think local, act global : an interview with Andrew Dana Hudson (part 2)

Welcome back to Worldbuilding Agency, for the second part of my interview with OG solarpunk and creative foresight practitioner Andrew Dana Hudson.

(If you missed the first part, no sweat, it's still there.)

In this conversation, Andrew fills me in on a bit of British labour history that's a little older than I am, before we turn to a more general examination of the failure of the current mode of production in the context of climate change. In the middle, meanwhile, you'll find a very substantial exchange on worldbuilding, which gives way to Andrew's take on the rehabilitation of the utopian impulse.

The final section actually came after we thought we'd finished the interview, and was prompted by my frustrations with the platform I was using to make the recording—and I hope you'll agree that, sometimes, digging out the old “where's my jetpack?” joke can result in an interesting discussion!

Enjoy.

PGR: We Brits have a terrible and undeserved cliche about Americans not knowing any history, but last time we met in person [in the summer of 2023] you filled me in on a bit of British labor history that I had absolutely never heard of, and I’d like you to tell us a little bit about it now.

ADH: So I believe it was 1976, and in the UK there was the energy shock and economic downturn. There was a company called Lucas Aerospace, who mostly made weapons of war for the British government, and they announced some plant closures, laying off all these workers and putting them out on the dole. And the workers came back and said “we don’t want to be on the dole, we want to have jobs that are socially useful.” It was kind of their rallying cry: “we demand socially useful work”.

And so they go to their MP and he’s like, well, put together a plan and we’ll see what we can do. So they put together this plan of how they could retrofit the factory, apply all the knowledge of the people on the shop floor and the engineers, and reconfigure the factory to make stuff that was useful and good; they even came up with the business angle.

But they wanted to turn this plant that was making weapons of war to making heat pumps, wind turbines, and hybrid cars—and this is in 1976! And in the end, their plan was rejected, the plants were closed, they were all laid off. But it was really, I think, a fascinating moment at the opening of the maw—you know, the defeat of labour, the decoupling of productivity and wages, of technology and and prosperity.

And they were in fact being futuristic—because now here we are, fifty years later, and the things that we are definitely trying to figure out how to build more of as fast as we can are electric cars, wind turbines, and heat pumps. And they wanted to build these things because, you know, British grandmothers were freezing to death in their homes, and they’re like “you know, we could build machines that would alleviate this”, and they were told “no”—they were told no by capital and the government and the company. But that for me is a really interesting example of proletarian shop-floor ingenuity, of the people who are the most futuristic in the room not being the researchers and the CEOs and the venture capitalists, but being the people who are actually working on the shop floor.

And so I’ve woven this into a larger critique that I’ve been working on and fleshing out in the background since we talked. The thrust of it is that when you opened the maw in 1973, what you essentially did was create a situation where most workers, wage earners, had no incentive as a class to be a part of the technological development process. They are on the floor of factories making the actual products, but if they come up with a more efficient way to do things—if they come up with a product that is better for customers or a more efficient production process—that is not necessarily going to feed into their overall material conditions, right? If anything, maybe one person will get promoted, but everyone else is going to be made more precarious by that shift.

Whereas before that, I think, there was very much a sense of getting a strong share of the profits: because we made really strong contracts, because we have strong unions, if we can make better products, then we can make more money for ourselves as workers! And that created an incentive to be innovative at every rung of the production process… but it just sort of went away. And instead, innovation got professionalized, it got sort of shifted over to be the domain of a professional class that served an increasingly narrow and disconnected segment of capital—first serving the interests of big companies, but eventually serving the interests of individual venture capitalist guys who were there looking for apps to fund that just sort of tickled their whims, right? They are completely without any kind meaningful needs any more… so we just got a whole era of app-making that seemed super disconnected from the needs of actual people.

PGR: I forget who said it first, but the mid- to late-Twentyteens was basically these incredibly wealthy guys getting apps invented to do all the stuff that their mother used to do. Which reminds me of another thing: someone recently wrote a new biography of Adam Smith, and it turns out that, you know, all that stuff about the invisible hand? He wrote all that while living at home with his mother. So it’s like Adam Smith’s infamous invisible hand was literally his mum.

And that explains such a lot about so much internet discourse, I think—like, as well as a professionalization of innovation, there’s a growth of a kind of court jester class, which has led us to this moment where you have guys like Mark Andreessen out there being all “tech is so great, why are people being negative about technology? It’s going to fix everything!”

And even that has a kind of “I think she doth protest too much” kind of vibe to it—like oh, everyone’s realizing that this is not working, right? And even Peter Thiel, one of the most sinister men on the planet—aspiring vampire Peter Thiel! Even he said “we were promised flying cars”…

ADH: “But we got 140 characters”, right?

