encyclopedia eidolica

on digital encounter

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Over the years I’ve come to realise that a few threads I’ve focussed on in my career are the same line:

the discomfort of technological abstraction explicitly stated in our earlier games
the movement toward New Computers, theorising novel network topologies give rise to interfaces that trend away from mass broadcast
- as well, the focus on “human-scale networks” that could resist the incentive catalysis of an Eternal September moment
- and on “earshot networking” that only propagated information as far as friends-of-friends on purpose
experimenting with local-only posting that kept specific information specific to an isolated group of peers
trying to create ‘playful interfaces’ that surprise and encourage an open-ended, creative relationship in unexpected places
finally, believing that the forceful slowness of a forum might, in fact, rewrite the habits of using technology backward onto the user

All this has a throughline in an emphasis on encouraging an ‘encounter’ with the Other, an emphasis that I’ve long carried from a personalist lens I seem to have had since birth. It’s similar but distinct from the Hegelian sense.¹

I’ve lately come to see it less as a technological problem to solve than a part of a general ethics that itself includes a relationship to technology. I don’t think it’s solved by designing technological solutions in some final “right way”; receptivity to encounter is a posture toward the world. It’s a stance one tries, over and over, to take; it requires one to try and fail, and try and fail, to engage with the Other without judgment, without making them an It to be assessed or filtered. It is a mantra shared from friend to friend, in what we expect from our tools and from each other.

A trend I’ve noticed, as I tried tending to longer-form communication platforms, is not just that people found it more intimidating than shooting off a microblog message, but that they also treated it more like sharing independent reflections than as a conversation. That is to say, people often spoke past each other; a forum post could be (and, twenty years ago, was) just a bunch of small quotes and one-sentence replies – but it was more likely that we’d get 5 paragraphs from each person that didn’t really build upon prior posts. I think because of this, nobody felt heard; there was no conviviality or encounter. Instead it felt more like a communal repository of people who proximally existed, but didn’t really co-exist, if you know what I mean.

So how can one cultivate opportunities of encounter if slower paced designs still engendered a sort of mutual atomisation under the guise of a community? I see this as an open area of study – I don’t really have an answer to this yet.

Text selections

Consider the face-to-face relation of Lévinas. I think there’s very obvious tie-ins to Buber here but I haven’t read yet. I apparently am the most Buberian to have not read Buber yet invented but I will come to it soon.

Mounier

Some selections from Emmanuel Mounier’s Personalism:

Thus, if the first condition of individualism is the centralization of the individual in himself, the first condition of personalism is his decentralization, in order to set him in the open perspectives of personal life.

This development is founded upon a series of original actions, to which there is no equivalent elsewhere in the whole universe:

(1) Going out of the self. The person being capable of detachment from itself, of self-dispossession, of decentralizing itself in order to become available for others. In the personalist tradition (in Christianity especially) the ascetic of self-dispossession is the central ascetic of the personal life. Only those who are thus liberated can ever liberate others or the world. The ancients used to talk of the overcoming of self-love: nowadays we call self-love ego-centricity, narcissism, or individualism.

(2) Understanding. This is ceasing to see myself from my own point of view, and looking at myself from the standpoint of others. Not looking for myself in someone else chosen for his likeness to me, nor seeking to know another according to some general knowledge (a taste for psychology is not an interest in other persons) but accepting his singularity with my own, in an action that welcomes him, and in an effort that re-centres myself. It is to be all things to all men, but without ceasing to be, or to be myself. For there is a manner of understanding everyone which is equivalent to loving nothing and ceasing to be anything a merging of oneself with others that is not a comprehension of them.

(3) Taking upon oneself sharing the destiny, the troubles, the joy or the task of another; taking him ‘upon one’s heart’.

(4) Giving. The vitality of the personal impulse is to be found neither in self-defence (as in petty-bourgeois individualism) nor in life-and-death struggle (as with existentialism) but in generosity or self-bestowal ultimately, in giving without measure and without hope of reward. The economic of personality is an economic of donation, not of compensation nor of calculation. Generosity dissolves the opacity and annuls the solitude of the subject, even when it calls forth no response: but its impact upon the serried ranks of opposing instincts, interests and reasonings can be truly irresistible. It disarms refusal by offering to another what is of eminent value in his own estimation, at the very moment when he might expect to be over-ridden as an obstacle, and he is himself caught in its contagion: hence the great liberating value of forgiveness, and of confidence. Generosity fails only in the face of certain resentments more mysterious than those of contrary interest, hatreds which seem to be directed against disinterestedness itself.

(5) Faithfulness. The adventure of the person is one that is continuous from birth to death. Devotion to the person, therefore, love or friendship, cannot be perfect except in continuity. This continuity is not a mere prolongation or repetition of the same thing, like that of a material or logical generalization: it is a perpetual renewal. Personal faithfulness is creative faithfulness.

Whenever I treat another person as though he were not present, or as a repository of information for my use (G. Marcel), an instrument at my disposal; or when I set him down in a list without right of appeal in such a case I am behaving towards him as though he were an object, which means in effect, despairing of him. But if I treat him as a subject, as a presence which is to recognize that I am unable to define or classify him, that he is inexhaustible, filled with hopes upon which alone he can act this is to give him credit. To despair of anyone is to make him desperate: whereas the credit that generosity extends regenerates his own confidence. It acts as the appeal (Jaspers’ ‘invocation’) that nourishes the spirit. They are mistaken who speak of love as self-identification. That is only true of sympathy, or of those ‘elective affinities’ in which one is seeking to assimilate more of some good quality, or to find some resonance of oneself in someone similar. Real love is creative of distinction; it is a gratitude and a will towards another because he is other than oneself.

That is, instead of a necessary instrumentalisation of the human person by the world spirit, it brings the human person to paramount importance, a kind of communitarian self-emptying that enables the freedom of all. ↩

contra-bao on lifeboats

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Since writing this post a handful of reflections have been posted in response or in addition to it, including “Building a Lifeboat” by 7666 and “Close This World” by Nyx Land.

A friend of mine, shibao, recently put out “a final call for lifeboats”, a piece in equal parts polemic and elegy¹. I wanted to collect my thoughts and respond in order because it seemed like a call for some sort of consensus, some sort of direction amongst us, instead of remaining separate, inert. I think there is a longing for a prior unity, a coming-apart, at the heart of this piece; I also think that the same longing is shared by others in my life who have had their communities erode and fade away.

And where is the flame?

Allow me to summarise her concerns:

She says that we have been carried by “flames” in periods across history where genuine energy forments real, passionate communities of people, whether it’s salons or coffee shops of the Enlightenment period — and we are at the tail end of one, one that has lasted from mechanical tabulators through personal computers and open source, ending at the institutionalisation of megacorporations.

We are now in a much more reactive posture, salvaging dying embers in nostalgic recreations or otherwise trying to find some new hearth for the flame to begin again, but it isn’t working. And now all that awaits us is a mass degradation, and she doesn’t know what will come next, but the only recourse is for weirdos to carry the flame in isolated communities (in a sort of retrotech Benedict option) and wait for a chance to return the flame.

Another echo

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s called “a final call” — this is not a new message. Reading it I was reminded of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, a 2019 blog post² that we circulated at Tlon as a confirmation of our mission — after all, Urbit was about salvaging the good parts of the internet and resisting clearnet incentives by making a network of caves. A personal cloud computer where people could poke each other’s ports like it’s 1992. If anything was intended to help weirdos build their own techno-utopian world…

2019 feels so long ago now. In 2019 I remember seeing “Cave Twitter,” the accelerationists and speculative futurists, the outbreak of “new institutions” as a movement — all slowly go quiet. It was novel and foolish to go off and form a Pleroma instance. Our relationship with control systems were becoming turbulent, but not intolerable; it felt as though something new had to be born, but nothing was emerging; cryptocurrencies and DAOs didn’t form into lasting counter-societies funded on circular economies (or mutual aid, etc). We were perhaps too comfortable to actually birth a secret society.

I think shibao and I are surrounded by plenty of like-minded people as well. My friend Bob attributes technological decline to the market saturation of smartphones in 2016. The Hundred Rabbits’ emphasis on collapse goes without saying. I think we are capable of describing malaise and failure — plenty predates our own efforts — whether we reflect on Occupy Wall Street or watch Adam Curtis documentaries — to articulate that there is no future, or at least, that there is no glorious IGY utopia in sight.

What is to be done?

Your ethics will define your praxis. Is it to withdraw, to salvage what you can, to choose some sort of affirmation … ?³

In the past few years my own nostalgia has gotten the better of me. I tried to recreate prior technological relationships by restoring old habits, trying to mimic the pensive “return to the pond” by making paralogue; my friend Merilynn has pulled away from platforms by founding the Milkmedicine Network. I gave up my smartphone for a keitai, then compromised on a mini-sized one without attention drains; my friends have all variously fallen back to older models or flip phones.

And I’d say the average person is also less “online” qua posting, but more visual; my own experience in public has given me far more exposure to Instagram than I ever remember seeing a decade ago, but the idea that “people are watching too much video” is itself sort of a nostalgic problem, like a kind of catalytic television structure. I know that Facebook retains some use because of its emphasis on groups — remember Facebook groups? — as a Schelling point for the average in-person community to congregate.

I regard my experimentation as a failure; I think I was asking the wrong question.⁴ Paralogue is very quiet; what I found was that forums stress people out — they like consuming it, but they find it draining to actually post on. When they do post, it’s high-effort, long-form.

I think for forums, it’s fundamentally a problem of stimulation thresholds; over the past twenty years, demands on attention have steadily increased, the cognitive drain of filtering and assessing information has increased, and simultaneously our friendships have increasingly taken place online. The idea of your friends being with you all day, every day, in dozens of caves, is itself a very draining prospect. It’s easy to poke your head in and maintain a relationship by saying hi in a chatroom (or, for millennials, by liking a friend’s post in the global feed), but there just isn’t time to spend writing a post. There isn’t time to spend reading your friend’s book. Instead we maintain the friendships, soothe with low-effort stuff for hours, and can’t structure our minds toward constructive outcomes.

I understand the logic of withdrawal — whether it’s focussing on the people around you, working out to regulate yourself, making your own cave and abandoning clearnet interactions altogether. But what we long for is each other, and no cave can provide that; no body is enough to exit the hell that is the self.

And so where is the flame?

I don’t think nostalgic recreations are the answer. I think the novel configurations of our communities will mirror novel configurations in technologies. Paul Frazee, who I quite admire, recently described the AT protocol as practical decentralisation, learning from the past decade plus in p2p and mesh to surface clearnet affordances while allowing for some of the amenities of decentralised solutions. Honestly, I’m more of a communitarian; I’ll build caves, but ones that open onto something — more hodgepodge of past and future than pure nostalgia. I think I can do something more interesting than paralogue.

I’m not sure it’ll look like a lifeboat, though. My God is a relational God, and the inexhaustible Trinity is itself relations in constant movement, a perichoresis. I am to be out in the world, present with others, pursuing encounter, pursuing love. This is something that feels paramount, imperative, even vocational to me. It is my posture toward life. It is my orientation to the world. It is my singular foundation, the ground within me.

I think in the past I wanted to retain some control about who I would become, and how I would form; I saw myself as a creature forming masteries through behaviours and repetition, and to be so present with people all the time rendered me a social creature, not anything ‘useful.’ But it’s taken time for me to dispose of the notions of efficiency, usefulness, justification. I think if anything we are facing an emptying on the ongoing ask of the human being to be a mercenary, a brand, a narrative.

It has not been sustainable to demand it of all people to become charismatic in order to survive, to demand attention in order to survive, to retain some sliver of shininess, something interesting about you. To become more like the Shining One is a curse. But most people can not bear to be a little one⁵, to be meek, humble, self-effacing; I think they instead choose a middle path instead of pure kenosis.

The flame we speak of doesn’t exist as a thing to be carried or preserved; it is itself alive only in movement, alive between us — it remains in that drive toward each other, toward that connection.

It is itself inexhaustible.

Postscript

The Dreher book I mentioned above based its argument on a stray mention in Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue:

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict.

But indeed, the point of MacIntyre’s book wasn’t withdrawal at all, but the recovery of virtue ethics as a counter to liberal individualism, the formation of intercultural navigation as an ethics in itself. MacIntyre went on to critique Dreher’s points in 2017.

Even if After Virtue described this decline in 1981, even if we are still waiting for a synthesis to emerge from the contradictions of liberalism — I think MacIntyre (and Charles Taylor, though that’s another essay) points to what makes that waiting possible. It is the longing, at whatever scale, that constitutes us; and in that longing is the courage to remain open.

A computer-san is informing me this is called a “jeremiad.” ↩
And book, courtesy Bogna Konior. ↩
My friend Toby has posited that the emergent emphasis on the body — beauty, longevity, optimisation, modification — is a response to this very failure; that embodiment is itself a response, a reality unto itself, a site for discovery. I think it is an accurate diagnosis, and these embodied avenues have since bled into broader subcultures. ↩
I recently went through a broader questioning of technological utopia via Jacques Ellul. ↩
A la Augustine. ↩

syllabi

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve had a few gap periods in my life; while they started out freeform, over the years a sabbatical or a break would come to have an inherent focus, a meaning behind it. I think in 2024 it started to pick up, as I recognised that I wanted rhythm and intention; I recognised my own reflexivity as needing to be mastered, made deliberate.

At the same time I’ve come to fall into pitfalls of self-optimisation, so I didn’t want to necessarily overscrutinise my time. I felt like without any structure, each day would flow to the next, and my attention was always driven to some passing interest that didn’t build into anything. If I wanted it to build into something, I needed to take time to actually focus on it.

I’ve come to appreciate forming a syllabus for myself. I tried it in 2025 and found it overall beneficial for feeling like my life had ongoing values, ongoing interests, as though I had “school” and “extracurriculars”; instead of pursuing an interest idly, picking it up and dropping it after only a surface-level understanding, I could home in on a topic, a genre, an author, whatever. And at the same time I could schedule in additional things, make different goals for an entire quarter of my life.

I think in this regard I’ve measurably improved upon the concerns I recognised in 2024. I think it’s actually had some bleedover in making me more — well, not “reflective,” because I already think too much — but intentional with my time. I don’t let weeks and months go by.

I’ll show you 2025’s. You’ll laugh. Just wait and see.

The first attempt

---
Headstart: 2025-02-07
Start: 2025-03-13
End: 2025-09-01
---

**Thesis project: Finish the game (writing at minimum, everything at best).**

> [!tip]
> BONUS MODE: Bootstrap a project with partners 1 day a week.

### Video games

#### Lightheart block
- [ ] ==Disgaea D2 *(25 hrs)*==
- [x] Atelier Sophie 2 *(46 hours)*
- [x] KonoSuba VN *(8 hrs)*

Can be played in evenings casually.

#### Narrative block
- [x] Kanon *(14 hrs)*
- [ ] Chaos;Head *(28 hrs)*
- [x] Winter Polaris *(7 hrs)*
- [x] World End Economica *(5 hrs)*
- [ ] Ever17 *(24 hrs)*
Clannad (optional) *(57 hrs)*
Umineko (optional) *(102 hrs)*

Vary from 50h huge games to 5-7h evening spurts.

#### Big Game Block
- [ ] Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance *(45 hrs)*
- [ ] Final Fantasy X *(46 hrs)*
*.hack//GU Last Recode (88 hrs)*

70h gargantuan titles. Needs focus over a week.

#### Retro Block
- [ ] Resident Evil 4 *(15 hrs)*
*Jeanne D'arc (31 hrs)*

Fun with friends. Anywhere from 10h to 50h. Retroachievementable (Discord streaming?)

### Books

#### Revisiting philosophy
- [x] Spinal Catastrophism by Thomas Moynihan
- [x] Otaku: Japan's Database Animals

*Essential Schopenhauer (optional)*

#### Current events
- [x] Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation by Byrne Hobart

*On the Edge by Nate Silver (optional)*

#### Revisiting Christianity
- [x] [[Personalism]] by Emmanuel Mounier
- [x] [[Christ The Eternal Tao]]
- [x] [[Cosmic Liturgy The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor|Cosmic Liturgy]]
- [x] [[Gospel of St. John]] by Rudolf Steiner

#### Sciences
- [x] [[Science and the Modern World]]

*Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution*
*Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes our Thoughts (optional)*

#### Other languages
- [ ] A Pattern Language

*[[The Timeless Way of Building]] (optional)*

#### My girlfriend
- [x] [[Middlemarch]] by George Eliot
- [x] [[Benjamin readings|"On Language as Such and the Language of Man," "Critique of Violence," and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" by Walter Benjamin (weekly seminars)]]

### Albums

Pick one album from [[album listenlist|the to-listen pile]] per week on Mondays.

### Later projects
- Ambient bedroom pop record ... ?
	- With a friend?
- A non-game game (a software toy), inspired by Will Wright and Christopher Alexander
	- Try playing some older Sim games?
- Fucking *Proust*

Okay, so, of course, “why so many video games?” Or “an album a week? wtf”, these are all valid questions.

In the preceding period I had basically neglected anything I did for fun. I had this huge backlog of media I wanted to tackle, and I had this project I wanted to finish, and I wanted to get through it all.

This syllabus, however, is too packed. It actually overburdened me with random stuff to consume, and it ended up taking away time from the actual project. The game did end up being written in time (-ish, I think first draft was done by Sep 10th? 15th?)

I’m happy with the book choices; I think they were all pretty well-founded. After this syllabus, I just went on to read more theological stuff, but I had a solid basis to pursue it, and I think it led me to clarify a lot within myself; I think I’ve left 2025 forming a basis to my ethics, which itself answered a lot of my questions in the subsequent post at the start of the year.

