week 5 / 2026: pots and kettles

“Who are you to wave your finger / you must’ve been out your head / eye-hole deep in muddy waters / you practically raised the dead...”

Hello from Malmö, where your humble correspondent managed this morning to fumble the alarm code for the building that houses his studio, and had to spend an awkward and cold half-hour on the phone to various call-centers…

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

among the pixels

Let's start with a masterclass in constrained yet dynamic speculative method from Scott Smith of Changeist, in which he scrubs emerging financial instruments against the sustained problems of the delaminating US health insurance system to produce a sequence of what we might call pen prototypes: somewhere between a vignette and a product use-case seen from the other side.

You don’t need to know much about the US health system to guess that these aren’t going to be cheery reading. But Scott has some wisdom to share about engaging in what we used to call #abyssgaze, back in the day:

I should be clear about the hazard here. There's a school of thought that imagining dark futures summons them—that speculation provides a blueprint, normalizes the unacceptable, or simply gives bad actors ideas they wouldn't have had otherwise. This concern is not unfounded. We live in an era when the distance between "dystopian thought experiment" and "Series A pitch deck" has collapsed to approximately eight hours—the so-called Torment Nexus problem.

But the alternative—refusing to look—doesn't make the vectors disappear. It just means we encounter them without preparation.

It should go without saying that this also applies to many other systems and situations. For example, it might have been nice had the governing powers of Europe given a bit more forethought to the question of regional dependency on US-based SaaS providers…

Talking of taking a square-on look at the darker end of the speculative spectrum, here’s one Ashleigh Axios at the Design Observer making an unusually nuanced point about the relation of speculative fiction and “innovation culture”:

Optimism, untethered from history, is not neutral. It narrows the range of futures we are willing to consider. It trains designers to ask how quickly something can be built, not who it might harm. It enables systems to be deployed before their consequences are fully understood, then justifies those consequences as unforeseen. We didn’t imagine this outcome becomes a familiar refrain — often despite the fact that someone did.

Their voices are being missed because the cost of these failures is rarely felt by those with the power to both imagine and implement these futures, but instead by those made to live inside them.

This is why I keep emphasising the value of fiction as a constitutive method for design and strategy, rather than just a means of making a more impactful output. It’s a way of doing the critical, red-teaming work of design by drawing on a well-established library of potential failure-states that design per se can seem constitutionally unable (if perhaps merely unwilling) to consider.

Or, as I put it in an essay here at WA earlier in the week: “Maybe if those of you who are in those boardroom pitch meetings exercised just a little more caution and scepticism early on, we grouches would have fewer opportunities to play Cassandra downstream?”

This week’s third and final piece is a critical essay about a fairly obscure science fiction short story, but it can teach you a lot about the craft of depicting objects and circumstances that the focal character of a story cannot understand, while still making them understandable to the reader.

Depicting the world from the perspective of something that doesn’t understand what’s going on, or which is in some way the wrong size or shape or proportion, is not easy. A story told through the eyes of a child runs the risk of being a story told through the eyes of a stupid adult, and trying to figure out what is going becomes an elaborate exercise in what you think the author thinks children think. One solution is to establish a narrative voice that, while mostly limiting itself to its subject’s perspectives, occasionally breaks through to tell you things. This is how Watership Down operates: rabbits do have their own language to describe the sun and the passage of time, but Adams will sometimes tell us what is what. Stapledon’s Sirius mediates its entire story of a superintelligent dog through a human narrator who can grasp the dog’s situation but also explain it to us.

This is a level of speculative exploration that only the written word can currently accomplish. In comparison to literally every other medium available, prose narrative is way out in front in terms of sophistication and technical maturity—and it’s also the unacknowledged foundation of all the others. If you want to explore and communicate possible futures effectively, you need to understand how it works.

between the pages

I’m still sailing my way through Moby Dick, so no bookish update this week! I’m into the final quarter, though—and it’s almost surprising how the sense of pace is building. It’s almost as if the frequent expository side-quests were a way of expressing the vibe of the long months of waiting and thinking while a whaler made its way to the hunting grounds…

Honestly, though—if you, like me, have had this book on your TBR for years, stop putting it off: pull it down and get stuck into it! It will repay your attention.

lookback

This has been a somewhat frustrating week, as I’ve had lots of things I really want and need to get into, but have lacked the energy and focus required to actually get into them. How much of this can be blamed on some sort of low-key illness, and how much on the traditional late-January slump (exacerbated by dismal, cold weather) is unclear—and also, to some extent, irrelevant. Some weeks and months seem to burgeon with energy and the time in which to expend it; other weeks and months seem starved of life. Them’s just the breaks.

But hey—it’s not like the week’s been a total write-off, not by a long way. I’ve had a bunch of calls with allies old and new, I’ve invested hours in laying down admynistrative infrastructure that should save time further down the line, and I’ve cracked the core problem that was blocking PROJECT HORNIMAN.

Again: this is why we log the work! A week that feels like a dead loss will often turn out to have been much better than you thought it was—and may also show you to have done way more hours than usual, even if (or perhaps precisely because) they weren’t of very good quality. I’m very leery of “quantified self” systems in general, but this one regularly proves its worth, at least for me.

ticked off

• Eighteen hours of admyn. (In the name of honesty, more than half of these hours might be more fairly labelled “poking somewhat desultorily at Dataview queries in Obsidian”, because there were some patches of the week where that’s all I had the spoons for. But I actually got some good and unexpected results out of it, and learned a bit more about query languages and javascript along the way.)
• Nine hours of reading for research. (“When you can’t write, read” is among the more forgiving aphorisms I’ve encountered, to the extent that it can feel like an excuse for not even trying. Is it a paradox to say that you’re putting serious effort into deprogramming yourself from productivity culture? Perhaps—but nonetheless, I am.)
• Eight hours on PROJECT HORNIMAN. (As noted above, a tricky theoretical know has been blocking this project for the best part of a year, but I think I finally wrote my way through it this week. Perhaps the lack of writing energy in other domains can be ascribed to its all having been focussed here?)
• Five hours of kinmaking and networking.
• Five hours of semi-structured writing. (Including the somewhat spontaneous essay from the start of this week.)
• Three hours on these here weeknotes.
• Ten hours of undirected reading and writing, as always.

That’s all for this week, I think. I hope all is well with you, wherever you may be.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 05 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!