week 17 / 2025

“You got respect for my mind / for I've connections too sublime / look for WEEKNOTES hard to find…”

I hit a brick wall on the work front this week—slowly, yes, and swervingly, but a collision with metabolic reality is always definitive.

It’s simple math, and it’s not like I don’t know it: work too much, get too little quality rest, and you’ll deplete your reserves. Which means that, when you do a fairly big intense thing, it’ll knock you flat on your arse.

(No prizes for guessing which of the following items had this effect.)

Well, selah. As crashes go, I’ve had far worse. Shall we take a look?

ticked off

• Eight hours on PROJECT PORTON. (Second run of the online workshop we did a few weeks back. Went well overall, I think, but luck of the draw gave me a very challenging break-out group to work with, and emoting into the void of Zoom for a whole morning took a great deal of psychic strength.)
• Six hours on PROJECT WATERWAY. (This is pretty much pure fun, this one, though the closeness of the deadline—plus the struggle to get anyone to respond to questions regarding the submission process—is a source of minor anxiety.)
• Five hours on PROJECT PONTIF. (This is the second week of laying down material on an almost-daily basis, and it’s already acquiring that gravitational field that a big long project requires.)
• Three hours on PROJECT VIENNETTA. (Attending a seminar, so not ‘work’ in the strictest sense of the term, but it’s in the ledger, and them's the rules.)
• Three hours pasting up the first part of my interview with Cameron Tonkinwise for This Very Website. (As I remarked to someone on Friday, in one sense interviews are a very low-effort way of attracting attention: all I have to do is convince someone way smarter than me to talk on the record for a few hours! But even with the use of open-source transcription models, fixing one of these up can take pretty much a whole day from audio file to web-friendly text. It might be faster if I used fancy software, but experience dictates that most such software gives my laptop serious emphysema, if it runs on Linux at all, and it’s all stuffed with bullshit “AI” features I neither need nor want.)
• Five hours of admyn. (Maybe more? I’m discounting a number of hours of trying to do admyn with little success, mostly because I should have known better than to push through when I knew I was getting nowhere.)
• Ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always.

Not that bad a week, really, but a notable slump compared to the last few. Moral of story: pushing through on the weekends merely defers the necessary downtime. Who knew?

kinmaking

I’m getting a bit slack on seeking out new people to talk to; in my defence, I’ve had a lot to do, but kinmaking is part of the job as much as it’s part of life, and I need to make the time for it.

But spending time with established friends is just as important—and a good rambling chat with design ethicist Hildreth England over a few beers was exactly what I needed after the killer workshop mentioned above. Thanks for coming out, Hildreth!

reading

For reasons of comfort, but also of genuine admiration, I re-read Zero History this week. William Gibson’s very best novel? I could make a solid case for it, I think—but I’m sufficiently self-aware to recognise the extent to which this book (and the Bigend trilogy as a whole) is very tied up with not just a particular formative period of my life, but also with the work I do, and the way I think about that work. Which is to say, my sense of ZH’s importance and quality is not at all extricable from some extremely subjective and emotional stuff.

(I’m still right, though.)

When discussing that formative period with people I got to know at the time, many of whom work in similar professions, it has been a commonplace to remark that Gibson was doing a sort of prefigurative narration, half foresight half conjuration, of what we would have described at the time as “the way things are”. Returning it to it this time, I found myself feeling like that conjured period is now historical: despite its opening with passing references to the 2008 financial crisis, ZH is a novel of the zero-interest-credit era, the fashions and personae and business models it depicts made almost quaint by the less-sudden-than-they-seem inversions of more recent years.

What sustains it, now it has become in essence a historical novel, is the writing. Gibson was already unusually deft when he debuted with Neuromancer, particularly by the standards of science fiction, but the Bigend trilogy surely represents the final perfection of his style. Much as Hunter Thompson did with The Great Gatsby, there are passages and pages in this book that I have transcribed to empty files, just so I’d know what it might have felt like to type them out.

a clipping

I’m doing my best to avoid “AI” related content, whether here or elsewhere in my life... but as no fewer than four people independently emailed me this essay about ‘AI as Normal Technology’, I pretty much had to read it.

I don’t regret it either—though I think it fair to warn you that it’s a) pretty long, and b) fairly academic, though surprisingly readable nonetheless. Here’s the thesis:

The statement “AI is normal technology” is three things: a description of current AI, a prediction about the foreseeable future of AI, and a prescription about how we should treat it. We view AI as a tool that we can and should remain in control of, and we argue that this goal does not require drastic policy interventions or technical breakthroughs. We do not think that viewing AI as a humanlike intelligence is currently accurate or useful for understanding its societal impacts, nor is it likely to be in our vision of the future.

As my informants rightly assumed, I have a fair degree of sympathy with the position of the authors, though I’m a lot less bullish on the underlying technology than they are: I still think there’s a lot more heat than light around Those Two Letters. But my concern has never been about what “AI” might do, as if it were some autonomous force in the world, and only about what people might do with “AI”, which aligns me with much of the material herein.

Having shared it with you, I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention my misgivings, which I summed up as follows in a note to one of my interlocutors:

This was measured, well-researched, and sober; however, no one will pay the least bit of attention to it until the VC money runs out. The polarity of the argument is a function of the stakes in play; for almost anyone with any proximity to the discursive sphere around tech, the stakes are “am I employed or not?” Until “AI” stops being either a) something your boss hopes to replace you with, and/or b) your potential ticket aboard the gravy-train, only tenured professors in STEM fields at well-endowed universities [like the authors] are going to be able to inhabit the normalist position. I wish to hell that weren't the case, but here we are. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To put it another way, the economics (and hence politics) of the whole thing is either studiously avoided or glossed over quickly, which I attribute much less to malice than to a sort of self-willed disciplinary myopia; no one wants to tug the thread which might well unravel the whole sweater, especially not while they’re wearing it.

(If you’re thinking that last image could be applied to many other groups of people and the things with which they’re presently trying to come to some sort of uneasy peace, you’re right—it’s the characteristic move of the current era, a fantasia of subtraction rather than addition. It’s shocking, really, how much history we’ve been willing to jettison in order to sustain the flimsy fiction of “The Future”.)

Right, that’s enough for now. I hope you’ve had a decent week yourselves! Give yourself a break, put your feet up.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 17 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!