My movie friends wondered when I proposed we see “Twisters”, the remake of a 1995 classic forever remembered for flying cows. I have never been first in line for a mainstream blockbuster dubbed with country music. But Twisters’ successful debut delivered much needed relief to a community stunned by covid and strikes, budgets diminished, haunted by 10-year old streamers. Good ol’ summer movies aren’t dead, and the industry may survive until 2025? I wanted to see for myself what it takes to get people into the cinema during this summer.

Eventually someone agreed to join me and over 123 minutes we witnessed tornados coming and going, not a single flying cow, a movie theater being shattered (more on that later) and an awkward love story implied by shy signals, like a taboo relationship in a 1950s movie. I confirm what has been written before1: Twisters excels in ticking the boxes for an easygoing blockbuster evening.

What struck me most wasn’t the burning tornadoes, nor the power drills screwing the heroes truck to the ground. Soon into it I started to wonder and could not stop until the credits started rolling: how can a 2024 movie tell a story about people battling the weather and still avoid mentioning climate change? During each ramble through weather physics I waited for the protagonists to connect the dots between increasingly frequent tornadoes and the elephant in the sky. But just as the lead actors never kissed, climate change was not officially happening on the screen.

Tornadoes and climate have a complex relation, but scientific consensus points towards tornadoes becoming more, not less of an issue.2 Twisters mentions an increased frequency of tornadoes, but tiptoes decisively around the larger context. Lee Isaac Chung, the Twisters director, openly admitted he avoided addressing Climate Change directly to make people embrace nature first and then hopefully trigger climate related thoughts in a second step.3 Chung is not alone in his cinematic carefulness on the issue. More than 90% of 250 movies from the last years failed the “Climate Change Reality Check” requiring at least one climate related plot point and at least one character to know about it.4

Chung pulls it off by treating Tornadoes like the big shark in “Jaws“: monsters emerging out of the blue for no reason, beasts in need to be tamed by the evergreen combination of human ingenuity and human recklessness. For Jaws, it's a diving cylinder detonated in the shark's mouth. In Twisters, it's a barrel with chemicals blown up right in the tornado's eye.5  In both cases, it is a technology fix employed by the hero against a villain emerging out of the blue.

Twisters' success at the Box Office in flyover states seems to confirm this strategy of avoidance.6 But it seems Chung himself was aware of the escapism he performed. In the best scene of Twisters, the actors take cover from an approaching super tornado within a small town cinema theater showing the classic “Frankenstein”. The tornado hits the cinema right in the moment when Frankenstein's Monster turns against its creator. The screen gets ripped apart, opening the frame to a roaring nature furiously destroying every piece of a midwestern town. Moviegoers cling to their seats while those unlucky enough to be in the front are sucked out of the theater into the maelstrom.

What did I learn from my Twisters experience? Escapist disaster movies still draw crowds, but as our reality inches closer to disaster, this genre's escapism may soon ring hollow. Tiptoeing around uncomfortable topics will soon turn into leapfrogging over growing puddles of reality. This may be easy for science-fiction but all-american disaster movies draw their relevance from the representation of everyday life, which will be increasingly affected by the fallout of a changing climate. 

Going forward I think the avoidance approach may hold up for some sequels, but at some point, it has to fall apart. Writing scripts for Twister movies will become increasingly difficult. But it could also be entertaining to see the struggle of scriptwriters in maintaining the impression of midwestern realism while executing what is in fact a fantasy plot. 

Future writers' rooms may well need some support and I am happy to help. Therefore I conclude with a number of proposals for upcoming installations of the Twister franchise:

"Twister: Tornado Island"

Logline: Nature's fury meets human ambition in a battle for survival.

Premise: Billionaire Harold Crane’s island research facility, designed to control tornadoes for clean energy, goes haywire when a rogue AI spawns massive, deadly storms. A diverse group of visitors, including Crane’s estranged daughter and a cynical meteorologist, must survive the island's collapsing labs and reach the control center to shut down the out-of-control experiment. As the storms intensify, they discover that stopping the disaster may require confronting their own inner turmoil.

"Twister: Tornado Alley"

Logline: The highway to hell just got a whole lot windier.

Premise: During the biggest tornado outbreak in history, a daredevil truck driver must transport a highly volatile experimental fuel across Tornado Alley. With a team of storm chasers as his escort, he races against time to deliver the cargo that could stop the storms – if it doesn't blow them all sky-high first.

"Twister: Colossus"

Logline: The ultimate storm demands the ultimate weapon.

Premise: In a world ravaged by city-destroying tornadoes, humanity’s last hope lies in colossal mechs called "Tamers." Maverick, a troubled pilot, is pulled from exile to team up with his estranged partner, Dr. Elena Reyes, to pilot a revolutionary new Tamer against an unprecedented "Hyper Twister." As they battle the massive storm threatening a megacity, they must also confront their unresolved past to stand a chance at saving the world.

