Week 28 / 2024

This has been another admyn-heavy week:

• sorting through and reading materials generated in Bergen for PROJECT TEMPORAL, and
• herding cats arranging for videocalls with academics who are mostly on holiday; and
• finally pulling the trigger on various long-fretted-over decisions and actions regarding This Very Website (see One Small Thing below)

It's not been wall-to-wall work, mind you. Indeed just last night, I was out for a few beers with a fellow foresight practitioner (namely Johan Lager of Point Design) here in Malmö... which may also go some way to explaining why I got up somewhat later than usual this morning.

Selah! OK, run the format.

One Big Thing

It should come as no surprise that PROJECT TEMPORAL is a lot to do with time; there's a clue in the name, right?

(I'm not really sure that's how SEKRIT PROJECT CODENAMES are supposed to work, but hey—this is my house and I'll do as I please.)

Given my involvement has been stated publicly a few times, I suppose I can also reveal that PROJECT TEMPORAL is my involvement (as a non-academic creative consultant) in the British Academy project The Times of a Just Transition.

Technically, the actual academics are supposed to be doing all the heavy theoretical-sociological-philosophical lifting when it comes to the possibilities of new social temporalities that are the focus of the project. But I was an academic for well over a decade, and a very theoretically inclined one at that—and as such, I've found myself kicking around a lot of my own thoughts about time.

Which is why this week's One Big Thing is the realisation I came to a few mornings ago: that routine is the secular, modern substitute for ritual.

Now, I'm very aware that I am far from the first person to realise this! It might even qualify as a fairly banal observation: a hazy 3am after-the-party "make u think" sort of thing. But there is a reserve of untapped wisdom in banalities, I think. We shrug off statements like this as obvious (or as "not even wrong") before spending time sat with them (or even in them) as metaphors.

Much of my work, whether as a writer of fictions or a foresight practitioner, is precisely about sitting with things as metaphors—and the worldbuilding workshops I co-convened in Bergen were a way of getting other people, perhaps less practiced at that sort of sitting than myself, to sit there with me for a while.

So yes, it may be banal to observe that late-late capitalism might be compared to a religion, and that our calendars and to-do lists might this be seen as analogous to the horarium and liturgy of medieval monks... but metaphor takes the next step onward from analogy. What happens when we do not merely liken our beloved to a summer's day, but instead claim that they are a summer's day?

In this particular case, the answers were far too plentiful (and, I will concede, raw and unpolished) to share here. And that's the real point, perhaps: turning a tired analogy into a fully concretised metaphor can revitalise it, and surface relations and connections which might otherwise go unthought and overlooked.

(Which is, not at all incidentally, one of the major arguments in favour of creative modes of futuring such as design fiction, experiential futures and narrative prototyping. And if you wanted to talk to someone in greater detail about those things, you should probably get in touch and arrange a call!)

One Small Thing

These One Small Things seem to be settling into a routine where they depict my encountering an illustrative example of a truism or creative cliche... but who am I to stand in the way of emergent pattern, eh?

(OK, don't answer that.)

This week's truism, then, is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. (And, as some people like to append, that the good is the enemy of the done.)

I have spent weeks—months, actually!—trying to work out the best way to structure the subscription tiers for this website, finesse the optimal arrangement of content categories, design a workflow that will allow a smooth and steady stream of interesting material to appear here, and establish an authorial and editorial voice that will make it all seem approachable and authoritative at once.

All I've got to show for this huge pile of empty strategy, after half a year, is an almost empty website.

The perfect is the enemy of the good, and the good is the enemy of the done.

Strategy is important, but it must exist in a dialectic with tactics. (Big shout-out to my man Michel de Certeau!)

Plans are pointless in the absence of action, just as action is futile in the absence of plans. Sometimes you just have to start.

So, watch this space...

A Clipping

This week's recommended read is the most recent installment of Drew Austin's Kneeling Bus newsletter. The following is the closing passage thereof, which is less a case of "OMG spoilers!!1" and more a case of "this is why this guy is seriously worth reading":

It’s fascinating to watch a baby use an iPhone and to see how quickly they figure out the interface. More importantly, in stark contrast to the unresponsive physical world, every swipe or tap of a phone screen has some coherent result. Randomly gesturing, you always end up somewhere on the internet, thanks to search bars and autocomplete and haptic feedback loops and dark patterns, and a less sophisticated user (such as a two-year old) usually ends up knee-deep in the digital slop that adults consciously avoid. It’s not just that iPhones are easy for babies to use—iPhones are actually for babies, and when we use our phones we become more baby-like ourselves, endowed with agency-on-training-wheels. You can see why we lose interest in the edge of the sidewalk.

Agency-on-training-wheels... try unthinking that thought the next time you're trying to dodge your way along a pavement (er, sidewalk?) full of head-down doomscrollers!

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 28 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 ™️, and you'll be funding free subscriptions for those with fewer monetary resources, 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.