week 01 / 2025

Happy new year, and welcome back to WEEKNOTES at Worldbuilding Agency.

I'm gonna forego the usual preambles here, for reasons which will become apparent...

ticked off

... and instead of the usual list, I’m just gonna say that I had much bigger plans for this week than this week had for me. I’m well into double figures on hours of admyn and planning committed, I guess? But they’ve been slow, disjointed hours, far from focussed, and on Thursday afternoon I grudgingly came to accept that I clearly needed some downtime, though I slogged on through most of Friday as well. Put it down to stubbornness.

Now, this is not the first time this has happened! I’ve gotten a lot better over the last few years when it comes to keeping weekends and evenings free of work, but the habit of trying to work through the winter holiday season probably dates back to those bohemian days when I worked in bars and music venues. There’s a difference, though, in that you don’t need to be especially motivated (or even especially awake) to run a cloakroom or sling tickets to drunk punters out on a late December bender with their workmates, and you’ll still get paid even if you’re not; you might even do OK for tips, and the occasional free drink!

But for what we call “knowledge work”, motivation matters rather more. You can sit at your desk and prod the keyboard—and it’s good to have a practice of doing so even when you don’t feel like it—but no good will come of it if you’re running on empty, and I’ve done this enough times to know it’s a wasted opportunity for better rest. If I’d just taken this week off work entirely and come back fresh on Monday, I doubt I’d be much more than a day behind where I actually am, and I’d have had a week off!

So, if you’re reading this and seeing something of yourself in it, let me be the first to say to you: take some time off over the winter! Because if it’s been the sort of year that makes you feel like you really should work through the turn of the year, then it’s probably also the sort of year when you really need that rest that will come from not doing so.

reading

Donna Tartt’s The Secret History: certainly not the first book ever to partake in the tropes of what the kids call “dark academia”, but surely the book that really defines the vibe? A lonely, bookish Californian kid of below-average circumstances blags and bluffs his way into a fairly fancy college in mountainous rural Vermont, and there falls in with a weird self-selected tribe of eccentric posh kids obsessed with not only the classics, but also the morality of the civilisations that produced the classics. Dissolution ensues, in every sense of the term.

I found it strangely atemporal at first—and perhaps deliberately so? The full first half of the book feels like you could have told me it was set in any year after 1968 or so, but eventually a slow accumulation of temporal details—a reference to kids taking Ecstasy at a weekend party; a mention of a laptop computer, in a manner that nonetheless underscored the novelty of such a thing—brought it toward the start of the last decade of the C20th. Even so, I was somehow astonished to see it was first published in 1992!

It wasn’t exactly a Proustian hit for me—because the US elite-college student experience of 1990 or so was evidently a fair distance from the UK former-polytechnic student experience of just a handful of years later, to say the least. But it was nonetheless to be reminded intensely of an adolescence that played out in the absence of the internet, and even mostly of mobile phones... and to contemplate that change not as something gained, but rather as something lost, perhaps irretrievably.

(That the novel is to some extent a cautionary tale about the hazards of hankering for bygone circumstances is an irony not lost on me.)

a clipping

I almost skipped this section because most of the few things I’ve read and clipped this week are essays about “AI”, and at this point I’m almost as sick of hearing myself and others try patiently to point out the political-economic horrors of this stuff as I’m sick of hearing glassy-eyed boosters trying to peddle it to me.

Instead, I’m going to share a paragraph from a NYRB review of Martin Wolf’s new book. Much as with “AI”, I dare say anyone reading these weeknotes already has a pretty good idea where they stand vis a vis the current configuration of capitalism and the prospects for technocratic reform thereof... and so you may not feel the need to read the whole thing, unless you’re the sort of reader who (like me) enjoys seeing someone slowly and methodically skewer the massive blind-spots and inconsistencies of a bloviating bag-carrier to the banking class.

But this passage is worth noting in its own right, because it highlights a particular take on what is sometimes referred to as “the passive voice”—and if you’re at all interested in the power of narration to explain or to obscure, then the passive voice is something you should teach yourself to recognise, to distrust, and to question relentlessly:

Wolf uses the distinctive elite construction that the journalist William Schneider named the “past exonerative.” It’s that unmistakable mix of passive voice and past tense that people with power use to say things like “mistakes were made” or that extrajudicial drone murders “have been authorized.” Wolf does this both when his side has done something horrible that he cannot admit and when the other side has done something undeniably good that he cannot acknowledge. Thus we find that “colonial empires disappeared,” “trade unions have greatly weakened,” and “the factories disappeared in the old industrial locations.” The revolutionary struggles for power that these phrases embody are thus rendered invisible.

Well then—that’s all for now. Happy new year, and thanks for reading along!

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 01 of 2025. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe. If you are already subscribed, please send to a friend who you think might also like it!

Have a good weekend.