The opening collection

Nov 3

The march fills two lanes heading down Granville Street under a grey Vancouver sky — Archive photograph: Vancouver’s AI and data-centre march, May 23, 2026. This is not a photograph of the November 2 UBC protest. Credit: Kris Krüg

01 / Vancouver · Civic tech

Who gets a say?

The lead Essay

You Can’t Rent a Social Licence

Students brought pots and pans to the Nest. Canada’s AI ambitions need something harder to buy: a social licence, earned with the people expected to live with the rollout.

Kris Krüg Nov 2

In photographs

What the signs said

Vancouver · May 23, 2026

A handmade sign reads People need WATER not AI. — Vancouver, May 23, 2026. A sign reads “People need water not AI.” Credit: Kris Krüg

A close view of a Canadian Animation Guild banner with a honeycomb pattern and drawings of tools. — Vancouver, May 23, 2026. A Canadian Animation Guild banner at the march. Credit: Kris Krüg

Read the accompanying essay

Also inside

Creative futuresEssay

Futureproof: Year One

Three days at the first Futureproof Festival of AI in Vancouver. Old friends, new builders, difficult questions, and what I’m taking into year two.

Kris KrügNov 1 · 14 min read

Intelligent machinesBrief

A robot demo needs a failure log

LeRobot's evaluation and rollout tools suggest a useful community experiment: keep the unsuccessful attempts.

The editorial deskNov 6 · 1 min read

Creative futuresEssay

sleep little machine

i gave my data center protest sign a lullaby.

Kris KrügOct 8 · 5 min read

Creative futuresField report

I Made Claude Paint My Portrait in MS Paint. No Scripts.

Four sessions, a hand mixed palette, and one rule: brushes and clicking only. No scripting the canvas. The failures taught me more than the finished picture did.

Kris KrügSep 27 · 4 min read

A note from Kris

Who gets to shape
what happens next?

The UBC protest opens a question that runs through this collection: who gets to shape what happens next? Follow it into Futureproof, a proposed robot experiment, a painting made one brushstroke at a time, and a lullaby for a data centre. Why start here?