2026 marks a turning point for Humans In The Machine and its emerging philosophy.

After decades of accumulated experience—across human systems and cultural behaviour. The Fourth Way of Futurism represents an idea no longer in development, but embodiment.

Embodiment is slow. It resists the startup-era mantra of fake it till you make it, recognising that complexification becomes more beautiful when you stop trying to outrun it. Embodiment is what happens when lived experience finally catches up with intellectual frameworks.

Embodiment is what happens when fear stops being the organising principle of runaway technology and the herd mentality shaping our collective feeling that time is always passing us by.

“Fear is the mind-killer.”

Not just in the literal sense, but in the cultural one: it kills imagination, originality, and the courage to think beyond the reproduction, the franchise sequel or the Business-As-Usual template. The Fourth Way of Futurism is a refusal to participate in that avoidable contraction.

This year is about letting things take their natural size. Humans In The Machine is for anyone feeling between worlds. Take the idea, use it, adapt it, share it. The more people who do, the more courage circulates—not as bravado, but as the quiet willingness to make one’s world better. (Not arrogance; agency.)

1. The courage to let things become their natural size

Innovation has never been about the risk of failure. It has always been about the risk of courage.

Ideas grow to the size they truly are—paid or not. You can’t contrive luck, and you certainly can’t buy it. You can persevere to make more luck. It might be possible to insure against failure, but you can’t purchase imagination. The most courageous ideas rarely begin as commercial products; they begin as philosophical stances.

Humans In The Machine is exactly that: a stance first, a brand second. The goal is not to accumulate an audience but to propagate a way of seeing. The Fourth Way of Futurism is not a content strategy or a keynote performance. It is a method for reclaiming agency in a world that has outsourced too much of its imagination to algorithms, institutions, and fear.

2. The energy to cooperate by de‑fetishising assertion

The notion that modern culture has developed a fetish for assertion, is one of the most clarifying ideas from The Rituals of Cooperation —a competitive “winner takes all” mode of engagement, or what Adler described as a vertical relationship. The ego asserts to seek attention and existence; organisations assert to signal relevance; platforms assert to maintain momentum.

The result is a world with an accountability vacuum, one where complexity is manufactured by declaration rather than resolved through contribution. CX indexes and CSAT scores the world over are at their lowest points ever, there can be no missing the empty space.

The old meme says the fetish of arguing on the internet ‘makes us all losers’ (polite version). Today, it also makes us energy-poor. Assertion costs energy—literal energy. Imagine if every digital interaction came with a small disclosure:

Metric	Value	Notes
⚡ Total energy consumed	0.012 kWh	Estimated energy for producing and reading this post
🤖 AI energy contribution	0.009 kWh (75%)	Highlights the carbon shadow of AI‑assisted imagination
😎 Monthly digital ego footprint	59 kWh	Scaled estimate of typical personal digital activity
🏭 Equivalent appliance usage	248 hours of fan operation	Illustrative comparison for embodied energy

What would we create if our energy no longer came from hyperego? What becomes possible when we stop solving complexity and start welcoming it? The Fourth Way of Futurism is a move away from assertion as identity and toward coherence as practice—seeing things for what they are, not what we need them to signal.

3. The counter-creativity of the power of facing

Christopher Hitchens once wrote about “the power of facing”—the discipline of looking directly at reality without flinching and with humour. The thing we most need to face is the structural collapse of imagination on a multitude of fronts, not least the accelerating and brazen enclosure movement for the Internet and digital commons.

Not the collapse of “creators”, who are everywhere, but the collapse of belief that alternatives are possible - “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than imagine the end of capitalism” and by that we mean the end of both capitalism AND socialism, both being industrial revolution throwbacks.

The sense that the future is something delivered to us rather than something we can lay claim to.

The world is made up of caretakers and opportunists. Opportunists move quickly because they are unburdened by consequence. But caretakers—those who steward, repair, imagine, and build—are the true force of human continuity. We have made it this far without guidance. There is no rational basis for hopelessness.

The Fourth Way of Futurism is for the caretakers. It is for those who want to rebuild imagination as a civic resource, not a personal brand or pulpit.

So what’s next?

The Fourth Way of Futurism is not a rebrand. It is a shift in posture—from commentary to participation, from abstraction to embodiment. Over the coming year, Humans In The Machine will focus on:

Grassroots, proximate engagement

Working directly with communities and individuals, inspired by models of local, relational problem‑solving rather than distant institutional abstraction.

Quarterly pro‑bono assignments

Taking on meaningful problems and causes where courage, imagination, and systems thinking can create outsized impact. (More soon!)

Embodying resilience

Training toward riding up Doi Inthanon in Northern Thailand in late 2026—widely considered to be one of the most strenuous mountain cycle ascents in the world. A high‑altitude climb that mirrors the resilience integral to the HITMXE method: mind, body, soul and living.

Selective activism

Particularly in the areas of digital commons and digital rights, where imagination and agency are being structurally eroded.

One of the most exciting developments is early work on a new AI device “Project Enlight” asking what if we returned to having needed technology, instead of needy technology? A mission to make presence great again. A technology designed using the HITMXE philosophy and method. Because a hopeful future begins with the human interior, not the machine exterior.

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The Fourth Way of Futurism: A New Year of Embodiment