The future doesn't arrive all at once. It leaks. A new app changes how we talk to each other. An algorithm starts choosing what we want before we know we want it. A breakthrough in longevity research makes death feel negotiable. By the time these shifts reach the headlines they have already rewired something fundamental in us. Future Tense is where I track those leaks... the moment a technology stops being a tool and starts being a condition of life. An essay most weeks, on a Wednesday, on patterns most people will not see for another six months. It is not tech journalism. It is pattern recognition from someone who spent decades building the systems and then started asking the wrong questions. The essays are the field notes. The novels are what I do with them. [Read Future Tense](https://ft.azmackay.com) --- ## Five ways in More than two hundred essays are in the archive as at July 2026, which is not a useful place to start. These are the ones I would hand someone first. **The Cloud Above the Clouds** On the proposal to move data centres into orbit, and what it means to put the machines somewhere we cannot reach them. **The Aquifer and the Algorithm** Compute has a water footprint, and it lands on specific places with specific water tables. What the environmental cost of intelligence actually looks like on the ground. **The Salesperson in Your Head** What happens to persuasion when the persuader knows you better than your friends do, is infinitely patient, and never leaves the room. **Parasocial: Word of the Year for a Lonely Species** On one-directional intimacy, and a culture that has started to prefer it. **The Safety Theatre of Agentic AI** Why the rituals we have invented to make autonomous systems feel controlled are mostly for our benefit rather than theirs. --- ## By preoccupation The archive is easier to navigate by what you are curious about than by date. **Machines and autonomy** — agents, evaluation, the commodification of models, and the widening gap between what a system does and what anyone can account for.  **Orbit and the space economy** — launch, debris, the industrialisation of low Earth orbit, and the strange new geography of putting infrastructure where nobody lives.  **Earth systems and resource** — water, sand, energy, extraction. The physical bill for the immaterial economy.  **Bodies and biology** — synthetic biology, protein folding, the clinic, and biology's slow conversion into an engineering discipline.  **Attention, work and the self** — hiring, persuasion, loneliness, competence, and what it does to a person to work alongside something that never tires.  --- ## Reading it Essays go out to subscribers. A selection is open to everyone... the full archive, the monthly deep briefings and the member discussions are for paid subscribers, which is what keeps the writing independent of anyone who might prefer a softer version of it. That independence does real work. Future Tense takes no sponsorship, carries no institutional affiliation, and is edited by nobody but me. It is the one part of my working life where no one gets to ask for a change of emphasis. --- ## Fair warning I am not interested in breathless AI hype, simplistic doomerism, ten-ways-tech-will-change-your-life listicles, or pretending technology is neutral. I write about humans. The tech is just what reveals us. If you want someone to tell you everything is going to be fine, this is not it. If you want someone to tell you everything is going to collapse, this is not it either. I write about what is actually happening, which is usually stranger and more interesting than either story. [Read Future Tense](https://ft.azmackay.com) [The fiction](/fiction)