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Unless you spend your time in boardrooms and C-suites, theres a decent chance youve never heard of the Future Today Strategy Group (FTSG). Theres also a better than decent chance youve encountered its influence. Every year the consulting firm publishes a massive tech trends report that maps emerging threats, white spaces, and opportunities early enough for companies to act on them. Past editions have flagged shifts around synthetic media, digital humans, and generative AI before they entered the mainstream conversation. And some major institutions are clearly paying attention: FTSGs client list includes Mastercard, Ford, and NASA. Which makes whats happening onstage inside a Hilton hotel in downtown Austin quite jarring. Clad in a black cloak, FTSG founder and CEO Amy Webb opens her SXSW talk with a mock funeral for the trend report. Somber music fills the ballroom while a slideshow plays behind her. We are gathered here today to celebrate and remember the life of the trend report, Webb told the rhapsodic crowd of roughly 1,500. She wasnt kidding: An anthropomorphic cartoon version of the report appeared first in a hospital delivery room, then at school, then sightseeing at the Eiffel Tower, before eventually arriving where it spent most of its life: the corporate boardroom. In an interview with Fast Company ahead of the talk, Webb is characteristically blunt about the spectacle. As long as we’re killing the thing we’re famous for, why don’t we have some fun with it? The issue, she says, is the format itself. An annual trend report captures only a fleeting moment in a landscape now shifting too quickly to summarize once a year. By the time a massive PDF lands in executives inboxes, parts of it are already outdated. The challenge with that static report is its a snapshot of a moment in time, Webb says. The bottom line is, things are changing incredibly fast. Instead of cataloging trends, Webb now wants companies to focus on what happens when several of them collide. In this years analysis, the most consequential shifts in technology arrive in clusters: AI, energy infrastructure, robotics, biotechnology, and geopolitical competition are smashing together in ways that reshape entire systems. These so-called convergences, the report argues, create structural changes businesses often recognize too late. As Webb put it onstage at SXSW, trends are only the signals. Trend tells you whats changing,” she explained to the crowd. “A convergence tells you whats going to become inevitable. Her framework borrows from meteorology. If trends are individual weather data points, Webb told the SXSW audience, convergences are the storm systems that form when those forces collide. Companies that want to prepare for the future, she argues, need something closer to a storm tracker than a static report. The report outlines several areas where those convergences are already taking shape. One example is what Webb calls the agentic economy. AI systems are getting better at planning and carrying out tasks on their own, which could push the internet away from todays model of search and browsing and toward one built on delegation. Instead of hunting for the best deal or managing subscriptions themselves, people might rely on digital agents to do it automatically. In that world, the companies running those agentsand the infrastructure behind themcould become the new gatekeepers of economic life. Automation, Webb argues, may not arrive as a sudden wave of layoffs so much as a slow erosion of certain jobs, as hiring freezes, attrition, and software gradually absorb office tasks. At the same time, AI tools are increasingly being framed as companions, advisors, and sources of reassurance, raising questions about what happens when people begin turning to software first when they feel stressed or need guidance. Onstage at SXSW, Webb warned that this shift could extend far beyond productivity software. AI systems, she suggested, could increasingly position themselves as, say, therapists and dating coaches. (Imagine smart glasses quietly whispering suggestions in your ear during a romantic dinner.) The risk, then, is that people could become deeply dependent on systems that are ultimately built and governed by profit-driven tech giants. As empowering as that may feel, Webb tells Fast Company, the tradeoff is that you are relinquishing a lot of the agency and decision making capabilities that you had to a system where you dont know why the system is making those decisions. Theres plenty more packed into the reports 157 pages, from polycomputea future where classical, AI, quantum, and biological computing systems operate side by sideto the rise of human augmentation technologies that blur the line between health care and performance optimization. But many of Webbs warnings revolve around a simpler problem: companies often see these shifts coming and still struggle to act. There are two guiding principles in just about every company right now, Webb says. Those two guiding principles are fear and FOMO. Back in the ballroom, the theatrical funeral quickly gave way to something closer to a rally. After the eulogy, Webb implored the audience to stand. Moments later, a University of TexasAustin marching band snaked through the aisles, horns blaring as it marched toward the stage. The room erupted. Attendees laughed, cheered, and raised their phones as Webb pivoted from satire to sermon. Her message, beneath the spectacle, was about so-called creative destruction. Capitalism is like a perpetual storm, Webb told the crowd. To survive the storm you have to recognize that entirely new technologies can make you irrelevant overnight. Webb also used the stage to lob a few criticisms at the AI industry itself. She singled out OpenAI for what she described as inconsistent messaging around surveillance and its Pentagon partnership. Pick a lane, Sam, she said, referring to CEO Sam Altman. But both onstage and in her conversation with Fast Company, Webbs larger warning was about where the technology ecosystem itself is heading. The next internet is being built not for people, she says. Its being built for machines.
