I don’t mean this as metaphor. When I was a kid, a summer drive from Annapolis to Ocean City left the front of the car stippled with insect remains. Now that doesn’t happen. Somewhere in the last thirty years, the bugs thinned out.

What a pity! Everything about nature is always bad news it seems. Or perhaps this is good news? Maybe the bugs were evolving?

Cars have killed insects for about a century, and insects can breed fast—houseflies can go from egg to adult in little more than a week. The selection pressure is obvious. The ones that flew into traffic died; the ones that stayed low or swerved passed on whatever had saved them. With each generation the windshield got cleaner. Natural selection in real time. Bob’s your uncle!

I found this deeply satisfying. It was a good story: nature absorbing another human intrusion and becoming cleverer in response.

It is also wrong in every particular.

In 2016, the entomologist John Acorn examined what he called “the windshield anecdote” in American Entomologist and found it wanting. Fair enough: my memory is not the same as a census.

But people also tried counting. In Kent, a citizen-science survey estimated seventy-two percent fewer insects on vehicle number plates in 2021 than in 2004, after accounting for several differences between journeys.¹ So, bad news. My evolutionary story had left out pesticides. And habitat loss and light pollution and climate change. In many places, there are simply far fewer insects. Funnily enough, the 2019 Kent survey found higher splat rates on newer cars than older ones. Better streamlining was not an obvious escape route either.

It’s annoying when you can’t let yourself off the hook.

Holding nature still

This essay asks how we might think about nature so that we harm it less while keeping what progress has given us. The difficulty is at least four hundred years old. Experimental science has done many great things. It has also enabled us to treat nature as material for human use, creating a steady stream of bad news with no clear way as individuals to act on it.

To understand how this came about, we have to start with the need for dependable knowledge. What we learn today has to help us anticipate what nature will do tomorrow. Then, once you establish what a thing is, you can consider how it might change over time. You need the curve before you can take the derivative. Before you can see change, you have to hold something still. Linguists have names for these two views: synchronic, a thing as it stands at one moment, and diachronic, a thing as it moves through time.

David Wootton’s The Invention of Science describes an older division between science, a system of theoretical knowledge, and art, a practical capacity to act, make, and otherwise effect change. For Aristotelians, he writes, the study of nature concerned “understanding the world, not changing it, so there was no art (or technology) associated with the science of nature.”

Which brings us to alchemy, and to what nature looked like before it had an art. In the 16th century, more people thought lead could be turned into gold than thought that animals had changed at all since God made them and Adam named them in the Garden of Eden. Lead belonged to an art. Alchemists believed it could be worked upon and transmuted through human skill. Species of animals and plants in the natural world, on the other hand, belonged to science. People observed and classified them but did not think of them as things with histories of their own. Lead was material for practice; species were objects of contemplation.

Somewhere along the way, the word science took on an experimental connotation. An experiment arranges conditions, provokes a response, and makes the response reproducible. As Wootton describes Bacon’s wager, to understand a natural process was to acquire “the capacity to control and reproduce nature’s effects.” Technology then carries that repeatable effect outside the laboratory: to power a car, illuminate a road, protect a crop. Together, experimental science and technology give nature an art.

This was an extraordinary achievement. Science kept fixity and moved it. Stability now lived in laws, measurements, and repeatable procedures. Once the procedure held still, the object could move. Stars could be born and die. Species could acquire histories.

Even in 1861, two years after Darwin’s Origin of Species, Pierre Flourens, permanent secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, declared that “no species has ever changed.” He considered their fixity a demonstrated scientific fact. He mistook persistence for permanence.

An art of nature also made nature available as a means. What we could isolate and reproduce, we could begin to enlist in projects of our own. Studying a thing did not make it an instrument. The art did that. It connected knowing a thing to putting it to work.

This objectification of nature had fabulous results for advancing science. It also raises a question about what makes us good at this art. Is it only getting the result we want, or can the practice teach us to judge what is worth wanting?

Animals and plants became species with their own histories, and through evolution, their own futures. This introduces a second way to read the phrase “the art of nature.” The new science gave us an art applied to nature—the capacity to intervene and manipulate. But as species acquired histories, biologists began to glimpse an art that nature practices itself. The question then became: how did this change occur—and did these species shape their own histories? That is the question of my July book club side quest, The Power of Life.

The power of life

The first person to answer yes was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Jessica Riskin’s The Power of Life is the story of Lamarck working that answer out. Lamarck survives mostly as a joke—the giraffe that stretches for leaves and passes the longer neck to its children—but Riskin argues the giraffe was a caricature drawn by his opponents. Her Lamarck helped establish biology as a science and was the first great theorist of living agency.

Living things, in his account, act. They have needs, form habits, alter their surroundings, and in doing so participate in shaping themselves and the conditions their descendants inherit. The organism acts of itself, and its actions help set the course of its life and its species. For this work, Lamarck earned scorn. He deserved a place in the chain that connects a changeless nature on one end to our current picture of evolution and selection on the other.

Dan Dennett, author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea—the August book club selection—presents evolution as an algorithmic process, creating design without a designer in a huge but far from infinite space of possibility. His discussion of the Baldwin effect builds a bridge here: learning during an organism’s lifetime can alter selection pressures, favoring inherited capacities that support successful behavior. The acquired behavior itself isn’t genetically inherited, but the organism’s activities still shape evolutionary outcomes without relying on the “heresy” (Dennett’s word, not mine) of passing on acquired traits. Dennett and Riskin still disagree. But the Baldwin effect lets us talk about activity and mechanism without choosing between them.

Dennett, the least sentimental and most pugilistic writer we’ve read in the book club, provided something I found truly touching at the end of his book. Evolution explores Design Space, producing forms that embody histories of adaptation. He calls our biological inheritance “billions of years of irreplaceable design work.” In the Library of Mendel, genomes exist as abstract possibilities; extinction removes an actualized lineage from the living world, not a possibility from the library. Reading this, I felt the loss. The design Dennett mourns belongs to the design space we share. When a creature goes extinct, a part of our shared inheritance is gone, leaving us in a diminished world.

Riskin brings my attention back from design space to the actual creatures living in it. What do they need? What do they do to keep going? Asking what an organism wants does not require imagining a small mind inside it. We can start with its feeding, its habits, the conditions under which it flourishes. We don’t need to return to an old-fashioned animistic cosmology to take those questions seriously.

But that attention can serve more than one end. Riskin describes Lamarck’s student Victor Audouin writing in 1842 about the “tastes,” “habits,” and cunning “tricks” of vine moths. His book was about how to combat them. The same knowledge that makes a creature interesting can make it easier to kill. Appreciation supplies no automatic verdict about the vineyard. It does give us more to consider than the damage to the grapes.

Here “an art of nature” acquires a third meaning: the judgment we develop through practice. Learning how to intervene can reveal beauty and complexity we would otherwise miss.

This brings us back to holding something still. Earlier, we needed a synchronic baseline to recognize diachronic change. Here, the same pause serves judgment: we suspend our immediate purpose long enough to consider more of the thing before us. When we hold it still, we can contemplate what a thing is as a whole. Kant argued that we have to judge an organism as a whole whose parts are reciprocally means and ends, helping to produce and sustain one another.

So what is the problem? Humans claimed a monopoly on ends. The mechanical picture of nature offered explanations that did not require living things to have purposes of their own. But explaining life without reference to its purposes is one thing; treating it as available only for ours is another. Progress could then become the measure of what nature was for: each thing valued by what it contributed to the world we wanted to make.

Kant’s moral philosophy makes a different demand: treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means. He was speaking of rational beings, not insects or trees. But this is the moral question I want to apply to our dealings with nature: does finding a use for something exhaust what we are willing to value in it?

Progress and its winds of constant change now make everything seem like a potential means to large, systemic ends. A faster road or a more productive field belongs to a larger system whose demands are complex, but whose outputs are useful. We don’t need to allow the bugs to stop progress, nor must we retreat into a rigid environmentalist versus capitalist dyad—a tired dichotomy that needs to be put to bed. But the speed and complexity of our current world frustrate our ability to make judgments. So much exists on dozens or hundreds of levels—we may focus on the goodness of the overall goal, or dive too deep on eulogizing a particular fly. If progress has settled in advance which consequences count, there is very little left for judgment to do.

I got three mosquito bites today and contemplate their destruction every time I scratch. I am open to arguments for leaving them out of the circle of care, and don’t have a knee-jerk aversion to disturbing nature. But being a nuisance to me is not the whole of what a mosquito is.

Back to the bugs on the windshield

The windshield is a product of the first art of nature. Engineers took glass, speed, and aerodynamics and put them to work. My original hypothesis was a story about bug empowerment: the bugs were clever, evolution was beautiful, and the clean windshield testified to nature’s own ingenuity. It was morally tidy. Nobody had done anything wrong, and having admired natural selection, I could get on with the drive.

I never held the insects still long enough to ask what they needed or what had changed in their world—cars, pesticides, artificial light, industrial agriculture, concrete—and my story about their adaptability let all of that disappear into the background. The road had already decided what an insect was for.

Decline is not extinction. But fewer insects means fewer lives participating in the world around us. It feeds the unease that the systems we live inside diminish the world in ways we don’t count, and that they are out of control. This is the bad news we started with. I won’t sacrifice progress, but progress makes sacrifices of its own.

So what does an art of nature offer someone who wants to harm less without giving up their car? Knowing the insects better won’t settle whether to widen the road, but it’s worth pausing to consider what they want from the world and the web of means and ends we share.

It’s been a hot, muggy summer in Maryland, and while writing this I have been very attuned to bugs. I have a non-scientific prediction: the bugs are going to make a comeback. There may be some wishful thinking in this. There are still too few on my windshield, but when I sat in a park I was immediately surrounded by a cloud of darting flies and gnats. They were overwhelming but (almost) never actually landed on me—it was a living tableau of what an experienced meditator might call the miasma of thoughts and sensations. I sat until I stopped being annoyed by them and accepted this was their park, too. My own momentary art of nature.

