On gender representation and generational enantiodromia in genre fiction anthologies.

In this rather occult instalment, Hans Blumenburg compares the worldmaking aspirations of high technology and high religion; Henry Farrell compares “AI” evangelists to alchemical hucksters; and Joseph Henrich inverts the evolutionary history of Yuval Harari. Plus: Jack Parsons versus L Ron Hubbard!

David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old argues that innovation is real, but tech-focussed futurology is nonsense. A true history of sociotechnical change should feature far fewer heroic inventions, and far more cumulative combinations.

Matt Hill, Mary Shelley, end-of-history vibes.

Path dependency in infrastructure is not just a hardware issue, and Effective Altruism (for all its failings) fills a gap identified by its critics. Plus: form echoes function in the writing of Stephen Jay Gould! And the Gothenburg book fair is inimical to the authorial sensibility!

This post contains a sentence which, if it could be spoken aloud in sincerity, might free you from a nagging worry that you never knew you had.

Tariq Goddard, Adam Curtis, Gavin Friday, Miranda Sawyer, the Nineties… it’s not nostalgia, it’s an ear for history’s habit of rhyming.

In this instalment: the demise of the deodand; a history of the microphone; and a gloss on civilisational collapse. Plus: the more-than-human in Haraway! The set-pieces in Iain M Banks! And my seeming inability to say no to academic writing opportunities, despite no longer being an academic!

Turns out that the people who enthuse about Laurie Anderson are very right to do so.

Even the ham-handed attempts to make it relevant … can’t quiet obscure the cosmic-scale mind-fuck of the core notion.

In this inaugural Deep Read essay, I pull a few strong threads from Haraway’s masterpiece string figure of a book, and attempt to rescue the concept “more than human” from its ongoing reduction to greenwash nonsense.

Parsing big signal in the divinatory noise.

In this instalment, we examine the perceived acceleration of time’s passing, tour the tawdry campus of a failed secular techno-guru-cult, and poach processes from a wide range of writers. Plus: Iain Banks, Charlie Stross and the history of space opera!

The enantiodromia of rationality is peaking real hard right now.

Go read a webcomic.

WTF AFK LOL

Cory Doctorow, master of metaphor

In this instalment, three things merit a second look: the impact of three- and two-wheel EVs on oil demand; Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?”; and—much as it pains me to admit it—Stewart Brand’s “pace layers” model.

Things I have been staring at lately.

By way of announcing of a new semester of deep-read reviews here at WA, I want to make the case for why people in futures and foresight should read a lot of history and social theory.

Take *that*, Burning Man

Foucault, Gould, Crowley (not that one).

Unexpected advice from Bogna Konior on rhetorical combat.

In this instalment, I try to rescue the baby of Kevin Munger’s vision for a more public-facing form of academic scholarship from the bathwater of handwavey “AI” enthusiasm.

Wise words from Olaf Stapledon.

A hymn to spontaneous days off, and second-hand bookstores.

A characteristically perspicacious observation on utopias from G K Chesterton.

Humans are arguably distinguished from other species by the extent to which we have transcended the temporal limits of natural selection through our capacity to adapt our environment to our needs, rather than the reverse.

This is not my first experience of weird coincidence with Perfect Sentences, whose editor I do kind of know, but would not presume to go so far as to claim as a friend.

In this instalment: container shipping is starting to hit its logistical limits, at least on the land, even as it enables some seriously dirty business models. Plus: Byung-Chul Han, and E J Swift’s Clarke Award-winning novel When There Are Wolves Again!

I think we’re probably past Peak Poptimism already, myself, and driving hard into enantiodromia territory; the headlines are full of it, if you’ve eyes to see with.

Some thoughts on the unnarratability of the extremely online life.

Attention conservation notice: weeknotes are (sort of) on holiday.

In this episode: we wander into the forests of medieval Europe, return with the underlying imagery of Enlightenment and Romanticist thought, and then feel for their bones beneath the skin of the present.

Yer man Ganzeer, setting out his advice to young artists about the realities of the job: Just know that it’ll involve something like 70% admin, 20% actual creative work, and 10% putting out fires and/or wanting to die. G A N Z E E R . T O D A Y https://ganzeer.today/one-of-the-surest-ways-to-infuse-my-existence-with-misery-is-to-sit-me-in-front Yesterday was the […]

Daily readings underscore the uncanny capacity of the cards to tell you things quite firmly, even if it’s not always entirely obvious what they’re telling you until afterwards.

In this episode: a long hard look at the distinction between art and artifice, and what it means to make things for their own sake. Plus: technical aspects of the new Ann Leckie novel!

In this episode: contemplating the end of the Western cosmopolitan urge; hanging with the New York neoLuddites; and Silicon Valley’s highly selective readings of science fiction. Plus, G K Chesterton!

Mid-list musicians as memento mori.

A quick stab at defining Sam Kriss as a literary genre unto himself.

Harrison, Leckie, Swift.

Sweden’s submarine silly-season.

In this episode: Scott Smith on “protocol communities”; the face as the site of surgical interventions into reality itself; and another look at “body futurism” as dark enantiodromia.

The internet is not a place, but it nonetheless has denizens, easily identified by their astonishing collective narcissism.

In this episode: can you make the words come without effort? You might think your LLM is helping, but really it’s a fast track to empty mediocrity. In the meantime, why not get a grip on your curiosity and (re)learn to enjoy reading books the old-fashioned way?

This week, a debunking of bio-factory protein production, which leads us to a broader look at solutionism, and the frustrating impossibility of simply swapping one metanarrative for another. Plus, the short fiction of Iain M Banks...

Take a peek inside to find a strong point of view on point-of-view, to learn the differences between writing for the page and for the screen, and to consider the importance of abeyance in our dealings with futurity…

Asterisk Magazine, which aspires to be The New Yorker of effective altruism, has a piece profiling “AI doomers” which, even after reviewing the author’s other sincere engagements with related topics, I’m struggling not to parse as a brilliant bit of parody and/or satire. … AI doom is a remarkably cozy catastrophe. If you suffered through […]

A clip from an essay on Zhaungzi’s approach to virtue.