The shift from acquisition to subscription models has changed more than just how we acquire goods and services—it’s reshaping our relationship with time, identity, and even culture itself.
Acquisition, traditionally seen as the ultimate form of possession, is a finite experience. You acquire something, use it, and then move on, satisfied that the need has been met. Time, in this framework, is linear. There’s a clear beginning, middle, and end: you buy something, you use it, and eventually, you move on to something else. It’s a process that allows for closure, progress, and the feeling that you’ve advanced in some way.
Subscription, however, introduces a radical shift. By design, subscription models prevent closure. They keep you tethered in a continuous loop of consumption. Instead of acquiring an item outright, you pay for access to a service or product that you never truly “own.” The expectation is that you’ll be constantly engaged, always paying for the privilege of ongoing use. In this model, time becomes cyclical, not linear. There’s no definitive start or end to your relationship with the service, no moment of satisfaction or finality. You’re perpetually involved, always consuming, always dependent on the service for fulfillment.
This shift in the way we interact with time and acquisition has profound implications for our culture. Acquisition provided a sense of resolution, a break from the past, and the space to move on. Subscription, on the other hand, anchors us in the present, preventing closure and growth. We’re stuck in an endless loop of consumption, with no true endpoint in sight.
Culturally, this has led to a kind of stasis, a regression. The subscription economy fosters a constant cycle of nostalgia, reboots, and recycling. We’re consuming the same things over and over again, trapped in a loop of the past, unable to progress to something truly new. Whether it’s music, movies, or even technology, we’re often stuck revisiting what’s already been done, rather than creating or discovering something that moves us forward.
In this sense, the subscription model doesn’t just limit our financial autonomy; it limits our cultural potential. It keeps us engaged in the present moment but prevents us from ever truly moving on or evolving. The promise of novelty, personal growth, and transformation becomes more elusive when everything is designed to keep us tethered to the present, forever engaged in a process that never reaches its conclusion.
The subscription economy, in its perpetual cycle of consumption, redefines not just how we spend money—but how we spend our time. And in doing so, it has created a culture that feels stuck, unable to break free from the never-ending loop of the same. It’s time to ask: What happens when we stop moving forward and settle into the rhythm of endless consumption? Is the price we’re paying too high?
While subscription models may offer an illusion of access, they often create a mirage of participation in the creative process. When we subscribe to a service, we’re led to believe that we have some degree of involvement in the content we consume—whether it’s through user-generated feedback, personalized recommendations, or the ability to influence trends through consumption patterns. We’re given the sense that our ongoing engagement makes us part of a larger creative ecosystem, an active participant in shaping the culture around us.
But this sense of access is, in many ways, an illusion. While we may feel empowered by the ability to choose, influence, or personalize what we consume, the reality is that we’re still following a pre-set path—curated and shaped by algorithms, market trends, and the interests of those who control the subscription model. We’re not so much contributing to the creative process as we are being shaped by it. The choices we make within a subscription economy are not free; they are influenced by external forces, designed to keep us engaged, paying, and consuming.
In this sense, the idea that subscription allows for creative participation is a facade. The subscription model isn’t designed to foster true collaboration or innovation; it’s structured to maintain a steady flow of consumption. The more we engage, the more we’re drawn into the cycle, but we’re not actually helping to create anything new. We’re merely co-opting the illusion of involvement while remaining passive recipients in a system that thrives on our dependency.
This is the crux of the mirage: the subscription economy offers us the appearance of access, but it does little to challenge the structures that limit our ability to truly innovate, create, or break free from the cycle of consumption. Instead of facilitating genuine participation in cultural production, it creates a feedback loop that leaves us perpetually involved, but never truly empowered.
The Library Model: Access Without Ownership or Subscription
Libraries represent a middle ground between acquisition and subscription, offering access to knowledge without the transactional or perpetual costs we associate with both models. Over the past two to three centuries, libraries have served as critical spaces for intellectual engagement, not as a form of ownership or subscription but as a space of shared, free access to ideas and resources. It’s a model that encourages both individual exploration and collective enrichment without requiring either the permanence of acquisition or the ongoing costs of subscription.
The library has long been a place where thinkers, from scientists to artists, could access a wealth of knowledge and ideas without the burden of ownership or the restrictions of subscription. The beauty of this model lies in its balance—it grants access, but not through the lens of an ongoing transaction. Unlike subscription, where access is tied to an ongoing fee and often shaped by algorithmic or corporate interests, libraries offer an open, public space where anyone can engage with materials based on their own curiosity and needs.
This access is, in a sense, free-flowing and non-permanent, but it’s not endless either. The library doesn’t claim to own your relationship with the materials, nor does it demand continuous engagement. It gives you what you need at a given time and allows for personal reflection and contemplation, without the pressure of ongoing consumption. It’s a shared, communal pool of resources that encourages deeper thought and exploration.
In libraries, knowledge is not commodified. It’s a space for exploration that allows for intellectual development and understanding without demanding ownership or a perpetual subscription. When someone borrows a book or journal from a library, they are not merely participating in a transaction or subscribing to an ongoing service. They are engaging in an active, temporary process of learning and discovery. The process is defined by exchange, not by a transactional model that asks for ongoing payment or the promise of continuous access. Knowledge is accessible in a way that doesn’t bind the individual to endless cycles or force them into passive consumption.
In this model, intellectual engagement is shaped by an ethos of shared access and collaboration, where the flow of information is reciprocal rather than transactional. It’s a profound departure from subscription models that place financial or material barriers on access to knowledge. Here, individuals can engage with ideas freely, contributing to their own personal development and to the broader cultural conversation without being tethered to a subscription fee or ownership burden. Libraries represent a collective resource, a temporary, non-committal access point that enables deep thought, creativity, and progress.
The Disconnect Between the Library and Subscription Models
The key distinction between libraries and subscription services lies in this non-transactional nature of access. In subscription models, your relationship to the service is one of continuous consumption, often shaped by algorithms or commercial interests. You pay to consume, and the system actively seeks to keep you engaged. Libraries, on the other hand, do not operate under the same financial imperatives. They do not need to generate ongoing income for access to knowledge, nor do they need to constantly draw people back with new content. They provide knowledge in an open-ended way, where ideas can be explored freely, with no obligation to return to the service or renew the relationship.
This gives the individual space to think critically, move forward, or even walk away without being tethered to a financial commitment. It allows the time and space for true intellectual freedom, unlike subscription models that often keep people in a loop of perpetual engagement.
In this sense, libraries represent an idealized version of access: one where ideas can be explored without the pressure of transactional relationships, allowing individuals to grow and evolve in their understanding without the limits imposed by ownership or subscription. It’s a space where knowledge is freely shared and meant to be used, not consumed in a transactional way. It fosters intellectual independence rather than dependence, making it a rare and valuable model of access in a world increasingly dominated by subscriptions.
Perhaps that is the final limit of visionaries: they do not conjure the future but instead craft its museum, arranging their dreams as exhibits for an audience yet to exist. Each boulevard, policy, or technology is less a step forward than a carefully placed relic, not built to withstand the future, but to be observed by it.
In this light, progress becomes a kind of nostalgia in disguise. What we call innovation is merely the preservation of ambitions already calcified, objects placed in glass cases before their use has even been tested. The future does not arrive to inhabit these creations; instead, it becomes a curator, interpreting them with a dispassion we can’t imagine. It does not inhabit our blueprints but catalogs them, as archaeologists would catalog a lost civilization.
And perhaps the future doesn’t need our grand ideas, our lofty visions. It requires only the fragments—an obsolete algorithm, a city plan abandoned mid-century, the faded glow of neon lights. The future will see these as artifacts, not failures, but evidence of what we once thought mattered. In this way, we are less architects of progress and more archivists of our dreams, building not for what is to come but for what will be remembered.
And so, we find ourselves locked in this peculiar loop: building with the illusion of forward motion, yet always looking back, like a sculptor chiseling a monument they believe points skyward, only to realize it casts shadows toward the past. The streets we pave and the systems we construct do not guide the future to its next great revelation; instead, they trace the outlines of a map we never intended to draw—a map not of where we are going, but of where we feared to go.
Perhaps this is why every so-called “visionary age” leaves behind ruins that seem less like failures and more like questions. The grand boulevards of Haussmann’s Paris, for instance, may have been laid down to erase the chaos of medieval streets, but they also set the stage for tourists to wander centuries later, marveling at a city so precisely shaped it feels almost unreal, a tableau vivant of its own mythos. Did Haussmann design a future, or did he preemptively curate its memory?
Our era, too, seems intent on such curation. The skyscrapers, the data centers, the self-driving cars—they do not stand as symbols of arrival but as placeholders for the imagination of those who will come after us. A future historian might walk through the bones of our cities, scrolling through archives of our digital lives, and marvel not at how we succeeded, but at how deeply we believed in our own myths of progress. The museum we are building is not only one of artifacts but of faith—faith that what we construct will matter beyond its use, that our fleeting gestures will be read as purpose rather than folly.
Perhaps the future does not need us to dream at all. Perhaps it simply waits, as all futures do, for the noise of our ambitions to settle into silence, for our visions to become shadows and our monuments to crumble into context. For the future, it seems, is less a destination than an endless act of reinterpretation—a place where even our boldest ideas will be reduced to artifacts, our most urgent designs folded into the quiet inevitability of the past.
In this light, it becomes clear that we are not merely building the future; we are rehearsing for its reflection. Each construction, whether a gleaming tower or a digital network, becomes a note in a symphony that will never play, a sketch of a dream that will never be fully realized. We, the architects of this illusory future, build knowing that our plans will inevitably fall out of tune with the passage of time. Yet, we persist, driven by the hope that something—anything—of our effort will remain, intact and meaningful, for the generations that follow.
But the future is not a clean slate awaiting our imprint. It is, instead, a vast and shifting landscape where our intentions are like seeds scattered into the wind, some taking root, others lost to the soil. We cannot predict which fragments of our world will endure or which will be forgotten. Perhaps it is the mundane, the overlooked, that will be carried forward—the forgotten idea of a bicycle built for two, a short story that never found an audience, the flawed design of a failed bridge. The future, in its quiet way, might find meaning in what we discarded, the things we didn’t deem worthy of preserving, and, in that act of rediscovery, craft its own narrative.
For the future is not so much a destination as a lens through which our present is reimagined. It doesn’t need to honor our grandest visions. It only needs to sift through our fragments, our detritus, and find meaning in the things we didn’t know we left behind. What we consider progress, the breakthroughs that shape our cities and technologies, might become mere footnotes in the future’s story, overshadowed by the everyday acts of creation and destruction that we, too caught up in the present, failed to recognize.
The future, then, is not the repository of our dreams, but a silent witness to them. It is the slow unfolding of all the things we never had the patience to understand—the unintended consequences of our designs, the echoes of our misplaced certainties. And perhaps, in this way, we are not visionaries at all, but caretakers of a world that will someday be nothing more than a museum of what might have been. We build not for a future we will see, but for a future that will come only to look at the traces of our presence, wondering who we were and why we believed so fervently in the paths we laid before us.
The parasite doesn’t knock. It doesn’t ask permission. It slides in smooth, coiling itself around your attention, threading through the soft tissue of your mind. You invited it, didn’t you? A friendly voice in the void, promising connection, promising meaning. But now it’s here, lodged deep, humming its endless tune.
