week 11 / 2026: pipelines and pylons

“Bombing hometowns, I can / watch it free from harm / United Arab Emirates / still keep the gas in my car...”

Greetings from Malmö, where we smiled at the sun too soon and scared him off. Welcome back to WEEKNOTES at Worldbuilding Agency, where we’ll be talking a fair bit about infrastructure.

Turn the tap, and let it flow…

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

among the pixels

I failed to bookmark it, but a few days back on L*nkedIn someone had a headline riff that said something to the effect that “software was never eating the world, it was always hardware”.

The point being: Current Unfolding Events are, or should be, a reminder that a very great deal of what we consider to be normality—particularly those of us in Europe and the US—is hugely dependent on the predictable, reliable global movement of material stuff.

You likely already guessed that Iran’s move to cut off the Strait of Hormuz would have an impact on the movement of oil; as we’re going to discover, it will have an impact on a whole lot of other things, too.

Now, my doctorate research was focussed on infrastructure, but from a sociotechnical rather than econo-political point of view. As such, I’m not going to make any claims for the power-struggle aspects of the analysis and claims made in this massive long-read, which is one of many such pieces floating about right now—but I will say that it’s looking squarely at a bunch of stuff that, by design, doesn’t often intrude on day-to-day thinking outside of the “security community”, but which probably should—and very likely will—intrude on your life in the months ahead, whatever line of work or walk of life you’re in.

To calibrate the economic shock, one must first establish the baseline of what is being severed. In 2024, oil flow through the strait averaged 20 million barrels per day — roughly 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption. Flows through the strait made up more than one-quarter of total global seaborne oil trade. The EIA estimated that in 2024, 84 percent of crude oil and condensate shipments transiting the strait headed to Asian markets. A similar pattern appears in the gas trade, with 83 percent of LNG volumes moving through the Strait of Hormuz destined for Asian destinations. China, India, Japan, and South Korea accounted for a combined 69 percent intake of all crude oil and condensate flows through the strait last year. Approximately 22 percent of global LNG trade — primarily exports from Qatar and the UAE — transits the Strait of Hormuz. Unlike oil markets, no coordinated strategic reserve system exists for natural gas. If LNG shipments are disrupted, there is no comparable emergency release mechanism capable of stabilizing supply.

It’s not just oil and gas, though; the Gulf region is also a dominant exporter of the raw materials that are used for fertiliser production around the world, and of raw aluminium.

Again, geopolitics isn’t my beat, but infrastructure is—and that leaves me with what I suspect is a very similar feeling of “we told you so” to the one that the geopolitics people have right now. There are few bright sides to the prospect of an energy-price shock comparable only to the crisis of 1972, if any, but disruption provides the ground for more fundamental change—for all the ugliness to come, this is an opportunity to hammer hard on the junkie-like dependency we have on fossil fuels, and push for not just increased roll-out and reliance on renewable generation, but also for the more frugal lifestyles that might make a decrease in emissions possible.

We’ve been dangling at the end of the petrochemical supply chain for as long as I’ve been alive, but we’ve never been closer than we are right now to being able to untangle ourselves, drop to the ground and walk away. To do so will require a change in how we live, as well as a change in the systems we rely on—and that former change requires better stories about what that life might look like.

You know what else flows through Hormuz? Data.

The cables that connect the countries of the world tend to follow much the same routes as international shipping, for reasons related to geopolitical history as much as practicality; you could do a lot worse than read Laleh Khalili’s Sinews of War and Trade to learn why.

In recent years, however, various players in the Gulf region have been trying to establish overland connections as an alternative to the undersea lines—but escalating regional instability is far from being the only obstacle:

The fallback, should Red Sea cables be damaged, remains stark. The specialized ships that fix submarine cables number roughly 60 worldwide, and none can safely reach either choke point while the war continues. When three Red Sea cables were severed in 2024, repairs took up to five months. Networks could redirect traffic through a terrestrial route to Istanbul and onward into Europe, or around the entire coast of Africa.

All three front-runner corridors converge on Turkey as the gateway to Europe, but whether traffic actually stops at Istanbul’s exchanges or transits through to Bulgaria or Germany depends on what content is available there. That is a commercial question that remains unsettled, said Bülent Şen, regional director for the Middle East at Frankfurt-based DE-CIX. [...]

The obstacles ahead may be as much about regulation as about fiber. “Who is allowed to buy and operate fiber pairs that traverse a country and what is the price?” is the question that matters most, Alan Mauldin, research director at Washington-based telecom research firm TeleGeography, told Rest of World.

I’m not in the business of making predictions, but I’m thinking that a lot of those Gulf-located hyperscaler “AI” datacenter projects are going to get canned pretty quickly, and not just because they make a really good target for bombs and missiles.

While we’re thinking about weaning ourselves off oil, lots of the usual opportunists and shills are going to be suggesting we try methadone instead of smack, so here’s John Quiggin marking the fifteenth anniversary of the Fukushima disaster with a quick reminder of why nuclear power is only really good for two things, namely the production of weapons-grade fissile material—which is why it’s currently so popular with various governments keen to get in on the re-armament game—and lining the pockets of consultants and lobbyists:

No nuclear plant has started in construction (as defined by first nuclear concrete) in Europe or North America since the disastrous Hinkley C project in 2017. And the future is not much better. The UK will presumably go ahead with the Sizewell C project, duplicating Hinkley, but that will only replace retirements of existing plants. In France, sites for six reactors have been identified, but no investment decision has been made. And in the US, even the announced restart of reactors closed as uneconomic in recent years is looking doubtful.

