Week 22 / 2024

Well, where did that week go? This is, of course, the question that weeknotes are meant to answer... but the philosophers among you will surely acknowledge (however grudgingly) that no answer can ever be complete.

One Big Thing

This week's big thing was surely two days of workshops uptown with my friends and colleagues at Media Evolution.

Now, it bears noting that I'm not actually running these workshops. It is my great privilege and pleasure, as story-writer-for-hire, to occupy a position somewhere between outside observer, participant, and assistant facilitator. As far as my contractual obligations are concerned, I'm there to follow the development of a set of scenarios—four in this case—with an eye to writing a story set in each of those worlds.

I get to observe what a certain sort of southern Swedish creative and/or techie professional thinks about a given topic, and about futurity more broadly; and as noted back in Week 19, there's a degrowthy vibe to people's thinking at the moment which would have surprised me just five years ago.

And I also get to observe a master facilitator at work! Reeta Hafner approaches workshops very differently to the way I would go about them: I like to stick to one or two frameworks or toolkits and go deep on them, but Reeta will often rattle through seven or eight models in the course of one of these (four day) cycles.

What's amazing is how she gets the participants to go with her: it's a gentle, unshowy style, and it really works well to bring in people for whom futures work is a new experience. I wouldn't try to imitate it, but I definitely find myself making little notes about particular turns of phrase of helpful metaphors.

One Small Thing

Perhaps influenced by all the talk of infrastructure at the aforementioned workshops, I've spent a bunch of time this afternoon making an infrastructural change for my business, and for my life more broadly.

A lot of people seem really not to like Cory Doctorow's concept of enshittification—though whether it's the word they dislike, or the thing it denotes, is perhaps not always clear. But someone who's been living and working on this thing we (quite erroneously) call "the internet" for two decades now, the dynamic he's talking about is incredibly obvious, as the big beasts of the tech industry double down in desperate panic upon their worst impulses, in what we can only hope is an extinction surge that presages some combination of collapse and firm regulation.

It's all been a pointed reminder that I've been very reliant on G**gle for a long time. I hustled for a Gmail invite early on, and I'm not ashamed to admit it! It was, and in many ways still is, a great product. But it sits atop an awful business model, operated by a firm that's doing its best to impersonate a complete moral vacuum while shoving soi disant "AI" into anything and everything. I want no part of that bullshit.

So I've finally gotten round to signing up for Proton's business package—and given I did so little more than three hours prior to typing this sentence, the fact that it's all up and running, that I can already send and receive mail on three custom domains, and that it's already imported all my old mail and contacts and calendars from the Big G... well, let's say I'm pretty impressed at the ease of onboarding and switch-over.

I'm sure it'll have its quirks, glitches and foibles... but what infrastructure doesn't? At least now, as a paying customer, I have recourse to non-futile complaint.

Now all I need is for ToDoist to finally roll out weekly calendar views...

A Clipping

I did a hard cull of my RSS list last weekend, as I had been planning to do for a long time. Given how few clippings I've taken this week, I'm tempted to chalk that up as a success! But we'll see how it pans out over the longer term.

In the meantime, here's a typically chewy long-read at Aeon, which has been on quite a streak this year. Hugh Desmond has a big question he wants us to think about, and I'm just gonna let him drop his own framing of it:

... we are ethically conflicted about our looming fate. How much more should we grow as a species? Do we have an obligation to leave future generations with a biosphere that is as rich and diverse as the one we inherited? How should we distribute the associated costs between poor and rich nations, between producers and consumers, and between institutions and individuals? These are important, pressing issues. Beneath many of these questions lies a more fundamental ethical quandary: what should we do about our ability to so easily dominate other species and the environment? It is a problem that has become urgent. Should we disavow our dominance and attempt to minimise it? Or should we embrace our powers to alter Earth and its inhabitants?

Perhaps we shouldn’t do either.

His argument did not quite end up where I expected it to, but was all the more stimulating for that. Recommended!

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 22 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.