week 8 / 2026: maps and compasses
Reading round-up: wind-powered freight (and how I think about weak signals); how audiences have come to understand the working of worlds; what science fiction has to teach strategists.
“So this is the difference between / living and not living / these are just bodies / we have a purpose…”
mattgraupman
Greetings from Malmö, where the snow is melting down to dirty slush like a wicked witch defeated, and the tiny birds have started singing down the spring. Welcome back to WEEKNOTES at Worldbuilding Agency!
Announcement: in a little less than a month, I’ll be rolling up the rails along the west coast to Gothenburg, where I’ll be reprising my guest lecturer role at HDK Valand on Monday 16th March, and giving a breakfast seminar talk on worldbuilding at Point Design on Tuesday 17th; if you’re in the area, it would be great to see you there! I have a few hours open on the Tuesday afternoon before my train back, so if you’d like to have a longer chat in person, do please drop me a line and let me know.
OK, then—grab your coat, and let’s get moving…
among the pixels
I got to sit in on a webinar with friend-of-the-show Kriz Gomez earlier this week, in which she was giving some Futures 101 to an audience from the social business and activism scene, and I was reminded how challenging it can be to define what we foresight folk call “weak signals”.
The crucial thing, perhaps, is to distinguish them from trends: trends are about continuity, while weak signals are about the (potential) disruption thereof. Kriz has a neat metaphor for this that’s rooted in forest ecosystems, but it’s still surprisingly difficult to put together a positive definition—perhaps because every foresight practitioner brings their unique perspective to the game. As such, you end up with something close to Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography: you know it when you see it.
So this week I thought I might share an example of the sort of thing I take to be a weak signal, as this one happens to be embedded in a rather lovely essay that’s worth reading for its own sake. The piece in question takes as its spine the writer’s weeks spent on a small sailing ship that does bespoke trading runs around Europe, but there’s also a lot of chewy infrastructural side-quests, too: a wonderful example of how writing about the small and specific can be a springboard to the large and systemic.
The idling juggernauts we passed at Skagen were metal and sulfur manifestations of a famously dirty industry. If it were a country, global shipping would come in around sixth in carbon emissions; methodologies of comparison vary, but concrete manufacturing would rank fourth and aviation probably fifth, similar to Japan’s output in total. The fact that shipping is not a country, however, is precisely why it can be so polluting — ships are able to operate in the open, unseen, often lawless spaces of the sea.
Attempts to revive wind-powered freight have been sailing into the wind for a little while now, and have been largely scuppered by recent economic and political shifts, but I file them as a weak signal nonetheless. I’m sure people from both sides of the political spectrum would form a queue to tell me just how unviable sailing cargo is—and by the parameters of the world as they exist currently, they would be completely correct. Their error, however, is to treat those parameters as set in stone.
My error, they would say, is the utopian urge—or even my “anti-futurism” (to use a concept from a recently published paper in the Journal of Futures Studies which, for me at least, sums up everything that’s wrong with B-school futurism). I will gladly cop to both of those accusations.
One of the things a weak signal can be is a dream, an ideal enacted stubbornly against a seemingly hostile context; the likelihood or commercial viability matters less than the pull of the vision. Now, the authors of that paper would classify this as an anti-future, because they are mainlining the narrative of capital-P Progress in which what was done before is bad by definition, and in which what comes next will, indeed must, be characterised by an ever-increasing penetration of and reliance upon the digital.
As is probably obvious, I don’t buy that metanarrative—and I also feel that resistance to it is increasing, at least in the West, where an awareness of the consequences of our logistically-sustained lifestyles is combining with a sense that the pleasures of accumulating ever more stuff are hollow and fleeting. If we think of Progress as the metanarrative of the Enlightenment—which is a huge simplification, but a useful one—then its counternarrative is that of Romanticism, which is characterised by a yearning for a more meaningful, even spiritual engagement with the world. There’s something about sailing freight from place to place—and, it seems, about the practice of sailing itself—that, for some people, has just such a romance to it. It is, therefore, a signal of a yearning for a very different world, and a rejection of the ideals of the optimal and the efficient.
(If you want another weak signal of that yearning, set against an account of the deeply weird behaviours that the optimisation imperative can drive people to, then this piece at The Point Magazine, which takes as its jumping-off point the people who devote a huge amount of time and effort to maximising the reward points that come with certain high-status credit cards, is also well worth your time.)
Of course, the seeming optimality and efficiency of big-numbers cargo shipping is a fiction which can only be sustained by various acts of externalisation, as the essay shows: taxes, emissions, labour rights are all off the books. The exploitation all happens somewhere else, at the far ends of the supply chains that bring us cheap stuff we don’t really need.
