week 22 / 2026: fathers and sons

“Spitting in a wishing well / blown to hell—crash! / I’m the last splash…”

Greetings from Malmö, where the maritime skies are grey like the hull of a new-built boat. This week, we’re looking at populist popes and tin-pot prometheans, and trying to see how the greater picture might be moving…

Alright, let’s roll.

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

among the pixels

Strange times make for strange bedfellows. I’m sure I’m not the only person somewhat surprised to find themselves more favourably inclined to the public statements of the pontiff of the Catholic church than to the self-anointed representatives of science and rationality, but, well—welcome to 2026, eh?

I have yet to read the Pope’s encyclical (though it’s in the queue) and I’m avoiding the Hot Takes, because I want to make up my own mind, but I’m interested in that meta-level sense of alliances and ideologies realigning—in the enantiodromia. The image I keep returning to is that of an hourglass: its upending actually happened a little while back (with the pandemic as the external force) and we’re now in the stage where the sand has to resettle before the flow between chambers regularises itself again.

The problem with this image is that it still proposes a more radical break than is actually the case. The enantiodromic reversal always appears sudden, but that’s because it’s an emergent function of countless actions to which you weren’t paying attention—such as, in the case of the Pope, a slow, steady and strategic push-back inside the Catholic church, a counter-reaction to the reactionary response to liberation theology in South America:

For Ratzinger, who led the charge against Gutiérrez, the problem was not the liberationist’s critique of capitalism—many popes had ventured one, at least since the 1891 publication of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, which condemned the corrosiveness of the free market and the suffering produced by the industrial revolution. But the cardinal inquisitor believed that liberation theologians had gone too far in arguing that the destitute were more than merely objects of charity—that they were, rather, the presence of God himself on earth. Divinity, as Gutiérrez put it, “smelled of the stable,” and the face of Christ was to be found in every emaciated, tortured, and terrified body in the world.

In Ratzinger’s view, this amounted to an indictment of the Church itself, of its pomp and wealth. To assign Christ’s crucifixion a primarily worldly meaning—as Gutiérrez did in his 1971 book Teología de la liberación, interpreting it as a sign of God’s solidarity with the afflicted—was to privilege the sociological over the salvational, the temporal over the transcendent.

What interests me here is the way in which the ideological movements of institutions, which can appear so drastic and contradictory from the outside, always have their roots in a genuine (if arcane and obscure) dilemma around their core beliefs and goals. It should go without saying that there is an ocean of difference between the Catholic church and, say, a municipality or a regional logistics company—but all the same, seemingly sudden changes in such organisations can likewise emerge from latent and slow-building shifts in meaning-making on the inside.

When I think about the sort of strategic work I’m interested in doing, this is exactly where I find my thoughts going: nurturing and helping along the front-line yearnings (and learnings) for better ways of operating in a changing world. The challenge is not only getting the gig, but getting the time and access required to understand what’s actually happening, and getting support from someone who not only wants to change it, but has also acquired enough clout to protect the early efforts.

On the other side of that ideological yin-yang, meanwhile, we find such auto-parodic tech barons as Marc Andreessen, whose enthusiasm for Large Language Models is increasingly easy to understand: they perform much the same sort of engagement with ideas and knowledge that he does himself, I.e. superficial, sycophantic and self-serving.

That he and other Valley moguls have taken a shallow reading of Nietzsche as an endorsement of their project is not unique or particularly surprising—after all, there’s rather ugly precedent for such projects of interpretation—but it’s deeply frustrating for those of us who read with nuance, and who find in Nietzsche in particular an exemplar of reading and thinking with nuance.

As such, there’s nothing particularly new to me in this essay by Nicholas Low—but if you’re less familiar with Nietzsche’s ideas, and want to understand the difference between his thought and the empty “accelerationisms” of the vencaps and techbros, this is a very accessible introduction:

The history of humanity’s Promethean ambitions has made it seem that we have only two options: throw off the cumbersome shackles of humility and boldly seize divine power, or humble ourselves and embrace human finitude. But Nietzsche envisioned a third way, recognizing that superhuman life can only emerge out of a reckoning with our humanity in all its miserable and wonderful smallness. In his own way, Nietzsche was an accelerationist. He believed that the only way through nihilism was in effect to radicalize it. But he saw that that would mean embracing, rather than fleeing from, our human limitations.

This week’s last clipping is about weather modification, and the fascinating chicken-and-egg relationship between on the one hand, actual efforts to meddle with precipitation patterns, and on the other hand conspiracy theories about secret government weather weapons. Conspiracy theories generally accrete around a little grain of truth, much like raindrops form around other airborne particles, and weather modification is a great example:

In the years following von Neumann’s death in 1957, much of what he foresaw began to come true. By 1968, the Department of the Interior was annually investing some $5 million in cloud-seeding projects across the country. The Department of Defense tried repeatedly to use silver iodide to divert hurricanes. At the same time, the Air Force was seeding the skies over Vietnam to create rains to flood the supply lines of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The operation was kept secret until it was eventually confirmed by the leaked Pentagon Papers. Mathematical models of weather prediction, driven by exponential gains in computing power, became the standard tool for meteorologists around the world.

