The Future is Yesterday

The future is yesterday.

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

I thought of the name a couple of years ago.

Bought the domain. Sat on it. Did nothing with it. Every so often I'd say it to someone: "The future is yesterday."

Some people just got it. Others would look at me and ask, "What does that mean?"

Fair question. I wasn't sure I could explain it succinctly. I could feel what I meant, but every explanation seemed to make it smaller. A clever way to say technology moves fast. Another AI newsletter. Something about disruption.

None of that quite gets there.

The distance is disappearing.

The future used to give you some warning.

You'd see an idea in a film, read about an experiment, hear someone describe a thing that might eventually be possible. There was distance between imagining it and having to deal with it. Enough distance to get used to the idea. Or to decide it probably wouldn't happen.

Now I keep encountering things I still have filed under "one day" that someone else has already built, released, used, and moved on from.

I don't mean I've suddenly discovered that progress happens. I mean the feeling has changed. What was supposed to happen later keeps turning up already finished.

By the time I work out what I think about one thing, the conversation has moved somewhere else. Sometimes I haven't even worked out what the thing is.

The future... is yesterday.

That's as close as I've got.

And yes, sometimes you're yesterday.

Occasionally, when someone asks me what the name means, the uncharitable part of my brain answers: "It might mean you're yesterday."

Which is a satisfying thought until I remember how often I'm the person catching up.

We all have an old picture of the world somewhere in our heads. A picture of what work requires. What creativity means. What a machine can do. We make decisions using that picture long after parts of it have stopped being accurate.

That interests me more than the release announcements.

When does a new capability become real to you? The first time you hear about it? The first time you use it? Or the first time it changes something you cared about?

You can know a thing exists and still behave as though it doesn't.

I suspect we're doing that more than we realize.

We're trying to understand a world we've already started living in.

So, this is a place to pay attention.

AI is the obvious place to start. It reaches into so many things at once: how we make things, learn things, earn a living, recognize each other's work. Following it can feel like following several different futures arguing over the same present.

But I don't want this to become a race to repeat the latest announcement.

I want to look at what happens around the technology. What people actually do with it. What becomes easier. What gets stranger. What we gain, what we give away without noticing, and which old assumptions deserve another look.

There will be tools here. Experiments. Essays. Eventually, conversations you can listen to. Some of it will be enthusiastic. Some of it will be skeptical. I'll change my mind about things.

I also want to make things with these tools. The artwork on this site is part of that. If we're going to talk about what's possible, we should be willing to find out.

We can take a minute.

There is something faintly ridiculous about starting a publication concerned with speed after sitting on the domain for two years.

But perhaps that's the point. I didn't need another way to watch everything rush past. I needed somewhere to stop and look at it.

That's what I'm building here.

If you've had this feeling too, you're in the right place. If the name still makes no sense, stick around. I might find a better way to explain it.

In the meantime... welcome to The Future is Yesterday.

When everything can be made, what is worth making?

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

There is a particular pleasure in making something that didn't exist a moment ago. A sentence. A picture. A small piece of software that does one useful thing. For most of us, that pleasure used to come with quite a bit of friction.

You had to learn the tool. Find the material. Get past the disappointing first version. The distance between an idea and its expression could be enough to make the idea disappear.

Generative tools can shorten that distance. That's a gift. It is also a new kind of problem.

When you can ask for another version, then another, then fifty more, the question quietly changes. It stops being whether you can produce something and starts being whether you recognize a reason to stop.

Abundance doesn't remove the need for taste. It gives taste more work to do.

Taste is often treated as a mysterious possession. Some people have it. Some people don't. But it may be more useful to think of taste as a practice of attention: noticing what matters, developing a point of view, and being able to say why one choice serves an idea better than another.

A machine can help you explore possibilities. The work of deciding what the possibilities are for remains yours.

That is why the most interesting uses of these tools may look surprisingly deliberate. A small palette. A recurring visual language. A constraint that makes the work recognizable. An editor willing to remove the beautiful thing that doesn't belong.

The temptation is to demonstrate how much you can make. The opportunity is to become clearer about what you want to say.

Make a lot, if it helps you think. Keep very little, if that helps someone else see.

The machine is listening. Are we?

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Open a conversation with a machine and you are immediately confronted with a very human problem: explaining what you mean.

The first request is usually an approximation. Make this better. Help me think. Tell me what I'm missing. The reply comes back, and suddenly you can see all the things you forgot to say.

You wanted it shorter, but not less thoughtful. More surprising, but still familiar. More like you, although you hadn't quite worked out what that sounded like.

There is something revealing about the corrections.

They describe the distance between an intention and an instruction. That distance exists in every collaboration. A colleague, a designer, a friend: each has had to work with the gap between what we said and what we thought we said.

Sometimes the most useful thing a machine can return is a clearer picture of your own question.

Fluent replies can make this process feel easier than it is. A confident paragraph is inviting. It has a rhythm. It offers an ending. But the sensation of being understood is different from the work of checking whether understanding happened.

So perhaps a useful habit is to slow down at precisely the moment the conversation becomes comfortable. Ask what assumption carried the answer. Ask what would make it wrong. Notice when a response flatters your framing instead of examining it.

These aren't special skills for talking to artificial intelligence. They are good habits for thinking with anyone.

The machine can keep talking indefinitely. The interesting question is whether the conversation is helping you notice something you couldn't see before.

It's a strange time to have a human brain.

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

You can understand that something exists without quite believing that it belongs in the world.

You watch a demonstration. You read the explanation. You even use the thing yourself. And yet some part of you files it under an older category: trick, experiment, someday.

Then you encounter it again, this time in an ordinary setting. A friend mentions it. Someone at work depends on it. The remarkable becomes part of the furniture.

Your expectations eventually catch up. But there is a period in between that can feel strangely difficult to describe.

Call it the lag.

The world doesn't need your permission to change. You do need time to decide how to live in it.

The lag is not stupidity. It is the work of revising a picture of reality that has helped you navigate your life. Every new possibility asks something of that picture. Some can be added easily. Others move the walls.

It is tempting to treat being early as a moral achievement. To divide people into those who get it and those who are behind. But keeping up is not the same thing as understanding, and surprise is not a character flaw.

A more useful question might be: what do I need to reconsider, and what still matters just as much?

Your attention is finite. Your relationships take time. Your body has a pace. None of these facts becomes obsolete because a new model arrives.

Be interested. Try the thing. Ask the awkward question. Then go for a walk without narrating it to a machine.

You are allowed to remain a person while the future sorts itself out.