Letter from November

At what point does business as usual become an abrupt and unstoppable transition to a new state? No one knows.

I’ve been thinking about Scranton’s essay on endings the one where he circles apocalypse and that beautiful, maddening idea of “apophatic futurism.” You know the move: we can’t know the future, all our narratives fail, so we should embrace unknowing as the only honest posture. It’s elegant. It’s probably right. And yet I find myself unable to fully accept it.

Not because I think we can know the future. I can’t. But because there’s something in that posture of radical unknowing that feels like another kind of escape a sophisticated one, granted, but still a way of not having to choose, not having to build, not having to commit to a specific shape of tomorrow when you’re pretty sure tomorrow will make a fool of you.

The Sparrow

Last week I watched a sparrow trying to drink from one of those architectural water features all sharp angles and surfaces designed for human contemplation, not animal survival. The bird kept landing, investigating, hopping to another spot. Obviously thirsty. The feature was probably award-winning. The sparrow didn’t care about the award.

I thought: this is what most of our solutions look like. Gorgeous from the human aesthetic standpoint. Completely non-functional for the thing they’re supposedly addressing.

I was waiting for a call about financing infrastructure in regions where traditional models are collapsing. I have what I think is a good model. It might even work. But sitting there, watching that sparrow, I felt the absurdity of the whole exercise. Not because the work isn’t necessary it obviously is but because I was about to spend an hour trying to convince people with capital that there’s a bankable future in a world whose basic metabolic processes we’ve destabilized beyond our ability to predict.

Scranton would probably say I’m constructing a fiction. That my pitch is a narrative I’m imposing on an unknowable future, and that the most honest thing would be to stop pretending I can build anything durable in the doorway between worlds.

Maybe. But the sparrow still needed water.

Fictions and Pipelines

Scranton’s right that we live by fictions. Every business plan is a fiction. Every climate model, every economic forecast, every promise that if we just optimize this system or deploy that technology, we can thread the needle between catastrophe and continuation.

But here’s where I part ways with the apophatic move: some fictions have pipelines attached.

When I’m building software, I’m not just telling a story. I’m writing code. Deploying infrastructure. Hiring people who then hire other people. Creating actual technical artifacts that do actual things in the world. The fiction is inseparable from the reality of servers spinning up, APIs being called, databases being updated, money moving from one account to another.

The fiction is load-bearing. It’s holding up something real.

Same with infrastructure projects. Yes, the pitch is a narrative about the future, and given what we know about tipping points and runaway systems, it’s probably a story that will be partially or wholly wrong. But while I’m telling it, while I’m raising capital and deploying it and building partnerships, I’m also moving resources toward projects that might help people survive what’s coming. The fiction is doing work.

This is what bugs me about pure apophatic futurism. It’s philosophically unimpeachable and practically useless. Worse: it’s a kind of privilege. You can embrace radical unknowing when your work is analyzing other people’s fictions rather than building things that might keep people alive.

I don’t mean that as an attack Scranton’s essay is brilliant, and I think he’d probably agree with the critique. But still. The sparrow needs water. And someone has to figure out how to modify the water feature, or build a different one, or at least put out a fucking bowl.

The Middle of the Middle

“In mediis rebus.” In the middle of things.

The point is that we’re always in the middle. We arrive after the story started, we leave before it ends. We construct fictions to make our arbitrary slice of time feel meaningful, to create concordance between our mortal span and the larger pattern we imagine ourselves part of.

Fine. But there are different ways of being in the middle.

There’s the middle where you’re passively situated born into a moment, shaped by it, carried along by currents you didn’t choose and can’t control. That’s real. I didn’t choose to be born into the tailwind of fossil-fueled capitalism or late-stage empire or any of it.

But there’s also the middle where you’re actively building where you’re making bets, deploying resources, creating infrastructure, shaping (in some infinitesimal way) what comes next. Every line of code, every hire, every partnership, every dollar allocated is a small claim about what kinds of structures might be useful in a future I can’t see.

The honest truth? I have no idea if any of it will matter. I don’t know if I’m buying time for people to figure out more fundamental solutions, or just building elaborate sandcastles before the tide comes in.

But I also know that infrastructure either exists or it doesn’t. Systems either work or they don’t. People either have tools that help them survive the next decade, or they don’t. And the difference between those states is the result of thousands of decisions made by people moving money and attention and effort toward one possible future over another.

So yes, I’m constructing a fiction. But it’s a fiction with rebar in it.

The Capture Problem

I wrote something recently about how every tool we build to increase autonomy gets absorbed into the systems it was meant to provide alternatives to. Decentralized networks get recentralized. Peer-to-peer platforms become extraction engines. Technologies of liberation become technologies of control.

This is the pattern I keep seeing everywhere. And it raises an uncomfortable question: if every alternative gets captured, if every attempt to build something different eventually gets routed back through the same power structures, why build anything at all?

Scranton’s answer, more or less: stop pretending you can. Embrace the unknowing. Accept that all your fictions will fail.

My answer: build anyway, but build with your eyes open. Know that capture is the default. Design for it. Create systems that are resilient to it, or at least that fail gracefully when it happens. And most importantly: build with people who share your understanding of what you’re actually doing, who aren’t naive about the forces arrayed against whatever you’re trying to create.

I’ve had ventures collapse not because the ideas were wrong, but because I chose people who were building different things than I thought we were building together. They were constructing fictions I didn’t recognize until too late—fictions that were incompatible with mine in ways that made the whole structure fall apart.