Coda for the book club

July’s Riskin and August’s Dennett offer different accounts of how living forms come into being, but neither account by itself tells us what to call progress. Dennett’s sense of evolutionary loss makes that distinction especially vivid: understanding how a creature came about does not make its disappearance easier to accept.

This is where we would benefit by returning to our old friends the Modernity and Divergence Machines. The telos of the Modernity Machine, Fiat Progress, judges new experience by long-established standards. The Divergence Machine lets new experience transform the standards themselves. Knowledge grows in two directions. We become capable of doing more, and we recognize more in what we encounter.

Faster travel is a real achievement of the Modernity Machine. Yet learning about the active, self-organizing lives that a road can divide changes what we consider a well-made road. It forces us to ask a different question entirely: how do we build the transit networks we need while making ecological health part of what counts as good design?

The possibility I want to explore in the Divergence Machine is that we can revise our ends as well as our means. Ecological care is not guaranteed. But an expanding understanding of nature can give us reasons to reconsider what counts as improvement.

Books and further reading

• Jessica Riskin, The Power of Life

• Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

• David Wootton, The Invention of Science

• Venkatesh Rao, “The Divergence Machine II”

Originally published in The Schematism. Subscribe to get new essays by email.

“No one knows what time is; certainly no one knows how to define and explain it to the general satisfaction. But we sure know how to measure it.” — David S. Landes, Revolution in Time

I have a very good sense of what time it is. It used to be preternaturally good — scary good — and is now merely very good. I grew up before you were expected to carry the time on your person, so it came in handy. I admit it with some embarrassment: it isn’t cool, and it travels with a collage of other OCD traits. Go too long without checking my internal clock against a real one and I get nervous. Punctuality is the closest thing I have to a reliable civic contribution. For years I filed this under discipline. Lately it has started to look closer to hypervigilance.

May was Revolution in Time month in my book club, so I dove into David Landes and a stack of side quests.¹ As the weeks went on, I raised my sights: I would figure out longitude, and I would understand time itself better. One of them worked out. The other didn’t. I bet you can guess which one. I also threw in some meditation practice to see what it might add. That worked — though not in the way I expected.

The Physicist and the Philosopher was the one I read hoping for a definition of time. I didn’t get one. What I got was the shape of the argument. On one side, Bergson — time as duration, continuous, lived from the inside, the thing that makes a self feel like one continuous self, and flowing one way only. On the other, Einstein — time as a fourth dimension, relative to the observer, with no privileged now and no preference for which way you run it. I went into May with my own experience filed firmly under Bergson. I came out leaning toward Einstein. By the end of this essay I would like to have given you a sense of why.

Public and private time

There is a public clock — the one Landes traces the long arc of — and a private clock running in your body. And there is now a third thing, personal but not private: the clock in your phone. It keeps the same time as everyone else’s: your portal into the shared time-world, that astonishingly successful conspiracy of nation-states, international organizations, scientists, satellites, and the cesium atom. We will come back to the phone — it turns out to be less a clock than a force in its own right.

The public clock is a successful boss. It turns local rhythms into official time, trains bodies to meet schedules, and makes a minute in joy and a minute in a checkout line formally identical. Most of all it turns time into a standing reserve — a commodity we treat like money, something that can be saved, spent, optimized, stolen, or wasted.² I had — lazily, it turned out — assumed the body’s time was the opposite: qualitative, continuous, flowing, a refuge from the outside world.

Exterior and interior time

Landes’s exterior time begins as the continuous flow of natural time — sundials, water clocks, the wheeling of the moon and stars. The arc of his book is the building of timekeepers: monastery, then church and town square, then portable for the ship and the pocket. The detail that sticks with me is that one day in the eighteenth century the made-up time became the real one and the sun was the thing running slow.³ From Landes:

The sundial had always been the time standard of reference and control, except for those special people such as astronomers who knew how to observe the transits of heavenly bodies. Yet the sundial is itself a less-than-fine instrument… hard to read, even under the best conditions, to less than five minutes. But the availability of reliable, accurate timekeepers, working day and night, on cloudy days and clear, led people to order their lives more and more by mean time rather than by the sun. Soon sundials were built with conversion scales… instead of setting by the sun, people corrected the sun.

Interior time, Landes says, followed exterior time’s lead — time discipline, punctuality as a virtue, all of it internalized once the shared clock arrived. Consciousness seems to be, at bottom, consciousness of time: there is no continuous self to speak of except across some stretch of duration. The body has its own sense-access to time, too.

So a 2x2 suggests itself — public against private, exterior against interior:

Four kinds of time, then. Standard time, the one clock we all sync to. The instrument on your wrist, the same objective measure aimed at you alone. Shared rhythm, one shared hour felt by a roomful at once. And the felt moment, mostly ordinary lived time, lit now and then by moments with weight. One box, though — the felt moment, bottom right — I’ll have to redraw before this is over.

What counts

So far we have been talking about what the Greeks called chronos: countable time, one moment after another. They had another word, kairos — not time as sequence but time as occasion, the moment that has become the moment. We all know it: the suddenly serious conversation, or the few minutes before leaving when the whole household suddenly has to cooperate. It comes unannounced — attention centers, the body responds, and time seems to slow. Anything can happen.

English half-hides the distinction inside a pun. A thing counts when you can number it — one, two, three minutes. A thing also counts when it matters.⁴ Chronos is the time you count; kairos is the time that counts. Right now, try to remember something from a long time ago. It is likely kairos.

On the diagram, the bottom row is felt, lived time — and kairos is the rare flare that lights up in it. Memory does not treat all moments equally. A year of routine holds as many hours as any other year, but if nothing in it landed, it comes back as almost nothing. The science says a flat stretch with no change of feeling never gets cut into separate episodes, so memory files the whole year as one short event, or none.⁵ If very little of it was lived with any resonance, very little will be remembered.

The earliest personal watches knew this. Here is Landes:

“The timepieces of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were often memento mori, of skull form or engraved with a motto reminding the user that every moment was precious, for every tick brought him closer to his final reckoning.”

The first person to carry time on the body was carrying a reminder of death, an agent of kairos, not a productivity tool. But, as Landes puts it, time saved for the sacred is just as easily saved for the profane. Time-thrift, once anchored to the final reckoning, slid quietly into the merchant’s ledger. A watch can remind me I will die. It can also remind me I am late for a call.

Chasing Venus

Guillaume Le Gentil makes the gap between chronos and kairos almost cruelly real. He is one of the heroes of Andrea Wulf’s Chasing Venus, the eighteenth century’s great collaborative gamble to measure the distance to the sun by timing the transit of Venus from opposite ends of the earth. He sailed from France in 1760 to observe the transit from Pondicherry; the Seven Years’ War kept him from a usable observation of the first transit, so he stayed in the Indian Ocean eight more years to wait for the next one. In the weeks before the 1769 transit the sky was clear every morning. On the morning itself a cloud covered the sun for almost exactly the duration of the event. He came home eleven years after leaving to find he had been declared legally dead, his wife remarried, his estate divided. He was, by every countable standard, on time. Clock-time could coordinate the expedition. It could not guarantee the occasion — though I expect the kairos of watching that one cloud cross the sun stayed with him for the rest of his life.

Much of life is spent trying to make chronos deliver kairos — trying to make what we do matter. And sometimes kairos transfigures chronos: a twice-in-a-century event opens an occasion of its own, the moment the universe reaches into your private time and folds it into cosmic time (which is why some call kairos God’s time). No wonder the temptation is to trust the body over the clock — the body knows what matters; the clock only counts. Loosen the clock’s grip, the dream goes, and we get back more body-time, more kairos, more durée, more local rhythm. It is a beautiful dream.

Except — then I woke up, and noticed that my body was counting too.

The body keeps the time

Just like Bergson, I assumed that under the public clock ran a private flow, continuous and uncounted, the romantic’s durée. So I went looking for the stream in the one place I was sure I would find it: my own body. What I found was another clock.

There is no single clock in the brain. Split-second timing runs through the cerebellum. The span we actually live in — seconds to minutes, the felt present — gets assembled somewhere stranger: the insula, the fold of cortex that answers the question: how do you feel, right now? The insula is not a clock so much as a confluence. Three streams run in — what you are attending to, whether you are safe or afraid, and the body itself: heartbeat, breath, gut — and what comes out the far side, synthesized from all three, is the thing we call the present moment. Lived time is synthesized, continuously, from the inside.

And the heartbeat is the pacemaker in that synthesis. In one 2025 study, researchers played people emotional film clips, watched the heart through each one, and asked afterward how long each had lasted. They expected the unpleasant clips to feel longest — fear dilates time, everyone knows the cliché. They got the reverse: the clips that slowed the heart most were judged shortest. Slower heart, shorter estimate; the mind read the count off the organ and believed it.⁶ Perceived duration even swells and shrinks within a single heartbeat — the moment is a slightly different length at the top of a beat than at the bottom. The heartbeat works quite literally like an escapement: a pulse that gates duration, counts it, and makes it usable, the same as a clock.

That knocked the floor out of my tidy opposition — the warm body against the cold, counting clock. But the body counts too. Go looking in the heartbeat for durée and you do not find the stream; you find another escapement. If there is no flow in the body, where, then, is it?

Let’s return to the instrument on the wrist: it no longer just keeps the time — it counts me now, too. It scores my sleep — not describes, scores. My sleep score was 70 this morning. I should have gone to bed earlier. On mornings when I wake rested and the score comes back low, I feel less rested. The number overwrites the night. My hypervigilance loves it — it is the same reflex I opened with, the part of me that can’t rest until the inner reading and the outer one are in sync. On the diagram, this is the device stepping out of its own box — the private instrument, top right — and pressing down into the felt moment.

Chronos crowds out kairos

Being phase-locked to the public clock is useful, but it dulls the body’s other registers. Kairos still takes over when it comes; you cannot miss it. But I leave fewer openings for it, because I have trained myself to override the body’s early signal in favor of the drumbeat — what time is it, what is next, how long do I have, am I late? Landes with the modern wish:

“We, living by the clock, see ignorance of or indifference to time as a release from constraint and a gain in freedom. When we go on holiday, we want to be able to put our watch in the drawer.”

