The future is yesterday.

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.