My feed is mostly designers talking about AI, and the temperature of all of it is the same: Something is coming. You need to get out in front of it. You need to be the one doing the changing rather than the one being changed. I don’t disagree with most of the individual advice. But read enough of it in one sitting and what surfaces underneath is competition — ordinary competition, of the kind that has always been there. The worry takes two shapes. Either the client no longer needs a designer, because the tool supplies the design. Or another designer, holding the tool, takes the job you would have had. Both are worth taking seriously. Neither is new. The Permanent Condition There has always been someone faster than me, someone cheaper than me, and someone better than me. This was true the day I started my career and it will be true on the day it ends. It describes a market, not an era. Designers — actually, all in the professional services — have a folk theorem for living with this reality: Fast, cheap, good — pick two. I’ve heard it said and read it written countless times. I’ve said it and written it, too, to win arguments and contracts. Today I got curious about where the saying comes from, and went looking. Nobody knows. The phrase itself gets attributed to something called the Common Law of Business Balance, and from there to John Ruskin — an attribution with no evidence behind it whatsoever. The idea underneath has a slightly better paper trail: an engineer named Martin Barnes drew it as a triangle, with cost, time and quality at the corners, for a project management course in 1969. Even that isn’t an origin. Versions of it were in use by the 1950s, and no one can say who put it that way first. This beaten-to-cliché piece of professional wisdom is a cipher. Which is useful to remember because it’s also, often, wrong. There are as many designers who are fast and cheap and good as there are those who are slow, expensive, and bad. I have worked with some of each. Thinking back on this now, I am surprised that no one ever responded to the “pick two” challenge by saying, “I want all three, I just won’t be getting them from you.” Faster and Cheaper My entire career has been punctuated by tools that sped up production. Desktop publishing collapsed typesetting and layout into something one person could do in an afternoon. Then Photoshop. Then the rest of the Adobe suite, Illustrator and InDesign. Then Sketch. Then Figma. Each one arrived, each one made producing the work materially faster, and each one set off a race to master it before everybody else did. Each of them may have changed what a day at work felt like, but none ended the profession. What makes faster feel dangerous is that we convert it immediately into cheaper, and we do that because most designers price their time. If the work takes four hours instead of twelve, charging the twelve-hour price feels indefensible, and somebody else will happily charge for four. That’s a pricing problem rather than a technology problem, and it’s been the same pricing problem through every acceleration I just listed. A practice that charges for outcomes absorbs a speed increase as margin. A practice that charges for hours absorbs it as a pay cut. As for cheaper, it arrived long before any of this, and it arrived by geography. I work closely with a designer who lives in the Balkans. They are, by some distance, among the most talented people I have ever worked with. They didn’t go to design school. I went to the Rhode Island School of Design, which bought me a credential the marketplace still reads as shine, and I’m clear-eyed about the fact that on the measure that actually matters they aren’t behind me. They can also charge less than I can, because rent where they live isn’t rent where I live. None of that has anything to do with AI. It has been available to every client I have ever had as long as we all had an internet connection. And just in case anyone thinks that professional design competition from overseas is a more recent phenomenon, the first designer I met when I visited Malaysia in 2004 was born and raised in Penang, had no design degree, and had dozens of clients most of whom were headquartered in the United States. He was fast, cheap, and good. That’s why they paid him, rather than someone else. What Better Means There is an objection to what I’ve said so far. I’ll try to put it in its best form rather than a convenient one. Every tool I listed made production faster without making the thing. Desktop publishing didn’t design the page. Photoshop didn’t choose the image. Figma doesn’t know what the product should be. AI, as a design tool, is different in kind, because it produces the artifact. So the comparison to Sketch and Illustrator is a weaker argument than it sounds. I think that objection is right about the tool and wrong about the job. It only holds if the artifact itself is better. Imagine two designers given the same brief — an identity system for the same client. Put the results in front of a panel, blind, with no knowledge of how either came to be. The panel picks a winner. They’re qualified to do it and their reasoning will be sound. Now ask the client which designer they’d hire again. It is by no means a given that the panel and the client will agree. The two answers can fork, and when