Writing
Below is a list of different pieces of writing. Some of them are quite short, because they are snippets of ideas or quick associations. With time, hopefully, some of them will grow, developing as the ideas they are trying to depict, refine, or experiment with become deeper, broader, and more layered. I list them here together as I hope that seeing them together will aid finding connections between them, rather than segmenting them as separate thoughts. They are listed in chronological order, most recently altered first.
Why I Want To Be A Carpenter
I want to train to be a carpenter, because I think the world is going to really change a lot in the coming years, but I think making things with wood will remain useful.
I like wood. It feels nice. I’ve spent a lot of time touching it, picking it up, moving it, and most importantly, chopping it up into smaller pieces. I spent a lot of time in my adolescence in a small wood with my Dad and some of his friends processing fallen trees into firewood. Despite my enjoyment of this activity and the tactile quality of the material at its centre, it didn’t occur to me until later in life that it might be fun to make things with wood, rather than just chop it up.
Why I Don’t Want To Make Speculative Design
I think about the future a lot. For this reason, when I heard about speculative design, I was quite enamoured by it, as a medium, movement, or method that investigates the future. That is, designs from a possible future. You might call these objects a guess, but they’re less sincere than that implies. It most often takes the form of a provocation about contemporary behaviour, topic, or system, attempting to materialise some of its potential repercussions ahead of schedule.
But I don’t think I want to do that any more, for two reasons:
1. I am absolutely bricking it about what the future holds, and any speculations I might make about it would be filled with enough virulent pessimism and fear to make them useless as experiments (but I at least might learn a little about what it is that I am fearful of).
2. I want to make things with clear and present needs in mind, because I think that is going to be an important skill to practise.
Begun: 5th March 2024
Updated: 5th March 2024
Supply Chain Realism
Our stuff, which we need, is made by capitalists. Our stuff is commodities. In our homes, we are surrounded by possessions. Outside the house, particularly in urban environments, we are surrounded by objects. All of these objects, whether they’re ours or not, form our material culture1. And our material culture, the products of human creation, is almost entirely manufactured capitalist structures and incentives.
We intensely understand this. We can intuit how the processes that have brought an item into our immediate vicinity were driven and altered by profit motives. The logic of why a producer would produce a profitable product is completely obvious to us, and the inverse mostly unthinkable. These logics are inextricably mineralised into the object’s bodies, when we look at them or touch them we can feel the crust it forms.
As well as this imminent tangibility, there is also a deep abstraction in our understanding of capitalist material culture. Complex and globalised supply chains have, especially for those in the West, further veiled the origins of any one product. We know our things come from somewhere, most likely China, but where and how exactly is an intractable mish mash of actions and interactions, whose elucidation reveals little to us anyway. We are comfortable leaving this gap unbroached.
Most crucially perhaps, we need these things. Our lives are sustained and benefitted by these commodities. For many examples, we cannot imagine going without them.
This combination - the materialised yet abstracted understanding of capitalisms effect on the objects around us, and their necessity to us - evokes capitalist production as indomitable. It structures our material surroundings so totally that imagining material surroundings built on other economics principles has become impossible. The material world and the structures it results from is far more imminent to us than any idea we might have of an alternate societal form.
Begun: 5th March 2024
Last Updated: 17th June 2024
Timeboat
I take time
I am time
Time holds me, like a boat
The things I care about take time
The things I care about are time, made of it
I will make a boat, to hold me
Begun: 17th June 2024
Last Updated: 17th June 2024
Peace Meeting
A bird from the sky right through the eye.
The bird had, for a brief moment, blocked the sun. In that instant, light flickered through as a splash, and coating and warming every feather on its body.
But its momentum carried it forward. Beak outstretched, it plummeted towards the heart of my pupil.
I closed my lids before we made our deep embrace. Feathers warm from its flight. Sky grounded, air becomes full, sun meets the earth.
Begun: 21st March 2024
Last Updated: 21st March 2024