week 31 / 2024

A Swedish friend of mine once spent some time working in Brazil, where he had to expunge what he claimed was his nation's essentially religious attitude to warm weather. In a country where you only get so much sunshine every year, you come to resent any time spent indoors working when it's nice outside; Swedes and Brits are pretty similar in that regard (though Swedish men are nowhere near so prone to removing their shirts in the high street). If you work somewhere like Brazil, though, you have to squelch that resentment or you'd never get anything done.

I'm glad he's learned the trick, at least.

Ticked Off

• A whole bunch of hours on the no-codename book editing/proofing project. (Really nice to be editing something that's in my field of knowledge and interest; make paying the necessary attention that much easier.)
• Four or five hours of admin and networking. (I really don't like the latter, but as Mandy Brown says, hardly anyone really does. Thinking of it in the rather more Harawayian sense of kin-making, as she suggests, seems to be helping a bit.)
• Filed a peer review job with the issuing journal. (Every time, I think "I'll be brief with my comments this time"; every time, I crank out around 1,000 words.)
• Filed a somewhat overdue review with the media section of the SFRA Review. (My first time reviewing a video game; but I was really affected by Citizen Sleeper, and somewhat surprised that sf scholarship appears not to have noticed it at all.)
• An afternoon of editing of an interview to be published on This Very Website. (Waiting on approval from the interviewee but hopefully this can go up next week!)
• A day of not writing a fresh essay for This Very Website, because distracted by a heretofore unnoticed backstage technical issue with This Very Website, related in particular to paid subscriptions. (Lots of spelunking in forums and documentation for answers not entirely forthcoming, followed by requests for customer support, which seem to be paying off.)
• Finished reading DBC Pierre's Release the Bats. (This is basically the "how to be a writer" book to end all "how to be a writer" books, which is to say that it's as interesting as a piece of writing as it is as an instructive document.)
• Re-cased my desktop computer into a smaller, quieter form-factor. (One always forgets how long PC building will take, though it's a mercy that the components are so much more durable than when I first did it back in 1990 or so.)

One Big Thing

At the risk of going a little bit meta, I'm going to talk about weeknotes in this week's One Big Thing.

As noted, weeknotes are a new practice for me—one which I thought would be best focussed on Worldbuilding Agency and my professional practice. I wanted to just get started and see what happened, and I think in general that strategy has paid off (though perhaps more so for me than for the few of you reading along at home).

In other words, instead of (over)thinking what weeknotes are for, I didn't really think about it at all. I just thought about the ones I read regularly, and threw something together that seemed to do something similar, just with more of my own style or attitude. This got me cranking the things out, which was the desired effect: nothing blocks action like overthinking blocks action!

The format has started to shift already: the Ticked Off section is fairly new, for instance. The thing is, once you start actually doing a thing, you're confronted with questions about how best to do it that you'd likely not have thought of if you'd just brainstormed it in the abstract.

I'm thinking there may be a lot of eyerolling in the audience right now, but listen: I was raised by two perfectionist engineers! "Thinking it through before starting, and then not screwing it up" was the closest thing our household had to a religion—albeit a doctrine which was much more often honoured in the breach, by all concerned. Catholics have guilt; we just had failure.

But failure is instructive! Getting a prototype up and running, seeing how it handles the curves, that's how you make things better—that's how you know what questions you want to ask, how you know where the grease needs to go.

For example, I've been thinking for a few weeks that One Big Thing and One Small Thing, while nice in a prompts-for-writing sort of way, are not very practical for weeknotes, precisely because they tend to generate way too much text.

(Uh, quod erat demonstrandum, I guess?)

So it was a lovely bit of synchronicity when Tracy Durnell posted a reflection on her own weeknotes practice, which features early on the very simple statement:

Weeknotes let me externalize my internal goals.

Head-explode emoji!

Weeknotes are a means to shape my own behavior. Headings serve as prompts: knowing I have a slot in the template waiting for me to fill in on Fridays is a reminder — and motivation — for me to do things that I value but might not make time for [...] Because I design my own format, weeknotes reinforce my priorities.

Obvious in hindsight, right?

Equally obvious: I now need to redesign this weeknotes format, and possibly split some of it across to my personal blog. (I'm not sure how professional it would seem to post my woeful rowing-machine distances here, for instance).

So, long story short: new weeknotes format next week; experimentation is how we learn things. Selah!

A Clipping

I think I'll keep the weekly clipping in the new format, though—something to entice you down to the end, here, eh?

Well, then: here's Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier talking about the implications of the CrowdStrike clusterf*ck.

This is where my background in infrastructure meets the part of me that does foresight work: d'you remember the Ever Given getting stuck in the Suez? Nope—and nor does anyone else, until something like it happens again.

The brittleness of modern society isn’t confined to tech. We can see it in many parts of our infrastructure, from food to electricity, from finance to transportation. This is often a result of globalization and consolidation, but not always. In information technology, brittleness also results from the fact that hundreds of companies, none of which you’ve heard of, each perform a small but essential role in keeping the internet running. CrowdStrike is one of those companies.

This brittleness is a result of market incentives. In enterprise computing—as opposed to personal computing—a company that provides computing infrastructure to enterprise networks is incentivized to be as integral as possible, to have as deep access into their customers’ networks as possible, and to run as leanly as possible.

Redundancies are unprofitable. Being slow and careful is unprofitable. Being less embedded in and less essential and having less access to the customers’ networks and machines is unprofitable—at least in the short term, by which these companies are measured. This is true for companies like CrowdStrike. It’s also true for CrowdStrike’s customers, who also didn’t have resilience, redundancy, or backup systems in place for failures such as this because they are also an expense that affects short-term profitability.

But brittleness is profitable only when everything is working.

This is basically the same reason that you should not be running headlong into the process of adding third-party "AI" services into your organisation... but I dare say a lot of people are gonna have to learn that one the hard way, too.

But not you—because you know someone who can help you think through strategic infrastructural risks to your business, don't you? Yes you do! So drop them a line.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 31 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.