Categories
People. Still interesting. Still the problem.
How we live together when the rules are rewritten by software nobody voted for.
9 stories
A policy sketch by a small-state competitiveness unit imagines residency sold in tiers, with an annual discount. The document contains a pricing table and, near the end, a footnote about belonging.
A feature concept being pitched to residential building operators would let households score one another after shared interactions. The proposal includes an appeals process, which its authors describe as the difficult part.
A municipal feasibility study imagines quiet delivered to the home like water, with a meter, a tariff and an off-peak rate. The cheapest silence would be available between two and four in the morning.
A justice ministry draft would move low-value civil claims entirely into a document-handling system. The projected median decision time is forty-one minutes, there would be no hearing, and there would be exactly one ground of appeal.
A draft practical guide for machine-assisted preaching would give the sermon a version number, a source list and a human review checkbox. The congregation would see, on the projector, which paragraph the minister rewrote.
A draft inside a national registry office would make posthumous avatars a matter of recorded consent. Anyone who never filed a declaration would count as available, and families could apply for "silent" status — renewable once a year.
A district would publish the formula behind its school placement algorithm, in the belief that transparency would end the annual round of complaints. The formula has three terms. The third one is the problem.
A draft university regulation would stop treating a submitted text as evidence of anything on its own. Every essay would be followed by an eight-minute defence. This is what one of those eight minutes would look like.
A school operator's pilot proposal would replace the register with corridor sensors and the wireless network. Seen from the third row, the issue is not privacy. It is the ten minutes when nobody knows where you are.
MISTAKE
One email a week. The future, before it files a press release.
Worst case: you laugh. Best case: we predicted the future.