week 23 / 2025

“A dreamer of WEEKNOTES, I run in the night / you see us together, chasing the moonlight...”

It was Eid yesterday, and the Muslim community held a festival on Gullängen, the green space just out back of my apartment block. The main upshot of this was that all afternoon I could hear traditional polyphonic Islamic chants and song in my apartment, which was really rather wonderful; it’s the sort of thing I’ve heard in snatches quite often, but rarely have I been in a position to just sit and listen to it. The passion and artistry of that very particular style of singing, with its soaring sustained tones and melismatic movements up and down the scales, bears comparison to solo guitar work, with its bends and slides and trills… but the technique, in this case, is clearly shaped by a sort of ecstasy, a stretch to connect the heavens and the earth. You can hear the yearning, and it’s beautiful.

(Lest this come across as some excessively spiritual experience, I would note that the festival’s MC would take the mic between numbers to do things like recommending a particular food-truck, or to call out the raffle numbers. But perhaps those interjections of the mundane made the music feel all the more magical?)

It’s been a strange week in many ways, but fairly straightforward when it comes to work, which has been almost entirely focussed on writing stories. Let’s take a look…

ticked off

• Twenty-five hours on PROJECT VIENNETTA. (Cranking out full drafts of the four stories from the scenarios generated in the workshops. This has been challenging, for reasons I should discuss at greater length when time allows, but that’s exactly why I arranged to have a full week with no other work getting in the way; the writing of fiction, in particular, has a way of monopolising one’s headspace.)
• Five hours on PROJECT PONTIF. (Still trying to keep a flame under this one, despite VIENNETTA’s monopolism. This is also a writing project, but it’s much bigger and longer, and much more self-directed; to continue the spatial metaphor, we could say that it already has a little annexe in my head-meat, so I have to keep the tenant fed and watered even when other things are happening.)
• Five hours of admyn. (Nothing exciting or noteworthy, just the mundanities of business operations and communications.)
• Two hours on PROJECT PORTON. (Meetings, basically. Next week will be focussed on PORTON, which is another reason that this week has been focussed on VIENNETTA.)

And the regular ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always.

kinmaking

I spent a couple of hours over ice-cream with Rasmus Hedin of Block Zero, who I met through the workshops for VIENNETTA, talking about worldbuilding and narrative and so forth. Interesting to have such a conversation with someone who comes more from the user-journey and strategic narrative side of things.

I also got to spend some time with FoAM’s Maja Kuzmanovic, who I hadn’t seen in person since the Futures Brought To Life symposium in Vienna back in 2022. It’s always nice when people are passing through or near Malmö remember that I’m here, and make the time to stop by! FoAM has been a little quiet in those intervening years, for a variety of reasons, but it sounds like things will be spinning up again in the near future.

reading

I’m midway through a handful of books at the moment, some of which have already been mentioned here in passing (e.g. Carr’s Superbloom, Chatfield’s Wise Animals). However, I did manage to polish off John Gray’s Feline Philosophy in a single evening, as it’s only a hundred pages long.

Gray’s basic argument here is that philosophy is a consolation of (and indeed for) consciousness, an always-already doomed attempt by humans to reconcile the fundamental anxieties of their existence. This is an interesting tell on Gray’s part. While he’s known as something of an anti-philosopher—one who largely eschews the system-building that the profession is known for, in favour of poking holes in the systems of others—he is a philosopher nonetheless; as such, this is a sort of tacit admission that his own project is driven by the same angst that drives the system-builders.

Cats, Gray observes, would find the philosophical project absurd, were they able to comprehend it—they live effortlessly and unavoidably in the moment, and are wholly untroubled by the reflexivity which is a by-product of human consciousness and language. This, one gathers, is a big part of their appeal to Gray, and to the rest of us who are drawn to cats: as he puts it, the attraction of cats is not that we see ourselves in them, but rather that we see in them something we know that we lack. The seeming happiness of cats is due entirely to their never for a moment wondering what might make them happy; they are fully occupied at every moment with being exactly what they are.

(I find this argument very plausible, but I suppose I could easily stand accused of accepting something that confirms my own priors. From my early teens, I have always said that, if the Buddhists are right about reincarnation, then they’re wrong on one aspect of the ladder of spiritual attainment: it seems very obvious to me that, if you live a sufficiently virtuous and perfect life as a human being, you might be lucky enough to come back as a cat on the next turn of the wheel.)

a clipping

Digging in the crates again, here, as this hasn’t been much of a week for internet reading. This essay by Virginia Postrel is full of interesting observations about the ossification of a particular techno-optimistic vision of futurity, namely the one that prevailed through the mid-to-late C20th.

Whatever its incarnation, glamour offers a promise of escape and transformation. It focuses deep, often unarticulated longings on an image or idea that makes them feel attainable. Both the longings – for wealth, happiness, security, comfort, recognition, adventure, love, tranquility, freedom, or respect – and the objects that represent them vary from person to person, culture to culture, era to era. In the twentieth-century, ‘the future’ was a glamorous concept.

For me at least, the piece falls down hard when Postrel turns to suggestions for how to reinvigorate the appeal of futurity, because that’s the point at which a completely uncritical fidelity to the shibboleths of growth and markets makes itself felt.

It’s interesting that Postrel decides to talk specifically in terms of an “abundance agenda”; this essay was published late last year, but nonetheless that phrase strongly prefigures the book that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are currently touring. I don’t think this is a particularly eerie coincidence, mind you! When you take a look at the masthead of Works in Progress, where Postrel’s piece appeared, it’s very clear to see that it’s an organ of liberal centrist policy-wonkism*, and Klein and Thompson are definitely denizens of that same mind-space.

Which is to say: we’re at an interesting point now, when even the econo-political centre is willing and able to identify the nature of the problem. That the only answer they can think of is “build more stuff”—in other words, just do what we’ve been doing, but more!—is frustrating. But there is some comfort to be found whereby the exhaustion of that approach seems to be very widely understood, with the notable but inevitable exception of those (per Upton Sinclair) whose salaries depend upon their not understanding it.

To steal once again from Neil Young: everyone knows this is nowhere.

[ * I actually kind of admire the honesty of WiP in this regard; there are a lot of online essay venues who are nowhere near so straight about their sources of funding and their ideological orientation. ]

Right, that’s your lot. I hope all is well with you, wherever you may be.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 23 of 2025. 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!