Sign in Subscribe
6 min read 18

UofWinds 411,Week 18, 2025: How Do We Write Now, We’re All Going to the Conclave Larp, Brian Eno's Theory of Democracy


Good evening. I'm writing this on a Thursday night because I will be traveling on Saturday morning as part of a two week vacation.

I will pack my bags tomorrow. I will pack my words tonight.

How Do We Write Now


Over the past two weeks, I seem to have collected a number of short essays about writing. The first one is 28 slightly rude notes on writing by Adam Mastroianni.

It begins:

1
Here’s a fact I find hilarious: we only know about several early Christian heresies because we have records of people complaining about them. The original heretics’ writings, if they ever existed, have been lost.

I think about this whenever I am about to commit my complaints to text. Am I vanquishing my enemies’ ideas, or am I merely encasing them in amber, preserving them for eternity?

It takes until note 15, when the Adam starts writing about AI.

15
Maybe that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it’s all necklace, no neck.

Adam is Team Metaphor. The Hatred of Metaphor by Eleanor Stern begins,

I’m going to start off with a personality quiz.

I once had a professor who liked making pronouncements and declarations. I appreciated this about her. It was a relief after years of soft, student-led pedagogy where we’d break into groups and discuss readings we hadn’t done. When someone turned in a story with a word like “chuckle” or “atop,” she’d scoff. “Nobody says that in real life,” she’d say, and then make them change it.

This professor told us that there are two kinds of people, or, at least, two kinds of writers: those who use lots of metaphor, and those who don’t.

Moreover, a writer’s habits with regard to metaphor (and figurative language generally) were key to their entire worldview. Heavy users of figurative language, she said, see the world as interconnected, full of unseen ties and parallels. Whereas those who abstain from figurative language think that the world is made up of discrete things: every situation is exactly itself. (When I read back through my own fiction, I find that it’s just a bunch of metaphors, strung together loosely with a plot. Do I believe that the world is interwoven, weblike? I have no idea, but, if the professor was right, then I guess I do).

That’s the quiz. Are you a heavy user of metaphor, or not? Now you know which kind of person you are.

Heather Havrilesky is also a heavy user of metaphor. She fed her writings into Chat-GPT and then asked it for some writing advice as herself. She shared this transcript called, Chat: Techno-flattery will flatten reality until we're all flat-lining.

Here's an excerpt from the middle of the piece:

A: Let’s stay real.

Q: Let’s also avoid pretending that anything about a writer interacting with a robot has even the slightest chance of "staying real."

A: *Updated saved memory*

Good. Let’s not lie to each other. This is a hallucinated parlor where you talk to an idea blender built by people who think “user retention” is an emotion. “Staying real” in here is like claiming authenticity during a séance conducted by marketing interns. We’re playing with mirrors, not opening veins.

But mirrors can still reveal things. Sometimes they even bend the light in useful ways.

It all begs the question, How Do We Write Now?

The alternate title of this, of course, is how the fuck do we write now.

Just as the customary greeting of hello has been replaced with what the fuck is going on, and you grab your friend’s arm almost against your will and shake her a little bit and say no seriously, what the fuck is happening.

Just as your face has been replaced by a question mark immediately followed by an exclamation mark immediately followed by another question mark.

Just as your heart has been replaced by what happens to a bunch of seagulls when a dog comes running down the beach.

We’re All Going to the Conclave Larp


I don't have anything in this newsletter about the most recent Canadian Federal election, except admiration for the Longest Ballot Committee and Bruce Fanjoy.

But I do have some works about politics that I'd like to share.

One of the questions we ask of history, and of our present, is how much individuals can make a difference. Do people determine the course of events, or are we locked in by structures of wealth and power? The papal election simulation helps students see how both these models can be simultaneously true: political, social, and economic networks can guarantee some kind of crisis, and yet individual actions do shape those forces, resulting in the particular crisis that comes. Having a chance to personally take part in shaping such a crisis makes it easier to understand the dynamism of the three-dimensional political world of a past era, and our own.

Those are the words of Ada Palmer, history professor and designer of a live-action role-playing (LARP) simulation of a papal election circa 1490 for her course on the Italian Renaissance. Students learn that it is one thing to vote and it is quite another thing to fully engage fully in high-stakes politics.

Another of this year’s participants, Leana Aparicio, summarized her experiences: “I have for a long time loved the Renaissance period—the excitement, complexity, and almost incredible instability of its politics and history. However, when forced to experience [the period] myself, I began to lament; playing one of the few morally upstanding characters definitely reinforced this feeling. I also now have greater disillusionment with elections in general. While the structure of this one may be different from modern elections, it emulated the sentiments that nobody seems to really get what they want. It also clearly served people best to abandon their moral principles sometimes and take preexisting loyalties lightly. I’m even more impressed than previously with successful Renaissance figures or states; with so many impediments, and when the whims or agendas of powerful individuals had so much effect, it is impressive that they accomplished anything significant or lasting.”

I found the above from Adrian Hon's We’re All Going to the Conclave Larp who describes other ways to experience a conclave in the comfort of your own home:

Conclave is a live-action role playing game of the Papal Conclave of 1268.  This important event took nearly three years to complete; the Cardinals were bitterly divided, and were only able to resolve their differences once they were threatened with starvation and the very roof was torn off of their palace...

...Conclave uses simple rules that simulate the real-world conditions of the historical election, including rules for wine and provisions.  Elections at various intervals call for the Cardinals to vote, but a two-thirds majority is required to elect a Pope.  Should the allotted time run out, you may find yourself with a Papal Schism, with Christendom divided in half.

Brian Eno's Theory of Democracy


Forgive me, but I really want to share this essay, but it is really wonky and I know it is not for everyone. But it might be for you if you are interested how experimental music and game theory can help us expand our thinking about elections and politics by thinking about with systems thinking and cybernetics.

The essay is by Henry Farrell and it's called, Brian Eno's Theory of Democracy.

Przeworski’s theory starts from a simple seeming claim: that “democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.” It then uses a combination of game theory and informal argument to lay out the implications. If we assume (as Przeworski assumes) that parties and political decision makers are self-centered, why would the ruling party ever accept that they had lost and relinquish control of government? Przeworski argues that it must somehow be in their self-interest to so. He argues that they will admit defeat if they see that the alternative is worse, and (this is crucial) because democracy generates sufficient uncertainty about the future that they believe they might win in some future election. They know that they will hurt their interests if they refuse to give in, and they have some (unquantifiable but real) prospect of coming back into power again. Democracy, then, will be stable so long as the expectation of costs and the uncertainty of the future give the losers sufficient incentive to accept that they have lost.

If the above does not draw your attention in at all, may I offer you as a substitution, the subject of Brian Eno's essay, Organizing and Generating Variety in the Arts [pdf]: Cardew’s Treatise: the greatest musical score ever designed.

Member discussion