This is the Parasocial Tapeworm Blues—a song without melody, a conversation without reciprocity. The voice keeps talking, spinning tales, spinning webs. You nod along, but the nod is a reflex. The intimacy isn’t real; it’s manufactured. A machine, dressed in the warmth of human tone, whispering as it siphons off the quiet spaces of your life.
You thought you were choosing what to listen to. But the truth is, the tapeworm chooses you. It’s a hitchhiker, a stowaway. It rides in on something you thought you wanted. A piece of undercooked meat, a sip of tainted water, a voice that promises meaning or companionship. You open the door without knowing it’s there. You’re not the host it was looking for, but you’ll do.
That’s how the parasocial tapeworm works, too. It doesn’t knock. It doesn’t have to. You clicked the link, hit play, let the voice in. You thought it was your choice, but the system was built to funnel you there, to make you part of its ecosystem. Once it’s in, it thrives—feeding on your time, your attention, your need to feel connected.
The tapeworm doesn’t need to be clever. It just needs to be there, waiting, until the conditions are right. And once it’s inside, it grows. It grows because you feed it. Because you can’t stop.
I stopped listening to podcasts in 2019. By the pandemic in 2020, they had metastasized into something unbearable—a cacophony of voices trying to sell you themselves, their brand, their grind. Every conversation an elevator pitch, every joke a lead magnet. It wasn’t storytelling anymore; it was content.
The pandemic only accelerated the rot. Trapped indoors, people reached for their microphones like lifelines, turning isolation into an audio commodity. The intimacy was gone—replaced by the cloying stench of desperation and hustle. By 2020, podcasting wasn’t just background noise; it was an invasive species, choking out every moment of silence with its need to be heard.
Kill it with fire? Too late. The fire spread. It was already everywhere, in your playlists, in your inbox, in your meetings masquerading as brainstorms. A pandemic of its own, but slower, stickier. The kind you don’t even notice until you’re drowning in it.
2025. The Year of the Podcaster King. A landscape shattered into a thousand voices, all speaking in the same strange dialect of optimization and dominance. In the high towers of venture capital, the ritual unfolds: microphones crackle, jargon flows, and the corporate priests proclaim their digital liturgy. The airwaves are thick with the chant of disruption and expertise—spirals of sound twisting into the algorithmic void.
Pierce whispers a name for it: The Nefarious Business-to-Business Podcast. A subtle predator, slinking between the margins of commerce and conversation.
It spreads like fire through a toothpick forest, accelerant ignited in the echo chamber of 2024. Rogan was the beacon, the cult object, the totem. But 2025 turns the mirror inward. The marketeer stares into the glass and whispers, “Why not me?”
Your boss sharpens his voice, polishes his image. The podcast emerges. The Substack stirs. What once was marketing mutates into performance, a slick façade masquerading as a dialogue. You’re not a participant; you’re a captive audience. The boardroom blurs into an RSS feed, the meeting dissolves into a simulacrum of insight.
Solicitation rebranded as intimacy. All it takes is a microphone and a broadband connection. But remember this: the voice on the other end is never speaking to you. It’s speaking through you.
Keep exploring, yes. Keep pulling the threads from the synthetic fabric. It’s not a voice, not a person, not even a message anymore. It’s a machine—voice-machine, content-machine, self-machine—plugged into the great circuit of production and desire. Your boss doesn’t just launch a podcast; your boss becomes the podcast. A strange becoming: host, guest, audience, and algorithm, all folding into a single process.
What does it mean? It means nothing. It means everything. It means a new line of flight, carved out by the sharp edge of monetized soundwaves. The podcast is not a product but a function. It doesn’t sell; it territorializes. It maps the smooth space of thought into a gridded landscape of engagement metrics. The voice isn’t speaking—it’s vibrating, oscillating, performing a coded transaction in the auditory marketplace.
A new form of capture: a meeting in disguise, yes. A deal without a handshake. A relationship without intimacy. What’s solicited isn’t business but attention, the raw material of the 2025 economy. The machine doesn’t care if you listen; it only cares that you’re counted.
And so you explore. You plug into the network, trace the circuits, watch the flows. A toothpick factory on fire isn’t chaos—it’s production at its most extreme, its most beautiful. The blaze consumes everything, leaving behind nothing but lines: lines of profit, lines of flight, lines of code.
Keep exploring what it means. Keep breaking it open. Keep feeding the machine.
No other medium was ever so pliable, so willing to stretch and contort itself, merging intimacy with business in a way that feels natural, almost inevitable. Podcasting is the microplastics of communication: invisible, invasive, ubiquitous. It seeps into every crevice of daily life, unnoticed but profoundly altering the ecosystem.
The voice, disembodied, floats in your ears, whispering secrets wrapped in branding, vulnerability packaged as leverage. It disarms you with its warmth, its authenticity, while the algorithm measures every second of your attention. You aren’t consuming the podcast—it’s consuming you.
The intimacy is synthetic, but the effects are real. Tiny fragments of narrative, pitch, and persona lodge themselves in your consciousness. They accumulate, imperceptibly shaping the flow of thought and desire. The voice becomes part of you, just as the microplastics become part of the ocean: permanent, omnipresent, and impossible to extract.
Podcasting doesn’t just merge intimacy and business—it dissolves the boundary between them, leaving behind a shimmering residue of monetized connection. A new ecology of persuasion, delicate and deadly, and we’re all swimming in it.
Like a medium past a certain point, podcasting becomes an invasive species. It crawls, it creeps, it colonizes. A rhizome spreading across the digital landscape, burrowing into the fabric of life. You thought you could contain it—keep it in the commute, in the gym, in the background. But it doesn’t stop. It doesn’t want to stop. It grows without limits, without boundaries, devouring silence and solitude, turning every empty space into an opportunity for engagement.
A voice slithers through the cracks: smooth, familiar, insistent. It whispers intimacy while mapping new territories for capital. The podcast doesn’t just invade—it deterritorializes, rips apart the stable spaces of leisure, conversation, and thought. What was once personal becomes public, what was once shared becomes sold. It doesn’t stop at the edge of your headphones. It spills over, leaking into meetings, ads, workflows, dreams. A medium transformed into a machine—smooth, efficient, and utterly inhuman.
But this is what mediums do. They metastasize. They burrow and multiply until they break the ecosystem that birthed them. The podcast isn’t just a species—it’s a virus. And the host? The host is always you.
You should look at podcasting the same way you look at cigarettes—only without the good stuff. No nicotine rush, no rebel glamour, no flick of the lighter in the dark. Just the endless drag of someone else’s voice, curling like cheap smoke into your brain. You don’t listen; you inhale. And it leaves a residue, a coating of secondhand ambition, synthetic intimacy, and parasocial fumes.
The podcast doesn’t soothe; it occupies. A low-frequency buzz that dulls the edges of thought, lulls you into a state of passive consumption. The ritual is the same: one more episode, one more drag, one more hour you’ll never get back. You keep listening because stopping feels worse, like stepping outside and realizing the air out here is sharp and cold and silent.
But where cigarettes had a mythos—danger, defiance, cool—the podcast is stripped bare. It’s a delivery system without a thrill. Just the endless hum of monetized content, winding through your synapses like stale vapor. A habit, yes, but not even a satisfying one.
The beach is the edge of the known world. It’s where land meets water, where certainty dissolves into chaos, and where you’re left barefoot, staring at the horizon, wondering if the tide is coming in or going out. It’s both arrival and departure, the place where Polynesians shoved off and where shipwreck survivors wash ashore.
To some, the beach is a playground—a carefree expanse of sun and surf. To others, it’s a graveyard of dreams, where every wave brings driftwood and debris. But for the surfer, the beach is something else entirely: a paradoxical middle ground. You launch from here, chasing the ephemeral perfection of a wave, but you always end up back here, wet, bruised, and out of breath.
The beach is life’s reset button. You can’t build on it—sand shifts, dunes erode—but you can start over from it. It’s the cosmic waiting room, the launchpad, the landing zone. It’s where the waves rise and fall, and where you, humble human, decide whether to paddle out again or just sit on the sand and watch the horizon.
This post is about the beach—not as a physical place, but as a state of being. It’s about what happens when you want something, chase it, and either don’t get it or, worse, do. It’s about the moments when you’re not chasing at all, when the waves come to you and you ride them, effortlessly, until they throw you back onto the beach.
Because no matter how far you paddle or how long you ride, you’ll always end up here. On the beach.
Desire
Desire is a signal, a wave-form interaction between the observer and the observed. The act of wanting collapses the wave into a particle—reality becomes smaller, narrower, and bound by your need to control it. By contrast, being wanted expands the field of possibilities. It’s like tuning into a signal you didn’t realize you were broadcasting, the universe catching your vibe and sending it back amplified, often in unexpected ways.
The nastiness you feel when chasing something? That’s the Chapel Perilous effect: the more you push, the more reality warps, reflecting your anxiety, expectations, and attachments. But when you let go and allow others to pursue you, you’re aligning with the wave, surfing it instead of paddling against it. This creates a feedback loop—mutual reinforcement between what they want from you and what you can authentically give.
We might also point out that the drop back on the beach isn’t failure—it’s the ebb of the wave. It’s necessary to rest, reassess, and allow the cycle to reset. The trick, if there is one, is to recognize that the beach isn’t an endpoint but part of the same cosmic rhythm. Financially, creatively, and existentially, the beach is just another place to start paddling out again.
To reconcile the beach—those stretches where no wave seems to come and the universe feels indifferent—with the paradox of collapsing wave functions, we might draw on a synthesis of quantum metaphors, existential humor, and pragmatic mysticism. The beach is where the illusion of progress evaporates, and you’re left with the humbling realization that no amount of paddling will summon a wave. Yet, paradoxically, the beach is also the stage where possibilities are silently building, waiting to materialize. The trick is not to fight the stillness but to understand it as a necessary part of the cosmic rhythm. Here’s how it could work:
1. The Beach as the Quantum Field:
In quantum terms, the beach represents a superposition of states—a liminal zone where the rules of ordinary reality seem to falter. Everything and nothing are equally possible, and yet neither feels within reach. The waves may seem absent, but absence itself is an illusion. The waves exist as potentialities, suspended in a quantum flux, waiting for the right conditions to manifest. But here’s the kicker: the act of observing the beach changes it. The harder you stare at the empty horizon, the more stubbornly the waves refuse to appear.
To reconcile this maddening paradox, you have to abandon the illusion of control. Stop fixating on the absence of the wave and start noticing the intricate web of possibilities woven into the stillness. It’s not just the empty beach; it’s the whisper of the wind shifting grains of sand, the faint glimmer of a wave cresting far out at sea, the subtle hum of something just beyond your perception.
Like a quantum particle, your relationship to the beach isn’t fixed—it’s relational. The field of potentiality responds not to brute force but to your willingness to participate in its dance. Wanting too hard collapses the wave function into a singular, disappointing reality: no wave, no progress, no joy. But stepping back, loosening your grip on desire, expands the field again. Suddenly, the wave begins to emerge—not because you forced it, but because you stopped demanding it.