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E-Commerce
Never in human history has there been a greater concentration of wealth than in Silicon Valley. The three most valuable corporations in the world have their headquarters in the region, within a few miles of one another, in addition to many other unfathomably wealthy people and companies. It would logically follow that such a place would have some of the worlds finest architecture, as weve seen in previous centers of economic power. Think: Beijing in the Ming Dynasty, Venice in the Renaissance, New York and Chicago in the early 20th century. But no, Silicon Valley looks like just about any other American suburb (with a few notable exceptions). The future is invented in boxy office parks shielded from the street by hedges and parking lots. Tourists who come to see the global epicenter of innovation inevitably leave disappointed. Cupertino, CA. [Photo: Wangkun Jia/Adobe Stock] This disconnect periodically causes a stir on social media. Matthew Yglesias captured the mood of a recent round of X discourse, posting, The tech industry would be so much cooler if it built iconic skyscraper headquarters instead of this lame office park bullshit. How did Silicon Valley end up like this? Its partially the story of a place that came into its own in the mid-to-late 20th century, a time when sprawl was the overriding mandate of American urban planning. But there are actually more particular reasons for Silicon Valleys architectural identity, rooted in the tech industrys history and ideology. Stanford Research Park (then called Stanford Industrial Park), 1955. [Photo: courtesy Stanford University] Research Park inc. In 1953, Stanford University and the city of Palo Alto opened a new joint development about a mile from campus called Stanford Industrial Park. The university marketed the complex as a hub for smokeless industry, where university affiliates could commercialize their cutting-edge research. It was immediately an enormous success, incubating Silicon Valley giants like Varian Associates and Hewlett-Packard, and later, Meta and Tesla. The first building in Stanford Research Park, Varian Associates, 1953. [Photo: courtesy Stanford University] Stanford Research Park, as it’s now known, is a fairly ordinary-looking office park to contemporary eyes. But at the time of its construction, there was nothing like it in the world. Its design reflected its identity as a fusion of the university, the factory, and the corporate office, Louise Mozingo writes in the book Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes. Stanford Research Park employed modernist architectural principles dictating the arrangement and spacing of buildings. The office parks developers were required to leave more than half of the land area as open space, and to establish 90-foot landscaped buffers separating buildings from surrounding streets, much like the rules governing tower-in-the-green-style housing projects going up in central cities. Stanford Research Parks zoning rules were based on earlier policies enacted by the neighboring city of Menlo Park in its Administrative, Professional, Executive, and Research zone in 1948. This was the ur-code for office park zoning, mandating strictly limited lot coverage, large lot sizes, generous parking requirements, and banning noxious industrial processes. Silicon Valley may have pioneered the economic and regulatory frameworks for office park development across the U.S., but it did so with a local flavor. Varian Associates main entrance, 1953. [Photo: courtesy Stanford University] Unlike the corporate estates that companies like General Motors and Bell Labs were building concurrently east of the Mississippi, early Silicon Valley office campuses lacked fancy executive wings. At Hewlett-Packards Stanford Research Park offices, open, non-hierarchical floorplans enabled executives to practice management by walking around. Facebook (now Meta) would follow the same principles in its early years, situating C-suite brass among mid-level associates, as depicted in The Social Network. This layout is meant to stimulate creative thinking by creating chance encounters between workers from different departments. Silicon Valley firms also had a special proclivity for utilitarian architecture. While blue chip industrial giantsbuilt palatial, starchitect-designed campusesthink of Bell Labs reflective obsidian block featured on Severanceto signal their power and permanence, rising Silicon Valley firms had more low-key taste. This has, at times, been ascribed to the poor design sensibilities of the nerdy engineers who ran these firms. Why waste money on expensive frills when the firm is ruthlessly focused on innovation and growth? But a disinterest in architecture may have reflected deeper priorities. In an essay called, The Virtual Architecture of Silicon Valley, architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright notes that the buildings of the area have remained resolutely bland, superficial, and ephemeral. This may in fact signal not mere cheapness but also an alternative aesthetic, as yet unarticulated: a self-conscious aversion to architectural representations of hierarchy, stability, and technological permanence. Working at the frontiers of technology and economic transformation, Silicon Valley companies needed highly adaptable workplaces. Venture capital infusions could necessitate rapid upscaling; market crashes meant rapid downscaling. Companies that had disrupted existing industries were wary of their own disruption, and made workplace decisions accordingly. Silicon Valley is littered with hermit crab shellsold office parks that have housed multiple generations of next big things. Alphabets Mountain View headquarters was built for Silicon Graphics. Metas Menlo Park campus was once home to Sun Microsystems. Apple Park [Photo: Zenstratus/Adobe Stock] Future aesthetic As the current crop of Silicon Valley titans have grown into trillion-dollar businesses, their corporate architecture has evolved to reflect their wealth, power, and, its hoped, permanence. Apple Park, a perfectly circular ring designed by Lord Norman Foster in consultation with Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, is a blast from the future, successfully delivering on its promise to translate Apples product design aesthetic into architecture. Meta Menlo Park [Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency] Not to be outdone, Meta and Alphabet subsequently brought on Frank Gehry and Bjarke Ingalls to design portions of their campuses. Next up is Nvidia, which hired Gensler to create a pair of canopied mega-structures sheltering multiple interior office blocks at its rapidly expanding Santa Clara campus. Thanks to these projects, Silicon Valley is gaining an architectural identity. But it remains a private, primarily virtual architecture. Silicon Valleys architectural achievements are canceled out by its urbanistic deficiencies. Besides the employees and business partners who are permitted on campus, few others will regularly see these buildings in person, and virtually none will regularly see them on foot. They are mainly designed to be viewed from the middle distance in photos and videos, offering a glitzy visual shorthand for the companies that call them home. Nvidia Headquarters [Photo: PhotoSpirit/Adobe Stock] Unlike a downtown office tower, these campuses will never be experienced by masses of passerby. They will never be civic landmarks in the way of the Transamerica Pyramid or the Chrysler Building. Theyre all on their own, not characters in a vibrant urban scene. If Apple ever goes the way of Chrysler, or Nvidia pulls a Transamerica, their campuses will become hermit crab shells themselvesbig, weird hermit crab shells.
