Johannes Kleske
@jkleske.bsky.social
Helping people make sense of futures, johanneskleske.com
The permanent underclass is a future narrative that primes expectations, and those primed expectations perform political work in the present. Here's my research about it: garden.johanneskleske.com/permanent-u...
Permanent Underclass
How a shitpost about podcasts became Silicon Valley's expectation of a coming caste system. The sixty-year history of the word, the thin evidence beneath the...
garden.johanneskleske.com
the case against the anthropomorphizing language that makes it harder to have clear discussions of what so-called "AI" technologies actually do, and when and whether to use them buttondown.com/maiht3k/arc...
How to talk about "AI" without adding to the anthropomorphization
Emily M. Bender and Nanna Inie In our op-ed for Tech Policy Press ("We Need to Talk About How We Talk About 'AI'"), we made the case against the...
buttondown.com
I'm fascinated by the shift from the Californian ideology to the Texan ideology among the tech elites. So I put together a primer in my digital garden to explore it. garden.johanneskleske.com/from-the-ca...
From the Californian Ideology to the Texan Ideology
Californian Ideology vs. Texan Ideology: the networking era's myth gave way to the extraction era's. What Fred Turner's term means and what differs.
garden.johanneskleske.com
“Europe 2031 uses science fiction and gripping prose to promote a policy agenda that is defeatist, dystopian, and anti-democratic. While the diagnosis might be compelling, the cure is likely to be worse than the disease.” maxvonthun.substack.com/p/what-euro...
What Europe 2031 gets wrong
A viral new essay is full of vivid warnings about Europe's tech dependencies. But its proposals would only make the problem far worse.
maxvonthun.substack.com
@reckless.bsky.social I think, this is the missing piece for your conversation with Jill Lepore: thebaffler.com/salvos/the-t...
The Texan Ideology | Fred Turner
CEOs like Musk who are moving their company headquarters from California to Texas are doing so in part to flee the inequality that their industries have produced.
thebaffler.com
“The future isn’t a chrome facade. It is messier, more complex, always dependent on the diverse, local life inhabiting it now. Our task is to stop being background characters in someone else’s spec script, and start writing – and building – our own.” aeon.co/essays/sili...
“When Thiel, Musk, Zuckerberg and Andreessen mine science fiction for blueprints, they are not finding the only possible futures. They are selecting the futures that justify their power.” aeon.co/essays/sili...
“200 economists agree that we sure ought to have some more research by economists” davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/on-the-st...
On the strategic function of anodyne statements
200 economists agree that we sure ought to have some more research by economists
davekarpf.beehiiv.com
I am a simple man. When Meghan O‘Gieblyn writes, I read. harpers.org/archive/202...
Backsliding, by Meghan O’Gieblyn
On the paradox of willpower
harpers.org
The Body Keeps the Score – If you haven’t engaged with the criticism of the book, may I recommend this episode of If Books Could Kill? pod.link/1651876897/...
The Body Keeps The Score
Listen to The Body Keeps The Score from If Books Could Kill wherever you get your podcasts!
pod.link
“Because “more” is the most socially acceptable way to avoid a decision.” – Beautiful piece by Jakob Flingelli. www.flingelli.com/articles/20...
The problem with my perfectly reasonable life — Jakob Flingelli
A personal essay on The Pathless Path, family timing, work, enough, and the strange problem of living a perfectly reasonable life that has started to feel too small.
flingelli.com
If you haven’t read this one yet, do it. And then look at the comments for even more reflective insights. fugitivemargins.substack.com/p/the-end-o...
We talk about “the AI race” as if it were a description of the world. It isn't. It's a 100-year-old metaphor with a hidden bet, and the runner in the next lane was never actually running.
“Many critical insights about a prototype system will only emerge in the context of a serious creative problem that’s not about the system itself.” – Andy Matuschak Don’t tell the Claude-Code-Influencers …
"To him a thinking man’s job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect. It was not an easy job." – Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
“Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.” – William Gibson, Neuromancer
With all the hand-wringing about cognitive surrender and brain fry caused by our new tools, I'm sure McLuhan would be having a field day right now.
The darkest futures are not the ones where things fall apart. They are the ones where everyone decided in advance that falling apart was inevitable and acted accordingly. futureslens.substack.com/p/doomscrol...
Dear people at Anthropic, That was one hell of a first quarter of 2026. You've all been cooking and taking this AI thing to the next level. I've been consistently impressed and excited by the progress you've made. You should be proud of yourselves!
A dominant metaphor for the future right now is the storm. Disruption as weather. Technology as a force of nature. The only reasonable response: readiness. Sounds intuitive. But the metaphor is doing real work.
I’m back at it, and it feels good. A month ago, I revived my newsletter, The Futures Lens. I’ve been procrastinating it for at least a year. Can’t believe it took that Shumer essay to get me back into the rhythm. futureslens.substack.com/
“Companies don’t need an AI strategy. They need a strategy for the conditions that AI creates.” – Sangeet Paul Choudary, Reshuffle
“The more a system is in malaise, the more tempting it becomes to invoke the future.” – Jonathan White, In the Long Run
“AI models, constantly trained on organizational knowledge, enable different parts of the organization to coordinate around the same shared understanding.”
Learning from a weather app how to deal with uncertain futures acmeweather.com/blog/introd...
Acme Weather
acmeweather.com
“The reality is that grinding kills creativity and big-picture thinking, even if it temporarily increases output.” – Cate Hall, How to Be More Agentic
In 1922, the sociologist William Ogburn described how culture lags behind technology. With AI, the pattern inverted. I've started calling it “Cultural Lead”: culture got there first: futureslens.substack.com/p/cultural-...
“Minds aren’t read. See, you’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print-literate. I can access your memory, but that’s not the same as your mind.” – William Gibson, Neuromancer
