Clouds of Unknowing is a sometimely newsletter by @original_chills, mining the present for unserious sermons, other worlds, and little rituals.
I’ve recently spent some time playing Factorio, a video game that is as unsettling as it is addictive. Your spaceship crash lands on an alien planet, and you, a little man in a space suit, are free to roam about a landscape of trees, rocks, and curious little patches of colour that you will quickly discover are fields of coal, iron ore and copper ore. You can hand mine these things. You can break down your own spaceship into iron pipes and plates that you can use to make things. E.g. a furnace in which to smelt the ores with coal, a water pump, steam engine and power station, to power the electric automatic mines, to build conveyer belts, cables, circuits, research centres, walls, weapons, trains, oil refineries, and eventually a rocket to take you back home.
Depending on your initial settings, you may encounter or be attacked by the inhabitants of the planet you’ve landed on, nightmarish insectoids born from pink wobbling blobs. If you look at the in-game map, you can watch a map of the pollution spreading from your furnaces and factories, piquing the interest of these creatures who swarm towards them, destroying all in their path, including you. You can’t help but wonder if perhaps the person building industrial society from scratch on a virgin planet isn’t the bad guy here.
You build, you burn, and somewhere, depending on your local energy mix, something else is probably burning so that you can do it. I recall being very struck the first time I realised that a lamp in a video game uses electricity just like a real lamp, and Factorio makes that link even more obvious. It is also an exquisitely addictive game to play. You stop seeing the trees for the wood, the inputs, the outputs, supply chains and bottlenecks. You can forever be optimising your factory, and the vague goal of getting off the planet ends up subordinated to finding resources and building ever more complex networks.
Last winter I became intimately aware of just how dependent my lifestyle was on the burning of fossil fuels. I was spending most of my hours in a draughty flat in a cold winter, balancing comfort, cost and condensation while keeping an eye on the thermostat. Our central heating, hot water and stovetop are powered by gas; you can literally see the stuff burning in front of you, flickering blue after the satisfying whoosh of a spark. The fact that this is familiar for most people in the UK is a contingency of history - the rush for North Sea oil and gas in the 70s and 80s, and our recent gradual shift to European and Russian supplies as our own begin to dry up.
Now that the colder weather is kicking in again, the petrol supply crisis and government’s half-arsed commitments to net zero ahead of COP26 have got me wondering about what will come after this civilization based on burning hydrocarbons (perhaps an exaggeration, but I always enjoyed the alien character Ford Prefect in Hitchhiker’s Guide naming himself after what he observed to be the dominant life form on earth!). Even the virtual is physical, as demonstrated by current shortages of microchips, whose production plants are somewhat anachronistically called ‘foundries’. Elsewhere we see the problems of sheer physicality in an age of instant information communications, as tankers block the Suez and supply chains seize up in cascades of covid disruption. It could be that this is in fact a symptom of software eating the world, as Venkatesh Rao has recently written, analysing supply chains through the lenses of computation, circularity and situatedness. In the real world no-one designs a supply chain from scratch - but sometimes a tweet thread is all it takes to unlock a bottleneck. Weird right?
The Logbook
I’ve been enjoying…
Reading Jeremy Johnson’s Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness, which I picked up from the table display at Watkins books on Cecil Court.
Watching Wild Wild Country on Netflix, a brilliant case study in cult dynamics (though, like Sheela, I felt it was bit long).
Listening to this banging mix of new skool darkside hardcore (bit of a mouthful).
