11 August '26

The 11 August 2026 session of the Future Text Lab brought together Frode Hegland, Brandel Zachernuk (briefly, before a standing meeting), Tom Haymes, Benja Gooder, Astral_Druid, and Heiner Benking (listening in from a train). What began as a technical question — can the HTML model element live inside an EPUB — opened out into one of the group’s most philosophical sessions to date: a sustained exploration of perspective itself. Frode’s new star-field view in Interatlas, which shows how constellations dissolve into arbitrary shapes the moment you leave Earth’s vantage point, became the session’s governing metaphor, threading through Tom’s knowledge navigator and its resistance to imposed ontologies, Benja’s proposal for negotiated glossaries between two people in dialog, and Astral_Druid’s account of watching a gift economy in VRChat collapse into a zero-sum market game. The session closed with a declared direction: building a dialog system for people who actually want to make the world better.https://futuretextlab.info/2026/08/11/11-aug-26/