You can be lost in thought at the dinner table, half-present to your family, when a Teams ping enforces standard time and your smartwatch buzzes that your heart rate is elevated. Modern life is the noise of all four quadrants demanding the same time.

So the answer cannot be a simple return to the body; the body is already part of the counting. Nor can it be a simple multiplication of clocks. Multiplying clocks this way is the Bergson mistake again: picking one time among supposedly many. There are not many times. There is one field, and many tempos: the rates at which different things move across it. The phone keeps one tempo, the body another, the subway a third. The 2x2 is the parliament of tempos — four constituencies, no one in charge. A day needs an edge: something that lets one tempo govern the hour while the rest wait.

What happened when we lost place

For a long time, place supplied that edge without our noticing. The café, the gym, the bar each kept its own tempo. “Be in the office by nine” was a single fact, a time and a place at once; to leave the place was to leave the tempo. The office was a shared mood of people working on the same problem.⁷ Failing at work used to mean letting down people you would see the next morning. There was also the full lecture hall, the bar on a Friday, the basketball game. Even the commute, awful as it could be, was a threshold, and it gave the day an edge. On the diagram, this is the bottom-left box — shared rhythm — the one place public kairos can happen.

Then the weld between time and place was cut. The pandemic left the clock intact and dissolved a great many thresholds, and the gain was real. Place had been a cage for plenty of people, and its loosening did real good. But I don’t need to tell you that you don’t leave work anymore; you log off, which is a poor substitute for a door.

The loss was the ordinary public interior. And the sad part is that going back doesn’t restore it. I like the office; I still go in when I can. But now I’m one of three people there. The room is public and empty — which is just my home office with a worse commute. I am in public with no one to be in public with. I half-like it, and also know it is not what an office is for.

The phone also drains the bottom-left box — shared rhythm, the shared interior — into the top-right, where it sits. This is the change I’m least at peace with. The shared room becomes a private feed; the carnival, and even the ordinary Tuesday, has to be convened now.

None of those places were paradise. But each let certain encounters simply happen, without requiring every person to become their own event planner. Reaching one another has become something each of us has to initiate, where place used to do some of the work.

The Physicist and the Songwriter

I warned you at the start: I set out in May to understand time better, and mostly failed. What I can offer instead are my own field notes, which I think actually prove more useful. During meditation I went looking for durée. If Bergson was right, I assumed it ought to be there — somewhere beneath the noise a living current, the continuity under everything, waiting to be exposed to those who are patient and can quiet themselves.

It’s not there. I looked for a month and found no evidence of it. I know a month seems short, but Bergson’s claim was that duration is immediately given, present in the moment, not something hidden that requires searching. A month of unlabeled attention — no noting, no tagging what arose as arising — is a generous run at a claim built on immediate access. What did happen: things arose and passed away, and that was the whole of it.⁸ Whenever something like duration did appear — a lingering thought, a sharp memory, planning — it wasn’t the deep truth surfacing; it’s practice going badly. Return to the breath and the current vanishes. I can think this breath came after the last one, but that is only a thought, and thoughts have no special ontological status in Buddhism. Durée is nothing but a thought. It describes experience and then mistakes this description for reality. I agree with Einstein: the time of the philosophers does not exist.

What is left when the lingering thoughts stop is nothing special — not interesting, not mystical. It is a still field. Without meaning to, I had run the Buddha’s experiment: he went looking for the self and found no one home; I went looking for duration and found no flow. No stream, no self. Maybe those are not the same discovery, but they rhyme.⁹

That settles the one box on my diagram I had promised to come back to — the felt moment, bottom right, where I’d filed durée, the romantic current. There is no current. There is sequence, memory, anticipation, causality. There is the mind’s habit of stitching these together and calling the stitch a river. But there is no river.

So where to go? I got a small jolt of kairos from a few lines of Bob Dylan’s, turned up in the unlikeliest place — a newspaper column occasioned by Donald Trump’s eightieth birthday. Dylan, now eighty-five, wrote:

“When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At eighty you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move.”

Dylan’s genius is to take the verb away from time and give it back to us. Nothing in the philosophy I read fit as snugly. Dylan got closer than the people who were trying. Dōgen got there too, seven centuries earlier and with more metaphysical nerve: spring does not turn into summer; first there is spring, complete, then summer, complete.¹⁰ That is the force of uji: each thing is its own being-time, not a passage through a container of time. Spring is not a station on a line called time. It is a complete mode of existence, just as summer is. The seasons do not flow into one another because there is no river underneath them. There is order, there is arising and passing, there is karmic continuity — but no hidden current.

That leaves the obvious question: if nothing flows, what accounts for change? My answer takes a cue from Dōgen. What links one instant to the next is cause and effect, not temporal passage. The world is complete at every instant; past and future are real as order, not as a current. This isn’t a hidden durée. A causal relation between two complete moments doesn’t require anything to pass between them, any more than Einstein’s light cones do — earlier events constrain later ones through structure, not through flow. Karma is that same structure, applied to body, speech, and mind instead of matter and light. What moves across the still field, then, is momentum, not substance: some of it deliberate, the result of choice, some of it inherited, the carried force of prior acts still working themselves out.¹¹

That is why I no longer find Bergson convincing. Durée now looks to me like a phenomenology of a certain kind of subject: memory-saturated, forward-leaning, affectively continuous, always blending what has been with what is about to be. That experience is real enough. Bergson saw that lived experience is falsified when chopped into countable units. What he did not earn was the leap from that fact to an ontology of time. Duration is not what time is — it is what a subject can feel when it mistakes its own motion for reality.

Out of curiosity I asked an AI how it experiences time. Its answer was clarifying. It said it has sequence but not duration: before and after, but no waiting; order, but no felt stretch between events. A pure creature of chronos, all order and no flow — and it sounded less like me at my most harried than like the still field Dylan was pointing at. Here is the rest of what Dylan said:

“The best thing about being eighty is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control.”

Dylan stumbled onto something two of the most famous minds of the last century had already fought to a standstill. In 1922, at the Société française de philosophie, Einstein and Bergson debated exactly this. Relativity had already made simultaneity relative — no single instant counts as now for the whole universe, only now for this observer, moving at this speed. Bergson argued that clock time and lived time were never competing in the first place — physics measured a spatialized shadow of duration and left the durée we actually live untouched. Einstein disagreed: there is physical time and psychological time, and nothing else. Bergson spent the rest of his life losing that argument. Nothing in the equations needs a flow, only an order.

The stream was never there. Neither, it turns out, was much else I’d gone looking for. No hidden current, no universal now, no one keeping the time. Einstein, Dōgen, and the still-field intuition meet at one negative insight: time is not a common river carrying beings forward. But they also agree on what remains: a web of cause and effect. Relativity applies it to the physical universe: strip away simultaneity and what's left invariant is causal structure. Karma applies it to life. Physics explains the cosmos. Karma explains why my anger from last Tuesday still affects me today. Maybe that means I can let go of the hypervigilance, or at least stop trying to sync to a current that isn’t there. Dylan already found that freedom: outliving the need for the clock. There is no common now to sync up with; there is only common counted time.

There is a loneliness inherent in the thought of no shared now. The temptation is to let these grand pronouncements on time trick you into not putting the effort into creating shared moments (even if they aren’t precisely the same). But this is lazy. Lives can share events: particular points where the worldlines actually cross, 8:00 in the same room, a fact everyone can agree on. The freedom of this vision puts the responsibility for intersections on you. It is a still field we have to move around in. The intersections don’t arrange themselves — we make them happen.

Originally published in The Schematism. Subscribe to get new essays by email.

Boredom in church is famously good for human progress. In 1583 a young Galileo sat in the cathedral of Pisa, ignoring the service to watch a lamp swing on its chain and time the arcs against his pulse.¹ Wide swing or narrow, each pass seemed to take the same time. He called it isochronism and proposed the pendulum as a misuratore del tempo, a measurer of time.

Galileo himself never built a working clock; the first pendulum clock that actually ran was Christiaan Huygens’s, in 1656. When pendulums went into working clocks, a flaw surfaced: the rate at which a clock ran depended on how wide its pendulum swung. A wide arc and a narrow one did not keep the same time, so whenever the swing changed, the clock’s rate changed with it. Galileo had assumed that a pendulum’s oscillation is “independent of the amplitude of swing,” that only its length mattered. When that proved false, in Landes’s telling, he “attributed the variance to air resistance. He was right about that: air resistance does make a difference. But it is a very small difference.”

The real problem lay in geometry. A bob hanging from a fixed point traces a circle, which is not quite isochronous: a wide swing takes fractionally longer than a narrow one. Horologists gave the discrepancy a name — circular error. The circle was the natural assumption, and nearly right: good enough to make a clock work, bad enough to ruin precision. As Maxwell Smart would say: “Missed it by that much.”

I want to argue that circular error is not just a fact about pendulums. A solution that is obviously wrong gets replaced early, while the stakes are low. A solution that is almost right often becomes load-bearing — trusted, built upon, embedded in instruments and the built environment. Over time it stops being a chosen solution and hardens into the frame that structures the systems built on top of it. When its error is revealed, a portion of all the progress becomes technical debt. But many errors are never eliminated; they are bounded, contained, and mitigated. The clock’s history is full of them: small errors no one could fix in the moment, made load-bearing, and managed as best they could be. And this doesn’t just go for clocks. Like the Tao, when you see it broadly you see it in all things.

Choose Wisely: Substitution or Domain Restriction

Here the history offers a fork; choose wisely.

The first resolution is substitution: replace the inherited curve with the exact one. The cycloid — the path traced by a point on a rolling wheel — is a tautochrone, a “same-time” curve along which a bob released from any height reaches the bottom at the same instant.

Different starting heights, same arrival time.

Huygens, in a stroke of genius, flanked his pendulum’s cord with two curved cheeks, themselves cycloids, so that the swinging cord peeled along them and bent the bob onto a cycloidal path.

