Near Future Laboratory Newsletter

Date: May 18, 2025

Summary: The future is coming in 24-hour increments, and it's difficult to keep up with the latest advancements in AI and generative visual storytelling. Nominalism may be ascendant as a way of comprehending the existential implications of these changes.

Essentially: Design Fiction Dispatch is exploring the concept of local models and their relationship with traditional large language models, which may have biases towards the interests of their owners. The newsletter is also diving into the world of design fiction, where artists and designers are using speculative thinking to imagine potential futures.

But why? This email is important because it highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of epistemologies and knowledge bases. As technology advances, it's crucial to consider the implications of local models and how they might shape our understanding of common sense. By exploring design fiction, we can gain a deeper understanding of the complex relationships between technology, society, and individual experiences.

If you're going to mess around with speculative futuring, please do so with a sense of a kind of solomn responsibility. That doesn't mean you can't have fun, or be a bit quirky. But when you get a bit close to imagining kinetic armed conflict between two nations that have a long history of a somewhat symbiotic relationship, that's not really reading the room very well.
Futuring, speculating, imagining into bloody conflict does not help the present state of things.
Read more in my post The trouble with staying with the trouble when the future is in trouble (or..How to avoid over-imagining into a dystopian future).

Another Design Fiction Dispatch

“Tomorrow's News Today!”

For Sale: Heirloom Language Models

Another design fiction dispatch!

There seems to be a lot of interest in the idea of local models, and the idea of having a model that is trained on your own data or the data of your community. Particularly as the corporate foundation models make it increasingly apparent that they will always have a bias, likely towards the interests of their owners, whether that be a corporation or a government. The idea of having a model that is trained on your own data or the data of your community is appealing, and it raises questions about what it means to have a model that is truly representative of your own experiences and knowledge. This is particularly relevant in the context of the recent discussions around the biases present in large language models and the need more nominalist appreciations for what training data is and becomes. Like Grok going crazy every so often and slipping its moorings and going off on South Africa and white genocide, or Claude doing its Golden Gate Bridge thing.
But what does this mean in the context of, you know — bedrock knowledge? What happens with the notion of 'common sense' when epistemologies are derived from a range or even infinity of knowledge bases? What happens when the knoweldge base is not a single, monolithic entity but a collection of potentially conflicting perspectives?
Nominalism, a core principle in discussion with the Oraculator Working Group here in the studio, may be ascendant as a way of comprehending wtf is going on/will become of us.

A Classified Ad From The Future! ⇒

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Or — check out all the books on my shop — like TBD Catalog, which is full of deisgn fiction dispatches. All are independently published. That means that they were written, designed, conceptualized right here. No Amazon! No big (or small) publishers!

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Seen in the Discord

Policy Wonking the Future ➜

(⁠🚀-design-fiction⁠) via @Jaymo

Not *quite Design Fiction, but Nik Sunil Williams, from Index on Censorship has started using fan fiction as a starting point for 'policy wonking'

Speculative entanglement ➜

(⁠🚀-design-fiction⁠) via @Julian

Grounded in the philosophical framework of Entanglement HCI, this paper introduces speculative entanglement, a practical methodology for technology speculation. This approach involves an iterative interplay between designers and technology practitioners, moving from real-world technological development to fictional representation (the design phase) and back to practical application (the use phase).

TADAM launches Media Edukathon in Athens ➜

(⁠🚀-design-fiction⁠) via @Julian

Take part in the TADAM Media Edukathon to be held in Athens from 3 to 5 September 2025 and help design creative and impactful media education activities that address how AI changes the way we access, process, and share information.

Generative Visual Storytelling

Moving very, very fast.

It's hardly 24 hours before some new workflow or model — offline, running locally — has evolved in the 'cinematic' space. As soon as go to the mats with the renderstation doing a bit of inevitable jiujitsu to get things configured to try some contorted workflow, something new comes along.
I know this can be 'triggering' for some; I get it. I truly do. There is at the same time something too curious here to simply get angry about, or to simply avoid.
That sample up there is from a new (I guess it still counts as new a few days after it dropped). The model card indicates it will run on a Macbook M2 with 16gb but also on the 4090. Which is just kind of nuts in the same way publishing on a desktop may have seemed nuts.
Decades ago, the newspaper my dad ran had that one guy, long hair, bell bottoms, a moustache sat at a table with Letraset and did paste-ups, which were literally pasting things up. I wonder what the world felt like when they went digital. I can vaguely remember visiting the newspaper. Was he curious? Peeved? Bewildered with wonderment? Resigned?
Are you curious to prototype, speculate, do some artifact creation?