About this site

Worldbuilding.Agency is not a newsletter! Rather, it's the research journal of Magrathea Futures AB, a boutique critical and creative foresight consultancy.

(It's managed and written by me, Paul Graham Raven.)

Not a newsletter, but a research journal

After over a decade in academia, I now find myself in the early stages of establishing a commercially viable critical and creative foresight practice. If you're wondering what the hell that means, well—join the club! We might choose to see the meta-project of Worldbuilding.Agency as the generation of an answer—or multiple answers, perhaps—to that very question.

More immediately, Worldbuilding.Agency is going to be an online space where I can think stuff out in public: a space to learn new things, rethink older things, and rephrase the connections between things old and new alike.

I don't want to lose the best part of being an academic, namely the extraordinary privilege to spend a lot of time learning and thinking about things that fascinate me, and sharing the results with the world. At the same time, I have ten or so years worth of academic research on futures and futuring which badly needs translating into more accessible language.

I also don't want to pay big for-profit firms to publish my research in places where it's almost impossible to find. So I'm going to put it here instead, and give you the option of paying me for it directly.

Research and writing is (part of) my job

I believe that there is value to this sort of work in general, and to my work in particular. I hope too that there is a way to make it pay, and this direct-to-the-public approach seems the best option available to me. Which is why I'm going to invite you to take out a paid subscription.

For €5 a month (or €50 a year), plus VAT where appropriate, you'll get to read everything that gets published on this site, and you'll get to know that you're supporting independent futures research that's not beholden to corporate interests or academic fashions.

There's also a €50 monthly (€500 annually) option for the high-rollers, and/or those who have a research budget that they can list such purchases against.

(This upper tier also gets you a free half-day of consulting time, and actually represents a saving on my standard day-rate—which means you get the research journal stuff for free! If you want to know more, please get in touch!)

What to expect?

Once again, this is not a newsletter. The reason I keep saying that is to emphasise—to myself, as much as to you!—the intention to avoid the "Relentless Mill of Content™" business model that is so prevalent right now.

I don't want to feel pressured to produce quantity over quality, and I don't want to feel I'm bombarding you with stuff that's not worth reading. As such, I also intend to avoid the having of "takes", hot or otherwise—though I may well write pieces from time to time that are deflationary of a prevailing take.

(The field of futures has historically been comprised of takes and not much else, and while things have improved a lot in recent years, there's still a whoooooole lot of bullshit to be shovelled out of the stables. Such work is, again, much easier to do if you're not beholden to a big corporation, to advertisers, or to an academia that's increasingly scared of its own shadow.)

What else?

In terms of "content verticals" (ugh, sorry) here's what I have planned:

Weeknotes

A weekly update of what I've been doing, business-wise, posted every Friday afternoon (Central European Standard Time), plus some reflexive stuff on what I think I've learned along the way, plus one must-read clipping from the edges of the internet.

(Honestly, the weeknotes are as much for my own benefit as anyone else's, but it's also a chance to show the world how the sausage gets made.)

Essays

Longer pieces—sometimes stand-alone, sometime in series—where I explore a question or a concept or a theory that I think is relevant to the work of futuring. A big part of this will be asking what it is that we think we're doing when we do futuring, as well as how we do it and why we do it in those particular ways.

(Or, in academic language, there will be a lot of methodological enquiry going on, with a decent serving of epistemological side-salad.)

Interviews

Conversations with people who i think have valuable knowledge and experience to share. My interviewees will not necessarily be futurists or science fiction writers, though I'll certainly be starting with quite a few of both!

(Might as well start from where you're at, right?)

Deep Reads

Synoptic and critical reviews of books, old and new, with relevance to the theory and practice of futuring. As the essays will be to my own work, these deep reads will be a sort of condensation and translation of important yet complex and/or obscure work which I believe merits being more widely known.

I'm particularly interested in translating the works of so-called "new materialist" or "flat ontology" thinkers into more accessible language, though I plan to wander far more widely than that. Suggestions very welcome!

News

Updates on Worldbuilding.Agency itself, and on Magrathea Futures AB.

... and other stuff?

There may be other, harder-to-categorise material as we go along; the above list is not meant to be exhaustive or prescriptive. However, and to reiterate, this will not be a place for hot takes or thort-lord think-bits. Certainly my opinions will be in play here, but only in what I intend to be a professional capacity.

(Those interested in my more personal angles on a wider array of issues are referred to my long-standing personal blog, Velcro City Tourist Board.)

How often?

Weeknotes will be published once a week, as the name suggests.

As I get this site (and the practice that will fuel it) up and running, I'm aiming for one more substantive article every week, every second one of which should be an interview.

(This rate may well increase after a while; given the nature of freelance consulting as a business model, it may also slow off for short periods when I have too much on my plate. This is not a newsletter!)

I intend to send one weekly round-up email every Sunday; essays and interviews and deep-reads will be emailed to those who have access to them. You can follow the whole site via RSS, if that's your bag.

Subscription and access

Occasionally an article will be locked for subscribers only, but I want to make as much material as possible free to access, because my work is for the world.

Those of you who take out a paid subscription should therefore see it less as buying access for themselves, and more as subsidising the free material for those less able to afford it.

(If you really want a full-access subscription and you really can't afford it, get in touch and let me know. We'll work something out.)