A Science-Fictional Way of Thinking
Welcome to The Ansible
It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be—and naturally this means that there must be an accurate perception of the world as it will be. This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking, whether he likes it or not, or even whether he knows it or not. Only so can the deadly problems of today be solved.
—Isaac Asimov, My Own View, 1978
Our Goal
When Isaac Asimov published his first piece of science fiction in 1939, he wrote for an analog world; a world without transistors or tupperware. There were no atomic bombs or automatic transmissions. We had yet to discover DNA or duct tape. Throughout his life, Asimov bore witness to many of the fictions he and others envisioned becoming reality. But he also knew that we were only getting started.
We live in an era of progress and incomprehensible change. The course of the last couple of centuries demonstrated that innovation can radically reconfigure geopolitics, economics, and daily life in ways that are not always under our control. Needless to say, as progress continues to escalate, technology presents us with enormous promise but also potential perils. The challenge before us is to continue ever upward without losing our humanity.
Toward this end, Asimov’s call for a “science fictional way of thinking” is not a flight of fancy. It is, in part, a recognition that we cannot approach questions of technology and society solely with the present in mind. A mindset that fails to anticipate technological trajectories risks becoming obsolete before any idea can be implemented. Consider the dilemma posed by the internet: early pioneers of cyberspace saw it as a pure conduit of freedom, liberty, and equality. In the words of John Perry Barlow, the internet was a place “more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.” The reality has proven far more complex as the internet has proven a source of liberation for some and a source of oppression for others.
Asimov was right. Change is the dominant factor in society and yesterday’s perception of today almost always proves to be inadequate. At the Foundation for American Innovation, we operationalize that insight by treating science-fictional thinking as a discipline rather than a vibe. To us, science fictional thinking is not daydreaming of alien worlds or lightsabers. It is a process of backcasting from multiple plausible futures to shape today’s policy options. We consider different scenarios to stress-test our assumptions and continuously scan emerging technologies for second-order effects. In short, we take Asimov’s charge to “see the world as it will be” and translate it into concrete strategy so our decisions are resilient to tomorrow’s shocks and expand the frontier for American innovation.
But looking to the future is not sufficient. As Asimov highlights in My Own View and other essays, science fictional thinking requires not only foresight but also hindsight. To him, science fiction is the product of observing the advancement of science and technology and in order to imagine a plethora of futures, as Asimov did, one must have a firm grounding in the past. Technology policy is no different. As a colleague, Robert Bellafiore, has written before, “it is precisely by looking backward that we prepare to move forward, by ‘remembering what had come before’ that we become capable of imagining what may come next.”
Just as the ancient Roman god Janus’ two faces looked both forwards and backwards in order to oversee beginnings, endings, and transitions, we aim to look to both the past and the future. It is only by doing so that we can hope to glean the foresight, imagination, and prudence to meet the challenges of inevitable change.
Our goal, then, is this: to do everything we can to make the future happen sooner.
Our Work
What we do is to try and approach issues of public policy in a science fictional way of thinking. Much of the DC intelligentsia surrounding technology and telecommunications approaches issues beginning with economics, sociology, or common law. These are all useful lenses from which to approach issues of public policy and many of our colleagues and competitors do incredible work from such a vantage point. Where we differ is that we choose to approach issues of public policy through the lens of technology.
It is for this reason that we spend an inordinate amount of our time learning about technology. We are fortunate enough to have built an extensive network of techies and we are not shy about leaning on their expertise. Whether it is educating ourselves about the organization and development of ancient Roman road systems or conducting cutting edge research on the future of quantum computing, our team starts with the tech.
In analyzing technology, we take the approach that tech and telecomm—which are often thought of in policy circles as distinct from one another—are, in fact, inextricably linked. We consider the full tech stack as one. Platforms, cloud hosts, DNS servers, wireless transmitters, cable lines, and submarine cables all work together to bring us into the digital world and policies that are targeted at one piece of this stack have ripple effects throughout the rest. Therefore, it is a crucial part of our work to think beyond just the piece of tech being discussed but to also consider how that piece interacts with all the rest.
While we start with tech, we don’t stop there. Economics, philosophy, common law, and many other fields are crucial to our work. But in starting with tech, we have the advantage of being able to apply social science and law to tech rather than the other way around. But it would be foolish to not use all the tools at our disposal. If you’re curious about where we’re coming from, just take a glance at our Bookshop.
Our Future
The pace of change is not slowing, and the stakes of getting it wrong are rising. In the years ahead, the frontier will be defined as much by software as by the oftentimes invisible infrastructure of compute, connectivity, chips, and standards that determine what is possible, what is profitable, and what is permissible. Those who treat technology as an exogenous force—something that “happens” and then must be managed after the fact—will find themselves forever reacting to the last disruption. Our bet is that the next era of American strength will belong to the institutions that can see the world as it will be and act early.
That is why this Substack exists. It will be our workshop in public. Some posts will be speculative, structured, evidence-based imagining anchored in what engineers are building now. Others will be more historical, because durable policy is rarely born from amnesia.
The throughline for our work is that innovation is not fate. Technological progress can widen the space of human freedom and national flourishing, but only if it is paired with the imagination to anticipate second-order effects and the prudence to build guardrails without smothering the frontier. We are uninterested in navel-gazing nostalgia and equally uninterested in naïve techno-utopianism. We care about the hard middle. We care about institutional design that lets free societies capture the upside of change while keeping the center of gravity human.
