In Between Worlds

I am everything, for I am nothing! I am a concept...of concepts! Life and death...good and evil...reality and illusion...all these thingsdo I know and affect...but never do they touch me!

—In-Betweener

Earlier this year, I described my role as a futurist as that of an “In-Betweener”: someone who operates between worlds. I’ve consciously taken that position for nearly two decades, from my earliest writing in the noughties through to System & Self and Me:chine today. This issue explores what that means in practice, and why the in-between matters so much to how we think about the future.

They say that once something is digitised, it can also disappear. The web feels permanent, because everything seems to be stored somewhere, but it's surprisingly fragile. So maybe I shouldn't have been surprised when one of my earliest pieces of writing seemed to have vanished, along with lots of other digital pages - four in ten according to a Pew Research report.

Back in 2009, I had a blog on Google's Blogger platform called Together-In-Between.

Blogger is still around I think, but my little corner of the early web had long since fallen out of view. I remembered the name. I remembered, roughly, what I'd written. So I went looking on the Wayback Machine.

And there it was.

Together-In-Between.

Monday, 23 February 2009. The header was still there. My old photograph was still there. Even the list of blogs I used to follow was still there.

And there was the post I remembered: Heroes & Superheroes.

One of my favourite comic-book characters has always been Marvel's rather strange In-Betweener, an entity who exists between opposing cosmic forces, Order and Chaos, and whose very appearance is split between black and white.

And I'd written about him.

I'd described him as emblematic of "the inbetweenness of things." One identity, then another. Someone capable of moving across boundaries that other people treated as fixed. I'd ended the piece with a line I had completely forgotten writing:

"That's the magic of being an inbetweener."

Even then, I wasn't really interested in the character for his powers. I was interested in his position. The aspiration was to be able to stand between worlds without being wholly claimed by either one, and to see something from there that wasn't visible from the edges.

Seventeen years later, I'm still writing about the same thing.

Not the Marvel character particularly, though I do mention him in a recent interview (below).

I consider myself an in-betweener: the perspective you get when you're not entirely captured by either side of a distinction. I was born in the Midlands so you know what I mean…not North but not South, not either yet both. The capacity to hold two apparently contradictory positions long enough to see what's actually happening between them.

And, increasingly, I sense that the world itself is becoming more in-betweener-ish, or might that be in-betweener-y..

What I mean by the in-between is not simply a transitional space like a corridor you pass through on the way from one settled state to another - I don’t mean liminality. I mean as a relational space in its own right: the place where two things meet, act upon one another and, in doing so, become something they could not have become independently. To be an In-Betweener, then, is not to be stranded between positions.

It is to take the relationship itself as your vantage point.

In fact, when brandLingual recently titled our conversation Inbetween Worlds, it felt less like a new description of my work than an old one coming back into view.

Perhaps the clearest expression of this in my recent work is hiding in a punctuation mark. In The Future of You: Five Years On — From Machine-Readable to Me:chine:

“This is where Me:chine begins. Not with the machine, but with the space between. The colon in Me:chine matters. It separates and it connects at the same time.
Me on one side. Machine on the other.
Neither collapsed into the other.
Neither held apart completely.
It marks a relationship rather than a destination. Me:chine does not describe the human dissolving into technology. Nor does it defend some pure, pre-technological self against contamination. There was never a pure self to defend. We have always been made through tools, language, institutions and relationships.”

That is the formulation from the book itself. The-Future-of-You-Five-Years-On.

That colon has become a kind of shorthand for the position I was groping toward all those years ago.

It holds two things apart while connecting them. It preserves the distinction without pretending the two sides are independent. And it opens up a space where something else can happen: the between.

This is also why I've always been a little suspicious of arguments that immediately demand you pick a side.

AI optimist or AI pessimist?

Acceleration or deceleration?

Human creativity or machine creativity?

Centralisation or decentralisation?

The framing itself can stop us from seeing what's actually emerging. Because sometimes the most useful position is neither compromise nor neutrality but rather a third position, one from which you can examine the relationship between the first two.

That, to me, is the In-Betweener position.

And without really planning it, it's become the organising logic behind all of my work.

Take System & Self.

At first glance, the name suggests two things: the system over here, the self over there. But System & Self was never really designed to study either in isolation. The real subject is the ampersand. What happens between the systems that shape us and the selves living inside them?

In some ways, the ampersand does the same work as the colon. It separates while it connects. It makes the relationship visible.

Systems organise possibility. Technologies, institutions, infrastructures, markets, norms, algorithms - all of them construct environments in which human beings perceive, decide and act. But the self is not simply an output of those systems. People interpret them. Adapt to them. Resist them. Appropriate them. Sometimes rewrite them altogether. Which is why the central line across all of my work has become:

Every future is written between the system and the self.

Neither side writes it alone. This became clearer to me once I turned System & Self into a deck of cards. There are System cards and Self cards, but the interesting thing never happens inside either pile - it happens when you put two cards together.

A force in the external world meets something in the interior world.

Addressability x agency.

Exposure x memory.

Anticipation x Intention.

Suddenly the pairing generates a question that neither card contained on its own. The meaning lives between them. The cards, I've come to realise, are a rather literal technology for thinking like an In-Betweener.

