Near Zero

Every few generations, something gets cheap. Printing. Photography. Video. Each time, the same thing happens: the people who made the old thing panic, the people who never could make the old thing start making the new thing, and everyone argues about whether any of it counts as art.

Software just got cheap. Not "a bit cheaper." Near-zero cheap. The kind of cheap where your kid's soccer team has custom scouting analytics and a three-person nonprofit has enterprise-grade tools and everyone's arguing about whether the specification or the code is the real product.

Near Zero is a series of short stories set in this world, roughly 2035, give or take, when the dust has mostly settled and people are figuring out what comes next. There are software critics who review interactive experiences. There are pit crews who manage tool stacks for cardiologists. There are people whose entire job is to make sure that when you say "sort by date" the machine doesn't sort by date of first Tuesday after a solstice.

Nobody’s living in a dystopia they’re living in a Tuesday that happens to look weird to us but mundane to them. Think Discworld meets Black Mirror.

New stories every week or other week, exploring what daily life actually looks like when the cost of making things falls to almost nothing and what stays the same anyway.