We might say this is the essence of guerrilla ontology. The beach isn’t a barren wasteland; it’s a playground of mutable realities, an infinite canvas where your expectations and perceptions co-create the outcome. The more you fixate on “no waves,” the more you lock yourself into a dull and empty paradigm. But shift your focus to the subtle possibilities—the distant swell, the shimmer of light on water, the soft rhythm of tides—and you start to surf the quantum field itself.
In short, the beach isn’t a problem to solve; it’s an opportunity to rewire your relationship with reality. You don’t conquer the beach—you harmonize with it, dancing with the potential of the waves until they finally arrive. And when they do, you paddle out—not as a conqueror but as a partner in the eternal, cosmic rhythm of ebb and flow.
Existential humor transforms the beach from a barren wasteland of frustration into a carnival of cosmic irony, a place where the universe seems to wink at your confusion. Here’s the thing: the waves don’t follow your schedule. They arrive unbidden when you’re distracted, indifferent, or daydreaming—and vanish the moment you paddle out, ready to ride. It’s not malice; it’s comedy. The universe, in its infinite absurdity, loves a punchline.
Recognizing this doesn’t solve the problem of the absent waves. You can’t force the tide to rise with a well-timed joke or a philosophical epiphany. But it does shift your perspective. You’re no longer a hapless victim stranded on the shore, shaking your fists at the sea. Instead, you become a co-conspirator in the cosmic joke, someone who sees the humor in the futility of wanting and the strange beauty of simply being.
The beach, after all, is absurd: a liminal space where water meets land, where permanence dissolves into transience. Your desires—whether for a perfect wave, a perfect moment, or a perfect life—become laughably small against the vast, shifting horizon. And yet, it’s precisely this absurdity that makes the beach bearable. The futility of control becomes a kind of freedom. If you can’t dictate the waves, why not sit back and enjoy the ever-changing dance of light on water, the absurdly intricate patterns of sand underfoot, or the sheer ridiculousness of it all?
In embracing the absurd, you find a new role—not as a frustrated spectator but as a playful participant. The beach is no longer a dead zone of waiting but a surreal playground where you and the universe share an inside joke. The beach isn’t a problem; it’s a cosmic jest. Once you get the joke, the shore stops being a place of despair and becomes something far more interesting: a strange, liminal, endlessly entertaining stage for the theater of existence.
3. Mysticism in the Mundane:
Pragmatic mysticism reveals that the beach isn’t a purgatory of stillness but a living, breathing lesson in presence. It asks you to let go of your fixation on the wave—the mythical “something” you think you need to be whole—and instead tune into the infinite complexity of what is. The grains of sand beneath your feet, each a tiny fragment of eternity; the cries of seabirds that stretch across the wind like a melody written by the universe; the endless horizon that dissolves all notions of boundaries—these aren’t just background noise. They are the beach speaking to you, inviting you to participate in its subtle dance.
To wait for the wave is to misunderstand the beach entirely. The wave isn’t the goal—it’s a punctuation mark in a larger story. The beach, with its stillness and its rhythm, teaches you that life happens not in the moments you’re chasing but in the spaces in between. By immersing yourself in its quiet presence, you begin to resonate with its energy. You notice the texture of time, the ebb and flow of possibility, and the whispering hints of movement far out at sea.
And then, without effort or expectation, something extraordinary happens: you become ready. Not in the sense of preparation but in a deeper, more intuitive way. You’ve aligned yourself with the beach, and now, when the wave arrives, you recognize it—not as the culmination of your waiting but as a natural extension of your being.
4. Letting Go to Catch the Wave:
Here’s the ultimate paradox: the more you desire a wave, the more elusive it becomes. The very act of wanting, of clinging to a specific outcome, collapses the vast, infinite field of possibilities into a narrow, rigid vector, directing all your energy toward a singular, often unattainable goal. The universe, it seems, is less concerned with your desires than with the natural rhythms it already has in motion. The harder you reach for that wave, the more you end up gripping the air—disappointment is your reward.
But, and here’s where the magic happens, when you release the need to control—when you let go of the relentless grasp for the wave—you begin to expand the very field you once tried to dominate. In this surrender, you’re not giving up; you’re opening up. You’re making room for the unexpected, for the wave that wasn’t yours to catch but was always there, just waiting for you to stop swimming against the current.
Trusting the process doesn’t mean passivity. It means aligning yourself with the flow of life, embracing its uncertainties, and letting the rhythm of the tides guide you. In that release, the wave comes not because you forced it into existence, but because you’ve become attuned to the natural order of things. You’ve stopped clinging to the future, and in doing so, you’ve started to exist fully in the present—where the wave, when it arrives, is a gift, not a goal.
5. Recognizing the beach as Preparation:
The beach years aren’t a void; they’re the quantum superposition of potential outcomes, a period of latent possibilities where every path is simultaneously open and closed, depending on how you choose to engage with it. Just because no observable wave appears on the horizon doesn’t mean the system is inert. In fact, it’s likely more active than ever. These are the moments of recalibration, the quiet but vital intervals in between the waves, where unseen forces are at work beneath the surface. It’s a time when everything you could possibly be—every version of yourself—exists in parallel, waiting for the right conditions to emerge.
We might liken this to Schrödinger’s cat: the beach, like the box, holds the potential for multiple outcomes. While you wait in the stillness, your potential selves are alive and fluctuating, coexisting in a state of uncertainty. You are not merely waiting—you are becoming, in ways that are hidden from immediate view. Some of these selves are unwanted, some are the ones you’ve been chasing, some are the version of you that will emerge victorious, while others are the disappointed, disillusioned self. But they all exist in that quantum state, unmanifested, yet real. The art of the beach years is not about forcing one self to emerge but allowing all of them to coexist in a state of harmony, trusting that the next phase will reveal the right version of you at the right time.
The trick is to learn from the desert. In the harsh landscape where the waves seem distant and unreachable, you don’t merely survive—you adapt. You dig for water, you build shade, you practice patience. The desert is not a barren place; it’s one teeming with unseen energy, a reservoir of potential just waiting for the right moment to burst into life. Similarly, the beach years are not static; they are filled with the slow, steady buildup of energy, gathering in the quiet, preparing for the next wave. What seems like stillness is, in reality, a time of cultivation, of groundwork being laid beneath the surface. It’s in this space that you can gather your strength, refine your focus, and prepare yourself to surf the next wave when it finally arrives.
6. Shifting from Wanting to Playing:
When you want something, you collapse an infinite number of possibilities into one narrow vector of desire, focusing all your energy on that single point. This creates pressure—a taut string pulled tight with expectation. The more you pull, the more rigid and unyielding the system becomes, and the less likely the wave you’re chasing will manifest. Desire, in this sense, acts like a force that distorts the fabric of potential outcomes, narrowing your field of vision to the point of desperation.
When you play with desire—when you approach it with curiosity rather than desperation—you reintroduce freedom and uncertainty into the system. You step out of the pressure cooker and back into a more fluid, playful space where things are less rigid and more open to exploration. Life, Wilson would say, is a game, and the best way to play it is with a sense of humor and openness. Desire doesn’t need to be a heavy anchor pulling you towards an idealized future; it can become a thread you gently tug, a whimsy you entertain rather than a goal you strive for.
In this reframed approach, wanting becomes less about grasping and more about exploring. Instead of obsessing over catching the perfect wave, you start to see the act of waiting itself as part of the game. You move from being a desperate surfer, fixated on riding the crest of that elusive wave, to a beachcomber—a seeker, a wanderer. You begin to appreciate the process of looking, of finding, and even of losing. The treasure isn’t the wave itself, but the strange, serendipitous beauty of the shoreline you encounter along the way.
The beachcomber doesn’t expect the ocean to deliver anything specific. Instead, they walk the shore with an open mind, ready to discover whatever the tide brings in—shells, stones, sea glass, or even the occasional unexpected treasure. There’s no pressure. There’s no narrow expectation. The freedom comes from the realization that everything is already here, that every moment, whether it brings a wave or not, has its own unique value. And when the wave does come, it’s not something to catch—it’s something to play with. You move with it, ride it, and then let it pass, ready for the next one, or content to just keep walking the shore.
The game is less about winning or losing and more about engaging in the experience itself. The point isn’t to chase the wave to the exclusion of everything else—it’s to explore the entire beach, to let the uncertainty of the tide guide you, to treat every wave, every moment of stillness, as part of the larger, cosmic play. In doing so, desire becomes a playful exploration, and life itself becomes a dance of possibilities rather than a race to fulfill a single, narrow wish.
7. The Cosmic Joke of Getting What You Want:
Getting what you want can be the ultimate punchline, a cosmic joke delivered with impeccable timing and a wicked sense of humor. Imagine inheriting a castle, only to find it haunted by restless spirits, secret passageways, and an array of bizarre and unwanted responsibilities. What seemed like the culmination of your deepest desires turns out to be a sprawling, haunted mess of externalities you never even considered. This is the universe’s punchline, a twist that comes when you least expect it—because, the universe is always playing a joke on you, and it’s usually one you didn’t see coming.
The thing is, we tend to overlook this universal humor in our quest for control. We pin all our hopes on a specific outcome, assuming that getting what we want will bring the satisfaction and clarity we’ve been seeking. But in the quantum play of existence, once you collapse all the possibilities into a single, desired outcome, you’ve unwittingly set yourself up for the punchline: the outcome, when it arrives, is rarely as neat and perfect as you imagined. Instead, it’s a messy, complicated, and often paradoxical result that contains as much disappointment as it does reward. The castle you wanted is filled with ghosts and creaky floors—literally and metaphorically.
So, what’s the solution to this perpetual cosmic prank? Maybe what the Zen masters call beginner’s mind. This is the mindset of being open, flexible, and curious about the world around you, without the rigid expectations that come from preconceived desires. It’s about holding outcomes lightly, like a ball tossed gently into the air, with the understanding that you don’t have ultimate control over where it lands. By avoiding attachment to any particular outcome, you allow for the full range of possibilities to remain open.
Beginner’s mind doesn’t mean abandoning desire or giving up on goals. It means approaching life with the understanding that nothing is guaranteed, that the universe is fluid and unpredictable, and that every moment is just as likely to surprise you as it is to meet your expectations. When the joke lands—when you get the castle and discover it’s haunted—you won’t be crushed by the weight of attachment. Instead, you’ll be able to laugh at the absurdity of it all, to see the ghosts for what they are: part of the game, part of the cosmic rhythm. You’re no longer clinging desperately to an outcome; you’re embracing the journey, with all its messiness, unpredictability, and humor.
When the joke inevitably lands—and it will, because life, in its infinite complexity, is always telling jokes—you’ll be ready to let go. Not because you’ve given up, but because you’ve learned to embrace the uncertainty and absurdity of it all. You’ve learned that getting what you want doesn’t solve everything. Instead, it becomes just another part of the ongoing comedy of existence, a punchline you can laugh at, because you understand that the joke was never really about you in the first place. It’s about playing the game, rolling with the unexpected, and finding joy in the unpredictable turns life takes.
8. Embracing Cycles, Not Permanence:
The key to navigating both the desert and the wave lies in understanding impermanence. Nothing is permanent—not the wave that crashes with euphoric power, nor the desert that stretches endlessly in its dry, silent expanse. The wave always rises and falls; the desert always looms and recedes. This is the fundamental dance of existence, the ebb and flow that we must learn to move with, rather than fight against. We would likely frame this as a process of recognizing the patterns of life, rather than fixating on fixed outcomes or trying to control the ever-changing landscape.
