Week 21 / 2024

This has been a difficult week, for reasons I can't quite explain, even to myself. Difficult isn't even the right word, really; it's just been a week in which it's been hard to get any traction.

There's various reasons one might advance to explain that away, but I'm also trying to get more comfortable with admitting to myself—and to the world at large—that sometimes we just have slow unproductive weeks, and that's OK.

(That said, it's much easier to be accepting of a slow week when the week in question is low on deadlines and urgent tasks And if you wanted to get all causal about it, you might even advance the hypothesis that the lack of deadlines may have prompted the slowness.)

But whatever the week may have been like, the weeknotes just won't wait...

One Big Thing

If you were going to dig deep on the possible psychic causes of my slow week, you might well light upon a long-deferred decision that I made last weekend—a decision which concerns this very website, in fact.

I conceived of the idea for Worldbuilding Agency in late 2023, as part of my planning for the establishment of Magrathea Futures and the building of my consulting business. This website is the public research journal of my practice.

A major plank of the plan for this site was the starting of a podcast. I want to do real research here, exploring theories and methodological questions in particular, and I want to do that research by talking to people rather than (just) reading books. So I thought that I would have "seasons" of interviews with experts and practitioners around a particular research question, which I would edit up nicely and make public, along with transcripts.

(I had also convinced myself that what I was thinking about wasn't really a podcast, because I have pretensions of academic and professional rigour. Of course, the reader will not be surprised to know that when I described the plan to various people, nine out of ten of them said "oh, right, you're doing a podcast". Selah.)

I have at time of writing done six of the twelve interviews I planned. Indeed, I've recorded around one a month since the start of the year. The plan was that I would release one interview every four weeks, and end the year with a solo audio essay in which I brought together everything I'd learned.

It's nearly the end of May, and there are still no podcasts on this website. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but they can mostly be bundled up under the heading "making a podcast that doesn't sound super amateur turns out to be really difficult and time consuming".

Some poor decisions on my part early on, plus limited access to high-end equipment or facilities, meant that the early recordings were pretty bad; further poor decisions on my part meant that (incredibly) the more recent ones are even worse, to the point that all potential production interventions would amount to little more than trying to polish a series of turds.

Or, more plainly: there's nothing I can do with this audio, as audio, that won't make me and—more importantly!—my guests look seriously amateur.

So my decision taken last weekend, very grudgingly, was to stop trying to save the audio, to defer my conquest of podcasting to a later date, and to continue with the first "series" as interviews to be transcribed and published as text rather than recorded speech.

That decision isn't this week's One Big Thing! Nor is this very roundabout announcement of new content incoming on Worldbuilding Agency.

No, this week's One Big Thing is a public note-to-self: it's fine to have big ambitions, but you need to be more realistic when you're developing plans that involve doing lots of new things; you need to take seriously the advice of people with more experience in the thing you want to do (thanks, Jay); and, perhaps most importantly, you need to take a clear-eyed look at things at every step of the journey, and address emerging issues as they come rather than hoping you'll find a fix later.

Worldbuilding Agency is a big project, and I had thought the whole thing would just come together on the hoof at the start of the year, while I was also doing client work.

That was hubris. This week, I finally faced nemesis.

One Small Thing

I've always resisted the habit common to some bloggers, and to other persons who to some extent work in public—I'm thinking particularly of Warren Ellis, but there are others—of giving codenames to prospective and ongoing projects. It's always felt rather pretentious, if I'm honest.

But here I am, four weeks into a weeknotes practice, and finally I understand the necessity: some projects can't really be discussed fully in public until they reach a certain ripeness or formal announcement, so codenames allow you to discuss such projects in a more passing manner without the need to allude to them through the vague and incoherent use of whatever characteristics are already safe and/or publicly known about them.

Obvious in hindsight, innit?

Given how fond I am for choosing names and titles for things, I should probably see this as an opportunity for fun! On the other hand, given how long I sometimes spend deciding on names or titles for things, I should probably see this as something that will need to be allowed for in scheduling...

(My original One Small Thing for this week was to have been about the development phases of a project that's just starting to spin up, but after I'd spent half an hour trying to work out how much I actually felt I could say publicly about said project, I decided to make the bug the feature, so to speak.)

A Clipping

I'm going with a twofer for this week's clipping content, because these pieces spoke uncannily well to each other, and I meant to do something with them on my personal blog, but never got round to it.

First up is a bit of an interview with Samantha Rose Hill, a scholar and editor of the work of Hannah Arendt:

Would you agree that people are becoming more tribal and ideological than ever before, because they’re living in these self-reinforcing filter bubbles?

I wouldn’t say the problem is bubbles. I would say it’s appearances. Technology has transformed the nature of appearance and being in the world so that one’s everyday experiences are mediated through some form of device or apparatus, which creates a baseline level of alienation.

The other side of this is a loss of privacy. Even when one is alone, they are never really alone, and this means that the space necessary for thinking is lost. And when one loses that space for thinking, one is driven further away from themselves and more likely to get carried away by the tide.

The second is a passage from the middle of a newsletter post from the musician Damon "DaDa Drummer" Krukowski:

What might be truly different about this IG moment in music, to me, isn’t that technology is dictating changes – that’s always been the case – but that live music can project a social situation which isn’t exactly social. Virality is collective, yes, in the way a meme requires shared use to have meaning. But virality is nonetheless largely experienced alone. Some live shows I’ve been to lately have had nearly silent audiences, not just for the music but before any music starts. I’ve never heard less chatter in a bigger room than I did in a 5,000-capacity club waiting for a Mitski show to begin. Hardly anyone was drinking. Hardly anyone was speaking loudly. No one was screaming – and I know they could have done, because later there was screaming after each song Mitski played like it was Beatlemania. But following those brief collective yells, the audience would again lapse into silence while waiting for the next tune.

The elucidation of a connection between the two is left as an exercise for the reader; you'll probably want to read the full Krukowski piece for that. But why not read them both, hmm?

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 21 of 2024. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe, but please consider supporting this research journal with a small monthly payment—you'll get access to the occasional bit of Exclusive Content ™️, but first and foremost you'll get the warm glow that only ever comes from enabling fully independent and climate-focussed foresight research to continue.

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Have a good weekend.