on AI goliaths ⊗ Hamburg combats loneliness with ”culture buddies” ⊗ Art veteran uses Gen Z slang

The mythology of conscious AI ⊗ The discourse is a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack

No.387 — Research as a form of pattern disruption ⊗ 10 things I learned from burning myself out with AI coding agents ⊗ Kim Stanley Robinson, science fiction maestro and utopian ⊗ What our Blue Planet really looks like

The post-American internet ⊗ Scanning the present through a polycrisis lens

No.386 —AI is changing the physics of collective intelligence ⊗ When the future isn’t somewhere else ⊗ Claude in healthcare and the life sciences ⊗ An enzyme that can break down polyurethane ⊗ 7,000-year-old underwater wall

AGI is here (and I feel fine) ⊗ A call for new stories

No.385 — BASAAP + hyperstition ⊗ Ancient everyday weirdness ⊗ The future isn’t fixed ⊗ Science, promise and peril in the age of AI ⊗ A year of clean energy milestones

AI in 2026 and beyond ⊗ Bioregionalism’s tech-driven revival

No.384 —America’s post-apocalyptic maps ⊗ Trying to end the power suck ⊗ Africa’s largest off-grid solar-plus-storage project ⊗ Nerdy joy in 2025

Gramsci’s nightmare ⊗ A small slice of human knowledge

No.383 —The future of rules-based international order ⊗ The Agentic AI Foundation ⊗ Protecting the Ecuadorian Amazon ⊗ Iceland’s flowing textures

Taking jaggedness seriously ⊗ All futurists are archivists

No.382 — Collapse ⊗ Designing responsible futures ⊗ The medical case for self-driving cars ⊗ Mushrooms in recycled egg carton towers ⊗ 100 notable small press books

Writing with probabilistic machines ⊗ What is the right atomic unit for knowledge?

No.381 — Large language mistake ⊗ The world lost the climate gamble ⊗ 2026 Trend File ⊗ Imaginaries of Artificial Intelligence ⊗ A dam removal and a river’s rebirth ⊗ Lo—TEK Water

11 discoveries that changed my worldview ⊗ AI acceleration vs. precaution

No.380 — Decelerationism ⊗ Seeing the unseen ⊗ AI eats the world (again) ⊗ A black fungus healing Chernobyl ⊗ Hidden antibiotic 100x stronger

Investing in the ecosystems that sustain us ⊗ The (Sino-)future is now ⊗ Actually existing solarpunk

No.379 — Future of Trust ⊗ VibeThinker outperforms DeepSeek-R1 ⊗ Silos for Sunshine ⊗ Fleshy underbellies of fungi

The pivot ⊗ We should all be Luddites ⊗ What is civil society, and why should we care?

No.378 — Reimagining the way the world works ⊗ Refusing generative AI in writing studies ⊗ World’s largest Indigenous-led conservation project ⊗ The Mighty Nein

Beyond the machine ⊗ History as science

No.377 — The abundance movement’s blind spot ⊗ New Horizons, Common Ground ⊗ We’re doing AI all wrong ⊗ Peatlands as climate regulator ⊗ Narrative String Theory

AI is fuelling a poverty of imagination ⊗ Why nothing about AI is inevitable

No.376 — Fungi as your Futurist ⊗ Offshoring automation ⊗ Solid state batteries for electric vehicles ⊗ Fast and tiny probes for interstellar travel