First up, Wholeness in a Timeless Activity by Nathan Chenhttps://www.yakcollective.org/projects/astonishing-stories/wholeness-in-a-timeless-activity/ …
Okay on to Out of the Loop by Sachin Benny.https://www.yakcollective.org/projects/astonishing-stories/out-of-the-loop/ …
-
-
Okay this is a kitchen sink near-future with UBI, programmable microbot tattoos, a Joker Act to rehabilitate incels... and a hero with a tattoo mirroring his roam graph that he can’t get pretty enough to satisfy his girlfriend because his depression is reflected in his Roam notes
Show this thread -
This story has a lot going on. Hero is depressed about dead father who wasn’t great and us now signing up for a surrogate father type dating app
GPT-45 makes an appearance. Also hero has ptsd growing up during pandemic as a high schooler so this maybe 2030s?Show this thread -
Hero moves on from real to GPT powered surrogate father. Good ending. Well that’s it for now. Will continue this thread as more stories are added.
Show this thread -
These are not pro scifi writers so don’t read with that expectation, but a nice mirror held up to the future to pop out big themes in the zeitgeist. Clearly API alienation caused by APIs Behaving Badly, and transhumanist forms of identity crises and trauma are big ones.
Show this thread -
As stories these all rate between a C- and a B, but taken collectively, the futures exercise seems to have surfaced some A+ patterns. It’s almost a kind of speculative imagination Gallup poll mechanism. I’d like to see a tag cloud or sentiment analysis across the anthology
Show this thread -
Though I’m obviously partisan as one of the original instigators of the
@yak_collective I think this project has serious potential for demonstrating a futures methodology that combines bith scenario planning and design fiction, and does so in a collective intelligence framework.Show this thread -
There’s 5 stories so far and a few more queued, and then the intention I believe is to keep adding stories. I suspect this approach would really shine past ~25 stories with some meta analysis to bring out collection-level patterns.
Show this thread -
Product placement: if you’re interested in hiring the yak collective to conduct such a futures exercise, contact
@SachinB91 or@WabiSabiFutures. We’ve actually already done one similar client project (not public) that produced a slide deck of visual vignettes rather than stories.Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.

