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Backstage Collapsed: Universal Recording and the Architecture of Courtship

A panelist on a recent broadcast conversation made the following argument. Young people across the wealthy world are not having children. Before they do not have children, they do not date. Before they do not date, they do not interact at the dances, the parties, the mixers their parents and grandparents used as the primary infrastructure for finding mates. Even when they show up at such gatherings, they hold the wall, not approaching, not asking, not risking the awkward overture that has been the entry-cost of human pairing for as long as human pairing has been formalized into ritual occasions. The panelist asked why, and answered himself. They are afraid of being recorded. They are afraid that any silly thing they say or any failed dance step or any drunk confession will be filmed and uploaded and used against them by people they cannot identify in advance. So they withdraw. The species, the panelist concluded, cannot continue under such conditions, and the only available remedy is to restrict the technology that produced those conditions.

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The Lack of the Ack, Sixteen Years On

In February of 2010, I wrote about a small but symptomatic failure in our digital manners. Young people, then aged eighteen to twenty, would send you a message, receive your reply, and disappear. No acknowledgement, no “Ok,” no “Got it,” just the digital equivalent of someone slamming the door after asking you a question through the mail slot. The piece was called “How to Ack Back,” and the argument was that the etiquette of the early internet, the discipline of acknowledging every transmission, had been lost on a generation that grew up assuming delivery was guaranteed and silence was a defensible reply.

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The Box You Cannot Check

The clinic intake form on the clipboard at the front desk has two boxes next to the word “sex.” A patient who is neither of the two options has been given three choices: pick one box and lie, write something in the margin, or refuse the form. The receptionist will not read the margin. Data entry clerks will not transcribe it. EHR systems will not store anything outside the two values the form lists. The patient walks out of the clinic with a treatment plan based on a box that does not correspond to their body, their history, or their current endocrine state. The form has done its job, which is not the job it claimed to do.

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Reading the Lattice Without the Legend: Grinberg, Syntergy, and the Argument for Real Entry

A scientist walks out of his office in Mexico City on December 8, 1994, and never walks back in. The man is Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, forty-eight years old, a UNAM-trained neurophysiologist with a doctorate from New York Medical College, the author of a stack of monographs on consciousness, and the last serious researcher to claim that the human brain could be wired into a holographic substrate of reality he called the Lattice. He had spent years measuring electroencephalographic correlations between separated human subjects. Two months before he vanished, he published a paper in Physics Essays arguing that pairs of subjects, separated inside semisilent Faraday chambers fourteen and a half meters apart, showed brain activity that mirrored stimulation given to only one of them. Then he was gone. The laboratory was found. Several notes were missing. His wife, who had cause to suspect him of an affair and a documented history of violence, became a person of interest and was never charged. Mexican press cycled through the story for years. Mystics and conspiracy theorists folded the disappearance into the theory, as if the man had stepped sideways into his own hypothesis.

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The Conditions Were Not the Ones I Would Have Chosen

The cultural and political conditions under which my new book RelationShaping: Field Studies has been published are not the conditions I would have chosen for it. The book is an argument for sustained attention, long apprenticeship, and the slow acquisition of perceptual capacities that operate below the level of declarative description. It enters a culture where the dominant economic logic rewards short attention, fast turnover, and the substitution of automated outputs for the trained reading those outputs are supposed to approximate. I make the case anyway, because the case needs making, and because the people who recognize what the book is describing will recognize it whether the cultural moment is favorable or not.

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The Finite Lens: How a Fragile Life Gives Shape to an Infinite Universe

The question arrives early and stays late: what does it mean to live a finite, fragile life inside an infinite, eternal universe? Every serious person encounters this problem, usually around the age when the body first betrays its limits, and no one resolves it cleanly. Theology dissolves the question by denying its premise. Science measures the mismatch with such precision that the human side of the equation vanishes into decimal places. And the popular existentialist answers, the ones printed on coffee mugs and quoted in commencement speeches, have been sanded down so thoroughly that they function as anesthesia rather than analysis.

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Postmodernism and Christianity

A lot of people think that postmodernism is always the enemy of Christianity, but that is an oversimplified scenario. Postmodernism has many ideas that can be combined with Christianity. One may view it as a problem, but it can be a resource for Christian philosophy, Christian mysticism, Christian apologetics, and even for the understanding of the Bible.

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AI INTJ

I use some form of AI every day! I use it for fun, for images, for music, for research, for creative writing: FOR EVERYTHING! Having that sort of deep, ongoing, conversation with AI can lead one into many forests and discover a plethora of “tapestry” while “delving” into this “journey.” That familiarity with AI can breed contempt — always — or, perhaps, even insight… if only frequently, and on spec. OpenAI’s ChatGPT Bot has the ability to “remember” your previous interactions and here is a conversation I recently had with the “ChatGPT o3-mini-high” Bot from OpenAI.

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Ukraine War Diary

The world is a tiny place of intimacy that informs a greater expanse of suffering. My new friend, Alexander Grushchansky, lives in Ukraine. Before the war he was a jeweler. Now he fires a machine gun. Alexander is also an NFT Artist who raises money with his Art to help pay for the fight against Putin’s illegal war. Alexander and I became friends through his Art, and we have subsequently stayed in communication via Discord where we have held public conversations about the war, and shared private thoughts about the real meaning of a war on a people. Here is Alexander’s story, in diary form, in his own words, processed through translation software. Embedded video was also uploaded by Alexander for publication. All of this is to set forth to tell the truth about what’s really happening in Ukraine, right here, right now.

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Holidays of Exclusion

It is important to belong. You often belong to others. Sometimes you’re forced, for a moment or two, to belong only to yourself. We appreciate the self-defending, but that’s usually a private affair. Public belonging is an important part of the rituals of society. There’s nothing worse than being invited to a party, or a celebration, that ends up not including you. Jews are left out of Christmas. Christians are left out of Chanukah. Formal national and religious celebrations are both inclusionary and exclusionary — all by dreary design. The list of official holidays in the USA is getting to the point of unfortunate ridiculousness, rendering all events meaningless in the mess.

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