week 39 / 2025: staying with various troubles

“The world is fucked / and so am I / maybe it’s the other way round / I can't seem to decide...”

This week saw the launch of the latest collaborative foresight cycle book from my friends and colleagues at Media Evolution, my contributions to which were going under the codename VIENNETTA earlier in the year. I also gave a talk on worldbuilding for policy to the DEFRA futures community-of-practice, meaning that I’ve been thinking a lot about the whats, whys and wherefores of the work.

As such, Julian Bleecker’s latest newsletter arrived at a fertile moment. (The web version seems to have a problem with the font being the same colour as the background, meaning you can’t read it without highlighting it or activating your browser’s Reader Mode, if it has one.) In it he wrestles with a question that he returns to quite frequently, which might be summed up in the man’s own words:

Suppose the cautionary tale isn’t read as something to be avoided. Suppose it’s read as a playbook?

This is, as Julian’s note points out, not a hypothetical question; if it were, the Torment Nexus would not be one of the most recognisable memes of recent years. Now, I take Julian’s point, and I recognise and greatly respect his work as both a theorist and practitioner of this stuff. I also agree that stories which take a physical-material form, whether partially or wholly, can potentially shape and direct our imaginations in different ways to pure prose—but I want to emphasise the word potentially.

I don’t think the tuning-out of the cautionary context that Julian describes can be blamed upon the medium used to portray it. The problem—if that’s the right word for it—lies in the interpreter, not in that which is interpreted. I’m keen to avoid the popular practice of diagnosing public figures with cognitive or emotional pathologies, and the often associated leap to moral conclusions, but we nonetheless know this misinterpretation to be a thing, not least because—in what is perhaps the weirdest aspect of the whole business—those who misparse the Torment Nexus can often be found on talk-shows and podcasts cheerfully admitting to it.

My point is that I suspect that any work of creative futuring sufficiently compelling to invite engagement is always going to be open to misinterpretation—and I’m not sure that the intentions of the creator(s) can fully dodge the issue, either. Any given piece of work is going to lie somewhere on the spectrum between art and artifice, as discussed a few months back. The closer it gets to the artifice end of the spectrum, the more direct it will be in delivering its intended message… but it will be less engaging and thought-provoking as a result.

If the last decade or so has taught us anything, it’s surely that creative work designed to transmit a particular message or moral position will be very popular with those who already agree with said message or position, but will to a similar degree turn off anyone who is already in opposition to that message or position. (This, in essence, is why climate fiction was never going to save the planet: its readership largely comprises people who already believe that saving the planet would be a good idea.)

A similar issue attends dystopian and utopian futures, but that’s not to say they’re without value. To be extremely reductive, the utility of dystopia is as a figure for that which we don’t want, while the utility of utopia is as a figure for that which we do want—but both of them are necessarily leaning toward the artifice end of the spectrum. What such stories enable is a gathering-together of people who can all point at the stories and agree on what they mean and how desirable they are. This is the sense in which visionary narratives are useful for societies, communities and organisations, in that they are a sort of bonding agent—a shared imaginary, to borrow a sociological term.

Again, this is fine: if you want to make utopian futures, in any medium whatsoever, I fully approve of your doing so! But you need to be prepared for some folk outside your intended or implied constituency—and perhaps some folk inside it, too—to read that utopia as dystopian, or vice versa. The exact reason for this, be it psychological or social-structural or whatever, is irrelevant; it’s just people being people. No choice or blend of media is going to prevent it, and the more you try to hone the precision of your optimistic or pessimistic message, the more clearly you will end up drawing a line between narrative insiders and narrative outsiders.

For my money, if disagreement and misinterpretation around narratives of futurity is inevitable, you might as well make it a feature, rather than try to squash it as a bug. That’s why, when I do fiction-for-futures work, I try to take what Tom Moylan called the critical utopian position, which I once summed up in my academic work as “depicting the utopian project in the process of its own inevitable failure”: I want to show the utopian possibilities of a future, and the yearning for such, alongside and in tension with the dystopian possibilities, and the all-too-human habits of mind and matter from which they emerge. In other words, I want my imagined worlds to have at least something of the contradictory and conflicted dynamics of the real world; I can’t claim I always succeed—whether due to the constraints of the commission or my own shortcomings as an author or, most likely, some combination of the two—but that’s what I’m reaching for.

Because if these worlds are contradictory and conflicted, their audiences will disagree about them, and interpret them differently in ways more nuanced than “future good!” or “future bad!”—and that, for me, is exactly the point. Now, you might say that we’re not exactly short of disagreement in the world right now, and I would tend to agree with you! But it will not go away through our pretending it’s not there, and it’s pretty obvious at this point that retreating into our various utopian positions and bellowing at the undecided to get with the program—our program, of course!—is only going to sustain that sense of schism.