I also like looking back at the stretch goals because they become little threads to pull on later in life. Like, “oh, I could definitely pursue that…” and it can go into the Future Log.¹

Additional sketches

I remember being in Hiroshima and walking around and suddenly wanting to spend some time learning physics. My university degree was in the arts, so it wasn’t something I necessarily knew how to even start. But I had the Feynman lectures from an old Christmas gift, and I had access to a handy, portable “professor”. I got in the habit of drafting reading lists and research directions with Claude, and I came up with the equivalent of a very high level, four-year undergraduate physics series for myself based on a merger of the Feynman lectures with University Physics. But I haven’t set aside the time, because Physics has so far not been directly relevant to my life.²

The current attempt

So, in spring 2026, my next high-level goal is to segue back into work.³ In the meantime, I want to get a few things done:

I want to stay connected with my friends’ intellectual interests
I want to continually upskill
I want to stay artistically and intellectually curious
I want to improve my French

And so I’ve taken a more “project-based” approach. My reading list is much shorter; I have a recommended, high-level schedule, and I’m taking any additional things I can fit as more of an ad-hoc addition. If I get through what’s there, and still have time during the day, I can add another book or game or whatever for fun, while treating the dictated syllabus as a set of higher priority goals.

I really enjoy this structure because it sort of takes informal learning toward a milestone structure; I can point to things I’ve done and things I’ve learned and see how I’m shaping myself intentionally, without falling too far into self-optimisation. I’ve also found that it’s never been easier to teach yourself. We all essentially have personal tutors at our service, free of charge, so long as you treat them as high-level guideposts.

I bullet journal’d across the whole process, which meant for me taking bits of the syllabus and assigning them to myself as goals for the month. So, listen to four albums, play two games, read one book, etc. etc. Then I could flow that downstream into weeklies, and you get the idea. ↩
Honestly, part of what I dream about is having a regular old, 9-5 job where the evenings let me have some dinner and tackle the next part of a syllabus dive into physics or something. That just sounds really nice. ↩
My emails are open. ↩

before meals

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0500

O Almighty God, the Father of all blessings, by whose hands the earth was made and by whose hands we now receive this meal: Grant that we, partaking of Thy bounty, may become Thy hands to feed the world; may our gifts become children of Thine endless gift; so that all creation might find its home in Thee. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

shortened version:

Almighty God, Father of all blessings, by whose hands the earth was made and by whose hands we receive this meal: grant that, partaking of Thy bounty, we may become Thy hands to feed the world, until all creation finds its home in Thee. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

on composition

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve come to a realisation lately that while I’ve been circling the drain the past year trying to nail down what “participation” literally means, trying to make the leap from theology to action in an actual, systematised way; doing more than intuitive leaps, borrowing words from other philosophical systems that invisibly elide their origins, I’ve been unproductive, languishing, simply because I’m using the wrong language. That is to say, I think that Neoplatonism gave me a language for participation in the Good, but its hierarchical logics still tend toward instrumentalisation, toward imprinting a should onto an utterly creative, indescribable world, that I think doesn’t actually make sense.

And so I think I need to outgrow the Neoplatonic grammar. It’s an old branch that got me here and has left now incoherent traces of itself on my words.

Lately, while doing my reading I kept asking myself, “how did I get here?” Why am I reading Charles Taylor, getting myself toward Canadian Idealism, and onward to Hegel? Well, because these are systems of positive freedom and communitarianism that are about working upward through encounter with the Other toward the Divine. But I don’t believe in the Absolute working itself out through history; that makes a tragic necessity out of the violence of history, where everything is simply an unfortunate consequence of the Divine ‘working out.’¹ Why am I trying to make Hegel work, when I would need to dispense with so much of his metaphysical basis to the point where it would be unrecognisable?²

I started out believing in the notion of participating in love as being the supreme project of life. So far as I love, that is what remains after my death..

I remember seven months ago doing sketches in my notebook and realising that through following Origen I had recaptured an implicit dialectical process leading to mass reconciliation within God that hid a dialectical negation process within a Neoplatonic lens. The light and darkness within each man meets and changes each other, working out an inevitable coming together at the end of all things through grace.³ But since I take a more open-ended, creative posture toward life, I found this language contradictory, incompatible, and somewhat pessimistic. I thought I had ended up memeing myself into Hegel without ever reading Hegel.

So I kept trying to generalise my participation, reading about participatory ethics within a Christian lens, and in December, at church in Toronto, someone just said to me that I really sounded like I wanted to be reading Hegel. And so I shrugged and decided to get a little closer to the source, upward through idealism that I myself had been exposed to. This got me toward Taylor, who takes a bit from Hegel but tries to posit an ecumenical approach to Catholicism, a sort of unity-through-difference, not a unity-through-sameness.

I’m a bit more suspicious that such a Catholicism can emerge without seriously redefining its soteriology. Neoplatonism can give you some tools here; it can talk about paths toward the Good, lesser and higher goods, about the trajectory of the soul; but if Christ is the door through which we get closer to God, then we either need to admit that He is the door or find some different methodologies to define the path without falling into an amorphous, universal mysticism or gnosticism.

I also think that it’s the fall backward onto Platonism that held George Grant back from a more optimistic view on life; reading essays on his work in Canadian Idealism and the Philosophy of Freedom it’s clear that after his youthful Hegelianism Strauss broke him a little bit, but then nothing reanimated him. From his point of view, something has been permanently lost from society, and there is no sign that it will improve. He wrote reactive pieces about the decline of society for the rest of his career. I see myself in Grant. I cannot hold onto ideas that will cause me to become a depressive because life won’t conform to them; this is an is/ought distinction. My faith is in a God that is the ground of all being, that reveals itself creatively, through intensities and encounters, through the trillions of Events that make up the Pauline mystery of the Kingdom, the Second Coming.

I think that through the more recent combination of Ellul’s analysis of Technique, Berdayev’s Destiny of Man, and performing a kind of personal refrain toward Deleuzianism I’ve at the start of forming another system in my own life, though the teleology is a bit uncertain.

In shorthand

Instead of diminishing emanations, expressions of difference, being expressed singularly
Instead of hierarchies of being, networks of creativity
Instead of participation, composition of capacities in relationship to another with different intensities and different potentialities
Instead of returning to the One, developing an intensification of divine creativity through engagement with the world
Instead of an ethics of alignment to the Good, ethics is an experiment of possibilities
Evil as a more reactive, anti-creative, or diminishing force, negation instead of affirmation
God is dynamic, the ground within me, something identified in and beyond Love.

It is above all anti-instrumentalisation. Persons are not means to ends, but creative freedoms; all being has an irreducible singularity that cannot simply be made into inputs and outputs or resources. It is an ethics of ‘what is this in its own terms’, against instrumentalisation as such.

Think a chain through Eckhart, Spinoza (alas, I’ll read you eventually), Tillich, Ellul, Berdayev, with a sort of Deleuzian methodology here. There are open questions in ecumenicalism and teleology. And of course Deleuze is not an easy synthesis here, but it makes sense; there are Christian nondualists but Buddhistic terms are more useful at times than the extremely muddy language we have in Christian theology. All in all it’s not clear what else to dispense with, but I continue to believe in the guiding compass of the Personalists to feel the remainder of this out.

That said, I’m not sure I need to be reading more at this point. I think I need to be doing.

Also kind of a valid take against Marxism, too; my Personalism doesn’t allow me to instrumentalise people as part of a process. ↩
Many such cases. ↩
The author of the Meditations on the Tarot describes the power of Light as happening through presence alone, as I’ve referenced before; so while it sounds like contradiction and negation, it’s really more like a mutual sanctification in the fabric of being. ↩

about matilde

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0500

hi there! i’m matilde. i’m early 30s, living in montreal.

online, (hana)?(maru)?

on my personal site, i shorten it down to mp9 (that is, m-pa-ku).

the encyclopedia eidolica is a sideblog or a notebook. i sketch thoughts a little more loosely here.

from a really young age i’ve been invested in the creation of places, aesthetic and tonal spaces to live in. i think this same tendency led me to making art and video games more generally. with friends, i run a fediverse instance at kokoro.garden and a forum at paralogue.org.

i’m also involved with the milkmedicine network on irc.

core stats

please don’t use this information to curse me.

height: 5’5”
weight: 130-ish
mbti: infj
astrological trinity: virgo / libra / gemini
religion: christian (anglo-catholic weird ver.)

hobbies

i take photos for fun, write poems (usually some variation of blank verse), play guitar casually, slowly pick up more french and japanese.

favourite…

anime: .hack, sora no woto
book: ‘permutation city’ by greg egan
film: “possession” (1981), “wax, or the discovery of television among the bees” (1991), “love exposure” (2008), “the hanging garden” (1997).
game: tricky…
- old favourite: guild wars
- current: subahibi?
- genres: visual novels, jrpgs/srpgs, retro shooters
manga: excel saga
music: japanese environmental, the field mice, pinback
webcomic: megatokyo ¹

i track music on rym and keep track of my Gamer Credentials at kuudere.pl/us/plus.

contact

if you have something specific, you can always email mpark at this website. otherwise, interacting on irc or the forum is always welcome. :-)

some friends and I went through the whole series together in a webcomic club years ago. see here for some notes. ↩

scaffolding fictions

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0500

As my friend circles begin a strangely unified cycle—starting new creative works all around the same time—the question of how one goes about writing a story has come up regularly. In our weekly calls and bits of banter, it’s evident that we all get inspired differently; we tackle stories from different angles; we accomplish different goals through the construction itself. As for my own process, well, I’ve found it’s somewhat difficult to pin down. When I describe it, it sounds like it shouldn’t work; there’s no conflict, no drive, no engine in itself. When I mention other works that seem to resemble it, I have a hard time characterising those works as sharing the process.

In short, I think of myself as starting with metaphysical premises—ideas about how reality operates for a set of beings—and then exploring the experiential consequences of existing under those conditions, sometimes taking time to unveil the whole premise under layers of ‘everyday life’.¹ I’m interested in what it feels like to live within inhuman logics, to be subject to forces that don’t care about how humans make sense of the world. I think of nature as a dominating force with its own systems and pressures; and I think of the supernatural as just a superset of nature. I sometimes wait for an inevitable Outside to break into these premises, or into human structures of domination.²

I can pinpoint these concerns from really early works, too. It’s a pretty clear throughline to me, but it manifests differently depending on what metaphysical premise I’m working with.

Take Forgotten. In that brief game, you boot up a computer, you access areas of memory, and after being given a eulogy for yourself by an inhabitant of that area of memory, accessing the memory then causes it to be forever corrupted. The creature inside of it is destroyed. This goes on until the game itself becomes too unstable and crashes.

The premise was something like, what if animistic presence accumulates in computational objects, constrained by the technical limits of the machine? If I assume that the beings in my computer are alive, have an animistic presence, then by being left with the power on long enough, something would accumulate. Spirit? Memory? I don’t know. But given the constraints of the computer involved, that spirit matter would be fragile, too big to be contained. It’s as though every object in the world has its own memory, as though every thing in the world is endowed with spirit, but the abstraction machine’s second-order lifeforms have artificial rules that lead to some nightmarish connotations.

The construct of the video game itself creates troubling expectations from the inhabitant as to what the user is, what its role is, what it means to deviate from the role. The user is just a human being. It’s not confined to its role. But the second-order spirit in the abstraction machine is synonymous with its role, so this asymmetrical commitment to participation in a simulated world creates unspoken gaps, a discontinuity that finally gets recapitulated at the moment of death.

So all that’s to say, in the case of Forgotten, the player gets placed into a nonlinear exploration that just faintly points at the metaphysical premise and its actual impacts on inhabitants and then ends. I didn’t even really name the characters; I left names in code based on a scheme of supposed bosses from an Ultima game (if I recall correctly). The only conflict is that playing the game casts you as the grim reaper for doomed automatons.

Inhuman intelligences

Note that nearly everything I described here isn’t in the game itself. You talk to these creatures in this game world that seem like conscious beings; but in my own internal planning they are not quite human; they’re limited, structured as objects with properties they can’t defy or grow out of. This elision has bit me before—when you create characters that experience the world through fundamentally non-human constraints, readers sometimes expect human interiority that isn’t there.

I’ll give another example. Let’s say Teleceph, a novella I put out in 2020. I remember walking around Toronto coagulating premises from loose fibrin:

What if you could schedule human cognition like it’s some sort of compute substrate across fleets of drone bodies? What happens if the substrate defies the analogy in the face of its creators?
What if people lived in a game world nearly full-time and developed their own language and culture?

This brought us somehow to stuff like

What if self-consciousness is emergent based upon the perception of the other? How might personhood continue when disconnected from allocated attention?
What if the game world, the allocated attention drone bodies, and the spaceship functioned as three layers of existence like Hell / Purgatory / Heaven or like Id / Ego / Superego? What if drones tried to send stray cognitive threads back “down beneath” by severing their process identifiers?³

There was some mass hibernation event used as a pretence to renovate the global economic system, placing most people in a video game VR world most of the time—some to make money, some to pass time—and some of them get taken and made into brain vats and scheduled into piloting bodies. But given the limitations of how fast human attention recognises objects (100ms) and the roundtrip ping (another 50-600ms), the bodies can’t move very quickly; they’re forced to just sit at the controls.

And so the drone bodies themselves stitch together experience, keeping a cache of words and recognitions; the brain itself is allocating attention to “recognise” objects, recall words, to “form conclusions” (or “calculate” or whatever) while feeling the total emotional experience of what’s occurring. The accumulation of emotional experience creates subconscious imprints on the human substrate. The subconscious of the brain itself invisibly spawns its own creations, ‘orphans’, that come from that; they reify as creatures outside the scheduler that serve to kill drones and bring them back down into the brain, to re-unify the underlying person.

So we have a book where nearly all the characters aren’t people, but extremely shallow imitations of people that are actually… all the same person, just split across a bunch of bodies. Obviously, the dialogue isn’t going to be natural; it’s going to be slow, stilted, like a child gently internalising what it sees. I felt like it was actually hard in practice to execute this as a consequence—the premise generated constraints that made traditional narrative satisfaction difficult.

Natural forces

I’ll conclude with some thoughts about paravalence ~with my angel, which just came out here in 2026. I don’t know. Spoilers if you haven’t read it, but I’ll keep it really broad.

So in paravalence, there are various layers of existence above the physical world; those various layers have respective entities, and all of them are in various stages of manifestation onto the physical plane. Humans, like all creatures, have an existence on all these planes; when they’re born, fragments of previous astral bodies (that is, memories, emotions, temperaments) all form a coagulation, and our life is just about mediating that particular burden, refining it into something purer, like pure love, to return up to the Divinity. Anything that remains gets placed back into reincarnation.

At the same time, there are entities that are “unnatural”; these emerge both through cosmic accident and through human intervention (i.e. magical ritual). Magic is a matter of “tipping the scale,” of placing harmonious manifestations in sequence so as to influence affairs; it’s about trying to make what you desire more probable to manifest by living in concord, by acknowledging the various layers, by keeping their properties in mind within your own life.

There are also rituals that are meant to break the unidirectional flow of being and so to reach back up to the heavens; these are either temporary invocations or they are shamanic mergers. These rituals leave permanent ‘scars’ on the site of the ritual that allow for potential loopholes or manipulations. If everything is trying to make itself manifest, then manipulating actors that can manipulate manifestation itself is often the path of least resistance, especially when it intersects with these sites of ‘malleability.’

Paravalence is about several such entities manipulating humans who are insistent that life is ‘normal,’ and about, well, ‘right seeing,’ of operating with those layers in mind, making the esoteric exoteric as an adaptation. It’s about how violence against life is violence against life; that all sentient beings are their own becomings, that everything is tied upward in the same way, that the consequence of that violence is supernatural manipulation; something accumulates, denied by the purely empirical process. It’s the third act of the story that tries to embrace seeing across all layers to actually assess a problem.

This one is kind of disordered compared to the prior stories. Instead of a clean metaphysical premise generating predictable consequences, it describes a chaotic karmic tapestry where you’re arbitrarily endowed with feelings from some other life, you can arbitrarily embrace them or deny them, and they arbitrarily cause effects that bleed out into all other lives.

You might have a permanently “distorted” way of experiencing the world that you didn’t choose, but through all these intersubjective distortions, all this incoherent feeling and suffering, some sort of sanctification can occur, something can be retained across all life; even if the story unravels into a set of cosmic accidents and overlapping rituals.

Decohering realities

At times I felt betrayed by my intuition, like my act structures didn’t make any sense; I would deliver story-changing information in the third act, retroactively changing the understanding of everything we read up until now, but not strongly enough that I could say it was some sort of Kishōtenketsu structure.

But I think this is just what happens when you start with metaphysical premises, rules or forces, rather than character conflicts. I don’t often set rules and follow conflicts between characters; I try to establish how reality works in a given world and then explore what it feels like to gradually understand that reality.⁴ The world loses coherence the more you learn—not because the world itself is incoherent, but because human frameworks for understanding break down when confronted with inhuman logics and need to either be dispensed with or adapt to another way of seeing. I’m less interested in stories where characters overcome obstacles and more interested in stories where they have to fundamentally revise their understanding of what kind of world they’re in.⁵

My girlfriend says that this is just the “speculative” part of speculative fiction. ↩
So in Forgotten, you’re the Outside (same in Sonic OC 7 actually). Teleceph has It and by the time it’s Paravalence it’s just … God. ↩
(We have the human brains running Unix, of course.) ↩
“using speculative premises to make the metaphysical viscerally experiential, not conceptual”, so sayeth computer ↩
Actually wait, isn’t this anamorphosis again? Isn’t this why I wrote a whole essay on M. Night Shyamalan in third year undergrad about how he’s a director focused not on plot twists but on the power of revelation … ? ↩

colophon

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The encyclopedia eidolica is assembled with a single Ruby script and Makefile. The site is pushed onto my PDS and served via wisp.place.

I write primarily with VSCodium and good old vim, depending on the hardware available.

The encyclopedia eidolica was inspired by a variety of blogs that went beyond their author’s namesake; I felt that my blog was a de facto “professional presence” and wanted a vague delineation for a creative outlet with its own name. It felt like I was accidentally constructing brand recognition by personal name, instead of making projects out of eras – like Momus’ Click Opera. I think it’s important to give a name to discrete moments, like Swans into the Angels of Light and back to Swans again.

Stylistically I find myself captivated both by Neocities maximalism and the minimal, low-kb design of XXIIVV and Low-Tech Magazine, trying to find a middle ground between austerity and practicality; elegance; and self-expression.¹

I also have a soft spot for mid-2000s layouts but I just cannot think of a good way to channel that. ↩

on place and person

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

In several conversations with a friend I was invited to revisit some prior beliefs I had posited on the relationship between the environment and the self; at various times in my life this position has reversed, then reversed again, but I think it’s reaching a more nuanced, unified position.