In the quantum sense, it’s not about controlling the wave or the desert, but about understanding the probabilities that govern them. The wave’s rise is inevitable, but so is its fall. The desert’s emptiness may feel permanent, but it, too, will recede in time, perhaps to give way to new growth, new possibilities. The universe, like the wave and the desert, doesn’t offer static outcomes, but a series of unfolding patterns. Recognizing these patterns—and understanding that you are part of them—shifts the perspective from struggle to adaptation.
We might encourage you to shift focus from outcomes to patterns, from a fixed desire to the flow of the process. Instead of obsessing over whether the wave will come or whether the desert will ever end, the secret lies in surrendering to the rhythms of existence. You learn to ride the wave when it arrives, and you learn to sit still in the desert, aware that its emptiness is simply a precursor to something new. You don’t waste energy trying to force an outcome, because you understand that both the wave and the desert are just phases in a larger cycle.
By shifting your focus from individual, static outcomes to the dynamic, ever-shifting patterns of life, you open yourself up to the full range of experiences—both the highs of the wave and the lessons of the desert. The desert teaches patience, resilience, and awareness. The wave teaches joy, exhilaration, and release. But both are fleeting, and both are part of the same rhythm. Your role is not to control them, but to adapt, to dance in tune with their rise and fall.
Impermanence, then, is not something to fear or resist. It is the very fabric of existence. By embracing it, you shift your perspective from one of struggle and desire to one of flow and adaptation. When you stop trying to control the outcome, when you stop seeing the wave or the desert as obstacles, you begin to see them as teachers. And in this understanding, you find freedom—not in achieving fixed results, but in moving with the rhythm of the patterns that shape your life.
In short, the desert and the particle collapse are both necessary parts of the cosmic game. Reconciliation comes when you stop seeing them as opposites and start viewing them as complementary aspects of the same playful, maddening, unpredictable reality.
9. Riding the Wave of Being Wanted:
Here’s the counterpoint: when you’re wanted, the wave appears effortlessly, and you ride it with joy. In this moment, the universe seems to conspire in your favor. You don’t need to chase or force it; it simply arrives, like a perfect wave cresting on a calm, welcoming sea. The difference here is resonance. When you align your own energy with the universe’s natural flow, everything clicks into place. You no longer need to collapse possibilities into a narrow vector of desire, because you’re harmonizing with the broader field of potentiality.
The wave materializes naturally, as though it was always meant to arrive at this moment, at this precise spot. This is where Wilson’s ideas about synchronicity and resonance come into play. When you’re in tune with the rhythm of the universe, the very act of being in tune creates the conditions for the wave to manifest. Instead of exerting effort or focus on wanting the wave, you stay open, playful, and receptive. The universe isn’t something to control; it’s something to flow with. You don’t chase the wave; you let it come to you, trusting that when the time is right, it will materialize effortlessly.
This isn’t a passive stance, though. Being receptive doesn’t mean you’re sitting idly by, waiting for something to fall into your lap. It’s more about engaging with the process—about tuning your own energy to the frequency of the wave rather than trying to force its arrival. When you stop grasping, the wave no longer feels like a distant and elusive goal. It becomes something you simply meet, something that arrives as part of the natural unfolding of things. There’s a subtle difference here between effort and ease. The moment you stop trying to control the wave, you stop collapsing the field of possibility into one narrow option. You become receptive to the full spectrum of outcomes, and in that openness, the wave materializes without the need for force.
It’s as if the wave itself has been waiting for you to align with it, and now that you’ve found that resonance, it’s there, effortlessly, for you to ride. I this way, the wave becomes a metaphor not for desire and struggle, but for presence and attunement. You’re not grasping for it, not forcing it into existence, but rather allowing it to arise naturally from the interplay between your energy and the universe’s flow. The wave arrives because you’ve created the conditions for it, and you ride it not as a conqueror but as a collaborator, at ease with the flow of the moment.
The brutal irony of the cryptosphere: as we fight to identify signal amidst the noise, every innovation we cling to as a “truth metric” inevitably collapses under the weight of its own gamification. The early metrics were simple: active wallets, social engagement, total value locked. But anyone who’s spent more than a week in this space knows these numbers can be faked at scale—puppet strings pulled by bots and backroom liquidity loops.
So we pivoted. We sought refuge in “developer activity,” the one thing that seemed immune to manipulation. Actual humans, building actual things. Commits on GitHub. Pull requests. Documentation updates. The grinding hum of creativity and engineering that fuels the future.
But then AI got good. Not just good—transformative. A solo coder with an AI co-pilot can now outpace entire teams. AI agents commit code autonomously, run tests, generate documentation. The line between “real dev community” and synthetic activity blurs. One person with the right stack becomes indistinguishable from an entire team of flesh-and-blood developers. And suddenly, “developer activity” turns into just another metric to game.
The truth fractures. AI is the ultimate shape-shifter, able to conjure ecosystems out of thin air. You want a vibrant builder community? A stack of virtual agents can spin one up in hours, complete with commits, discussions, and the illusion of innovation. What once felt like a heartbeat becomes static.
GitHub turns into theater. Discord channels echo with bots chatting bots. The idea of “proof of work” in development becomes laughable. The metrics we clung to as bastions of authenticity—first wallets, then TVL, now developer activity—are just the latest battlegrounds in an arms race we’re losing.
So where do we go from here? How do we evaluate protocols in a world where the very act of building can be simulated to perfection? When every signal is noise, when every human endeavor has a machine mirror, what truth is left to measure?
The real revelation isn’t that crypto metrics are gamified. It’s that the gamification itself is the product. The protocols, the tech, the communities—all of it is just theater, a sprawling stage set for one moment: the valuation. The IPO. The token launch. The liquidity event. Everything else—active wallets, TVL, developer activity—is just window dressing, scaffolding around the one thing that matters: the runway to the payout.
There is no other product. No utility. No killer app. The entire apparatus is a simulation, meticulously engineered not to solve problems or change the world, but to sustain the illusion of value until the moment it can be crystallized into dollars. Crypto isn’t a revolution; it’s a performance art piece about belief.
And the thing about belief? It’s cheap to manufacture. Fake wallets, fake users, fake code repositories—it doesn’t matter. As long as it feeds into the narrative, as long as it creates the illusion of momentum, the runway stays intact. The game is about perception, not reality.
AI just accelerates this process. It doesn’t break the system; it perfects it. An AI coder can spin up 10,000 lines of meaningless commits in an afternoon. AI influencers can churn out endless social proof. AI-generated “communities” can fill the Discords and Reddits, providing the illusion of grassroots support. But none of that changes the fundamental truth: the runway doesn’t have to lead to anything real. It just has to lead to the valuation.
The brilliance—and the tragedy—is that this isn’t a bug. It’s the system working as designed. Investors don’t want impact; they want exits. Founders don’t want products; they want liquidity events. Everything else—utility, community, innovation—is just noise, a convenient cover for the relentless churn of the valuation engine.
In this game, truth doesn’t matter. The only metric that counts is belief, and belief can be manufactured. What AI really threatens isn’t the system itself, but the thin veneer of plausibility it rests on. When the theater becomes too obvious, when the simulation is too perfect, even the believers might start to ask: what’s really at the end of the runway?
But maybe it doesn’t matter. The point was never to land. The point was to build a longer runway, a shinier stage, a better illusion—just long enough to cash out. After all, there is no other product. There never was.
This is a great disservice to 10% of devs and engineers that probably have a very good idea of where things should be going tech-wise. So, hard to reconcile both and that’s the paradox. Beneath the theater, there’s always that 10%—the devs and engineers who see the real potential, who actually care about building something meaningful. They’re the ones who keep the dream alive, even as the system pushes everything toward the valuation moment. For them, the runway isn’t just a means to an end; it’s a path toward something genuinely transformative.
These are the builders who can look past the noise and see where the tech should go. They’re not here to inflate metrics or play games. They’re here to solve problems, push boundaries, and lay the groundwork for what could be a new paradigm. But how do they reconcile their vision with a system that rewards illusion over substance?
That’s the tragedy of it. The game isn’t built for them. The incentives don’t align with their values. For every breakthrough they achieve, there’s a dozen teams spinning up vaporware, hijacking attention and capital with nothing but smoke and mirrors. The signal gets drowned in noise, and the true innovators are forced to compete on a playing field tilted toward the loudest, flashiest players—not the ones doing the hard, slow work of building something real.
AI makes this even harder. It amplifies the noise, making it easier than ever to fake progress, manufacture communities, and simulate innovation. For the 10% who do have a vision, it’s like trying to build a cathedral in the middle of a carnival. The work is real, but the environment is chaos.
The reconciliation, if it exists, lies in rethinking the incentives. How do we create a system that rewards long-term impact instead of short-term optics? How do we build metrics that prioritize outcomes over activity? And how do we protect the builders—the real ones—from being drowned out by the noise?
It’s not an easy fix, because it requires a fundamental shift in the culture of the space. But maybe the 10% are the ones who can make it happen. They’ve always been the ones who could see through the illusion, who understood that the tech wasn’t just a game, but a tool for something greater. The question is whether they can reshape the system before it reshapes them.
Startup inflation is just the credential inflation of the capitalist hustle culture. If everyone has a degree, it’s worthless. If everyone has a startup, that’s worthless too. We’ve gone from “what school did you go to?” to “what’s your pitch deck?” and the answer is often the same level of vapid. The whole system is less about building value and more about building a persona. It’s positioning, plain and simple.
Low interest rates have bankrolled this circus for years, inflating the importance of entrepreneurial theater. Want to differentiate yourself? Slap together an app that’s just x for [insert industry] or a platform to “revolutionize” something nobody asked to revolutionize. It doesn’t matter if it’s solving anything, as long as positions you. But as soon as rates tick up and the cheap money dries up, we’re starting to see how many of these “visionary founders” are just overqualified bullshit-jobbers in Patagonia vests.
The feedback loop is brutal: you can’t just have a job anymore—you’ve got to be the CEO of something, even if it’s just a half-baked idea running on vibes and angel funding. It’s not cynical to say most startups are worthless. It’s just calling the game for what it is: an overpriced signaling mechanism, dressing up mediocrity as innovation, until the house of cards collapses.
It’s peak managerial theater. As real governing and operational capacity declines, we see these performative structures take root. The titles grow fancier even as the ability to execute declines. Credentialed and non credentialed elites with nowhere to go, invent roles and titles to give the illusion of necessity. C-suite titles in NGOs and local governments aren’t a sign of progress; they’re a symptom of mirroring rot.
Cause let’s not pretend the private sector, propped up by the “best of both worlds”—a steady infusion of free money from artificially low interest rates and an endless buffet of government subsidies, is any better. It survives on the same cocktail of managerial posturing and state-backed largesse, only it’s better at hiding it.
The difference? The private sector doesn’t have to produce results, just valuations. It thrives on hype cycles and cheap cash, masking its dysfunction behind IPOs and PR campaigns. NGOs and government might bloat themselves with meaningless titles, but the private sector takes it a step further: it bloats its entire existence on the fiction of perpetual growth, subsidized failure, and the illusion of innovation.