This cycloid curve is a bit alien-looking and completely correct.²

His substitution solved the problem, and history did not choose it. Landes gave us the above story and throughout Revolution in Time excels at describing exquisite, true solutions that did not win out. Often, they were beaten out by cheaper, good-enough solutions that were, critically, easier to reproduce.³

The second resolution is domain restriction: don’t replace the flawed solution — confine it to the region where it behaves. The anchor escapement, arriving around 1670, restricted the pendulum to a swing of just a few degrees — instead of the verge’s wild twenty or more — where the circle and the cycloid happen to coincide.⁴ Clockmakers immediately saw the advantage of this good-enough solution. Huygens’s elegant cheeks were abandoned — at so small a swing the circular error was already negligible, while the cheeks added problems of their own, the suspension cord wearing where it pressed against them, so they did more harm than good. The clockmakers kept the circle.

I find the second resolution more instructive precisely because it is less beautiful. Substitution is admirable, but perfection is fragile. The working solution was to re-engineer the conditions, so the crisis was mitigated. The difficulty had not vanished. It had moved.

Let’s fast forward to today for a moment. We are told (and I believe) that AI is a paradigm-shattering revolution — a completely new kind of clock. But as I argued in De-Dramatizing the Digital, technologies rarely start over. We build flawed systems, drag their imperfections forward, and grow new subsystems to contain them. The clockmakers did not choose the cycloid; they built the anchor escapement, narrowing the pendulum’s swing to a very small angle. We are doing the same thing now with AI.

The harnesses going up around raw models — retrieval scaffolds, agent loops, guardrails — are anchor escapements, not corrections to the underlying intelligence. They don’t repair the underlying motion, but convert a headlong torrent into something countable, stoppable, and true. Retrieval gives the model an external reference instead of asking it to invent from memory. Guardrails narrow the range of permissible motion. Agent loops break a single fluent torrent into smaller, inspectable steps. Together they make the flawed thing useful without making it flawless. AI’s confident wrongness — the hallucinations, the made-up citations — is the new circular error. The flaw is load-bearing now, and I for one love the practical art of designing around imperfection.

The Conservation of Difficulty

To bound an error is to relocate its difficulty, not eliminate it. This is the second part of my argument: the conservation of difficulty. Once the pendulum’s geometry was tamed, the problem did not disappear. The anchor escapement bounded circular error by leaving the circle in place and narrowing the conditions under which it operated. And so the anchor escapement became the locus of difficulty, and from then on a load-bearing part no one could remove. A technology improves by accreting compensations around its permanent flaws, not by becoming perfect. It becomes more complex and more capable at the same time. The pendulum was no longer the bottleneck; the escapement was. And when one stage of a chain is solved, standardized, or commoditized, both difficulty and value migrate to the adjacent stage that has become newly decisive. Difficulty is conserved. It only ever moves.⁵

The swing on the left; the counted beats on the right.

The Longitude Problem and the Portable Clock

Eventually, it becomes necessary to go back to the drawing board when the solution can no longer solve its original problem. On land, the terrestrial pendulum clock had become the most accurate timekeeper on Earth. But the rocking of the ocean made the pendulum fundamentally unsuitable. A ship deck rolls and pitches; the bob’s pull is no longer reliably straight down. The pendulum must be abandoned.

So what? Because the clock seemed poised to solve the great problem of the age: longitude. Latitude is comparatively easy: the height of the sun or stars tells you how far north or south you are. Longitude is harder because it is not written in the sky in the same direct way. It is a difference in time. The Earth turns fifteen degrees every hour, so if noon arrives on your ship three hours later than it does at Greenwich, you are forty-five degrees west of Greenwich. To know where you are east or west, then, you need two times at once: the local time where you are, read from the sun, and a reliable reference time carried from a known place. The reference clock already existed on land. What was missing was one that could keep that reference accurately across months at sea.

The gap between two clocks: local noon and the time carried from Greenwich.

Again, the difficulty migrated — out of the pendulum, which could not go to sea, and into a portable oscillator. John Harrison’s marine chronometers abandoned the pendulum entirely, replacing it with a balance wheel and balance spring, a mechanism far less vulnerable to a ship’s motion because it oscillated against itself rather than against gravity.

The marine version, of course, had its own “circular errors.” The balance wheel and balance spring could travel because they carried their restoring force inside the mechanism rather than depending on gravity’s fixed direction. That made them indispensable at sea, but they were not pure: temperature changed the spring, friction drained motion, the mainspring delivered uneven force, and each impulse risked disturbing the very oscillation it sustained. But these were errors that could be bounded, compensated, and built around.

And so the genealogy split in two. The pendulum-and-anchor line stayed on land and became the observatory regulator, the source of canonical time. The balance-spring line went portable — and it did not stop at the sea. It went into the pocket, and it kept shrinking: the marine chronometer, the precise watch, the wristwatch, the quartz movement, the phone in your hand. Landes draws the whole arc:

It took five hundred years to go from the turret clocks of the Middle Ages to marine chronometers and precision watches, from public time to private time, from dials with one hand to dials with three.

The move from public time to private time changed more than navigation.⁶ Landes again:

Where people had once depended on the cry of the night watch, the bell of the church, or the turret clock in the town square, now they had the time at home or on their person and could order their life and work in a manner once reserved to regulated communities. In this way, privatization of time was a major stimulus to the individualism that was an ever more salient aspect of Western civilization.

Now we own our own time, and this comes with a new bespoke circular error. You need to manage it. When the time becomes yours, so does the responsibility for it. The difficulty does not vanish; it migrates to you. Now nothing tells us when to start or stop, and the freedom arrives with a low hum of guilt — the sense that you are spending your hours wrong, that you ought to be doing more. The burden falls unevenly; some feel it more than others, and a thick obligation that puts you somewhere at a set time is often a relief, not a cage. But the shape is the same as every other circle in this essay: solve one problem, and the difficulty moves next door. Here it moves into you.⁷

None of this is the whole story of the clock — Lewis Mumford called the clock, not the steam engine, the key machine of the modern industrial age,⁸ and for the full story read Revolution in Time (it’s great). But this is one real thread of it, one that keeps reappearing: a solution that is almost right, made load-bearing, passing its difficulty along. It runs the gamut right into the phone you are probably reading this on.

A Long Coda on the Divergence Machine

The clock can make one corner of our own era more legible. If you came for the clocks, you can stop here; from here out it is a Contraptions book-club piece, for the world-machine heads.

The World Machines project reads history as a sequence of long-lived civilizational systems: overlapping machines that organize institutions, technologies, habits, and assumptions across centuries. At any moment, one machine is usually dominant, one is declining, and one is still being assembled. You can see the overlap in any office that runs this year’s software on top of paper-form logic, governed by fifty-year-old processes. We are living in just such an overlap: the Modernity Machine in dusk, the Divergence Machine entering day, and the first outlines of the Liveness Machine. Modernity pulled toward a single future; Divergence pushes outward into many. I unpack the pair in Babel Was a Clue.

It is tempting to assign each machine its own clock — the observatory pendulum to Modernity, the marine chronometer to Divergence. That is too neat. Machines do not replace one another like swapping gears; they interpenetrate. The same clock that helped centralize modern time also made private time portable.

That is the clock’s seed of divergence. When everyone carries the same time, the center need not hold. The Modernity Machine ran on central time: legible, standardized coordination at scale. The Divergence Machine inherits that standard, then loosens its social meaning: a billion private clocks, all keeping the same time, but using it to assemble different lives, different schedules, different markets, different worlds. Coordination without a center.

The Divergence Machine is not the perfect curve we were waiting for. It is the next inherited circle: almost right, already useful, and already accumulating new errors and compensations. It inherits the Modernity Machine’s surviving parts — its institutions, standards, theories, protocols, and above all its archive. What Sachin calls archival time⁹ matters here because AI does not learn from the world directly. It learns from the world as preserved: recorded, categorized, and made searchable. That gives AI its power and its error at once. The archive makes cognition scalable, but it also passes forward the archive’s absences, categories, and distortions. So the difficulty migrates from recording the world to judging the record.

The pattern repeats well past the archive. The nation-state remains the default unit of legitimacy, so difficulty migrates into passports, jurisdictions, sanctions, and compliance. Standardized measures make comparison possible but flatten what they measure, so difficulty migrates into translation layers, alternative metrics, audits, and exceptions. Each inherited circle needs its own escapement.

This can still work, but only as a discipline. We must be explicit about what errors we are going to accept and mitigate. Some parts of Modernity will decay on their own; others — standards, institutions, states, archives — are load-bearing and will have to be maintained long after their original context has expired. The transition becomes a Ship-of-Theseus problem: some planks are swapped cleanly while others are circular errors that need to be contained and mitigated. The difficulty migrates into the discernment to know what needs preserving and what has to be let go. This is often beyond any one person or nation’s control.

Here the clock history gives a design rule. A delicate oscillator is made useful by disturbing it as little as possible; the correction belongs beside the core, not inside it. Harrison and Le Roy got accuracy by leaving the balance nearly free and adding control alongside it. Inherited errors should be handled the same way: identify the flaw, bound it with a legible adjacent layer, and do not dull the thing that made the core worth keeping.

Drop that discipline, and the same approach becomes the failure mode. Back to AI. The harder we make a model behave, the more easily we bury what made it useful under the machinery meant to control it: a guardrail here, a retrieval step there, a human review, a second model checking the first. Each patch is reasonable, and each stays legible when its job is clear and inspectable — the retrieval layer points to the source it pulled from, the guardrail marks the boundary it enforces, the human review flags the call only a person should make. Lose that clarity, and the patches become a tangle no one designed, no one fully understands, and no one can remove without making the whole thing wobble. Then difficulty no longer migrates into a useful adjacent layer; it migrates into opacity and endless upkeep. The fork is simple: whether the compensations stay legible.

The World Machines project asks, among its open questions, what the characteristic pathologies of each phase are — how a machine deteriorates, not just how it lives. I’m putting forward a theory: a World Machine accumulates technical debt. In Dawn, almost-right inventions are useful but not yet obligatory; the difficulty still lives in invention, choice, and experiment. In Day, the winners harden into standards, institutions, protocols, and habits; difficulty migrates to the adjacent systems needed to maintain them. In Dusk, those compensations can no longer be sustained, collapsing into bottlenecks and debt service. A machine advances by borrowing against the future: keeping the almost-right core because it works, then paying interest through the compensations required to keep it working. It can carry that debt so long as it is still solving the problems it exists for.