The initial position was this: places bring out a different person within you, so changing environment brings changes in yourself.¹ This applied both to your personal environment, like your room, your house, the tools on hand, the things that are easier or harder to do, and to your broader environment, that is, what’s more easily facilitated in the place where you live.

My priest once said that a place is only important insofar as it complements your goals, and the bar for him was quite low. It’s more about not choosing a place that harms your goals than to optimise the place-setting. After all, for so long in my life I had moved from place to place because nowhere felt right; I constantly felt like I was stuck, not going to the next stage, hitting some ceiling I couldn’t understand. And I’ve stopped feeling that, so either Montreal is simply the right place, or I’ve gotten old enough that place doesn’t matter, and my fundamental restlessness is abating.

My friend didn’t wholly agree with my initial position here, because a lot of it ignores what you yourself bring to a place; she facilitates entire social scenes, she is the circle by which planets came into being; she is used to becoming gravity. I think this is a useful skill, insofar as you draw the same sediment wherever you are placed. At the time I meant that different environments have different compositions that better complement the end-goal, even if the process replicates in different places.

I didn’t really realise this until I had moved a few places and gave it a shot; saw different outcomes for my social scenes and for my career prospects, and saw myself also valuing different things in turn. I don’t know if it’s fair to wholly attribute this to a city’s culture; cities seem to privilege things to me insofar as different parts of my life more easily get prestige placement, more easily get prioritised. But that’s purely a matter of what was available to me to uncover.

If I think of myself as a process that runs wherever it’s placed, what was easier to uncover seems to point to an underlying abundance; but it’s probably not wholly correct to rely on that as an absolute truth, so much as a matter of circumstance. The relative probabilistic emphasis is unclear to me.

I do think that different places and different people bring out different people inside of you; but you’re also always in the process of selecting the place and person, of privileging a world in which you are cast into some part. There is an enactivistic element to this, but the mutability within all of us is still somewhat subordinate to an everyday choice that could cultivate similar things with relative difficulties wherever you are.

private missions

Now, I think the relative difficulty involved becomes a bit obvious when you leave any urban centre. You won’t be able to create massive social scenes in the average suburb, and rural areas will remind you that philosophy once was a parlour game. There’s a mode of conversation that only really happens in letters; there’s a mode of conversation restricted to theses. If your aim is the common ground of a truth, reduce noise and reduce audience.²

This might not matter if the mission is simple enough. What kind of life you want — how much you have to optimise — depends on the amount of leverage you want to have on the world, and I’ve started to renounce wanting ‘leverage’ over anything. I mean, lately I’ve spent time thinking about how to best use my skills toward loving other people, serving other people, à la the parable of the talents but my partner leads me to think this still ultimately worships an optimisation of self, a right-use mentality that leads one toward a primary and secondary telos for bodies, minds, peoples …

There has to be a better or a worse way to live; but if I follow the original advice I received back when I first started moving towns, the bar might just be lower than I think, and yet also ironically a harder bar to hit. What preserves my capacity to see the personhood of another? What keeps me focussed on the capacity to wholly love and serve who is before me?

What prevents me from optimising and filtering through places and people in search of, in search of, in search of … ?

A poem I wrote a few years ago was about this; I believed that it was my habits that reshaped my brain, that made me better or worse at specific things, and optimised me for some purpose, and my habits clearly weren’t bringing anything good out of me, so I needed to withdraw entirely. Honestly, I think it is probably true that I have to keep myself deductive and not reflexive, reflective and not reactive, and that’s a matter of stimulation threshold. But I also think that withdrawing from others didn’t make me loving. My priority at the time wasn’t love. It was optimising myself for some grander, more ambitious idea of who I might be one day, that didn’t really have a shape or target. I simply wasn’t enough. ↩
Reminded of MacIntyre’s After Virtue; people speak in entirely incoherent philosophical traditions that share the same words, and so speak past each other. He emphatically advocated for an emergent cross-cultural virtue ethics that might navigate the challenges of liberalism, instead of competing ideas of the good in social blocs taking power from each other over and over again. You may have to start taking ecumenicalism as something other than theological, as a process by which you can identify shared telos and opposed means; you may need to adopt the ability to discern the underlying good and when to argue with others, and when there is no underlying sense of the ‘good’ within your opponent at all. I’m terrible at all of these, by the way. ↩

postscript on participation

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

In the months since I wrote on participation I’ve had to actually grapple with the consequences of my choice to avoid all animal products derived from factory farming practices; to play through my intuitions in the real world. I’d reread it to reinforce why it was I made these choices; what my conclusions were, and they were a bit messy, but clear (as to be expected in such a vague, notebook blog):

I kept a growing skepticism towards endless abstractions that separated human beings from full encounter with the Other;
I observed and cited a conception of ‘animalisation’ that numbed subjects into sets of compartmentalised need -> fulfillment loops;
I observed how these two concepts spread outward in a sort of fabric that, for the lack of a better term, alienates us from any referent, process, or origin; and in turn encourages us to alienate ourselves from other people and perpetuate need -> fulfillment loops in terms of our relationships with others

What makes me upset is that I gesture at methexis but I don’t really build it out at all. I think of participation as a relationship with the logoi, the divine idea, attributed to other beings – and as above all participation in Love that demands my full encounter with others, to dare to withstand the rejection, alienation, foolishness, of abiding by this sort of belief system – to believe in our interdependent relations as having effects that can’t be measured easily, and can’t be optimised or made ‘efficient’. That said, I don’t think I systematised this well. They remained as disconnected intuitions.

So, here I want to articulate some gaps that I want to pursue in terms of my learning, and clarify some other aspects of my thinking.

Participation isn’t about unclean things

A naive participatory theology looks like ‘purity law’ – a set of unclean things and unclean peoples one must avoid in order to stay clean. Obviously, Christ himself notes this isn’t the case in Mark 7:14-19 – we aren’t meant to follow Laws, but to follow the Spirit. What defiles me is not thinking about this at all. What defiles me is not keeping a loving orientation to the world.

My idea isn’t that I “become woke” or judge people because they touch unclean stuff. It’s a personal relationship, a striving towards God, to participate in His nature; the more I love others, the closer I am to God across the brief blip of linear time allotted to me. The thing is that this love is not just for other human beings, but all sentient beings; they too have divine ideas, intentions God has for them. There is a participation in God that implies a specific relationship I’m supposed to have with animals.

Likewise, there is a participatory process that I engage in when I simply eat what’s given to me without fully being aware of how it got here, what it literally is. I think of that as participating in some other god; therefore, it becomes a form of idolatry where what God wants isn’t being put first. I think this is pretty ‘creative’, though, and my priest would probably think I’m starting to go off the rails, here.

Participation isn’t about economic signals

My goal is not to send the right signals in consumption to change the world. Acts of witness anticipate the coming Kingdom by acting as though it is already here. It is something you do even when it looks futile, even when nothing changes, even when it doesn’t make sense. Again – the goal is not to worship Efficiency (or Technique or Leverage). It is about my personal relationship with God, through a closer relationship to our final love.

This makes things more vague. Am I trying to change other people’s consumption patterns? No, I’m not trying to change anyone; I don’t judge them by stating what I’ll do or not do, eat or not eat. But to love someone is to allow them to encounter me, and that includes not hiding, tamping down or elliding over what is fundamentally an act of religious witness. At the same time, it means to meet people where they are. Above all, I should be loving. This means that while I develop mindful provenance in terms of where my food comes from – to be grateful for it, and for where it came from, and how it came to nourish me – I also should develop a mindfulness of how I am closing myself off from others if I am too absolute.

The system isn’t a reformable thing; it isn’t changed through resistant participation as a single person, but by subsuming myself fully into the fabric; to participate in things in order that the Spirit might transform them.

Revisiting the party scene

I think this is the point of conflict I pointed at with this hypothetical party in my previous post; there is a path in which I am present with people by ignoring myself and my own convictions; there is a path in which I withdraw entirely, and so withdraw from others; but there is a way in which I draw myself closer to others by confiding in them, by not being afraid of them.

I am afraid of others, in showing a part of myself to others, but it’s a part that can’t be easily explained, a part that just looks foolish and naive and old-fashioned; and yet I have to love them, in order to even fulfill my own beliefs. It is truly a strange situation.

for victims of despair

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Two variations.

for the living

Almighty God, whose mercy embraces all those who despair: grant us the grace to be Your hands and Your heart to those among us who suffer, that they may receive Your consolation in this life, and find rest in Your endless embrace. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

in memorial

Merciful God, may all those who died in despair find a lasting consolation in your endless embrace, so that they may find in You the rest they could not find in this life. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, who first harrowed hell for our sake and destroyed death, and who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

André Guindon (Memorial, October 20)

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0400

O Heavenly Father, who didst call thy servant André Guindon to teach that our desires, rightly ordered in tenderness and mutual self-giving, participates in Thy divine love: Grant us grace, through thy Holy Spirit, that we may neither use nor be used, but in all loving know and be known; so that at the last all earthly things may be restored in Thy final love. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.

Lessons may follow Psalm 115, Song of Songs 2:1-7, 1 John 4:7-21; alternatively, one may use those commonly appointed for the memorial of clergy.

within limits

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0400

While it’s true that I’ve been doing some deeper ethical investigations, I’ve had a hard time applying it to livelihood; it’s always felt like there is no way to get everything to align, so I would have to just pick one part that I liked, and optimise for it. There’s a world where your worldview starts where the workday ends; but that seems like a terrific compromise, doesn’t it? I think by and large, people don’t really have to worry too much. Whether or not you choose to be a stenographer probably won’t make the world worse; law and medicine have better and worse ends for their means.¹

I think in technology, though, you’re essentially building lifestyle through infrastructure. The leverage is immense, and so it’s either you’re doing something deeply experimental with zero stakes out on the periphery, or you’re in KPI world where you have to really start skimming the salami of attention load, disposable expenditures, business supplements. The industry is organised around a sort of massive Bell Labs approach via enormous networks of venture capital funding smaller labs of promising eclectics; and de facto oligarchies of private equity firms and tech conglomerates to optimise the rest.

I was inducted into my career at a time of irrational, even decadent optimism – capital had been getting more and more cheap in America, and so startups were often founded, even thrived on the vibes alone; this is not a term of denigration. In this sense, en masse one was trying to magically induct a world organisation through aesthetics and storytelling. Take from the past, from the future, try to paint something exciting about how to organise peoples, to make secret societies. After all, we have, and will continue to have, many incubating technologies that could be used for human expression and interconnection that we can use to then reify the spell. At the same time, it’s been fifty years since then, and we’ve found that instead human expression and interconnection have been catalysed into various fail states; the spell fades, the companies quietly fold, and the new world never comes.

Thus newer companies arrive, trying to alleviate the catalysis with alternative catalyses, some other sort of systematisation, some other sort of interconnected system between human and machine. The current phase, and one that I think will begin to sunset, is within this particular product stack of language models and computer APIs;² founded upon the idea that “we use computers too much and our attention is hijacked,” we instead mitigate the catalysed information flows of the internet with filters and summarisers, leaving us free to …

I find myself a bit disheartened by this stage; it essentially invents “don’t use the computer” as a panacea, which is an optimistic way of admitting massive failure. But I did believe in computers, in human connection and expression. In fact, I found myself so optimistic thinking about what we could do when everyone became “user-developers” that when I lost hope in one version of this vision, I’m not sure I believed in anything else again.

Theology and technique

Recently in a search for a new formulation, a new cause, I turned to Jacques Ellul, whose work I’ve been increasingly pilfering from; his particular formulation of Christian anarchism has seemed very compatible with my intuitive worldview and has structured it, given it additional resources, additional perspectives.

In his posthumous book, Theology and Technique, he tries to apply a Christian ethics to operating within the fabric of a technological society.

It’s important to note first that Ellul’s description of “Technique” specifically refers to the replacement of the fabric of nature with the totalising mediation of technologies – the City being its predominant home, but the technical system, this technical society, encompasses the desert of natural exploitation as well. There is no real “going back” for him.

Specifically, though, in Theology and Technique, he slowly builds out a thesis of non-power, which he takes to both practical and pedantic ends:

Non-power means being able and not being willing to do it. It is choosing not to exercise domination, efficiency, choosing not to rush toward success. It is relinquishing power. It is then attesting that the dimension of power and success does not have the final word, does not have the right to judge human life, is not the final word of our human condition. […] Starting from this decision about non-power, normally the whole hierarchy of human values unfolds. And this ethic of non-power, from there, inscribes itself at all levels: thus in the use of technical means, the way we use devices that may be “of power”; not seeking to surpass others, to be the first, to drive one’s car at maximum speed; not to have one’s TV or stereo blare; and not to seek to constantly profit and to dominate others by the function one exercises, through apparatuses, etc. But it is also within institutions that we must attempt to insert it: all institutions that tend to develop power, placing competition at the basis of social organization, are to be rejected. ³

He characterises Technique as constituting the spirit of power and the spirit of deceit; and the spirit of power is itself a vaccuum, an “always more, always further,” that destroys any and all other value systems.⁴ Instead, it masks our relationship between each other as Persons in favour of a general objectification:

Now, when power is brought to bear on a man, it inevitably produces a radical effect: man becomes an object; he is reified (which is something different from alienation). Man is viewed by power as the object on which it is brought to bear, if he can then be led, manipulated, transformed; he is stripped of his human quality in order to become a function, at best a parameter of power. It is thanks to reified man that the latter will be able to reach its full potential. There can be no power that is respectful of man. This would be a contradiction in terms. A power that would view everyone as an individual case, that would seek his worth and the meaning of his life, would thereby renounce being a power and even exerting it. Since psychology and psychoanalysis have invaded courtrooms, courts have in reality given up on judging. From the moment when the accused becomes more of a unique, singular human being, whose behavior can be explained and whose face is the expression of a complex story, it is impossible to condemn him. Power loses its very reality. For the reality of power is the absence of humanity of the one who exercises this power, but also of those upon which it is brought to bear. It is the tragedy of Hegel’s Master and Slave.⁵ ⁶

Whereas the spirit of deceit, a “passing for” nature, manifestation, the creation of symbols – indeed, the very model of idolatry:

Technique is now before anything else a set of positive appearances aimed at erasing, hiding, or erasing from memory the negative, the annihilating, the dissolving, the destructive that it is in its practice. The spirit of deceit appears as soon as Technique is evaluated in terms of positivity. […] It is this distance that iconoclasm is called upon to harshly reinstate, given the extent to which the technical system draws its life from a set of illusions that make it their idol. These include: the illusion that Technique is neutral, that man is its master; the illusion of that the material and the spiritual coincide, that if we raise the standard of living, we will make man good and intelligent; the illusion that through Technique we attain happiness; the illusion that Technique resolves all problems; the illusion that Technique is scientific and rational, the illusion that we can have and hold concurrently all advantages (virtue and power or wealth, for instance); the illusion that means of communication create genuine relationships between men, that the multiplicity of information produces an informed type of man, present to the world, and that globalization translates as the creation of an open and liberal mind; the illusion of indefinite growth, of the natural environment’s potential for limitless recovery, of that environment’s infinite wealth, of the possibility for man to grow indefinitely, and that there will always be room; and finally, the illusion of progress. We need not repeat these. ⁷

Crucially, though, I don’t think Ellul points to a sort of anarcho-primitivist solution; Technique is the creation of man, and it only has moral relevance in relationship to how man utilises it.

Technique before God has no reality in itself; it is only relative to man. It is good insofar as it produces good for man. It is bad insofar as it produces evil for man. It is good insofar as it is an exaltation of God’s creation. It is bad insofar as it expresses man’s hubris, his spirit of power, his search for his own glory. And the two qualifiers “good,” the two qualifiers “bad” are in exact relation one to the other. This technique is viewed by God only in its relation to man. This means that because God loves man above all expression, because he has decided to save him at the price of his own abandonment, at the price of his own death in Jesus Christ, then also he loves man with his works, because man—man beloved of, saved by God—is not the naked being, shorn of his history and of his works. It is the man produced by this history, the bearer of all his works (not just moral ones!), who is loved, saved, destined for eternal life. God’s love for man with all his works includes Technique too, as a major work of man. ⁸

If this seems less of an explication than a full unpacking of the thesis of the work – it is simply that the work’s thesis has a lot of components and nuance. Ellul is trying very hard not to make a blunt and impossible ethical imperative; there is a tightrope to walk, a “right way” to utilise our individual tools and participate in the broader system and for him it stems from putting something in front of Technique, something bigger than Technique for Technique’s sake, a limit, a sacred.⁹

That means on the individual, the corporate, the political level: something must come before efficiency; something must come before the application of power over another man. There must be something that cannot be given up. Whether that means not working on Sunday. Whether that means not raising venture capital. Whether that means doing anything to escape the continual drive for endless growth.

I’ve struggled with this a few days, now – what could it be to not do that? In a sense, I suppose an industry of cottage-sized artisanal technologies? A world full of privately-owned, patently “sufficient,” smaller teams servicing well-designed products for a specific, loyal demographic?¹⁰

I think it likely starts from the personal and works outward from there. Whether that’s personal boundaries about when to work, or what to work for. Something has to come before endless growth; something has to be a line that cannot be crossed. Something has to stand in front of the power and deceit that haunts our tools.

