Archive of Possible Futures

Bostjan examines how AI and imagination can transform humanity’s connection to the Earth and the futures we aspire to create.

SpaceX IPO, Part 4: The Drain

SpaceX lists on June 12. But in the three weeks since the roadshow was announced, Bitcoin dropped 22%, Ethereum dropped 32%, crypto markets lost $440 billion, and the Nasdaq had its worst day in a year. This is not coincidence — it’s capital rotation at historic scale. We map the full bill: who paid it,…

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SpaceX IPO, Part 3: The 10x Problem

SpaceX lists on June 12. But in the three weeks since the roadshow was announced, Bitcoin dropped 22%, Ethereum dropped 32%, crypto markets lost $440 billion, and the Nasdaq had its worst day in a year. This is not coincidence — it’s capital rotation at historic scale. We map the full bill: who paid it,…

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SpaceX IPO, Part 2: The Bill Nobody Sees

SpaceX is raising $75 billion in the largest IPO in history. We tracked where that money is actually coming from — and the true cost to global markets is closer to $500 billion, paid invisibly by millions of ordinary investors in crypto and tech stocks who never got a roadshow deck.

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Nobody Cares About Your Chatbot

Code is cheap now. Building something that would have taken a year and $500K in 2019 takes a weekend and $200 in API credits. That’s genuinely exciting — and it’s producing a lot of chatbots nobody asked for. The problem isn’t the technology. The problem is that cheap code has never solved distribution. We keep confusing…

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The Magical Typewriter

I recently discovered that one of my most valuable AI workflows is completely impossible to automate. Not technically — the API exists, the model is the same, the endpoint is right there. Just functionally, utterly impossible. I’d been working with ChatGPT on rewriting a specific type of text. The results were excellent — exactly my…

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The New Wonders of the World

The five largest tech companies will spend roughly $690 billion on AI infrastructure this year. That number is so large it stops meaning anything. So let’s try to make it mean something. The Large Hadron Collider cost about $9 billion to build. That’s the most ambitious pure-science project in human history — 27 kilometers of…

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The Pope Read the Room

Two weeks ago, the Vatican published the most interesting AI ethics document of the year — and almost nobody in tech noticed. Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is 42,000 words long, heavy on scripture, and absolutely worth your time. At minimum, read the first few paragraphs yourself. Then send the rest to your…

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The Algorithm That Owns You

There is something ancient in the way we distrust hidden motives. Long before we had language for manipulation or propaganda, we could sense when someone wanted something from us that they weren’t willing to name. This instinct hasn’t gone anywhere. If anything, it has migrated — and today, it quietly shapes how many of us…

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Why We Write (When We Don’t Really Write)

One hundred days ago I started a blogging experiment. For the first sixty I wrote almost daily. For the last forty I wrote nothing. This is also ten years since I last wrote anything at all, so the sample is contaminated by every possible variable. Here’s what I think I learned anyway. The Distribution Reality…

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The Last Attention Grab

Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants tells the same story on repeat across two hundred years: a new medium emerges, finds a pocket of human time that nobody had thought to monetize yet, and sells it to advertisers. Newspapers colonized the morning. Radio took the commute. Television claimed the evening. The internet got the office hours. Social media…

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Shorting the OpenAI ad bet

Six weeks. That’s how long it took OpenAI’s nascent ad business to cross $100 million in annualised revenue after launching inside ChatGPT. The entry price: $60 CPM, with a $200,000 minimum buy. Higher than most premium display inventory. Higher than YouTube. Priced, in other words, like a statement. Whether that statement holds is the most…

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KEY FUTURES

For ecological imagination and planetary stewardship.

For short reflections, emerging ideas, and cultural pulses.