What's This Reconfiguration You Keep Talking About?
About What I write about, and why I write
I unpack how climate change makes our world weird one take at a time, so you don’t have to!
Note: This is a different kind of take; we’ll resume next week with the usual shenanigans.
When I was in high-school, I briefly considered a musical career (I’m a mediocre drummer at best, to be honest). I was fortunate to study at an international boarding school in the US that had a great studio and musical department with fantastic teachers. I asked one of them, a local bass player, for advice, and his response stayed with for years to come:
“You know, I do music because it’s the only thing I know how. Music is one of those things that unless you really, really have to do - don’t do it".”
Naturally, I didn’t have to do it, so I let it go. But the bar my teacher raised stayed with me (and the love for a great bass line). The same is true for startups, PhDs and other things that are notoriously hard. To be honest, living in a startup-driven market, I always asked myself why I am not working/leading one. I never found a single-focus problem that I felt I just had to dedicate a decade to solve.
Years later, in 2025, I find myself with the same question.
In a way, writing a blogSubstack in 2025, and creating content in general, raises the specter of “if you don’t have to…”. There’s so much great content out there. There are so many smart, eloquent and creative folks out there. All of them are at the tip of your fingers, beholden only to the great god of social media: The Algorithm 🤖
There’s life: Family, friends, a job, dog, hobbies, TV, and many other things that make life so worth living. Creating consistently takes time, energy and effort, and most of the time it’s when you least have it.
And then there’s AI. The rise of generative AI causes many creators to think twice, because it’s so easy to generate text and video. Many creators are looking for their own meaning and their own added value in an age of of machines that '“think”. I do too (I have my doubts, my fears and my hypothesis on how all of this will end, but that’s for a different take).
So, in face of all of these, why write/create?
It’s simple: Because I have to.
Shouting From the Solar Rooftops
I swear, I tried to ignore it, but the Reconfiguration is hard to unsee once you see it. As I previously wrote, I stumbled upon all of this by accident:
It was just another article I stumbled across. Russian military build-up in the Arctic. Curious, I thought to myself. Surely they have better things to do with their soldiers… One article after another, I started noticing that no one is really waiting for the climate to change…many of the systems we rely on are… changing in response, and are changing quite significantly.
Little by little, article by article, coffee chat by coffee chat, I started formulating and formalizing my recent obsession and started digging deeper: From the Arctic tundra to the lithium markets of Africa through the wild west of the climate data industry, I hop between different aspects of our modern lives to look for clues 🔎 of the Reconfiguration. These are hints of something that is changing beneath our feet. They don’t come easy. As we’ll see later on, the Reconfiguration is a complex set of interrelated (and sometimes a bit less related) phenomena, changes, reactions and shifts that take place in our world as a result of climate change. The clues hide in plain sight. They are the trees that make the forest, but these trees are not meaningful if you don’t have a crude sense of the forest.
I write because I cannot unsee it and I have to say something.
A Sea Change
At the heart of what I see is the gut feeling that something’s afoot. Something fundamental about our world is changing, and climate change plays a big part. It’s that feeling you get when you know something is different, but you can’t put your finger on it. I’m trying to put my (digital) finger on it 👈
Many of the conversations on climate change focus on extreme weather (rightly so), talk about the need to prevent (we should) and adapt (we better), discuss what will happen if we don’t (spoiler: it will be pretty bad) and share the ways we can act (there are lots of ways).
I think that climate change is already here, and it came unannounced. Just like that, our world is different than what it was 10, 15, 20 years ago. The changes caused by our shifting climate are so strong that they cause strong reactions. Some of them are visible, most are not. Some demand our attention, most go unnoticed. Some are coordinated and directed from the top, most are bottoms-up reactions by companies, individuals and even governments that simply have to change or see an opportunity.
I’m here to write about the “most” and try to see the trees for what they are: A part of the forest that is the Reconfiguration.
So, I write because it helps me put my finger on “it” and make sure I keep seeing the trees and the forest.
Yet another climate newsletter?
No. Not in the literal sense.
The Reconfiguration is about the reaction to climate change. There are many gifted storytellers that chronicle how climate change is unfolding, some of them on this platform: Volts, Heated, Heatmap and others.
I am more interested in how different players, systems and even regions are reacting. If you think of a pond, I’m looking at the ripples.
Human civilization is too complex to capture in its entirety, but here’s what I’m looking at:
This is not a definite list. These topics help me think in systems and put some order into the chaos.
Some of the topics I’ve covered and intend on covering include:
This is not a Substack about climate change. This is a Substack about how climate change is changing our systems, and how we are reacting.