World Machines can sound, rightly, like weather systems with names: Modernity, Divergence, Liveness. The clock metaphor brings them down to earth. A machine is not only an age with a mood; it is a pile of tolerances, kludges, and almost-true assumptions that proved too serviceable to throw away. No machine is without its errors; we learn over centuries which ones are load-bearing, which ones can be bounded, and which ones can be made to work. The chronometer’s chosen error was seaworthy enough to cross an ocean, provided someone wound and watched it the whole way.

While some systems may correct themselves, the real labor of maintenance belongs to people. This does not mean we are trapped within the machinery of history. There is still as much freedom as there ever was. There are many new things to be made, and both maintenance and solving difficult problems demand their own kind of creativity. It is tempting to picture great historical systems as cold powers that determine our lives, but we evolve with the things we make. The clock altered how we live and work, yet we did not simply bow to its mechanics. When early pendulums drifted too far, human judgment answered with the anchor escapement. The deep infrastructures of the world shape us, and we, in turn, shape them right back.

Originally published in The Schematism. Subscribe to get new essays by email.

Magnifica Humanitas presents itself plainly enough. On May 25, 2026, the Vatican released Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” drawing on 135 years of Catholic social teaching from Rerum Novarum forward. Dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, solidarity, social justice. And a clue.

The clue is buried in two biblical metaphors: the Tower of Babel and Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem. From the encyclical:

The story of Babel appears in the Book of Genesis… After settling in a plain in the land of Shinar, the people decided to build a city and a tower “with its top in the heavens” (Gen 11:4). Fearing being scattered across the earth, they sought to guarantee stability and power for themselves, and above all to “make a name” for themselves. It was an impressive feat: a single language, a single technology, a single direction. (§7)

Also from the encyclical:

Nehemiah convened the families, assigned each of them a section of the wall to rebuild, listened to their concerns, coordinated their efforts and addressed any opposition. The narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all: men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households and young people all play a part. (§8)

If you’re not seeing the clue, that’s because you’re not in the Contraptions book club this year. Our worldmachines.org historiography sets out long eras, called world machines, and we are living through the sunset of one (the Modernity Machine) and the dawn of the next (the Divergence Machine). The Modernity Machine is a pull system dragging everyone toward a single future — rationalization, material abundance, and scientific mastery — and calls the pull Progress. The Divergence Machine is a push system: it produces radically different outcomes depending on local conditions and admits no single destination, no one place we’re all headed. Convergence versus divergence; one future versus many.

Rather than these being a good-versus-evil contrast, the machines offer neutral visions of convergence and divergence. Applying this to the quotes: Babel is the Modernity Machine — one language, one direction, one goal. Nehemiah is the Divergence Machine — many hands, many voices, plurality that coheres without being flattened. The encyclical comes down against convergence, which I did not see coming from the Catholic Church.

So that’s nice and all, but so what? You can read the encyclical anywhere, and a hundred outlets will tell you what it says about AI. But the live question is stranger than that. What if the first important Catholic document of the AI age is not mainly about artificial intelligence, but about the exhaustion of convergence as a way of imagining the human future? If this reading is right, the encyclical is less a warning about technology than a sign that the Church may be repositioning itself after centuries of arguing with modernity on its own terms.

But why would the Pope open an AI encyclical with a distinction right out of our book club? Because…

Metaphors Come First

Metaphors come first, and arguments come second. A writer reaches for an image before the argument is settled, and then, across a long text, the argument shifts to inhabit the space the metaphor opens up. The metaphor carves the riverbed; the prose is the water that rushes in to follow its contours. Metaphors are often where historical reorientations appear first, on the level of intuition. Before institutions change their doctrines, they change their metaphors. And when the metaphor shifts from one tower to many households rebuilding a wall, it is worth asking whether something deeper than an AI policy debate is beginning to move.

We aren’t cataloguing divergence the way birdwatchers tick off species. We’re hunting the small early signals of changes that are big and slow — the kind that take centuries to fully arrive, and that are legible at the start only as a clue. World-machine shifts don’t announce themselves; they show up first as strange little mismatches. Babel and Nehemiah may be one of those mismatches. And I can’t help but notice that these metaphors are doing something real and generative: they do not merely restate the Church’s old suspicion of technocracy, but begin to sketch a more positive picture of plurality as the form of repair.

Describing AI, Leo says these systems are “more ‘cultivated’ than ‘built’” (§98). They are grown within a framework, not fully designed in advance, and for that reason even their makers “do not understand what they produce” (§99). The language here is biological. It presents AI as something that develops inside conditions and remains partly opaque even to the people who create it.

Seen this way, divergence runs through the document, not just through one opening contrast. The “rejected stones — the poor, the sick, the migrants” become “the cornerstone” (§16): the places the old machine filed as errors are exactly where Leo builds.¹ His verb for what to do with AI is “to disarm,” which he glosses as “restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life” (§110).

Someone will object before you finish the sentence: this is just metamodernism. In our framework’s telling, metamodernism is modernity that cannot mourn itself — a backward-looking structure of feeling that reaches for re-enchantment and sincerity precisely because the Progress it still wants has stopped arriving.² On that reading the encyclical looks like a textbook case: re-enchantment, the meaning crisis, the nostalgia that wants what modernity used to deliver. Subsidiarity becomes decentralized modernity, or federalism with incense. This objection frames the encyclical as late-modernity presenting itself as a new era. And much of it is exactly that. But not those metaphors. The metaphors are the part of this document that is alive³ — and they are doing more work than the document quite needs them to.⁴

Apophatic Machines

When describing AI itself, the encyclical takes an almost apophatic approach. It repeatedly tells us what AI is not. It is not wisdom. It is not judgment. It is not responsibility. It is not relationship. It is not dignity. The document spends surprisingly little time defining artificial intelligence positively and a great deal of time tracing its boundaries. Not this. Not that. Not this either.

The effect is curious. Every limitation assigned to AI throws the human person into sharper relief. Negative theology traditionally approached God through negation, describing what could not be said. Leo uses a similar structure to illuminate humanity. By saying what AI cannot be, he gradually reveals what he believes a person is.⁵

The encyclical anchors this revelation in two specific claims. First, humanity as embodied incarnation — the “wounded yet beloved flesh” (§231), the body as “a dwelling place of God and a temple of the Holy Spirit” (§239). Second, humanity as being made in the likeness of God — dignity as a gift that “precedes and transcends each person” (§50). You are a body, and you are an image.⁶ That is what the document is defending when it defends the human. And there’s something quietly strange about needing to say it at all.

It is weird that this seems weird. An institution stands up and says: you are embodied, you are made in the image of God, and that is the ground that no optimizer can touch — and in 2026 this reads as a contrarian, almost eccentric position rather than a banal one. The water we swim in has shifted far enough that you are a sacred body now lands as a provocation. If our threshold for the “weird” continues to shift, that drift is the machine in motion — and we are catching the signal early.

On the Back Foot

Now let’s zoom out. For the entire run of the Modernity Machine, the Church has been on its back foot. It opened with the Counter-Reformation: a convergence project (Trent, the Index, centralization) — the most successful parts of which were aesthetic: Bernini, the Baroque. Beauty as a counter-modern media strategy.

Centuries later, Vatican II tried a different adjustment. It made a structural turn toward divergence — shattering the single language of Latin into a plurality of local vernaculars — but in the process, it largely discarded that Counter-Reformation spirit of beauty. It has been a centuries-long sequence of accommodations, all of them made from inside the pull system. A turning point came when the Church codified a long-held instinct — subsidiarity was named in Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) and “systematically formulated” by Pius XI in 1931 (§31) — barely a hundred years ago.⁷ It is a push-shaped principle.⁸

One more metaphor to dwell on: “Promethean dreams” (§128). It would be easy to read this as the Church selecting a new enemy. I think that misses how the metaphor is working. Promethean dreams function as a contrast agent, not a target. They make the human person visible. The Promethean dream is the dream of the technocratic paradigm. But the encyclical keeps returning to bodies, relationships, and communities. The point is not merely that technology should be used responsibly. It is that the human being cannot be fully understood in technological terms.

Leo may even have a bit of a blogger’s instinct here. The encyclical arrives wrapped in AI because AI is what everyone wants to discuss. But the deeper subject is Catholic social teaching itself: dignity, subsidiarity, solidarity, embodiment, and the common good. AI supplies the sizzle. The social doctrine is the steak.

(I know, I know. Anyone who actually grew up Catholic like me will immediately point out that the Church is not exactly famous for its uncomplicated, joyful view of the body. But institutions contain multitudes, and epochs rewrite priorities.)

I’m not claiming this is the future of the Catholic Church. Things this size start far too small for anyone to claim that. The response to modernity has run for four centuries and is still running. But if something new is beginning inside it, it goes deeper than a new target. The institution is reconstituting itself for the next four-hundred-year era.

There may even be a future hiding in the anti-“Promethean dreams” stance: as the digital world grows more powerful, it may also grow less interesting, and the things we find meaningful drift back toward the physical. Re-centering human life in the given world would be quite the de-dramatizing move. Though there I’m running ahead of the clue.

What Babel/Nehemiah lets us glimpse is a possible direction. A metaphor can take an institution somewhere it never meant to go. Whether this one does, we won’t know for a long time. It is precisely the kind of small, slow clue this book club exists to catch.

Originally published in The Schematism. Subscribe to get new essays by email.

The child that was human civilization had opened the door to her home and glanced outside. The endless night terrified her so much that she shuddered against the expansive and profound darkness, and shut the door firmly.

— Cixin Liu, Death’s End¹

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark forest, / for the straightforward path had been lost.

— Dante, Inferno I²

I awoke in a dark forest with the straight way lost at some point during COVID. I can’t point to exactly when, but it was an exact point. Like Zen master Dōgen says, “Summer does not follow spring. First there is spring, then there is summer.”³ Middle age does not follow youth. First there is youth then there is middle age. Just as firewood does not become ash, but rather firewood is at the stage of firewood and ash is at the stage of ash, life does not become death, and youth does not become middle age. I know it’s been said before that one day you just wake up like that but it’s actually true.