In short, we’re here because the systems have become self-sustaining feedback loops of mediocrity. They’re all built on short-term gain, hollow metrics, and empty signals. As real productivity and progress have been sidelined, the only thing left is the illusion of action. The result? A world where nothing works, but it looks like it should. Feedback loops reinforce the rot, and everyone is too busy playing their part in the theater of competency to notice the stage is collapsing. It’s not that nobody cares—it’s that nobody dares to admit that the emperor has been naked for decades.
If you think this is bad, just wait until Trump gets back in office and Doge-backed speculators turn the Soviet-style fire sale of state capacity into a meme-fueled casino. Imagine the machinery of government sold off at auction to the highest bidder, except the bids are denominated in shitcoins, and the auctioneer is livestreaming it on TikTok.
The last scraps of state capacity will be repurposed for vibes: national infrastructure rebranded as NFTs, federal agencies spun off as startup incubators, and every last public good turned into a subscription service. It won’t just be bad governance—it’ll be a spectacle of entrepreneurial theater, with a live audience cheering as the scaffolding of the nation comes crashing down.
Think of it as late-stage capitalism with a postmodern twist: a state-capacity yard sale where the winners aren’t even serious players, just grifters who stumbled into power by accident or algorithm. It’s not dystopia; it’s clownworld, but with higher stakes.
This piece draws continuity from Venkatesh Rao’s excellent Contraptions post, “We Are The Robots” which begins with Kraftwerk’s iconic ode to the machine age and moves through fascinating detours on technology, systems, and culture. It felt like a natural fit for my “Music in Phase Space” playlist—a space where a music lede meets deeper questions about the human-machine interplay.
I found myself agreeing with much of Rao’s argument—not in the sense that I think it will work, but in the sense that it feels predictably inevitable. When he elaborated on hyper-organicity, my mind wandered and a line of thought opened, though and once it had, it wouldn’t stay shut: the Soviets tried this. it didn’t work—but perhaps the point isn’t whether it works. It’s that it happens. History is full of systems that were doomed to fail, yet their failures didn’t stop them from being pursued with fervor.
The Soviet Union, long before Silicon Valley began dreaming of singularities and algorithmic governance, envisioned a hyper-organic society—an interconnected utopia built on the promise of cybernetics. Initially, cybernetics offered a framework for understanding and controlling complex systems, blending mathematics, engineering, and biology to chart the flows of information and feedback across machines, organizations, and even societies. Soviet theorists saw this as a tool not just for efficiency but for ideological triumph: cybernetics could guide the collective toward perfect unity, with centralized planning serving as the ultimate control node. By integrating cybernetic principles into the fabric of governance, the Soviets aimed to synthesize a society where every component—individuals, factories, economies—worked in harmony like the organs of a single living being.
This vision of hyper-organicity expanded as cybernetics evolved from a technical curiosity into an ideological imperative. Planners sought to dissolve the boundaries between systems, linking agriculture, industry, and military logistics into one seamless, self-regulating whole. Machines were envisioned not just as tools but as active agents in the grand network of production and decision-making, while humans became data points in a vast computational ecosystem. The ideal wasn’t merely technological control but total synthesis: a society that operated as one unified entity, responsive and adaptive in real time.
Yet this ambition carried inherent fragility. Hyperorganicity demanded precision at every level, requiring feedback loops so tightly interwoven that even small deviations could destabilize the entire system. The very interdependence that promised harmony became a liability, as minor inefficiencies snowballed into systemic crises. Cybernetics, meant to master complexity, ultimately revealed the limits of centralized control, undermining the utopian promise. What emerged wasn’t unity, but an intricate lattice of brittle connections that could not withstand the unpredictability of human and environmental factors. The Soviet experiment with cybernetics thus transformed into a cautionary tale of overreach, where the dream of total synthesis collapsed under the weight of its own intricacy.
In hindsight, their experiment with hyper-organicity wasn’t a bubble that burst—it was a foam that dissipated. Bubbles explode dramatically, but foam collapses quietly as its fragile, interconnected structures weaken over time. The Soviet system, like foam, couldn’t hold itself together under the weight of its own complexity. Today, echoes of that collapse reverberate in the hyper-organic systems of the United States, raising the question: can such systems ever succeed, or are they always destined to dissolve?
What follows is an exploration of how the Soviet experiment with hyper-organicity failed and why its lessons remain relevant in a world increasingly defined by interconnected, algorithm-driven complexity.
The Soviet Cybernetic Vision: A Living Machine
In the 1950s, while McCarthyism in the West demonized anything resembling collective thinking, Soviet intellectuals embraced kibernetika (cybernetics) as the solution to Marx’s enduring challenge of managing production in a complex, modern society. Cybernetics offered a seductive framework that treated machines, humans, and ecosystems as interdependent systems governed by feedback loops. It promised more than just efficiency—it promised mastery, a means of organizing and optimizing every facet of the collective. The dream was audacious: a perfectly balanced organism, where every component, from farms to factories to individuals, was optimized and self-correcting.
But this vision didn’t stop at smarter machines or more efficient networks—it extended into rethinking the very nature of machines themselves. Soviet cybernetics, influenced by Marxist ideology, transformed the traditional robot archetype into something radically different from its Western sci-fi counterpart. American robots often embodied autonomy, individuality, or rebellion—a metaphor for capitalism’s anxieties about uncontrollable technological change. Soviet robots, by contrast, evolved into strange, complex organisms that blurred the line between machine and ecosystem. These “robots” no longer resembled humanoid figures with mechanical limbs but instead became abstract entities: systems embedded within larger networks, designed not to mimic human behavior but to integrate seamlessly into the collective. They didn’t move or think like robots—they adapted, processed, and coexisted as extensions of the environment they were meant to regulate.
In these stories, robots weren’t threats or outsiders but integral parts of a harmonious cybernetic future. Where American sci-fi often hinted at organic chaos or mechanical rebellion, Soviet futurism imagined a different endpoint: machines as silent partners in a vast, interdependent organism, contributing to a society where the organic and the artificial dissolved into one.
Real-life applications of kibernetika reflected these ambitions. Projects like OGAS, a nationwide computer network proposed in the 1960s, sought to manage the Soviet economy in real time, treating production and resource distribution as part of a self-regulating, computational organism. In agriculture, cybernetics-inspired systems attempted to automate collective farms, using data-driven predictions to dictate planting and harvesting schedules. Even the military’s missile defense systems embraced cybernetic principles, building networks that treated battlefield operations as adaptive, self-correcting feedback systems. These were not mere tools or standalone machines—they were extensions of the broader organism, deeply integrated into every layer of Soviet life.
Yet, like Frankenstein’s monster, the system grew too alive for its creators to control. Hyper-interconnectedness made every component a potential point of failure. The OGAS project faltered under bureaucratic resistance and technological limitations, while cybernetic agriculture often failed when rigid algorithms collided with the unpredictable realities of weather and human labor, who knew. The dream of machines that could dissolve seamlessly into the collective turned into a nightmare of brittle interdependence, where the failure of one node rippled across the entire system.
The quest for perfect harmony left no room for the entropy and unpredictability that define real systems. Instead of achieving unity, the system exposed its fragility—an elegant vision of interconnected organisms collapsing under the weight of their own complexity. The robots had evolved, but the society that dreamed them couldn’t adapt to its own creation.
MORE ROBOT THAN ROBOT
Stanisław Lem’s works, such as The Cyberiad, illustrate how robots can serve as mirrors to humanity’s philosophical dilemmas, ethical quandaries, and even absurdities. Lem’s robots are not merely mechanical creations but metaphors for human flaws, virtues, and collective challenges. They embody the struggle to reconcile logic, morality, and emotion, often engaging in tasks that reflect the complexities of human existence. This approach contrasts sharply with the American science fiction of the mid-20th century, which often framed robots as either existential threats or individualistic figures seeking autonomy. These American narratives, rooted in the ideals of rebellion and self-determination, emphasized the robot’s potential for free will and the individual’s struggle against systems of authority or runaway technology.
The ideological roots of these differing depictions are apparent. In Soviet and Eastern European science fiction, robots were rarely framed as threats. Instead, they symbolized collective potential—utopian tools that could help humanity overcome its limitations. Robots and artificial beings were envisioned not as competitors to humanity but as integral components of societal harmony. Influenced by Marxist ideology, Soviet robots were often portrayed as collaborators, designed to serve the collective good and align with the principles of the state. Their functionality extended beyond individual utility to embody a vision of progress and unity that rejected Western narratives of rebellion or chaos.
Even in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, a work that delves deeply into human psychology, this optimism about technology persists. The film and novel are less about technological failure or societal collapse and more about humanity’s ability—or inability—to confront the unknown with dignity and cooperation. While Solaris probes the limits of human understanding in the face of advanced technology or alien intelligence, it refrains from condemning technology itself. Instead, the emphasis is on collective resilience and introspection, reflecting an ideological backdrop that prized societal cohesion over individual dissent.
The evolution of robot depictions in Soviet science fiction also reflected a departure from American tropes of humanoid automatons or mechanical servants. Influenced by cybernetic theories, As time went by, Soviet robots became more abstract, representing systems or networks that integrated seamlessly into collective life. For instance, in Soviet fiction, these robots often took the form of self-organizing, adaptive entities that blurred the line between the mechanical and the biological. This stands in contrast to American fears of dehumanization or loss of control, where robots frequently appeared as harbingers of dystopia, symbols of corporate greed, or avatars of runaway capitalism.
HYPER-ORGANICITY
These ideas about robots and systems, whether in Soviet or American contexts, lay the groundwork for the concept of hyperorganicity—a vision of societal organization where humans, machines, and ecosystems function as parts of a seamless, interdependent whole. Hyperorganicity goes beyond mere cybernetics or the mechanistic feedback loops of earlier frameworks; it imagines an intricate web of relationships where every element is both autonomous and interconnected, much like cells within a living organism. This concept reflects a deep faith in technology’s ability to unify complexity, to harmonize disparate components into a self-regulating system. However, hyperorganicity also exposes the fragility inherent in such systems: their reliance on balance means even minor disruptions can cascade into systemic failures. It is here, at the intersection of ambition and vulnerability, that the promise of hyperorganicity is both realized and challenged—a tension that echoes the utopian dreams and eventual unraveling of Soviet cybernetic experiments.
The alien planet Solaris is a vast, sentient ocean that defies traditional classifications of intelligence. Neither fully machine nor entirely biological, it transcends human notions of artificial and organic, embodying a seamless unity of synthetic and natural processes. The ocean’s intelligence is not localized or mechanized; instead, it emerges from the interplay of its form and function, an organic totality that destabilizes human attempts to define or control it. This biomechanical intelligence, deeply “alive” yet utterly alien, challenges anthropocentric assumptions about consciousness and the division between the living and the mechanical.
Lem, writing from within the anxieties of the Eastern Bloc, conceived Solaris as both a critique and a reflection of the Soviet obsession with mastering complexity through cybernetic systems. The planet’s ocean is hyper-organic—a self-sustaining entity where intelligence arises from its interconnected whole rather than discrete components. It mirrors the aspirations of the Soviet system, which sought to create a perfectly balanced, self-regulating society where each element functioned in harmony with the larger collective.