So, I write because it is our story and how our world is changing. Writing about it helps me crystalize my thinking and gives me an avenue to explore a story that grips me. I hope it will grip you too.
Not A Theory of Everything
To be clear, this is not a Theory of Everything. I’m not trying to explain everything.
There are things that have nothing to do with climate change. The rise of generative AI has nothing to do, in my view, with climate change. AI does play a big role in the future, but I don’t think climate change explains any one bit why we have OpenAI and Anthropic.
Some things are out of scope. I’m still not sure what exactly, but I will try to be honest about what isn’t explainable or attributable to the Reconfiguration.
I am inherently lazy about details a macro thinker, but the Macro is not very interesting without the Micro. The interaction between the forest and the trees is what’s interesting, and where I find most of the magic happens. This means that while I try to give my readers (yes, both of you) a broad, macro perspective on how the world is changing, but supported by evidence and by what’s happening in the field. The reverse is true as well: Most of my favorite ideas and topics start with an article or two. I rarely try to theorize the big picture, but rather try to compare and contrast evidence and micro happenings with hypotheses and gut feelings and try to treat what I read as breadcrumbs.
So, I write to follow those breadcrumbs and tie them to the bigger story.
Something For Everyone
Whenever I speak about this publication, I am asked, and with good reason, “who’s this for?”
The honest truth is that I’m still figuring it out. I want this Substack to have something for everyone:
To the generally curious public, who are looking to make sense of the world we live in, I hope to show the forest I see.
To entrepreneurs, who are looking for problems to solve, I hope to help find problems to fall in love with and challenges to sink their teeth in.
To investors, who are looking for new opportunities, I hope to offer a framework to evaluate investments and interesting directions to pursue
To people in the industries I cover, who are interested in the big picture, I hope to offer a perspective that may get them to think differently about their own work
To executives, who are impacted by the Reconfiguration, I hope to help identify patterns and find new ways of thinking about their challenges
To Policymakers and Policy Analysts, who are looking to activate large systems and set the paths our societies walk in, I hope to offer a new way of looking at the policies they contemplate, and maybe offer new ideas
More than anything, I personally hope to learn, discuss and maybe quiet that metaphorical voice that gnaws at me and wants to make sense of things. The story of the Reconfiguration, for me, is a way to make sense of a world that has become too strange to reconcile with the notions that I grew up with. Ignoring this story comes at a cost: the feeling of being out of sync and out of touch of an important tidal wave that is hard to see, but impossible to ignore.
This is why I write: Because I can’t not do it.
That’s it for this week
As always, stay tuned to Saturday’s edition of “The Time Machine”, where I tell you what things you should care about this week. As a reminder, I’m still tweaking this newsletter, so if you have suggestions - hit me up!
See you on Saturday, and next week with a brand new take!
Don’t forget to subscribe 🔽
And if you have any comments, thoughts or suggestions, I’d love to hear from you in the comments (I also need the traffic 🤷♂️)
I love the concept of doing something because you have to - it's that compulsion, that "I can't NOT do something about this" that leads to progress, rather than people discussing something without action, discussing something offhand because they kind-of-think-maybe-someday it will be important. I love reading your posts because there is always something that resonates with my problem-solver brain, and this was the part for me this week!
Thank you also for so clearly putting into words how this complex system impacts so many other parts of our cohesive world, it's that context that makes it tangible and actionable.
This is beautifully written. Thanks for sharing! I’ll admit, I don’t think too much about climate change (I know, I wasn’t supposed to say that out loud). It’s scary, and it feels like there is nothing I can do. I think more about smaller issues: people, policy, and politics. Somehow, I think there is more I can do here.
So, when I think about the world reconfigured, to borrow your term, I think about all the systems we built that once made sense and that are now cracking, unable to bear the load we have piled on them: representative government, international law, dollars, etc. It’s scary. Hopefully, we build something better, but we are definitely in the midst of a reconfiguration.
So, when you talk about the need to make sense of a world that has become too strange to reconcile with the notions that we grew up with, to be even lazier about the details, I wonder how the climate story in 2025 is different from the Lorax (the very same climate story we grew up with). I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve always thought of the climate story as one that is existential, scary, easy to ignore, impacted by humans but with effects that pop up in different, seemingly mysterious ways. And, since about 2001/2008/2016, when it turned out History Didn’t End, there are a lot of seemingly new stories about our reconfigured world. So, I’m looking forward to following this and becoming more educated about the tidal wave that I’m not seeing!
Hopefully long comments don’t hurt you with the ever powerful algorithm 🤷♂️