week 44 / 2026: down and out
Attention Conservation Notice: I have the plague, so this is Minimum Viable Weeknotes
Paul Graham Raven
week 43 / 2026: chips and dips
The microprocessor supply chain is the apogee of economic globalisation—so you should plan for it failing, or being broken on purpose, fairly soon. Also: drawing a (fuzzy) line between the didactic telos of narrative prototyping and science fiction as literature, with Wells and Verne as exemplars.
week 42 / 2026: rooms and readings
A rare essay from Superflux’s Jon Adern offers us some amazing insights into how and why their speculative practice works to open up questions of futurity in a way that can’t be done with words alone. Also: some reasons you should see the movie Digger while it’s still in cinemas.
week 41 / 2026: after the fast
This week I have been reading quite literally nothing. Now you can read about why that is the case, and what effects it had.
week 40 / 2026: enchantments and charlatans
In this rather occult instalment, Hans Blumenburg compares the worldmaking aspirations of high technology and high religion; Henry Farrell compares “AI” evangelists to alchemical hucksters; and Joseph Henrich inverts the evolutionary history of Yuval Harari. Plus: Jack Parsons versus L Ron Hubbard!
shock therapy for the hype hustle: how David Edgerton de-centered innovation in C20th history
David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old argues that innovation is real, but tech-focussed futurology is nonsense. A true history of sociotechnical change should feature far fewer heroic inventions, and far more cumulative combinations.
week 39 / 2026: utilities and utilitarianisms
Path dependency in infrastructure is not just a hardware issue, and Effective Altruism (for all its failings) fills a gap identified by its critics. Plus: form echoes function in the writing of Stephen Jay Gould! And the Gothenburg book fair is inimical to the authorial sensibility!