A series on world exhibitions, technology, and the politics of imagined futures

Tomorrow Was Here

Every world’s fair is a curated bet on the future. But more than that: it is a political act. To make a particular future feel inevitable before it has been decided. These are the visions that became infrastructure, and what they cost.

Est. 2026 · Biweekly · World exhibitions, 1798 — present

1964 World's Fair

Essays

Latest Essay

1964 New York

The Call Nobody Needed to Make

AT&T and the Picturephone

At the 1964 New York World’s Fair, visitors to the Bell System pavilion queued to see the future of the telephone. The exhibit had eight Picturephone booths – each with a small rectangular screen above a standard handset, displaying a grainy black-and-white…

The Hidden Assumption The Timing Problem Read →

1893 Chicago

The Night They Lit the World

The procurement that wired the world

Read →

1900 Paris

The Walkway That Waited

Built for a fair: Saved by a radio mast

Repurposed Futures The Timing Problem Read →

1952 Stockholm

The Borrowed Future

The automobile city travelled by prestige

Futures as Infrastructure Futures That Required the State Prestige Futures Read →

1939 New York

The Future They Chose to Build

GM Futurama and the automobile society

Futures as Infrastructure Futures That Required the State Read →

The Lenses

Each essay engages one or two recurring analytical themes. These are not categories - they are lenses that accumulate meaning across the archive.

Futures as Infrastructure Futures That Required the State Invisible Winners Prestige Futures Repurposed Futures The cities of Europe were rebuilding after 1945. American consultants arrived alongside reconstruction funding The Hidden Assumption The Timing Problem

The Series

One exhibition. One hidden assumption. One pattern that still operates today. New essay every two weeks.

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