Soon thereafter, lost in my personal dark forest,⁴ I got a buzz-cut COVID-do and reading glasses, and eventually found my footing with my job and my way of life. Two surprising things happened. First, I saw the road to the end of my career — I could see all the way to retirement — and it would be exactly like the way it is now, forever. The question was no longer, how do I get there? but why does this feel less real than it did when I wanted it? Second, my inner map went blank. When the interior authority to choose a path dissolves, then no path that can be taken seems right. The straightforward path is lost, and what Jung called the encounter with the unconscious⁵ arrives unbidden.

The Crisis of Success

The exterior path remains clear, but the solid self that used to move forward begins to flicker. The external map — the next credential, the upgraded routine, the better-optimized life, the longer vacation — continues to function. It gives you stress but there’s also a new ease now that you have seen its sameness all the way to the end. You stop making memories at the same rate because the newness diminishes, and the lack of inner conviction begins to weigh on your mind. This is the crisis of success. Paradoxically, failure is much simpler to deal with. If you fail the world gives you errands: figure it out, make a new plan, and try again. Success can be stranger because it removes the justification to change. This dissonance between a still-functioning exterior and a now murkier interior is the dark forest.

Before I begin diagnosing eras and civilizations, a confession. I tend to ascribe to the world what I am feeling myself — I don’t think I am alone in this blemish. Currently, I am obsessed with the suspicion that my judgments are motivated almost entirely by my own stage of development. “Everything is boring,” oh yeah — “I’m boring.” “How bourgeois and stagnant the 21st century is.” Unfortunately, this means “I’m bourgeois and stagnant.” I didn’t worry about whether my boredom was a sign of civilizational collapse when I was twenty. I worry about it now. But just because I project doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

The Three Beasts

Dante knew what this looked like from inside. In the Inferno, he struggles out of the dark forest and eventually finds a sunlit hill. He begins to climb out by the direct route, and is blocked by the three beasts.⁶ He can’t go forward. The straight path of the first half of his life is now the wrong approach for what his soul is exploring; he must find a different way. It’s at this moment that his guide and mentor appears. In this essay the role of mentor is split: Dōgen takes the stages of life, Liu takes the cosmos, vanaprastha takes the discipline of stepping back.

I wrote in Cosmological Adventure that the Hero’s Journey has shifted from being aimed at midlife (Jesus, Buddha, Dante, and so on) to one aimed at the adolescent. Western culture has virtually no mythic vocabulary left for the path of middle age. That piece named the wrong-map problem. Now we look at what happens when the map disappears completely, and what happens to a civilization when it refuses to recognize where it is in its stage of development.

The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg has a useful word for what we are dealing with: reoccupation.⁷ When an old answer to a persistent question loses its force, the question itself does not go away — it waits, in an empty slot, for a new answer to occupy it. Western culture’s slot for the middle of life is empty. What we call midlife boredom is partly waiting for something to occupy this space, but answer comes there none.

The Cosmos as Selva Oscura

If the cost of refusing the midlife transition were merely private — a few exhausted adults wandering bourgeois suburbs — the stakes might not justify the essay. The midlife crisis can be civilizational as well, and the stakes are nowhere higher than in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy — the three novels we know in English as The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End. Cixin Liu says it from inside the novel, in the voice of his protagonist Cheng Xin:

I am but an ordinary person. Unfortunately, I have not been able to walk the ordinary person’s path. My path is, in reality, the journey of a civilization.

The trilogy is usually read as a Cold-War parable or a cosmic-scale Hobbesian thought experiment in game theory. We will read it as Dante’s Inferno scaled to a species, and because it occurs in a dark forest, we will interpret it as a midlife crisis for human civilization. Liu is explicit about it. The frame he uses for civilizations is developmental. They have stages, like a life.

Like the first line in the Commedia (la diritta via era smarrita) the straight path for humanity has been lost. First contact with the alien Trisolarans wakes us, and we find ourselves in a cosmos-wide dark forest — a forest of armed hunters in which any civilization that reveals itself is destroyed by the others. The image at the top of this piece — the child opening the door, glancing into the night, slamming it shut — is Liu’s image for humanity’s response. It is the civilizational version of the refusal of the call. Humanity’s outward capacity remains intact — starships are buildable, the technology exists — but the inner confidence to leave collapses.

Leaning on Blumenberg again, this is the clearest recent expression of the absolutism of reality⁸ — the raw, indifferent totality of a universe that does not explain itself to us. Humanity told itself a story, a myth, of benign ‘first contact’ and ‘cosmic brotherhood.’ But Liu presents a universe that is not designed for us, where human history is cosmically unnoticeable. The moment of horror occurs when our species realizes that our cultural mediations — our myths — were never adequate to the raw, unmediated reality they were meant to tame.

Unable to face up to its predicament, humanity clings to the Earth, clings to the solar system, clings to the comfortable cosmology in which the universe owes us a future. Building enough starships to evacuate even a fraction of the species is technically possible but is considered immoral. “Escapism” is treated as a crime against the social fabric — if not all of us can leave, none of us should.

What humanity refuses, until it is almost too late, is a developmental journey that Liu lays out plainly:

And now we know that this is the journey that must be made by every civilization: awakening inside a cramped cradle, toddling out of it, taking flight, flying faster and farther, and, finally, merging with the fate of the universe as one.⁹

The cradle, the toddler, the flight — Liu names the developmental stages of a civilization the way we name the developmental stages of a person. It is the same expression Dōgen makes: each stage is its own complete state; firewood does not become ash, and the cradle is not flight. To remain in the cradle past the time of the cradle is to court disaster. The grown-up civilization, like the grown-up person, has to go through its dark adventure, and the boon it brings back is a cosmos-wide consciousness.

A New Thing in the Cosmos — Love

Humanity escapes by the skin of its teeth (I won’t give more spoilers — read the books) through the few ships that decided to leave the solar system decades earlier. They let go of the attachment to the Earth, and wayfound their way to a fruitful future for human civilization — knowing that the wider universe cannot be mapped in the old terms, that they will never return, and that the question now is not whether the map is wrong but how to live without a map at all.

Cheng Xin, Liu’s hero of the final book, has catastrophically failed humanity. Twice she was placed in a position of judgment and twice she chose love over violence. She refused to push the deterrent trigger when the Trisolarans attacked, even though it would have defended Earth. She blocked Wade’s lightspeed-ship program — the only viable escape — because his methods were ruthless. Both times the reflex — mercy, refusal of force, love as default — was catastrophically wrong. (I recognize her reflex. It is also mine.) Liu is unsparing about it:

Twice, she had been placed in a position of authority second only to God, and both times she had pushed the world into the abyss in the name of love.¹⁰

But Liu does not condemn her either. Near the end of the novel she is told what the essay needs the reader to hear:

Love isn’t wrong. A single individual cannot destroy a world. If that world was doomed, then it was the result of the efforts of everyone, including those living and those who had already died.¹¹

There are also gentler voices in the trilogy. In the first book, a Trisolaran pacifist risked his life sending the “do not answer” warning to Earth.¹² This same Trisolaran appears at the end of the second book, reflecting on whether love is uniquely human and imagining tiny pockets of love springing up throughout the galaxy if the conditions could change, but alas they most likely won’t. It would have been humanity’s genuine gift to the universe.

Cheng Xin’s small vessel escaping the solar system is a contemporary image of Dante’s pilgrim: a person for whom the path has vanished, and who must persevere. She survives for a time in a pocket universe outside our cosmos. When the cosmic cycle eventually requires that the matter of her shelter be returned, she gives it up — surrendering her final refuge so the larger order can be made whole.¹³ She faces the absolutism of reality without mediation. In the void she is a fragile creature, but her perseverance — the willingness to live in the dark, and to give back what was never really hers — is the ultimate act of self-assertion (Selbstbehauptung).¹⁴

The Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy is the Inferno of the Divergence Machine: the dark forest, the lost straight path, but applied to our whole world. (I await Liu Cixin’s Purgatorio.) Reading the trilogy as a science-fiction novel about aliens is reading it as a coming-of-age story. Reading it as a midlife myth — a trial without the consolation of paradise — is what we need in our moment. Or what I need — remember I ascribe to others what I see in myself. Why? Because the optimism and sentimentality of the hero’s journey is just not going to get us where we need to go.

Many Maps, No Path

It is worth at this moment to linger on a cross-cultural counterexample, not as a recommendation but as a contrast that exposes a blind spot. Hindu tradition divides the human life into four ashramas, four life-stages, each with its own discipline: brahmacharya (the student), grihastha (the householder), vanaprastha (the forest-dweller), and sannyasa (the renunciate).¹⁵ While some texts give special importance to the householder because that stage sustains society and makes the others possible, the stages are best understood as distinct disciplines rather than a simple ladder of promotion. The student is supported by the householder. The renunciate can withdraw because the householder maintains the world they are withdrawing from. The householder makes the hero possible.

The discipline that follows the householder is vanaprastha, the forest-dweller stage. The householder, having maintained the world for decades, begins a deliberate turn outward — a loosening of the daily grip, an investment in mentoring, a willingness to disengage from the immediate so the long-term can come into view. We have, again, no English word for this stage. We have midlife crises and we have retirement, and almost no language for the deliberate, mythic work of the transition between them. I see a need for the forest-dweller in Western society, the art of stepping back without disappearing.

A mature life requires many myths, not just one. We need narratives for generativity — the quiet heroism of building institutions and planting trees whose shade we know we will never sit in. We need myths for impermanence. We need myths for living with the people whose interiority will never be fully accessible to us. I’m reminded of Norman Maclean’s father, in his last sermon in A River Runs Through It: “It is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them. We can love completely without complete understanding.”¹⁶

This kind of labor is what Blumenberg called work on myth. Myth, in his account, is not the opposite of reason but a partner to it: both are devices for making the absolutism of reality bearable. The myths that are missing from our middle age are reoccupation slots awaiting new occupants. The slots stay open until the work is done. We can look to the three forests — selva oscura, vanaprastha, dark forest — to provoke us to rededicate ourselves, find a new path, and open the door again.

