Everything we create is a prototype of something else, something destined for a better form which will be, essentially, a prototype of something else to follow. A prototype of a prototype of a prototype, and so on. 

Fire becomes a campfire, becomes a torch, becomes a lantern, becomes a lightbulb, becomes a laser, etc., each illuminating what we might perceive as the next thing. Glints of the future are there in the process of becoming and this is true for Phano. So here we are at the end of the first quarter-century of the millennium. What comes next?

Why start this website? Last summer, I came down with a case of Covid while traveling. Isolated with little to do I spent the time drawing and experimenting with new web design tools. What you see here just kind of snowballed out of that time to myself. As a writer, this has been a shift in perspective for me to serve as an editor for other writers. Phano received over five hundred submissions before its first issue. In working with our writers to develop their stories I am reminded that there are others who feel like I do, see things as I do. I understand what it means to be vulnerable through art and to be understood through what we make. Being among the first to care for another’s work has been healing for me. To the authors that have contributed to this and forthcoming issues, I’m so excited to share your work. Thank you for your trust.

What do I intend for Phano? Right now, it’s a publication and a website. It uses storytelling as a way to speculate and make sense of the future. I hope that it will move artfully between fiction and nonfiction through the liminal spaces between literary journals and genre fiction zines, between technology mags and strategic foresight blogs and far-horizon whitepapers from think tanks. And what shapes could such a publication sustain? What’s the value of the speculative word nowadays? I have some hunches about reaching beyond selling media or forecasting or pulling rabbits out of hats for deep pockets. 

When it comes to the future, I’m interested in cultivating wonder as a state of mind. Were you ever shown something, perhaps on a screen or a page, to then come away with a new way of seeing? Something resonated with you. You had to sit with it for some time to process before sharing with everyone what you saw on the other side of it. There’s something special about a clear and uncertain mind that has been given ideas from strange frontiers to play with. A mind like that, open to possibilities, is drawn back like an arrow.

I was taught, both as a designer and a writer, to never be precious at the beginning. I like to cross a big X through the first empty page I find in a sketchbook. This way of marking it before putting anything else to paper makes whatever goes there already imperfect. It’s a way of stepping around the pursuit of perfection, a way to dispel any illusions of control over what I think can or will happen and to just get on with it. Perfect is the enemy of good, as they say.

I’d like to mark this page at the beginning of Phano with a big lopsided X. In this way, I admit that I’m fallible. I admit that this is a prototype. Of what? Let’s find out together. The only constant is change. The path to growth comes from making mistakes, so I give myself permission to make mistakes. I give this permission to our collaborators, to our contributors, to our audience, and to you. 

If you are reading this, you have a job to do. You’re responsible for bringing your thoughts and experiences into whatever you find here in Phano with openness, honesty and the humility of uncertainty. Nobody really knows for sure about anything. Not really. Like it or not, you are now a participant in this process of becoming. I hope that you draw back and fly far and true and find something wonderful.