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

Pincer movement

Academia in an interregnum

Fragments

Pressure points

The confused contemporary

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kokura

Memes and monsters of the interregnum

Beware decoys

Big tech, big mistakes

A bank run on meaning

Of mice and dice

Values all the way down

Of hoses and pipes

Where are we?

In conversation with Pete Chambers, Q1 2000-25

Polycrisis: redux, deluxe

The brutal and the stupid

The plastic and the questionable

In media res, in the style of immediacy

Piecing and parsing

Looking back, facing forward

The strange intruder

The ordering principle

In search of windmills

Knowing the time

Marked

Gray democracy

Enframing in the East

Stresses and surprises

Beset by monsters

In conversation with Pete Chambers, Q3 2024

Cold war or hot world

The problem of...

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

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?

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

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

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 process

A year ago, I started this Substack as an experiment for sharing my writing. A major motivation for doing so was a recognition of the role that academics play in marginalising their own voices. Part of this is through getting lost in narrow niches and specialisations; part of this is through being caught in a dysfunctional neoliberal university system;

Throwing sketches into the wind

The aim of this series is

 thinking through

and

 thinking with

China. One of the references for ‘to orient’ is Edward Said, and while these notes likely fail to meet his exacting standards, hopefully the intent and core ideas might. The aim - the need - is to recognise and reckon with China, in all its complexity and detail.

Digital worlds

Faced with contagion, confrontation, conflict, how to avoid disorientation? And if that can be managed, how can we actively and positively orientate ourselves? A   starting assumption here is that there are better and worse ways to orientate, and we should aim for better ones.

To orient

The world is presently a strange mix of the old - building things and destroying them - and the new - technologies that replicate human thought and intelligence. A year ago I wrote a series of notes on ‘reckoning with AI’. To recap some conclusions: Part 1: Part 2: Part 3: Nothing I have seen in the intervening period has led me to revise these judgments.

Low-res living

Friedrich Nietzsche,

 Beyond Good and Evil

: - Leo Tolstoy,

 War and Peace

: - Christopher Clark,

 The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

: - Lawrence Freedman,

 Strategy: A History

: - Stefan Zweig,

 The World of Yesterday

: - Albert Camus,

 The Rebel

: - Karl Jaspers,

 Tragedy is Not Enough

: - Innokenty Annensky, ‘Nightmares’:

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

With this note, I would like to thank and welcome new readers, and provide an update on what I am exploring through this Substack. By training, I am a scholar of politics and international relations, and hold positions at universities in Australia and Japan, the former my country of origin, the latter my country of residence.

A note on notes

Part of what I have been suggesting about polycrisis is the difficulty in making sense of it. Given this, I am trying a slightly different format for this note, it is consciously fragmentary, presented as a series of somewhat connected thoughts, observations and provocations about the current moment.

Observations and provocations on the current moment

Defending worlds

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

Evil might seem like a strange topic to be commencing the year with, but I have been finishing an article on this elusive theme and these notes are consciously untimely. It is a difficult, awkward topic, weighed with religious and mystical connotations, it does not fit well with many contemporary frames.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche, Aphorism 125, ‘The Madman’,

 The Gay Science

[1882]: - Hermann Broch,

 The Sleepwalkers

, Part 3, Chapter XLIV, ‘Disintegration of Values (6)’ [1931-32]: - Ezra Pound, ‘Canto CXIII’ [1969]:

Imagining the real. Really imagining. There and here, blending and blurring, all together. Hayao Miyazaki,

 Shuna’s Journey.

Christopher de Bellaigue on the possibilities of ‘an unstoppable spiral of state violence and popular fury’ in Iran. Alexander Baunov on Russia’s objectives. 2022 is set to be ‘a fabulous year’ for some. Ali Ansari on ‘failures of imagination’ in Iran.

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

In conversation again with Pete Chambers. With this episode we have moved to a new recording setup and the audio quality is much better as a result. Thanks for the feedback from listeners and to our producer, Peter Van Hoesen, for his guidance. Our starting point is the extreme weather that has marked this year’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

In conversation with Pete Chambers, August 2023

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

Simone de Beauvoir,

 The Ethics of Ambiguity

(1947): - Robert Oppenheimer, Hearing Before Personnel Security Board (1954): - Bill Joy, ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us’ (2000): - Victoria Krakovna, ‘Risks from general artificial intelligence without an intelligence explosion’ (2015): - Ezra Klein, ‘This Changes Everything’ (2023): - Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher, ‘ChatGPT Heralds an Intellectual Revolution’ (2023):

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

A key theme across these notes is moral agency. Rarely do we determine the conditions in which we act, but this does not absolve us. The circumstances may be more or less extenuating, yet we always have a choice. Recognising and accepting our agency, and the responsibility that flows with it, is a necessary part of acting in the world. The macro is made up of the micro.

Snake and the wheel

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 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

Imperfect notes on an imperfect world

There is a pivotal scene towards the end of

 Magnolia

, where the seemingly impossible happens, a situation that leaves its characters confused and confounded. A camera shot shows the words written, ‘but it did happen’. These words, and that scene, capture the gap that can appear between experience and expectation, the space between beliefs about what can occur and what actually does eventuate.

But it did happen

Nietzsche was close to the tragic end of his lucid existence when he reflected that, ‘this absurd state of affairs must speedily be brought to an end; we are skating upon very thin ice, and the warm breeze of a thaw is blowing.’ This reflection foreshadowed his own future and the world’s. It would take a few more decades before the the Great War arrived and the ice cracked.

A warm breeze is blowing

With the impending anniversary of Japan’s triple disasters, this piece reflects on an important lesson I learnt from the research I did on the Fukushima nuclear accident: some things break.

On 11 March 2011, a huge earthquake off the coast of Japan triggered a massive tsunami that struck the Tohoku region.

Things break

This piece was first published in

 The Japan Times

in late January 2021. The year 2020 undoubtedly defied expectations and predictions. Yet as a new year commences, the experience has not deterred many from offering predictions about what is coming next. While it might be tempting to decisively announce that the world after COVID-19 will be fundamentally different, it really is impossible to say.

Lessons from living through a pandemic

This piece was first published on E-IR. An important truism within disaster studies is that all disasters are human-made. What this insight conveys is that how people act – before, during, after – plays a crucial role in shaping how a disaster unfolds, even if the trigger is from nature.

The pandemic and our place in the world

Welcome to ‘Imperfect notes on an imperfect world’, an open-ended experiment sharing my writing on this platform. I am a scholar based in Japan, my research and teaching draw on politics, ethics, sociology and related fields. The title hopefully gives a bit of a sense of the perspective you can expect here, a sketch book of thoughts and reflections on our world. Humans are wonderfully incomplete, constant works in progress.