week 45 / 2024

Hello again, and welcome back to WEEKNOTES.

The renovation continues, like Pete Tong on a treadmill... though we have turned a corner now, in that every time I look into that bathroom, it looks slightly more like a bathroom, as opposed to a space in which a grenade has recently detonated. Improved communications around the schedule are also making it easier for me to plan the use of my time... and it's only taken four weeks to reach this point.

(How many weeks left to go? No idea! I'm guessing three, mostly that means I'm less likely to be disappointed when it's two and a half.)

Eh, I'm sick of typing about it. Let's get on with the show, shall we?

ticked off

• Five hours on PROJECT HORNIMAN. (Probably closer to eight hours, because most of this work has been reading for research, and I fit other small chunks in here and there, but not everything gets captured when I'm operating in fragments shorter than an hour at a time. Was reminded how fortunate it is to have a job where I can sit and read a book on a topic that fascinates me and legitimately call it work.)
• Twelve hours of admyn (!) including a bunch of email tennis, some short pitches, and a bunch of tedious but worthwhile updating of web presences here and there. (I now have a services page on my LinkedIn profile, which I feel is unlikely to result in a sudden torrent of opportunities, but which certainly can't do any harm; I've also brought my canonical site mostly up to date with projects and publications. All of which may sound quite impressive, until you realise that it's all displacement activity aimed at avoiding doing the thing that really needs doing, namely the Magrathea Futures website, which after nearly a full year is still just a "work ongoing" holding page. Selah; procrastination that results in the wrong work being done is better than the other sort.)
• Five hours of kinmaking, which I'm clocking here for the sake of its being a non-trivial chunk of the week. (I'm tempted to clock the cycling to and from, as well, because that's another couple of hours... but no. That feels like it would be a sort of false accounting.)
• Ten hours of undirected reading and writing, because that's what we do. (One of the reasons we do it is that the undirected writing can, in the absence of expectations, actually result in material that's directly relevant to ongoing projects—and this was the case this week. Sometimes good stuff just falls out of your head, in other words; you just have to make sure the paper's there to catch it.)

A much better week than last week; lowering expectations was the right choice, clearly. That said, I'm very much looking forward to being able to raise them again...

kinmaking

The second session of the as-yet-unnamed monthly Malmö-adjacent futures-people meet-up took place on Wednesday morning, and ran to well over ninety minutes, as we hit a strong seam of conversation around degrowth and the futures of business, against the backdrop of climate change and, well, everything else. Good coffee, good people, good times.

Thursday morning was a breakfast seminar by Martin Behm and Vanja Johnson of MakeThrive, offering general tips for SMEs navigating the emerging sustainable marketplace. I was there less for the advice than to see how a successful agency like MakeThrive frames this stuff—and given it was all in Swedish, the detail would have escaped me anyway!

(Nonetheless, I think it's a weak signal that you can go to this sort of thing and hear someone laying out not just the desirability but the necessity of decommodification and the reorientation to values over profit; this is partly a response to the regulatory landscape of the EU, but also to the sea-change of public attitudes on the environment. MakeThrive are clearly betting the house on this happening, one way or the other.)

Finally, later on Thursday I spent most of the afternoon having a long overdue catch-up with the many-faceted Abigail Sykes of Omställningsbyrån, who recently finished an interesting climate-y futures-y project at Kristianstad Vattenriket, and who generally juggles an array of competencies, from journalism to facilitation, that make me feel like a one-note wonder.

reading

I will defer discussion of the book I'm currently reading for PROJECT HORNIMAN (see above), as I may want to write about it here at greater length later on.

Fictionwise, I decided it was time to see what I thought of the decade's least-expected literary collaboration, namely China Miéville and Keanu Reeves's The Book of Elsewhere. On the basis of the few reviews I've seen, it's not exactly been received with rapture by the sf/f world, and I went in with pretty low expectations... and I think I quite like it? I mean, sure; it's a novel about this effectively immortal demigod berserker guy who—after eighty thousand years or so of alternating between either living it up in relative obscurity or cutting a murderous swathe through whomsoever has unwisely pissed him off—has ended up embedded in a sort of modern-day special-ops unit built around the instrumentalisation of his extraordinary capacity for killing.

BUT—China Miéville has written it! So, yes: there's a fair bit of fighty-killy and secret-base-eyes-only-experiments-in-the-space-between-science-and-the-occult. But there's also deep ruminations on what it would be like to be unable to die (or, more accurately, to repeatedly return from the dead), or to have witnessed tens of thousands more years of human history than humans currently believe existed, or to have spent a lot of your insanely long life trying to stamp out cults that have formed around the merest rumours of your own existence. So, less "Conan, what is best in life?", and more "Conan, what even is life, anyway?"

It also features a bunch of stuff about grief and therapy and the loss of family members, particularly mothers. It also features an immortal berserk demigod deer-pig. The premise is frankly absurd, but Miéville has treated it no differently to any of his own, and the result seems to me to indicate that I'm actually more than willing to put up with hokey conceits and pulp-comic action-movie cliches at the level of plot, so long as it's delivered in that insightful, involved and baroque prose style that Miéville is known for. Go figure.

a clipping

How to explain this week's clipping? Well—one of the long-term questions that I poke at when my mind has spare cycles is best summed up by asking "who or what is the subject of the verb 'to evolve'?" The question seems simple, though the answer is anything but... and its relevance to my work comes from the connection to the challenge of trying to narrate systemic and/or infrastructural dynamics without recourse to the frankly inadequate (but understandable) human obsession with directly causal relations.

(In other words, asking who or what evolves is similar to asking where climate change comes from, just less politically loaded... which is quite the turnaround from, say, two decades ago.)

Anyway, this essay by one Marco Giancotti is also trying to explain the evolutionary process without recourse to causal forces... only from a position of, uh, basically knowing a lot more about it than I do? Along the way it does some very accessible stuff on probability and feedback and (eco)systems, and I'm hugely admiring of anyone who can make this stuff seem so simple, even while they're pointing out how un-simple it is.

What is the source of what we call order? Why do many things look too complex, too perfectly organized to arise unintentionally from chaos? How can something as special as a star or a flower even happen? And, for that matter, why do some natural phenomena seem designed for a purpose?

Great writing, and a fascinating topic. Enjoy!

That's all for this week; we'll be back on Wednesday with the second half of my interview with Andrew Dana Hudson. (First part's here, if you've not read it yet.) Cheerio!

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 45 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.