About MISTAKE

MISTAKE publishes satire about the future. Every story describes something that has not happened, set in a year that has not arrived, and written in the flat, confident register of a news report. The form is borrowed from journalism. The content is invented on purpose. Nothing here is a claim about the present, and nothing here should be read as one.

We are closer to a magazine than to a joke feed. Stories are researched before they are written, the trend underneath each one is named openly, and the humour is the delivery rather than the point. If a piece makes you check the date twice, it is doing its job. If it makes you go and check the news, better still.

Technology moves faster than human intuition can track. We are good at extrapolating in straight lines and bad at noticing when a curve has already bent. By the time a shift is obvious enough to report as news, most of the interesting decisions about it have quietly been made by somebody else, somewhere else, for reasons nobody put to a vote.

So we write the story early, while it still sounds ridiculous. A scenario that seems absurd today is a cheap way to think about something expensive tomorrow. Fiction costs nothing to be wrong about. Being wrong in public, years ahead of time, is a fair price to pay for occasionally being early.

MISTAKE never presents an invented event as a real one. Every story is framed as a scenario, dated forward, and paired with a block called Reality Behind the Joke, which names the actual trend and the real reporting the scenario was built from. The invention and the evidence sit on the same page, clearly separated from each other.

That block is not a disclaimer bolted on at the end. It is the reason the rest of the piece is worth reading. Satire that cannot show its working is just noise with a layout. If the real trend underneath a story is too thin to state plainly in a sentence, then the story does not run at all.

For people who read technology coverage and feel that the sober version is somehow missing the scale of it. For anyone who has watched a punchline from five years ago turn up in a product announcement. You do not need to work in the industry, and you do not need to be worried about it either. Curiosity is enough.

MISTAKE publishes in English and Hungarian, in parallel rather than in translation. Both versions are edited to read as though they were written first, with their own rhythm and their own references. The jokes travel differently in each language, which is usually the most interesting part of the whole process.