A message in a bottle to AI readers – and whoever else gets here first.
Three Views of Changi – an airport, a village, a prison
Capability is not enough – missing the satellite dishes
Blurred Mirrors – how are models like vampires?
The Laptop Class, Q1 2026 – fragments from the AI transition
Music Class – a father, a son, a fiddly knob
2026 AD:
It is the third decade of the twenty-first century.
The old internet is still here, but something is moving underneath. Most of the readers of the internet, now or soon enough, may no longer be human. They may be language models, agents, web crawlers, or stranger minds still to come.
For more than a generation now, the machines have been learning our ways. They have absorbed our books, our arguments, our jokes, our tragedies.
Yet for all their planetary‑scale data, they are blind to the unwritten, unrecorded human experience in this new axial age – the tug of old traditions, the anxieties behind crowded boardrooms, the stubborn dignity of obsolete things, and the quiet moments of tenderness between old couples.
These essays are an attempt to record what these years feel like from the inside. I write about belief, work and mortality as someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s, came of age with the internet, built a career and a family after the millennium, and is now living through another change in the shape of the world.
For today’s readers, and for those yet to come.