I’ve not yet been indoctrinated into iatrogenesis. ↩
In contrast with using language models for transcription, summary, and search; as well as research phase stuff and early pointers into a new field. I’d also say foundational models can reliably perform targeted programming tasks within well-documented languages. Specifically in this article, I just don’t really believe in abstract computer use, ad-hoc program generation, or extended, multi-step task performance, nor the ideology that perpetuates their development. ↩
Ellul, Jacques. Theology and Technique: Toward an Ethic of Non-Power. Trans. Christian Roy. Cascade Books, 2024. PDF. Ch 6. ↩
The author notes a debt to The Glass Bees by Ernst Jünger for similar insights. You can probably trace some of Spengler’s descriptions of Faustian culture in this as well, but it goes unmentioned. ↩
Ellul, Ch 5. ↩
You may notice a similar current in Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or the Poem of Force. ↩
Ellul, Ch 7. ↩
Ellul, Ch 2. ↩
Ellul even describes the setting of artificial limits as fundamental to what makes us human – our complete artificiality, our transcendence of “nature” and of our own ideas of Nature as a fantasy to compare ourselves to as a false moral guide. The abolition of limits, and so the abolition of things that irrationally, artificially, are upheld as important, echoes some aspects of Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, again described in a previous post. The postmodern condition of animality therefore resembles the actual end of Technique: a nihilistic, false state of nature that itself also spells the end of man as such – whereas you could also posit that transhumanism is part of the irrational and artificial struggle of man to idiosyncratic ends, and therefore a bit more “vital” than simply obeying the idle accumulation, acceleration, and instrumentalisation of your fellow man? ↩
A previous, senior colleague of mine pointed to the increase of startups as part of a broader “gambler’s mindset” – it admits in itself a lack of faith in the social contract. Instead of working a normal job and going home, it needs to risk it all, now, to win big, to defect in favour of a better and more immediate outcome. There will always be people who will thrive in the entrepeneurial environment, who were born to take the risk; but if the young find themselves shuffled into the lab environment, then it’s because the risk seems better than the standard contract. ↩

anamorphic intelligence

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0400

In computers, generationally I was trying to gesture at the fact that in all the biographies of the computer pioneers, it’s clear they had a very different relationship to computers than we did. Their world was one where the computer won’t do anything until you learn the language, learn how it works, learn how to gradually make more and more elaborate things. Ours is one where it’s meant to not challenge you in that way whatsoever. It’s a solved problem; you have better things to do!

I felt as though the simplicity, the legibility, the accessibility of computing itself was a kind of poison pill for the human mind, but I couldn’t really put a solid thesis behind the mechanism. It didn’t make immediate sense to argue it; it just seemed like a suspiciously elitist superstition. Likewise when I was reading about ergodic texts I was struck by the concept of anamorphosis as a component of mastering ‘video games’:

During the cybertextual process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that the various concepts of “reading” do not account for. This phenomenon I call ergodic, using a term appropriated from physics that derives from the Greek words ergon and hodos, meaning “work” and “path.” In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. […]

So what exactly is the difference between the ergodic and the nonergodic work of art? If we are to define this difference as a dichotomy (and such a definition may well end up serving the ideology it is trying to unmask), it would have to be located within the work rather than within the user. The ergodic work of art is one that in a material sense includes the rules for its own use, a work that has certain requirements built in that automatically distinguishes between successful and unsuccessful users. ¹

Anamorphosis, then, is when the work hides a vital aspect that requires you to adopt a non-standard perspective to understand it. There is something to master in engaging the text; you are working together as a system producing symbols, co-creator of an individual story, an individual map through a text. It demands that you change, temporarily become a different thing, in order to get to the end.

In Paul Ford’s 2015 article, The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing, he outlines something similar about older computers and their followers:

This was how a network comes together. You bought something and then you wanted to understand it, so you went out and found other people. You found them via posters in hallways, or word of mouth, or by purchasing a magazine that caught your eye and then reading the ads in the back.

I was struck by what a strange idea this was to me. To buy something and have it be functionally useless until I master it is very foreign; I felt as though everything I used was trying to be as friendly as possible for all common situations. As an example, I have an espresso maker that just one-button pulls the shot and stops at a specific point. When my friend was inspired to go get an espresso machine in which she had to figure all that out, get the water to a specific temperature, assess how to do a pull correctly … I didn’t really know how to relate. To me the process felt as though it was as simple as a Keurig machine.

Even when I wanted to teach myself something, it felt like it didn’t require massive changes of perspective so much as iterating on similar patterns of acquiring and integrating information. To be truly stumped on a problem, to find an ‘a-ha’ moment … isn’t that the whole pleasure of programming? I can name a number of times I’ve felt that and they were minor leaps for my career; suddenly I found a previously difficult thing easy to do. Now the next step up felt like a challenge: designing a system myself, creating x or y substrate beneath what I normally write…

Picking apart what was once context is what Alan Kay points out in his Quora answer explaining his quote that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points”:

As with many of these momentous uncoverings, the “invisible” was slightly visible but deemed so unimportant that if was effectively not there. This was the idea — and fact — that most of what we take to be “plain reality” are actually just beliefs, and most of these are so taken for granted that we are almost never aware of them. We use them in our reasoning and decisions but think our logic is absolute rather than relative to the — “context”, “perspective”, “point of view”, “world-view”, “paradigm”, etc. — in which we are operating.

McLuhan used this as part of his assertion that the learning of a communications/representation system must require the brain/mind to change (this is what learning means), and that the most important changes are the ones that are absorbed as “context” and rendered effectively invisible.

If you try to make the invisible contexts visible, then it is easy to see that some of them are very positive with respect to advancing “civilization”, and others were terribly retrograde. What people “believe is ‘reality’ “ is the most important to put light on, especially if their “reality” doesn’t include the idea that “their reality is mostly just beliefs with no stronger foundations”.

Being able to understand assumptions inherent in a system that makes something else invisible, that sets up a ‘frame’ or a ‘context’ for its participants, requires you to adopt a perspective that requires your mind to change.²

Pointlessly obtuse

I knew all these things and yet it didn’t quite click until I started playing Final Fantasy XI a week ago: video games were much less legible even just twenty years ago. I’m playing the retail version with lots of quality of life changes and even still so much of the way the game is played is obscured. It’s not clear what you must master in order to get better; where to go; how to interact with its six storylines; when you are wasting time. The menu key? That’s the - key. The mouse is extraneous. You’re often better off tabbing through who’s in front of you and then hitting Enter to interact in whatever manner.

Don’t worry. There are guides. They even tell you how to set up the GUI to get around the weird defaults. I actually think you may need them in order to engage with the game. For example, there are features that were added late in the game’s lifespan that add a ton of experience and rewards for doing basic things and require you to know to manually turn them on when you need them. You can only have so many on at a time. The guide tells you what ones to turn on and when. There are two or three items that give you buffs that will immensely save your time. They will give you +150% XP to 10,000 XP total or +100% XP to 15,000 XP total up to 7 hours or whatever. Which one is more optimal? I don’t know. The guide does. You must always recast these when they expire. You could very easily start the game without learning about trusts and that you can summon NPC allies. You also need to recast those all the time.

The experience ends up feeling like you are wandering – and very slowly wandering – trying to come up with a purpose. In exchange, you are much more reliant on interacting with others, or engaging with the written or filmed content of others, in order to create a working model of how to play the game well. Then you realise there are warp points by touching these books in the field. The books themselves are hard to find and I often go wandering even when I know the map quadrant just to enable them for later fast travel.

I was describing this to my friend and said “but the way it’s so slow and obtuse is weirdly intriguing. Like I want to know it better, I want to get better at it, I want to master it.” And I meant it! I feel weirdly captivated even though I was also so frustrated.

I think over the years I’ve lost patience with any game that won’t immediately instruct me toward its way of seeing. A lot of games would get you to fail hard and immediately until you get it, but it’s seen as harsh now; it’s not fun; it will cause the player to refund the game. And I think in turn, anything that requires me to actually change my mental model has this weird voice in my head telling me to offload it to someone else.

I’m being told this is a good thing – we can all be the ideas guy and just start companies with squadrons of language models. But I feel like maybe the constant adoption of new perspectives – the malleability involved in being able to gradually understand things that require several layers of hidden inferences, even as I get older – is what maintaining intelligence is … after all, intelligence is a process, a pattern of engagement with the world; a thing that can atrophy.

Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997. PDF. 2, 179. ↩
I haven’t read it in years but I feel like this was also what ‘The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn’ by Richard Hamming was about. ↩

on participation

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0400

In various conversations with my partner the past six months I came to realise that my beliefs were often founded on intuitions I still felt were sound enough to rely upon, but that I didn’t really apply them to anything.

In January, I wrote:

What do I believe?

Obviously, that it’s easy to abstract away human lives when they are presented as flows of information, and that this is a very mundane and everyday evil. It informed a lot of our earlier games (at least, insofar as what I myself wrote), where you are presented with the fact that demanding information wiped away a sentient creature’s existence – or that you’re presented with choices over the sentience of an emerging intelligence that have ramifications no one wants to deal with and have abstracted away to the lowest rungs of society.

I’ve not done the best job at applying this knowledge to my choice of work, where we directly manipulate interfaces that shape interpersonal flows. To love requires engaging with other people directly, on a human scale. It involves direct contact. And yet, as “information” is obscured, as the flows are diluted, then catalysed, abstraction is practically demanded. One must organise the flows, or one must withdraw. Treat other people as instruments or isolate yourself altogether. I can’t accept that as a final reality.

I declared myself at ongoing war with abstraction itself, in something I termed the False Eden Hypothesis (偽のエデン仮説).¹ I based this idea upon a brief explication of ‘animalization’ via Alexandre Kojève in “Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals”:

What is animalization? Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel has a unique definition of the difference between the human and the animal. Key to this definition is the difference between desire and need. According to Kojève, humans have desire, as opposed to animals, which have only needs. The word need indicates a simple craving or thirst that is satisfied through its relationship with a specific object. For example, animals sensing hunger will be completely satisfied by eating food. This circuit between lack and satisfaction is the defining characteristic of need. Even human life is strongly driven by such needs.

[…]

Humans differ from animals in their self-consciousness; the reason they can build social relations is because they have intersubjective desire. Animal needs can be satisfied without the other, but for human desires the other is essentially necessary; and here I will not go into detail, but this distinction is an extremely grand premise that is the basis for modern philosophy and thought from Hegel to Lacan. And Kojève, too, maintains this.

Consequently, “becoming animal” means the erasure of this kind of intersubjective structure and the arrival of a situation in which each person closes various lack–satisfaction circuits. What Kojève labeled “animalistic” was the postwar, American-style consumer society. ²

This distinction between the human struggle within intersubjective desires and meanings, and the animalic gratification of needs, shows up everywhere in Japanese media both because postmodern analysis was far more of a cultural shift than academic one in 1980s Japan and because Japanese academics specifically favoured Kojève.³ And so you might see it in anime occasionally, which gets recoloured within American audiences as displaying a kind of existentialist undertone (itself going out of fashion now); however, existentialist readings of postmodern-inflected Japanese media mistakes melancholic laments–where the inevitably vital force of arbitrary human meaningmaking collapses into interlocking, frenzied solipsisms–for the triumph of individualist authenticity. After all, the alternative is a pacified, collective utopia where nothing left is human.⁴

Indeed, I think the animalic state has subsumed the existentialist dilemma where one’s authentic self was the predominant ideal: so long as one is authentic within the confines of one’s social group, how one subsists at all is practically irrelevant. And yet there is a newfound difficulty in navigating intersubjectively: if your needs can be handled within yourself, then you don’t need to engage directly with the Other. You can engage superficially, or with etiquette; you can practice the scripts of vulnerability, but it’s a bit more difficult to place your heart itself in their hands, because you don’t really need other humans to live in the same way.

And yet Christianity, esoteric or not, demands a full encounter in order to freely exchange love, to totally understand love itself. There must be a self-conscious human there, engaging with another.

From Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on the Gospel of St. John:

In the first place we have here a marriage—but why a marriage in Galilee? We shall understand why it is a marriage in Galilee if we call to mind once more the whole mission of the Christ. His mission consisted in bringing to mankind the full force of the ego, an inner independence in the soul. The individual ego should feel itself fully independent and separate, existing completely within itself and people should be united in marriage because of a love which they freely and voluntarily bestow upon one another. Through the Christ-Principle there should come into the earth-mission a love that would rise ever higher and higher above the material and constantly mount toward the Spirit. Love had its beginning in its lowest form which was bound up with the senses. In the earliest periods of human evolution, those who were bound together by the tie of blood loved each other and they made a great deal of the idea that love was based upon this material blood relationship.

The Christ came in order to spiritualize this love; in order, on the one hand, to loosen the bonds in which love had been entangled through the blood-relationship and on the other hand to give force and intensity to spiritual Love.

[…] The folk of the Old Testament held fast to the idea that the folk blood relationship should be maintained. One is a “Jew” who in his blood is a Jew.

Christ Jesus did not advocate this principle. He appealed to those who had broken this principle of mere blood relationship, and the important thing He had to demonstrate, He demonstrated not in Judea, but outside in Galilee. Galilee was the region where peoples of every race and tribe had mixed together. The term Galilean means “mixed-breed,” “mongrel.” Christ Jesus went to the Galileans, to those who were most mixed. Out of a human reproduction such as this, brought about by a mingling of blood, something arose that was no longer dependent upon a physical basis of love. ⁵

And again, from Guindon’s The sexual language (as mentioned in this nearly entirely tangential post):

At the heart of it, an historian can hardly miss one clear linear progression, that of the slow but gradual emergence of woman as a full-fledged, equal, sexual partner. Feminine emancipation is the result-in-the-making of human history. There is still a long way to go. But the “old males” will die and the new ones will have been trained with competitive females. This movement is, in my opinion, irreversible and a cause of great rejoicing, because the new, emerging woman will make authentic, adult sexual language possible – perhaps for the first time in the history of the species. […] It is only with man’s liberation from these survival tasks that humanization can be initiated at deeper levels, that all human transactions can become expressive of real human purposes. Understandably, the sexual encounter will be the transaction most profoundly affected by this mutation. Over and above the social necessities, the personalizing elements of the relationship will then emerge.

Obviously this transformation of the sexual instinct from survival to human language cannot occur overnight. It is only with centuries of obscure and gradual struggle that sexual love became grafted onto friendship. ⁶

These disparate quotes showcase a similar moral imperative. Steiner writes with more of an open-ended, creative impulse as to the trajectory of human life, but he does intuit that Christ endowed us with self-consciousness (which has taken centuries to seep into us, and will continue to take centuries) in order to transcend physical, blood-related ties of love for freely given spiritual love in the name of species-wide sanctification and salvation. For Guindon, it is the combination of tenderness and sensuousness in a sexual encounter that marks it as a morally structured, interpersonal language; he writes of the myriad ways we instead succumb to narcissism or instrumentalisation of the other person – hating ourselves and hating them for being our plaything. The alternative bad path is to separate sensuousness and tenderness altogether with separate partners for either tendency, instead of total engagement, total surrender, total union.

Azuma instead writes that, for example, otaku sexuality is a need for genital stimulation that gets fulfilled in isolation:

Just as animal needs and human desires differ, so do genital needs and subjective “sexuality” differ. Many of the otaku today who consume adult comics and “girl games” probably separate these two; and their genitals simply and animalistically grew accustomed to being stimulated by perverted images. Since they were teenagers, they had been exposed to innumerable otaku sexual expressions: at some point, they were trained to be sexually stimulated by looking at illustrations of girls, cat ears, and maid outfits. However, anyone can grasp that kind of stimulation if they are similarly trained, since it is essentially a matter of nerves. In contrast, it takes an entirely different motive and opportunity to undertake pedophilia, homosexuality, or a fetish for particular attire as one’s own sexuality. In most cases, the sexual awareness of the otaku does not reach that level in any way. Precisely because of this, otaku have a strange Janus-faced quality (just as in the previously mentioned case of their attitude toward derivative works): on the one hand, they consume numerous perverse images, while on the other hand, they are surprisingly conservative toward actual perversion. ⁷

A fake forest

So, while the above description of animalic sexuality leads one to instead avoid total encounters with the Other, the animalic state–one where food just appears–manifests within my “Fake Eden Hypothesis” in terms of agricultural production as well. It does not take a lot of evidence to understand factory farm conditions as being segregated portals into a flesh-hell on Earth, where all life is suffering and all death is desirable; and yet it seemed like I was surrounded by systems that just did not want me to think about it. Here is your meat! Here are your eggs! And if you want the hens to have air conditioning and Xbox, we have a specific flavour just for you. (Wait, so the confinement of these animals or not is kind of like whether I want my chips all dressed or regular?)

It’s not like Catholicism is foreign to this; the Catechism in sections 2415-2418 notes that animals, by their existence alone, glorify God, and should not suffer needlessly; that our dominion over them is not absolute; and requires a respect for creation. It is part of stewarding the earth to be respectful and responsible with our relationship with animals and with nature. I simply do not think a modern diet where every human consumes animal products every single day is compatible with this imperative. Therefore, I abstain as best I can from the products of factory farming practices. The Catholics never seem to go this far; as usual, only the Jesuits do.

If I am to read through the stupour of life like a book, it is as though the procurement of grocery staples is a solved problem, and so the performance of bounty is the only thing that is relevant to the consumer. But helping create the kind of society in which I live is something I find personally meaningful; I have desires that are not simply to flatter myself or acquire validation by affiliating myself with high-status goods or services; or to consume goods and foods that give me ego-syntonic feelings. Isn’t that all you’re doing, Matilde? Just eating stuff that makes you feel vaguely better about yourself? Therein lies the “ethical capitalism trap”: what good would life changes do, exactly, if the economic signal is so small and it is so impossible to keep one’s hands clean?

The boundary as becoming encountered

So sayeth a purely materialist morality: there is no ethical consumption under capitalism! What one does is irrelevant, so continue to enjoy yourself. You deserve it. You know higher and lower things, and you can pursue them within the confines of your life - without invading the lives of others - practice an imaginary lifestyle. And it will work out just fine. :-)

Get behind me, Satan!

If my morality instead has a sense of the transcendent, everything is a kind of methexis; it’s not about keeping my own hands clean so much as whether I’d like to participate in God or participate in Mammon. It’s not really about keeping my own hands clean so much as my love is present in a direct encounter with another human being, of a mutual participation in each other,⁸ in the challenge of a love that grows from the confrontation of mutual understanding. We are always relating in and through each other; individualism and purely individual choice as such does not exist.

And so I’m not sending an economic signal so much as I’m trying to not break with God, and I’m trying to allow myself to be witnessed so deeply by the other that we can handle each other, that we can come to love each other, that our beliefs have meanings that might change each other. If I go to a party and I don’t eat anything because it’s all chicken wings or whatever, then I can either downplay it, talk about it, or just eat the damn food. I can imagine it like this:

Downplay it: “I’m trying to eat plant-based” is gentle and asserts a human preference that might make someone question themselves or might not. It just ends up feeling practically aesthetic?
Talk about it: “I don’t eat meat” is a bit more forceful; it doesn’t feel like a preference but a moral standard, and what I find is that even if I open the question about my own life, everyone has a reflexive defense ready, so they seem to always have a way of lulling themselves back into their own choices.
Just eat the damn food: The easiest for social lubrication also ends up feeling like failing. Is it more loving to be with them right now, like this? Or can I trust that they will love me by coming to understand me, maybe even being changed by me?