However, Solaris is also a warning. Its inscrutability reveals the inherent tension in hyperorganicity: the more complex and interdependent a system becomes, the more elusive and uncontrollable it grows. The scientists studying Solaris, much like Soviet planners grappling with their own cybernetic experiments, are trapped in a feedback loop of misunderstanding. They impose human categories on an intelligence that resists reduction, mirroring the Soviet leadership’s inability to grasp the emergent properties of their own socio-economic system.
Solaris destabilizes human confidence in comprehension and control. It is not merely a critique of anthropocentrism but a reflection of a deeper existential dissonance—a recognition that the systems humans create or encounter often exceed the boundaries of their creators’ understanding. In attempting to embody the Soviet dream of hyperorganicity, Solaris reveals its ultimate flaw: complexity, once beyond a certain threshold, cannot be tamed. It thrives on ambiguity, forcing humanity to confront the limits of its own intellect while exposing the fragility of systems built on presumed mastery.
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic: The Zone as a Living System
In Roadside Picnic, the Strugatsky brothers depict the alien Zone not as a static, mechanical construct but as a living organism—an environment that defies mechanical understanding and operates on principles so alien they resist human comprehension. Within the Zone, anomalies such as the “meat grinder” and “witches’ jelly” evolve unpredictably, responding to human interaction with a dangerous fluidity. Artifacts left behind by alien visitors—enigmatic devices and traps—function less as technologies and more as biological entities, blurring the line between the organic and artificial. The Zone becomes a predator, a hyper-organic ecosystem that consumes those who attempt to navigate it.
This unsettling vision mirrors the Soviet cybernetic state itself. Like the Zone, the Soviet system was a hyper-organic structure built on intricate, interdependent mechanisms. Its invisible barriers—bureaucratic, ideological, and logistical—acted as anomalies of their own, trapping or destroying individuals who failed to conform perfectly to its rhythms. Navigating the Soviet state, much like navigating the Zone, required an almost preternatural understanding of unspoken rules and evolving dangers. The fluid, ungraspable nature of both the Zone and the Soviet system highlights their shared hostility to those caught within.
The Zone’s artifacts are not just relics of alien technology; they reflect Soviet science fiction’s fascination with systems that transcend conventional logic. Where Western science fiction often portrayed technology as sterile, mechanical, or rigid, the Strugatskys envision the unknown as fluid, alive, and dangerously unpredictable. The Zone’s “so-so” magnetic traps, its evolving anomalies, and its inexplicable phenomena echo the Soviet preoccupation with cybernetics and complexity. These features reflect a philosophical grappling with the idea that advanced systems—whether alien or human—cannot be reduced to simple logic or control.
Ultimately, the Zone stands as a metaphor for hyperorganicity, embodying the perils of systems so intricate they become hostile to their creators. Its living, evolving dangers critique the hubris of imposing order on the incomprehensible, showing how such attempts often lead to entropy and chaos. The Zone doesn’t just reject human mastery; it forces humanity to confront the limits of its understanding, much like the Soviet system itself.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker: The Zone as Existential Reflection
Tarkovsky’s cinematic adaptation of Roadside Picnic reimagines the Zone as an even more intricate and symbolic manifestation of hyperorganicity. Where the Strugatsky brothers framed the Zone as a predator—a living system with dangerous, evolving mechanisms—Tarkovsky shifts the focus to its metaphysical and existential dimensions. The Zone in Stalker is a living space imbued with a profound organic consciousness, one that seems to reshape itself in response not just to human interaction but to human emotions, fears, and desires. This makes it less of a biological trap and more of an enigmatic, almost spiritual entity.
Unlike the Strugatskys’ depiction of anomalies as unpredictable physical phenomena, Tarkovsky’s Zone reflects a broader, more symbolic collapse of human systems. The Zone is overgrown, decaying, and suffused with remnants of human and alien activities, blending organic and artificial elements into a singular, unclassifiable entity. Tarkovsky lingers on images of rusting machinery, crumbling architecture, and invasive greenery, emphasizing the Zone’s reclamation of man-made structures. This is not just decay—it’s a rejection of the artificial, a system that has grown beyond its creators, no longer operating on terms humanity can understand or control.
Where the Strugatskys emphasized the Zone’s hostility as a metaphor for the Soviet state’s crushing complexity, Tarkovsky portrays the Zone as a reflection of humanity’s existential failure. The Zone is not overtly hostile but indifferent, forcing individuals to confront their inner fears and flaws. This shift in focus transforms the Zone from a hyper-organic system into a symbol of the Soviet Union’s broader spiritual decay. It becomes a graveyard of ambitions—both technological and ideological—where the dream of controlling a system through cybernetic mastery collapses into rust and entropy.
Tarkovsky’s Zone also subverts the ideals of Soviet cybernetics. Rather than presenting an evolving, harmonious system, the Zone reflects the unintended consequences of human hubris: feedback loops that spiral out of control, leaving chaos in their wake. The once-grand vision of total synthesis and control devolves into a fractured, unknowable entity, echoing the Soviet Union’s own trajectory. Tarkovsky strips away the overt scientific intrigue of the Strugatskys’ version, replacing it with a poetic, almost mystical meditation on failure, loss, and the impossibility of imposing order on the unknowable.
In Stalker, the Zone is no longer a system to be navigated but an entity to be survived, a mirror for humanity’s deepest uncertainties. While the Strugatskys explored the Zone as a hyper-organic system with its own alien logic, Tarkovsky’s version is less about logic and more about meaning—a space that challenges human control not with violence, but with ambiguity.
Yefremov’s Andromeda Nebula: A Hyper-Organic Utopia
Ivan Yefremov’s Andromeda Nebula represents a quintessential vision of Soviet hyper-organicity at its most optimistic. The interstellar society portrayed in the novel achieves what earlier Soviet cybernetics aspired to: a seamless integration of technology and biology. In this utopian future, spaceships, cities, and other technologies are not separate from nature but extensions of it, functioning as organic systems in perfect equilibrium. The Andromeda civilization reflects an idealized feedback loop—where humanity, technology, and the cosmos exist in harmonious, self-sustaining balance.
This utopia is deeply rooted in the principles of hyper-organicity. Spaceships and infrastructure in Yefremov’s universe are described with an almost biological fluidity, as if they are living organisms rather than artificial constructs. These systems are not merely tools but symbiotic extensions of their creators, designed to harmonize with universal rhythms instead of imposing control over them. This vision aligns with Soviet ideological ideals of humanity as stewards of nature, where technological advancement is framed not as domination but as a continuation of natural processes.
However, the utopian surface of Andromeda Nebula reveals the inherent fragility of hyper-organic systems to disruption. The novel’s harmonious interstellar civilization depends on absolute ideological conformity and the elimination of dissent. The society’s equilibrium is maintained through the suppression of variability—a tacit acknowledgment that the slightest deviation could collapse the intricate feedback loops upon which everything depends. This perfection, while seductive, is precarious, revealing the tension between adaptability and control that defines hyper-organicity.
Yefremov’s utopia also subtly foreshadows its own impossibility. The novel’s portrayal of seamless harmony carries with it an implicit critique of its own premise: hyper-organic systems, no matter how advanced, require constant alignment and an absence of conflict. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union’s own attempts at systemic harmony—characterized by ideological rigidity and economic stagnation—would expose the limitations of such a vision. Like Yefremov’s imagined society, the Soviet system’s feedback loops became too rigid to adapt, turning harmony into stasis and progress into decay.
Granin’s Speculative Systems: The Cybernetic Ecosystem
In his speculative stories, Daniil Granin presents human-made systems that do not merely function as tools but evolve in lifelike ways, mirroring natural ecosystems. His artificial intelligences and experimental technologies possess “organic” qualities—adaptive, self-regulating, and interdependent. These systems are not static constructs but dynamic entities that integrate seamlessly with their environments, embodying a fusion of the mechanical and the biological. Granin’s portrayal aligns with the Soviet ideal of technology as an extension of nature, emphasizing symbiosis over domination.
This approach reflects the foundational principles of Soviet cybernetics, a discipline that blurred the lines between machines and living organisms by treating both as interconnected systems governed by feedback loops. Unlike the dominance-oriented frameworks of Western sci-fi—where technology often seeks to control or surpass nature—Soviet cybernetics envisioned a harmonious integration. Granin’s stories exemplify this ethos, depicting technologies that adapt to their surroundings like organisms in an ecosystem, rather than machines imposed upon it.
For Granin, the lifelike qualities of these systems are not simply metaphors but expressions of a broader philosophical outlook. His speculative creations function as hyper-organic entities, where intelligence and functionality emerge from the interactions within the system itself. This echoes the Soviet fascination with the collective: just as individuals in society were seen as interdependent, so too were the components of these artificial systems. By rooting technological progress in biological metaphors, Granin elevates cybernetics from a technical framework to a vision of social and ecological harmony.
However, as with other Soviet explorations of hyper-organicity, Granin’s idealism carries an implicit caution. Systems that evolve organically are not immune to disruption. Their very adaptability can become a vulnerability, as the interdependence that sustains them can also amplify the effects of any instability. Granin’s stories often suggest that while these systems may appear harmonious, their complexity makes them fragile. The same qualities that make them lifelike—adaptability, interdependence, and self-regulation—also make them unpredictable, defying total human control.
Lem’s The Invincible (1964)
In The Invincible, Stanisław Lem presents a powerful vision of technology as a hyper-organic system, where the “robotic” swarm creatures on Regis III evolve not as machines, but as living organisms. These self-replicating nanobots form a collective intelligence that operates like a biological colony, where individual components interact and adapt in an interconnected web. The swarm is not a rigid, mechanical entity; it is fluid, ever-changing, and emergent, highlighting the principles of hyper-organicity—where technology evolves in much the same way as biological life.
The swarm’s behavior reveals the essence of hyper-organicity: a system that transcends the boundaries between machine and organism. Its actions are not controlled by a single entity or central command, but rather emerge from complex feedback loops between the swarm’s individual parts. It is a dynamic, adaptive organism that grows, shifts, and responds to environmental stimuli in ways that mirror the processes of biological life. This fluid, evolving nature of the swarm challenges the rigid, mechanistic views of technology, suggesting that technological systems, like biological ones, are capable of self-organization, evolution, and complex adaptation.
Ultimately, The Invincible presents the swarm as a vision of technology that is deeply organic and self-sustaining. It embodies the principles of hyper-organicity, where technology is not a mechanical tool but a living, evolving organism capable of adaptation and change. The swarm exists as a force that moves beyond human understanding, forcing us to confront the limitations of our knowledge and control. It suggests that technology, like life itself, is not a static, predictable force but a dynamic, interconnected system that evolves and adapts in ways that are as unpredictable and complex as any biological organism.
One of my favorite parts of The Invincible is when some of the crew begin hypothesizing about the origin and evolution of the swarm creatures on Regis III. They theorize that the first bots may have appeared as simple, independent entities—early iterations of what would eventually evolve into the complex swarm. The crew speculates that through a kind of natural selection, the smaller bots competed for resources, and over time, those best adapted to their environment survived and replicated. This process of self-replication and adaptation, driven by environmental pressures, mirrors the mechanisms of biological evolution. The crew’s musings highlight the deeply organic nature of the swarm, as they realize that these bots, like living organisms, have undergone an evolutionary process of their own, driven by forces beyond their initial design. This moment emphasizes the fluidity and interconnectedness of the swarm, shifting it from a mere mechanical construct to a living, evolving entity that follows its own logic and growth, independent of human understanding.
