Week 23 / 2024

Well, here we are again. Operations at Magrathea Futures this week have included co-planning a workshop to be delivered at the end of the month, and the slow, patient rebooting of a focussed reading-for-research practice. More news on these in weeks to come—and also on the glorious paleofutures pictured in the header image, which should be a real teachable moment for anyone in the field.

In the meantime, let's do this thing, eh?

One Big Thing

This week's one big thing actually began before last week's weeknotes, but the consequences—I nearly wrote "fallout", there—has been rather longer.

Long story short: I switched my personal email away from G**glemail (which I've been using since 2006 or so) and over to Proton, before setting the latter up to handle the mailserver stuff for various of my little collection of web domains. This was due to increasing problems with "deliverability" for email on my own domains (a euphemism for the odds of an email you send actually making it into the inbox of the recipient), but also a long-simmering personal discontent with the Big G. They are simply not a company I want to be making use of, if at all possible—and recent revelations, though far from being the first of such, were enough to give me that final push.

Credit where it's due: Proton have aimed to streamline the relocation process as much as possible, and while I found the migration of my Gmail archive a bit slow, hindsight suggests that 24h or so is not an unreasonable timeline for the transfer of 7GB of archived mail. Setting up the custom domains was clearly explained and hand-held, and they were mostly up and running within half an hour.

On the downside, Proton's product—setting aside the whole encyption/privacy aspect, which for me is a very distant second to basic functionaltiy—is not (yet!) on par with Gmail at all. Some limitations are a function of the privacy thing: in-body-text search, for instance, is not available, because to do that they'd have to scan and analyse all your emails, which is the one thing they say they don't want to do. Others are, I presume, just a development curve issue: the Android app for Proton Mail is not just basic (and devoid of widgets!) but slow and janky, too. You also kiss goodbye to the widely-available SSO option that Gmail provides, and the various integrations with other services that have accrued over the years.

Ultimately, I think it will be worth it—and I suspect I've jumped before being pushed by circumstances, because the desperate race for the bottom among the big tech firms has a real fin de siècle vibe about it. I figure that getting used to paying for services we expect not to fuck us over may be a survival strategy for the next couple of years.

So that's this week's big thing: fixing my personal and business infrastructures ahead of what looks like seriously heavy weather.

One Small Thing

This week's small thing, meanwhile, has been realising just how deeply laced into those infrastructures I had been, and dealing with the consequences.

I'm thinking here particularly of what I'm gonna choose to call the psychic impacts: the mental routines which, once detached from and deprived of their accustomed prostheses, start flailing around inside your head. I suspect—well, OK, I know—that I am more prone to this than the average person, but routines and systems provide a sense of security and confidence. To give them up is to be confronted by the diminishment of your cyborg self: it is to be a snail, and to be confronted by a slug in the mirror.

To be clear, it could be worse! Indeed, at other stages of my life, it would have been worse, and indeed was—and because of those experiences, I knew to expect disruption this time round, even if I wasn't quite prepared for the forms it came in.

I knew also that the best way to deal with it would be to take the time needed to jerry-rig something as close to my old system as possible. This almost certainly won't survive for long—hell, it's already being rebuilt and bodged on a daily basis. But the point is to have a system there to bodge, rather than a void into which your existential dread can leap screaming...

I should also have known to expect little of myself beyond that refactoring operation, but... well, yeah. Luckily yesterday was a "red day" (bank holiday equivalent) here in Sweden, so I hitched a ride with a friend and spent five hours walking in a nature reserve, which was very restorative on the psychic side.

On the physical side, uh, let's just say I should have taken some insect repellent...

A Clipping

This week's recommended read comes from the website/newsletter of one Hanno Böck, and it's a very detailed analysis of the mismatch between words and deeds from Equinor, the Norwegian state energy company, regarding the prospects of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. It's very inside-baseball, but the implications are pretty simple.

Equinor operates what is arguably the best working example of a CCS plant, at the Snøhvit gas field, but now has plans to electrify the operations there, in order to reduce emissions; this will mean a big draw on the Norwegian power grid, and the construction of a transmission line through Sámi reindeer herding areas. Not unreasonably, people are asking: couldn't they just CCS for the same emission reductions, given they've already got the proof of concept running?

To which the answer is a resounding "no": despite the site in question being about as optimal for a CCS set-up as you could wish for, Equinor are not keen, because the price per ton of emissions avoided is just way too high.

But—and this is where it gets fruity!—Equinor is nonetheless happy to sell the prospect of CCS in its partnership with various other fossil multinational firms, even though it judges it too expensive and impractical for deployment on its own, optimally-sited projects.

Look, I would love it if we had a technology that looked like it had a good chance of partly reversing the past century-and-a-half of CO2 emissions—I would literally love it.

But we don't have such a technology.

What we have instead are perpetual-motion-adjacent boondoggles that keep a clade of (mostly well-meaning, but dangerously incurious) consultants and academics in grant money for as long as the hype cycle lasts, and which also (conveniently enough) provide fresh excuses for the fossil fuel firms to keep on drilling.

Trouble is, because we don't want to change our lifestyles, we'll happily latch on to each and any sky-pie promise that the joules can keep flowing without further problems...

(If you or your organisation would like some help thinking about what post-fossil operations might look like for you, please get in touch—because that's my job! The good news is, it needn't be anywhere near so grim as you probably think... but you need to be acting now, ahead of the rush.)

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 23 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.