The future doesn’t arrive all at once. It leaks.
A new app changes how we talk to each other. An algorithm starts choosing what we want before we know we want it. A breakthrough in longevity research makes death feel negotiable. By the time these shifts hit the headlines, they’ve already rewired something fundamental in us.
Future Tense is where I track those leaks — the moment technology stops being a tool and starts being a condition of life.
What This Is
Every week, you get an essay on patterns most people won’t see for another six months.
How AI is restructuring status and desire. Why space colonization talk is really Earth nihilism in a spacesuit. What happens when gene editing makes “natural” feel like a choice we’re opting out of. The hidden psychology of algorithmic culture. The economics of manufactured scarcity, attention, and belief.
This isn’t tech journalism. It’s pattern recognition from someone who spent decades building the systems and started asking the wrong questions.
Three Years In
Since 2023, Future Tense has been tracking the patterns that eventually become headlines. Readers have watched the analysis arrive months before the news cycle catches up — on AI’s cultural rewiring, on algorithmic governance, on the quiet shifts in how we relate to work, identity, and each other.
The archive now holds 100+ essays and a growing body of serialized fiction. The readership includes strategists, researchers, founders, writers, and people who just think about things more than is strictly healthy.
How to Read Future Tense
Future Tense writes about technology using a method that probably needs explaining, since it falls somewhere between analysis and fiction in ways that make conventional categories uncomfortable.
Who Gets What
Free subscribers:
Weekly essays every Wednesday (ish)
Paid subscribers:
Everything above, plus:
Monthly Deep Briefings — extended analysis connecting emerging tech to shifts in culture, power, and psychology
Full archive — essays on AI aesthetics, algorithmic psychology, and digital culture
Member discussions
Founding members:
Everything above
Locked-in rate that never increases
Direct access for pattern-sharing and questions
Who’s Writing This
I’m A.Z. Mackay. I’ve spent decades in tech, watching engineers build systems that would quietly reshape human behavior. I started Future Tense because the most important story isn’t what the technology does — it’s what it does to us.
This newsletter is where the analysis becomes fiction, and the fiction becomes prophecy.
I’m not here to explain how the tech works. I’m here to decode what it’s doing to us.
Fair Warning
I’m not interested in:
Breathless AI hype
Simplistic doomerism
“10 ways tech will change your life” listicles
Pretending technology is neutral
I write about humans. The tech is just what reveals us.
If you want someone to tell you everything’s going to be fine, this isn’t it. If you want someone to tell you everything’s going to collapse, this also isn’t it.
I write about what’s actually happening — which is usually weirder and more interesting than either story.
The future isn’t coming — it’s already running in production.