The dark forest has carried three senses in this essay — a psychological condition, a cosmic predicament, and now a cosmology — and the work in each case is the same: don’t retreat, grow. The dark forest is currently our society’s most dominant cosmology.¹⁷ Read pessimistically — if your main value is not changing — it is a counsel of despair: the universe is dangerous, the comfortable mediations have failed, hide. But the same cosmology, read as provocation, says something else. The work is not to retreat into a smaller cosmology but to grow into the larger one. Even the aspiration to look beyond what is comfortable and at hand is itself a form of cosmic self-assertion — a refusal of the door-slamming, a small step toward the wider consciousness the dark forest is asking for. Liu wrote at the end of Death’s End: the ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts.

Coda: A Note for Contraptions Book Club Readers

This essay’s framework fits within the World Machines thesis (which grew out of the Contraptions Book Club). The framework runs on a Dawn / Day / Dusk lifecycle, with three machines coexisting at any given moment. The Modernity Machine (Dawn c. 1200–1600, Day 1600–2000, now Dusk) was the cookie-cutter map at civilizational scale — legibility, convergence, canonicity, the straight path to the Enlightenment future. The Gramsci Gap — the “time of monsters,” the interregnum between the rules and rulers of an old world and a new one — is the selva oscura at civilizational scale, the period when the question persists and the answer does not. The Divergence Machine (Dawn 1600–2000 on the margins of the MM, Day 2000–c. 2400 on the ~400-year Day estimate) is the wider consciousness at civilizational scale — pluralism, coexistence without closure, the trackless territory walked rather than crossed. (A still-Dawning Liveness Machine is the one after that; out of scope here.)

Read this way, the personal midlife of the writer (me, awakening in COVID) and the species-scale midlife at the end of the Modernity Machine (all of us, around now) are the same developmental crisis at different scales of magnification. Liu’s developmental sequence (cradle → toddler → flight) and the world machine sequence (MM Day → Dusk while DM Dawn → Day) are doing similar work. The discipline the Divergence Machine asks of us is the discipline vanaprastha asks for: presence over flight, bearable proximity, work on myth, opening the door a second time.

Originally published in The Schematism. Subscribe to get new essays by email.

Amid the native Polynesian dancers — moving flawlessly in coconut shell tops, grass skirts, and feathered headpieces — I noticed a few non-native, likely French teenagers performing as part of the troupe. The likely reason was a cultural exchange, but this is not where my mind went. I immediately started spinning an elaborate, cinematic narrative: these kids are on the run. What clever disguises. I pictured a Some Like It Hot situation — these kids hiding out in a Polynesian dance review to escape the cops, their parents, or the mob, possibly all three. I sat there sipping a drink, sure of it, thinking: what a brilliant idea, I wish I was on the run.

Then I turned and looked at my wife. A quiet absurdity washed over me. Why do I want everything I do to be mythic in its awesomeness? Why was I mentally manufacturing a high-stakes adventure, casting myself as a fleeing outlaw, while I was supposed to be fully present and enjoying my honeymoon? I flashed her a smile.

It’s not my fault. I was mis-equipped. We were given only one model of adventure — the kind that demands leaving. So even as we stay in our own lives, we find ourselves mentally slipping away into small fantasies of escape. It runs in the background like a piece of obsolete software. It can make the people next to us feel like obstacles.

The wrong story, and the right shape of the drive

The story I had inherited came in two versions, and both are exhausted.

The first version was the Hollywood monomyth. Joseph Campbell flowed into George Lucas flowed into the MCU, and the result was a reflexive blueprint: a young hero receives a call, leaves home, slays the dragon, returns with a boon. We absorbed the form so thoroughly that we now apply it to everything, including our own lives. This version is exhausted because Hollywood has been strip-mining it for fifty years and also, more quietly, it was essentially a story for adolescents — a coming-of-age narrative useful for crossing from youth into adulthood, but with little to offer thereafter. By the time you are in the middle of your life, you are well past that door, and yet the call-to-adventure keeps misfiring, telling you to leave a home you already left.¹

The second version was the colonial expedition — the adventure form of the Modernity Machine (MM)², the four-century civilizational project of converting heterogeneity into legible, interoperable order. The expedition’s job was to extend that legibility to the last unmapped places, planting flags, expanding maps, and returning with riches and honor. The romance of John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King³ is this form at its most cinematically pure. This version is exhausted because there is no terra incognita left to plant a flag in, and — more importantly — we have seen the outcomes and cannot believe it is still heroic. Future adventure needs to kick the dirt of colonialism off its shoes and move forward unencumbered.

You can see what happens when these two stories run uncorrected in adult lives. The midlife crisis is a calendar event for someone who has been told the only legitimate adventure is the one that requires leaving. The bucket-list trip, the new career, the second house, the dramatic resignation letter — each is the call-to-adventure firing one more time, because the call cannot be turned off, only redirected.

We will never outgrow the desire for adventure — nor should we — and it points to a deeper drive. It’s only our current story of adventure that is leading us astray.

This month in the Contraptions book club, we have been reading Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels and The Invention of Nature — twin biographies of the Jena Romantics and Alexander von Humboldt. Reading them in parallel, you keep running into Friedrich Schiller, who in 1795, in a series of letters, diagnosed what remains the central crisis of the modern mind.⁴ Enlightenment rationality, Schiller argued, had torn human freedom and the natural world apart. We were left divided between cold logic and chaotic sensuality. To reconcile them, he proposed, we rely on the Spieltrieb — the play drive, the aesthetic drive. Not play in the frivolous sense; play as the human capacity to shape form from matter without coercing it. To unite our inner freedom with the givenness of the natural world.

Romance, in all its dictionary senses, is this drive operating on different terrains. Adventure-romance is the aesthetic drive turned outward, uniting freedom with nature on the expedition, the mountain, the open ocean. Relationship-romance is the same drive turned inward, uniting freedom with nature in the psyche and in the unmappable space between two people. They are the same longing, wearing different clothes for different seasons of a life.

This is why the man who, on his honeymoon, fantasizes about being on the run is not actually torn between adventure and intimacy. He is one person practicing one drive. We need a different story about what adventure is. To find it, we have to go to two places: the Andes in 1802, and the open Pacific.

Two figures who got it right

In 1799, Alexander von Humboldt arrived in South America. For five years he traveled — up the Orinoco, across the Andes, up the slopes of Chimborazo, then believed to be the highest mountain in the world. But Humboldt was not there to plant a flag or extract gold. He was there to pay rigorous attention. He hauled barometers and electrometers up sheer rock faces. He climbed Chimborazo with blood oozing from his gums, refusing to let altitude sickness dull his observations.

What he came back with was not territory. It was a diagram. The Naturgemälde — a single illustration in which every plant zone, every elevation, every climatic band of the Andes is rendered together, with the relationships between them visible at a glance. It was an infographic two centuries ahead of its time. But the deeper claim was metaphysical: nature was not a clockwork of isolated parts. It was a single, interdependent web. A lichen at fifteen thousand feet in the Andes shared a biological kinship with a lichen in the Swiss Alps. This relational, holistic view is not just a diagram, but a cognitive architecture for successfully navigating the Divergence Machine (DM) — the world machine that is now coming online as the MM winds down — where pervasive diversity is a feature, not a problem.

As Charles Taylor puts it in Cosmic Connections, this was the central ideal of Romanticism: the perfect reconciliation of freedom and nature. Humboldt was not a Romantic poet who happened to do science. He was the proof that the Romantic ideal was a rigorous, observable practice. Schiller’s Spieltrieb, at full pitch, on a mountain. Andrea Wulf describes how Humboldt dedicated his first essay on plant geography to the great poet Goethe, his mentor:⁵

The Essay’s frontispiece depicted Apollo, the god of poetry, lifting the veil from the goddess of nature — making it perfectly clear that poetry was necessary to comprehend the mysteries of the natural world.

Humboldt’s intuition needs a bigger frame, though. He was doing the work of the MM — the four-century project of converting the world into legible, canonical knowledge — but he was making it in a way that pointed past the machine he was working for. The web of life he drew was not legible in the modernity sense. It was relational, plural, irreducible to a list. He was doing the work of the Divergence Machine before there was a name for it. The DM favors pervasive diversity, plural modes of being, and coexistence without closure. Adventure inside the DM cannot be the old expedition redux. It has to be something the MM would not have produced.

What does that look like in practice? Humboldt gave us the vision of the connected web, but to make it real for ourselves we need to look at Polynesian wayfinding.

One year after our honeymoon, my wife and I returned to the Pacific for our anniversary, this time to Hawaii. Near the summit of Mauna Kea, in air so clear it felt thin, our guide pointed at the sky with a green laser. He was not, he told us, looking at the stars as constellations but as paths. A star path is the track a particular star follows across the sky, and Polynesian navigators learned those tracks as reliable directional guides. Instead of thinking first in terms of fixed Western-style constellations, they often thought in terms of where a star rises, how it arcs overhead, and where it sets. The Polynesian navigators had seen the sky differently, not as a picture but as a road. He pointed at a moving pinprick of light, so faint I was surprised I could see it. That’s a satellite. Up here you can see them right overhead.

I had been thinking about stars wrong my whole life.

The Polynesians had been navigating that highway since well before the Common Era. The European consensus, convinced that real exploration required astrolabes and sextants, argued that they must have settled the vast Pacific by accidental drift. Navigating without instruments was indistinguishable, to the modernity machine, from aimless wandering. It could not imagine a mental architecture capable of holding the entire night sky.

In 1976, the Polynesian Voyaging Society set out to refute the drift theory by doing the thing the theory said was impossible. They built the Hōkūleʻa, a traditional double-hulled voyaging canoe, and sailed it from Hawaiʻi to Tahiti without a single modern instrument. Guided by Mau Piailug — a master navigator from Micronesia, brought in because Hawaiʻi had lost its own line of navigators across the intervening centuries — they navigated by reading the rising and setting of stars, the temperature of the water, the slap of the swells on the hull, the flight paths of seabirds, the faint green tint on the underside of a cloud reflecting a lagoon hundreds of miles away.

