Japan-based scholar Christopher Hobson reflects on how we can live and act in conditions that are constantly changing and challenging us. Pursuing open thinking.

Australian National University

Fragments

The confused contemporary

Memes and monsters of the interregnum

Of hoses and pipes

Where are we?

In media res, in the style of immediacy

The strange intruder

Knowing the time

Gray democracy

Stresses and surprises

Pincer movement

Academia in an interregnum

Pressure points

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kokura

Beware decoys

Big tech, big mistakes

Of mice and dice

A bank run on meaning

Values all the way down

In conversation with Pete Chambers, Q1 2000-25

Polycrisis: redux, deluxe

The brutal and the stupid

The plastic and the questionable

Piecing and parsing

Looking back, facing forward

In search of windmills

The ordering principle

Marked

Beset by monsters

In conversation with Pete Chambers, Q3 2024

Enframing in the East

The problem of...

Cold war or hot world

This evening I found myself at the closest convenience store to my apartment, one of four that are within five minutes walk, all of which are open 24-7. How necessary such a situation is, well, that is besides the point, each is slightly closer for someone. Never mind the costs of keeping these places permanently staffed, lit and at the right temperature, just as long as the onigiri and beers are always available.

What is undone?

Zooming in, zooming out

Reality as metaphor

The political and financial might of the United States, combined with the centrality of its tech platforms and English as the

 lingua franca,

ensures voices from that one country tend to occupy an outsized role in discourse and thinking. Certainly, what happens there is deeply consequential for the world, and so it is important, it does matter.

Contra and counter cold wars

We live in a world of ‘up and to the right’. Much of the stresses and strains we are facing can be connected to that gap between expectation of continued possibility and a biophysical world of life that is generally not well matched to such rapid and sustained growth. And yet, this is what is wanted.

Up and to right

I recently returned from a 5 day trip to Shanghai, my first visit to the city and the country since late 2019. It was interesting and instructive being back. While it was a short and incomplete visit, I thought it might be worthwhile sharing some observations, especially given that the vast majority of content on China is being produced at distance and with little direct engagement.

Back by the Bund

Writing in 1891, Frederick Engels reflected on Karl Marx’s ‘remarkable gift’ for That is our challenge. One of the ways that Adam Tooze has sought to respond is through adopting the frame of polycrisis, which he has further outlined in a new FT piece and accompanying Chartbook entry. The concept intuitively fits. It captures something in the air.

Picking up polycrisis

Recently I came across a thought provoking entry by Gabriele de Seta on ‘black technology’ (

 heikeji

黑科技), a Chinese term used to describe cutting edge and futuristic technologies, so advanced that they defy comprehension. Researching further, I was struck by how commonplace this idea is in Chinese, while it is effectively unknown in English.

Black technology

Trying to think of one word that might capture this uneven year, I am yet to fully settle on the right one, but ‘disruption’ feels more appropriate than most alternatives. As with so many things, disruption can have fractal properties. Pandemic waves continue to ebb and flow, albeit increasingly pushed to the side or back of our minds;

Polycrisis

The Captive Mind

by the poet Czeslaw Milosz is a remarkable set of reflections on the way Polish people dealt with their country being ripped apart first by the Nazis and then the Communists. Considering the experience of the Second World War, he wrote, ‘for five and a half years we lived in a dimension completely different from that which any literature or experience could have led us to know.

In the garden of choice

How to capture the present moment? The drift, the disconnect, the gap… The pandemic rolls on, in some places life coming back to normal in stops and starts, elsewhere no end in sight, collectively what appears like limbo is, on closer inspection, movement is occurring, just perhaps not where and how we want. At some point, a normality of sorts will return, much of the old, a bit of the now, some new too, stuck together unevenly.

Errors of the times

This year the cherry blossoms have been late to arrive. Waiting, waiting, with expectation, they have finally appeared. Matsuo Basho in Spring 1688: And yet, with the clouds and the rain, the blossoms scatter too soon. Basho a few years and seasons later: More than a century passes, and with it, many seasons, and Kobayashi Issa pens: The deep appreciation of the seasons is one of the most distinctive features of Japanese culture.