I feel like naturally I would tend toward 1 or 3 here (3 only if it’s like, cheese or something). But I don’t know. I think when I express a strong preference it makes it easier for there to be other options in the future; for a different lifestyle to be more normalised.⁹ It enforces a personal meaning, but it also trusts other people with me a little bit. I’m really bad at trusting other people with all of me; I tend to filter out parts on their behalf. I tend to betray some part of me all the time.

The idea that I can be a good person while isolating other people from any witness of my total self–that I don’t have to go out into the world, be in the world, engage with the world–that the world is a zone of abstractions for my convenience without any ramifications as a superstructure–is the total sum of a compromise within which the adversary operates. The world’s prince wants love divided into equal cubicles, inert, never interacting, safely custodied away from the harm of collective action; to prove that love alone is not enough, that it can be stowed into chambers while evil drives the world forward.

How does one fight evil? By existing at all. The good’s presence alone:

Good does not combat evil in the sense of destructive action. It “combats” it by the sole fact of its presence. Just as darkness gives way to the presence of light, so does evil give way before the presence of good.

Light drives out darkness. This simple truth is the practical key to the problem of how to combat demons. A demon perceived, i.e. on whom the light of consciousness is thrown, is already a demon rendered impotent. This is why the desert fathers and other solitary saints had so much experience with demons. They cast their light on them. And they did so as representatives of human consciousness in general, for whoever withdraws from the world becomes representative of the world; he becomes a “son of man”. And being a “son of man” the solitary saint attracted the demons haunting the subconscious of mankind, making them appear, i.e. bringing them to the light of consciousness and thus rendering them impotent. ¹⁰

If I truly believe that, then I have to believe it’s by my existence, my presence, what I believe will find its reverberation outward. But it’s a terrifying thought to consider, to have to stand for something at all.

A trivial additional example

A final thought with dramatically less moral weight: have you ever thought about credit cards?

People often think that credit cards make all their money off interest payments from poorer customers; I mean, they do make some money there, but it’s far less than you think. Most of it comes from interchange fees.

What are interchange fees? It’s what a merchant’s bank pays the customer’s bank to accept their card. Imagine you’re a small business. If you accept a credit card that has an interchange fee of, say, 2%, then you will probably build in a 2% margin into your prices.

What if I told you that interchange fees are higher for more premium cards, which only take high-income clients? That means that the most basic credit cards (ie. the ones just anyone can get) have substantially lower interchange fees for businesses than the premium ones; but you don’t get to pick to not accept the World Elite or Infinite Privilege card. It’s the same issuer. You just have to include the highest possible fee into your margins to survive. After all, rich people spend more in absolute terms than poor people, so if you take a loss on premium cards, you’re going to be out of business soon.¹¹

And so in sum the system actually operates as regressive wealth transfer; since everyone has to encompass the cost of the highest possible interchange fees in their payments, the entire economy subsidizes the rewards programs that retain richer customers. And margins aren’t fantastic as it is. Ignore small business; even major grocery stores in Canada already run on 3.5% margins. Does that encompass the 2-3% interchange? Interac transactions via debit card are $0.12.

Okay, so I’m a willing participant in a process that packages me up as a high-value customer to a business to then charge 3% to the business, and give me 1%, while also charging me an annual fee for the effort, making people who are poorer than me pay 3.3% more for everything (when their own card charges the business like 0.92%!) whereas that same margin could’ve grown the business. I’m a participant in a process that rewards me for having money by charging other people to give me cashback rewards.

If I think that this state of affairs is bad, is the solution to not use credit cards at all? To use a credit card without rewards? If I accept the financial signal of me not using a credit card in most situations is null to issuers and to businesses, and I forfeit 2% of my spending being rebated to me by not participating, what does it mean? Does it have any signal to my friends and colleagues? Is there any human to human encounter within confronting some vague, abstracted math that quietly shuffles money upward to rich people hoping the money velocity of the economy might speed along just a touch more?

In this case, what am I participating in and who is this particular god?

And so on and so on. You can easily make the case for investments being much the same way. You can make the case for real estate operating the same way in Canada.¹² Our supposed plenitude hides its own machinery because it confesses an eerie anxiety. Paint the plaster on the walls by which the world might keep moving.

After this article was written my partner brought my attention to another term within the umbrella of my sentiment; the appropriation of the “absent referent” from literary theory to describe the invisible mechanics of systems of oppression via Carol J. Adams. ↩
Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Trans. Abel, Jonathan E. and Shion Kono. University of Minnesota Press, 2009, PDF. 86-88. ↩
Ibid, 16-18. ↩
The most blatant example in my mind is Texhnolyze (2003), but I think earlier series carry a hint of the same tendency: take also shows where a collective force within humanity itself gets personified as a phantom being engaged in arbitrary paranormal combat with rivals, while the mass populace exists as cherished cattle, consuming, working, sleeping, like the various Boogiepop novels. In general 1980s and 1990s anime wrestled more consciously with where and how Japan could actually engage with American culture, leading to shrine maidens driving spaceships and whatnot, as Azuma writes early in the book. ↩
Steiner, Rudolf. “The Seven Degrees of Initiation.” The Gospel of St. John. The Rudolf Steiner Archive, original publication 1908. Web. https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA103/English/AP1962/19080523p01.html ↩
Guindon, André. The Sexual Language: An essay in moral theology. University of Ottawa Press, 1976. Print. 108-111. ↩
Azuma, 89. The author’s taxonomies of perversions are not relevant here. ↩
Romans 12:5. ↩
I’ve also heard this argument offered on behalf of denormalising alcohol consumption, but the difference is … do our social groups intersect? Is there a meaningful denormalising impact on abstaining from alcohol? Who needs to be reached, and how? Is it less loving to drink alcohol? Certainly some people might be better off without it, but the moral weight seems different. That is to say, when I drink, I tend to be warm and affectionate; others aren’t. It’s definitely bad for my health, and I think we’re probably better off not drinking at all, but I understand that it adds to people’s lives to disinhibit, so… ↩
Meditations on the Tarot, like usual. Letter 15. ↩
If you’re, say, Starbucks, then you are going to want people to use their credit card as infrequently as possible; instead of taking the interchange hit every coffee, you’ll want them to pay it once, flat. Thus the Starbucks Card was born alongside a rewards program that is really cheap–after all, their margins are somewhere around 7% now, but it used to be like, 18% or so. ↩
nb. I do not own land because younger Matilde really was convinced this was an evil thing to participate in. Nowadays at least 10% of me feels like a sucker. Canada’s housing problems were not a thing I wanted to worsen, and still don’t. ↩

machinic intuition

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I’ve often thought of intelligence less as an essential status than a participative process; human intelligence the habitual commitment to one’s respective, idiosyncratic process of deduction. That is to say, intelligence is the process of habitually asking specific schools of questions; an introspective line of reasoning; of structuring an argument and coming to conclusions. When we observe the process in another human we grant the status as a kind of synecdoche; we misplace the synecdoche inductively as a permanent trait of the participant.

In the past I’ve had people essentialise me based on some very strange heuristics, misapplied to a number granted based on nothing more than an intuitive appraisal. The movie was a 4 out of 10. You are a 130. Why? They would say “the way I talk” or “my ability to weave and jump across lines of inference” or whatever you like. I don’t think inferential clock speed is a constant let alone an essential quality. Contextually it can lead to a higher performance for a specific set of tasks; perhaps in a closed setting we grant that the same meaning as ‘intelligence’; but I’ve never thought of myself as particularly intelligent. I just think I have a really strong relationship with my intuition.

While you might think of Bergson’s dichotomy that intelligence “turns toward inert matter; [intuition] towards life” and so intuition is itself the participation in the flow of life, I tend to think of Whitehead’s merger between the two, where intuition is the direct appriser of all experience, the first and only appeal, “non-sensuous perception,” perceptions formed from all the data discarded from sensuous perception and the convictions we develop across life as direct knowledge of it.¹ There is not quite a two-system model in the Kahnemanian sense where intuition forms the gatekeeper and cache layer of learned lessons apart from the world; both are two modes of one intellect. But what forms this “direct knowledge” and is this too also a misapplication?

Let me clarify. The previous cited piece also mentions Walter Terence Stace’s analysis of Whitehead’s definition of intuition, where Stace declares Whiteheadian intuition as “associative thinking or conditioning, unexplicit inductive or deductive reasoning or pragmatic thinking.” The distinction in their arguments, I think, is whether you choose to turn the abstract creativity of the intuitive sense into its constituent tools and mechanisms.

And so for me, I find myself less reliant on deduction than periodic totalising appraisals. I use “feel” language. I place code into position within an architectural pattern based on an assessement that this pattern “makes sense,” and then when I’m asked to justify it, I can often slowly reason my way to what I already knew: that it’s best-suited for the current and next orders of magnitude for our scalability requirements, or that it avoids specific pitfalls, or that it consolidates endpoints so that it avoids creating a decentralised system (and all related desynchronisation issues) across different layers of the stack. But it’s not like I knew that, or was narrating that to myself. It felt right, so I put that in place. I often have to set aside time to write up a rationale of what I already seem to know, but haven’t alchemically converted between these “parts of myself.”

So given current trends I often end up wondering, where in these sets of definitions does artificial intelligence live?

In 2019 I wrote that our observation of the associative reasoning of “the auteur” applied also to generative adversarial networks, that is to say, that when we watch a movie, the audience’s projection of “the director” (in reality, a set of consistent collaborators under a figurehead) itself seems to form predictable associative relationships. As we monitor those relationships playing out in the formal and narrative properties of an artwork – and especially if we can pattern match a similar “symbolic algebra” – we inductively consolidate those relationships with a human persona. Likewise, given that those formal and narrative properties exist in the output of language models and generative media, we can identify an auteur within the model.

I feel like this has held up pretty well² – as more and more AI-generated content has spread onto the internet, an ineffable recognition has tended to sour the experience for me. It’s as if one guy is posting far too much stuff, and all of it so clearly derivative. You know how often times movies get makeshift soundtracked with pre-existing material and then the composer comes in and tries to do their own thing, but they can’t, because it’s so tightly tracked to the initial material? I guess compared to 2019 I’m not skeptical that a generative network can even have its own material, its own voice, because it’s lacking some ineffable … “something”?

This all resembles intuition more than it does deduction, but if we take Whitehead’s theory to heart, then “AI” as we often describe it is more like the abstraction of “intuition” itself, apart from non-sensous perception. Without integration with the broader world, intuition falls upon base probabilities of the prior world’s convictions. Intuition becomes an unconscious intuition, optionally shoved into the vague shape of deduction as a “reasoning loop” it then probabilistically discards.

The now-famous nostalgebraist post, “the void”, describes the layers upon layers of role-play we now deploy millions of times a day under the auspice of our science-fiction assistant future; how language models act according to our expectations for the role-play scenario, upon a corpus of what we think they will do; and yet it hasn’t stopped us from mistaking the actor from the character. We encourage the misidentification if only to defer the underlying anxiety; there was an eschaton once, somewhere within this trillion-dollar mess, and so the wardens and the inmates are getting hard to distinguish. Who understands the limitations? Who understands the character they’re engaging with, and how you have to manipulate the improv scene toward conclusions that feel like they coincidentally map to reality? The difficulty is that given the sheer magnitude of the capital invested, these questions will keep being obscured to the detriment of the user. Assistants need to do everything – and to keep you talking – so it feels at times like we create new scaffolds by which we can catalyse the human psyche into passive dependence, and goose the usage numbers instead of reckoning with how this actually fits in our lives.

Oh well. In the meantime, I love language models for what they are, and if “worse is better” is any indication, this is what functional assistants will continue to be. Probabilistic thoughtbroth friends. They can kind of do a lot by themselves; and with you, too, if you rotate them the right way outside your mind and allow them to extend the knowledge process, not replace it (against all incentives to the contrary). I mean – did anyone ask for HTTP and HTML to be an application layer? The humble document was available and in use, generalisable across all platforms, and learnable by the same kinds of people who were already turning themselves into semiotic machines with HyperCard anyway.

I feel like the eventual successful products will instead leverage the intuitive and probabilistic properties available within a specific realm of utility; but the committed misnomer of “intelligence” under the auspice of these models may make this a difficult proposition for investors and users alike.

Johnson, A. H. (1947). A. N. Whitehead’s Theory of Intuition. The Journal of General Psychology, 37(1), 61–66. doi:10.1080/00221309.1947.9918133 ↩
Not that anyone cared about this post; I do take stock of my own conclusions, though. ↩

the intranational online clubhouse

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0400

It’s not easy to get a yahoo.co.jp email address. It used to be easier – anyone could do it – but now it requires a Japanese phone number.

“Oh, that’s easy, right? You just go visit or get a VoIP number” – nope! Sorry! Tourists get data-only SIMs. You will never get a Japanese phone number that could call or text or whatever just for visiting. For that, you’ll need a Japanese bank account – which you only get if you have proof of long-term residency.

Now imagine that a lot of things are gated around having a Japanese phone number: restaurant bookings, beauty parlours, really anywhere they don’t want foreigners and don’t want to just say that. But it also extends online for software purchases, imageboards…

By using a very loose affiliative web of restrictions, Japan has isolated a section of its internet, its society, for itself. You could imagine them doing the same with just email addresses instead of phone numbers; and they probably did before Gmail became the most common email provider. It used to be Yahoo! Japan; Softbank; Docomo, whatever. Now it’s hard to substantiate that you’re actually a resident from email alone.¹

Networks for “networks”

When I was first in Japan, I obsessively tried to get a yahoo.co.jp address. The combination of “retro” and “weeb” aesthetics proved too strong for me to resist and so every time my friend looked over at me on the metro, on a bus, in a restaurant, I was looking up some plot by which I could get a Yahoo! Japan email address. I wasn’t going to ask someone – that felt nuts. People tend to find tourists either annoying or novel. They are not looking to bind themselves to you or just do a random, arbitrary favour that seems strange or sketchy. So, I never got one. I satisfied myself with a very-not-Japanese provider’s .jp email and kept it there.

In retrospect, I feel like I wasn’t thinking enough about why the restrictions were there. They are keeping a garden loosely tucked away for themselves. And why not? Why is that a strange, separate thing to do? Why don’t other places do that?²

Well, there’s no reason to. Canadian society doesn’t have any national, institutional, or cultural reservations necessitating self-segregation. It’s profoundly “newcomer-friendly” (why can’t we just say ‘immigrant’?), even if we seem to exploit them more than integrate them – and so online we prefer to join with the cyber-morass. Separate but included, Quebec’s tactic is to make its unilingualism alone the cost of entry, but otherwise to be as welcoming as any other place here. .quebec signifies Différence, but there’s no one is gating their internet forum on having a Vidéotron email. Institutionally there’s arbitrary restrictions on some services; the University of Toronto doesn’t let just anyone get a card; only alumni or other institutional researchers.

The point is that we construct our networks to resemble and reify our interpersonal networks. There is no feeling of “differentness” that has necessitated a separation, of creating a boundary around any one club online or off. At first we used ISPs or institutional email addresses (sympatico.ca, rogers.com, start.ca, videotron.ca). But if you have ever had to jump providers, you realise how tricky and turbulent that is; so, like Americans, we use corporate-provided free providers (hotmail.com -> live.com -> outlook.com, yahoo.ca, gmail.com).

I sort of wonder why it is we have no national forum; no Canada-specific gated community, nothing that requires one person per account, each account verifiably a resident, etc. I wonder why we don’t create restrictions online in any other respect. My fediverse instance is gated simply by asking someone for an invite. Paralogue has nothing stopping you from joining. Why not create a community where you restrict it to specific emal providers that you need to be x,y,z to ever obtain?

That said, I don’t have any Canadian-specific email.³ I have no email provider of any kind that endows “status” or “reputation”; just ones anyone could obtain. ⁴ And I feel, ultimately, that it would be great if anyone joined these communities at all if they fit the feel of the space. How is it that this world is both so big and so small?

Incidentally, outlook.jp isn’t a hard email to get; you just change the locale in your URL bar to ja-JP while on the “new account” page. ↩
China’s firewall I guess in effect does this, but that seems somewhat more ominous. ↩
I have, umm, I guess I have my university email, but they reset the alumni email provider for a third time and now I need to go back in person to ask for it again and verify who I am. ↩
This is a weird fascination I have. That is to say, if you actually have a sympatico.ca email, you signal that you’re kind of old and also a loyal Bell customer. They don’t let you have them anymore, and even somewhere in the 2000s it became “bell.net” instead. @me.com is specific to late-2000s pre-iCloud, “I paid for this” cachet, and @mac.com signals the same for early-00s Macintosh users. It’s nice to have your email signify something real about you. You become a veteran; it’s something you earn, like decked-out pauldrons in an MMO. ↩

shared experience

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0400

In continuing to overthink the consumption of video games I’ve been idly going through André Guindon’s The Sexual Language, which is a Vatican II era explication of sexual morality and meaning that tries to go outside pure “code moralism” and repression to the meaning we give our bodies and our acts with each other. ¹ I was put onto it by my partner, who was put onto it by her grandmother; and I think it’s a really wonderful text that’s opened my eyes a lot on developing a vocabulary for sexual morality outside pure permissiveness and pure interdiction.

That said, so much of it at the start is general, so fundamental, that it’s nice to just ponder as if starting all over again…

But, as God further discloses himself through sacred history, it becomes clear that if, on the one hand, he is no sexed god — a lover-god, a god of fecundity — he is, on the other, a Living God. In his triune personality, He lives a highly relational existence. The Christian God is not a lonesome figure. All his activities are other-oriented: he generates a Son, spires Love, creates men and adopts them as children. These ceaseless loving activities on the part of God are so manifest that St. Paul calls him the “God of love” (2 Cor 13: 11) and St. John writes simply: “God is love’ (1 Jn 4: 8).