PGR: Yes, and also “capitalism is not compatible with democracy”. Something to that effect, or possibly even more blunt.

ADH: That even someone in his position is disappointed at the sort of technological place that we ended up in thanks to this set of economic incentives is, I think, really telling.

And in the meantime, our clothes have gotten worse, our food has gotten worse in many ways, the quality of many of the products that we use on a daily basis has diminished, and a lot of our infrastructure has gotten a lot more fragile. Technology is supposed to make everything better all at once, but are constructed worse, and this is something that we use every day. There’s a clothing commentator I like, and they said that we live in the era of mids: it’s not even that we have access to cheaper clothes than we used to, it’s like the price thing has balanced out and now we just have worse stuff for the same price.

So, this is kind of where I’m at, right? If you want to actually make technology a driver of exciting, optimistic futures, this is what you have to change. Earlier you said I was more optimistic than you, and I don’t know if I entirely think that’s true; I feel like my project is a little less critiquing and a little more being like, well, if you really were going to do it, here’s what it might look like. And I think we need both.

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PGR: One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you early on is that both of us really came to futuring through writing fiction first. And therefore I suspect that you recognize commonalities—that something similar goes on in both of those things.

There’s been a sort of Cambrian explosion of methods in futuring, right? There are lots of new—well, maybe not so new, lots of revived ways of doing futures; lots of people making, exploring, critiquing futures. And that’s great—I think that’s a really super thing. Ten years ago, when I started my PhD, futures studies was still a very staid scene, and I think it still is, but the landscape has changed a lot and that’s a great thing.

But it feels to me that while there’s a lot of people doing futures in all these different ways, they’re really struggling to talk to each other and identify useful commonalities, not necessarily in method. I’m trying to not get too theoretical here, but at the methodological level… so, look, method is what you actually do, but methodology is about asking “ok, hang on, why do we do that? And what is it that we’re trying to do when we do that?”

My interest in worldbuilding is that it’s a concept that we can use to get someone who does futuring through that real hands-on material design fiction approach, someone who makes prototypes that you can pick up in your hand, to recognise what their practice shares with what we do as science fiction writers, and to recognise what both of those practices share with the work of people like the integrated assessment modellers at PBL in the Netherlands, the hardcore quantitative policy-facing futures stuff.

All of these different people are building worlds, as far as I’m concerned. And in truth, that argument for a common thread is the easy bit! But it can be very, very hard to get a bunch of different sorts of futures people in the same room and say, okay, how can we work together? Because everyone’s like, “well, that would be great, but I’m not sure how”. So I’m really interested in what this methodological concept looks like to other people.

It would be great if I could just kind of achieve my own satisfactory summation of what I think it is, and then just tell everyone and have them adopt it! But that’s not going to happen—and there’s no reason it should, either. So what I’m really interested in doing is finding out from other people who I think are doing something similar and I think would recognize at least the space I’m pointing at when I say it’s in there.

And this, after that very long introduction, is your cue: how would you define worldbuilding, if it’s a term you recognize as having any use to anything you do? Is it a thing you do?

ADH: People always talk about worldbuilding and I don’t really feel like that’s what I do. I pick the details to serve the story I’m trying to tell, right? I’m trying to tell a story, and the idea that I’m gonna sort of map out every single place that exists in this world, even if my characters don’t go there… nah.

Now, [Kim] Stan[ley Robinson] tends to tell very planetary-scale stories; he writes books that show us a broad swath of what is going on, and I think he’s kind of having it and eating it there. And for stories that take less of a satellite’s-eye view of the situation, I think it becomes much more relevant whether or not you fill out the map.

What I think is the core activity of worldbuilding is saying “okay, my story isn’t about these things, and my characters aren’t going here, we’re not going to do anything with any of this... but it’s still important that I have a broadly conceived world that extends beyond the fog of war that my characters are pushing around in”. Sometimes that takes the form of literal map-making, but sometimes it also takes doing the equivalent of asking “where do hobbits get their pipeweed?” What’s with the plantations where this is being grown and harvested, how is it sold and transported and toasted? Or is it all just, like, in their back garden? What is the movement of these commodities? Do they pass through only the places that we see in Lord of the Rings, or do they pass through all the places on the map that are there in the lore, but not shown in the book?

The more you ask these questions during the creative process, the more opportunities you get to say okay, I’m going to clearly state that the pipeweed comes from up the river, from the lowlands, where this other type of people sells it, and there’s a vigorous exchange of goods that has been going on for centuries... or maybe this is new, part of a brushing-up of cultures that happened fairly recently. These are the kinds of questions that I think have to become part of this worldbuilding process—though it’s not limited to trade and commodities, that’s just an easy way to get into it, into the sense of creating a world that is just as worldly and planetary as our own.

