How to Read Future Tense
Or: Why This Doesn't Feel Like Regular Tech Commentary
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.
The approach is deliberate. When examining how technology reshapes human behavior, straight reporting often misses what matters most… not what the technology does, but what it’s already doing to us before we notice. By the time everyone agrees something is happening, it’s too late to see it clearly. The pattern is already normal.
So Future Tense writes in what you might call speculative present-tense. Not predicting the future. Describing the present with better lighting.
The Three Registers
Essays here toggle between three modes, sometimes within the same piece:
Documented Present: This is happening now. Amazon requires AI disclosure labels. Algorithmic feeds optimize for engagement. Gene editing costs are dropping exponentially. These are facts, verifiable, sourced when relevant. This is the foundation.
Logical Extrapolation: This isn’t happening yet, but the mechanisms are already in place and the trajectory is visible. When an essay describes “AuthenticityScore dashboards” that don’t exist, it’s not prediction… it’s following existing infrastructure to its logical next iteration. Amazon already has review systems, verified purchase badges, and algorithmic categorization. The authenticity score is just the next checkbox in a pattern that’s already operational.
Satirical Acceleration: Sometimes the clearest way to see a truth is to push it into absurdity and watch it snap back into focus. When tech CEOs claim to be surprised their engagement-maximizing algorithms radicalize teenagers, treating this as deliberate farce reveals more than treating it as sincere confusion. When billionaires discuss Mars colonies as backup plans for Earth, following that logic to its conclusion exposes the nihilism better than polite analysis ever could.
The key to reading Future Tense is recognizing which register you’re in. The essays signal this through time markers (”six months forward”), conditional language (”picture the moment when...”), or tonal shifts into obvious satire. But the lines blur deliberately, because the line between present and near-future is already blurrier than anyone wants to admit.
Why This Works Better Than Straight Reporting
Here’s what conventional tech journalism does well: explaining what happened, describing how systems work, reporting on announcements and policy changes. Here’s what it typically misses: the moment before we notice we’ve normalized something we would have found unacceptable two years ago.
By the time there’s enough evidence to report conventionally on a pattern, that pattern has already become infrastructure. By the time everyone agrees algorithmic feeds are reshaping human attention, your attention has already been reshaped. The story that matters happened earlier… when the shift was happening but not yet legible as a “story” in journalistic terms.
Future Tense operates in that earlier moment. It identifies patterns while they’re still emerging and follows them forward just far enough to make them visible. Not prediction (predictions are fortune telling, and fortune telling is for people who can’t read patterns). Signal detection.
When an essay examines how AI training datasets encode cultural biases, it’s not forecasting some distant future. It’s explaining why certain futures are already being constructed right now and what that means for anyone who’ll inhabit them. The analysis might describe scenarios that don’t exist yet, but they’re built from mechanisms that do. That’s not speculation. That’s engineering logic applied to social systems.
What This Isn’t
This isn’t hot takes pretending urgency justifies sloppiness. It isn’t doomerism that mistakes pessimism for insight. It isn’t tech boosterism that confuses novelty with progress. It isn’t think pieces that identify problems without understanding systems.
It’s also not prediction markets or forecasting. Future Tense doesn’t claim to know what will happen. It claims to see what’s already happening before the consensus narrative catches up. There’s a difference between “this will occur” and “this is already occurring but we haven’t developed the language to describe it yet.”
The essays here don’t tell you what to think. They give you frameworks for seeing patterns you couldn’t see before. Whether you find those patterns alarming or inevitable or both is your business.
The Sourcing Question
When Future Tense describes something that exists, it exists. Amazon’s AI disclosure policy is real. Algorithmic feed optimization is documented. The economics of attention markets are well-established. These aren’t claims requiring faith.
When it describes something that doesn’t exist yet (the authenticity score dashboard, the human touch-up services, the subscription tier that monitors your creative process) those scenarios are built from existing infrastructure and economic incentives. They’re not invented from nowhere. They’re the next logical checkbox in systems that are already operational.
If you’re uncertain whether something described exists or is extrapolation, the uncertainty is probably the point. The interesting zone is where present bleeds into near-future, where what’s already built determines what comes next with enough certainty that the distinction stops mattering.
How to Use This
Read the time-stamped sections (”six months forward,” “twelve months forward”) as thought experiments built from current mechanisms. Read the present-tense analysis as documentation of patterns that are already operational even if not yet widely recognized. Read the satirical sections as diagnostic tools… when something sounds absurd but makes you uncomfortable because it’s plausible, that discomfort is the analysis working.
Most importantly: Future Tense assumes you can distinguish between reporting, extrapolation, and satire without needing each paragraph labeled. The audience here is smart enough to parse rhetorical moves without hand-holding. If that occasionally creates productive ambiguity about where present ends and near-future begins, that’s intentional. Reality doesn’t resolve into clean boundaries, and pretending it does just makes the analysis less useful.
Why This Matters
Technology companies build infrastructure that shapes behavior, then claim surprise when behavior changes. Platform architectures create incentive structures, then treat resulting patterns as emergent rather than designed. Systems get implemented incrementally, each step seeming modest, until you look up and realize you’re living in a world nobody explicitly chose but everyone helped construct through a thousand small acceptances.
Future Tense exists to make those patterns visible before they finish calcifying. Not to stop them (most of this is probably inevitable given existing incentives) but to make sure you see them clearly while there’s still time to decide which version of inevitable you’re willing to inhabit.
The methodology is simple: identify documented mechanisms, follow them to their logical conclusions, describe what you find in whatever register makes it most visible. Sometimes that’s clinical analysis. Sometimes it’s speculative scenario-building. Sometimes it’s satire that reveals what straight analysis would miss.
The goal is always the same: make the pattern impossible to unsee.
Future Tense is a weekly newsletter about the moment technology stops being a tool and starts being a condition of life. Written by A.Z. Mackay from somewhere inside the infrastructure that probably shouldn’t exist but definitely does. Subscribe for weekly essays. Pay for monthly deep analysis and early access to serialized fiction that extrapolates these patterns into 2033 when they’ve metastasized.