Rather than arguing over the foundational planks of those positions, which are almost always abstract notions, I want to use techniques of futuring—textual, visual, material, environmental—to confront audiences with the messiness and contradiction that arises when new circumstances, technologies and ways of living are unfolding in a world-as-lived. The concretisation of a particular (if fictional) case creates a space where we can debate the consequences, and see them from subjective points of view. It’s at this level, the level of sympathy, that we can begin to notice the child in the Omelasian oubliette, or the small, bright light in the dystopian darkness—because, as the yin-yang symbol reminds us, every absolute necessarily contains the seed of its opposite.

Again, for the avoidance of doubt: I am not suggesting there’s no value in making prototypes or telling utopian stories about the futures we want! And by the same token, there is a similar value to be found in more dystopian visions. But both of these types of future—indeed, any type of future, in any medium—will be subject to different interpretations, because interpretation itself is inherently and unavoidably subjective. I see my role as working with that subjectivity, rather than against it: foregrounding the contention and contradiction which is the essence of human social dynamics. If we want to avoid the cautionary context of futures evaporating behind the easy appeal of glossy prototypes or stereotypical hero’s-journey story arcs, this is the work that we need to do—the work that, as I understand it, Donna Haraway indicates when she talks about “staying with the trouble”.

That’s what I have tried to do in the stories contained within the new Media Evolution book, At the edge of here, and much of my work before it. Whether I have succeeded is for you to judge.

reading

My book group has been reading this year’s winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award, Stella Greer’s Annie Bot. I’m in the process of writing a longer discussion of it, so I will keep my powder dry and summarise: it’s not a bad novel, by any means, but I do not judge it a great one.

It doesn’t have much to say about the “artificial intelligence” debate, because it’s using the sentient-robot trope primarily to explore feminist issues in human relationships, and I feel it has very little to add to that latter debate due to Greer’s decision to focus solely on the domestic-individual end of the question. This book portrays a misogyny detached from patriarchy, and in so doing reifies the very division it rightly decries. A missed opportunity, for all its deftness.

a clipping

This week’s clipping is something of an echo of last week’s thoughts about Bogna Konior’s “dark forest” theory and the question of free will. It has arrived at a moment when questions of habituation and self-destructive behaviours are very much front-of-mind for me, due to the current and historical struggles of various friends and family members, and my (not unrelated) interest in the role of narratives—both personal and societal—in constraining the decisions and actions of which we believe ourselves to be capable.

For Smith, free will is a spectrum, and yet many volitional behaviours get jumbled together under the label “addiction”, as if people with substance-use disorders have permanently lost control over their actions. She believes that although her desires, intentions and choices were constrained by factors that developed from continued drug taking – such as a lack of access to medical care, running out of money, being locked out of the university system – she maintains her behaviour was always the result of conscious decisions. For the same reason, she emphasises that lifelong cravings and relapses are not inevitable. Like everyone else, people who use drugs are “complex systems that can change”, and she believes that they should be held responsible for enacting that change.

(One hopes it goes without saying, but the inclusion of a clipping in my weeknotes does not necessarily imply endorsement of its contents. When it does imply that, I try to make it plain; other clippings, like this one, are offered more in the spirit of “this made me think hard about what it had to say”.)

ticked off

• Twelve and a half hours of admyn. (End of the month, innit.)
• Eight hours on PROJECT FLATPACK. (Research and interviews continue. It’s fun to get paid to learn new things!)
• Seven hours of off-project research and writing. (This includes a sudden splurge at my personal blog—sometimes the rusty engine just shakes itself awake—and the book review mentioned above, as well as some related rabbit-holing.)
• Seven hours of exhibition activity. (Malmö Gallerihelg is this weekend—do drop by if you’re in town—so there’s been an amount of setting-up to do, as well as the rather more agreeable experience of hanging out with one’s fellow exhibitors and talking to visitors.)
• Six hours of kinmaking. (See below.)
• Four hours of art practice. (Figured it’s high time this started going in the ledger, too, especially now that my new studio set-up makes it easier for me to do.)
• Three hours prepping and delivering a talk on worldbuilding for DEFRA’s foresight community-of-practice. (Thanks to Jason Dinsdale for the invitation, and to all the attendees for their thoughtful questions.)
• Plus ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always.

OK, now I realise why I’m so tired today.

kinmaking

Lots of events uptown at Media Evolution this week, including the launch of At the edge of here (where I did a short reading from one of the stories), but also wrap-ups for a couple of other projects in which I was not directly involved. Most notable was Tuesday evening’s opening of the art installation that came out of The Future Is Here, and the launch of the “newspaper” that Dark Matter Labs produced as a project output. I’ve been a fan of Dark Matter ever since seeing Indy Johar carpet-bomb a roomful of fin-tech drones at some event in London back in 2018 or so, and I spent a very agreeable half hour chatting with two members of the Copenhagen branch about their newspaper, and about narrative prototyping in general.

OK, that’s it for now; I need to trundle up to STPLN and do my stint as gallery warden. Do drop by and say hi if you’re in town! Otherwise, I hope all is well with you, wherever you may be.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 39 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!