they do it isn’t because the client has poor taste. The panel is assessing an artifact. The client went through something. They were asked questions nobody had asked them before. They had a position drawn out of them that they couldn’t have articulated on their own. At some point they were told that the thing they wanted was the wrong thing, by somebody who had earned enough credit to say so. None of that is necessarily visible in the file — nor should it be. I wrote recently that expertise is becoming subjective — that where knowledge is cheap, experience is what differentiates. If that’s true, it cuts in both directions. Experience doesn’t only distinguish you; it aligns you with some people and not others. A prospect’s fit with how you’ve worked, what you’ve lived through, and how you talk about it is doing as much work as the expertise itself. Which means there’s no better in the abstract. There’s better, for them. There’s also a posture question here, and it matters more than it looks. To believe that your prospect couldn’t do better than you is a level of audacity that runs counter to how every designer I know actually thinks — and yet it’s close to what we’re advised to project. In a world this populous it’s absurd to imagine you’re the best at anything, and more absurd still to build a public persona on the premise. That advice persists because it works on a seductive technicality: whether or not you believe you’re the best, behaving as though you are turns out to be convincing to other people. Notice who that advice is sold to. We’re the market for it; our clients have never heard of it. Rejecting that is accuracy rather than modesty. The world is too crowded with designers to spend a second ranking yourself among them. Beside the posture, the same feed sells a tempo, and that carries its own irony. All that commentary argues that you should move faster in order to stay ahead. But if experience is the differentiator, speed is the thing eroding it. Going slowly through a problem — getting it wrong, trying it on a real client, finding out — is where the differentiation was built all along. The race is being run on the wrong road, and running it costs you the one you needed. Nobody Asks About Tools When I moved from Sketch to Figma I thought it mattered. I had reasons. I argued about it. Designers I respected stayed on Sketch for years afterward and we all thought the other was wrong. In the end, it didn’t really matter. I know designers who still work primarily in Photoshop. In the last twelve months, I saw a website design produced in Illustrator. Of course I think these are mistakes, bordering on the absurd. But it’s also none of my business, and as far as I can tell it hasn’t cost them a job. Isn’t that interesting? But it makes some sense. After all, nobody has ever asked me what tools I use. Except another designer. I don’t know what this technology does to the profession over twenty years, and I notice that the people who claim to know are usually the ones with something to sell. What I can see from here is smaller and steadier than that. Somebody out there is faster than me. Somebody is cheaper. Somebody is better — that isn’t modesty, it’s the realism that comes from decades in the work, and I have met them. All three have been a phone call away from every client I have ever worked with. Any prospect can have them, faster, and at a cheaper price. But they don’t have me. And they don’t have you.

At 3:30 in the morning on Thursday, July 9th, 2026, I woke in a rented house on Oak Island, North Carolina, and felt compelled to go downstairs and out onto the back deck, which faced the ocean. The night was exceptionally clear. I spent about twenty minutes looking up, finding stars and watching satellites pass over — there were many. Then my attention was drawn to a bright star at roughly the three o’clock position, taking twelve o’clock to be straight out over the Atlantic. Just beneath that star, there was a flash. It was very small and very bright, smaller in aperture than the star but much brighter than it, closer to a strobe than to anything I would call astronomical. Over the next five minutes there were eight or ten more. Each one was stationary. The light appeared in a spot, went out, and then another appeared somewhere else; none of them moved while visible, and none left a trail. They also had no overall direction. One would be to the left of the star, the next to the right, at varying distances from it. They did not begin in one part of the sky and progress to another. I have watched satellites flare when they catch the sun at the right angle, and this was not that. It was not aircraft. I did not photograph any of it, and probably wouldn’t have been able to anyway. These flashes were shorter than a second. I have since worked out what I was looking at, and the explanation turns on something I hadn’t known enough about to consider. The Explanation The bright star was Vega, which at that hour sat high in the west-northwest. The sun was twenty-five degrees below the horizon to the northeast. That matters, because the earth casts a shadow into space, and the edge of that shadow is a surface that sweeps across the sky as the night turns. Satellites inside it are dark. Satellites outside it are lit. The boundary is perfectly invisible, because