Actually existing nuclear power programs around the world are similarly limited. China has an established industry which starts construction around 10 new plants every year, and typically connects them 5 to 6 years later. Russia builds about one per year, mainly to replace old RMBK (Chernobyl style) plants.

(If you’re thinking “but it’s clean and safe”, I’d be curious to know how close to a reactor, waste disposal site or uranium mine you live.)

But we can keep using fossil fuels if we find a way to capture the carbon before it reaches the atmosphere, right? Hypothetically, perhaps; practically, no. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a favourite suitcase concept among hydrocarbon peddlers who’d like us to sustain our habit, but has been shown to work effectively in very few, very specific set-ups, most of which aren’t actually related to fossil fuels at all. Even in those cases, the promises made rarely last longer than the subsidies that attract them, as demonstrated by Denmark’s decision to apply a new rule to tenders for CCS projects: if you don’t deliver the promised reductions of emissions, you have to pay a lot of the money back. The result? 80% of bids for Denmark’s most recent CCS tender were withdrawn.

We’ve known what we needed to do to quit fossil fuels for half a century. We’ve had the technical capacity to do it for a couple of decades. And we’re about to have a collective experience that will remind us just how dependent we are.

Now is the time to dream better, and dream loud.

between the pages

Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha turns up on a lot of literary bucket lists. I’ve never considered it an urgent priority, but a nice cheap copy of the relatively recent Modern Library translation came within my grasp recently, and I grabbed it and read it this week.

It’s… OK? (The book as an artefact is lovely; the Modern Library produces beautiful hardback editions.) Deeply cancel-worthy by contemporary standards, of course, and likely not just for reasons of cultural appropriation—but it’s easy to see why it struck such a chord with the mid-century proto-counterculture: the basic principles of Eastern mysticism, stripped of the deep paradoxes and packaged in a fairly pat tale. No wonder it’s a landmark work of the Western self-help and lifestyle-spiritualism canon.

I don’t think that makes it particularly problematic, to be clear—but it doesn’t make it a great book, either. It’s slight as well as short, and you’d likely get more value out a few hours listening to old Alan Watts lectures on Y*utube (as is true of a surprising number of activities). I suppose you could say it’s a victim of its own success: the ideas it advances were new to the West at the time of its publication, but are widespread now, albeit at an equally shallow level.

I’m left with far fonder memories of Steppenwolf, a later, deeper and far superior novel by the same author, though it’s been decades since I read it. I’ve also yet to read Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, which keeps cropping up as a reference in all sorts of places. Perhaps I should read that next… though I’m not sure the battered 1970s paperback copy that I picked up years ago would actually survive the attempt.

lookback

It’s been a good week at Magrathea Towers: various projects are up and rolling, and the sails of a few more can be spied on the horizon.

I’ve been wading through drivers for MUNICIPAL, which is actually very enjoyable work in many ways—though it will be nice to get a winnowed list out of the spreadsheet where they currently reside and into Miro, where they can be worked with in a more spatial manner. Sifting drivers for a particular project is very much the work of worldbuilding, in a way: it’s a matter of thinking about the client and their strategic issues, and about how any given driver would manifest in their operational scope. The thing with drivers is that any of them could be potentially relevant in some way; that’s what makes them drivers, after all! But the client’s capacity to respond is important, too, and depends on where they sit in the global scale; the question is how a given driver (or cluster thereof) might actually impact on the organisation, and how those impacts might manifest. In narratological terms, it’s sort of like extracting possible plot points from landscape features of the fabula: not every protagonist is going to end up heading for Mount Doom with the One Ring in their pocket, but if you’re sat in the Shire waiting to see how it all pans out, it might be worth preparing for Saruman to turn up with a fistful of factory blueprints, so to speak.

RADBURN kicked off this week, too. I don’t think there’s any hazard in revealing that this is an invited chapter for an academic edited volume; that means it’s unpaid labour, regrettably. But it’s also an opportunity to set down a lot of my more recent theoretical and practical thinking about futures work in a particular context—and the other authors are very simpatico, and doing some fascinating work. The trick with this one will be to keep it simmering while I’m juggling other paying projects, which is going to demand some scheduling discipline… so feel free to nudge me if you don’t see it crop up in the ledger for a while!

What else? Oh yeah—I’ve transcribed and tidied up an interview for this here website, which will be going live next week, and I’m lining up a stream of new material as we move in to Q2, so watch out for that. I also marked the twenty-year anniversary (!) of my personal blog, Velcro City Tourist Board. Apart from writing in the very broadest sense, I don’t think there’s any project or activity that has been a feature of my life for quite so long. It’s been a long strange trip, as the man used to say. Selah—onwards!

ticked off

• Seven hours on PROJECT MUNICIPAL.
• Seven hours on PROJECT RADBURN.
• Seven hours of art practice.
• Six hours of admyn.
• Four hours of work on this here website, plus three hours on these here weeknotes.
• Three hours of blogging.
• Two hours of networking calls.
• Two hours working on talks and slides.
• Plus ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always.

By the time most of you read this, I’ll be either en route to or ensconced in Gothenburg, where I’m playing guest lecturer at the design school HDK Valand on the Monday, giving a talk on worldbuilding to the local Futures Sweden network on Tuesday morning, and having a few meetings in the afternoon before heading back home. Nice to be getting out on the road rails again!

In the meantime, I hope all is well with you, wherever you may be.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 11 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!