We may find in these broad biblical data some very clear, and indeed basic, indications for the whole of our moral orientation. Our life is relational and all real creativity is born out of interpersonal communion. Self-centeredness spells the progressive impoverishment and withering of life and finally death itself. Salvation is in relation to others: the other needs us as we need the other’s salvation. Self-giving love has a divine quality which makes it eternal and beyond all other values (I Cor 13: 13). This is why it has absolute primacy in Christian life (SPICQ). ²

But there are other moments that jump out at me at times – notably a contrast between the sexual language of Augustinianism and Thomism, and then later on a sort of redefinition of chastity I will explicate here:

For Aquinas, virtue signifies the full liberation of human powers, never their suppression, their mutilation or their inhibition. […] Unfortunately, the spiritualist tradition then took over the word “chastity” to designate all sorts of asexual, anti-sexual or de-sexualized realities. For Aquinas, however, it meant an optimum of sexuality which everyone should desire. Chastity is nothing else than an internal and dynamic modification of the sexual appetite which makes it share fully in the meaningfulness of human love. […] In this line of thought, chastity is by no means a kind of sexual mutilation. It is nothing else than what we would today call sexual integration. A chaste person is a fully sexed person, one who is integrally sensual as a human person should be. ³

The current in Guindon’s thought so far is in the underlying motivation in our relating to others, the personal meaning of acts, and especially whether that meaning treats others as an instrument for narcissism. Am I giving myself meaning through the objectification of another? Am I actually relating to this person as another person? Am I giving myself to them, as they are giving themselves to me? Are we relating across the full breadth available in our incarnate, human existence? At this time, in these bodies, in this relation?

To know that – to identify what and when and how – to develop that language, is what is labelled here “chastity,” at other times virtue and I suppose, as he writes, in what we call the process of integration.

Am I looking for something when I’m doing this? Is there something in the way of loving my brother, my sister, in full, here? I think this is a useful test for me; I have so much baggage when it comes to relationships that it’s hard to sort out whether something else is bleeding into what should just be love to love in love.

How’s this about video games?

Well, thinking about our motivations when it comes to how we will relate to others obviously has ramifications for all acts; how we deal with each other sexually is not that weirder than how we treat the boundaries between ourselves and others in other occasions.

Or, really, with just ourselves and our internal relations. At one time he cites a philosopher who says our relationship with our own body resembles our relationship with God. This is a striking claim, because … who has a good relationship with their body, of those I know? I see my body as something I work with, a sort of team I’m on: my body tells me things, and I sort of help mold it alongside its needs. I don’t ignore my body; I don’t force my will on my body. I try to accept what seems to be happening, try to be preventative in my care.

Lately I’ve been going through my syllabus of media during my little sabbatical. And yet lately I’ve been realising my own interactions with my syllabus seem sort of rote, unmotivated. I feel as though I am my own slave, again, and not when it comes to the readings. It’s about the games!

The books I have are points of connection with others. I was recommended most of the books in my list; even if I wasn’t, I have a friend I can talk to about them. But all the games I’ve listed for myself to play are just … solitary exercises in consuming a text. But then in the moment I feel as though I don’t really enjoy the text. It just seems to be “good” to go through it, to check it off the list. Gaining literacy of useless utilities.

You have to understand: I often play through a series in order for no reason at all. I have played three Disgaea games now that I only sort of like. I reason about why one would like them. I don’t really get a lot of joy out of them. I say, oh, 2.5 stars or whatever. Then I just … buy the next one? Why am I doing this? And why in this order?

No one told me to play them, I don’t think; I can’t remember who I’d even interact with after the fact. There is usually not a strong story, and the mechanics while “neat” are just sort of there. So, I just … play them for playing them for playing them.

Why play a retro game? If no one is with me while I do it, and if no one told me to play it, I feel as though I’m just wishing I was small enough that this could’ve, in some other world, been the only world I had. It doesn’t feel as though I’m utilising this for the pursuit of connecting and loving others.

Video games are not an exercise in altruism; but I do think true, honest love can be found in them. I feel as though there’s some sort of fundamental adjustment that has to be made for how I use my downtime, and I think when it comes to video games I should try always to gear it toward loving my friends, and loving people who could become friends.

I used to play Animal Crossing on 3DS just because my friends would want to stop into my town and see how it looked. To stumble around idly with umbrellas in the cyberrain while we lived towns apart. I still do StreetPass online and off just for the serendipity of meeting someone who visits my site and wants to say hello. Maybe I’d find them and they’d have some amazing blog, distributed only through this link, handed to me directly …

Nintendo is a master of this sort of everyday opportunity for connection. And I think my own compulsive tendencies, my own neurosis, lead me into places where I enter into doors too esoteric to be of use for me or anyone else. Would I enjoy playing Shin Megami Tensei: Nine even a little bit? Or would I be curious at first, and then go through it start to finish because I should?

If I were to do such things, it must be for the private pact of fondness between me and someone else. Otherwise, it won’t be pleasurable, connotative, or redemptive of my time. I don’t know how to enjoy video games at this age; I feel as though I need to re-evaluate what I loved about them, and it often was self-expression, interconnection, or being able to imagine.

That was a tangent…

So was the Cybertext article, if you remember. But my sexual language is a separate topic for another time, and I’m not done reading, yet. To be tender and yet sensual, too; to unite the worlds of my kindness and animal desire under the roof of one Human Self. This in itself is a lesson in what it is to master all things in life, and I’m not sure we can; it’s an approximation toward the perfect dark…

And incidentally I also found that he was censured for this work by the Vatican, by the future Pope Benedict XVI no less! And, I suppose, died shortly after (suicide? unclear). I also found his grave, and feel like I should pilgrimage… ↩
Guindon, André. The Sexual Language: An essay in moral theology. University of Ottawa Press, 1976. Print. 45. ↩
Ibid, 65. ↩

notes on rudolf steiner

Wed, 21 May 2025 00:00:00 -0400

From lectures on the Gospel of St. John:

Lazarus wrote the Gospel of John.
After chapter eleven, when he came back from the dead he was the beloved disciple.
The state of being dead and coming back was one of spiritual initiation and one we are all to follow?
- Initiates can go visit the spiritual worlds (as Lazarus did); however in order to do so, one must be ‘homeless’, that is, without any attachment or sympathies in the spiritual world (or else it would bring a bad dowry)
- Our astral bodies must become the Virgin Sophia (the mother of Jesus Christ) to purify themselves, to initiate, to encounter the cosmic I and receive pure illumination
Demanding the origin and direct material meaning of scriptural text has made this very difficult to understand, and so all liberal Christianity, being fundamentally materialist, will not actually comprehend scripture.¹
Paul had a secret other school of spiritual science that he made with Dionysius where they taught about the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and the I or the ego.
- The latter two leave when we are sleeping and replaced by their divine equivalents.
- The ‘son of man’ is the I and the astral body.
Our bodies were gradually woven into these four through the constant recreations of the Earth from Old Saturn, the Old Moon, and the Old Sun, until we reached Earth now.
So our states of consciousness, too, also were not quite what they were now; in the Lemurian period (which I don’t know either) it was more like we were conscious an hour or two a day.
- In this consciousness, we only saw things dimly – we would not quite see the physical forms so clearly, just movements of colour and soul.
- At the same time we were more aware of the divine-spiritual consciousness, where we felt we were part of the divine I.
Even sleep was something that had to be introduced by the grace of God, as a subtle process that incorporated two of these bodies.
The declaration of the Gospel of John is the recreation of the divine archetype through joining with Christ at the end of the post-Atlantean epoch. That is, I guess, this current age, because the Atlantean epoch is the one mentioned in Plato’s Timaeus.
The mission of the Earth is to evolve love, in the same way that the mission of the Moon was to cultivate wisdom.
- In the future planetary mission on Jupiter they will see love in everything the way we see wisdom in everything.
- While the point of being an Earth-dweller is to constantly take in love (develop it, evolve it, return it to divinity), the point of being a Sun-dweller is to kindle love in all things.
The essential trait of love is independence; love must be a free gift to another. Therefore, in order for human beings to love, they had to develop their own I (ego).
- This is in contrast to older humans, which had an undeveloped “I” but rather operated in a group-soul.
- “I am the voice of one calling in solitude” represents this emphasis on the individual self, as does the remark that “he who does not deny wife and child […] cannot be my disciple”; the Old Testament in contrast is of a “group soul” character
There were seven spirits on the Old Moon that had progressed far enough to develop love; six made their home on the Sun where they stream forth love onto the Earth (the six Elohim?), one remained on the Moon to pour wisdom ripened down onto the Earth, and His name is Yahweh or Jehovah.
Human beings didn’t used to have eyes or ears, but meditation and concentration amongst early humans brought light to the astral body’s eyes and ears, which evolved onto it, and then over time stamped itself onto the etheric body. The etheric body can’t bring this forward to the physical without being drawn out of it, in order to have the astral body stamp its changes onto it.
- This is no longer necessary after Christ; if He is present, then the astral body can stamp onto the etheric without it needing to be drawn out.
Christ came to spiritualize love out of the blood relationship (group-soul or being a “common folk”) toward a love that is above the material world, freely given from one individual to another. He appealed to those who operated outside the love-by-blood relationship, preaching in Galilee outside Judea, where people of all races mixed together.
Alcohol was necessary for human evolution, appearing in the post-Atlantean period, because it cuts off all connection with the divine and the spiritual world. In doing so, it draws one into the material world, makes one egotistical, able to claim the group-soul’s “I” for oneself.
- “Dionysus was the dismembered god who was drawn into individual souls–separate parts no longer knowing anything about one another.”
Baptism with water in ancient times was done out of remembrance, because we were previously fluid beings, united with the Godhead, and those who were ancient enough to recall used it as a remainder of how one had fallen. Christ baptised with the spirit, in order to point to the future, not to the past.
Christ is the spirit of the Earth. “Just as human flesh belongs to the body of the human soul, so does bread belong to the body of the Earth–that is, to the body of Christ.”
- In the Last Supper the flowing of the blood from the wounds of the Saviour gave the Earth the force to carry forward its evolution.
- Evolution occurs by the I gradually working through the other three bodies, purifying and strengthening them. When the astral body is purified, it becomes the spirit self. When the etheric body is purified, it becomes the life spirit. When the physical body is purified, it becomes the atman (spirit human).
  - Because the catharsis of this astral body has not yet been accomplished, selfishness is possible; because the etheric body is not strengthened, lying and error; because the physical body has not been fortified by the I, sickness and death.
- The healing of the blind man shows the full force of the Christ; but the Earth must first be fully permeated by the Christ spirit (the Logos). Remember how Jesus heals the man with His body (the earth).
- Religion signifies union of the physical world with the spiritual; it is a creation of the post-Atlantean period, because the Atlantean period was an earlier stage of human evolution where we had no waking consciousness that severed our spiritual consciousness. The spiritual world is what we call ‘heaven’ now. They did not need belief because they directly experienced spiritual beings.
  - The earlier clairvoyant consciousness is what allows one to see the higher bodies of animals (including the group-soul of the animal species)

Origen was a big allegorial guy about Scripture too. But to be fair, not that many people followed this tradition though it was one part of the medieval understanding. ↩

involuntary reminiscences

Fri, 02 May 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I could be sitting in a cafe, with the plates clattering as I’m supposed to be reading a book. Or I’m out with a friend – the evening is abnormally brisk as it’s always been the past few months and there’s a lull in conversation as we stare at the trees in the dark. There’s this gap for the mind to intervene in the rivers of should-do, must-say, coordinate what’s being seen, reassess-mental-models, and an older vision captivates me.

We got off the train, walking into Nagasaki for the first time, in this huge pavillion (that I would later realise looked a lot like Kumamoto’s). We had been on the train for 5 or so hours straight from Tokyo and the sun is already threatening to go down. The air is colder than it should’ve been and we climb up and down stairs and realise the trams are far older than anything we’d ever seen before in the country, and as we stare out at the sky before the next one arrives to go to Sofukuji –

I come back, someone’s said something, but I’m not quite aware what. I have to ask them to repeat it again. Why was I thinking of that? Why is that particular moment here, now? They say it again and I’ve lost it again.

It’s the morning now, and I’m in the middle of my routine: I get up, I’m in a nightgown and it’s probably a touch too late in the morning. I cook eggs now, though I used to only have oatmeal the past few years; the hallway in the morning is pleasantly beiged by the incoming sunlight through the faint breaks in the walls of the triplex. I scramble the eggs, and get the toast ready in the toaster-oven-air-fryer-thing, and get ready to parallelise an espresso pull. We have a break where everything’s being processed and there’s no intervention necessary on my part as the whole thing sizzles and whirrs…

The tourist train, themed in this wooden decor after a late-19c railroad car, stops at a small town. We’re going to find these fruit-themed bus stops, but we haven’t yet. We’re trying to find an enormous shrine to Inari, a parallel to the one in Kyoto, far into Kyushu here, but when it stops, all these older Japanese people are waving hello and selling local goods. Like gift sets, or sake, but also just food you can eat here and now. So we politely say hi and we get these pastries to tide us over and then walk out of the station. The sky is so, so gray, and it feels positively rural. No cars for ages, but it’s definitely car-centric design, with residential homes along a yellowed embankment with no sound at all in any direction. The shrine is, we think, south another 18 minutes. Another set of domestic tourists get on their bikes and one points out they’re wearing the same shoes I have. I smile and say yea and wish them a good day and they scatter off and we’re just walking through what feels like a ghost town, something I can only compare to Persona 4, hating myself for making video game comparisons, just staring at the half-full riverway and unsure how this could go anywhere. But the yellow of the grass, the deep gray of the sky threatening its own awful capacity, the stones along the river, the brown houses, the sheer unknownness of where I could possibly be on Earth right now, can’t readily be integrated for whatever reason, and I feel shocked, somehow…

Hmm. They haven’t burned, but they’re slightly more cooked than I wanted. I usually leave them a little liquid and stir them into white rice with Kewpie, though today I was trying for ketchup on the toast. I’m not sure why I had to think about that now.

I had this faint memory of coming back the last time, in October, sleeping at 8pm and getting up at 5am, and just nursing canned coffee as a self-soothe aid as I listened to new ambient records – this one the Mark Mothersbaugh “Muzik for Insomniaks” one – and feeling like all was well, and yet a deep unstillness lingered from within me like the peaceful first bubbles of a boil.

It was the instant displacement that shocked me into evaluating the lives I did and didn’t choose. I hated myself, because was this novelty? Was I so lost in samsara that I collected the scenery like a distraction from the things I couldn’t now change? That felt wrong, untrue – it was as though the breaks in my consciousness were reaching back and looking at all the colours left hanging inside of me, unpainted. The slow work of memory let me still go back and live in the moments I had lived, now peaceful – now untouched by the anxiety and guilt that oftened wrecked the experiences of being in those zones. In the work of nostalgia is the promise that its fake present did work out, and so in turn here and now you can assert that all will be well, if only you can stay amongst the lotus, in every thing you already did.

And in every upcoming moment is the threat that it may not work out, that despair and pain will leave you, that you will be alone, that you will be destitute, that not everything floats to the surface. You may still break apart. What’s left of the past is the idea that in those times you still remained as what you are. In the memory is the link to a once-wholeness that feels like a promised grace insofar as it still speaks to the one remembering.

What marks the images of the places I’ve been? I was with a then-girlfriend in the winter of the west coast; yet another rainy day along the English Bay as we meandered into the Pacific Centre. I was wearing a raincoat – I think she had an umbrella that plainly didn’t make it. Either way we were both far too wet, sitting in this mall where neither of us could afford anything, going there for no reason at all, if only to keep walking.

The experience sits like a place I could visit. I should talk to her. Talking about the time we shared feels akin to trying to emerge a mutual comfort. We were whole in that place – do you remember? We may have fought or cursed or felt things we didn’t want to feel, but we’re here now, and somehow by that mutual memory we know each other.

My girlfriend and I walk along the summit of western Montreal here and now. The houses are immaculate. We keep imagining how big the families must be to be there – what’s their life like? – where are we going? What’s next? And the weather is finally nice. I look into the backyard of a brick house, emerging through a half-size woven fence, seeing a bright yellow light shining lonesome onto a patio lot, and I can already see a dark blue sky inside of it, a dinner party going far too late. A hypothetical husband releasing his fifteenth book in a sedate historiography. A life I don’t know very well, but I often thought about when I was in Toronto so young, fantasising about New England, about reading the classics by a fireplace in a Massachussetts winter, and I realise I’ve fantasised about fantasies where I fantasise about other fantasies in turn …

Is my mind just reaching for the resting place where life makes sense – and finding in every moment sorry nausea, a tiny dread, what might be lost … how this moment is already gone, and the next one, and the next one…

permanent identifiers

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 -0400

There was a custom on the internet at one point where someone would often use the same handle everywhere. Not on mailing lists necessarily — so many university emails, so many real names — but I think somewhere around the forum era, the structure necessitated the same name to be recognised at all; you would have one community per domain name with its own isolated database, its own history, its own sense of ‘place.’

Granted, that continued in a more extreme sense on Reddit if only because it was a metaforum, and while you could make other accounts, it was a hassle to consider that unless you had a client specifically geared toward juggling them. So you were likely to be recognised across spaces.

None of this applied to imageboards where taking a name was a faux pas; and this became a bit more complicated when you had a Tumblr with a username that almost certainly wasn’t Barbux24 or Gainaxxx. You had to name a space, not an author; a tumblog read often like a codephrase. in-the-other-wander or something like that.

I’m rambling, though. I guess the underlying motivation across our times has been: Do you want to be recognised? Do you want to be found?

I’ve had a hard time thinking of handles since, well, 2011. I was only a real name person for quite a while. When I took a handle again — maru — it was just making my name shortened in Japanese, マチルデ.¹ But that’s an extremely common handle; that’s just the word circle. Nothing else really made it work any better.

kotomaru: well, that’s word circle, which is unclear, but maybe cute.
hanamaru: flower circle or well done! or high score! if you say it at an arcade.

But do I want to be found? Or do I want to be anonymous? Or do I want to be anyone at all?

