week 32 / 2024

This has been a very desk-intense week, the upside of which is that being largely stuck indoors has protected me from both the rather muggy high temperatures of the start of the week and the blustery rain that's now emerging ahead of the weekend.

Malmöites will be largely unsurprised by this turn of events: Malmöfestivalen starts this evening, and the weather knows its cues like a mercurial but well-drilled thespian. For my part, I now have twice as many reasons to avoid the top end of town until it's all done and packed away.

Meanwhile, the Scandis are slowly starting to return to the office from their vacation shacks, answering emails and making plans... around these parts, August is basically a slow, stately awakening after the long bright dream of July. Things are starting to happen again! And the lousy weather just makes staying in and working that much easier, as previously discussed.

On which note—what's been happening around here?

Ticked Off

• Sixteen hours of editing, i.e. either marking up a printed-off script of chunks of the book I'm editing, or bashing my edits into the digital files. (That may not seem a great tally for a full week, but there's a limit to the number of hours a day you can do this sort of work without starting to add more errors than you're correcting.)
• Some firefighting and refactoring of the plans for PROJECT TEMPORAL. (Sometimes unrelated events external to a project conspire to delay or damage the project itself, and that's never much fun—particularly for us creatives, as it usually means some sort of compromise of the original vision, which is the sort of thing that makes us a bit sulky, if only on the inside.
• Outlined, wrote and posted an essay on This Very Website. (I was fairly pleased with it, especially given how many other chainsaws I was juggling around the writing of it.)
• Took a lot of notes toward an essay that I promised to the editors of Vector back when I thought I was going to have a lot of spare time on my hands over the summer. (Yeah, well, that will teach me—though I've been using my morning pages practice for this purpose, in the name of using my time as wisely as possible, and I've been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the results. Not that I actually have an outline for the piece yet, mind you... but I do have a lot of notes, and that's not nothing!)
• Five or six hours of admin, and a couple of hours of non-professional blogging. (Personal blogging is a kind of admin? It's like, things get stuck in your head that you need to publish... and if you don't publish them, they'll just sit there and mutter at you while you try and fail to do something else. In conclusion, being a writer is basically a pathology; I will not be taking any questions at this time.)
• Did some promotional rah-rah-rah on LinkedIn around my role at The Conference later this month here in Malmö. (I will announce that gig more fully in this week's Sunday newsletter, I think. Oh, I also set up some meetings with people who are in town for The Conference; gotta work the ecosystem when it comes to town, amirite?)
• Fielded an email from someone I've worked with before, arranging a meeting to discuss what sounds like it could be a very interesting project indeed in the back half of the year. (I'm gonna dub this one PROJECT HORNIMAN, and hope that to give it a name is not to tempt fate too much.)

Reading

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist. Yeah, I'm way behind the curve on this book, but I'm not really much of one for horror. This is the latest title in the neighbourhood book-club, however... and is actually proving quite timely with regard to the Vector essay mentioned above.

(Put it this way: the issue of Vector is themed around "community", and Let The Right One In seems to be almost entirely about its absence, or at least about those whose only community is that of having been excluded from everything else. It's also a great book for undermining any naive notions you might still be harbouring about Sweden as a cheerful socialist utopia.)

Kinmaking

This is mostly a placeholder category this week, introduced as part of the refactoring of the weeknotes format that I started last week.

As mentioned then, I like Mandy Brown's reframing of "networking" (which everyone claims to hate, even the seemingly-most-effortlessly social people I know) as "kinmaking" (which has many merits, not least of which is that it's a Donna Haraway reference).

I too hate "networking"! But I am also socially inept in a way that is not immediately obvious, due to its having been mostly disguised by the means of (wait for it...) studiously avoiding situations where I have to introduce myself and have conversations with people I don't already know.

I am also a person with their own consulting business, as well as being an immigrant man in his late forties who recently read some fairly scary research about the relationship between life expectancy and the size of social circles.

In other words, there are a whole lot of reasons for me to get the f*ck over myself and make more effort to get to know people. The kinmaking framing makes that feel less instrumentalised, somehow? Like, I'm not "working the room"; rather, I'm trying to "find my people".

(Oh, hey—there's another idea for the Vector essay!)

So, yeah: if weeknotes are for tracking stuff you want to improve at, then I should definitely have a kinmaking category. I'm not sure quite how I'll handle it; I guess not everyone I talk to will be keen to have their name go up in lights (er, pixels) on This Very Website? But we'll see what happens.

In the meantime, if you would like to talk to me about foresight, worldbuilding or other such things, please get in touch!

(No, mum—not you. You can call at the same time as always.)

A Clipping

This may not be an obviously foresight or worldbuilding-related article, but I think it has a lot to say to the field for those who are willing to listen. (Besides, it's basically a media-theoretical argument—and if you don't see that as being pertinent to futures work, well, we need to have a chat.)

It's rare for me to recommend book reviews these days, because Attention Economics has incentivised the form in very bad ways, but this review by A S Hamrah of Emily Nussbaum's new history of "reality" television has all the things that a good negative review should have: yes, a bit of fire and fury, but also a detailed and analytical riposte to the argument of the book delivered by someone who knows whereof they speak. It's no hatchet-job, but it's all the better a murder for that.

Knowing who these people were was part of my job, and if all this is a self-own, so be it. My job was valuable to me not just because it paid my bills but because of what I learned from it as a critic. Seeing the sausage get made at the C-suite level of television production, and then analyzing the fandom of the sausage, made me realize that every negative thing ever written about TV was true, the concurrent rise of quality television notwithstanding. Newton Minow’s “vast wasteland” speech, Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Harlan Ellison’s The Glass Teat, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death—they were 100-percent correct. 

(It's also very long! But hey, it's Friday; turn on your OOO and take the rest of the afternoon, why not?)

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 32 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.