I’ve gotten better at sniffing out whether people are building toward something real or just performing the building. Whether they’re okay with the uncertainty and the probable failure, or whether they need the fiction to be comforting. Whether they can hold “this will probably not work” and “we’re going to give it everything anyway” in the same breath.

Those are the people I want in the middle with me.

Fire Temples for Dead Ideas

I’ve been reading about Zoroastrianism lately. It’s connected to my spouse’s heritage, but also it’s just fascinating as a case study in how wisdom traditions adapt or fail to adapt to historical transformation.

Zoroastrianism was huge once. The state religion of empire. A sophisticated theology that influenced everything that came after it. And then it shrank. Got absorbed, overwhelmed, reduced to a small community keeping the flame alive.

But here’s the thing: it didn’t disappear. Even after centuries of marginalization and persecution and diaspora, the tradition persisted. Not in its imperial form, obviously. The world it was built for ended. Multiple times.

And yet: fire temples still operate. Texts are still studied. Rituals are still performed. Not because anyone expects the old world to come back, but because the people keeping the tradition alive believe there’s something in it worth carrying forward, even specially into a world that doesn’t particularly want or understand it.

I think about this when I’m trying to build systems that operate according to principles that markets don’t value. What I’m doing probably won’t “succeed” in any conventional sense. The worlds I’m trying to build toward probably won’t arrive, at least not in forms I’d recognize. The fictions I’m constructing will almost certainly fail to predict or prepare for what actually happens.

But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the point is to keep certain principles alive decentralization, human agency, resistance to capture, attention to limits, all of it not because they’ll triumph, but because they’re worth carrying forward into whatever comes next. To be a kind of living memory for different ways of organizing human activity, different relationships between technology and autonomy, different stories about what humans could be and do.

Like a fire temple for ideas about technological sovereignty.

That sounds grandiose, which makes me uncomfortable. But I also think it’s true.

What Can Be Done From Here

The sparrow eventually found water. I watched it hop to a less-designed area just a regular patch of ground with regular plants doing regular plant things. There was a puddle. Problem solved.

My call went fine. They’re interested, they have questions, we’re scheduling another conversation. The usual dance. We’ll either close or we won’t. The venture will either find the right structure or it’ll shut down and the lessons will go into the next thing. Markets will either reward what I’m building or they won’t.

And underneath that: the planet will keep warming. Systems will keep destabilizing. Tipping points will tip or won’t or already have. The world will end, has already ended, is always ending, exactly like Scranton says.

But I can’t won’t accept that the only honest response is sophisticated detachment or radical unknowing. Not because I think I can know the future. I can’t. Not because I think my fictions are any less fictional than anyone else’s. They’re not. But because there’s a difference between accepting that you don’t know the destination and refusing to take a step. Between acknowledging that all narratives fail and deciding that therefore no narrative matters.

The difference is this: I’m standing in the middle. Not just passively situated there, but actively, daily, building something with full knowledge that it’s probably not what the future needs, but it’s what I can build with the tools and people and capital and knowledge I have access to, in this specific historical moment, in this specific body, with these specific constraints.

My fictions have pipelines. They’re doing work in the world. That work might turn out to be useless or even counterproductive I’ve built things that failed to do what I hoped they’d do. But the work is happening. Resources are moving. Infrastructure is being created. Small modifications to the world’s surface are being made.

And sometimes not always, but sometimes those modifications help. Someone gets water. Or doesn’t drown quite yet. Or has a slightly better chance of surviving what comes next.

Is that a fiction? Sure. Is it naive? Probably. Is it enough? Absolutely not.

But it’s what I have. It’s what I can do from the middle of the middle, in the gap between what’s dying and what hasn’t been born yet, with clarity that my understanding is partial and my tools are inadequate and the outcome is uncertain.

Building in the Dark

Maybe what I’m proposing is building without the comfort of confident fictions. Building without knowing if you’re building the right things. Building because not building isn’t actually an option if you want to survive, if you want others to survive, if you want to carry anything forward into the unknowable future.

It means holding several truths at once:

You don’t know what will work. You’re going to build things anyway.

Your narratives will fail. You need narratives to act.

The world is ending. A world is being born.

Your work probably doesn’t matter. You’re going to treat it as if it does.

This is uncomfortable. It doesn’t resolve into elegant philosophical positions. It’s not satisfying in the way Scranton’s essay is satisfying that beautiful, terrible clarity about accepting unknowing. But it’s where I actually live. In the uncomfortable space of building things I’m not sure are worth building, with people I hope I’m right to trust, toward a future I can’t imagine.

The Evening Light

It’s November. The light is that specific gray that makes you understand why so many philosophers were obsessed with absence and void and the death of meaning. Outside, the city is doing its evening thing trams running, people heading home, shops turning on their lights. All very normal. All very end-of-the-world.

I’ll send this out, and then I’ll go back to work. Pitch decks to refine, code to review, partnerships to negotiate. The same things I was doing yesterday and will do tomorrow. Small modifications to the world’s surface. Pipelines attached to fictions.

I don’t know if any of it matters. I don’t know what the world will look like in ten years, or fifty, or whether there will be anything but ash and memory. I don’t know if I’m building toward something real or just keeping myself busy in the doorway between what was and what’s coming.

But I know the sparrow needed water.

And I know someone has to try to build the water feature differently.

Or at least put out a bowl.

—M.