week 37 / 2024

Some days are diamonds, sang John Denver, and some days are stones—and he sang it repeatedly, in fact, particularly if you found yourself travelling in vehicles driven by my mother during the early to mid 1980s.

To be honest, dear reader, this week's diamond/stone ratio feels like it has been much more in favour of the latter... and while it's very tempting to indulge in the pathetic fallacy, there ain't much point in blaming it on the end of the warm weather.

Hell, there ain't much point in blaming it on anything. So instead, let's shake those stones out of our shoes and walk on in to weeknotes...

ticked off

• Twelve hours of book editing. (This job is essentially done now, though two of these hours have involved my doing a supplementary extra thing with this manuscript, because reasons, and there may be a bit more of that over the weekend, too.)
• Four hours of prep and meetings regarding PROJECT TEMPORAL. (I'm off to London in a week and a bit for some more workshops and onsite stuff , so there's lots of things to be sorted out.)
• Four hours of work on material for This Very Website. (Nothing published this week, but I figure it's better to get myself to a position where I've got stuff in the bag and ready to go than it is to hurry half-baked stuff out of the door on a weekly basis. Quality over quantity, innit.)
• Two hours of personal blogging. (Including the documentation of an emotional-motivational wobble yesterday, which is probably very unprofessional, but hey—I'll handle my mental health the way that works for me, OK? Personal blogging is not at all always an outlet for my angst and panic, but sometimes it is, and it's surprisingly effective. Some people shout into old wells or scream in remote forests; I write stuff on the internet.)
• Two hours of accounts. (This may have been a contributing factor to the angst and panic mentioned above.)

Throw in maybe a couple hours admyn in fragments, plus a certain amount of time spent running around in the real world (e.g. for optician's appointments and in-person meetings—see below), and that's your lot.

kinmaking

Switching up the order a bit here, because kinmaking takes time, and so listing it next to other stuff that gets the temporal quantification treatment makes sense... especially in a three-meeting week such as this. No new friends this time round, but it's good to keep in touch with people we already know, isn't it?

On Wednesday afternoon I spent some time with the wonderful Reeta Hafner, futures lead at Media Evolution. I got to hear how The Conference went (in summary: very well), and then we spent a bunch of time chewing over the state of the field. We may also have decided to start a futures-y reading group? (Malmö-based worldbuilders, please drop me a note if you think this sounds like a thing you would like to get involved in.)

Thursday afternoon gave me some time with Tobias Revell, design futures lead at Arup. I got a quick look at what a model he and his team have been developing, the aim of which is to situate the more cautious sort of client in a factually grounded projection of the possible before moving into more speculative territories. There was also some discussion of the possibility of futures thinking going the same way as design thinking, which is a topic that seems to be exercising the whole scene at the moment—but perhaps it's not a total downer if it serves to normalise the profession a bit? (Or, put another way: perhaps a bit of banalisation is actually beneficial in terms of Getting Things To Happen, which is and has always been the big obstacle.)

Finally, over lunchtime today I had a long rambling chat with the incomparable John Willshire of Smithery, which went to all sorts of interesting places, but which I shall not discuss in detail because a lot of it concerned PROJECT TEMPORAL, whether directly or indirectly.

A very peopled week, by my usual standards!

reading

Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken Macleod. Much like Paul McAuley, I feel like Ken Macleod has never quite achieved the reach and reputation his work really deserves: he's been writing consistently high-quality sf with chewy (and non-USian) political dimensions for three decades. This is the first of a fairly recent trilogy, in which tropes and themes from throughout that long career are all thrown into the mix at once, and baked into something that, while very readable, is neither light nor jumbled. FTL travel, AI, post-revolutionary social relations, What If the Cold War But Different, gnomic and possibly post-biological alien life, conspiracy theories... all that and more can be found in this very zippy novel, the sequels to which I shall be acquiring forthwith.

(In addition to being a very fine writer, Ken is also a very modest and lovely man; he was the first "pro" I ever met on the sf convention circuit, and I'd been talking to him for the best part of an hour before I realised who he was. I was very sad to hear of his wife's recent passing.)

a clipping

I've seen not one but two scathing reviews of Yuval Noah Harari's latest book, both of which I appreciate as much for their writerly finesse as for their assaults on the output of a man who has mistaken the enthusiasm of his biggest patrons and fans as an excuse for repeating their ideas using slightly longer and more complicated words... but let's consider those as bonus material.

Instead, I'm going to indulge in a little shameless self-aggrandizement by pointing you toward this post from Hannah "Sustainability by Numbers" Ritchie, in which someone who is very much coming at things from the quantitative end of the spectrum ends up taking a position on the structure/agency issue very similar to my own:

Rather than it being one or the other, individual behaviours and system-builders work together. Institutions need to make it affordable and easy for people to make the switch: that’s anything from discounts, tax breaks or deals for the low-carbon choice; to putting mandates on automakers; to making sure that the country has a reliable charging network. But people also need to show institutions that this is the direction they want things to move.

Those who have the power to make structural changes need positive reinforcement from the public that what they’re doing is popular. The best way is for individuals to show that by moving to public transport, getting an electric car, or installing a heat pump.

Later in that post are points where disagreement starts to creep in, but given the epistemological gap, I think such disagreements are productive. Both Ritchie and I are interested in the idea of substitution as a route to sustainability, but—for me at least—her argument starts getting bogged down in handwavium due to its lacking a theory of change beyond "incentivize the right consumption choices in the market"...

... which is one more reason I should get the hell on with writing more about that stuff, isn't it?

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 37 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.