week 39 / 2024

Is there a point at which hotels stop having that pervasive low-grade sense of the uncanny—a point related to your own amount of exposure, perhaps?

Have they always been uncanny, or is it just the exhaustingly chipper and cheap-jack Millennial tone of contemporary low-mid-price hotels that makes them feel like the set for some hidden-camera "reality" show, carefully designed to push you to a point where you lose your patience with the pervasive infantilisation implicit in the decor and the defensive architecture, only to be called out as some sort of intolerant old monster under the glare of a few dozen held-aloft smartphones? What manner of lasting damage has been done to the field of commercial interior decoration by the relentless barrage of aspirational photographs of ball-pit-equipped tech firm offices during the late Noughties?

My name is Paul Graham Raven, and you might say I'm like a fine wine: I improve somewhat with age, but I don't travel well.

ticked off

An accurate breakdown of hours is not really available for this week, so it might be simpler to say that it's been devoted to PROJECT TEMPORAL, for which I've been in London—or sat on trains to and from London—pretty much all week.

I really don't want to become the sort of person who engages in Information Management Discourse, but I will note in passing that I seem to have reached a point with my own adaptation and customisation of Obsidian that it makes a really useful one-window system for working on projects with a lot of documents in play. I'm very accustomed to a two-screen set-up in my home office, and while I'm a long way from having the sort of stadium-sized allocations of screen real-estate that some desk-jockeys enjoy, going down to a single 13-inch laptop screen when on the move feels like a real constraint; finding a way to make the best of that is very welcome.

(It is of course much easier to make the best of it when the trains you're on are not packed to the gills, and run to schedule. I was mostly lucky in this regard on this trip, and have as such taken care to make the appropriate sacrifices and libations to the gods of steel and concrete.)

kinmaking

Being on site for PROJECT TEMPORAL meant this was inevitably a fairly social week, and it was good to catch up with not just the project PIs (who I've worked with before) and the other participants (who I last saw in Bergen back at the start of the summer).

This was also my first time back on British soil since moving to Sweden in 2020, and I was lucky to get the chance to spend some time with some old friends and colleagues. I spent a very rainy Friday morning in South Kensington chatting with Andrew Curry (currently of SOIF), who has all the best stories (and all the hardest-won wisdom), and later that day I went out for a shockingly good vegan curry in Theatreland with OG solarpunk and friend-of-the-show Jay Springett. Hell, we even got a proof-of-life shot:

(On that note, I would heartily recommend the small chain of Sagar restaurants, especially if you need to accommodate folk with the sorts of dietary needs that central London is still not that great at providing for. Not a shred of meat on the menu, but a whole bunch of flavour! I also had a very good meal with my sister at Yalla Yalla, an affordable and generous Lebanese place near Oxford Circus.)

reading

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. Not a great week for reading, what with all the work and travel and social stuff, but have managed to get around fifty pages into this much-discussed book. I have become very wary of political commentary from the other side of the Atlantic—not least for the tendency to assume, if only implicitly, that the United States and the world worth discussing are effectively coextensive—and likely wouldn't have picked this up if it hadn't been selected for a book group I'm part of. It's hard to make a full or fair judgement on so small a pagecount, but after a somewhat off-putting introduction, Klein is settling into a deal more self-examination than the intro had suggested was in the offing, which is encouraging.

(That said, I'm already further through Doppelganger than the last non-fiction title we looked at; I didn't even reach the end of the intro of Hans Rosling's Factfulness, which is now my go-to illustration of the notion of "not even wrong".)

a clipping

It's a thematic two-fer in the clippings department this week, and the theme is population—a topic whose recent resurgence in the context of the frankly ugly politics of the current era is alarming, given how often I've heard it raised as the preamble to policy proposals (amateur and professional alike) which seem to belong to the 1920s as much as to the 2020s.

So our first pick is Doug Muir of Crooked Timber parsing the latest world population report from the UN; the top-line summary is basically "it's still growing, but that growth is slowing even faster than previously estimated, and likely to start shrinking from 2080 after a peak at 10.9 billion".

Almost invariably, however, someone with something to say about population is usually interested in a very particular set of sub-populations, and Muir has a useful rejoinder to that subtext:

At this point someone will mention climate change.  Here’s my position on that: climate change is not really a population problem.  Climate change is a policy problem.  Atmospheric CO2 has been increasing ever since we started measuring it (1958), but the /rate/ of increase in atmospheric CO2 started increasing in the early 2000s — right around the time the rate of population increase was falling faster and faster.  Also, most of the world’s population increase is going to be happening in poorer countries, and Afghans and Ghanaians aren’t exactly topping the leagues in per capita CO2 output.

With apologies for those who don't need the point to be belaboured: handwringing over population increase in "those countries" is pure projection. Climate change is everyone's problem and everyone's responsibility, but population growth in underdeveloped nations does not in any way diminish your own complicity or responsibility to change, and pretending that it might is not a good look.

Your bonus population longread is an LRB review of a new book on Malthus. Being an LRB joint, it's pretty hefty, so I don't feel too bad about giving you the first half of the closing graf, whether as an enticement to read the whole thing or an excuse not to—but I would recommend the former if you're interested in the topic.

Neo-Malthusians are adamant that the escape from hunger and constraint has only ever been partial, and can’t possibly last for ever. Paul and Anne Ehrlich claimed in 2013 that if everyone on the planet ate like an American, we would need five Earths. The space available for global food production declined from just over an acre per person in the 1960s to half that amount four decades later. What if Malthus was right in the long run? Valenze turns the question on its head. What if all of this is Malthus’s fault?

Theory has consequences, kids!

OK, that's all for now. I'm back at HQ in Malmö next week, so things should be as close to normal as they ever get around here; in the meantime, thanks for reading!

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 39 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.