Contributed By: Julian Bleecker
Post Reference Date: May 13, 2025, 06:49:55 PDT
Published On: May 13, 2025, 06:49:55 PDT
Updated On: May 13, 2025, 06:49:55 PDT
Yesterday was the first session of General Seminar Season 06, Episode 05. Good fun. Great group! Great feedback!
“Julian is the consummate host and it was fun to be able to meet other business creatives to concept and kick around futuristic concepts and imagine and create artifacts from the near future.”
~ T. Moning
“Julian hosts fascinating people and prompts expansive discussion. Do not miss!”
“In addition to Julian’s thoughtful setup and framing, what’s different about these seminars is the other participants. When you decide to get into the janky time machine, you definitely want these folks traveling with you. People full of ideas. People who can MacGyver their way out any sticky situation.”
“I was expecting more of a lecture or a TED talk, but this seminar truly lived up to its name and felt as though it was a meeting of the open-minded. It was an incredible concept of how to look at imagination and creation, as well as how to incite it in the workplace and industries. I am glad I attended and highly recommend it!”
▶There might still be tickets for the next session, May 14th at 0900!◀
Really deeply engaged in the approach and the topic of a world in which digital twins and other kinds of agentic AI are part of the fabric of our lives.
There were several compelling artifacts that came up in seminar, a few of which I quickly sketched out — like this one, Faraday’s Cage: A Bar and Grill.
Do you dig this kind of worldbuilding? Join us in General Seminar!
We do this kind of work all the time.
We make artifacts and diegetic prototypes to help us explore the implications of things like agentic AI and digital twins in our lives.
The value of doing this kind of work is to venture into these new and unfamiliar territories with a sense of both playfulness and practicality. These are the kinds of approaches and explorations and activities can lead to new weird artifacts, unexpected but curious cultural idioms, insights into trends, peculiar-but-generative prototypes, newish concept development, and even new models for value creation (a/k/a/ the future of commercial stuff).
And Plenty of Booze.
Faraday’s Pub was on the verge of closing down when the owner’s nephew Edgar, had an idea: why not turn it into an old fashioned bar and grill with a twist — a joint where people actually meet other people without the aid of their digital twins or the latest in-earpod from Heathkit or Fairchild Facsimile assessing and analyizing what their would-be date is saying.
Skeptical, but with nothing to lose, the owner, who goes by ‘Pinky’ (this reporter could not determine if Pinky was a Faraday — or even who or what was the neighborhood pub’s namesake), decided to give it a shot.
“We were two weeks away from completely shutting down. I was basically done. I had tickets for Cabo, that’s how done. There was nothing to lose,” said Pinky. “I thought, what the hell, let’s give it a shot..I told Edgar, ‘sure why not?’”
I am continuing to find ways to represent the work we do here, and what happens in General Seminar — and to emphasize the inherent value of this way of conceptualizing and prototyping the future. These concepts and artifacts are not just for show, but are part of a larger conversation about the future of technology and society. They are a way to explore the implications of agentic AI and digital twins in our lives. The value of doing this kind of work is to venture into these new and unfamiliar territories with a sense of both playfulness and practicality. The actions and activities can lead to new insights, prototypes, concept development, and even new business models.
The value of doing these kinds of diegetic prototypes and design fiction artifacts is to do the work of venturing into these new and unfamiliar territories with a sense of both playfulness and practicality. The actions and activities can lead to new insights, prototypes, concept development, and even new business models. These new territories need sense-making and exploration to augment the free-wheeling bluster of the venture-oriented venturing into possibilities and futures. Along with the creation effects of venture capital, it is helpful to explore the territory through these kinds of artifacts and diegetic prototypes to help add some kind of semantics and meaning and language to help us inhabit these new territories.