week 43 / 2024

Welcome back to WEEKNOTES at Worldbuilding Agency.

Before we get started, I'd like to remind you that I am a consulting critical and creative foresight practitioner, and I have capacity available in the months ahead—capacity with which I could help you (and/or your organisation) use story and narrative to think through strategic challenges, to explore and communicate your organisational values, or simply to flex up your thinking in the face of a fast-changing landscape, both literal and figurative.

If any of that sounds like you, then let's have a chat—our operators are waiting for your call email.

Thank you. Now, on with the show!

Those of you playing the Renovation Nightmares Drinking Game may wish to place an order for a new liver with your favoured Chiba City chop-shop, because this thing's just gonna roll and roll, it seems.

The damp man (who, perhaps unsurprisingly, seemed a little put out at being referred to as "the damp man") gave his verdict on Thursday, and the verdict was "that's gonna need another week of the dehumidifier". Those of you whose notion of amusement is more oriented toward gambling may wish to open a book on the question of whether I'll get to take a shower in my own home before Christmas; the street odds are about two to one at the moment, I'm told.

In other news, I heard that we missed out on the grant that bore the name PROJECT HOTPLATE. The competition was apparently not just strong but numerous, which makes it a little less painful, but to be honest it still feels like a boot in the balls during a period when a little bit of good news would be very welcome.

But sometimes the world just doesn't work that way, does it? So we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start walking once again. Onwards!

ticked off

No project work was done this week. This is in no small part a case of me adapting the schedule to the circumstances—or, to put it more plainly, doing things that can be handled in short bursts, because I'm stressed out and out of routine, and unable to drill down on the big stuff.

That's not going to be a sustainable strategy, though. So next week I'm going to have to bite one or more bullets, and find somewhere quiet enough to let me get properly stuck in to PROJECT HORNIMAN, which can only be left fallow for so long.

In the meantime, it's not like I've been sat around on my hands doing nothing...

• Eight hours of reading and taking notes for a grant assessment thing I was asked to do. (Another bit of lucky timing, this, in that this rather bitty sort of work is a good fit with a fragmented week. For reasons of non-disclosure, I am sadly not at liberty to discuss this any further—but honestly, it's not very exciting. I mean, the opportunity is exciting for the applicants! But the process of doing a first shortlisting pass on the bids is very much a wheat-from-chaff scenario.)
• Seven hours of applying for grants, workshop slots and (in one case) an actual job. (Because this is how the sausage gets made, innit? With regard to the job application, it's not something I would normally do—I have committed to this freelance thing, much as weeks like this one make me question my sanity for having done so—but sometimes you see an ad for a position that would be such a wild and swerving change in your life that you can't not take a swing at it. Said position is likely to be off-the-charts competitive, however, and I'm a rank outsider to the industry in question, so I've filed the submission receipt with the intention of forgetting about it entirely. I've got better and more immediate prospects to be hanging my hopes on.)
• Ten hours of admyn. (Mostly strategising the hunt for the next gig, but also a fair chip of time spent thinking about what I want to do with This Very Website. A plan is coming together on that front, slowly but surely.)
• Ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always.

kinmaking

Once again, more a case of kin-renewing than making afresh—but it had been more than three years since I'd last spoken to Scott "Changeist" Smith, when we were both in Vienna for the somewhat-socially-distanced seminar/conference thing that eventually became the book Futures Brought to Life: We are no Futurists, lovingly curated by Tim and Tina of Time's Up.

In addition to catching up more generally, I got to ask a whole lot of inside-baseball questions about Foom, Changeist's new GPT-powered strategic simulation system. Gotta be honest, it sounds pretty wild—not at all the sort of thing I do, but then, to be fair, probably not the sort of thing I'd even be capable of doing. Scott and Susan are restless inventors who frequently use themselves as crash-test dummies, and the chat-bot bit is the least important element of this fast and intense approach to strategic workshopping; I strongly suspect that, once again, they'll leave the more traditional agencies choking on the dust that this thing blows up behind it.

(Get in there quick, is my advice, so you can say you tried it before it McKinsey rolled out a shonky knock-off for the Saudis.)

reading

Bitty work for a bitty week, then. And a bitty book, too—though that's no disservice to Reality Hunger by David Shields, which I bought back in 2011 (when it was the subject of much excitement and controversy) but somehow never got round to reading. It's a writer's book, in that it's a writer writing about writing, and on what they think writing should be—not quite a manifesto, but definitely a polemic, and thus likely of little interest to those who do not write themselves, or who don't at least read a great deal.

But those among you who live with the pathology of the written word may might quite enjoy this collection of 600 or so short fragments, the significant majority of which are slightly tweaked quotations or paraphrases of other writers (or writings), stitched together with Shields' own asides. It's about plagiarism, about theft and borrowing, about the differences (or lack thereof) between non-fiction and fiction, and it's an argument for a sort of writing that doesn't so much shun generic categories as treat them as a grab-bag of opportune and sometimes dangerous tools to play with. It's tightly wound, it's occasionally surprisingly funny, and it's as relevant now as it was nearly fifteen years ago.

a clipping

Digging in the vaults a bit, here—and this one actually dates back to about the same period as Reality Hunger, oddly enough, though I didn't plan it that way.

A bunch of meandering thoughts about music as an arena for worldbuilding pointed me back toward a short piece by Robin Sloan which left a big mark on me at the time; if you've read me elsewhere waffling on about "the media cyborg", well, this is the post that coined that term.

When you think of someone like Kanye West or Lady Gaga, you can’t think only of their brains and bodies. Lady Gaga in a simple dress on a tiny stage in a no-name club in Des Moines is—simply put—not Lady Gaga. Kanye West in jeans at a Starbucks is not Kanye West.

To understand people like that—and, increasingly, to understand people like us (eep!)—you’ve got to look instead at the sum of their brains, their bodies, the media they create, and the media created by others about them. All together, it constitutes a sort of fuzzy cloud that’s much, much bigger than a person.

Damn, man—we used to write some wild stuff on blogs, back in the day.

My middle-aged nostalgia aside, the media cyborg is a big but largely undeveloped part of my personal theoretical landscape, and a whole lot of things seem currently to be pointing me back toward it.

By way of example: Sloan used Kanye as an example looooong before Kanye's position as the face of that vast cyborg organism made his brainworms much, much worse. Taylor Swift is a media cyborg; so's Donald Trump.

It's not a new phenomena, either—Bowie was a media cyborg, for instance, and perhaps one of the first to choose it knowingly, though far from the last to think he could control it. The difference between then and now is a difference of intensity, and of extent... and that I'm using terms with more than a whiff of the Deleuzean about them is appropriate, even if unintentional.

And now I've gotten myself started, haven't I? But this isn't the time or the place; maybe later.

In the meantime, the week is over—so thanks for reading, and watch out for some mid-week material on Wednesday!

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 43 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.