week 01 / 2026: the medium is the maxxage

“So here’s your life / we’ll find our way / we’re sailing blind / but it’s certain nothing’s certain...”

Trying to explain away earworms is surely right up there with telling your dreams to random strangers, but if anyone can explain to me how this chirpy little number from 1992 got stuck in my head, I’d be very grateful, as I'd actually quite like to avoid it happening again.

Anyway, welcome to 2026, and welcome back to weeknotes at Worldbuilding Agency! Would sir and madam care to see the menu?

• among the pixels
• between the pages
• lookback
• ticked off

among the pixels

We can all agree that 2025 is finished, but this piece argues that almost nothing else ever is. I’ll note up front that I’m not at all keen on its LinkedIn “broetry” stylings, but the essential thesis does perhaps merit its being stated so clearly:

We move from one thing to the next, but rarely arrive.

This is not simply a distraction, burnout, or impatience. It is not a personal failure of focus or discipline. It is something structural—designed into the systems we move through every day.

And once you start noticing it, it seems to appear everywhere.

(The usual caveats regarding marketing people who think they have a way of doing marketing that will make the world a better place definitely apply here.)

Talking of LinkedIn, I find Andrew McLuhan’s discursive style on that platform off-putting, to say the least—a classic case of the medium really being the message, perhaps—but this essay on the “tetrad” analysis developed by his grandfather Marshall and father Eric is good enough to counter my qualms about that, as well as about linking to the newsletter of vencap Medici-wannabes Andreesen Horowitz:

The point of the tetrad, the point of media studies at all, is to make media visible. To force us to pay attention to what’s happening all around us, sometimes only slightly beneath our awareness, sometimes buried deeply underneath. The true user experience is what we don’t notice but which shapes us all the same.

I started using the tetrad method because I consider media in the McLuhanite sense of the term to be effectively synonymous with infrastructure, which made it a useful tool for my doctoral research (though it never made it into the final thesis, for an assortment of reasons). Andrew McLuhan here seems to count media as synonymous with “technology”, which to me seems a little too vague—not least because “technology” is so capacious a term as to be meaningless, which is why I’ve taken to putting it in scare quotes. However, that’s not to say that the tetrad approach doesn’t work just as well for thinking about new products and services, or even emerging phenomena without a direct human origin; it’s a very useful part of the foresight practitioner’s toolkit, as demonstrated by another Andrew.

Talking of having the right analytical tools for the job, this piece at Harpers is mostly about the failure of USian political science—both the academic discipline, and the lucrative punditry operations downstream thereof—to account for the success of the current occupant of the White House.

Since its birth at midcentury, the dominant form of American political science has broadly consisted of three interlocking research programs: institutionalism, rational-choice theory, and behavioralism. All three share the underlying assumption that data and formal modeling can yield a predictive science.

Spoiler alert: they can’t, as has been repeatedly demonstrated.

Though it complains of wonkery, the piece itself is fairly wonkish—though our USian friends can perhaps be forgiven for their ongoing search for someone or something to blame. Outside of the narrowing context of US electoral politics, however, this piece is another data point for the pile in favour of qualitative methods, and in particular “thick description [which] requires the time-consuming art of interpretation, informed by years of learning about a culture and its history”. I’d offer that the value of interpretive work holds true for any sort of foresight, of which poli-sci is merely one type among many.

I’ll end with an example of foresight done very well indeed; if you want a clear-eyed state-of-the-abyss address, then Team Changeist are the people you want to listen to. Here’s Scott Smith discussing the “risk-maxxing” dynamic.

... we were the first generation (X) to watch the American Dream fall apart. We've lived in three countries (our own choice) and worked in dozens, and seen similar erosions taking place in the big global economies. The postwar deal was simple enough that it barely needed stating: education plus work plus time equals house, security, retirement. It worked, more or less, for three generations across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia—long enough that people mistook it for natural law rather than policy choice.

In the 80s and 90s, the cracks appeared.

Scott posits three basic responses to the disappearance of that deal among the younger generations: the titular risk-maxxing (e.g. crypto, sports betting); reform (e.g. protest and activism); and exit (e.g. go elsewhere, or go back to your parents’ place). All three of these options are deep into instability, foreclosure and diminishing returns. A reckoning must eventually come—but a glimpse at the party politics suggests it’s unlikely to come easily.

Scott does ballpark his analysis mostly within the Anglosphere, and I think it’s fair to say things are not quite so bad in the EU; while the EU definitely has a whole raft of its own problems and political hypocrisies, it also has a regulatory system that provides some protection from the worst of this stuff. The question of whether that system will hold, however, is far from settled—and there’s still plenty of discontent to go round.

between the pages

Over the last few nights I’ve been reading Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.

Its narrator John Dowell begins by announcing his intention to tell us the “saddest story I have ever heard”, which is the story of his erstwhile friend Edward Ashburnham (the eponymous good soldier) and his wife Leonora, and of their long relationship with Dowell and his own wife Florence. The further we get into the book, however, the more Dowell’s account savagely undermines what initially promised to be a happy tale of fast friendship with successive revelations of deceit, duplicity, adultery and insanity on the part of all the major characters, and not a few of the minor ones.

The Good Soldier is counted as a sort of proto-modernist work, and Dowell as an early and spectacular example of the technique known as the “unreliable narrator”, in which a first-person account unfold in such a way as to leave the reader in doubt regarding some or even all of the story they’re being told. (Gene Wolfe, discussed here at WA last year, was perhaps the greatest proponent of this technique in C20th genre fiction, though by no means the only proponent.)

It’s a good, propulsive little novel; Dowell’s voice on the page is very compelling, even as one comes increasingly to find his story unconvincing and his character questionable. It’s also an interesting historical document, in that the infidelities and deceptions that form the core of the plot seem very modern in many ways, but the context in which they play out—namely that of well-heeled Anglophone bourgeoisie spending most of their lives at early-C20th continental spa resorts—can feel at times astonishingly alien. “The past is a foreign country,” and all that jazz.

lookback

I worked my way through the holidays, as I usually do, but I have to say I didn’t work as hard or as focussed as initially intended. I needed a rest anyway, but a minor dental crisis has been enough of a distraction to make sustained focus very hard to achieve. I’m not in much actual pain, as the molar which has split was subject to root canal work a long time ago, but at the same time I basically can’t use that side of my mouth. I’m hoping I can make it to the first available appointment with my dentist without the damned thing coming apart any more than it already has; given that appointment is a little over a week away, that may be quite a challenge.

The week just gone has mostly been one of reading and writing, and this weekend has seen Malmö receive a light dusting of snow, meaning yours truly is on the snow-shovelling rota in the mornings. I’m looking forward to the reassertion of the standard week as the year gets started; the holidays mostly serve to remind me just how much a creature of habit and pattern I really am.

ticked off

• Ten hours of admyn. (The usual stuff, but also the end of year stuff, both domestic and commercial.)
• Six hours of research reading.
• Five hours of fiction writing.
• Five hours of art practice. (Experiments with masking fluid and paint-pens. Lots of fun, but there’s not much to show for it! But new techniques should open up new options in later works.)
• Four hours on these here weeknotes.
• Three hours of non-fiction writing. (Including what I’m billing as a sort of “structured reflection exercise”, looking back at the year just gone.)
• Two hours of networking. (Basically a long chat over coffee yesterday with Christian Simon.)
• Ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always.

Not a short week, but a fairly indulgent one, in terms of the work I chose to focus on. Nothing wrong with that!

OK, that’s all for now, I think. Happy new year, and I hope that all is well with you, wherever you may be.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 01 of 2026. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe. If you are already subscribed, please send to a friend!