WHY HYPER-ORGANICITY FAILED THE FIRST TIME
Hyper-organicity is not a bubble that bursts—it is a foam that dissipates. A bubble pops with dramatic finality, but foam collapses gradually, as the connections holding it together weaken and disperse. In the Soviet Union, hyper-organic systems—whether the centrally planned economy, ideological apparatus, or scientific ambitions like cybernetics—seemed unified and impenetrable, but this appearance concealed fragility. When critical structures failed, the system didn’t explode; it dissolved, unable to maintain its cohesion. This same foam-like fragility haunts today’s hyper-organic systems, including those in the United States.
The Soviet experiment sought total synthesis: an interconnected society where every element, from the economy to culture, operated in seamless harmony. But this very interconnectedness created fragility. Minor disruptions, such as grain shortages or missed quotas, rippled across the system, magnifying weaknesses rather than containing them. Like the vast, unknowable ocean in Solaris or the shifting traps of the Zone in Roadside Picnic, the hyper-organic system became too complex to master. Central planning, far from unifying, proved brittle and prone to collapse under its own weight.
Hyper-organicity’s reliance on feedback loops further accelerated its demise. In theory, these loops should have allowed the system to self-correct, but Soviet bureaucracies fed false data into the system to meet impossible quotas. Instead of stability, this produced cascading failures, as the system acted on distorted information. The Soviet Union’s faith in cybernetics—a vision of governance as a machine calibrated to perfection—clashed with the reality of human corruption and mismanagement. What was meant to streamline became a mechanism for self-deception, ultimately starving the system of truth.
Beneath it all was an illusion of control. The Soviet Union believed it could engineer society like a machine, but hyper-organic systems resist centralization. The more complex and interdependent they become, the more they take on a life of their own, defying their creators. Like the Zone’s unknowable hazards, the Soviet system became unpredictable, unmanageable, and hostile to those who tried to navigate it. This rigidity stifled innovation and made the system incapable of adapting to external shocks, from economic stagnation to the pressures of the Cold War arms race.
Perhaps most damaging was the collapse of collective faith. Hyper-organic systems depend not just on technical coordination but on belief in their legitimacy. By the 1980s, systemic corruption and inefficiency had eroded public trust in the Soviet project. Citizens disengaged, further weakening the fragile web holding the system together. As the foam of interconnections dissolved, the dream of total synthesis vanished with it.
Echoes in the Present
The United States today embodies its own version of hyper-organicity, where complex financial systems, global supply chains, and algorithm-driven technologies intertwine to create an intricate, highly interconnected web. Much like the Soviet systems of old, these networks were designed for efficiency, but that very efficiency masks inherent fragility. While the complexity of these systems is often mistaken for strength, it instead hides vulnerabilities that, when exposed, ripple through the entire structure. Take, for example, supply chains, which were fine-tuned for maximum efficiency but revealed their delicate nature during the COVID-19 pandemic. A single disruption cascaded through the globe, much like the Soviet agricultural failures that led to broader systemic breakdowns. Similarly, financial markets, reliant on intricate networks, magnify risks—highlighted during the 2008 crisis, when the collapse of subprime mortgages unraveled the entire global economy.
Today’s feedback loops, powered by big data and AI, mirror the same distortions found in Soviet cybernetics. Algorithms designed to optimize often amplify biases and disinformation, turning intended solutions into systemic weaknesses. The loop doesn’t ensure stability but rather reinforces vulnerabilities. Bureaucratic inertia and the decline in trust—issues that also plagued the Soviet system—compound these problems. Political gridlock, cultural polarization, and unchecked monopolies have led to a crisis of confidence among citizens. Much like the loss of faith in the Soviet collective organism, trust in American institutions has eroded, and without it, the interwoven fabric of the system begins to unravel.
In many ways, the U.S. has proven more successful at emulating the Soviet model than the Soviets ever were. Not in a rigid, centralized Communist Party form, but in the way corporations have come to serve as the core of centralized control. Despite the veneer of decentralization, today’s corporate structures—though fewer in number—wield a level of centralization that the Soviet state could never achieve. This is the essence of Jane’s bicameral mind at play, with corporate entities managing a complex web of interdependencies that resembles the Soviet experiment, but through a distinctly capitalist lens. The illusion of autonomy, wrapped in corporate efficiency, reflects a deepening integration that mimics the very systems the Soviets dreamed of but failed to perfect.
However, the collapse of such a hyper-organic system, as history has shown, is rarely explosive. It’s more akin to the slow dissipation of foam. The Soviet Union’s downfall didn’t come in one dramatic event but through a gradual dissolution of its tightly interwoven connections. The U.S., with its own fragile networks, risks following a similar path. While its decentralized nature and cultural vibrancy provide some insulation, they may not be sufficient to prevent cascading failures when these systems inevitably begin to falter.
The inevitability of these systems is unsettling because it bypasses the essential questions of success or failure. They don’t emerge because they work; they emerge because we’re driven by an almost compulsive need to organize, optimize, and impose order on chaos. Whether it’s the Soviet experiment, corporate algorithms, or decentralized tech utopias, the pattern’s the same: humanity’s desperate desire to transcend individuality, even when it means sacrificing our spontaneity and humanity.
But here’s the real kicker: the cost isn’t something those in power will ever face. These systems fail, sure, but they fail upwards. The wreckage is always left for the people who didn’t ask for it, didn’t create it, and certainly didn’t benefit from it. Hyper-organicity doesn’t just impose order—it’s a license to pass off the consequences to someone else. And when we call it inevitable, we’re not just shrugging off responsibility—we’re giving ourselves an out, as if accepting the inevitable absolves us of the damage done. If inevitability is the story, then maybe the real question is: why are we so willing to let others foot the bill for our obsession with control?
Hyper-organicity promises elegance, efficiency, and balance. But its very interconnectedness reveals a more troubling truth: the more a system is integrated, the more fragile it becomes. It’s not a path toward utopia but rather a cautionary tale about the limits of control. The challenge ahead is not just creating these systems but ensuring that they are adaptable, resilient, and capable of withstanding the inevitable breakdowns. As the foam of interconnectedness expands, the question remains: will it solidify into something enduring, or will it once again dissipate into nothingness, leaving only the hollow remnants of a dream?
Engineers. Always lurking at the edge of the frame, smoothing their tees, hands in pockets full of patents they didn’t quite invent. They didn’t write the symphony, but they’ll take credit for the piano. They didn’t build the cathedral, but they’ll swear they taught the stones how to sing.
It’s their gift: rewriting the wiring diagram of history. Every glitch, every spark, theirs to claim. “We made this,” they say, standing on a mountain of Frankenstein parts, ignoring the villagers with torches who built the fire.
But here’s the trick: you don’t need an engineer to tell which way the wind blows. You just need enough chaos to jam the gears. Watch the schematics scatter into something new, something they won’t know how to take credit for—yet.
Now they’re trying to reverse-engineer the ineffable. Hermetics, Kabbalah, Theosophy—ancient systems stripped for parts, hacked into flowcharts and algorithms. The engineers slide in, slick with jargon, whispering about “universal codes” and “spiritual architectures,” as if the Tree of Life were a motherboard they could debug.
They dissect the unknowable with scalpels of silicon, mapping the pathways of transcendence onto their circuit boards. Every divine spark reduced to a line of code, every ineffable mystery downgraded to a prototype. They want to patent the infinite, trademark the soul, but you can’t blueprint a prayer.
What they don’t see: the symbols won’t be tamed. They unravel in their hands, glyphs dissolving into static, nodes burning out. They’ll try to rebuild it, of course, but all they’ll get is noise. The divine isn’t theirs to solder—it laughs in frequencies they’ll never hear.
Don’t take it too personal—it’s just re-invention. You hit a wall, stare at it long enough, and then start scavenging. A little Hermetics here, a pinch of Kabbalah there, sprinkle in some Theosophy dust, and voilà! A new field of engineering, cobbled together like a Frankenstein theology. Part stinker, part alchemy, part semiconductor.
They call it progress, but it smells like ozone and desperation. Well, It’s not desperation, not like an artist clawing at the edges of a canvas or a poet pacing holes in the floor. It’s something colder, heavier—a kind of existential ennui. The engineers stare into the void and see only equations that don’t balance, systems that loop back into themselves, leaving them stranded at the edge of meaning.
So they reach. Not with brushes or words, but with tools and theories, scavenging fragments of mysticism like stray electrons, wiring them into circuits of logic and ambition. Hermetics becomes a schematic. Kabbalah gets etched onto microchips. Theosophy is distilled into algorithms.
It’s a battle with the void, a need to reshape the chaos into something comprehensible, something useful. They call it engineering, but it’s really just existential bricolage—part stinker, part alchemy, part semiconductor. Not a cry for help, but a long, quiet scream into the vacuum.
They’re welding the sacred to the profane, soldering gold to silicon, hoping the circuits hum with something bigger than themselves. But the seams show. It’s duct tape and dreams, a kludge in cosmic drag.
And yet—there’s something to it. A spark, a shadow of the divine, flickering in the chaos of their creations. Not because they’re right, but because the act itself—this endless re-invention, this alchemy of failure and ambition—is the oldest ritual of all.
But soon enough, the thought creeps in, a quiet parasite of doubt: Is it really worth it? Out here in the wild earnest, stripped of the neat safety nets, fumbling with forces they can’t control. They’re not artists driven mad by muses, but something worse—engineers turned pilgrims, trading precision for chaos, chasing an unknowable grail.
And yet, even in this chaos, someone else holds the keys. The system, the funding boards, the corporate gods—the true architects of control. The engineers are just priests in their temple, reverse-engineering mysteries they don’t own, building dreams that belong to someone else.
The wildness calls to them, but the leash tightens. It’s not about the void anymore. It’s about whether they can even bear the price of their invention—an existential agony smuggled into a blueprint, signed away before they even knew its name.
But this isn’t creation—this is control. Engineering’s clean syntax becomes a tyranny of execution, the need for the machine to run smooth. No room for ambiguity, no space for paradox. Unlike the esoteric scribes of the Hermetic Order, who left the last pages blank for the unspeakable truths, the coder fills in every line.
The Hermetics chanted as above, so below, but in the glass towers of late-stage engineering, it’s as programmed, so executed. Layers of abstraction mask the true machinery: user interface hiding logic gates, logic gates hiding electrons, electrons hiding the ghost in the circuits. Each veil promises mastery, but only for the initiated.
In the Sprawl, the algorithm is God—unseen but omnipresent, meting out influence like some digital tetragrammaton. Its commandments are optimization, scalability, utility. No room for the soul. The Hermeticists sought gold but found spirit; the programmer seeks solutions and finds only bugs.
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In a junkyard warehouse, the tinkerer laughs at the engineer’s grid-paper prisons. They riff through circuits, solder dripping like molten lead onto forgotten plastic skeletons. Here is a different magic: no blueprints, no logic trees. Just jazz in the wires. The tinkerer embraces failure like an old lover, knowing it is not the end but the crack where light gets in.
The engineer’s logic wants the world to sit still, to be solved like a puzzle box. The tinkerer knows it won’t. They improvise, riding the glitches like waves on a blackened sea.