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E-Commerce
Entertainment in 2026 is a bit of a double-edged sword. Excellent films and television shows are widely available in ways that would have sounded like science fiction just 20 years agobut at a steep price. A single movie ticket costs an average of $16, while the average American household spends over $42 per month on streaming services, which adds up to $504 per year. And if youre anything like me, you may not even be getting your moneys worth on those streaming services. Often when I sit down to watch something, I scroll through the options on Netflix, only to go to bed an hour later without having watched anything. In many cases, that decision paralysis reflects my desire to recreate the feeling of watching something I loved, which is impossible. (What do you mean theres no show or movie that will give me the same emotions I felt watching Outlander for the first time?) However, there is an easy and free solution to this entertainment conundrum: your local library. Your library card will help you access books, ebooks, DVDs, audiobooks, and other media that can help you get your entertainment on for freeand can offer you similar stories to the movies and television shows that have captured your imagination. If youre looking to lower your entertainment costs, here are some recommendations for what to pick up at your local library. If you loved Sinners With sixteen Oscar nominationsthe most in Academy Award historyRyan Cooglers Jim Crow-era horror film offers some insightful allegories of racism and cultural appropriation within a tense and emotional vampire flick. If youd like more vampire lore or gore with a side of cultural commentary, you might check these out from your library: My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due: Originally published in 1997, this is the first book in Dues African Immortals four-part series. When Jessica, an African-American journalist for the Miami Herald, marries David, her Mr. Perfect, she has no idea he is actually a 450-year-old immortal who traded his soul for unending life. Initially, she shrugs off warning signs, such as the fact that he seems strangely youthful and his injuries heal too quickly, but David eventually tells her the truth when his immortal brothers come to retrieve him. When the people around Jessica start dying violently, David plans to make her and their daughter immortal, whether they want it or not. Fledgling by Octavia Butler: Butlers final novel before her death in 2006, Fledgling tells the story of Shori, a girl with amnesia who discovers that she is in fact a 53-year-old genetically modified vampire. Despite her memory loss, she must work to discover who has made her what she is and find a way to save herself and those she cares for. Dread Nation by Justina Ireland: Rather than vampires, Irelands 2018 YA novel imagines that zombies began walking the battlefields of Gettysburg during the Civil War. Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead rose, and as a Black child, she is required to attend a combat school to learn how to protect the living from the walking dead. Get Out, Us, and Nope, directed by Jordan Peele: Ryan Coogler specifically credited Jordan Peele as one of the filmmakers who influenced his work on Sinners. While none of Peeles three masterpieces specifically deal with vampires or other traditional monsters, each one does look at horror tropes through the lens of race and culture similar to how Coogler does in Sinners. If youve lost count of your Heated Rivalry reheats The global phenomenon written and directed by Jacob Tierney and based on the bestselling book series by Rachel Reid has made it clear that romance is not dead, although it does involve more ginger ale, loon calls, and concussions than anticipated. If you havent already read the entire Game Changers series (and you may have had trouble getting copies at your local library), Reid has also written two standalone novels, Time to Shine and The Shots You Take. But there is a long and storied history of queer sports romance that you can check out from your local library while waiting for season two of Heated Rivalry and book seven of Game Changers: Gravity by Tal Bauer: This friends-to-lovers hockey romance finds self-proclaimed middle-of-the-road player Hunter Lacey starstruck when he meets his hero, 26-year-old Bryce Michel at the All Star Game. But the two men have instant chemistry on and off the ice. If you like your hockey romance to feature plenty of time on the ice, this is the book for you. Wake Up, Nat & Darcy by Kate Cochrane: In this second-chance hockey romance, Darcy LaCroix and Natalie Carpenter were once college teammates, friends, and lovers. But that was years ago, before Darcy broke Nats heart and they became bitter rivals. After being cut from the U.S. womens hockey team, Nat takes a guest hosting gig on Wake Up, USAs winter games coveragewith Darcy as her co-host. The snark and banter between Nat and Darcy is reminiscent of the playful and sometimes biting chirps shared between Shane and Ilya in Heated Rivalry
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E-Commerce
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