Weeknotes

week 52 / 2024

Wandering around the city graveyard, gloved hands deep in the pockets of your long, dark coat—old goths never die, they just start writing WEEKNOTES. This week, biology is hacked (and punked), and a gold-rush refused.

From a Christmas Day wander in Malmö's ostra kyrkogård

Welcome back to (NULL)WEEKNOTES at Worldbuilding Agency.

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My name is Paul Graham Raven, and I am a consulting critical and creative foresight practitioner. I would like to help you or your organisation think through what it might mean (and look like!) to do the thing that you do in a world where the climate and the culture are changing way faster than the technology. I've done this sort of work for universities, professional institutions, charities and NGOs, as well as businesses; you can see some case studies and examples here. Whether you're wondering how I might be able to help, or if you already know what you need, drop me a line and let's arrange a chat.

Null Week! My preferred label for the liminal temporal wasteland around and between Christmas and New Year's Day.

(The Swedes call it mellandagarna, which translates as “the between days”; not only is this a fine example of the Swedish lexicon's frequently charming literalness, it also reminds me of a truly excellent song by The Cure.)

Null Week is nice, because it’s a week when you can pretty much guarantee that no one is going to be chasing you to finish stuff, and therefore (perhaps counterintuitively) a week in which you can actually get stuff finished. Null Week is also a little nasty, in that it sometimes deep-sixes the regular rhythm of the week; when the major holidays fall in the middle of the week, as they do this year, then one never quite gets oneself out of a fundamentally weekendish sort of head-space. “So why not take a holiday, Paul, like a normal person?” Well, the question answers itself: I am not a normal person, and this is not a normal job.

Which is why I’m doing WEEKNOTES in Null Week, and why I’ve been working Null Week, albeit not to the extent I would expect of myself in a regular week. Let’s see, shall we?

ticked off

Five hours of writing toward PROJECT PONTIF. (About half of this involved typing up handwritten notes, and the other half editing, adding new material, removing rubbish, and buffing up the thing as a whole.)
Two and a half hours writing toward a little not-quite-commission piece. (Too small a project to merit a code-name, this one... but nonetheless the sort of thing that one doesn’t want to talk about in case it doesn’t come off, or comes off in a different form to that originally expected.)
Ten hours of admyn, which rolls up assorted paperwork and little bits of incidental writing with a couple of hours spent under the hood of my canonical website, trying to do some fancy tricks with custom fields and templates (partly successful, but you’ll not notice any difference yet), and three hours playing with and assessing an Obsidian plugin for project management purposes (conclusion: the garbledness of the documentation was a warning sign, and I should have heeded it).
Ten hours of undirected writing and reading. (Actually probably more than ten, but the ten that get counted are the scheduled ten that make it onto the daily ledger. And sure, they’re all work hours, in one sense—but they don’t feel like work, particularly not the extra ones that you do because you feel like it.)

kinmaking

Nope, not this week. Hermit Mode: Activate.

reading

I finished Ian Green’s Extremophile early in the week. Punk-rock eco-biohackers against corporate sociopaths in a climate-and-plague-buggered future London? Yeah, why not! Propulsive without being excessively pulpy, this novel actually features one of the more sophisticated fictional treatments I’ve so far encountered of the dilemma posed by books like Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline: to what extent is violent resistance justified, or simply understandable, in the context of a structural violence such as climate change and the profit-seeking of which it is a by-product?

(Hint: the sophistication of the treatment lies precisely in its not advancing a pat one-side-or-t’other type answer to the question, as well as its working it out through character development and action rather than narrative digression.)

It’s a very accomplished book! It even manages to portray DIY music scene characters and politics in a way that didn’t provoke any eye-rolling and muttered accusations of tourism, which is a very rare thing indeed. I liked it way more than I expected to, to be honest.

a clipping

This is a listicle from Kyle Chayka (with a little help from some friends) that bills itself as “The new rules of media”, after the modern etiquette articles that used to be a staple of lifestyle magazines when lifestyle magazines were still a thing.

Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult. You have to cultivate your own, no matter how small. To do so you must always be relatable, but also ideally aspirational. Just don’t get too out of the reach of your cultists.
One Thing https://onethingnewsletter.substack.com/p/the-new-rules-of-media

I have parsed it as being simultaneously a factual analysis of “how to substack”, and also a knowingly ironic, tongue-somewhat-in-cheek way of doing exactly that commercially-viable-on-the-internet sort of writing while simultaneously despairing a fair bit about the grotesque compromises that it demands, particularly of someone whose main writerly beat is media and/or tech criticism.

That interpretation is likely influenced by my having found it via Robin Sloan, who commented (and I paraphrase) that Chayka’s piece is a statement of why we can’t carry on as we’ve been carrying on. It certainly served to remind me that there’s little point in me trying to apply the current model for writing one’s way to fame and fortune—not least because it requires a commitment of time that I don’t have to a sort of writing I don’t particularly want to do, as well as a commitment of energy that I simply don’t think I have access to any more.

Before you conclude I’m being lazy, consider that I tried my damnedest to write my way to fame and fortune during the so-called golden age of blogging... and while I didn’t fail at that, so much as I succeeded instead at falling sideways into something somewhat different to what I set out to do, I am nonetheless very aware that the game is given to changing very quickly, the audience is more fickle than ever before, and that what you’re capable of in your early thirties is really not the same as what you’re capable of in your late forties. A gold-rush is, or should be, a young person’s game.

(Really, gold-rushes shouldn’t be anyone’s game, but hey—they’re the sine qua non of capitalism, and so long as the people in charge are still making a mint from selling the shovels, I expect we’re stuck with them. Selah.)

Anyway, this is one of the reasons that I’m no longer charging for subs to This Very Website; I’ve got enough things to do without adding one more metric on which to chase after Number Go Up. Plus the accounting is, if you'll excuse the vernacular, a total fucking nightmare.

Well, that's it for this week—and for this year, I suppose! Thanks as always for reading along, and a happy new year to you.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 52 of 2024. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe. If you are already subscribed, please send to a friend who you think might also like it.

Have a good weekend.