week 42 / 2025: reinventing the wheel

“If you need a little help to move, let me know / because hardly I can wait to say to you ‘let go’…”

I’ve got a fun little gig coming up next month, and—as is traditional—I’m thinking through what the work is for, this time with a little help from the wit and wisdom of the late great Douglas Adams.

So in early November I’ll be “coaching” (which is to say facilitating) one of three tracks at the 2025 Lund Green Transition Hack, formerly known as Climathon. As the name implies, this event gathers young people—many of whom, though not all, will be postgrad students at Lund University—to think about a set of climate-related challenges posed by the event’s sponsoring partners.

Yours truly has been given the futures track—or the Worldbuilding Track, as I have elected to label it. There is also an entrepreneurial track and a science-y track, and it’s a great privilege to be not only allowed but encouraged to develop my own track in a way that is distinct from the others. In a nutshell, my track will not be taking a solutions approach to the challenges.

That’s all well and good, but how do you justify not taking a solutions approach to sponsors who have put forward challenges to be solved? Or, more bluntly: what’s the value of worldbuilding around the questions of a green transition, when participants could be spending their time developing products and services instead?

While I was thinking this through, I was reminded of a favourite bit from Adams’ Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

In this scene, the intrepid yet distinctly louche freelance writer Ford Prefect is roaming a version of Earth that was built to replace the original, which was destroyed in order to clear the way for an intergalactic highway. This ersatz Earth has been (re)populated with the less-than-essential members of a civilisation which was obliged to relocate across the galaxy due to the destruction of their own planet.

Given that the Earth was carefully designed to serve as a computational device that would calculate the answer to life the universe and everything, the, uh, limited imaginative range of its new inhabitants is looking like it might be a problem, as Ford discovers when he goes to see how the castaways are getting on with restarting civilisation from scratch:

“When you've been in marketing as long as I have, you'll know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We’ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them.”

The crowd were tense. They were expecting something wonderful from Ford.

“Stick it up your nose,” he said.

“Which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know,” insisted the girl. “Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?”

“And the wheel,” said the Captain. “What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project.”

“Ah,” said the marketing girl. “Well, we're having a little difficulty there.”

“Difficulty?” exclaimed Ford. “Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!”

The marketing girl soured him with a look.

“Alright, Mr. Wiseguy,” she said, “if you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be.”

Now, I’m not quoting this passage in order to laugh at the absurdities of marketing and the people who do it—though I’ve gotta say, that sector has an innate capacity for auto-parody which makes doing so both tempting and easy. (In this house, we believe in Bill Hicks.)

The more charitable reading would be that Adams is illustrating the futility of marketing in the absence of the genuine vision and inventiveness that results in substantive change: all these characters know is how to make a thing superficially appealing to a particular segment of the population. That is arguably fine with non-essential things like, I don’t know, perfumes or novelty swimming-pool inflatables, but when it comes to important stuff like fire and the wheel—stuff where the fundamental function of a thing is the essence of its value—then it’s ridiculous.

Let’s put it this way: the problem is synecdoche. Because of the way our societies work, when we think of an idea like “green transition” or “decarbonisation”, we immediately start thinking in terms of products and services that might represent and embody it. I’ve been talking a lot lately about the importance of moving toward the concrete from the abstract, and that’s sort of what’s happening here: imagining a green transition is hard (though I suppose we are at least spared the dilemma of working out what colour it should be), but imagining things which might be part of a green transition is easier: break it down into problems, then pick a problem and solve for it. This is the power of reductionism as a cognitive principle—but in the absence of a holistic perspective to counteract and balance it, reductionism has a tendency to run aground. It becomes surrounded by problems which it cannot solve, because it cannot see them.

Now, one might assume that concretisation, in the sense I often talk of it here—i.e. portraying and exploring a world from a subjective and human-scale point-of-view—is a reductionist move, because it seems to be moving toward smaller elements of the system; that would mean that holism is basically abstraction, a zooming out.

But that’s not actually the case—or at least not necessarily so. It turns out there’s a sort of paradoxical tension between these two spectra, [abstract/concrete] and [system/element]; they don’t map cleanly onto each other at all. To concretise an imagined world is, for me, to reveal and explore in detail a limited part of the vast web of relationships and connections that the world comprises; it is not at all to separate things, but to look at how they go together. Likewise, to abstract an imagined world is not to see it as a complex system, but rather to put all of its variation and nuance in a black box and consider it only in terms of overall inputs and outputs.

(I’m sure that many readers who have experience of the standard suite of foresight thought-tools are thinking exactly the same thing I’m thinking: there’s an interesting 2x2 to be drawn, here! I’ll return to that challenge next week, if time allows, but you should feel free to take your own swing at it; drop me a line if you do, I’d be happy to link and discuss other people’s takes alongside my own.)

