Looking ahead
I’m adjusting the schedule of this newsletter. We’re looking ahead into the month as we begin, not back at the past month.
So: October. Let’s go, together.
Online reading
Sometimes you read something that clarifies the moment. What is going on right now, really? For me, it was this detailed reporting from a ‘materials sourcing’ conference for footwear companies:
When you make stuff to sell—mountains of stuff, so much stuff that the human mind cannot fathom the volume of it—you cannot pretend that your industry will just function as it has forever. Sneaker manufacturing isn’t like tech, where you can blabber on about how you actually need to devour cities’ worth of energy for years at a time in order to make Generative AI and keep your investors happy. These companies are in a more tactile business. Whatever Nike’s vision of itself might be, it sells shoes and facilitates the manufacturing of shoes. For a company in that business, thinking five years ahead means thinking about what the marketplace will be like five years deeper into multiple environmental catastrophes.
Corbin Smith
Books
Fall is a season for old science fiction. Let’s visit J.G. Ballard’s Studio 5, The Stars from 1961. Here, ‘VT’ is short for ‘Verse-Transcriber’—a machine that emits soulless poetry on demand, to spec.
Fifty years ago a few people wrote poetry, but no one read it. Now no one writes it either. The VT set merely simplifies the whole process.
Ballard’s vision of text extruders everywhere fits our moment, which is the moment of over & over encountering LLM-generated text, copy without end, argument-shaped things without arguments. Of “pushing a button, selecting metre, rhyme, assonance on a dial.” I’m so tired of all of it.
Fall is a season for Wendell Berry, who helps me remember that caring is not abstract, or theoretical. I love his definition of ‘provision’—what it means to provide—from the recent collection The Art of Loading Brush.
Provision, I think, is never more than caring properly for the good that you have, including your own life. As it relates to the future, provision does only what our oldest, longest experience tells us to do. We must continuously attend to our need for food, clothing, and shelter. We must care for the land, care for the forest, plant trees, plant gardens and crops, see that the brood animals are bred, keep the house and the household intact. We must teach the children. But provision does not foresee, predict, project, or theorize the future. Provision instructs us to renew the roof of our house, not to shelter us when we are old—we may die or the world may end before we are old—but so we may live under a sound roof now. Provision merely accepts the chances we must take with the weather, mortality, fallibility. Perhaps the wisest of the old sayings is ‘Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.’ Provision accepts, next, the importance of diversity. Perhaps the next-wisest old saying is ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.’ When the bad, worse, or worst possibility presents itself, provision only continues to take best possible care of what we have, or of what we have left.
We’re here in the moment of bad, worse, or worst. What to do? As Berry puts it, ‘only continue.’ I can do that. So can you. It just might be enough.
On the site
I’m running a new publication schedule. If you’re reading this on the e-mail newsletter, you’ll get two mails a month:
- newsletter for the month ahead (first Tuesday of each month), and
- a regular old blog post (third Tuesday of each month).
Now, I update the site more frequently than this. One example of updates that aren’t sent out as e-mails (or even distributed in the RSS feed) are HOWTOs. These HOWTOs are more telegraphic and less explanatory than what I usually write here. Procedures for assembling a particular kind of diagram, checking in with a group—that kind of thing. I joked that I have reinvented the concept of putting up a plain old web page, for my own use. Take a walk through them here:
Brian Kerr
Upcoming events
This month, my friend & neighbor Andy is hosting Awktober—a monthlong celebration of being genuinely awkward, or maybe better put, awkwardly genuine. A thesis of Andy’s work is that when you embrace your awkwardness, you’ll find joy in the doing, and confidence thereafter.
And looking ahead to November, you can get your ticket today for Makesensemess on Nov. 7. This will be an incredible event, as always. It is:
The brain child of information architect and author, Abby Covert. It is an annual (virtual) celebration of sensemaking that started in 2021. Part virtual unconference, part virtual party, all virtual fun. It is celebrated every November, which also happens to be the publication anniversary for How to Make Sense of Any Mess.
The undefined moon
Pity the wayward Moon Phases Mastodon bot. It posted the following on October 1:
Today’s undefined moon is 0% of full brightness, and is currently NaN km from Earth and NaN km from the sun. It’s been NaN days since the last new moon.
I thank this misfiring script or disconnected data feed for nearly a week of happiness produced by that phrase. It is the season of the undefined moon, unnumbered in distance, duration, and brightness. Yet, as I write these words, the moon is up, and it is full, and still, and brilliant.