week 08 / 2025

“Don’t you read the papers? / Economics is gonna save us / and WEEKNOTES never sleeps…”

I went to see the Hellacopters play Mejeriet in Lund last weekend. I have been known to joke about how that band were about the only thing I knew about Sweden before I started working for LU back in 2019 or so; it’s not true, of course—I knew a whole bunch of other Swedish rock’n’roll, stoner and doom bands, too!—but it’s true enough to get a laugh out of people.

The Hellacopters were never particularly big in the UK, unless you were into that sort of stuff in the early years of the century; that’s probably why I was lucky enough to win the opportunity to see them record a Peel Session at Maida Vale in 2003. (And yes, I met The Man Himself, albeit rather more briefly than the lads from the band.)

Here in Sweden, though, the ‘Copters are a household name, known even to people who aren’t into that sort of thing at all. Winning the local equivalent of a Grammy award very early in their career probably helped—as does frontman Nicke Andersson’s fairly relentless formation of new bands and side-projects across a variety of genres—but mostly I guess it’s a function of this being a very big country with a very small population.

It’s over two decades ago I saw that session at Maida Vale. Life moves pretty fast, as Ferris Bueller once warned us—though I think I did a pretty good job of stopping to look around once in a while. (Maybe too good a job, if I’m honest... )

Anyway—what did I get up to while the tinnitus was fading?

ticked off

• Eighteen hours on PROJECT PORTON. (Big ol’ chunk of work, there; capacity issues persisted, which meant I stayed on the field for much of the week. More to come next week, but that’s scheduled.)
• Six hours of STPLN stuff. (Went to a lecture on bookkeeping, which mostly taught me that I’ve learned most of the basics pretty successfully over the years, albeit by trail and error. Also a discussion on curating an exhibition we’re all doing as part of Southern Sweden Design Days this year.)
• Three hours of Worldbuilding Agency work. (Editing up an interview; I’d hoped to get this out the door this week, but I sent it for the interviewee’s approval at the last minute, so I can only blame myself! In my defence, I’ve had less spare hours than I expected over the last few weeks, and I’m not about to start complaining about that.)
• Three hours of admyn. (Including a meeting with my accountant, in which he ran me through last year’s accounts. They’re now all filed and done, and the taxes paid in advance, which feels good.)
• Two hours of reading for research.
• Ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always.

Yup, busy week again… and more to come, it looks like. Onwards!

kinmaking

No formal kinmaking this week, but a bunch of time chatting with fellow STPLN people, which is good enough when you’ve had a lot on.

reading

Most of this week’s reading time has been spent rattling through Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics. Appropriately enough, I acquired it as a hand-me-on from a friend; the downside is that it’s the original 2011 edition, some of whose optimisms regarding the possibilities of peer-to-peer exchange as exemplified by the internet circa 2010 have not aged brilliantly. However, the counterpoint to that claim would be that much of what has happened to the internet since then is a collection of textbook examples of the sorts of economic enclosure that Eisenstein identifies as being driven by the ethos of separation.

Indeed, reading this book now, in the midst of the tulip-bulb mania of “AI”, has made it very easy to see the bubble for what it is: a desperate all-in gamble on the possibility of further growth in an economic model whose possibilities for such are all but exhausted. In the absence of viable options for what David Harvey called the “spatial fix” for capitalism, the virtual commons of the internet presents itself as a final frontier for externalisation: the deployment of LLMs as an interface that pulverises the knowledge commons of the web and extrudes it as ad-garnished slurry is much the same thing as the enclosure of common land for agribusiness, or the annexing of heretofore marginal lands (and the disenfranchisement of their indigenous occupants) for the exploitation of minerals. That which was once free to all must now be paid for; less “information superhighway”, more “knowledge turnpike”, complete with tollbooths and highwaymen, ever harder to distinguish from one another.

(I made this point a while back on my personal blog, building on friend-of-the-show Jay Springett’s notion of cultural fracking. It has only become more applicable.)

I could write at great length about this book, despite still not quite having finished it—and maybe I will do so, if time permits. For now, though, suffice to say that if your own futurism, like mine, assumes that a long-term vision for a humanity worthy of the name requires the supersession of economics as she is currently played, then you’ll really want to read this book, which offers explanation and hope in equal measure. Eisenstein put his money where his mouth was when it was published: it’s a Creative Commons work, which means you can acquire it and read it for free (in its most recent and updated edition, no less). Thoroughly recommended.

a clipping

In keeping with Eisenstein and the perspective gained therefrom regarding Those Two Capital Letters, the obvious choice for this week’s clipping is David Roth’s Defector piece on the latest Consumer Electronics Show at Las Vegas, which is an appropriate blend of informed critique and exhausted ennui:

It is both the nature and the business of casinos to make the outside world disappear, but there was a greater recession at work here—all these miracles and potential miracles worked to push users into the same stilted and solitary prisons of ease. Steve Jobs's belief that people don't know what they want until it is shown to them has long been a catechism in this cohort; Silicon Valley types have spent nearly two decades now showing people things they mostly do not want and insisting that they actually do. If there is anything new about Silicon Valley's triumphal AI push, it is the extent to which its exponents are no longer asking whether anyone wants what they're selling and simply asserting its inevitability. "A world in which human wages crash due to AI—logically, necessarily—is a world in which productivity goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero," the reactionary venture capitalist Marc Andreessen tweeted last Friday. "Consumer cornucopia."

As Cory Doctorow is fond of saying, anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. I remarked to someone on Business LARP Facebook LinkedIn a few days back that we’re in the shoeshines-giving-stock-tips phase of this bubble; someone else remarked to me that I’ve been saying things to that effect for at least a year already and, well—they’re not wrong.

But as the weeks pass, I become more and more certain that I’m right… and the consequences of the inevitable rapid deflation become more and more consequential. As Roth notes in his lede, that CES is staged in a city synonymous with the temporal distortion and scammy legerdemain of the casino is very telling: they’ll do and say whatever they have to in order to keep you sat in front of those fruit machines a little longer.

(Bonus content: Ed Zitron’s epic rant from earlier in the week is another fine read for those frightened of and exhausted by marketing-masquerading-as-news.)

OK, that’ll do for now. I hope things are good with you; stay sane, and switch your phone off.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 08 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!