The future will be built by people who can see several moves ahead, who can learn from what came before, and who refuse to outsource tomorrow to accident.
What’s in a Name?
The name of this publication, The Ansible, describes the work we are trying to do: communicate quickly across distance—between disciplines, institutions, and futures—without ignoring the fact that distance exists. The word comes to us from the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. In her novels she first introduced the ansible as a device that allows information to be transmitted instantaneously across space. But the ansible is more than just a gadget, it is a philosophy of connection: the right information sent to the right place at the right time to shape what happens next.
Le Guin never treated the ansible as a trick to make plot problems disappear. In her Hainish Cycle novels, she made it the backbone of an interstellar social architecture. Her cosmos is full of worlds too far apart for physical connection, even at lightspeed. Yet these varying worlds are capable of coordination because information can arrive when it is needed. The ansible enables the Ekumen, a federation that persuades instead of conquering. Communication has become a tool for reciprocity. That intuition—connection without domination—animates our work on technology and public policy. We aim to connect the people who build systems with the people who govern them, bring evidence into rooms where decisions are made, and enable pluralism.
The name also clarifies what we mean by taking on Asimov’s call to a “science-fictional way of thinking.” Science fiction at its best is neither prophecy nor mere entertainment; it is a laboratory for stress-testing assumptions. It allows us to ask how today’s architecture behaves under tomorrow’s loads. That is the method we try to bring to questions of networks, platforms, devices, and public policy.
Extending the Metaphor
The ansible metaphor disciplines our practice in several ways. It reminds us that information can move faster than institutions. Statutes do not change overnight, but ideas and incentives can propagate quickly and change behavior long before the ink dries on a bill. Our job is to compress the distance between insight and implementation. Speed does not excuse sloppiness; it demands clarity, because analysis that arrives late or muddled is indistinguishable from silence.
It also warns us against centralization by convenience. Le Guin’s ansible allows governments and technologists to coordinate without homogenizing. That is a design principle we try to honor in technology policy. When we champion interoperability, open standards, and contestable markets, we are not romanticizing chaos; we are acknowledging that a complex, innovative society stays resilient when no single chokepoint can dictate outcomes. Experimentation at the edge, coupled with accountability for power at the core, is how we ought to govern technology without smothering it.
A third lesson concerns tradeoffs. Even an instantaneous link has limits: bandwidth, context, interpretation. Likewise, modern networks are miracles bounded by physics and incentives. Undersea cables can be cut; satellites can be jammed; software can be hacked; supply chains can be poisoned. If policy pretends that constraints do not exist, it will push systems into failure modes. Starting with engineering humility is not technocracy; it is prudence. From that base we can apply economics and align incentives; we can apply law to protect rights and enforce responsibility; we can apply political theory to keep public institutions sovereign.
The Ansible in Practice
What does this metaphor mean for this publication? First, it is a promise about translation. The ansible in Le Guin’s work connects worlds that would otherwise ignore or talk past one another. Our aim is to do the same across the tech stack and the policy stack. We convene builders and policymakers, operators and scholars, civil society and regulators. We try to get deeply technical without losing legibility, and to get philosophically serious without losing purchase on implementation.
Second, it is a promise about scope. The ansible is a communications device, but in Le Guin’s hands its implications span from physics to diplomacy. So, too, our beat ranges from radio access networks to First Amendment doctrine, from datacenter interconnects to export controls, from privacy engineering to administrative law. Posts will vary in form. Some will be deep dives and some will be short opinions. All will seek to synthesize the complexities of technology and public policy into useful and actionable information.
Third, it is a promise about time. The ansible makes it possible for distant actors to coordinate while coordination still matters. In policy, timing decides whether analysis changes outcomes or becomes a tidy footnote. We aim to publish while Congress, agencies, courts, companies, and cities can still use what we write. When the facts change, we will revisit our priors.
The name guards us, too, against a common failure mode in Washington: mistaking rhetoric for reach. Faster-than-light communication does not abolish politics. It gives capable institutions the chance to coordinate and act with less friction and more foresight. That is enough. Our work is to help those institutions—public and private—see around corners, understand constraints, and choose well.
What to Expect
What you can expect here, then, is writing with the builders in mind and the public in view. We will begin with the technology. We will integrate economics, law, and philosophy as tools rather than talismans. We will try to be timely without being faddish, principled without being doctrinaire, and ambitious without being naïve. We will take seriously the way choices at one layer of the stack ripple across the others. We will pay attention to incentive gradients, institutional competence, and constitutional limits. Most of all, we will never pretend that complexity is an excuse for paralysis.
The last reason we chose this moniker is that the ansible refuses the fantasy of omnipotence that sometimes clings to technology. Instant communication in Le Guin’s books never makes disagreement disappear. It never erases culture or preempts moral risk. It simply gives communities a better chance to meet their responsibilities with eyes wide open. That vision keeps us oriented toward the work that matters in tech policy right now: expanding capacity without stifling competition, securing critical infrastructure without freezing innovation, moderating at scale without deputizing private censors, globalizing supply chains while hedging against authoritarian leverage.
Calling this Substack The Ansible is our way of committing to that balance. We want to move the right ideas quickly to the people who can use them. We want to knit together the technical and the civic, the near-term constraint and the long-term horizon. If we do our job, this publication will not just talk about the future; it will help bring the best versions of it into being sooner.
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