Seasons and cycles

Pitted with the present

What to make of our present conditions? The post-Cold War era has passed, (hyper)globalization has peaked, the unipolar moment has finished, neoliberalism has perhaps entered its zombie phase.

Resisting kitsch analysis

Last week marked two years of this Substack, so it seemed like a good moment for a brief update and review of the project. The original aim was for it to be a ‘thought sketchbook’, and that is roughly how it has developed.

Re-view

I find myself in a disposable hotel, a place that could not have existed 10-15 years, and most likely will not exist again at some point in the near to medium term future when we are forced to consider more what we choose to build and consume.

Disposable world

W. H. Auden, ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’.  For more: ‘A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight’.

Matcha variations

Josef Adalian and Lane Brown have written a thought provoking article about the state of the television industry, ‘The Binge Purge’. What is remarkable is how much of what is being described could be applied more broadly to describe many industries and institutions today.

In a nuanced and thoughtful piece, Philip Zelikow judges: Indeed. And yet, the tendency is for analysts to mix empty platitudes with unearned certainties. Conflict as content, triviality prevails. Faced with a troubling array of possible futures, grimly marching towards November, there is a need to escape social media circularity, and instead move outwards in thought. With that in mind, some points and provocations.

Geopolitics and dice

Continuing the conversation with Pete Chambers, this time recorded in-person during a trip to Australia in February 2024. Donald Horne famously described the country as ‘a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck.’ That depiction could easily be applied to much of the West over the last few decades. Central to our conversation is the issue of scale, prompted by a rare interview with Vaclav Smil.

In conversation with Pete Chambers, Q1 2024

A central theme of these notes is

 thinking through

and

 thinking with

: searching out and identifying fragments, frames, clues, people, texts: whatever might assist in reckoning with our collective conditions. We need partners, collaborators, aids and inspirations. With that in mind, this note engages with a series of artists and artworks, classical and contemporary, centred around a recent Europe trip.

What we cannot see

Much of what we use and touch every day is likely connected to the sea: many items would have been wholly or partially produced abroad, and most – if not all – of the remainder would have relied on commodities that would have arrived on tankers and other ships. Yet this all forms part of that background web of global interconnections that we too rarely recognize or reckon with, but are vital to how we presently live.

In Conversation with Laleh Khalili

My aim in this series is to think through the likely trajectory of current AI-technologies, and what some of the potential ramifications might be (notes one and two). In doing so, I’m not attempting to assess how powerful these current models are or could become, but assuming that they have reached a stage of development consequential enough to be impactful.

Embedding extraction

Below a selection of some news pieces, articles and podcasts that have caught my attention. I might try doing notes like these more regularly if there is interest. The full name is ‘Very Intense Tropical Cyclone Freddy’. From FT: What is remarkable is that the cyclone circled around and hit Madagascar and Moazambique

 twice

. It came back for a second shot. And add in that Malawi is experiencing its worst cholera outbreak on record.

Listening

This week I found myself back in Kyoto. Walking through temples that have been standing for hundreds of years, lasting through wars, plagues and much more, served as a useful reminder that this pandemic too will pass. But seeing so many people flocking to sakura and choosing to ignore a less serene reality made me also think we likely still have some time to go before that passing will happen.

Of scraps and circles

When a dam breaks, we can be confident bad things will follow. To what extent we can accurately forecast where exactly the water will rush to, what the precise damage will be, that is much more difficult to predict, as Falconer explains. War is much the same. Wars are a distinctive mixture of highly contingent, historically distinctive features and relatively constant dynamics that tend to reappear.

Everything washes by

In the first note thinking through the arrival of ChatGPT and the incipient AI arms race, I suggested Shoshana Zuboff’s work on surveillance capitalism as an important reference point. The behaviour of big tech over the last 15 years offers a clear track record of what we might expect, and it does not look promising.

