Preface
This preface was written in November, 2025.
This one requires some explaining because of how experimental it was.
The title of the story is “April 16, 2026.” I wrote it in March 2023; it was a work of near-term imagination.
I had read an article on a neat intersection of neuroscience and deep learning (this one, for the curious), and it gave me this idea about how you might be able to verify the success of an “adversarial attack” against the human brain—show just the right perturbed pixels in a person’s field of vision to trigger them to hallucinate an idea.
I thought it would be fun to tell the story in the form of a fictional news article set in the future, which was a format I first encountered as a chapter in qntm’s Fine Structure (specifically, Two killed in “transporter accident”). Then I had some fun thinking about how it would be misreported. One thing led to another and I wound up using a fictional future Drudge Report page as a frame story to tell the sci-fi story.
I don’t think anyone really understood this one, but I had a lot of fun making it. This story was originally posted on twitter as a series of screenshots; I’ve reproduced the experience below.
April 16, 2026
The date is April 16, 2026, and unsurprisingly the media still does not know how to report on science.
Original Postscript
Whew! This was fun to make, and a bit of a challenge. Largely inspired by https://biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.18.517004v2, and then I got carried away doing research to sketch out a plausible future this could live in.
The mix of what’s real and what’s not: the fake Drudge page refers to real people, but the fake MIT News article only refers to fictitious people. The research sketched out in the fake MIT News article is strongly inspired by some real research that is happening at MIT, though!
(Specifically, inspired by extremely cool stuff from @DeblinaSarkar59’s group on cyborg cells.)
Re: details on the fake Drudge page: ngl I really hope that they do not come true. I picked things out of a hat that felt plausible and that felt like they would be framed that way on Drudge. Next time I do something like this it’ll probably be a fake HackerNews front page.
2025 Postscript
Many things wrong in this as a prediction, but surely I get some Bayes points for imagining near-2026 pro-democracy protests against President Sheinbaum back in March, 2023 (a full year and a half before she was elected, and before she was even running).
The Poland-Belarus border is of course an active area of interest right now… we’ll see how this shapes up in the next six months.