on glitches, glimmers, and cracks in the fabric

As futurists we look for signals—small, often weird things. They are usually new technologies, new behaviors, new narratives that don’t fit into the mainstream, but that are often precursors of important transformations. We then try to discern the larger patterns that these signals herald to understand where they might lead ten or more years down t

How do we spot ‘glimmers’ of the futures we all dream of? What forms of knowledge, and whose voices do we need to be attuned to, to ensure we are seeing these possibilities for what they are?

I’ve developed a certain tenderness for the glitch: the riddled, dysfunctional thing that evades the conditions of what might be expected and what might be known, rupturing unfamiliar territories, or maybe a glimpse into a second reality that has been there all along

Erik Davis on The Ezra Klein Show recently spoke about “high weirdness,” saying that “‘weirdness’ isn’t just a quality of things that don’t make sense to us; it’s an interpretive framework that helps us better understand the cultures and technologies that will shape our wondrous, wild future.”

A glitch is similar in that it is a failure in a minor key, a moment of slippage when the code or the machine blunders and produces an unintended, random output.

“The glitch is a wonderful experience of an interruption that shifts an object away from its ordinary form and discourse… But once I named it, the momentum—the glitch—is no more…” For Menkman, the glitch cannot be described or it ceases to be what it claims; it is a lack, a break in the pattern of meaning that forces its own opening.