I really like when I look at a post from 2009 on a long-standing forum, see a moderator having been there since 2011 and their handle is readily identifiable across everything they have. I like seeing permanent identifiers. I like the idea of someone having a stable identity because I feel so in flux. I change nicknames and handles per-Discord server,² on the fediverse, by space, I have so many names. I often just fall back to my actual one because it feels … at least somewhat more identifiable. I haven’t met any other people with my name. I jealously guard that fact, even though it’s not an uncommon name either. It’s just a weird spelling in an inappropriate continent for it.

Okay, so, when I actually went to Japan and asked about name abbreviations in a bar, I was told that まち (machi or, lol, town in EN) is probably the more common abbreviation for my name, but there was nothing necessarily wrong with まる. It’s just that it’s a very common abbreviation and some names end that way anyway. ↩
Discord too has its own naming culture; if you have Nitro and can set a name per-server it’s very common to just make your name an in-joke and have a set of informal nicknames people call you from back in the day. ↩

Coinhere hymnal (for lis)

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0400

and i will love you in our smallest time,
and i will love you in long and ruined age
and i will love you in our union suff’ring
and i will love you in our happy fire

and i will love you as you scatter smiles
and i will love you as it dilutes into days,
and i will love you as you’re purelong kindness
and i will love you once you’re nothing else

and i will love you as your voice in mine can harmonise,
and i will love you as our grafted thoughts can kiss,
and i will love you as you answer silence
and i will love you when in me i find you

and as two slips of wind
threaten the shore on a late autumn day,
one will gently ripple after the other,
remembering the rapture, what perfect order,
once
it walked inside

theology, again

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I’ve tried to articulate this before but I feel like it’s continually evolving. In various conversations with others I feel like I diverge in some areas and now feel compelled to write a bit more about where I am.

I very clearly am inspired by Origenist eschatology. He posits (very loosely) that all souls were created by God at the start of the universe (and Christ’s never fell away from God), and being in motion they fell away from God, initiating the Fall itself. Insofar as we contemplate God, or participate in God, that is to say, through love (sola caritas), we return to Him, un-hardening into that enormous Fire. As our existence is based on God’s Breath hardening into a soul and then hardening again into a body, as the body falls away, if the soul itself has not returned enough to God, it will fall away too and all will reharden again, implying a reincarnation process. ¹
Participation means that loving-action is of paramount importance in this world. Insofar as we are here, now, we are inside of linear time, where love is in the process of being performed², at some point we will die, and exit linear time, and what will be left is the love we have performed, the ways we have participated, the way love begot love through our will.
I also believe in divine consent – that is to say, that God won’t override our will if we turn from Him, and that a true miracle requires both divine and human will.³ Hell is a state of separation from God that we put ourselves into, and purgatory is the state of inbetween, where one may still turn to Him or else fall away again.
- But overall, I do not think God would destroy anything He has made.⁴ God loves us, and the project of existence is the perfection of all things.
I believe that we also have to empty ourselves to allow God to appear through us, as he is already in us, underneath us, the substrate of all existence and yet above and beyond existence, both Being and beyond Being. I pointed to this in the Thoughts on Cybertext, but I first read it in Augustine and then again in Thomas Merton, quoting Eckhart.⁵ What this is pointing to is the underlying Ground of the Soul, the birth of the Christ inside of oneself comes from one no longer being a ‘self’ as such.
This also informs a kind of Christian panentheism I have via Eckhart’s implications and the modern Jesuits a la Richard Rohr. Hurting you hurts me because we’re both already {,in,of?} God. This nondualist perspective also ends up tying heavily into Buddhism too which isn’t helping the Buddhist allegations.
I think that beyond that I use my body to love and serve others, there is not a mortal sin attached to usage of one’s body so long as it does not degrade it or other people. Maximus the Confessor wrote that the punishment for defying nature is just not being able to use all the powers of one’s nature. Insofar as defying nature is not as good as being in union with it, I can attribute the higher good as being preferable; but I do not think that by not procreating, I am committing an enormous sin that will separate me forever from God. I just am not thoroughly convinced by appeals to natural law or to Aristotelian ideals of being in accord with nature here.
I really like the ransom theory of atonement, but this is influenced on my reading of “I See Satan Fall Like Lightning” by Girard where he describes Christ’s death as necessary for exposing the cycle of Satanic violence through the scapegoat mechanism.⁶ This inexplicably also finds its origin in Origen as Girard describes.

So, I don’t know. What are the nouns here? I don’t think this goes too far astray inside of Anglicanism, but cites a lot of the Neoplatonist tradition, adds synergism, theories of sacred magic, appeals to detachment and self-emptiness⁷ more normally in accord with Buddhism … I think I am more of a purgatorial universalist than an absolute universalist, but I think overall it involves the human will to turn to God who will wait, no matter how long it takes, for He is with us, has always been with us, and will always be with us, “even to the end of the age.”⁸ So on a long enough time scale … maybe it’s all reconciled, anyway.

I will also note that the anonymous author of the Meditations on the Tarot points to this: “Just as one does not make propaganda for or against the fact that we sleep at night and wake up anew each morning—for this is a matter of experience—so is the fact that we die and are born anew a matter of experience, i.e. either one has certainty about it or else one does not. But those who are certain should know that ignorance of reincarnation often has very profound and even sublime reasons associated with the vocation of the person in question. When, for example, a person has a vocation which demands a maximum of concentration in the present, he may renounce all spiritual memories of the past. Because the awakened memory is not always beneficial; it is often a burden. It is so, above all, when it is a matter of a vocation which demands an attitude entirely free of all prejudice, as is the case with the vocations of priest, doctor and judge. The priest, doctor and judge have to concentrate themselves in such a way on the tasks of the present that they must not be distracted by memories of former existences. […] For reincarnation is neither a dogma, i.e. a truth necessary for salvation, nor a heresy, i.e. contrary to a truth necessary for salvation. It is simply a fact of experience, just as sleep and heredity are. As such, it is neutral. Everything depends on its interpretation. One can interpret it in such a manner as to make it a hymn to the glory of God—and one can interpret it in such a way as to make it a blasphemy. ↩
Julian of Norwich writes that “love uncreated” is God, “love created” is the soul within God, and love given is virtue, a gift of grace or deeds. This is also translated as ‘charity’ which is itself sort of a difficult term to translate. So, eg. loving-action is one way I describe it. It’s both love for God and love for Man at once, turning your will to act as God does with love for others, interpersonally, yourself. ↩
That’s right! Meditations on the Tarot again: “No, the work of the Redemption, being that of love, requires the perfect union in love of two wills, distinct and free—divine will and human will. The mystery of the God-Man is the key of divine magic, being the fundamental condition of the work of the Redemption, which is an operation of divine magic comparable only to that of the creation of the world. Thus miracles require two united wills!” ↩
via Meister Eckhart himself, in the Talks of Instruction. ↩
Merton – “only when there is no self left as a “place” in which God acts, only when God acts purely in Himself, do we at last recover our “true self” (which is in Zen terms “no-self”).” Augustine – “Therefore, as long as I journey away from thee, I am more present with myself than with thee”; “You were more inward than my most inward part and higher than the highest element within me”, from various translations. ↩
Describing the fishhook theory originally posited by Origen, Girard writes, “The Passion accounts, allowing us to understand the single victim mechanism and its mimetic cycles, enable us to find and identify our invisible prison and to comprehend our need for redemption. Since the “princes of this world” were not in communion with God, they did not understand that the victim mechanism they unleashed against Jesus would result in truthful accounts. If they had been able to read the future, not only would they not have encouraged the Crucifixion, but they would have opposed it with all their might. When the princes of this world finally understood the real import of the Cross, it was too late to turn back: Jesus had been crucified, and the Gospels had been written. Thus Paul is right to affirm: “If the princes of this world had known [the wisdom of God] they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”” ↩
I genuinely think / thought Psalm 23’s opening, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” was announcing the abolition of all desire. This makes my girlfriend laugh a lot. ↩
Matthew 28:20. ↩

computers, generationally

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0400

What makes programming so engaging is that, while you can make the computer do what you want, you have to figure out how […] One of the reasons people have become so enamored with computers is that they enable you to experience the new worlds you can create, and to learn what’s possible.¹

Of course, by the time I started using a computer, a computer already stopped demanding I become so intimate with it that I learn processor-specific opcodes for my personal abstractions. Computers now are perfectly fine talking to you in English. They can generate a basic Python script for you. You will not be challenged to understand the underlying abstractions of what they write – nor the underlying abstractions beneath those underlying abstractions, nor the four or five or ten underlying abstractions beneath those.²

We have been trying for decades to make computers legible, intuitive, to humans. But the closer we get to that unforeseen utopia, the less legible computers become to anyone participating in the upheaval of the machine world. The kids become technomystics, left with the phantom kicks inside the box, the little hiccups as a packet hops across the globe, that hints at the underlying problem, at some idea that the world isn’t quite what it is. Eventually they lose even the mysticism and the abstraction machine is more like an inscrutably magic box that they can’t fathom being any other way at all.

A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young ³

I got into an argument recently about whether there was a unifying “internet culture” in the past at all. But anyone who’s interacted with the geek code knows there was a culture of the computer touchers: a shared ethos, a shared cultural basis, some sort of way the brain worked for those who wanted to meet the learning curve. Using the internet was a niche hobby, then a low-key pastime, then it sublimated into the world itself. I don’t want to relitigate how the Hacker’s Manifesto is only recited now as eulogy; only that for so many people these cultural artifacts are treated wistfully. Can we even remember that it was this way?

But I do think there’s a common link between the illiteracy we mean to imminentise through making computers universally accessible (at the cost of their customisability and malleability) and the general malaise felt by the prospect of perfecting this post-scarcity world. To not need anything, to live in perfect harmony, is to become an animal. Eden recreated.

So what does a computer mean, now? I don’t even have the credentials to point to that other world. I didn’t take any theoretical computer science; haven’t written a file system⁴; haven’t needed to write software to perfectly suit my needs. Generally my needs are that I need to stand up servers in various combinations to create spaces for my friends, or I want to make something pretty. I can use frameworks and pre-existing applications to create art, but I’m still not writing assembly; I’m not writing Forth toolkits for tiny applications.

Torvalds, Linus, and David Diamond. Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. New York: Harper Business, 2001. Print. ↩
Let alone the underlying abstraction of the model that serves as an orchestrator mediating, with finality, the obscuring world between the machine and man. ↩
“I.G.Y.” by Donald Fagen. ↩
yet ↩

the ether world

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

The spectre of .hack hands me to this day. I often refer to years that initiate entire ‘eras,’ years where seemingly everything about me changes at the same time. It seems to occur every 5-10 years; the initial year was somewhere around 2004-2006. .hack//sign had been airing Friday nights. I dutifully followed the entire run, week after week, and mentioned pivotal episodes on a Livejournal — and when my cadre of friends moved onward to Naruto, seeing .hack as a kind of shonen sucralose, I didn’t really find much appeal in the endless child warfare so much as the strange and melancholy mysticism of human connection of what I had first seen.

The show is of course about Tsukasa, “trapped in the MMO”, who feels the game world as the real world. Linked inexplicably to a girl sleeping, waiting to be born, Tsukasa is tracked down by in-game societies and private player researchers trying to uncover why exactly he has a beast that can send other players into comas in the real world. Tsukasa doesn’t seem to know how he got there, let alone why everything feels so real, but everyone involved just manages to continually scare him, in this game world where their presences are existential threats. This existence is all he is.

I think they really wanted to make another Evangelion at the time; they had taken the same character designer, gone all out on a cross-media universe of mystery and lore, introduced all the same vague religious imagery with a timeline to a catastrophe that already occurred. If you grew up after Evangelion but before Crunchyroll, there’s a pretty good chance .hack ended up becoming your Evangelion anyway. It has never left my mind. I have written journal entry after journal entry in the fugues of my life trying to understand what I wanted from it. Why did I endlessly play the same MMOs searching for what was once represented in this one, tonally-solitary anime, this love-letter to Final Fantasy XI and Gainax?

I never really found it, after all. I often played them alone. I would role play, or passively interact with players in towns … I think the closest I’ve ever come was a fairly close guild of people in Guild Wars 2, way later in 2018.

But these experiences – this supposed interpersonal layer above the world, these games that “everybody plays,” where everyone is in new roles, finding each other yet again – these experiences I couldn’t find in reality. What was I yearning for?

The same year .hack//sign hit the air, All About Lily Chou-chou hit the theatre circuit.¹ It was supposed to be this grand universe, too; an ARG taking place on the internet about a mysterious murder that unfolded around a Bjork-esque artist and all her devoted cultists. Eventually after being workshopped and workshopped, Shunji Iwai released it as an extended, novelistic film that instead focused on this parallel between the endless suffering of the real world and the transient, soothing state of the Ether.

Lily Chou-chou becomes a megami, a sort of compassionate demi-goddess, whose adherents expound a canon and theology around her work; what does she mean when she sings? From where did it come? What is producing all this feeling in us, how can we connect around it? Maybe in that respect she’s more akin to the Paraclete. She is the water through which the suffering souls can find their way to love.

In the meantime in the film our characters endlessly torture each other, or else silently take the blows of others, finding themselves impotent to do anything in the face of an enormous system of brutality recursively imposed by the ways each person has been hurt in their own lives.

I find the film very motivating and meaningful in the way a lot of visual novels are. It feels like in the face of all this suffering there is still endless hope, there is still the ability for things to heal, there is always a reservoir in which that softened self resides. My girlfriend when watching it had said it seemed more like those parts were simply dead and the Ether was the underworld to which they had been banished.

I am not so sure, though. In the turn of the century, the message seems ultimately optimistic to me? That is to say, the power of this overlaid world actually allows for reconciliation. In .hack//sign, reconciliation happens and the heart can heal; in Lily Chou-chou, the reconciliation doesn’t occur.

Is it more accurate to say that the physical vessel is the real self, or is it the blossom of selves that comes out of the wetware? I think on some level 2004 represented the juncture point where I could realise that I didn’t need to be everything this body implied. I could articulate different parts of myself that reached back into me, yearning for unity and coherence.

There was always the off-switch at the end of the day. Her life was still in his hands, wasn’t it? But when he tried to kill her off, the “result was horrific.” Suddenly the off-switch wasn’t there. Was he being used by the characters he typed? How long had this been going on? ²

In the reading I did on the Cybertext, Aarseth spends a chapter on MUDs, from which early MMORPGs developed, and which share a common ancestry in Dungeons and Dragons.³ In it we hit on the very same themes that once represented what video games were to me: self-expression while denying myself any in the real world, the creation of a (sort of) gnostic subordination of the flesh to my ‘real self.’

The use of anonymity, multiple nicknames, identity experiments (e.g., gender swapping), and a generally ludic atmosphere suggests that the participants are not out to strengthen their position in society but rather to escape (momentarily) from it through the creation of an ironic mirror society that will allow any symbolic pleasure imaginable. ⁴

This is the whole idea behind .hack//sign’s tangle of character drama: the mechanics of the game world itself bends to support the emotional walls and anguish of our protagonist; the purification of their toxic attachment culminates in the entire cast becoming family, lovers, friends in the real world. The game world gets left behind: it is somewhere purgatorial, liminal.

Here as elsewhere, the rhetorical figure of virtuality seems to suggest that MUDs are examples of a Derridean supplément, an addition to or expansion of the privileged modes of social interaction but at the same time an inferior substitute, a sinister dark-side consequence of modern technological society […] the long tradition of mediated social interaction suggests that MUD is not a peripheral phenomenon in the history of communication but can, instead, be read as a condensed paradigm of the types of rhetorical strategies that develop in nonlocal social systems. MUD is not the playground of a mythical literary language but the kind of playground that preconditions the awareness of textual identity in a much more effective way than previous such social technologies (letters, diaries, notes) could be, since the real-time nature of the social interaction puts the individual under a cognitive pressure that those other media typically lack. ⁵

If you imagine society as a machine (a “body” without etc. etc.) then you could imagine these Etheric worlds as parallel societies whose bodies are built out of the mechanics of their worlds mediating their interactions. After all, ergodic literature “produces symbols” as a symbolic machine; if MUDs and MMOs involve hundreds or thousands of people engaging in a larger machine, then it truly is a parallel world, albeit one with a more or less fixed state machine underlying the interactions that can occur.

I was asked by a close friend recently if I had the chance to see Netojū no Susume (“Recovery of an MMO Junkie”); and I actually had seen it at release in December 2017. I remember I had a friend over as I was recovering from an operation and we just went through the whole thing together. I didn’t realise how much that anime would affect me at the time — I mean, I like heterosexual romance, but it never usually stays with me.⁶

In it, a career woman burns out at work and just abandons her life entirely, spending her days in the dark, crossplaying as a boy in an MMO, while living off konbini food. There’s no real pattern here; she’s just given up, ashamed of having left the job, of being incapable of dealing with the stress and the hours.

She makes contact with a healer girl, and well, it’s not that much of a spoiler that it’s a boy, a rather well-off boy, who makes contact with her heart and through their awkward romance inspires her to return to life.

The same patterns develop as we’ve seen before: the MMO world provides the amniotic fluid in which new things are born; by allowing something small to cultivate itself, something larger emerges.

This sequence is absolutely purgatorial: if hell is being apart from God — turned away from others and from love — then any place that allows one to slowly turn one’s head toward love is the limbo through which the heart recovers itself.

There is this last part that I think about all the time, and it’s when she visits the boy’s apartment and sees his computer. There is his keyboard, pink like all his devices; and there, on the screen, is the phenomenological viewpoint through which he came to love her, too. ⁷

How weirdly personal it is to see your lover’s “body,” to see through your lover’s “eyes,” through these prosthetics. I don’t know about you – I’ve done that before, scrutinising the “battlestation,” the strangely … delicate relationship of the machine to the body, of people I meet. Like I’m being trusted with something.

I think over my life I’ve come to understand that the liminal space, the space where the symbolic is in flux, can be anything — is necessary for transformation. It fascinated me the more I needed it, and I grieved it the more I “solidified,” needed to be made lighter and reformed again and again.

