week 43 / 2025: l'esprit de l'ascenseur

“I gave you the warning, but you never heeded it / how can you say you miss my lovin’ when you never needed it?”

Greetings from Malmö, where I managed to get through a couple of hours of my Sunday before realising that the reason I’d woken up before my alarm was that the clocks had changed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ My mind has been on other things, I suppose—business development not least among them, due to having attended a couple of workshops this week that were aimed in that direction.

I understand both the principles and the necessity, but it will come as no surprise to readers of this journal that I struggle with the simplicity and brevity that a solid marketing strategy requires. That’s due in no small part to my innate tendency to the verbose, of course, but there’s also an issue of principle wrapped up in it: put plainly, I believe that the pressure to condense and simplify messaging in the business world—which has by this point infected all the other sectors of human endeavour—is a major contributor to the short-sightedness and tactical flailing-around that characterises the current moment.

I’m going to illustrate the point by looking elsewhere. Literacy, and its supposed decline, is among Alan Jacobs’s hobby-horses, and here he is, mounting up once again:

When people say “post-literate society” what they mean is “a North American and/or Western European society in which a smaller percentage of people read books than in 1950, and are correspondingly more likely to get information and entertainment from audio, video, and short-form texts.” Which is a big thing! But it has nothing to do with literacy. I would bet that the average today reads and writes more words-per-day than the average person in 1975 did, when TV ruled the media world. Almost every “post-literacy” jeremiad or lamentation acknowledges this — e.g. — but their authors can’t be bothered to come up with a phrase that accurately describes what they are rightly concerned about.

I agree almost entirely with Jacobs here, and furthermore I think he puts his finger on the causal factor in his last line. The specific literacy which is declining, namely the ability to pay attention to and absorb the content of long-form prose, is declining because all the incentives for producers and distributors of long-form prose aim toward simplification: they reduce this more specific phenomenon to “literacy” because it’s shorter, and (not coincidentally) more contentious and eye-catching. Comprehension is a mental muscle, and it increasingly goes unexercised; in education, in entertainment, and in business, challenging a reader—obliging them to pay attention, in other words, and to think—is verboten. Who has the time, right? Just give me the elevator pitch!

The trouble is that any idea that can be explained in the ninety seconds or so recommended by the elevator-pitch approach is either banal or dangerously underdefined: it either tells someone something they already (think they) know, or provides a space into which they might project their own inchoate desires. A product or service or idea that can be explained and sold in ninety seconds isn’t necessarily a bad thing, to be clear—but it is necessarily a simple thing, addressing a simple and well-defined problem.

I’m going to go out on a limb, here, and suggest that most such simple problems have long since been solved. The problems that remain are complex, systemic, and (ironically enough) consequential to the “solutions” to seemingly simple problems which, it turns out, were actually less simple than they were made out to be. Climate change is the most obvious example, but it’s also illustrative of the dynamic under discussion: “climate change” is a convenient and concise label, but when you hide away the complexities of the planetary ecosystem inside that suitcase, you’re doing the same thing that Jacobs’s literacy pundits are doing. A complex problem is simplified, which in turn invites the suggestion of simple solutions, the delivery of which merely perturbs the underlying complexity further. In other words, the drive to simplify problems results in well-intentioned attempts to deal with complexity by adding yet more complexity to the overall system—and as Joseph Tainter has shown, that works fine until, all of a sudden, it doesn’t.

This will not be news to many of you, I assume; of all the ways one can define modern foresight practice, framing it as a way to navigate complexity and uncertainty is surely the distinction that makes a difference. Furthermore, the challenge of selling such a service is perhaps the most common thread of conversations between people in the field. At the best of times, everyone’s too busy making bank to think about tricky stuff… and as grizzled foresight veteran Scott Smith noted earlier this year, at the worst of times, the dominant response to complexity and uncertainty is (still!) to sit on your hands and hope it blows over:

... this happens every damn cycle. Organizations’ leaders and managers pull themselves back into their shells for the most part, either in overconfidence or abject surrender to uncertainty. It’s so consistent I’m beginning to believe it’s a foundational part of business school curriculum: Self-harm for Leaders.