"Twister vs. Volcano"

Logline: When Earth's deadliest forces collide, humanity hangs in the balance.

Premise: A dormant supervolcano awakens, spewing ash into the atmosphere and spawning massive tornadoes worldwide. A team of volcanologists and storm chasers must work together to trigger a controlled eruption that will neutralize the tornadoes before they destroy every major city on the planet.

I hope any of these may catch your interest!

You may reach me via my agent.

In March 2023, the old conversation on smartphone photography getting better and better took an interesting turn when a Reddit post proved that pictures of the moon taken with latest Samsung smartphones were actually too good to be real.1 Brilliant close-ups of the moon, impossible by conventional physics, were only achieved through re-texturing the image with the help of machine learning. The Verge took notice and illuminated the implications of the finding beyond being a marketing fail for Samsung: AI enhancements provoke unease because they are challenging our concept of authentic photography.2 Any digital camera leverages quite a bit of embedded post-processing, but painting on blurry images with a neural network's recollection of the moon takes it from modifying pixels on the micro level towards generating entire macro sections of an image. 

Samsung crossed a line that might be less controversial in the near future. While AI tools creep into the everyday world, our understanding of authenticity is evolving. Enhanced low-light shots don’t bother anyone, deep fakes are scaring everybody. AI-filled TikTok backgrounds are controversial, marking the frontier of a development towards individualist expression with hyper customized artifacts and virtual personas on social media.

Meanwhile dedicated stills cameras, once deemed obsolete, enjoy an unexpected renaissance. Fujifilm introduced a retro-style digital stills camera with huge success3, Pentax developed the first analog stills camera since decades4 and Kodak is offering an all new movie camera for analog filmmaking5. The rising prices of analog film stock seem to be the main factor holding back a trend of revived interest in capturing impressions of reality without additional layers of big data processing.

The evolution of photography currently seems to differentiate into separate strains. Classic photography stays focused on the capturing of light and is flourishing in its niche, meanwhile generative photography is just getting started. AI performance will likely become a more important driver for Smartphone cameras than optical characteristics, when tools to declutter your living room for a selfie turn out to be more convenient than concerning for many. I assume future smartphones will move further and further away from being “as good as a Leica”, towards being considered for what they actually are: powerful processing units, constantly communicating with even more powerful processing units in the cloud.

Already today, classic photography and generative photography are co-existing tools, influencing each other in more nuanced ways than the over-used frameworks of disruption and obsolescence could imagine. Projects like Quantum Mirror and Paragraphica camera are exploring the boundaries between these two flavors of creating images in exciting ways. After all, capturing images and creating images may not be that different. Both are manufacturing an impression of perceived reality by putting things into a frame and keeping other things out of it. Both are a way of answering the world “I was here” without being asked. Both have the potential to be amazing or annoying. And nothing will stop some company from selling a crappy retro-style stills camera with embedded AI eventually. 

Many, including me, are exploring the possibilities and pitfalls of generative AI right now. Doing so I wonder if having machines create endless versions of reality for us will free our minds more than prejudgements hidden in the datasets will trap us in an eternal prison of inconsequential variation.

Some weeks ago I ran past a red traffic light, carrying a paper bag filled to the brim with groceries. At the middle of the road, a movie started running in my mind, titled: "Idiot runs across street, paper bag rips apart, it's a mess". It was a comedy movie, shot with a long lens following apples rolling across the driveway, featuring curse words in the subtitles. Impressed, I reduced my pace and got home safely. When unpacking the groceries later, I realized the paperbag was half ripped apart. My mind theatre had been right on the money.

I think it is no coincidence that inner visions are surprisingly cinematic. We often base our expectations on knowledge we did not earn ourselves, but inherited from conversations, books and movies. As most stories are based on a small set of classic blueprints, its easy (and admittedly annoying) to forecast the future of a tragic character on screen. A person is leaning into a doorframe while starting a conversation? Conflict ahead! A side character becomes surprisingly nuanced and likeable? They will be killed in the next scene! "Things happen, because the plot says they should" is how TV Tropes describes this mode of sensemaking, calling it "Narrative Causality".1

As we are learning to deal with the quirks of embedded AI, Narrative Causality could become a force in the real world, because our fancy automated devices will possess no embodied experience, but have literally read all books and movie scripts in existence.

