week 33 / 2024

Another sticky August afternoon in Malmö!

This week's header image is actually from my wanderings on the backar of Brösarp a year ago today—partly because I just haven't photographed anything in the last week or so, but partly because my ungulate friend there is wearing an expression which is not unlike the one I end up wearing after a long day of staring at a computer screen.

Probably high time I saw an optician, innit?

ticked off

• Around fourteen hours on the still-ongoing book editing job. (It's slow going, but it's also a really intense form of engagement with an argument: with an academic text in particular, you're not just fixing the sentence-level stuff, but trying to strengthen and clarify the conceptual through-lines. In other words, it's not just the application of simple grammatical rules!)
• Finished editing, pasted-up and published the first interview on This Very Website, namely the chat I had with Karl Schroeder far too long ago. (Karl has, in response, described me as a "maverick thinker", which is the sort of thing one could never dare call oneself for fear of sounding hubristic, but which is definitely going into my small collection of great blurbs. Thanks, Karl!)
• One meeting for PROJECT TEMPORAL, mostly around refactoring the activities to come. (Despite the unfortunate nature of the circumstances, the deferral of this work is in many ways a blessing, given the expansion of the editing job... though it's going to make a logistical mess of September unless I can get ahead of myself a bit.)
• A short meet-the-other-presenters meeting ahead of my talk at The Conference. (Nice to be able to get an idea of what everyone's planning for their own parts of the day, see if there are synergies and connections to incorporate in advance. I'm admittedly biased, as they're clients and friends by this point, but Media Evolution's approach to running events is thoughtful and thorough, and should be a model for conferences and conventions everywhere.)
• Perhaps five hours of assorted admyn, note-taking and bookkeeping. (So glamorous, the freelance life.)
• I did also do a fairly longish personal blog piece, and continued making use of my morning pages to think through material towards the "community" essay.

I'm not hugely satisfied with the number of hours on the slate this week, TBH... but I lost more than half a day to dealing with the fall-out of having my bike stolen over the weekend (right out of the bike-shed, after some muppet left the gate open), and another couple hours to a no-show (but also no-fault) in-person meeting, so I'm trying to cut myself some slack.

(Plus it's been pretty hot for most of the week, by Malmö standards at least—and while I love hot weather, it ain't necessarily conducive to cranking out the desk-work.)

reading

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052—2072 by M E O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. I've been hearing a lot about this book since it was published, and I can see why. I have a lot of thoughts about it, on two different levels: there's my political response to what is very deliberately and knowingly a utopian project, and my writerly response to the techniques and devices deployed in its making.

Neither response is entirely positive, to be honest—and the problems of both aspects are interestingly interlinked, in that some of my beef with the utopian aspects is probably worse than it would been had it been depicted differently? But I haven't had so many thoughts I needed to note down about a novel in quite some time; I suspect I'll be talking about it as an example of worldbuilding—both cautionary and celebratory—for some time to come.

(It's definitely going to feature in that essay that's under development... )

kinmaking

Made a great start to the kinmaking project by having a two-hour chat with Christopher Rice: erudite, charming, a true Southern gent.

We talked about a lot of stuff, but extra thanks are due for his seeing past my cringe-y British reticence and intuiting that I'd appreciate some discussion of the business side of the futures game: not "how do I get clients" (though, c'mon, let's be real, we all want to know the answer to that one) so much as "how do I get the right balance of the right clients", "how do I stay true to what I believe in while still making the rent", and "how do I deal with the ebb and flow of the project pipeline".

Christopher noted that foresight folk don't talk much about this stuff; whether that's particular to the field or a more general thing with freelances and consultants, I have no idea! But it was great to have someone point at the elephant in the room and discuss it with me.

Would you like to discuss foresight work, worldbuilding, climate change, science fiction or narrative—or some other interesting thing—with me? Drop me a line, let's have a ramble. New friends, old friends, lingering enemies, whoever; let's make it happen!

a clipping

It's been another slow week for my reading-from-the-internet... but in truth, I count that as a victory, because I used to do way too much of it! Hopefully the reduction of quantity will manifest as an increase in quality.

The debate about what design fiction is or does (or should do) seems not to have abated much in the decade or so since I became aware of it; I'm sure its increased visibility (and the resulting drive-by appropriations) has done a lot to keep the waters stirred, so to speak.

If anyone should know how to define design fiction, though, it's Julian Bleecker, who is as close to being the definitive coiner of the term as we're ever going to get without a time machine. Here's an attempt of his from earlier this week, filtered through (or flavoured with?) a current fascination with metamodern theory:

Rather than seeing Design Fiction as purely speculative or only as a critique of the present, Metamodernism helps me see it it as a methodology that bridges the gap between what is, what could, and what should be/come. Design Fiction leverages the oscillation between the possible, the not true *yet and the actual, and it does this to generate new ideas, provoke thought & discussion, and create inspired action. The artifacts created in the Design Fiction space are not just ‘made up’; they serve as probes or experiments that help us navigate the complexities of the modern world, offering glimpses of how our ideals and realities might intersect in transformative ways.

What's fascinating to me is that Bleecker's definition is always shifting a bit, like he's iterating on a central idea that, perhaps, he still doesn't feel he's thoroughly nailed to his own satisfaction, as he comes into contact with new data and new ideas. Which is to say, it's a prototype in its own right... which I suppose is a very designerly way of approaching it.

(If you'd like to correct me, or to expand on these points, Julian, do drop me a line. Would be fun to put you on the other side of the interview desk for a change!)

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 33 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.