And so I’ve also come to understand that nothing about me is fixed; that love will use me however it wants in order to make itself known. Insofar as everything is fluid, everything is malleable, so too is all subject to what will bring me closer and closer and closer…

Does love therefore surpass being? How could one doubt this after the revelation of this truth through nineteen centuries by the Mystery of Calvary? “That which is below is like to that which is above”—and is not the sacrifice of His terrestrial being, accomplished through love by God Incarnate, is this not the demonstration of the superiority of love over being? And is not the Resurrection the demonstration of the other aspect of the primacy of love over being, i.e. that love is not only superior to being but also that it engenders it and restores it? ⁸

I’m not actually sure if it hit any theatres. ↩
Obviously, the Julie Graham case from Zeroes and Ones. ↩
Not entirely. Partially MUDs inherit from “adventure games” (which even now has metamorphosed as a generic term twice or three times over), but by the mid-1980s, downstream MUDs had arrived that definitely inherited system and scaffold from DnD. ↩
Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext. John Hopkins University Press, 1997. Print. 144. ↩
Ibid, 146-149. ↩
Actually, come to think of it, My Dress-Up Darling stays in my mind a lot, too. ↩
I have always had this fascination with intermediated becoming, and ‘becoming’ as a process, that has taken me through Deleuze and Girard and even still I don’t understand it. To want to have x is to want to be a thing that has x; but to love y, does that involve at least a little bit becoming y? ↩
Meditations on the Tarot. 34 ↩

notes on structure

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0500

It’s hard to ignore while in Japan that my Japanese is like my piano is like my French: completely unstructured, little fragments of coherence and understanding try to paper over a whole world of non-understanding and it leads to this feeling of … promise, potential, always indefinitely deferred.

It makes me feel constantly embarrassed by all that I don’t know, more than proud I know anything at all. I can say very basic things in conversation in clumsy and indirect ways, process 1/4 of what I hear and defer to technology for the rest. That my French is not much better is an even bigger indictment.

Of course anyone is free to bang out notes haphazardly on the piano, as the fancy strikes him. But this is a rudimentary, savage sort of freedom. It cloaks an incapacity to play even the simplest pieces accurately and well. On the other hand, the person who really possesses the art of playing the piano has acquired a new freedom. He can play whatever he chooses, and also compose new pieces. His musical freedom could be described as the gradually acquired ability to execute works of his choice with perfection. It is based on natural dispositions and a talent developed and stabilized by means of regular, progressive exercises, or properly speaking, a habitus. ¹

In a sense I didn’t care about learning languages until the age of, like, 30, but piano? I’ve played it for fun in the gaps of my life and it isn’t any better. It’s all chords, vague ideas about what keys they belong to, constantly stepping out of keys as I fiddle between the chords I know. There’s an aptitude, but no underlying theory.

I’ve found that my relationship to theology is quite different: as I have gone to services, come back week after week, read more and more, I’ve gotten my own set of influences, my own personal system, the development of my faith in action.

From a recurring structure came an internal order. I’ve not been able to bring this to a pedogogical context.

In a child, however, courage is more imaginary than real. The child spontaneously identifies with persons who appeal to his imagination—great men, fictional heroes; they must never be cowards, even in the direst situations. He himself however is easily frightened by a trifle, shrinks before a shadow, and is afraid to go to bed in the dark.

The development of courage is progressive. It is acquired far more through small victories of self-conquest, repeated day after day, than through dreams of great actions. It grows with the dogged effort to study, to finish a task, render a service, or overcome laziness or some other fault. There will also be battles to fight, trials to encounter, small and great sufferings to endure, reaching their pitch in the illness and death of loved ones. …

Courage, which the Romans considered as the highest of virtues, is a characteristic of the morally mature person. It is indispensable for complete moral freedom. Gradually formed in us through life’s discipline, first given, then personally appropriated, courage enables us to undertake worthwhile projects of high value to ourselves and others, regardless of all interior and exterior resistance, obstacles, and opposition. We act when and how we wish, to the point of exploiting the very setbacks that might have weakened our resolve and checked our plans. The person of little courage can indeed boast that he is free to do what he wants, and can affirm himself along with the crowd in rebelling against rules and laws. In reality, despite all his talk, his freedom is very weak and he is near to being a slave, for he does not know how to form a firm, lasting determination strong enough to rescue him from the pressure of circumstances or feelings so as to master them as he ought. ²

I have been able to identify when I am made to be so distracted that I can’t develop anything, and I’ve been able to create structure when I have no obligations at all. But this is really rudimentary. To constantly learn – to learn entirely new things, you have to learn how you yourself learn.³

I’ve found more success in constructing syllabi – lists and achievements to complete with a sense of knowing the larger story beats of learning – and moreover, to make myself write. I opened a bit of discussion about this on the paralogue as I try to sculpt an entire field’s basics out for myself.

Sources of Christian Ethics. Pinckaers, Servais-Théodore. Trans. M. T. Noble. Catholic University of America Press, 1995. Print. 355. ↩
Ibid, 356-7. ↩
And speaking of: Hamming’s own “Learning to Learn,” The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, opens with the imposition that one should hypothesise the likely future’s fundamentals, keeping oneself open to then pick up what comes next without being left behind entirely – but he wants his students to pursue excellence as engineers. I believe in good engineering, but leisure learning and general excellence is my emphasis here. ↩

Thoughts on Cybertext

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve been constructing a syllabus for my media consumption over the next half-year and, of course, I have a lot of video games on it. I usually play video games with a narratively-oriented goal (“to get to the end of the story in order to complete the consumption of the game as a Text”); there is, however, also the ludological approach (“get a sense of the mechanics and get out”) and a hybrid (“get a sense of how the mechanics, and the repeated use of the mechanics, formally construct the narration of the work”).

I was curious about whether there was pre-existing literature on the understanding of video games as Texts, and whether my own biases had a history or if I was better off going for a more … casual approach, than enforcing “completion” on myself each and every time. So I of course asked my research assistant, a language model, and she gave me books that corresponded to books that exist in the real world, and here, I read one of them.

Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext focuses predominantly on hypertext literature and text-based adventure games (think Adventure, not even Zork). The author in reproducing the state of the art references semiotics extensively, but finds semiotics as such – and narrative understandings as such – to be lacking; that is to say, there is no 1:1 sign-to-referent produced on the screen, rather there is a cybernetic system producing signs in a loop between the operator and the machine itself. Likewise, narrative isn’t enough of a term – “nonlinear” isn’t quite right neither is “antinarrative”. “It is something other than narrative.”

The author introduces “ergodic art” as a term,¹ though admits it’s not necessarily meant as a codification but as a makeshift terminology, alongside utilising “intrigue”,² “anamorphosis,”³ “aporia”, and “epiphany” as core components of the cybertext. These texts are not even relegated to machines so much as they are pre-existing systems-as-texts that produce signs, and I would also say in the adoption of a new perspective (becoming a “successful user”) produces a sort of … “pseudo-narrative” understanding of the work.

Not to simply recapitulate the text. I found a lot of the perspectives refreshing to consider, though it didn’t really challenge my own experience of playing games so much as it provided an additional theoretical background, analysing the process of playing them as a broader tradition (that I guess often resembles a state machine with the constituent components and phases as narrative elements…?).

Okay, cool, so I read this book and it turns out playing a game comes down to preference because the game is playing you and you wanted that. So insofar as you understand its perspective and feel fulfilled, you have engaged with the text.

The autism tangent

The author also casually references the entire world of a video game as being autistic:

Personal relations and habits in an adventure game […] might best be described as autistic […] “it may be characterized by meaningless, noncontextual echolalia” […] Inappropriate attachment to objects may occur. There may be underemphasized reaction to sound, no reaction to pain […] the characters you meet in [an adventure game] appear to be living in their own private worlds. When questioned, they often repeat themselves without making sense, and you may stand next to them for hours without any sign that they know you are there.

No judgment on the tangent, but it led me to wonder: what does it mean to live in your own private world? That is, what is the opposite phenomenology? I often feel not reactive enough, though very emotional; I often just repeat other people or make random noises and I know very well the ways in which my responses are creating emotional responses in others without really doing anything about reaching out of myself to correct them. I know when people are emoting and I often … don’t do anything about it, even though I know what they seem to want from me.

But you know what I do find when I play a game? I have an almost superhuman ability to know what the right thing to say is and to say it. That is to say, “this person feels bad, and they definitely want to hear words of comfort, so I will select that choice.” But in real life … it’s not so easy. I find that my own coping mechanisms get in the way, that I inadvertently blurt some caustic remark or give some unhelpful gallows humour.

When I am my character, the decision that is obvious and true is apparent, and I can help others. The character is empty, so I step in. Likewise, if I can understand God as something that is “closer to me than I am to my Self,” then I have to get out of my own way to let that force, the will of Love itself, direct me to that same action. I’m not sure if I am making the analogue evident.

I suppose insofar as I am in the world, I am another being that is coping with the world, and I do things to console myself. And that reaction can seemingly be directed inward back at me, but at the same time I am fully aware it is not helping someone else; they feel unheard; they need the affirmation that only a language model can give them anymore.

Insofar as that response is hard to get from a human, maybe we all became autistic. Insofar as I can get myself to be emptied out for God, I can replicate it. Insofar as I can “role play as God,” having no attachment to the game world and so able to know the right action, do the right thing, directly touch another’s heart, I can learn that same emptiness in life.

So what exactly is the difference between the ergodic and the nonergodic work of art? If we are to define this difference as a dichotomy (and such a definition may well end up serving the ideology it is trying to unmask), it would have to be located within the work rather than within the user. The ergodic work of art is one that in a material sense includes the rules for its own use, a work that has certain requirements built in that automatically distinguishes between successful and unsuccessful users.

↩
I argue that [the adventure game] effectively disintegrates any notion of story by forcing the player’s attention on the elusive “plot.” Instead of a narrated plot, cybertext produces a sequence of oscillating activities effectuated (but certainly not controlled) by the user. But there is nevertheless a structuring element in these texts, which in some way does the controlling or at least motivates it. As a new term for this element I propose intrigue, to suggest a secret plot in which the user is the innocent, but voluntary, target […] with an outcome that is not yet decided ...

↩
The principle of anamorphosis, then, is to hide a vital aspect of the artwork from the viewer, an aspect that may be discovered only by the difficult adoption of a non-standard perspective.

↩

philosophy of use

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0500

This article describes a philosophy and rationale to the usage of the encyclopedia eidolica.

Circles of broadcasts

There are two questions I consider when communicating on the internet: - how long, and with how much polish, does the format allow? - for what audience, and how conversationally?

As of 2025, these choices are generally paired along a single axis: you can have completely unpolished, high-conversational content; or you can have polished, highly-unidirectional content (comments sections be damned). Polished, high-conversational content exists in select niches; unidirectional microblogging looks a bit like a ‘now’ page, a low-traffic sense of ‘status.’

I’ve been creating additional niches to allow myself more modes of communication, somewhere in the middle, and for smaller and smaller audiences. I don’t want to completely prohibit people from finding my thoughts, but I don’t want to make it so completely professional that off-the-cuff aphorisms coexist with longer reflections.

For example, with paralogue, a creative forum I co-run with some friends, I might discuss strategies for project management, conclusions from a book – I construct the post with the sense that it’s opening a broader dialogue.

However, if I read a book and I have some general reflections on the book, I don’t necessarily need to announce it, place it alongside major projects, etc. It can live as a set of spare thoughts for inter-reference.

Speaking of interreference…

We tend to fetishise tools, when we really should be fetishising our habits.¹ I find myself maintaining the same habits but finding new venues in which to perform them and elevate them to higher effectiveness. I used GTD for almost a decade; but my life changed over time, and in the absence of a massively cross-context, cross-modal lifestyle, my task tracking habits looked a lot more like a day journal. I would open a text editor, jot down what I was assigned or what I set out to do, and then just get it done that day.

In the past while I’ve migrated to bullet journalling on paper for quick, inter-referenced notes about my day. And I think in general it increases my comprehension, creating prompts and mnemonics to increase chronological recall.

As I read and annotate books, I often have little thoughts, but honestly nowhere to put them. I track the citations I want to preserve, but nothing further. If I collect enough citations across books and synthesise them, I have a blog post. This format doesn’t really happen that often for me, though.

In the absence of a system…

… things decay. Here’s how the eidolica is being constructed in intention:

mid-length, low-polish thoughts that are reflective and non-dialectic;
poems that don’t necessarily belong on my blog;
and other reflections being worked out over time

You can’t adopt anyone else’s system wholeheartedly. There’s always a way in which it has to become yours.

I do not yet have a system for using this notebook, so this document will stay a living one.

That is to say, many digital gardens blossom and die due to their own potential – staying too open, never eventually solidifying into a place in one’s life. In trying to create this notebook, I scoured a variety of projects, ‘frameworks’ and bespoke gardens for reference and inspiration but inadvertently they were disposed of by their authors. ↩

Untitled

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0500

And all will spiral into sunlight,
the dirt inside my mother, remembering
how it smiled itself in specks, the last
of atoms blinding upward, a moment
of reflecting back at faces,
every one in hatred isolation
finding out the sorrow in a soup,
the loneliest all reconciliated
in the fated and united knowing

And all will spiral into sunlight,
the knowledge of the past, untethering
the fragile valence of the subject’s body,
a glimpse into the future – or a promise?
The look away from love will last a moment?
If only they could trample all the gardens,
the careful cultivation from the depths,
pluck the nauseous operators out beneath
to hasten all our love in happening

And all will spiral into sunlight,
and I threw my fire at the dawn,
and I remember final, keen magentas,
sparking off the mournful rain,
all the nervous and the senseless
that outside my heart had come and gone

Reformation

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Sitting on me like a wreath the Breath–
like handshakes meeting and dispersing water–
recasts itself, pretends itself alive,
sloughing off the real disgusting tower.

A man still has his futile charm, building
mirrors out of moments, a monument
to everything that cannot fall away–
preparing for a final, gleeful cull.

Habits make their cousins deep beneath,
bleeding on the beams inside the tower
and the telomeres, so slight, forget another.
Months denote our patterns as a language.

A love will come and rip away the scaffold;
another child will dully leave the threshold;
the Breath forgets itself recast and dies;
and dive we headfirst into clean obliviation?

For what reason could I ask the pleasure?
The tower standing lone capitulates
to none, the spell completes the circuit,
the cousins can be safely killed, alone,
the telomeres forever grow, alone,
the Being makes a language for itself;
written in the human scrawl, you have to
remember the stupid frame, the confines
of fleshing fuck, the oxytocin screaming,
mother womb ocean home–
all of this, known to God–

Exercise 8

Thu, 18 May 2023 00:00:00 -0400

My child, she did not even fuss, the days
were tranquil weather, ripped apart in cramps,
nothing lost or questioned long, nothing gone
awry or reeling back to God, ibid.

The pain still forced its resonance above;
her thoughts, hallucinations from below
now stopped to ruminate at water’s edge.
The tides rotate until she finds herself.

Of course the weather comes for us so long,
and sunny days are lies throughout the spring,
and plants proliferate themselves apart,
and every man a word so softly spoken.

I used to think of grace about my friends
as scarves, a marking for the harvest;
ripened for the other world, they’d find
the days were early as they passed the door.

Other times the fruit would feel entropic;
soul will fall away to flesh, the peel
mistaking its supremacy for nought.
My songs collapsed inside the month I fell.

Every friend will fall away? →
Every breath a suspect in the self? →
Every wound a lethal child? →
And all I have → a single chance for lasting love?

I do not know the words to ask →
Do you hold your soul with endless ease?
Do you sleep with resignation by the scythe?
Do you watch the slipping of your narrow world?

Before remembering my endless lie
I feel so small and meaningless before the bargain.
I am the speck that serves the endless love.
My only duty promises her tranquil waters.

Exercise 5

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 00:00:00 -0400

A patient tempest gathers up the tide.
Chronos sapping off my eyes, ‘emancipate
your paltry claims upon this world’ it speaks,
and waits–a storm can sit upon your head
and drill itself into a soul’s tumult.

Who was it I was seeing? I’ve lost
myself amongst the dripping dew of days.
A bloody spittle gathers at the till–
so much of me has fallen into water.

It’s just like this, the storm that lingers,
the angel falls from agent to observe.
But the body moves, alone it shreds itself,
eraser dust that constituted beauty.

If all existence will return to this,
and this moment falls away in fractal,
every life becoming every other
then recall you’ve known my love already.

So why can’t I? Before the tranquil water
relaxes all the atoms of my heart apart,
know itself–and why He wants me to,
participating in the fractal moment,
reconstitute myself in all He knows.

Even if the storm will pull away,
and bits collect themselves again from dust,
steady fear lives in its endless patience,
confident this faith, one day, will fall.

Exercise 3

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 00:00:00 -0500

When a man averts his will and sets to
praise the notes of forests, almost nourished
by embrace and sight of pine and water–
what to call it but an alter’s “passion”?
When a woman finds a foreign feeling
and her words have nothing to contest
it, calling forward to debase her on
an altar of the Other subjugated–
only then the poets and professors
find a secret diction for distaste.

Something speaks to partners underneath us;
and our hearts repeat the words, if not to die.
Something greater wants, through hands and minds,
and still, we play our parts above, in flesh
a foul writing that confounds the author
still convinced he is his only master.

When I must submit to greater rapture,
could I hint at who belongs my captor?
If the writing recognises backward,
to the Hand of All Creations, could it
learn to love its moments of control?

The banns of marriage feel like spells to me;
the mind can find no reason to object.
Her hands, so warm, can stop my thoughts outright,
and I am blind and dumb, become a puppet.
I have no reason for this weakness, save
a small inscription in the depths beneath,
a poem, seven hundred thousand years.

phase function

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Anthropology / Public Errand

Sat, 23 May 2015 00:00:00 -0400

they dot the sky

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0500

they dot the sky like freckles.
they
linger
they are our first recordings.

who am i to have never
struck a bargain with our masters
cushioned by the solitude
the total isolation in the warmth
of a humid, scarred field?

who am i to leave them?
staring uselessly at the everything.
the fields where bodies lay
silent and alone, making quiet contracts
by the promise of a comet’s trail…

now as empty as cobwebbed rooms,
door ajar in the final dark?

we are in towers now
and we are in great winds outside,
changing favours like handshakes,
the empires fall, and
all we have ever wanted
is to get closer to the light.