For the avoidance of doubt: I don’t see a widespread adoption of sailing freight, or even a significant one, as being a likely outcome any time soon. But that’s not the point with this sort of weak signal. We think of the world as singular and universal: a thing defined and measured by science, that’s the same for everyone. But while there is only one planet on which human existence makes sense, that planet contains many worlds, some of which are in stark contradiction to the dominant story.
To move freight by sail is not only to believe that another world is possible, but to act as if it already existed. That, to me, is far more radical and futuristic than any amount of sloppy generative-model-driven KPIs deployed in the C-suite of some hypothetical multinational.
Talking of worlds, I want to point you at an essay by my good friend Jay Springett, who has for quite some time been theorising worlds from a somewhat different perspective to my own, but whose thinking I find in many ways very complementary—not to mention ambitious and highly original.
World literacy is the extent to which an audience treats a piece of media as a window onto something larger than itself. That the thing you are reading/watching/playing is a window into an implied world. The world exceeds any single text, or release.
In the 2020s, almost everyone (not just nerds!) has developed this intuition. You watch a film and you understand, without being told, that there are things happening off to the left of the camera. A history that the characters (and the audience) take for granted. Events the story refers to obliquely. Decisions that happened before the opening frame that shaped everything you’re watching.
This seems obvious now, but it hasn’t always been the case.
It would do Jay’s work a disservice for me to even attempt to paraphrase it. Suffice to say that, if you find my own thinking about futures as worlds to be of interest, you will likely find his to be of equal value—or even more so.
I’ll close this week’s selection with a somewhat self-aggrandising mention of the latest piece from Zoe Scaman. I (among others!) have long been making the case for science fiction as both a resource and a method for strategic work in a world where the old certainties are dissolving; it is therefore very gratifying to see a highly accomplished strategist making the same argument from their side of the disciplinary fence.
It’s not just that the imagination crisis has deepened, though it has. It’s that we’ve industrialised our way around it. We now have AI systems trained on existing patterns telling us what to make, what to fund, what to greenlight. The feedback loop has closed. We’re not just failing to imagine different futures; we’re building systems that make different futures harder to surface.
The science fiction writers saw this coming. They always do. Because they give themselves permission to think dangerously - to ask questions that don’t have good answers, to imagine that the whole edifice might be wrong. We've trained that out of ourselves.
I love being able to tie up the week’s clippings with a neat loop, and Scaman’s parting shot gifts me a way to do it:
Six years ago, I made the case that science fiction writers were doing the strategic thinking our industry had abandoned. I hoped we’d catch up.
We haven’t. If anything, the gap has widened. The writers kept writing. We kept optimising.
We cannot hope to optimise our way out of the consequences of a centuries-long paradigm of optimisation. Other dreams are not only available, they are desperately needed.
between the pages
Most of this week’s words-on-paper reading has involved dipping in and out of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s characteristically epic exploration of the tarot, co-authored with Marianne Costa, which is just as gloriously idiosyncratic as the man’s movies.
For all its claims to the contrary, I don’t know that The Way of Tarot offers all that novel an interpretation of the cards, nor of the ideal approach to their use—but the route by which Jodo arrives at roughly the same place as everyone else is utterly singular, obsessively detailed, and mad in all the right ways. Probably not a book for the casual reader, or even the casual tarotist, but if you’ve already spent some time in that sort of headspace, you’ll surely get a kick out of it.
lookback
The sense of being of the seasonal cusp is surely contributing to a feeling of this being a week in which things have started to move in interesting ways, albeit mostly on a medium-term horizon. Previous weeks of thinking, planning and systems redesign feel like they’re starting to pay off in new patterns of activity, and structures that can support them over the longer haul.
I’m also thinking rather further back in time this week, as yesterday was the sixth anniversary of my arrival in Sweden. The world feels like it has changed a lot since then, to say the least—but so have I, and mostly for the better. I’ve never been much of a fan of John Lennon (blasphemy, I know), but his observation that “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans” feels pretty apposite when I think about the last six years or so.
ticked off
- Fourteen hours of general bizdev, plus two hours of bizdev specific to PROJECT X. (Things are taking shape! Alliances are being forged! PROJECT X is a very hokey label, yes, but it’s the sort of project that can’t be given any old name; hence the placeholder.)
- Nine hours of admyn, correspondence and kinmaking. (The tally is disaggregated in the ledger, but I’m experimenting with bundling by related functions when it comes to reporting here.)
- Seven hours of art practice. (This feels like a bit of a cheat, because four of those hours were taken up by a serious blitz-tidy of my studio… but you’ve got to get your infrastructure running right, haven’t you?)
- Five hours of essay writing and related research.
- Three hours on PROJECT CHAPERONE.
- Three hours on these here weeknotes.
- And ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always.
OK, that’s all for this week. I hope all is well with you, wherever you may be.
This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 08 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!
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