there is nothing out there for it to fall on. As it happens, that boundary was moving through Vega’s part of the sky during the exact minutes I was watching. At 3:55am, objects in that direction were only in sunlight above seventy-five degrees of elevation. Ten minutes later the line had dropped to forty degrees. Vega sits at fifty-six. The patch of sky I happened to be staring at was crossing out of the earth’s shadow while I stood there. And that patch was busy. Counting catalogued objects, roughly twenty-five lit satellites crossed within ten degrees of Vega during those five minutes. So the flashes were not one object doing something strange. They were two dozen separate objects passing through a small window of sky, a third of them catching the sun on a flat surface for a few tenths of a second as they went. A glint that brief moves about a tenth of a degree, which the eye reads as a point, not a streak. Each flash was a different machine in a different place, which is exactly why they had no direction. What strikes me is how much of this is hidden. The satellites are invisible until the geometry lights them. The shadow that decides which ones are visible is invisible always. I was watching a mechanism operate with every part of it concealed except the result, and the result was eight or ten silent flashes with no pattern I could read. Epilogue I do not think I would have arrived at any of this on my own, standing on a deck at four in the morning. The honest account is that what I saw was anomalous to me, and stayed anomalous for three months, and the sky was never doing anything other than what it does every night. My wife asked me if I was disappointed to land on this explanation. The honest answer is no. I have seen many things in the sky, some of which I have still not been able to explain with natural or known phenomena. I cannot say I am absolutely certain that things like secret advanced technology, non-human intelligence, or the supernatural explain them, but given the evidence of which I am aware and my own experiences, I am, for now, persuaded that such things are possible. But that doesn’t mean that even the strangest things we see and experience aren’t the result of the known and mundane.

We do not know what is going to happen. This is a hard truth; we desperately want to believe the opposite. And so the most successful corners of the modern internet have been organized, very deliberately, around that desire to convince you that someone, somewhere, knows what is coming next, and that we should all look to them. The category includes astrologers and channelers, futurists and political analysts, sociologists writing op-eds and foresight professionals working by the hour. Across every register, mystical and analytical, the assumption is the same: that not knowing the future is a solvable problem. Never mind, of course, how they know what they say they know; modern epistemology is as social as it is slight. This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, of course. Soothsaying is as old as we are. Its spotty track-record has always kept it in something of an intellectual quarantine, though — considered, even believed, privately; dismissed publicly. But in recent years, it seems as if that arrangement has reversed. Predictions are made, believed, and defended as fluidly (and irresponsibly) as the most inconsequential gossip, but with much more potent implications beyond the attention they attract. What strikes me, looking at it, is how much sense this makes. The growth of prediction, I think, is not merely a symptom of an attention economy out of control — it’s a reaction to a plague of uncertainty. An Age of Uncertainty If anything has objectively increased over the past twenty years, it is uncertainty. Some of it is physical — a perfect storm of fragile globalism, fragile ecosystems, and fragile cultures, each crisis spilling into the others, each year producing the conviction that the rules have not stopped changing. And some of it is informational: an abundance of data and analysis that, instead of resolving anything, multiplies the directions in which a person could plausibly be wrong. The condition is the same either way. We do not know what is happening. And we know less, day by day, about what to do about it. Alvin Toffler, more than fifty years ago, called this future shock — the dizziness of living in a society changing faster than people could adapt to it. He did not predict everything we are experiencing now, but he did predict the shape of the problem with uncanny precision. He saw that under sustained acceleration, ordinary minds would seek refuge in nostalgia, in escapism, in tighter ideologies. He could not have fully known, in 1970, how cheap the refuge would become, or how thoroughly it would be served. And he could not have known that the central refuge his descendants would buy would be the one he himself was trying to give them: foresight. Foresight, of course, is the intellectual’s crystal ball, and as analytical and promise-withholding as its practitioners may be, its buyers want portals into time. That is the unexpected outcome of Toffler’s expected future shock. It’s the actual shock. If the spirit of the age is doubt, the sin of the age is gluttony. And like in so many arenas, we feast at the banquet — in this case, of answers — however empty those calories may be. The prediction economy has grown because the demand for relief is enormous, and a forecast is a kind of relief, even when nothing it says happens to be true. As people will tell you about communication itself, audiences forget what was said but not how it made them feel. The feeling of safety carries forward until the next prediction, even past the obvious failure of the last one. From the Cloisters to the Commons There is a second, quieter story alongside the first. It is not only that demand for prediction has grown; it is that the supply has moved into the open. For most of the past century, the kinds of practitioners who would have called themselves seers or psychics or channelers worked, by necessity, in small rooms. Their audiences were the people who walked in the door, or who subscribed to a newsletter, or who attended a Sunday meeting at the back of a metaphysical bookshop. The analytical side was no less cloistered. Futurists worked for governments and consultancies; foresight, where it was practiced seriously, was a profession rather than a content category. The cloisters did not fall. Their walls were quietly removed by the cameras in our pockets. What had once required an audience now requires only an account. A psychic in suburban Florida, a strategist with a TED talk, and an analyst running scenarios in a basement now share the same publishing infrastructure, the same incentive structure, and — increasingly — the same audience. The astrologer and the political scientist are colleagues now in a way they never were, and not because their methods have converged. They are colleagues because the platform pays the same way for either — co-workers in a boundless office of attention. This, I think, is the deeper proof of how thoroughly the speed of modern communications has reshaped us. The change is not only that we receive more information faster; it is that the conditions of speaking publicly have collapsed. The voice once reserved for those who had spent decades earning it is now the voice of anyone with a webcam and a thumbnail. And in such an environment, the genres that always promised the most relief — that always made the most reassuring claims about what comes next — were inevitably going to win. What “Next” Reveals Even granting all of this, the appetite the platform feeds is itself worth a closer look. What kind of certainty are people — including me — actually after? It is not certainty about the present. The present, by definition, requires no forecasting; it is the thing in front of you. Nor is it certainty about the past, which is what historians and memoirists and grief itself work on, and which is no less hard for being settled. The certainty being marketed and consumed in such enormous quantities is sequential. It is certainty about the next. The next election, the next collapse, the next breakthrough, the next era. The next thing I should be ready for. The next thing I should be afraid of. The next. This is a strange object of desire, when you sit with it. To want to know what is next, more than you want to know what is here, is to admit something about the relationship you already have with what is here. Wanting to know what is next is, very often, just wanting to be somewhere other than here, dressed in the language of time. The hunger for the future is, half the time, a way of being elsewhere without ever leaving the chair. I wonder, sometimes, scrolling through these forecasts, whether we have ever really cared about the now. Whether the recent surge in prediction is not a new condition at all, but only the moment in which the technology finally caught up with an old, restless wish. The Hard Work I do not want to dismiss foresight as such. There is a real and difficult tradition of looking ahead — Jeane Dixon’s bolder claims and Alvin Toffler’s quieter ones are not the same kind of thing, and I am not equally persuaded or put off by either. I actually think that underlying project they share is honorable, so much so that I have tracked predictions of all kinds in a spreadsheet for years. But to attend carefully enough to the present, in either mode, that some pattern of the next becomes visible, is a necessary balancing discipline. It is hard, being present. When it works, it is generous, because it gives the rest of us something to do with our anxiety besides be ruled by it. What we have flooded the commons with is something else, and on inspection most of it is the opposite. It is a way of buying the feeling of foresight without the practice — of metabolizing uncertainty by paying someone to swallow it for you. It is, I think, a form of intellectual cheating. The prediction industry sells us the feeling of having figured something out without the friction of actually figuring it out: a way of being done with uncertainty in advance of doing the slow work of moving through it. There is no shortcut here, though. The reality — the actual reality — is the one the prediction industry has organized itself to help us avoid. Uncertainty is hard. Mistakes are hard. Pain is hard. Loss is hard. These are not problems to be predicted past, and the most useful thing any of us will ever do is to sit, attentively, in the part of time no forecast is ever about: the present.