From Nodes to Stories, Fiction as a Tool for Thinking

On Sunday I wrote about what happens when a fundamental input gets cheap and new categories of activity explode in ways nobody predicts. I teased, at the end, that I’d been writing science fiction about what life looks like on the other side of that explosion.

The same day, Citrini Capital published The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis. A fictional macro memo from June 2028 describing the economic fallout of AI displacing white-collar workers. S&P down 38%. Unemployment at 10.2%. Mortgage market cracking. It’s been everywhere these last few days.

I bring it up because it’s the same starting conditions as what I’ve been writing about and exploring. Same premise. Very different place to stand while you look at it.

The Citrini piece counts the jobs lost. It models the displacement spiral: AI gets good, companies cut headcount, spending collapses, the feedback loop accelerates. If you only count the jobs that disappear, the math is brutal.

I’ve been more focused on the new jobs that will be created.

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Basically since I created it with Claude, I’ve been clicking around the Traffic Jam Explorer. Sometimes I would get stuck on some of the leaps from node -> second order effect -> traffic jam -> new role. The abstractions too abstract. So I started asking Claude to just write me a short story about a day in the life of someone doing one of these jobs. Show me what it actually means for a person to be a “Computational Experience Reviewer” on a random afternoon.

What came back was surprisingly useful, fiction as a thinking tool. The stories made the abstractions concrete in a way the tree in the Traffic Jam Explorer couldn’t. I started using them to reason through all types of AI-related problems I’d been kicking around with friends, and the narratives kept unlocking angles my analysis alone missed. Protocolized has been doing something like this with their protocol fiction work for a while now, and this exercise finally made it click for me that fiction can let you stress-test ideas or get a better sense of them by making them live somewhere you can imagine.

So I built it a home to share the best of it with you all.

Near Zero: weekly short stories, set in a world where the cost of building software has collapsed. New professions, new problems, new people navigating what comes after the disruption everyone keeps modeling. If all goes according to plan, I’ll also collect the stories into an ebook on Kindle at the end of each month.

The first piece is called The Executable Muse and it looks at a day in the life of a “Senior Computational Experience Reviewer” and the rise of software as content. I think you’ll all really enjoy it.

Works On My Machine continues as usual with open source and other projects, me building and thinking in public. You can think of Near Zero as a companion to this newsletter and expect to see some of the inventions in that world get built and launched here.

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