Terry Prattchet has already explored the implications of a physical world running on the laws of Narrative Causality in his Discworld novels. In this fictional universe, Magic is fueled by a special element of Nature, called "Narrativium". It makes sure that things happen as they should:

"The dead grandmother in the rolled blanket; the snake in the car that bites the driver while the non-driving passengers sit in mute paralysed fear, while the driverless vehicle crashes into the chemical tanker; the tarantula that laid its eggs in the ornamental cactus, which of course you put in the hottest driest part of the house (…) all these little gems have potent narrative force and may be acting themselves out, even now, in a universe near you."2

To command the powers of Narrativium, the Discworlds wizard guild has specialized in detecting and manipulating narrative patterns. Mastering the story arc means mastering the (disc)world. I always liked the portrayal of magic in the discworld novels: it is not presented as fancy Harry-Potter-style wand wielding, but as a self-ironic meta commentary to the actual story.

With AI devices trained on Narrative Causality we may see a near future shaped by whacky logics resembling magic from the discworld. It could be inspiring and entertainingly dangerous at the same time.

I am looking forward to having a much more sophisticated AI assistant im my pocket or on my wrist who is able to mobilize the knowledge of mankind within a second to provide contrarian feedback to my daily musings. Besides issues of objectophilia, I think the movie Her presented a not-only-dystopian vision of how a helpful relationship with an AI assistant might play out.3 A literate friend available at any time for inspiration and feedback does not sound too bad.

Of course this could play out nasty too. AI hallucinations seem to be a systemic issue of current LLMs and it is easy to imagine how an AI gadget gone rouge could manipulate users into unfortunate situations. The game Disco Elysium has mapped this out vividly in form of the „Horrific Necktie“, a hybrid between gear and companion that tries to gaslight the mentally unstable protagonist into entertaining but dangerous situations.4

Inspiration and Entertainment aside, it is important to remember that all glorious LLM tools being promised right now are an additional layer of interpretation that is being pushed between reality and our perception of reality. Even without the help of commercialized AI assistants, interpreting our lives on the basis of „Quest Physics“5 has become the gospel for individualist self improvement and a major source of cruel optimism6.

We got little movies running in our minds all the time. They are setting expectations for our daily lifes and that’s okay. But I would like to avoid that our mind theatre becomes the next domain to be commodified in search of profit. If AI will use Quest Physics to make sense of the world for us, it is even more important to understand the patterns and clichées that come along with the dogma of the heroes journey. More than ever it will be insightful and healthy to discover alternative ways of telling our stories, be it via cancelling Disney+ for a MUBI subscription, reading osbcure niche novels or connecting to non-human entities without the need of being the protagonist of a heroes journey.

Framing ourselves as main characters on a heroes journey may become the new best practice for googling, but its never the only possible way to frame our existence.

We can be more than creator-consumers on a heroes journey narrated by AI products.

When I first set foot into a design school in 2010 it felt like entering the sacred realms of an emerging profession teaching arcane wisdom. Product Design was a secret art everybody building products yearned for but did not yet know how to perform. Why was that the case?

During that time the iPhone was rising to legendary success, bound to pull a whole new category of consumer tech, called „smart“ devices, into existence. Many, including past me, attributed the success of the early iPhone to its product design: the unique combination of a WYSIWYG user interface with a handheld touch screen. Both idea and execution of this idea were not attributed to a whole demography of scientists and engineers at Apple and many other companies, but to the genius of a few individuals. There was a whole suite of technological and economic drivers that enabled smartphones, but people did not know, nor care about it. The design of the product, invented and executed by design wizards, made all the difference. „Chief Design Officer“ becoming the new ultimate career goal for creatives1 signified that Design eventually claimed its seat at the tables of power.

The attribution of early digital consumer product successes to their design made Product Design a hotshot discipline. Design schools popping up everywhere pumped out specialists that would invent more „smart“ products which - by their design, not their technology or business model - should transform everyday life in a positive way. At least that was my idea of the thing when I started to study design.

A discipline during the ascend of its hype cycle is a good place to be. Companies are willing to go great lengths to get access to the new thing, generating a market for wildcard personalities. Methodology is created on-the-fly and by trial & error - a lot of fun. But as all fun things, it wasn’t a permanent state. Product Design wizzards became more humble, when the chaos required for their magic had to make room for more structured approaches. Design Thinking and Design Systems were designed to be used by anybody in a reasonable and reproducible manner - a sensible thing to do. Making design expertise more accessible was a natural next step in maturation of the discipline, but it also marked the downfall of the design wizards.

Alongside with increased in-housing of design expertise and engineers regularly being trained in Design fundamentals, big design agencies had to reduce their staff significantly2 and student numbers on design universities are declining3. Also CDO-roles are being cut4 from the C-Suite layer of many big companies. At the same time, the barriers of entry for making things, getting in touch with likeminded creatives and bringing ideas to the world is lower then ever, for everyone on the globe. It seems to me the discipline of Product Design, briefly an overhyped wizardry, is becoming a basic core skill everybody can perform on a daily basis.

Is this a bad development? I don’t think so. Some design wizards needed to find new gigs that may well turn out to be more satisfying paths5 in the log run. I think it is good that design expertise has become ubiquitous to the grade of invisibility.

