The Spaceway brief

People ask me to explain Spaceway. I find it harder to answer than most questions, not because the answer is complicated, but because the question is usually too small.

The instinct is to reach for the nearest category: is it an analytical tool, a research framework, a publication, a consultancy? These are the shapes a serious professional project usually takes. Spaceway is serious and professional, and none of those shapes is exactly right.

Here is my attempt at a description that is accurate rather than convenient.

Spaceway is my way of giving an input of my observations on nature and the unnatural or supernatural or the otherworldly, a combination of scientific and fantastic and speculative theories about space, life, universe, physics and related ideas. It is an important angle where I try to make sense of the world but also provide new ideas, different thinking, angling to think differently about our lives, our universe and our material and managed reality systems, structures and sub-systems.

I want to explain the logic behind this, because the form follows the problem.

The standard methods for analysing geopolitical events are well-developed for producing retrospective accounts. They work backwards from what happened and explain it. They are much less effective at producing prospective analysis, which asks what is actually going to happen and why, because they are optimised for description and not for prediction. The analytical step that prediction requires is structural: you need to understand the underlying pressures, not the surface events. Events are what pressures produce. You cannot read the pressure from the event alone.

This is the problem Spaceway is designed to address. Not by replacing existing analysis, but by adding the structural layer that existing analysis tends to leave out.

The work is ongoing. This piece is an attempt to set out the logic in a document I can refer to, so that conversations about the project can start from this rather than from nothing.