week 46 / 2024

Hello, and welcome back to WEEKNOTES at Worldbuilding Agency.

It's been a busy week, and I'm all out of jovial riffs on the weather, which has finally gone hard on the traditional attributes of autumn in Malmö, which is to say windy and deeply overcast. I respect the opinions of people who claim autumn as their favourite season, but I really do not share them.

And don't even ask about the bathroom renovation, OK? Just don't.

Enough of my whinging—on with the show!

ticked off

• Five hours on PROJECT TEMPORAL. (This one just keeps running and running. Which would be fine, if it also kept paying...)
• Fourteen hours at the Solar Design Lab workshops, hosted by Cross Innovation Sweden. (This was a fun and very intense way to spend Wednesday and Thursday: prototyping interventions for "the low-tech city". Unusual to see events combining a low-tech/degrowth framing with the I-word, which is one of the main reasons I went to what was basically a volunteer thing with a slim chance of being getting a bit of funding to develop your team's prototype further. Nice people, interesting ideas, and some workshop/facilitation ideas to steal consider imitating.)
• Four hours of grant/commission bid development. (Because this is the reality of things—so I'd better get not only used to it, but also get good at it.)
• Two and a half hours working on This Very Website. (Pasting in the second half of the ADH interview, plus doing these weeknotes, which deserves to be counted as much as any of the other stuff.)
• Five hours of admyn. (Because ain't no one else gonna answer my emails and do my accounts. No, I will not be using "AI" for this sort of stuff—and I bloody well hope you aren't, either.)
• Two hours at a seminar on "writing for games" hosted on Monday evening by the Danish Film School in Copenhagen. (This was interesting, but nowhere near as informative as I had hoped given the price and the travel time involved. The guests were interesting—though, by their own admission, hardly representative of the majority or writing roles in the games industry—but the thing was rather marred by its moderator, who repeatedly interrupted and talked over her female guest, and then closed the proceedings with a demo of her own game in development, which was so cringe-worthily terrible that I was obliged to interpret her general overconfidence as a compensatory projection.)
• Ten hours of undirected writing and reading. (Because that's how we do what we do.)

kinmaking

I spent fourteen hours not just talking to people but workshopping with them, and honestly that feels like more than enough kinmaking for a week, or perhaps even two. I am very introverted, and as such these sorts of events are exhausting—and all the more so when they go well, ironically.

However, I also took a call earlier in the week with Ulises Navarro Aguiar of HDK-Valand, the merged arts-and-design HE institution up in Gothenburg. It's always nice when someone else gets in touch to arrange a chat, not least because it's a reminder that people out there are actually encountering your stuff and getting interested in it.

(So if you're reading this and thinking you'd like to chat, please do get in touch!)

reading

I'm having one of those phases where I can't decide what fiction I want to read, so my evening reading has been non-fictional instead: The Religion of Technology by David F Noble. It's not exactly a thrilling read, but it does have something going for it that's unusual in academic or academic-adjacent books, namely a simple thesis which is steadily evidenced in clear, unfussy prose.

That thesis is right there in the title, but Noble points out in his intro that he's not saying that technology is (or has become) like a religion, but that it really is one—a religion whose origins are found in the Christianity of the Middle Ages, and which developed through monastic programs aimed at developing the "useful arts", through millenarian Protestantism and the early days of e.g. the Royal Society in Britain, Freemasonry, and the earliest engineering-oriented educational establishments. (It's not his focus, but there's enough here to make it plain that futurity and prophecy have always been closely attached to the technological project, too.) This sort of sociological history inevitably comes with a sort of grudging respect for the tenacity and reach of both projects, but Noble was clearly way ahead of the current fashion for worrying about the power of the technological imaginary over our capacity to imagine times yet to come.

And lest you think it's just ragging on Christianity, there's an astonishing line near the end of the first section where Noble argues that Marxism became the most powerful system of technological prophecy since the influential millenarian commentaries on the book of Revelations. (Some would likely want to correct him by qualifying that as "vulgar" or "Western" Marxism, but to do so would miss the point: it's not so much the source texts themselves, it's the cult-like projects that slowly reinterpret them.

As I say, it's not a riveting read, but it's clear and thorough—and provides a useful historical plank for a tech-critical argument. I'm looking forward to the second half of the book.

a (lack of) clipping

No clipping this time, I'm afraid, as it's been a slow week for interesting stuff on the internet: everyone is writing about the same topic, it seems, and we're still at the stage where the airing of pent-up sound and fury is way ahead of any sustained attempts at signification.

Perhaps you've read something good this week, and would like to recommend it to me and/or other readers? Be my guest! Use the comment function below, or drop me an email if you wanna keep it personal.

(But please: no blue-wristband rubbish, OK?)

And on that note, I'm gonna call it a week—thanks for following along.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 46 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.