Category Archives: General
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Face-off
Spent Sunday afternoon walking around Persistence Works on their annual open-studio day; lots of sculptors and silversmiths, some furniture-makers, painters, print-makers, mosaicists. Super building, too; gorgeous raw concrete, great views.
Not sure what this thing was all about, if I’m honest (it’s a David Allsopp), but the resemblance was much remarked upon.
There is no them
The champions of peace will always be vulnerable to the argument that since the enemy, too, is whetting his knife, talk of peace is unrealistic, even dangerous or treacherous. The quest for peace, like the struggle to arrest climate change, requires that we think of ourselves not just as states, tribes, or nations, but as the human inhabitants of a shared space. It demands feats of imagination as concerted and impressive as the sci-fi creativeness and wizardry we invest in future wars. It means connecting the intellectual work done in centers of war studies with research conducted in peace institutes, and applying to the task of avoiding war the long-term pragmatic reasoning we associate with “strategy.”
Escape was the purest form of resistance
A longread (at, er, Longreads) on pirates and maroons and freedom in the Caribbean during the time of the triangular trade. Like someone went out and did the research legwork on Hakim Bey’s Pirate Utopias.
I like the following paragraph in particular, partly (of course) because I agree closely with its analysis, but also because it’s a fine bit of writing, using Drake as a gateway to the system-of-the-world, and then stepping through the scales in one neat and logical paragraph, all the way out to the abstracts of ideology and economics. Good stuff.
The age suited [Francis Drake]. He exemplifies that entrepreneurial energy unleashed by Queen Elizabeth’s new, partially meritocratic society — energy that had lain dormant for generations under rigid hierarchies. Capitalism was walking on the lanky, jointy, and clumsy limbs of its adolescence, running wild all over the globe, round the Horn of Africa, across the mysterious Atlantic, and finally round South America’s treacherous wave-raising windy cape into the Pacific. Those historians of class conflict, Marx and Engels, thought that these oceanic explorers triggered the modernization of Europe. Capitalism “sprouted from the ruins of feudal society” only when ships opened up trade routes — and markets — between societies hitherto isolated from each other. One does not need to be a Marxist to agree that these bold mariners had to come before factory owners. Before new commodities and new means of producing commodities could be invented, the explorers had to open markets.
Instant Archetypes: 21st Century Tarot from Superflux
As acolytes of the Cult of Ellis may already be aware, the Kickstarter campaign for the Instant Archetypes card deck has just gone live. If you’re interested in futures, the occult, hypermodernist semantics, lush and unique artefacts, or some mix of all four of those — and if you’re still reading this blog, I figure you’re interested in at least one of those things — then I invite you to pop on over there and pledge for a deck.
Those of you reading here because of an enduring interest in my own perspective on institutional dynamics and tactical foresight might be further interested to know that you can also pledge for a consulting session with yours truly, in which I’ll work with you and the cards to think through whatever question or issue you’d most like to explore. (Apparently they decided to ignore my suggestion that this be billed as “consult a scruffy academic wizard about teh fewtch” — which only goes to show you how smart those Superfluxers really are.)
It’s really satisfying to see this project finally come to light; we first floated the concept during the lobby track of FutureEverything 2015, which for a variety of reasons, both personal and contextual, feels like a different aeon entirely… though somehow this feels like exactly the right time for it to emerge, too. The fashion for futures’n’ design folk producing decks of cards was just starting to pick up a head of steam; as I recall it, I made some fairly flippant comment about how you could just dig out an old tarot deck and achieve much the same thing, or even use Eno’s Oblique Strategies. Anab and Jon asked me to explain further, and so I rambled on about archetypes and sortilege and Jung, and Gaiman & Pratchett’s Good Omens (which is perhaps the most formative cornerstone of what passes for my personal cosmology), and how I’ve long used the tarot as a writing prompt or creative disruption device, whether for fiction or non-fiction work, or simply just for life in general. Anab suggested we should make a reboot of the tarot specifically for futures-y folk, which I thought was a wonderful idea, albeit one that would most likely go the way of so many lobby track brainstorms. But it seems it stuck… and in fits and starts, taking advantage of gaps between Superflux projects and the demands of my doctoral studies, we thrashed out rewritten names and definitions for the Major Arcana, and found an amazing artist in Amelie Barnathan.
I still feel a twinge of guilt over the art phase of the project. Amelie asked me quite a few times for further interpretations of my little scripts describing the cards, or for suggestions as to how she should bring the symbols to life, and every time I told her that she should just go with what her own head and heart were telling her in reaction to my writings — which was clearly frustrating for her in at least a few cases. But I had an intuition that the deck would only have a proper visual unity and a genuine freshness if I stayed out of the art side as much as possible. (I was also mindful that I didn’t want to do a Crowley and browbeat an artist into channeling my own ego through their skills; Crowley was a great mage, but also a manipulative douchebag, and I don’t believe that the latter is essential to the former.)
As mean as it seemed at the time, I think my instinct was right: when the PDF of the finished designs came through, I actually cried, because they were just so *right*. The strongest magic comes from people finding their own way through the maze, and the resulting cards are so much better than they would have been had I tried to come up with more detailed prompts for the visuals. Think of it as an alchemy, if you like; I certainly do. (And thank you, Amelie, for enduring my refusal to guide you; I hope you agree it turned out for the best.)
And because it’s a Superflux joint, not only is the artwork fantastic, but the production values are off the freakin’ hook: designers are perhaps the ultimate details people (more so even than mages, if there’s any substantive difference), and every little aspect of the cards has been obsessed over and refined in prototype after prototype. They don’t just look amazing, they feel good in the hand — and that tactile aspect really amplifies the ritual vibe that’s essential to getting your head in the right space for thinking at angles to the actual. The Instant Archetypes are a genuine artefact, an object that expresses all the obsessive attention and passion poured into its creation, and I’m ridiculously proud to have played my part in bringing it to being.
As far as I’m concerned, this is my first book — and best of all, it’s a book that contains every story ever written, and all the ones that have yet to be written. I hope you’ll enjoy exploring them.