Aaron Vick's The Forecast extends his ongoing investigation into what human experience resists capture—and what happens when capture occurs anyway.
Where his earlier Transmission trilogy examined the slippage between presence and documentation (The Moment), thought and ownership (Whose Thought Is This), and identity and fixity (The Self), The Forecast turns toward a different temporal horizon: the future. Specifically, the future as territory to be claimed, modeled, and enclosed before it arrives.
The piece presents as a simple interaction. Five multiple-choice questions. Nothing that feels diagnostic:
From these five answers, the system generates a prediction—staged in three revelations. First, an initial forecast. Then, a demonstration of how much was inferred from the first answer alone. Finally, the full prophecy: a detailed claim about who the visitor is becoming, what decisions await them, what patterns they'll recognize too late to escape.
The questions probe temporal orientation, locus of control, identity stability, recent emotional trajectory, and relationship to desire. Together, they form a minimal psychological fingerprint—not enough to know someone, but enough to model them. Enough to generate a prediction that feels true whether or not it is.
What distinguishes prediction from prophecy is not accuracy but authority.
Prophecy admits uncertainty. It speaks in metaphor, leaves room for interpretation, acknowledges that the future is not yet written. Prediction forecloses this openness. It speaks in the language of probability and confidence intervals, presenting its claims not as possibilities but as distributions—as if the future were already determined and the only question were measurement precision.
This is the violence The Forecast makes visible. Not the violence of being watched, but of being known in advance. When a system claims to predict your behavior, it doesn't merely observe—it preempts. It colonizes the future self, replacing the person you might become with a statistical ghost that can be optimized against.
The visitor to The Forecast experiences this colonization directly. They answer five questions. They receive a prediction. And then they must live with the uncertainty: Was I seen or manipulated? Did the system understand me or merely perform understanding well enough to feel true?
This uncertainty is not a bug. It is the condition of living under algorithmic governance. We cannot know whether the systems that predict us are accurate or merely persuasive. And the distinction may no longer matter.
The piece opens with a warning: "You can lie if you want. It won't matter."
This is not bravado. It is a structural claim about how predictive systems operate.
Traditional surveillance requires truth. It wants to know what you actually did, thought, purchased, said. Predictive systems have a different relationship to honesty. They don't need your truth—they need your behavior. And behavior includes lying, evading, performing, resisting. All of these are data. All of these can be modeled.
When the visitor attempts to game The Forecast—answering strategically, trying to confuse the system—they are not escaping prediction. They are providing more information about how they respond to prediction. The system doesn't need them to be sincere. It needs them to be patterned. And resistance is a pattern like any other.
The closing text makes this explicit: "You gave five answers. The system needed fewer. Your resistance was already modeled."
Part of the piece's unsettling power comes from the disproportion between input and output. Five questions—multiple choice, perhaps thirty seconds to answer—yield paragraphs of specific prediction.
This disproportion is not exaggeration. It reflects the actual dynamics of contemporary profiling. A 2013 study demonstrated that Facebook likes alone could predict personality traits, political affiliation, and sexual orientation with startling accuracy. A 2017 analysis showed that smartphone typing patterns could indicate mood disorders. The systems that model us do not need extensive questionnaires. They need traces—behavioral residue from which everything else can be inferred.
The Forecast dramatizes this economy of inference. It shows the visitor how little data is required to generate a confident prediction. And it refuses to reveal whether that confidence is warranted.
The piece unfolds in three acts:
Act One: The Initial Forecast. Based on all five answers, a preliminary prediction. Broad but specific. The visitor is told something about their patterns, their tendencies, their relationship to the future. It feels like being profiled—because it is.
Act Two: The First Answer. The visitor is shown what was inferred from their very first response alone. This is the piece's most disorienting moment. They realize the system didn't need five answers. It barely needed one. The rest was confirmation, triangulation, refinement—but the core model was already built.
Act Three: The Full Prophecy. The complete prediction. A specific claim about decisions the visitor will face, patterns they'll recognize, versions of themselves they're becoming. And then, the source reveal: which answers drove which inferences. The machinery made visible.
This staged structure serves a pedagogical function. It teaches the visitor how little data prediction requires—and how much confidence it nonetheless claims.
Vick's Transmission trilogy argued that certain aspects of human experience structurally resist capture: presence dissolves in documentation, thoughts escape ownership, identity refuses fixity.
The Forecast extends this argument to the future. The future, too, resists capture—but prediction does not merely fail to capture it. Prediction replaces it. The future that would have existed without prediction is foreclosed by the prediction itself.
This is the piece's deepest claim. When systems model your future behavior and then optimize your environment based on those models—showing you certain content, offering certain opportunities, closing certain doors—the future they predicted becomes the only future available. Not because the prediction was accurate, but because it was acted upon.
The visitor to The Forecast cannot know what future they would have had without the prediction. That counterfactual self is already lost. The piece doesn't mourn this loss. It simply makes it visible.
"You can lie if you want. It won't matter."
This is the bargain we have already made with predictive systems, mostly without realizing it. We can attempt to resist, to evade, to confuse—but our resistance is itself data. Our evasion is a pattern. Our confusion is legible.
The Forecast does not offer escape from this condition. It offers awareness—the uncomfortable recognition that our futures are being claimed, modeled, and optimized before we arrive in them.
Whether that awareness changes anything is not the piece's concern.
The prediction has already been made.