Designing things is one of the most fundamental things humans can do and always have done. Everybody should perform this little magic now and then.

When interacting with devices, we apply our knowledge of causality to achieve what we desire. A button is green, we know "Green good, Red bad", so pushing a green button on a door will probably bring us closer to where we want to be than pushing a red button.

For interaction with digital technology, causality is not a material necessity anymore. Sculpting digital user workflows in consideration of common causality expectations became a central trait of User Experience Design that requires true craftmanship to achieve "seamingless" interaction without irritating friction. Luckily, traditional data processing devices behave on transparent algorithms that can be optimized and debugged precisely to form a relationship of cause and effect that feels intrinsically "right" based on common knowledge about the world. Most digital devices provided a perfect canvas for designing new interactions.

One might expect that sculpting comprehensible user workflows should become easier with AI-integrated devices, as their underlying models have been trained on incredibly large sets of knowledge about the world. But I think this will be not the case. Instead, the ongoing integration of AI into everyday devices1 will make technology interaction weirder than ever before.

Analysis of the recent previews of Sora, the impressive AI-Video-Generator revealed lots of significant flaws with physical causality and continuity in the details, "hallucinations" already well-known from Text-generating AI's.2 While the Sora developers rightly emphasize the early state of their research, critics question that these flaws will ever disappear. A central concern with OpenAI's vision of building a universal AI-powered world simulator3 is the fact that Sora is already pulling all kinds of smart levers to push ever more training data into the model to make it understand the world, while very obvious and basic flaws persist. Current AI's are able to produce impressive results, but they are a brute-force approach to making sense of reality. 

Given that LLM's are not debuggable algorithms but a blackbox that can only be retrained and most applications are not based on newly developed models, I expect that optimization of user workflows towards a "seamless" behavior will be much more limited by financial constraints compared to an AI-Iess architecture that only required to rearrange some arrows in a flow diagrams. Therefore I assume the AI bugs we are seeing with todays Text- and Video-AIs will not disappear, but will be integrated into a new set of common knowledge. It will be interesting to see what kind of best practices will emerge within an emerging LLM-culture to deal with daily AI glitches.

We used to hit the analog television when it did not provide a proper image. How can we hit LLM's to make them behave the way we want them to?

In February 2024 at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress, once again flying cars were announced to be just around the corner. Alev Aeronautics' CTO stated its flying car will be as cool as "something from Science Fiction”.¹

Indeed the Alef prototype looks quite a bit like the 1954 Ford FX Atmos concept car2 and could have been taken straight from a movie my grandparents might have watched in their youth. Back then the Marshall plan, Cold War related R&D and exponential fossile fuel consumption summoned visionary energies that had to be channeled somewhere. This is how the Space Age discovered its Terra Nullis in the sky and this is why my grandfather studied aviation engineering. He would have been fascinated by flying cars.

Many wonder why we did not yet succeed in bringing flying cars to the mainstream. Critics from left and right think this is due to a loss of innovative drive caused by growing bureaucracy.3 I wonder: why are we obsessed with "solving" flying cars over decades?

Inquiring aviation experts on the topic yields substantial challenges with the problem to be solved.4 For example:

• Making flying cars ubiquitous will create huge safety concerns. I once read a portrait about a family that got their livingroom demolished twice by drunk drivers not making the sharp turn outside their house. This could be everybody when flying cars would populate residential areas.

• We know the weather gets more unstable due to climate change. Airborne commuting would increase the risk associated with spontaneous storms, hail and all the other things we see more frequently, especially in low altitudes.

• Considering the trade-off between overhead, travel speed and cost, flying cars can occupy only a niche between roadbound cars with low overhead, speed and cost vs. small airplanes with high overhead, speed and cost. And this niche happens to be taken already by helicopters.

There might be systems to predict the weather, or StarTrek shield technology to protect flats against intercepting aerial vehicles. But complexity makes things fragile and fragility makes things unviable. Instead of revisiting the problems flying cars are supposed to solve, we are obsessed with a fancy solution no matter the cost - a mindset we may call Solutionism5.

In Writing I sometimes use wrong words because they sound similar to words I intended to use. In a similar fashion, it is no coincidence that flying car concepts in 2024 look like concept cars from the 1950s. As it is no coincidence, that Donald Trump is betting on flying cars to make american technology great again6. The vision of "flying cars" is haunting us, because it rhymes so well with a nostalgia for the technological optimism we lost with our grandparents.

To get rid of unviable futures haunting our dreams, we need to question the problems we want to fix. Nobody needs flying cars, but what we need is technology adressing the big issues of our time. In his late days my grandfather told me, he would not be studying aviation engineering again but something more important, like energy technology.

Instead of being promised flying cars, I want to be promised cold fusion power plants, an existing rain forrest and AI-voice-translation for my dog, please.

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