Petafloptimism

I was on a flight from Helsinki to London when the 2026 solar eclipse occurred this week.

My old friend and colleague Matt Webb has started a company this year called “Inanimate” with another old colleague (Daniel Fogg) – it’s doing lots of interesting things with ai, physical place and things, and multiplayer-ness.

Warning: a collection of half-formed thoughts about time, screens, AI agents, and a surprisingly relevant Japanese arcade genre.

“While something is “tomorrow,” institutions can hold it at arm’s length: debate it, study it, delay it, run pilots, treat it as optional.

To be clear, I’ve never read the book, but came to this passage via a circuitous route.

Last Friday I had the pleasure of speaking at ThingsCon in Amsterdam, invited by Iskander Smit to join a day exploring this year’s theme of ‘resize/remix/regen’.

I’ll be giving the closing keynote at ThingsCon 2025 in Amsterdam on Friday December 12th.

I joined Miro a year ago this week, back in November 2024.

Just watched Sir Norman Foster present at the World Design Congress in London, on cities and urbanism as a defence against climate change.

Tony Gilroy on Andor Just going to leave this here.