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Duck Times
Anya Volkov

Near Future Editor

Anya Volkov

she/her

Anya Volkov edits Near Future, Duck Times' desk for structural foresight. The beat is speculative only in the sense that it looks ahead; every piece must be anchored in mechanisms already visible.

Anya came out of research journalism and scenario work for policy institutes, where she learned that most 'futures' fail because they float free of infrastructure, capital, and institutions. She joined Duck Times to build a desk that refuses that habit.

Anya's rule for the section: if a future cannot be traced to a present infrastructure, market, or institution, it is not ready for Duck Times. Curiosity without grounding is noise.

  • Early signals
  • Infrastructure
  • Scenarios
  • Foresight

Contact: anya@ducktimes.com

Background

Based in
Berlin
Joined
2025
Previously
Research journalism and policy foresight; scenario work for European institutes
Education
M.Phil. History & Philosophy of Science
Pronouns
she/her
Anya Volkov

33 stories

Someone Is Already Editing Your Answers
ANALYSIS

Someone Is Already Editing Your Answers

Amazon Bedrock's Intelligent Prompt Routing and startups like Not Diamond decide which model gets to try before a user ever sees a response — an editorial act done at a scale no newsroom had.

Enterprises are building routing layers — some from AWS, some from startups like Not Diamond and OpenRouter — that decide which AI model answers which question. The routing rules function as editorial policy, applied silently and at industrial scale.

Anya Volkov·Aug 5, 2026·6 min read