Big tech and bad faith

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

A year ago I wrote a note considering the appearance of a new coronavirus variant, Omicron. I stressed the difficulties of making sense in real time and the need for greater intellectual humility.

One year on

‘All alike burned in its fire’ - a line taken from the fragment below - captures something powerful about the impact of disasters, moments when worlds bend and break. How to make sense of the nonsensical? How to comprehend the incomprehensible? What to do when reality outstrips imagination? Robert McLiam Wilson on the trial for the 2016 truck attack in Nice, France.

As we struggle to make sense of our ‘unnamable present’, one logical direction to turn is backwards. Historical analogs are sought out, comparisons are offered, and sooner or later, a reference is inevitably made to the Nazis. Certainly, historical reflection is a vital part of comprehending and acting in the world, but the manner in which it can work as a guide is less straightforward than what is often hoped.

The old new

In this episode, I speak with Sun-ha Hong, a scholar based at Simon Fraser University, author of the 2020 book,

 Technologies of Speculation: The limits of knowledge in a data-driven society

. His work challenges claims that we should simply listen to what ‘the data’ tells us, questioning whether it really has the capacity to reveal hidden truths about how humans interact.

In Conversation with Sun-ha Hong

In this episode, I speak with L.M. Sacasas, who has become a leading voice in examining the ethical, social and cultural consequences of technologies. His prior blog,

 The Frailest Thing

, and current Substack newsletter,

 The Convivial Society

, offer a wealth of insight, encouraging a greater awareness of the ways that technologies shape the conditions within which we live and act.

In Conversation with L.M. Sacasas

In this episode of ‘Imperfect World’, I speak with Claire Benn, a philosopher who explores how our growing reliance on digital technologies are impacting our moral landscape, and the ethical challenges that come from a world shaped by machines.

In Conversation with Claire Benn

This conversation was already posted on the ‘Imperfect world’ podcast feed, I am cross-posting it here in case this platform is better suited for some audience. For future episodes, I will post them across both platforms simultaneously.

In conversation with David Cayley

Bertolt Brecht once stated, ‘to those who do not know the world is on fire, I have nothing to say.’  Given his was writing in the first half of the 20th century, such an observation is understandable. What would Brecht say today? Whether looking at the spread of COVID-19,  increasing signs of social unrest, or the very direct and immediate consequences of climate change, the image of fire has both real and metaphorical resonance.

And it burns

There is little clarity in Christopher Nolan’s deeply confused movie,

 Tenet

, but there is one line that shines through: ‘we live in a twilight world’. This potentially captures something important about the world we find ourselves in. Between day and night, we exist in an interstitial moment.

 L'heure bleue

. The blue hour.

The Empire of Twilight

On and off target

Candy and whip

Global ethics in a time of deglobalisation

Turning, returning to Fukushima

Pacing and spacing

Another golden age

Polycrisis through Peking

This note continues the ‘to orient’ series, prompted by a recent visit to China. The plan is for this ‘batch’ to be published relatively quickly, and with that done, return to a slower publication schedule.

Lost online

A new missive has appeared from the ever-prolific , this time about Antonio Gramsci’s much quoted ‘interregnum’:ChartbookChartbook 298 Built not Born - against "interregnum"-talk (Hegemony Notes #2) "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born;

Of silkworms and butterflies

Zooming in and zooming out, moving from the micro to the meso and the macro. From the most basic of daily interactions, through to the relationships and institutions in which we work and participate, all the way up to the highest levels of international politics and global power, remarkably consistent patterns and dynamics are found. Similar shapes, similar uneven edges and jagged lines. Social entropy is fractal.

