The Ways of Worldmaking, Part I
In times past, monsoon clouds were so dense, people built cities inside. Squinting upward, you could see children scampering up turrets in the sky and disappearing into the darkness. Rain came with gifts, sometimes a carpet, sometimes a curtain, and after a downpour, a bed or table. You should see the fights to grab a fallen treasure, for the cloud-dwellers were skilled craftsmen.
They grew everything in the clouds, from succulent oranges to the finest rice, but they couldn’t cultivate what they loved most: mangoes. Just before the monsoons, the Cloud Emperor would send his merchants to the ground in floating boats to bargain for the sweetest mangoes of the season. That's when I met them. I would come with my father with two loads of mangoes we would exchange for clothes and jewelry and cloud cherries that burst in your mouth like ripe balloons.
-- from the Book of Lost Worlds
World-making before World-bettering
Every child asks their parents: 'why am I here?' or the slightly more dangerous 'who made me?' Why do they ask so? Isn’t our presence in the world the most familiar of affairs? Nothing could be more evident than opening our eyes in the morning and seeing the familiar list of possessions.
That familiarity masks an undercurrent of terror. Nothing could be more disturbing than realizing that one morning we won't be around to survey our empires. We take the world for granted while we inhabit it and take out insurance policies for the afterlife. The French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal portrayed an insightful version of these insurance policies:
The anthropocene asks for a different wager: instead of wagering on the existence of God, we wager on the existence of the world. As Pascal says: why hesitate? What do you have to lose? How do you wager on something oscillating between the familiar and the terrifying? Why would you do so?
One reason: you want to create a better world. An excellent reason, but the mini-Socrates standing on your shoulder whispers in your ear: what is this world you want to better?
Let’s say you were a venture capitalist looking to invest in the next unicorn. A startup founder comes to you saying ‘I want to make a better spacedrive.’ You might be like ‘wow, tell me more about these spacedrives.’ The founder looks puzzled; ‘I have no idea what spacedrives are, I only know how to make them better.’ And then they ask you to invest in their spacedrive company.
Would you whip out your chequebook?
So why believe someone promising to make the world a better place without knowing what a world is?
Our Hypothesis: worldmaking before world-bettering
We are not the only creatures trying to make sense of the world. We can learn from the other beings caught in the wheel of samsara. Like how, all you need is patience. In one of the greatest hits of worldmaking, Jakob von Uexkull talks about the tick's approach to the world:
Years and years of waiting, a few minutes of grabbing on for dear life and a meal of warm blood. That's about it for Tickji: the next generation is waiting for its turn. Once you start paying attention, you realize the world isn't a giant container into which we throw the lives of cats and crows and every other creature in the woods. Our animal worlds overlap, but they aren't the same. Which is exciting - with new technologies, we might get to see their worlds through their eyes. Who wouldn't want to be a blue whale for a day?
Here's a thought experiment: suppose we strapped you into a machine, all Matrix-like, and fed you the sensory stream of a dog or a dolphin, will you ever feel like a dog or a dolphin? At what point will you shed the trappings of humanity and take on the world of the other creature?
We aren't there yet, but we will be able to run this experiment in our lifetimes.
It was the same day, every day, for the two brothers. Bedrise at 7. The older one prepares tea, half a spoonful of sugar for himself, and a heaping spoon for his brother. The younger one sets the board, getting the pieces out of the bag where they had been stored carefully, placing them exactly where they were the night before.
Then they go at it with fierce intensity, stopping only for a quick lunch at noon and a leisurely dinner at six. A final shift through midnight, when they stop, and the younger one clears the board after noting the position of the pieces. Big brother prepares a warm drink of milk and turmeric with a dash of ginger and pours it into two mugs.
Sleep.
Rumor says when the game ends, the world fades. People stop hearing. Daylight turns to dusk. We lose taste and touch and wait in the darkness for judgment.
-- from the Book of Lost Worlds
What’s in a World?
Humans have been making models for centuries: maps, blueprints, prototypes, and other representations of reality. Worldmaking is the next (evolutionary? or revolutionary?) step in this ladder of simulation. The pioneers in this turn towards worldmaking are storytellers. Starting in the nineteenth century, speculative fiction brought the arts of worldmaking to the reading public, populating our minds with worlds no one had gone before.
We love fictional worlds, for the gloom of Mordor is as compelling as the evil of Sauron, but stories are not the only reason for worldmaking. We also want to use it for social purposes. We want to be able to tell whether a carbon tax will help transition towards a cleaner, greener economy. We can model those tax scenarios with equations that make predictions, but worldmaking has a visceral effect that can't be reduced to prediction and explanation. By placing ourselves in a future world, or an alternative world, we learn how our current world is just one among many. It becomes easier to plot the way from where we are today to the better world we want to create tomorrow.
Until recently, it's been impossible to simulate an entire world. It's not just a matter of computational power, of creating digital twins of the 'real,' though twins are becoming widely available. It's a matter of mindset, of thinking about the elephant and not just its parts, and that too an elephant meandering in a dense forest. The time for worldmaking has come, and we are committed to grasping the world before bettering it.
The elements that go into worldmaking, from technological tools and storytelling techniques to prototyping methods and the organizational mindset are falling into place. Over the coming weeks, we will slowly unveil a world we have been incubating for the last few months and show how that world can help us think and feel and act 'wickedly.'