I remember in a book that I read as a young child, a middle-grade book or maybe earlier, a kid meets some aliens and one of the aliens is describing how he misses his home in the swamps and the kid’s like “oh, do you come from a swamp planet?” And the alien replies “do you come from a forest planet, just because you happen to live in a place that has some forest?” So being able to have my character go through the dark forest, great—but presumably there are other biomes available, and other people might live in those and have built their lives around their environmental conditions.

I think those are kind of the questions you start to get into when you worldbuild. And for me, when I think of worldbuilding, I do tend to think first of secondary worlds, which are more often the domain of fantasy writers. Sure, science fiction will do this by putting its secondary worlds in space, or in a kind of “long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away” set-up, or several galactic empires deeper down the line from our present. But this question of doing worldbuilding, but doing it on our world... what this opens up for us is the chance to take the relevant questions and then try to acknowledge that this question is going to be reshaped across a wide variety of social, political, environmental, economic and cultural contexts.

So if your central question is “what if I invent this new gadget” or “what if AI” or “what if climate repair”, that’s your science-fictional prompt, and you could pick a setting, pick a character, and explore that idea without ever leaving that fictional town, right? But you can also incorporate into your creative process the idea of saying okay, there’s a whole world out there, what do they do with this stuff? How’s it different in Canada, how’s it different in Mexico? How’s it different in Antarctica and Australia and China? Is this “what if” only applicable to some people, or will the street find its own uses for things... and not just my street, but the streets all over the planet, some of which are going to be dirt roads, some of which are going to be high speed trains, and so on.

PGR: You’re trying to explore lots of diverse lifeways, to borrow a favorite phrase of the Anna Tsing crowd.

ADH: Right. That to me is where worldbuilding and futuring sort of merge, and I think it’s really cool and a good thing to point out, like you’re doing, because we do need to be thinking more planetary, right? We need to be engaging our imagination at the level of both the local particular and the planetary-global systemic, because increasingly we are all subject to global systems as much as we are subject to local systems. And I think that that is kind of a new condition for a lot of people: to understand that the thing that is making my weather worse is not just weather. The factory down the street—we can close that factory and my air quality will improve, but my weather will keep getting worse because now there are ten factories on the other side of the planet. That is, I think, a new one for human beings… so the more we can exercise this capacity, see beyond our own fog of war, see our local problems in a planetary context, the better.

The classic saying is “think global, act local”, with regard to what’s happening to the planet: see the big conflict, and take that fight to your own little locale. I think that’s a good strategy, but I think we also sort of need to do the reverse: we need to think local and act global. We need to see the climate impacts, the economic impacts, on our communities, on our local ecosystems, bring that knowledge and care to fights at the COPs, to fights for treaties and demands to these entities that act on a planetary scale, like governments and corporations.

But to kinda come full circle on this, I think I’d say that the worldbuilding that people in my sort of circles have tried to take up in recent years has been this kind of utopian variety. We’re not just building “what-ifs”, but trying also to ask “what should, what could?” I think this is an interesting activity to engage in—sort of going back a little bit on a debate that I think was settled for a long time on the left. Like, Marx very clearly made the argument, you took on the utopian socialists and said, no, no, no: you can’t get a better society by designing it, you’ve got to fight for it! The utopian project will emerge out of the political project that advances the interests of the working class, you know, that sort of stuff, which established a fixation on the social planning side, on the get-in-the-trenches side... and I still think that the larger part of that is correct.

But I think now we need some of this utopian thinking to help us frame some of the choices that we need to collectively make about where we’re going, and how we want to live when we get there. I mean, the energy transition is trying, deliberately and with care, to do stuff that has happened multiple times over all on its own, just through the power of markets and capital and infrastructure needs and deals being made. I think what’s different is now is a sense that we have to do this not because of technological opportunity exactly, and not because of economic pressure exactly, but for this other kind of reason... and also we want to do it in a way that is deliberate and thoughtful, which has not been the case in these previous transitions.

And that requires, I think, some amount of asking these normative questions about what kind of world you want to live in. And it’s not just what kind of community you want to live in, not just “do you want to live in a big town or a small town?”, but more that we now know that whatever the size of your town, whatever the dynamics of the community around you, it’s all ensconced in global systems. So we can’t just design cities and communities—we have to design whole worlds. Globalization has gone far enough that we now need to kind of revisit Marx’s position on that, and try to bring not necessarily the type of thinking that the old utopian socialists were doing, but a new sort of utopian thought.