And so, in a typically roundabout way, I think I have an answer to my original question: the value of worldbuilding for an issue like the green transition is in the reintroduction of a more holistic view, and the (re)situating of the challenges in the sociotechnical context of a hypothetical world in which they have been successfully addressed.

We (mostly) all agree that a green transition is necessary, but—if we’re honest—we have no idea what that actually means, and no idea of what the world might be like on the other side of it. In a very real sense, therefore, we don’t know where we’re going; as such, we’re trying to decide what the next step should be while wearing a blindfold. We’re trying to decide what colour the wheel should be, without having thought about what the wheel is actually for, and what sort of machines and practices it might become a part of.

Just as holism is not a replacement for reductionism, but rather its necessary complement and counterweight, I’m not saying that visioning is a replacement for the search for solutions—though I would argue that, given the long, entrenched dominance of the reductionist approach to futures (and to human activity in general) we have everything to gain from setting it aside for a while and reacquainting ourselves with a more holistic view. Rather than rushing ahead on a step by step basis, we should take the time to work out where we’re actually trying to go

We know we need to change, but what are we changing for? That’s a question that only worldbuilding can answer.

reading

This week I’ve mostly been reacquainting myself with the first book of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, which I haven’t read since I was gifted it by my aunt in (I think?) 1990. But as I have yet to finish that first book, and as this week’s essay turned out pretty long, I’m going to wait until next week to talk about it.

(Though I will note that the cover art of the Vintage reissue I bought back in the summer—see above—is sufficiently cheap and disappointing that, had I not already been familiar with its contents, I’d have needed considerable persuading to buy it. Which just goes to show: even a cynic such as I will sometimes care what colour the wheel should be.)

a clipping

This piece by Sophia Rosenfeld is an argument that choice and freedom are not the same thing, though we have come to assume that they are; I think it makes a very complementary companion for my ramblings above.

Perusing a menu of options to decide what best matches individual desires and values – which is what we generally mean today by making a choice – is a key feature of modern democratic and consumer culture alike. It is also an exalted one. People may disagree about what the possibilities should be, but rarely about the principle of maximising arenas for choice-making or the options themselves. For many of the world’s citizens, this is simply what freedom feels like.

Yet, as you may have also felt at various moments, abundant choice isn’t always so straightforward.

ticked off

• Seventeen and a half hours of admyn. (That number surprised me, but if anything it’s probably smaller than the actual amount of time spent on admyn this week—though it bears noting that five of those hours were spent making long-planned adjustments to my Obsidian set-up. I have mostly avoided getting too rabbit-holey with systems of productivity and information management, because I know that I could all too easily focus on them to the exclusion of the work and information that they are intended to deal with; but there have long been certain things that I wanted Obsidian to do, and that I knew it could be made to do, and this week was the week for making it do them. I do rather wish, however, that I’d known I’d need to spend three hours getting a crude grasp of regex in order to do so.)
• Seven hours researching and drafting an essay. (Sometimes we plan to write things; other times, things plan for us to write them. This piece has been nagging at me for months, and early in the week a key part of it just dropped into my head, so I took advantage of a brief lull in client hours—and the distraction of an electrician installing new lights in my studio—to braindump a load of ideas into a notebook.)
• Two hours on PROJECT MALACHITE, which is the label for the above-discussed coaching/facilitation gig.
• Two hours on PROJECT PORTON. (Will it stay down? Only time will tell, but I think I’m all done on this one now.)
• Two hours on PROJECT PONTIF. (Writing bandwidth was diverted elsewhere; see above.)
• Ten hours of undirected reading and writing, as always.

An odd, in-between-things sort of week, this one. There’s another new project about to come on deck, but I’m waiting for the final negotiations and paperwork to clear…

kinmaking

On Tuesday evening I got to experience the manly polyphonics of traditional Georgian choral singing at Inkonst, thanks to a spontaneous spare-ticket invite from Hildreth England, and—by sheer happenstance—to meet a member of a band whose work I’ve listened to for years. Cheers, Hildreth!

Thursday morning saw me surfing the community breakfast at MINC, Malmö’s hub for start-ups, on the invitation of some nice folk I met a few weeks back. Bit of a noisy scene for this introvert, truth be told, but the conversation was excellent (even if the coffee was, uh, rather less so).

Right, that’s your lot; I’ve not done much in the way of art this week, so I think I’ll take the rest of the day to address that shortfall. I hope all is well with you, wherever you may be.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 42 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!