We live in an era defined not by paradigm-shattering inventions but by a vast, networked convergence of people coordinating within existing cultural forms. Rather than each generation announcing a radically new aesthetic or movement, 21st-century culture channels its creative energy into remixing, iterating, and expanding what already exists. On TikTok and other social platforms, millions of users perform the same viral dances or participate in meme formats instead of seeking unheard-of forms...

Amanda looked out the window of her home, taken aback for a moment by the vision of Ærion laid out in front of her instead of San Fran. It was late at night, the kids had been down for hours now. She could not remember slipping into Hyperreal Hospitality, her mind was preoccupied on other things. Well one thing, the state of her marriage. It had been three days since she confronted Henry in Los Olivos. Three days on her own, without him in the house, without the sitter who she dismissed. Her ...

A man will do anything to avoid editing his novel, and that includes inventing a band and releasing an album. Welcome to the world of Los Believos, a group of rural liberal arts college dropouts hoping to get their demo picked up by an experimental indie label. To help frame this better, let's have the group hail from Greenfield MA, make them a semester short from graduating Hampshire, and have their big dream be getting signed by Elephant Six. Presenting the debut of Los Believos out on thei...

OSHA-CORE by Starholder is a high-concept visual collection disguised as workplace signage, blending safety aesthetics with the weight of philosophical inquiry. Across its vivid, glitch-streaked panels, viewers are confronted not with falling objects or wet floors, but with semiotic traps, broken systems, deferred futures, and the burden of selfhood. The collection’s central conceit is simple and brilliant: if the world is a site of ongoing risk, it is not the body alone that needs protection...

Catalyze outlines a new paradigm where value is created not by capturing attention, but by designing products as computational catalysts—parameterized seeds that AI systems process, refine, and grow over time. Powered by tokenized reasoning rights, middleware optimization, and computational interest, it reframes creation as an investment in intelligence, not visibility. This is how we build in a post-attention economy.

Forecasting the future is an easy way to look foolish in ten years. Sometimes however, there is a convergence of trends today that one cannot help but project out into tomorrow. In this case, I feel like I've entered a disturbing liminal space adjacent to necromancy or some other dark art, but we need to call them as we see them. So consider this a chilling view of how things could break once AI and automation really start cooking and neoliberalism intensifies. I'm not suggesting a permanent ...

I. Introduction: The Unseen HarvestDepopuflation Defined: Systemic population decline as a second-order consequence of capital optimization.Not a conspiracy—an emergent outcome.Capital learns to grow without labor, leading to demographic collapse.Historical Parallel:Peak Horse in 19th-century London: Horses became obsolete as automobiles redesigned urban infrastructure.Peak Human (2020–2025): AI and automation rendered human labor increasingly redundant.Core Premise:Capital optimizes for effi...

The harvest has begun, slowly and silently. For decades, capital has been retooling itself to no longer depend on the masses it once fed upon. We are witnessing a system that, once set in motion, follows the path of least resistance toward a stark endgame: intensifying inequality, perpetual labor precarity, and even a selective contraction of the human population. This is not science fiction or wild conspiracy. It is the plausible outcome of forces already at play, a long harvest of society’s...

It happened on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday afternoon. I was sitting in a glass-walled conference room, half-listening to my boss run through quarterly numbers, when I realized the mood in the office was eerily subdued. The hissing fluorescent lights overhead felt overly bright as if exposing something we weren’t ready to see. Then the announcement came: our company was laying off a third of the team. An artificial intelligence system we’d been testing—once a side project, now suddenly t...

In early 2023, as tech giants announced mass layoffs and Wall Street cheered their stock bumps, a grim quip made its rounds among economists: “Welcome to wither up economics.” The phrase is a dark play on the old promise of “trickle-down” prosperity. Instead of wealth trickling down to the masses, it seems the base of the economic pyramid is withering, even as riches pool ever higher up. This isn’t a conspiracy hatched in smoke-filled rooms, but rather an emergent alignment of incentives – a ...