A signal is a fragment of the world that someone has decided means something. For decades, foresight practice has treated signals as raw material. The tools built on that assumption are now meeting a world where the substrate they depend on has been polluted.

In 2014, Crimea jumped two hours ahead to Moscow time in a fraction of a second. In 2021, Texas measured pregnancy in hours. Watching futures films through the heat, I could hear my neighbors discussing being express kidnapped in Mexico: we live intertwined with more scale than we can grasp.