The Spell is Breaking

A rumour – and subscribers' call in just over four hours' time

On the night of Wednesday 6th November last year, as the world absorbed the result of the US presidential election, Anna and I were welcoming eighty participants to the first session in one of our online series. I always pick some music for the start of these Zoom sessions, and that day, I knew the song I wanted to play as people arrived.

Nick Cave breaking the twelve-bar blues over Warren Ellis’s shimmering chords:

I woke up this morning with the blues all around my head…
I felt like someone in my family was dead.

But it wasn’t the part about waking to dread that made me choose it, nor the glorious French horn, but the moment halfway through when the song breaks open. When the flaming boy – that ghost in giant sneakers, laughing stars around his head – delivers the message for which he has woken the singer:

We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.

Maybe you have to earn the right to speak for joy, in times like these. It wasn’t an obvious choice to lay on that audience that night, to say the least. But even among all the deepening horrors that fill the news, and among all the smaller sorrows that never get reported, I keep being drawn back to an insistence on joy.

Here’s what I think it is: when I started writing and speaking about the things I write and speak about, twenty years ago, the hard part was to get people to take seriously the depth of the trouble we are in. There was so much resistance to the idea that we might be living “the end of the world as we know it” (or at least, the world as some of us, around here, lately, have known it). Today, that’s the easy part, the bit that’s priced in. What’s hard now is to hold open the sense that this isn’t “the end of the world, full stop”, that there might be room for joy along the path this sets us on. More and more, that’s where I want to lay the emphasis.

A book came in the post the other day, a newly published PhD thesis, and the note inside explained that the author had missed my talk in Lund last year because she was in the depths of writing, but her partner had brought her back a copy of At Work in the Ruins:

I must admit that my first reaction was sceptical. I had no energy for another book that would leave me hopeless. But your book did the opposite.

That made me smile, not least because it gave some confirmation of my own major criticism of that book, which is that it could easily look at first glance, from the dust jacket or the opening pages, like another book that was going to leave you hopeless.

Illich used to say that hope is “remaining open to surprise”. Not assuming you know the end of the story.

Talking with Charlotte Du Cann and Caroline Ross last night, I said, “You know, I’m starting to wonder if the spell is breaking?” It’s what I was writing about in Tuesday’s post, those glimmerings of the possibility that the screens and apps might be losing their power over us. “Well,” Charlotte said, “that’s what spells do, isn’t it, sooner or later? They break!”

This post from Kollibri terre Sonnenblume about the extent of the pushback against data centres and AI is another aspect of that glimmering:

I have never witnessed anything like this much pushback against a technological development. During my life, many new inventions have been foisted upon the public without consent which transformed society in part or in whole: video games, cable television, CDs, VHS, personal computers, digital photography, the world wide web, cell phones, social media, smart phones, and streaming media. All of these were criticized, but only marginally, and “progress” always marched on.

AI and data centers are decidedly not enjoying the same reflexive and nearly universal acceptance as everything on that list did. For the first time, I feel like the basis of the “progress” myth is being questioned, if only implicitly. Enough people are asking “Do we need this?” and “Do we even want this?” that I daresay this time is different. And that’s exciting.

There’s a rumour here worth spreading, the rumour that the spell of inevitability might be breaking. We’ll still be deep in trouble, even if that’s true, but we’ll be able to look at that trouble with different eyes, see different paths worth taking through it.

The other thing that’s brought me joy this week, as I pulled back from work on the new book to look back over 2025, is the realisation that for the first time I find my work being taken up by communities of practitioners, people who bring a lot of experience but have reached a point where they need to reorient and reframe the work they are doing. I said no to most of the speaking invitations that came my way this year, and I’ll have to go on doing that until the book is finished, but in two cases where I said yes, I find myself ending the year with a clear sense of an ongoing relationship with organisations who are picking up and walking with the stories and maps that I’ve shared with them, taking them further in ways that surprise me. I’m curious where that might lead in 2026 and beyond.

And now it’s time for me to go and pick up Alfie from school on his last full day before the holidays – but I’ll look forward to seeing some of you in a few hours’ time for our first Writing Home paid subscribers call.

To the rest of you, I wish you joy and peace in this Christmas season.

DH

Writing Home Subscribers’ Call

Thursday 18 December

8.15pm CET • 7.15pm GMT • 2.15pm East Coast • 11.15am West Coast

Here is the Zoom link you will need to join the call: