week 50 / 2024

Welcome back, once again, to WEEKNOTES at Worldbuilding Agency.

There are a lot of these "labours of the given month" images (such as the one above) to be found in museums collections, and I guess it shouldn't come as so much of a surprise that slaughtering various animals was an important activity through the year in pre-industrial periods. These pictures really bring home how in the open that activity was, however—in the sense of "in the middle of the street", as in this image, but also in the more subtle sense of being something that was very much present in everyday life.

I'm no vegetarian, to be clear—but I do wonder how much easier it is for us to be so profligate with our meat consumption when the messy realities of it are hidden away in windowless facilities.

At this point, I kinda want to find some way of comparing my week's labours to that of slaughtering a very harrowed-looking pig, such as the pictured peasants are doing, but that would be cheap. Sometimes the illustrative image is just an illustrative image, you know?

(I could have slotted some "AI" slop in there, I guess, but if you've been reading awhile, you'll know that's not a direction I'm willing to go. In the meantime, I'll leave the possible connection between the obfuscation of meat-industry practices and the obfuscation of generative-model data-centers as an exercise for the reader.)

Pig-sticking aside, what's been going down around here, then? (Other than the publication of the first half of an interview with none other than Bruce Sterling, that is...)

ticked off

• Four hours on PROJECT PONTIF. (Reading, listening, taking notes. Following the breadcrumbs, here—those moments when, after you've been thinking about a particular idea, serendipity just drops exactly the right link or text into your lap.)
• Two and a half hours on PROJECT TEMPORAL. (A minor log-jam was successfully worked around, and plans were made for the proper clearing thereof.)
• Four and a half hours of kinmaking. (Details below, as usual.)
• Two hours at a seminar up at Malmö University. (A ten-year retrospective by the authors on the book Collaborative Media, which was in effect a discussion of what happened to the utopian notions of the internet that prevailed through the late 1990s and up to what was rather optimistically called "the Arab Spring".)
• Three and a half hours of prepping and being recorded for a podcast. (This is why I was reading The Difference Engine a few weeks back! Will link the thing when it gets released, which I think will be before the end of the year.)
• Two hours of tooling. (Tooling here refers to the deployment of new technologies and or softwares; specifically, I was seeing how well Obsidian would work on my recently-acquired Onyx BOOX e-ink tablet. Unfortunately, the answer is "so poorly as to be useless", but hey, at least I know now—and I found a workaround for getting book annotations and notes into Obsidian via Dropbox instead, so the time wasn't wasted.)
• Three hours of roleplay-performance at a light-hearted experiential futures thing at the Media Evolution vinterfesten on Friday night. (Playing the "bouncer" for the "futures bar", which is the kind of psychopomp role which I'm probably best suited for: the trouble with being a writer is that it's hard to play any role which doesn't have a certain degree of awareness of its own position within the mytho-narratological system, you know?)
• Seven hours of admyn. (Lots of things to clear down for the end of the year, particularly with regard to accounting. Not counted: a couple of hours of logistics, fetching my stuff from my old desk and locker at Media Evolution, as I'll be based at STPLN next year.)
• Ten hours of undirected writing and reading. (Undirected, as always, but a fair bit of this kinda fell into PROJECT PONTIF territory, which is probably why the synchronicity engines have been running so smoothly there this week.)

kinmaking

Spent an hour or so on Monday evening talking to the generous and patient Christine Prefontaine, who kindly offered to help me think through some business development stuff. Thanks, Christine!

The third meeting of the still-unnamed Malmö futures folk meet-up was Wednesday morning. It's boiling down to a smaller core group than the very busy first event back in October, but that's quite nice, as it allows for a more focussed conversation. (This in turn means it doesn't feel at all like "networking", more a discussion between peers and colleagues. This is an unalloyed Good Thing as far as I'm concerned.)

Wednesday afternoon featured a call with Maria Bang, formerly of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (among other institutions). Systems thinking, prefigurative social interventions, narrative approaches to futures... we had a lot to talk about!

reading

A lousy week for recreational reading, this one—mostly because I've been reading toward PROJECT PONTIF, on the evenings when I've still had the concentration for text.

However, I finally cracked open my first Robert Bolaño book last night! The Spirit of Science Fiction is small enough that it might even be a novella, and is notably shorter than Bolaño's best-known novel, 2666... but one of the blurbs claims it to be a sort of condensation of or key to his other work. Whether that means it's a good place to start or a terrible one remains to be seen, I guess? I like it so far; it has a weird Beat-esque sort of vibe, though I'm not yet sure quite where it's going with it.

a clipping

Today's clipping comes via L M Sacasas, who is a must-read thinker for me these days (and has been for some years now).

This piece is a long essay based around the author's visit to the last village in England that still has a system of common-land usage:

As a visitor from the age of private property, it seems remarkable to me that commoners held rights to land they did not own or rent, but, at the time, it was commonplace. In addition to common pasture, commoners were granted rights of pannage, of turbary, of estovers, and of piscary—rights to run their pigs in the woods, to cut peat for fuel, to gather wood from the forests, and to fish. These were rights to subsistence, rights to live on what they could glean from the land. In the course of enclosure, as written law superseded customary law, commoners lost those rights. Parliament made property rights absolute, and the traditional practice of living off the land was redefined as theft. Gleaning became trespassing, and fishing became poaching. Commoners who continued to common were now criminals.

Very nice writing, as you'd expect from The New Yorker—but also admirably reflective on the differences and, uh, commonalities between the US and the UK with regard to land tenure as it relates (and related) to class, race and gender. Well worth half an hour of your time.

(There is a welcome side-note in the piece regarding Garret Hardin, which doesn't shy away from mentioning the virulent racism that motivated his widely-known but largely fictitious theory. But it doesn't mention the best scholarly antidote to the insidious untruth of "the tragedy of the commons", namely the life's work of one Elinor Ostrom, who empirically proved Hardin wrong many times over.)

OK, that's your lot! Thanks for following along.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 50 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.