What happens when the prediction fails, but the system marches on as if it hadn’t? When the algorithm forgets what the body remembers? When an entire epistemic infrastructure shifts beneath your feet, and you’re told to be grateful for the newfound “agility”?
Lost Predictions is not a cry for the past. It is not a polemic against machines. It is not even, really, a story about publishing. It is a crack in the fantasy of smooth futures. A novella that stages the slow implosion of one man’s academic life—his marriage, his methods, his metrics—while implicating us all in the devouring logic of optimisation. Authored by Fiona Murphy, Eva van Roekel Cordiviola and an AI named ChatGPT, the work collapses the divide between critique and complicity, satire and structure.
We offer this novella not as a diagnosis, not even as an argument, but as a provocation. It does not ask: do you agree? It asks: where does it hurt? Where does it itch? What forms of knowing are dissolving in your hands? What quiet refusals are you making, daily, just to survive in a system where velocity without memory prevails?
Writing with AI is itself part of the problem and part of the play. It’s a critique of automation through collaboration with it. A tongue-in-cheek experiment in co-authorship that is also a serious inquiry into authorship, ethics and control. It is a paradox we’re sitting with: using the tool that threatens to erase us to write ourselves back in—glitchy, fallible, human. What does it mean to write with and against at the same time? We don’t claim to resolve this tension. We write in it.
We are inviting you—not your citation metrics, not your conference paper formatted in Helvetica 12—to respond. Through text, sound, image, code, gesture, puppet show, PowerPoint nightmare, or speculative review. Send us your weird, your humour, your angry, your mourning. Rewrite the ending. Animate the middle. Respond completely anew, as you wish. Do it anonymously or under your real name. Do it messily. Do it with love. Or don’t love it at all—just let it provoke something. Because in the echo chamber of “innovation,” we need stories that rupture. We need aesthetic disruptions that don’t solve but unsettle.
On the Public Anthropologist site, we will be gathering these responses under the banner: What Was Lost, What Still Refuses.
This is not a special issue. It is not a curated forum. It is an open door. And later, this door becomes a space. The novella and your response ecology will be installed as a multimodal, living syllabus—a site of shared breakdown and speculative pedagogy in a number of conference sites (maybe even return to Berlin, who knows?). A place where publishing is no longer submission, but interruption. A place to gather the fragments and refuse the smooth. Because refusal, too, is a form of relation. And sometimes the most honest response is to leave the page unfinished, and let others pick up the thread.
—FM, EvRC, & the ghost in the machine.
Please send your responses to antonio.delauri@cmi.no.