(Of course, while this is to some extent a natural process, conspiracy theories can also be seeded, just like the rain.)

This essay seems of a piece with my other clippings because it features characters whose combination of beliefs and actions seem at first glance contradictory: born-again Christians using new technology to do what they hope is God’s work; ecomodern evangelists who are nonetheless surprisingly cautious about claiming success for their interventions.

The intractability and unknowability of the weather—and of the climate, of which weather is perhaps best thought of as the local manifestation—has always tested our sense of causality and agency. As it gets more unruly, I suspect we’re going to see more strange syncretisms like this. I’m reminded of the characters of J G Ballard, particularly the mid-career stuff of the 1960s and 70s: feral scientists driven mad by the mismatch between their models and a rapidly changing world, professional men trying desperately to impose the logics in which they were trained upon an environment far beyond their control.

This is not a reassuring comparison, of course! But it is perhaps a timely reminder that the relationship between our inner and outer lives is poorly understood, still obscured by the assumption of the Cartesian split, and that the fault lines there start to rumble and quake when external stressors make themselves felt. There will be a lot more strangeness ahead, both human and environmental—and we’ll struggle to understand it for as long as we fail to reconcile that illusory distinction.

between the pages

I finally finished Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance, and in the end I’m glad I stuck with it, because for me the final third of the book paid off the frustrations of the earlier parts: this is where she really gets into the history-of-ideas material, asking all sort of convention-upending questions about Machiavelli and ethics, about modernity and humanism and atheism (and what we mean when we say those words), about the means of distribution of knowledge as well as the means of its production, and much more.

It was a particularly interesting book to be finishing in the same week as the publication of the afore-mentioned papal encyclical, because the Catholic church plays a huge and important role in the Renaissance—one that makes its legacy position in the present seem in some ways much weaker, but in others much more enduring. As I think I mentioned before, Palmer’s framing argument is that “the Renaissance” is in many ways a ridiculous category, more a function of the need of later thinkers and institutions for narratives that would legitimise their own virtue than of any really recognisable or coherent project unfolding in that era.

But at the same time, interesting things were really happening, and Palmer uses the evidence she’s jumbled together to argue that the answer to the question “is futurity made by the actions of heroic Great Persons, or by the accretion of more minor changes and practices enacted by people with far less visibility and clout?” is “yes”. The seemingly great and powerful are not all-powerful, and the seemingly powerless are not entirely so; we are caught within legacy structures which to some extent determine how macro-scale dynamics play out, but decisions by even the most minor of figures can nonetheless introduce changes that accumulate over time, and thereby change what will become the course of history.

lookback

It’s been a strange week—though not in a bad way. I think the strangeness is due in part to my having had to do a certain amount of running around to obtain my official identity documents, having only recently had my citizenship approved; this feels oddly mundane and anticlimactic in the moment, but I guess there’s some sub-surface churn as my unconscious mind adjusts to the fulfilment of a goal that’s been six years in the making, and shakes off a weight long carried. (I have been having some very weird dreams.)

At the same time, getting properly stuck in to the writing of PROJECT RADBURN has been attended by the sort of synchronicities which, if you saw them in a TV show or the plot of a novel, you’d dismiss as very lazy plotting. But, as I’m sure at least some of you will have experienced, sometimes the universe just decides to drop useful things into your lap, just at the moment you need them… the trick is to take these gifts with gratitude, but to not conclude that they are proof that you are walking a destined and righteous path. One needs a certain hubris to be able to take on a substantive creative project, certainly—but experience dictates that, in excess, it’ll sink you as easily as float you.

It’s also been nice to have a full day away from the desk, as weekends will be in rather short supply over the next couple of weeks. I took advantage of my newly-recovered freedom of movement to hop across the sound and catch up with James Bridle (in town to speak at the Bloom Festival) and to hang out in a quiet corner of a surprisingly under-used Copenhagen park, talking art and ecology and technology and governance and water management, among many other topics.

(That I not only get to do things like that, but also to legitimately see doing such things as being part of my work, is among the upsides of this freelance life. It’s a weird, precarious and ill-defined occupation, but it beats the crap out of having a regular job!)

ticked off

• Twelve hours on PROJECT MUNICIPAL.
• Ten hours on PROJECT RADBURN.
• Five hours of admyn.
• Four hours of networking.
• Three hours on these here weeknotes.
• Two hours of art practice.
• One hour of blogging.
• One hour of bizdev.
• And ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always.

OK, time to grab a last few hours of calm before things get crazy busy once again. Your attention is appreciated, as always—and I hope all is well with you, wherever you may be.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 22 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!