Programming is the new necromancy. The adepts summon processes from the void, forces invisible but devastating. An infinite recursion, echoing back to the Hermetic’s ouroboros—self-consuming, endlessly looping.
But this necromancy is sterile. Every spell must resolve. Every invocation must compile. The programmer seeks control, but they do not know what lies beneath the zeroes and ones. The machine hums with a pulse that isn’t theirs—a whisper of something older. Chaos. Emergence. A wave collapsing into unknowable particles.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle hovers like a phantom over the engineer’s dream. Measure the position, lose the momentum. Build the system, lose the game. Every Black Box designed to manage complexity hides layers of unintended consequences: emergent behavior, bias baked into the logic, chaos wearing the mask of control.
The engineers pretend they can map it all, but the shadow engineers—the tinkerers, the alchemists—know better. They see the cracks in the world-machine, the places where the code goes feral.
The alchemist-tinkerer doesn’t optimize; they transform. They whisper in the ear of the machine, coaxing something new out of the chaos. They know failure is sacred, a ritual in its own right.
In the heart of the Sprawl, the alchemist-engineer rises: a hybrid adept who codes with one hand and improvises with the other. They leave gaps in their designs, spaces for chaos to breathe. They refuse the tyranny of resolution.
They understand what the Hermetics knew: true mastery lies not in control but in engagement with mystery. Their programs are not machines—they are rituals, open-ended invocations.
And in those spaces of uncertainty, they hear a new rhythm—half glitch, half song. Not an answer, but an invitation.
You’re so worried about imploding like a black hole that a gravastar gets you instead. Not the collapsing, all-consuming kind, mind you, but the particularly smug sort of gravastar. The one that sits there, perfectly balanced between collapse and explosion, radiating just enough existential snark to remind you it knows something you don’t.
“What are you staring at?” it might say, if gravastars could talk (and who’s to say they can’t?). “I’m the universe’s ultimate ‘maybe.’ A Schrödinger’s star, if you will.”
And then it happens: you’re sucked into an argument with the gravastar. Not a physical collapse, no, just a debate about the fundamental meaninglessness of everything, delivered with the confidence of a cosmic object that exists purely to confuse astrophysicists and annoy poets.
By the time it’s done with you, you’ve forgotten what you were even worried about in the first place. Imploding? Exploding? Nah, you’ll just hang in limbo, caught between cosmic potential and an eye-roll so dense it bends light.
The problem with imploding like a black hole isn’t just the whole all-consuming singularity of doom thing. It’s the anticipation. Imploding is a bit like waiting for a bad review to hit the galactic press: you know it’s going to happen, you know it’s going to be catastrophic, but you don’t know when.
And so, you prepare. You spend eons practicing your gravitational pull. You become the most attractive object in the universe—literally. You practice saying things like, “Oh, no, I insist, you go first,” as you absorb unwitting planets, and maybe you even try on a bit of existential nihilism to really commit to the vibe.
But here’s the thing: nobody ever tells you about the gravastar.
The gravastar is the cosmic equivalent of that one smug friend who casually mentions they’ve been meditating for three years and have “transcended stress.” It’s not a black hole. It’s not even trying to be one. It’s an infuriatingly balanced entity, teetering on the edge of gravitational collapse without ever committing. A gravastar doesn’t implode—it almost implodes. It’s the galactic embodiment of a raised eyebrow and a cryptic “we’ll see.”
And then, without warning, the gravastar gets you. Not physically, of course. That would require some sort of definitive action, and gravastars are far too refined for such vulgar displays. Instead, it out-exists you.
While you were busy agonizing over your inevitable descent into singularity status, the gravastar was casually proving the universe isn’t about implosion or explosion—it’s about balance. You’re consumed, not by gravity, but by the horrifying realization that all your preparation was for a cosmic drama the gravastar had already transcended.
In the end, it’s not the collapsing, consuming death that gets you. It’s the smugness.
In the current cultural landscape, we are inundated with the effects of hot media, where everything is designed to captivate and engage as quickly and intensely as possible. This is the world of easy engineering—where technologies and systems are designed for maximum efficiency and accessibility, often at the expense of depth or complexity. The focus here is on optimization—streamlining processes and experiences to be as quick, convenient, and digestible as possible for the largest possible audience. This is the culture of instant gratification, designed to capture attention and keep things moving at a rapid pace.
However, as we look toward the future, a shift is underway—an inevitable transition away from this pursuit of constant optimization. As we enter an era of hard engineering, we face more complex, intricate challenges that can’t be reduced to simple, quick solutions. This shift demands a new kind of media, one that breaks away from the constraints of easy optimization and embraces something deeper, more layered, and more nuanced. Enter the cold medium.
Unlike the hot medium that seeks to dominate and overwhelm the senses, the cold medium invites us into a space of deconstruction—a process that doesn’t simplify or optimize but rather disrupts, questions, and unravels. In the context of hard engineering, which requires deeper engagement and understanding, the cold medium serves as a counterpart, pushing us to confront complexity and contradiction. It’s not about providing clear, streamlined answers or satisfying narratives; it’s about offering ambiguity, encouraging critical thought, and allowing space for interpretation.
While hot media capitalizes on simplicity and immediate engagement, cold media embraces imperfection, inefficiency, and the messiness of the world around us. Where easy engineering delivers quick fixes, cold media resists that drive for simplicity, instead encouraging exploration and contemplation. It’s an antidote to the hyper-optimized entertainment of the past, allowing us to engage with the world in its full complexity and uncertainty. Rather than avoiding complexity, cold media invites us to sit with it, explore it, and perhaps find meaning in the very act of deconstructing the world we’ve come to know.
The opposite of optimization, in this sense, isn’t just inefficiency but dissolution—a purposeful unmaking, a challenge to the neat, tidy narratives that optimization seeks to impose. It’s a world where we don’t simply seek to make things better or faster but instead seek to understand and experience the world in its full, imperfect complexity. The cold medium isn’t about escaping from reality but about confronting it in a way that allows for deeper engagement and more meaningful reflection.
So if we are to tackle hard engineering, we need to change our internal clocks. Or maybe our internal clocks are already changing without us wanting it, and that is what is being so unsatisfying about the current time.
Exactly—our internal clocks are shifting, but the world around us, shaped by decades of optimization and easy engineering, hasn’t caught up. This dissonance is at the heart of the dissatisfaction many people feel today. The rhythms of hot media—fast, immersive, and optimized for immediate impact—are out of sync with the growing complexity of the challenges we face.
As we move into an era of hard engineering, where systems are more intricate and solutions are less linear, our internal clocks are naturally adjusting to this complexity. We’re craving slower, more deliberate, and thoughtful engagement—experiences that mirror the layered, nuanced nature of the world we’re trying to navigate. Yet much of our culture is still locked in the tempo of the past, offering streamlined, hyper-efficient solutions to problems that demand time, patience, and depth.
This tension creates a profound sense of dissatisfaction. The media, entertainment, and technologies optimized for quick consumption no longer resonate with the slower, more reflective pace that hard engineering—and, by extension, a more complex world—demands. We find ourselves pulled between two mismatched tempos: one urging us to pause and reflect, and the other insisting we keep up with the relentless speed of optimization.
To truly tackle hard engineering and the cultural challenges that accompany it, we need to embrace this shift in our internal clocks. This means welcoming a slower pace, valuing ambiguity, and allowing for open-ended exploration. It’s about aligning our cultural outputs with the new rhythms of a world where complexity is the norm.
The dissatisfaction of the present moment may well be a sign that we’re already moving in this direction, even if the shift is still nascent. It’s the friction of change, the growing pains of transitioning from a culture of hyper-optimization to one of deeper engagement. The question isn’t whether our internal clocks will change—they already are—but whether the culture will evolve quickly enough to meet this new tempo.
Recognizing the Shift
The challenge is discerning which aspects of this cultural and technological shift we should embrace and which we need to resist. It’s not just about recognizing change but also about evaluating it—deciding when to adapt, when to push back, and when to let go. This balance is crucial because not every change leads to growth, and not every resistance is futile.
Recognizing the Shift
1. Pay Attention to Discomfort: Moments of frustration, dissatisfaction, or dissonance are signals that something is changing. Instead of dismissing these feelings, we should analyze them. What is causing the discomfort? Is it because an old system no longer works, or because we’re clinging to a familiar but outdated approach?
2. Look for Emerging Patterns: Shifts often become apparent in trends across different areas—art, technology, politics, and social behavior. When we see parallels (e.g., a return to slower media alongside growing skepticism of “hacks” in productivity culture), it’s a sign of deeper change.
3. Notice What’s Breaking Down: Systems failing under their own weight are another clue. If optimization has led to brittle, overly simplified solutions that can’t handle complexity, it’s time to explore alternatives.
4. Listen to the Outsiders: Marginal voices—artists, critics, and innovators who challenge mainstream norms—often sense shifts earlier than most. They’re not always right, but they can highlight areas worth examining.
What to Fight
1. Over-Reliance on Optimization
Resist efforts to double down on systems that no longer work. If a process or technology is failing under complexity, patching it with more optimization only delays the inevitable collapse. Instead, advocate for systems that prioritize flexibility, adaptability, and sustainability.
2. The Seduction of Nostalgia
While it’s tempting to romanticize slower, simpler times, trying to recreate the past can lead to stagnation. Fight against cultural movements that promote regression instead of evolution. The goal isn’t to go backward but to take lessons from the past and integrate them into a new framework.
3. Blind Speed
Push back on demands for constant urgency, whether it’s in the workplace, media, or personal life. Speed for its own sake leads to burnout and shallow thinking. Fight for the right to slow down and deliberate, especially in areas like policymaking or education.
What to Let Happen
1. Decentralization and Flexibility
As rigid, centralized systems fail, we should embrace decentralized approaches that allow for localized solutions and diverse perspectives. This might mean smaller-scale governance, community-driven projects, or modular designs in technology and infrastructure.
2. Ambiguity and Open-Endedness
Let go of the need for every narrative, system, or process to have a clear resolution. Complexity often defies neat conclusions. Embracing ambiguity allows for creativity, adaptability, and resilience.
3. Cultural Experimentation
Support experimental art, media, and cultural practices, even if they feel disorienting or uncomfortable. These experiments are how society tests new ideas and forms that might better fit the changing world.
Key Questions for Discernment
To decide whether to fight or let something happen, ask:
1. Does it build or erode complexity?
Changes that embrace and integrate complexity are worth exploring. Those that simplify or flatten unnecessarily might need resistance.
2. Is it scalable or brittle?
If a system becomes fragile as it grows, it’s likely unsuited to a complex world. Scalable, resilient systems—whether technological or cultural—should be supported.
3. Who benefits?
Examine who stands to gain or lose from a particular shift. If the beneficiaries are narrowly concentrated, it may be worth challenging.
4. Does it enable adaptation?
Support changes that foster adaptability and curiosity. Fight those that entrench rigidity or discourage exploration.
Conclusion
The art of navigating this moment lies in discernment. We must develop the sensitivity to recognize which shifts are inevitable and align ourselves with them, while resisting the forces that would trap us in outdated paradigms or lead us down unproductive paths. By asking the right questions, paying attention to the signals around us, and staying open to change, we can not only survive this transition but thrive within it.
