Introducing Certain Impossible Things, a newsletter in microfictions
Hello! I’m so glad you’re here.
This is the intro of a newsletter that isn’t really a newsletter. I won’t be analyzing the news or providing useful advice. Instead, every other Wednesday, I’ll send you an original piece of speculative fiction of exactly 175 words. No more, no less.
The stories will be about people, mostly, but also about technology, and mystery, and the places where these things intersect and we don’t yet have a map.
If we haven’t met yet, hi! I’m a fiction writer who’s also spent a good chunk of my professional life employed by big tech. Working at the bleeding edge of AI has shaped how I think about the future and how it gets born. Tech worshippers and tech doomers both sell visions of what’s coming based on stories about what’s already here.
I’m starting Certain Impossible Things not because I have answers about the mess we’re in, but because I have questions.
I have questions about what other futures are possible — not necessarily utopian or dystopian but in the messy middle. I have questions about how to live with caring and reciprocity in an extractive economy. I have questions about the limits of knowledge and the infinities of love. Speculative fiction lets me explore these questions in a contained space, to see whether the spark of an idea might branch out like lightning, illuminating the territory.
The stories we’re being sold are so tight, and the visions so vivid, that it’s easy to forget a simple truth: No future is inevitable. It’s up to us to imagine, and then figure out how to get there from here.
Also, I miss art. After many years in product design, I want to recenter my creative practice as a ritual of devotion. You’ll find questionable experiments here, unpolished prose, ideas still in gestation — all 100% human generated. Please react, respond, deconstruct, and reconstruct! I’m excited for the ideas we can build together.
Crafting each story to be exactly 175 words is a nod to GPT-3, the first generative AI model I worked with back in 2021. GPT-3 had 175 billion parameters, which is too vast for my human brain to comprehend. 175 words is a smidge more graspable. (Fun fact: Even today’s most sophisticated large language models can’t reliably produce outputs with an exact word count. Human writers for the win!)
175 words — less than a minute of your attention — also seems small enough to slip into busy lives. I hope you find these stories worth your time. The first one comes out next week.
*P.S. The images used in this newsletter come from Polish artist Michalina Janoszanka’s exquisite reverse painting Rajski ptak (Bird of paradise), ca. 1920s. See more of her art in the Public Domain Review.
I’m Jenny. I research and write about people and technology.