Further down that piece, Scott declines to rehearse any standards from the “you need foresight!” songbook, leaving it to “[y]ounger, more idealistic, or telegenic folks”. I’m younger than Scott, admittedly, but I’m a long way from telegenic, and the contextual circumstances have ablated away much of my former idealism; I don’t think I can explain the necessity for foresight to someone who can’t already see it. I also think that trying to simplify it is counterproductive; the client inertia that Scott describes is to some extent a consequence of the turnkey futures “solutions” that Big Consulting has peddled for years, which tend to do little more than insert the hyped gimmick of the moment into step 2 of the underpants gnomes business plan.

Which leaves me at something of an impasse: how can I sell a service that I can’t simplify? I’m all out of clever conclusions this week, so if you’ve got suggestions—serious or sarcastic—by all means send ‘em in…

reading

I finished the first volume of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy this week. It’s a bleak book, and no surprise: it was written during and published shortly after the second world war, in which Peake had served as a war artist, an experience which traumatised what was presumably already a very sensitive mind.

For all that bleakness, however, Titus Groan in particular is actually about change, about futurity: the eponymous baby Earl of Gormenghast is, in this first volume, being set up as both symbol and locus of the radical changes that will sweep through the world into which he has been born. The established interpretation of the trilogy is that it’s about the colossal changes that swept through British society in the mid-C20th, and it’s easy to see why: the ossified traditions of the castle, and the grotesques who act them out unquestioningly, map easily to certain self-conceptions common to that archipelago. (I certainly read it that way in my early teens, without any critical prompting.)

But it’s also a rather reductive reading. Better, perhaps, to describe it as being about the emergence of enantiodromia at the moment of fullest expression of decline. That a book written by an English writer at that point in history should use images and atmospheres that conjure a certain Englishness is unsurprising, if not inevitable—but we shouldn’t let that distract us from finding a broader relevance. Titus is an archetype that stands outside the time and place of his having been imagined: he is the child born into a world evacuated of meaning, held together only by empty ritual, and ripe for exploitation by nihilist opportunists like the ruthless Steerpike.

Titus, in other words, is a pretty good figure for so-called Generation Alpha. It will be interesting to see how the other two volumes respond to such a reading.

a clipping

I’m trying very hard these days not to read, let alone share, material that deals with Those Two Letters. However, that’s very hard to do, as we’re at a point where the bubbly hysteria has leaked into every corner of the discourse; it’s literally inescapable, haunting even pieces that don’t mention it at all.

My excuse for sharing this one, other than the fact that I don’t have much else in the hopper from the past week, is that it talks about “AI” less as a cause, and more as a symptom. To return to the terms above: it positions the “products” bundled up in that simple term in relation to the practices and circumstances of their deployment, and does so in a refreshingly blunt way:

The Apple Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM.

Not used. Not allocated. Leaked. A basic calculator app is hemorrhaging more memory than most computers had a decade ago.

Twenty years ago, this would have triggered emergency patches and post-mortems. Today, it's just another bug report in the queue.

(As an added bonus, Stetskov talks in terms of abstraction: various frameworks and products which make the production of code easier and faster, at the cost of reliability and good function. Lovely bit of synecdoche, wouldn’t you say?)

ticked off

• Thirteen hours on PROJECT FLATPACK. (Analysis, synthesis, structural drafting… all that good stuff. Probably my favourite phase of any project, really: elbow-deep in stuff you’ve learned, looking for the shapes that will make sense of it.)
• Thirteen hours of admyn. (Including the afore-mentioned marketing ‘masterclass’, and some bizdev off the back of it. But also a bunch of time fiddling around in Obsidian, the result of which is that this list of projects worked on and hours spent is automatically calculated from the notes I’ve made during the week. I am feeling quite pleased with myself, even though I’m aware that it took me the best part of a day to do something that a more code-literate person could have achieved in twenty minutes.)
• Seven hours on PROJECT PONTIF. (Writing and reading, reading and writing.)
• Three hours up at STPLN. (A workshop on brand development—which, coming the morning after the marketing masterclass, made it obvious to me that those two disciplines are two sides of the same coin. Not that this realisation does much for my dilemma above, mind you!)
• Three hours on these here weeknotes. (I keep forgetting to include these! But the new auto-tabulation system means that I now get reminded...)
• Two hours on PROJECT MALACHITE. (Up the rails to Lund to pitch my “track” to participants at the Green Transition Hack pre-event. Which went fine—though I have the nagging feeling that I have picked up some sort of plague from some obviously under-the-weather members of the audience. Bloody students, etc etc.)
• Ten hours of undirected writing and reading, som vanligt.

Sheesh—busy week! And more to come, I’ll wager…

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

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 43 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!