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future culture is now
smart interviews, dumb bros, and there is no behind or ahead—a curation of links beyond the algorithm
Laura Winberry
September 02, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
gm and welcome to issue 33—thanks for being here. 🏴☠️
One of the sentiments I keep circling back to—future culture is now—didn’t fully click for me until falling face-first into crypto and web3 almost a year ago. Pretty sure some PhD had coined a term for this already, I asked Chat this morning.
Chat came back with a list of possible frames, a few of which got close to the feeling of the future sneaking in quietly before we notice. Here are some of my favorites:
The “presentism gap”: a phrase sometimes used in media theory for how we underestimate the significance of what’s happening now until hindsight reframes it as history.
The “future shock” lag (from Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, 1970): the idea that technological and cultural change outpaces our ability to fully perceive or adapt to it in real time.
The “retrospective recognition effect”: historians and cultural theorists often talk about how people only later realize they were living through a transformative moment.
“The adjacent possible” — a concept from Stuart Kauffman and Steven Johnson: innovations feel incremental in the moment but, looking back, mark the opening of a radically new era.
“The present future” — a phrase sometimes used in tech/culture writing for exactly that uncanny sense: the future isn’t ahead, it’s already embedded in now, unnoticed.
And my absolute favorite:
Gibson’s line: William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Feel free to do with these what you will—pick the ones that resonate, mash ‘em together, discard the rest. But maybe also keep them as one lens for viewing both this newsletter’s links and humanity at large.
We’re way fucking behind in so many ways. But also perhaps further ahead than we think.
Or: there is no behind or ahead. Just future culture, and it’s now.
If you missed last week’s issue, you can find it right here. Otherwise, onward to today’s curation of links your algo won’t feed you. lfg.
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First, something light about being a dad from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
“Being a man’s man is easy. Any douchenozzle can wake up at 5 a.m. to go to the gym and dip their junk in ice water, or whatever the hell bros are doing these days… A man might hear a baby banshee-wail and let someone else deal with it. But a dad doesn’t pawn off his late-night duties on a woman who’s still recovering from getting ripped in half. A real dad knows that chick needs some shut-eye.”
✨ Middle Layer → where things get interesting
Next, the opposite of light: an interview from Tin House with Canadian author, activist, and filmmaker Naomi Klein about her 2023 book Doppelganger—part memoir, part political analysis, part conspiracy-as-reality.
Think: cultural analysis, the warped machinery of centralized social media, AI’s blurred content, and even the literal doubles in our lives.
“[It is] a perfect distillation of the values of the attention economy, which have trained so many of us to assess our worth using crude, volume-based matrixes. How many followers? How many likes? Retweets? Shares? Views? Did it trend? These do not measure whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, but simply how much volume, how much traffic, it generates in the ether.”
It’s reflective, rigorously researched, and razor-sharp—especially in a time when everything feels like it’s trending in the opposite direction.
It’s also for anyone “who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters.” Which is to say, it’s for all of us.
🔮 Deep Dive → bring snacks, it’s dense down here
This next link, wtf is blockchain, is from the Babe archives and for sure could have gone at the beginning of today’s read. But, if you haven’t already noticed, things don’t really get done in order around here. So it goes.
Anyhow if you’ve heard the word blockchain more than once (or used it in a sentence hoping no one would ask you what it means), this post is an explainer for people like you and me, who still only half get it but want to understand more.
“The real magic of blockchain isn't the technology—it's the new economic and social arrangements it enables when you remove the need for trusted intermediaries.”
To close out today’s picks, here are a few upcoming blockchain events worth having on your radar.
SheFi Summit Buenos Aires → mid-November, rolling right into Devconnect Argentina the next week. Both look dope.
PDX crew: this Friday, Stand With Crypto is hosting Unblock the Block. Free entry, NFT gallery, and a Foster the People DJ set (perk or a problem—your call).
That’s it for issue 33. Thanks for hanging out—send me your non-sketchy links, and I’ll see you here next week, nerds.
xoxo,
lw
PS: Subscribe now if you want in on this arithmetic. Miss the last issue? It’s right here. Also literally none of this is ever financial advice. I’m sharing what I learn through Babe, and perhaps you’ll learn from my mistakes. Hopefully, maybe, who knows, ily. Also if you’re not already, come hang with Babe on insta, Farcaster, and TBA 🟦.
Next week in Babe: More links, bitches ily!