An Interview With Emily Segal

That's right. I keep going. Something in what you were just talking about reminded me of, you talked about how you're about cultural futurism now. Is that a recent shift or how did you find that place? And what does that mean in how you work?

It is and it isn't. We've always been doing our work like this, where it's always predictive. The whole ide... See more

The canonical example of the 2010s was probably the trend-forecasting agency K-HOLE, which was formed by four art-school friends who, while grifting fashion-industry jobs in New York, became ‘interested in the total collapse that comes with being the thing itself’. As it turned out, they were exceptionally good at ‘the thing itself’ – publishing pu... See more

For me personally, it would have meant the preemptive realization that many of the ideas we theorized at Other Internet had little feasibility beyond the thinkpieces they were contained within, not because they were bad ideas, but because they never had the agency to be implemented.

Eventually, I began coding some rough prototypes for John Michael and Stuart. At that point, we didn’t talk about how it would be a business or even how it would function on a practical, user, or human level. It was really, really utopian.Those days we asked questions like, “How does a person be their best self on the internet?” and “How do you get... See more