Social entropy is fractal

Karl Barth, ‘The problem of ethics today’: - Hannah Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’: - Bertolt Brecht, ‘And in your country?’: - Theodor Adorno,

 Problems of Moral Philosophy

: - Eugenio Montale, ‘Cuttlefish bones’: - Paul Valéry,

 History and Politics:

In process

In his seminal analysis, Max Scheler defined

 ressentiment

in the following terms: It is tricky concept that speaks to a tricky reality. Recently, it has been explored by Pankaj Mishra in his book,

 Age of Anger

. In an accompanying article he observes: One of Mishra’s points is that the surfacing and spread of this anger is neither incidental nor accidental, it is deeply connected to prevailing political and economic structures.

In Conversation with Joseph Vogl

To these questions posed by Guillaume Pitron could be added: how much energy was required to create this note and podcast? What inputs are required for you to be able to read and listen to it? These are things we simply do not think about: the whole digital experience feels ‘light’, it is in ‘the cloud’. But that cloud is very real and very heavy.  Look at these charts and then wonder: what resources are needed for this growth to be possible?

In Conversation with Guillaume Pitron

Bruno Latour, ‘I am interested in Europe as an ecological problem’ (2019): - Tony Judt, ‘The Way Things Are and How They Might Be’,

 London Review of Books

(2010)

 :

- Sam Knight, ‘What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?’

 The New Yorker

(2024): - Salman Rushdie,

 Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

(2024): - Adam Curtis, Interview with

 Jacobin

(2023):

This week I am teaching on how humanitarian crises are understood and seen, or more often,

 not

seen. In a prior note, ‘the meaning grinder’, I considered the perverse dynamic in which conflict is flattened out and turned into content. It ended with gesturing towards the value of silence.

Silent horror

Ernst Jünger

 , On the Marble Cliffs (

1939): - Hannah Arendt, ‘From an Interview’ (1978): - Herbert Marcuse,

 One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

(1964): - Arundhati Roy, ‘Intimations of an Ending’ (2019): - Karl Jaspers,

 Tragedy is Not Enough

(1952): - Albert Camus, ‘Are We Pessimists?’ (1946): - Pankaj Mishra, ‘Welcome to the age of anger’ (2016):

Tolstoy’s depiction of the jumbled mix of good and bad, continuity and change, is one that still holds. Invariably, though, our attention is drawn to the specific ideas now appearing and perishing. With the new year, the content monster rolls on, with previews replacing reviews, all while the trendlines remain in place.

Polycrisis, past and persistent

How to finish writing in, through, and on the fractured, fracturing year that is hastening to a close? Initially, a long post was drafted, full of quotes and charts, but on further reflection, more analysis is not needed at this point. Grimly marching towards the new year with more trepidation than anticipation. The balance of probabilities would suggest that conditions are likely to get worse. Pseudoreality prevails.

Noted, late 2023

In Kyoto, the calendar indicates it is middle of December and winter has started. Looking around, red leaves gathering on the ground, it still feels like late autumn. Seasons and schedules increasingly fall out of sync. The translators note that ‘

 aki no kure’ ‘

can mean either “autumn evening” or “the end of autumn.”’ Twilight hours and twilight times.

Pseudoreality prevails

Continuing the conversation with Pete Chambers, in late 2023, in which late-ness is deep with connotations. Our dialogue was partly prompted by Naomi Klein’s thought-provoking new book,

 Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

. Using frames of mirrors, shadows and others, Klein manages to capture something about the deeply weird and warped relations that now prevail between online and the real / ‘real’ world.

In conversation with Pete Chambers, late 2023

With each new incident or disaster, a rush to place it within a frame, to enlist it to a narrative. In our eagerness to decipher the meaning of the moment we miss that what is occurring might simply beyond our capacity to comprehend and order, or that it has not yet crystalised. Too soon, not yet at hand.

Not quite here, but yet at hand

Late September, almost a month into autumn. Walking by Kamogawa in Kyoto at night. The air has cooled slightly, the intense humidity has finally lifted. The

 nouryou-yuka

remain, raised wooden decks constructed each summer, allowing people to dine and drink while overlooking the river. This yearly tradition is now extended an extra month, until the end of October. The warm lights from restaurants reflect and shimmer in the water.

Imperfect notes on an imperfect world