Sérgio Tavares
There’s a moment in every technological cycle when noise starts to saturate the signal. Here’s a way to cut through it.
Let’s start with an example that is alarming everyone: the enormous wave of irrelevant or harmful content created by AI.
AI is now flooding the internet with cheap content. AI is used now for for scams, deepfakes, texts with unverified claims, false information, overall poor quality content (the likely Oxford’s word of the year, slop), and “thought leadership” written by nobody in particular.
There are many ways to think, strategise and exercise foresight in this realm. But I am convinced most tools for scenario building result in very complex descriptive artefacts. Big, detailed scenarios which are only useful for big, multi-track endeavours such as policymaking, governmental studies or long-term strategies of corporate holdings or portfolios.
Most of us have a couple of projects in mind, working with specific roles, and in limited scopes of action. So I thought something sharp, but focused could be more useful.
The Red Zone
I needed a conceptual space to indicate the direction things are going, but not too far into the future. It’s a bit of a paradoxical space: a quick peek into the future, without looking at all potential upcoming transformations everywhere. So I created this small leap that uses metaphorical “5 minutes” to indicate that it’s a very near future of dystopian proportions — a hyper-saturated glimpse of the worse-case scenario, so we can compare and contrast with the present.
In the AI example given above, if the trajectory of exponential AI misuse doesn’t change, it is likely to cause the web to become an echo chamber of its own simulations — that’s a Red Zone. In other words, a Red Zone is a space in which disorganisation (here I use the term entropy) has creeped in and imbalanced the system fundamentally.
I like to place this speculative zone as five minutes into the future. It’s not real and present, not far away into the future, but a worst-case scenario exaggeration of a near-worst future. In a way, this scenario is a crystallisation of a trend — it shows the harmful direction to which things are going, and asks us to imagine the responses.
Adaptive Reversal
But as we know, the market reacts to that when it’s working as it should: users start to voice their dissatisfaction, agents in the market start to move and fulfil the new jobs to be done.
So we will have a momentary equilibrium, where curated and human content stands out. Loyalty for good content producers increases, an aversion to AI slop is established and we have an adaptive reversal of the red zone. Humans fight back. We pay for voice, authorship, friction. “Human-made” becomes the new premium label, Substack the new safe haven. Sounds good, right?
For a while, yes. Soon enough, the imitation game starts again, in a process eroded by a re-entropy state — pseudo-authentic posts, AI that pretends to be self-aware, false biographies of allegedly human curators, unverified claims, unverifiable claims, false academic portals, you name it.
As the counter-movement decays into its own new vulnerabilities, it is fair to assess it as a false equilibrium.
A Canvas for the Half-Life of Ideas
The Red Zone Canvas is a thinking tool for anyone trying to build something that lasts longer than the next hype cycle — designers, founders, writers, policymakers.
Instead of forecasting decades ahead, it compresses foresight into two short jumps:
- Five minutes into the future, where a harmful trend saturates and breaks down;
- and Five minutes more, where the fix itself begins to fray.
These two speculative spaces are Red Zones — a volatile, speculative space where the signal is turned into noise.
While the first Red Zone helps us see the first responses to a saturated world, the second helps us to make more stable decisions in positioning yourself and your strategy.
Of course, we could go indefinitely imagining how harmful agents would creep in the ecosystem and do harm, but those speculations are subject to too much uncertainty (we could recall here the headlights allegory of foresight, in which what is near the headlights is clear, what is further not so much). This this space is called a foreseeable equilibrium, in which we understand it is temporary, but enough to support strategic discussions.
How It Works
- Select a harmful trend that’s reshaping your field.
- Entropy (first five minutes).
- Adaptive Reversal.
- Re-Entropy (five more minutes).
- Position.
Example: AI-generated content overwhelming social platforms, which is a problem for content creators.
Imagine what happens when the trend reaches full spread. Who gets exhausted? What collapses?
Content quality becomes indistinguishable; trust erodes; audiences retreat into private circles.
Identify the natural correction — the human, market or cultural reflex that restores meaning.
Slow, well-researched, verified work regains attention; small creator communities thrive.
Watch how that correction decays once it scales.
Authenticity becomes a branding; everyone claims to be “real”, even AI-generated content.
Decide where you stand — how to act now while designing for the next decay.
Limit AI to supportive roles, verify sources, build transparent provenance.
The result is a map of how entropy and re-entropy play out in your ecosystem — and how to locate your work in the space between.
Why It Matters
Most strategic tools teach us how to chase opportunity. The Red Zone Canvas asks how to outlive it.
In an age where every good idea is instantly replicated, and every counter-culture is monetized within months, resilience means learning to anticipate the moment when your fix becomes the next problem.
It’s not cynicism. It’s temporal awareness — a way of designing with the second half-life of meaning in mind.
The Payoff
When you use the canvas, you start seeing patterns everywhere:
- The sustainability movement turning into greenwashing.
- The wellness boom collapsing into burnout.
- “Authentic” influencer culture staging its own authenticity.
Each of these is a story of entropy, reversal, and re-entropy. And each has a window — brief but powerful — where clarity lives before imitation sets in. That’s the zone to design for.
Download the Red Zone Canvas
Use it to map how harmful trends affect society, anticipate responses, and rise above entropy. Ideal for individual or workshop work.