Technology, followed to its human consequences.
Future Tense watches technology leave the stage, enter the furniture of ordinary life and begin moving the chairs.
About once a month, I begin with something you could put on a table or in a court filing: a product, a failure, a scientific result, a rule, a corporate process or a piece of observed behaviour. I follow it through the walls and into the likely changes in power, status, work, intimacy, agency or shared reality.
The result is a long-form narrative investigation: the sort of thing that might occupy a chapter of a book, acquire a tasteful price sticker and spend three years judging you from a bedside table. I keep researching until the evidence, strongest objection and likely human consequences have received more than a hurried pat on the head.
I have spent nearly three decades around safety-critical and consequential technology. It taught me to admire what engineering can do and to watch the surrounding social machinery with the suspicion normally reserved for a damp plug socket.
The thesis beneath much of my work is simple:
Advanced technology fails socially before it fails technically.
This leaves plenty of room to like technology. Sometimes the machine works, the institution behaves sensibly and the future deserves applause. The interesting questions are who receives the benefit, who absorbs the uncertainty and which choice becomes ‘inevitable’ five minutes after somebody has made it.
Science fiction is prior art
I am interested in fiction whose social pressure could become real: rules and institutions, technological satire, bureaucratic cosmoses, competence, mediated reality, ethical optimism, manufactured belief, enhancement and desire.
Gadget prediction is the least interesting trick. I want to know what the story understood about people, and what it missed about the price, policy, procurement decision or irresistible convenience that would carry its future through the front door.
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Founding members receive the same publication and contribute more towards the independent time required to make it. The secret council has mercifully failed to materialise. This is probably safer for everyone.
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Future Tense is independently written, and its editorial judgement belongs to me. Relevant public conflicts are disclosed. Private access supplies no invisible authority.
If this sounds like the way you want to read technology, begin with how the publication works.