PGR: This reminds me of the distinction between the three stages of utopia as utopian theorists talk about it. The classical utopia, which is Thomas More’s, says okay, our society’s broken, so we’ll go somewhere where there’s nothing—well, maybe there’s some people there already, but we’ll conveniently forget about them—and we’ll write a new constitution and that will fix everything.

That’s followed much later by the technological utopia, which emerges late C19th, and it’s the hand in the science fiction glove puppet, if you like: that notion of okay, we understand that the perfect society is unachievable by constitutional means, but nonetheless societal betterment can still be achieved by technological means! And that’s accompanied by a deep and unspoken suspicion of the political dimension; it’s very much an engineer’s idea of utopia.

And finally there’s the critical utopia, the thing that Tom Moylan famously said was being done by Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delany and others in the 1970s. With apologies for basically quoting myself, the point with the critical utopia as literature is to portray the utopian project in it in the process of its inevitable failure—because what you’re saying is okay, we understand that we can’t just build a blueprint constitution and expect it to work, and you can’t just turn it over to machines and expect that’ll fix it all. But at the same time, we still have to be able to believe that things could at least be better, even if far from perfect, and that we can try to make it better... and I going back to what you were saying earlier, that’s the rocket we’re missing, right?

The purely technological rocket stage got us to where we are, but it can’t get us any further. And the the fuel of that rocket was, to go back to the Lucas plan, they burnt up that kind of proletarian possibility of being able to imagine betterment for themselves rather than have it passed down. I don’t know...

ADH: I like that description of the critical utopia as a utopia in its inevitable process of failure. And I wonder if maybe... I do kind of feel like there’s something slightly different happening? Call it “dystopia in its inevitable process of failure”, a sort of ceasing to become permanently dystopian… because we have to start from this point of crisis, and walk our way towards something new. I think it’s somewhat different, and it’s as much a response to dystopian fiction as it is a response to previous generations of utopian fiction, right? Because that is what we had in the immediate era before our current neo-utopian moment that solarpunk is a part of: we had a lot of grim, dark, dystopian, apocalyptic mass media.

A large number of people, including me, were like you know, these are important warnings, but also this is demoralizing, and I want to talk somewhat about ways in which my life could actually get better through deliberate choices that are not just about my own accumulation. And that’s a proletarian project, because the bourgeois cultural project is always about how you balance that with other sort of moral, personal, familial priorities, but the proletarian project I think is more “I am a cog in the machine, so let’s talk about the machine.”

PGR: There’s a sense that—particularly in the last five years, but probably over the last twenty five—[there were] an awful lot of people who never really thought they were one of those cogs in the machine, but it appears I actually am! This is a very, very bastard reading of Marx, but the bourgeoisie is kind of an illusion, right? Unless you are actually a capitalist, we’re all really working class: we all have to work to live. But the sense that you can convince yourself—you know, the bourgeois are those who have been convinced that they are not… and the sense that the rising sea level is sort of creeping up that ladder of class, and all of a sudden people are like “oh, I shouldn’t have wet feet! Only proletarians have wet feet!” They may not be willing to admit it yet, but a lot of people are realizing that actually they’re in the lower decks, not in the escape vessels.

ADH: For the many not the few, right? I think the idea that inequality is metastasizing, metastasizing so much that the people who were middle class in the way of having mixed allegiances between proletarian and bourgeoisie, they now find themselves all kind of lumped together with those below them—I think that idea is mostly but not entirely right.

America still has a very strong… like, they’re not capitalists, but they are kind of the American gentry, and they’ve got it good enough, but they’re also able to maintain their position by kicking people off the ladder below them. The percentages of these different groups—middle class, gentry, culturally bourgeois, actual capitalist, plutocrat, you know—are shifting more and more, that part of the spectrum is condensing. More people are precarious—or, to the extent that they are not precarious, they’re not precarious because the government gave them $1,400 one time.

I mean, that was crazy shock to American poverty that our lawmakers have been working to undo, in order to get us back to a sort of recognizable level of malleable, precarious, impoverished labor force. But it’s like trying to convince people that you can’t do that magic trick after all—it’s like, “no, no, no, it only works once!” Yeah, but you just did it; you just gave us money and it worked. “Ah, yeah—well,we can’t do that again.”

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PGR: This is the zipless future, where we can all talk to each other on every side of the world... but, you know, you still have to spend fifteen minutes saying “is your mic okay? Shall I turn something off here? Maybe you should try the other…” [laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah.I just want my fucking jetpack, man. That’s all I want. It’s not much to ask—just one jetpack. Doesn’t even have to be a very good one! I’ll just, I’ll accept any...

