A few seats are left to join me Wednesday February 4th at 10:00 (UTC-8) for this session of General Seminar where we explore how to use Design Fiction approaches to help strategy sense into possibilities.

Much like the Design Fiction Dispatch above, we'll be exploring how to use speculative artifacts to help organizations think through the implications of emerging technologies. This time, we'll be focusing on AI as ambient infrastructure and how that shapes organizational strategy.

If you get the sense that strategy work could use a bit more imagination, this session is for you.

Consider this approach an antidote to the often dry, overly-analytical strategy sessions that leave participants uninspired and disconnected from the future possibilities they are meant to be preparing for.

PROMPT “AI is now ambient in the future or your organization. It’s as normal as butter on toast. It’s in planning, research, marcoms, product, analytics, hiring, and customer interactions. Nobody debates ‘should we use AI’ anymore. The question is: what kind of organization did that create?”

ACTIVITY Time For Some Strategy Futures Archeology: you can’t interview the future, you can only come back with evidence (labels, receipts, notices, quick-start guides, stickers, junk mail...fragments like this) that implies this ambient AI world.

STRUCTURE YOUR STRATEGIC FICTIONAL ARTIFACT — Bring something back from this world. Something that will help you and your organization think about the future you want to inhabit, rather than the future you feel rushed to implement. How do you avoid the pitfalls of thinking of AI as just a screwdriver rather than as a world-building contrivance?

Psst — General Seminar is the platform I created to use Design Fiction approaches to explore and discuss emerging societal-implicating technologies. It‘s got 4.8 stars according to the average of everyone who has attended over the last 6 Seasons!

Hi! Welcome. Thanks for reading. In case you're new here and wondering -- I'm Julian Bleecker. I help leaders and strategy teams navigate uncertainty through strategic prototyping -- working backward from plausible near futures to make today's choices clearer.

I use an approach I pioneered called Design Fiction. You see some of it here in the newsletter and definitely over on my site over at Near Future Laboratory.

I create tangible artifacts and narrative experiences that turn abstract foresight into concrete strategic options, alignment, and action. My practice spans engineering (BSEE, MSEng/HCI) and the social sciences/humanities (PhD), so the work holds up technically and lands with cultural relevance and it's grounded and tangible.

Near Future Laboratory can bring decades of experience, expertise, and an extensive network of similarly talented professionals -- and I'm available for commissions, facilitated workshops, seminars, talks, embedded engagements, and leadership roles.

An argument for designing platforms that foster connection rather than isolation — a short manifesto urging builders to prioritize resonance over attention extraction and to center social technology on shared flourishing.

Thirty-three designers renew the First Things First Manifesto, urging a shift away from consumer-driven design toward projects that prioritize social, cultural, and environmental impact over profit.

Forget sweeping digital overhauls—small, custom-made tools built with generative AI are quietly solving real problems without upending workflows. These "boring tiny tools" are practical, precise, and designed to solve a single problem for a single team.

Bruce Sterling's short story about the Winkler — a roaming, art-making wheelchair — and the strange human cultures that gather around it. A posthuman fable with humor, tragedy, and some pretty relevant and topical questions about agency and creativity.

Small apps that help Danish consumers avoid American products have rocketed up local app charts — a neat example of how mobile tools become rapid instruments of political and consumer expression.

CreepyLink intentionally makes shortened URLs look sketchy — a playful, ad-free tool for pranks and inside jokes, run on donations with a simple reporting flow for problems.

Published CVE entry for CVE-2026-0855 — a security advisory listing affected products, severity, and suggested mitigations. Check the advisory for details relevant to your environment.

Benj Edwards' first-person account of experimenting with AI coding agents — the productivity highs, the creative acceleration, and the unexpected burnout that followed. Useful reading for anyone adopting agentic workflows.

Previously, in Office Hours..

1) A big theme was “own your stack”: use AI coding agents to stand up a VPS and migrate off SaaS tools (bookmarks, notes, mail, etc.) toward self-hosted equivalents like the Awesome Self-Hosted list (catalog of self-hostable apps).

2) Related: build “Squarespace vibes, but you control it” publishing workflows with Astro (content-driven web framework)—static output, simple deploys, and less platform rent-seeking.

3) On that data-security thread: if you must collect names/emails, treat it like sensitive infrastructure so..minimize what you store, and prefer privacy-first services like Proton Mail (encrypted email) over casual spreadsheet vibes.

4) A privacy tangent surfaced Don’t Track Us (privacy tool directory) as a handy resource for finding privacy-respecting alternatives to common web services.

5) Counterpoint: sometimes query strings are the whole point (they encode state for playful web toys), so the real skill is learning when “?” is surveillance versus when it’s the mechanism of the experience.

6) The “make the internet small again” conversation got anchored by After the Internet (MIT Press page) and the First Things First Manifesto 2000 (Eye Magazine) as a pair of prompts: stop optimizing for platforms, start optimizing for meaning and autonomy.

7) There was a nerdy preservation swerve into reviving classic Flash-era web art from YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES PRESENTS (official site), using Internet Archive (web + media archive) as the retrieval layer for old SWFs and related artifacts.

8) A craft tangent turned into a real workflow: use Calligraphr (handwriting-to-font tool) templates to capture brush/pen lettering, then build a personal typeface that can travel across projects without losing the hand-made character.

9) Planning chatter surfaced a June Denver “compound” style gathering with a letterpress/typesetting sprint—making printing less “precious object” and more “daily practice,” including ideas for using cameras/sensors to track and document the physical composition process.

10) Two writing-structure tricks landed: number every paragraph/line (Bible / code style) so the text becomes referenceable and remixable, and build a living glossary where key terms link to your definitions so you don’t inherit funder jargon by accident.

11) Denver culture notes: a fundraising push was mentioned around screening BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (official film site), with the local anchor point being MCA Denver (Museum of Contemporary Art Denver) as the likely venue/home base.