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.
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
Occasional field notes and observations
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 — argue with 2,500+ people who see the patterns too
Founding members ($200/year, limited availability):
Everything above
The satisfaction of funding independent writing before it was replaced by AI
Who This Is For
You work somewhere near the edge — tech, media, strategy, culture, research. You have the creeping sense that something fundamental is shifting, but the breathless hype pieces and reflex doomerism both miss it.
You want to be the person in the room who saw it coming.
You’re tired of tech coverage that treats technology like it’s separate from us, when really it’s a mirror showing us who we’re becoming.
You read 2,500-word+ essays for fun. You think about things. You’re not here for hot takes.
Who’s Writing This
I’m A.Z. Mackay. I’ve spent 30 years working 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.
What I’m Actually Doing
Here’s the truth: I want to write full-time. Fiction. Essays. The kind of work that requires undivided attention and doesn’t fit inside anyone else’s priorities.
But that requires building something sustainable first.
The math is simple: I need 1,000 paying subscribers to make full-time writing viable.
Right now, there are 2,500 of you reading for free. If 200 of you become founding members in the next 90 days, I’m halfway there.
This isn’t charity. You’re getting:
Analysis six months ahead of the conversation
A front-row seat to watching someone build the writer’s life everyone says is impossible in 2025
Founding member rate: $200/year (goes to $240/year when the founding period closes). Lock it in now before I raise prices.
The faster this grows, the faster I can focus entirely on this work. That’s the bet: if enough people think this matters, I can make it my entire focus. If not, this stays a side project that competes with everything else.
I’d rather find out.
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 Bet I’m Making
The best ideas don’t wait for permission. The most interesting work happens outside institutions. And there are enough people who care about thinking clearly that you can build something real.
If you’re one of them, this is for you.
The future isn’t coming — it’s already running in production.
Join 2,500+ readers who are one pattern ahead.
