SPECULISTA
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catherinedltan.bsky.social
SPECULISTA
@catherinedltan.bsky.social
design-led legal futurist. founder-CEO of Uncommon Future Press, an activistic startup reimagining media x academia through cinematic insurgency.

pioneered law & fringe sovereignties @CambridgeUni.
The Montevideo Convention stipulates only four criteria for statehood. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer out here randomly adding a 5th 🤦🏻‍♀️

(fifth criterion: Israeli consent)
July 30, 2025 at 10:59 PM
Last 5 months at Cambridge Uni. Spending it nurturing fauna and drinking ‘sexy tea’ (for real, it’s called sexy tea — not a code for something!)

Then it’s off to the races, building my activistic startup: a Netflix infrastructure for academia.
July 30, 2025 at 10:06 PM
The world needs integrated intellectuals. Not people who have split lives and split personalities.
Last 5 months at Cambridge Uni. It’s been a wild run: writing, research, teaching, engaging.

But my least favourite part is the disembodiment.

We need less mind-centrism; more making w/ hands.

Less philosophising; more manifesting.

Less paper-writing; more artifact designing.
July 30, 2025 at 10:03 PM
Last 5 months at Cambridge Uni. It’s been a wild run: writing, research, teaching, engaging.

But my least favourite part is the disembodiment.

We need less mind-centrism; more making w/ hands.

Less philosophising; more manifesting.

Less paper-writing; more artifact designing.
July 30, 2025 at 10:02 PM
We need an app where we could rate landlords and property managers.

If Glassdoor is accountability toward companies.

This, for property regimes.
July 30, 2025 at 9:59 PM
It’s a strange thing to be a legal specialist in an era of lawlessness.

Law is supposed to have an inherent binding power; gluing subjects to its substrate.

But we’re witnessing that some subjects just aren’t designed to stick.
July 30, 2025 at 9:57 PM
Storytelling time: I’m building an alternative academic press house to dissolve existing oligopolies.

Last week a deep-tech VC tried to convince me the project was legally unsound. She threw out legal jargon to induce alarm & collapse.

Plot twist: Lady, I’m a legal scholar 🤣

#AcademicSky
May 19, 2025 at 10:26 AM
Academia could have been a hedge against capital’s psychic toll.

Instead, it trained us to internalise its metrics.

#AnotherWorldIsPossible #Metricity
#CognitiveExtraction
May 19, 2025 at 9:48 AM
Just because you don’t get the vision, doesn’t mean there is no vision.

- early career researchers to trad academics

#AcademicSky
December 6, 2024 at 12:41 AM
The world is imploding but here we academics are, producing papers.

What we need to graduate, get promoted, get tenure is papers. (barring design schools)

Circa 2024, there has to be more tangible immediacy in our output. Capstone projects. Policy campaigns. Activism. Institutions.

#AcademicSky
November 21, 2024 at 7:17 PM
An underrated metric of personal power? How your presence alone prompts people to fix themselves.

One mere gaze from you makes them sit up straighter. Even one LinkedIn accept prompts them to finesse their profiles to signal more worth.

When you don’t have to say a word—that’s peak persuasion.
November 19, 2024 at 12:44 AM
Now that this is my last full year at Cambridge, I’m so tempted to be uncouth and start spilling ☕️ on all the drama and hot goss

I am this 🤏🏻 close to spreading mischief and starting some blind items 😈
November 18, 2024 at 7:55 PM
Hi Bluesky 👋

Allow me to intro myself. These days I wear 2 professional hats.

1. Expert based at CambridgeUni, specialising in how futuristic sci-fi inventions alter human civilisation at first principles. From indigenous robots to ice architecture to outer space settlements.

#FutureTech

(1/2)
November 18, 2024 at 7:45 PM