And this matters, because the technological environment itself is producing more and more states that don't fit neatly into the old categories.

Look at humanoid robotics. The International Federation of Robotics has just begun counting humanoids as a distinct category in its industry statistics, estimating that around 7,000 were sold globally in 2025 for industrial and professional-service applications. That's still tiny next to the conventional industrial robotics market, and many are being bought for research rather than ordinary work. But the definition itself is telling: a humanoid is designed to resemble us closely enough to operate autonomously in environments built for humans.

For most of the digital era, we adapted ourselves to machines. We learned their interfaces. Sat in front of their screens. Translated our identities into usernames, profiles, fields, passwords. Converted our movements and behaviours into things computational systems could recognise.

Now something is starting to move in the opposite direction: the machine is adapting itself to our environment. Software is acquiring sight, spatial awareness, dexterity, movement, memory, voices, bodies. The machine is crossing into the human world.

At exactly the same moment, the human is travelling toward the machine.

More and more of us becomes measurable, classifiable, predictable, reproducible. Faces become templates. Behaviour becomes data. Preferences become probabilities.

So what, exactly, are we looking at? Humans becoming machines? Machines becoming human? Neither description is quite right.

Something is happening between them.

The same shift is already under way inside institutions. AI agents are beginning to undertake tasks rather than simply answering questions, and researchers are openly imagining systems in which humans and agents coexist, collaborate, and divide labour between themselves. Anthropic, for instance, has described the prospect of some institutions becoming explicitly human-AI hybrids, alongside others where agents increasingly interact with one another.

Again, the interesting question isn't simply which side ‘wins’. It's what kind of organisation emerges in the middle? What happens to responsibility when an action belongs partly to a human and partly to an autonomous system? What happens to authorship? To expertise? What happens to agency, when the environment around us begins not merely responding to us, but anticipating us?

These are In-Betweener questions.

And they're the questions, and the posture, that eventually led me to Me:chine.

Me:chine is sometimes read as though it's primarily about machines. It isn't.

Nor is it an argument that human beings are becoming machines.

The colon matters. Me : chine.

The colon creates a gap - a meeting place, the territory between the self and the systems that can increasingly model it.

I describe one side of this encounter as the machinable self: everything about a person that can be captured, quantified, classified, predicted, simulated or synthesised.

But that immediately generates its counterpart:

What about the parts of human experience that resist complete machinability?

And yet, once again, I'm not really interested in declaring one side superior. Machinable or unmachinable. System or self. Human or machine. Those forced choices miss the point.

Me:chine exists between them.

Not a war between man and machine, but a meeting of selves.

And perhaps that's why the idea has always felt so natural to me. I didn't suddenly become interested in the space between humans and machines because generative AI arrived. I've been deliberately exploring the space between things for nearly two decades.

Together-In-Between named the territory in 2009.

The In-Betweener gave me a position from which to see it.

System & Self gave me a method for investigating it.

Me:chine names the condition in which that territory increasingly matters.

There's another reason this matters now. The institutions of the twentieth century trained us to think in categories: inside or outside, employee or employer, producer or consumer, public or private, human or machine. But networked systems do something peculiar to categories. They connect things that used to be separate. They layer new structures across old ones. They create states in which something can be simultaneously here and elsewhere, individual and collective, physical and digital. And AI accelerates that ambiguity.

Perhaps our task isn't always to eliminate it. Perhaps we need to get better at inhabiting it.

That doesn't mean refusing to make decisions, or pretending distinctions no longer matter. The In-Betweener is useful precisely because they can see the distinction, they simply refuse to believe that reality ends at its boundary.

In the piece I wrote in 2009, I called that "the magic of being an inbetweener."

I think I understand that magic a little better now.

The in-between gives you perspective. It makes relationships visible. It lets you notice the system from the standpoint of the self, and the self from the standpoint of the system. It reveals things that disappear the moment we plant our feet too firmly on one side.

And increasingly, it's where new forms are being made: new kinds of work, new kinds of organisation, new kinds of identity, new relationships between humans and machines, new futures, even new kinds of selves.

Seventeen years after Together-In-Between, the terminology has changed considerably.

But I haven't. I'm still asking:

What can we see from in-between worlds that we cannot see from either one alone?

That's still the territory I want to explore.

And that, ultimately, is what Me:chine is about.

A note on lineage

For anyone interested in how this idea has developed over time:

2009 — Together-In-Between
My early Blogger site, where I wrote about “the inbetweenness of things” and “being an inbetweener.”

2021 — The Future of You
I argued that twenty-first-century identity would be neither fixed nor fragmented but “something in between”, and called the resulting adaptive, continuous identity the polymorphic self.

2025 — Me:chine
I wrote explicitly about “the in-between” as the space in which human agency returns to itself, and about Me:chine as a third position between machinable and unmachinable selves.

2025 — System & Self
The relationship itself became the method: Every future is written between the system and the self.

2026 — Inbetween Worlds
In my brandLingual interview, I described the futurist as an In-Betweener and talked about the value of an In-Betweener mindset.

2026 — The Future of You: Five Years On
I described Me:chine as beginning “not with the machine, but with the space between,” with the colon both separating and connecting Me and Machine.

The wording has evolved. The territory has not.