ADH: No matter how lethal. Though that water-based one might not be so bad?

PGR: A jetpack’s one of those things where it’s like, oh yeah, it’d be great to have one of them—but then when you really think about it, it’d be great for an afternoon. That’s the thing, no one needs their own jet pack, but we need our socially-provided jet packs. [laughs] I mean, we’ve gone full political economy. Let’s go all the way! Socially provided state-regulated jetpacks for public transport use only!

ADH: So, I recently went to Vegas, in part as a research trip, in part for fun, in part to just sort of stare at American capitalism and its most ridiculous face. And we went to see the sphere. Are you aware of the Sphere?

PGR: I am aware of it.

ADH: The sphere is very wild. Inside there’s kind of cool auditorium—not that much different from the omnimax-type auditoriums that I think I remember going to when I was very young. And it’s an experience, you know; they require a special camera to get the footage, and the footage was very nice, and the seats kind of jolted and they could blow air in your face. It was a very good experience!

But in the interstitial area, where you’re sort of inside the sphere, but you’re not yet in the auditorium, they had a little mini museum of the future: exhibits with little signs there saying like “this will allow us to live longer, maybe even forever; what will that mean?” It’s asking these sort of future-thinking questions—but in a much less thoughtful way than even the Museum of the Future that I visited in Dubai. But they had this—have you ever seen the fan-based hologram thing, where they have a bunch of whirring fan blades, and a thing that projects on them to create the illusion of a three dimensional hologram?

PGR: Yeah, I know the ones.

ADH: So I’ve just been thinking the last couple of days about how holograms are a science-fictional form of 3D television. Like, what if you could just, boop, make an image appear not on a screen, but in three dimensions! Which, if you really think about it, does not make sense—any sense. And yet we have worked so hard to find ways to mimic this idea that I’m not even sure we ever really needed or wanted... you know, it looks cool, but it’s only useful getting an observer to think “huh, that’s kind of like a hologram”.

This is a very round-about way to say: it’s just interesting to me that we have these fictional ideas, and sometimes, in order to get that future that has jetpacks, we don’t invent actual jetpacks, we invent water-jets. We want holograms, but we can’t get holograms, so we invent fan-projection hologram simulations... and there’s a lot of ingenuity that goes into that stuff. But it always kind of makes me feel like this was never the thing that we were supposed to get excited for anyway, right?

PGR: Yeah—it’s kind of the flip side of “in your hurry to realize the fact that you could, you didn’t stop to ask whether you should”. You know, chasing a thing for so long that when you finally get there, you’re like “oh, um, okay? I guess we’ve done that now.”

The problem with Silicon Valley in particular, as we were saying earlier, is you’ve got all these guys who were raised on science fiction, but I’m fairly safe in saying that they didn’t understand it in the same way that I did. When Musk cites Douglas Adams as an influence on his inventive mind, I’m like “you did not read the same Douglas Adams I read!”

But that sense that, you know, science fiction concretizes metaphor, and they’ll tell you “yeah, sure, we understand that—but, nonetheless, what if we did build the concrete metaphor? What if we did build the torment nexus?”

ADH: [laughs]

PGR: “But no, no, what if we build the metaphor of the good thing?” And then, well, you’ll have built a metaphor of a good thing; you won’t have built the good thing, you know? And I think that goes back to what you were saying earlier, about who are we asking when we’re deciding what a good thing might be? On what basis are we assessing the goodness or not of that thing?

ADH: Something that opened things up for me a lot was Neal Stephenson’s concept from Seveneves—this idea that a society is making some deliberate and not so deliberate choices about what technologies are going to be used, about what technological capabilities they are going to pursue and maintain. And it’s very possible that we might live in a future that has a great deal of things that to us feel very futuristic, but… like, in Seveneves they’re living in orbital cities and have these giant space infrastructures, but they have to delete some ebooks off their tablets to make room for more, because they just don’t layer silicon as densely as we do, so they just don’t have as much storage and computing power to throw around for domestic uses. That for me was really interesting, and really made me feel like we should be talking about these things as choices—not saying “in the future, technology will X”, but saying “let’s decide what we want”.

There’s only so much that... like, we are shaped by the technology, right? And in ways that we can’t avoid. But having the sense that we could make democratic decisions about this stuff; it’s just an important corrective, even if the actual capacity of democratic process to grapple with this stuff is limited. And it’s the sort of mythmaking that we need to do in order to make sense of changing times.

And there it is. You can learn more about Andrew at his (admirably comprehensive) website, and follow his newsletter at solarshades.club, which is a priority read for me.

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