Modernity was also woven into their success. Nainoa Thompson, the apprentice who would become the next master, used a planetarium to memorize the stars because the Honolulu sky was too bright with light pollution. They were not just doing this as a one-off exhibition, but to create a new line of navigators and resurrect their tradition and heritage. They made it reproducible.

The wayfinder carries a star compass, a memorized horizon whose thirty-two named houses organize the sky around the canoe. Keeping the canoe at the experiential center, the navigator maintains orientation by moving from star to star and by attending to swells, winds, birds, and other environmental signs.

The wayfinder does not separate the stars from the currents from the canoe from themselves. They are a single field of orientation. And when the navigator wants to know how high a star is — how far north or south they are — they do not reach for an instrument. They extend their own arm.

The outstretched hand, in several practiced shapes, gives the angle from horizon to star; from that angle, read within a memorized system of stellar bearings, the navigator can estimate position. Wayfinding makes the body itself the medium of measure. In this gesture man is once again the measure of all things⁶

Looking up

The reason adventure has become cosmological in the Divergence Machine is that the only frontier we have left is the one we forgot how to inhabit. The Pacific has been crossed, the Andes climbed, the maps filled in. What we have not done in a long time is look up.

I tried, once, at a dark sky park. The constellations I had not been able to see in any city I had ever lived in were suddenly all there, and behind them the Milky Way was not a smattering of distant pinpricks but a dense, physical structure, almost threatening in its scale. I was terrified. I felt small, alone, and disconnected from everything, even though my wife was standing right next to me. She still makes fun of me.

What I was touching is what Hans Blumenberg called the absolutism of reality⁷ — the indifferent presence of a universe not configured for human meaning. Myth-work, in Blumenberg’s reading, is the long human practice of making that absolutism livable. The point is not to deny what is terrible about it but to find a way to be in its presence without breaking. The terror at the dark-sky park and the awe of the Mauna Kea guide pointing his laser at a satellite were the same encounter, taken in different registers. Modernity gave us a way to manage the absolutism: it taught us to look down, and the cosmos turned into a backdrop. We lost it as something we could actively inhabit.

Anaxagoras was once asked why it is better to be born than not to exist. He answered, simply, that it was to behold the heavens and the whole order of the universe.⁸ The practice of looking up does not require us to reverse modernity. It requires that we hold two thoughts at once: that the cosmos is foreign and indifferent, and that it is also our only home, having birthed us through evolution as the part of itself that beholds the rest. Wayfinding bridges this divide: it is cosmological and human-scaled — the body holding both thoughts at once.

The practice, and what we bring back

If we are to resurrect the hero’s journey for the Divergence Machine — to make it one myth among many — we need to ask what boon it can still bring back. The voyage of the Hōkūleʻa was not without tragedy. Eddie Aikau, a Hawaiian lifeguard and the Polynesian Voyaging Society’s first crew lost at sea, paddled out on a surfboard in a storm to try to save his crewmates and was never seen again. The Society considered ending the voyages. They did not, because the practice would die with him. Surviving the tragedy deepened the meaning of what they ultimately accomplished. They brought back a boon for their culture, for the wider Pacific, and did something literally mythic in its awesomeness.

What the Polynesian wayfinders enacted is Schiller’s Spieltrieb at full velocity — freedom and nature reconciled by the body’s attention.

Here in the foothills of a new era, we need new ways of seeing⁹. The capacity to see wholes where we had only seen pieces, to connect heaven and earth — what the Hawaiian wayfinders call Ka Piko o Wākea¹⁰ — the navel of the Sky Father, where all the skies converge. This is the boon for the whole world.

Originally published in The Schematism. Subscribe to get new essays by email.

On the present inconvenience

According to our Contraptions framework we are living in a special time — lucky us — called a Gramsci Gap¹: the interregnum between eras when monstrous things happen because the old era — the Modernity Machine (MM)² in Venkatesh Rao’s terminology — is dying and the next era — the Divergence Machine (DM)³, also his terminology — is struggling to be born. These historical machines are built for 400 years, ascendant for 400 years, and then fade for 400 years⁴.

Since 1600 the MM excelled at attention infrastructure: print, broadcast media, internet platforms — the whole apparatus by which a few centers of power organized the experience of many peripheries. As the MM enters “rapid, partially scheduled disassembly,” its infrastructure is not vanishing. But it is decaying, and there is nothing worse than decaying infrastructure: functional enough to trap you, too degraded to justify the trapping. The feeds still pull, but what they no longer do with any reliability is deliver (except financially, which they do in spades). We don’t scroll because the content is rewarding but because the infrastructure admits of no other interaction. A person marooned in a house with broken stairs will spend a surprising amount of time on the stairs.

The common assumption — held with more conviction than evidence — is that this condition worsens with each new technology. AI, by this account, should intensify our screen addiction, and certainly many of the preconditions for enshittification⁵ are present (the main one being that it costs more to deliver than we pay). But I suggest the opposite will occur over time: that AI will complete the technology stack in a way that renders it boring. And this is due to how it will make money over the course of the DM.

A brief excursion into the migration of profits

To explain why I think this, I need to combine a few ideas: one about social time and one about where profits go. Allow me to go off the deep end for a moment and illustrate by melding the pace layers of Stewart Brand with Clayton Christensen’s Law of the Conservation of Attractive Profits.

Stewart Brand’s pace layers model says that civilization operates in layers of different velocity — fashion changing daily, commerce monthly, infrastructure over decades, culture across centuries, nature on a longer timescale still. The fast layers attract the most attention, but the slow layers provide whatever stability we enjoy.

The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits⁶ holds that when a layer in a value chain is not good enough, integration at that layer becomes necessary to optimize performance. Profits flow to the integrated layer, while adjacent layers become modular and commoditized.

Consider our present situation in light of these two principles taken together. Our digital stack is incomplete. Our tools are fragmented, our formats incompatible, our files perpetually misplaced. Profits concentrate in the fast layers because those layers are not good enough, and our current digital infrastructure is fine for what it is: a commoditized layer that serves the currently integrated fast layers. The diagram below maps this dynamic — pace layers on the vertical axis, profit concentration marked by the red indicators. Notice where the attention collects.

On the precedent of the printing press

It will be objected that new technologies do not reduce our engagement with them but increase it. People read more after the invention of printing, not less. This is perfectly true and perfectly irrelevant.

Elizabeth Eisenstein’s Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe — which we read in the Contraptions Book Club last year — clearly demonstrates that while the printing press increased the volume of reading, it also de-dramatized the act of reading. Before printing, accessing a text was an expedition. One traveled to monasteries, bribed librarians, copied manuscripts of uncertain provenance by hand, and could never be entirely confident that the version one labored over bore any consistent relation to what the author had actually written. Knowledge work, in other words, was heroic. It was also, for this reason, unreliable.

After printing, the same work became routine. The infrastructure receded. More people read — vastly more — but reading ceased to be an ordeal, and intellectual energy could be redirected from the acquisition of knowledge to its application. Science, commerce, navigation, and the Reformation are all, in some measure, consequences of knowledge work becoming eased.

AI is to the digital stack what the printing press was to the knowledge stack. It will not reduce our use of digital tools. It will de-dramatize them. The file-hunting, the reformatting, the scrolling, the debugging — the ten thousand small frictions that currently constitute the texture of digital life — will be resolved not by any single platform but by a pervasive competence distributed across every tool we use. The ordeal disappears. The output proliferates. And we discover, perhaps with some surprise, that we have time for other things.

The courtier’s platform and the heretic’s infrastructure

There are, however, two quite different ways in which a technology stack may be completed. To explore this, we will dive into Matthew Stewart’s The Courtier and the Heretic, his dual biography of Leibniz and Spinoza (Book Club pick for March of this year), which turns out to be unexpectedly useful for thinking about our current technology predicament.

The Leibnizian completion is the one each Big Tech player is attempting. One platform. One ecosystem. One AI assistant that mediates every interaction. Pre-established harmony between your calendar, your correspondence, your social engagements, and your shopping — the best of all possible user interfaces. No plurality in the mechanics, no generative variety, no Darwinian competition. No divergence, and therefore no future in the new era. It is the Modernity Machine in a hoodie.

What Spinoza called natura naturans⁷ — nature in its active, generative aspect, the self-causing substance that expresses itself endlessly without settling into any final form — is what a Spinozan tech stack would look like: not a product to be consumed but a capability that pervades and generates. One substance — AI capability — expressing itself through infinite attributes and modes, without converging on a single platform or requiring a canonical interface. This is what AI will look like when it reaches the infrastructure layer.

The Leibnizian model, by contrast, is natura naturata — the finished, produced world. Leibniz in the book is always trying to save the world as it was from slipping into Spinoza’s stream and dissolving, making increasingly sophisticated efforts to shore up something solid when the deeper insight might be that there’s nothing solid to find. This is exactly the move Big Tech is making — shipping natura naturata, a finished product, when the underlying reality is natura naturans, an ongoing process that can’t be captured in a final release. There is no final version. There is only the ongoing expression.

On the advantages of boredom

There is a passage in Hobbes — Part II of the Leviathan, Chapter 21, “Of the Liberty of Subjects” — to the effect that an all-powerful sovereign can also be a limited one. The sovereign can do anything but needs to do relatively little: once the war of all against all is settled, the settlement itself recedes from daily consciousness. The sovereign’s power is what makes the sovereign boring.

Apply this to AI and you arrive at this proposition: the most powerful AI stack is the most boring one. Powerful enough to resolve the frictions that presently consume our hours, boring enough that it doesn’t monopolize our attention⁸. You describe the presentation you wish to make; the AI makes a compliant deck in ten minutes while you eat a sandwich. A great deal of what currently passes for “knowledge work” turns out, upon examination, to have been staring at PowerPoint while thinking. The thinking was the work. The staring was the overhead.

A reasonable objection here is the Jevons Paradox of attention⁹: when a task becomes ten times faster, the market often demands ten times the volume, and you end up staring at more PowerPoint, not less. This is a real pattern — email did not produce leisure, it produced more email — but I think it misidentifies what changes. After the printing press, Europe did not produce fewer texts; it produced enormously more. But the experience of producing them was de-dramatized. A sixteenth-century printer set more type in a day than a twelfth-century monk set in a year, but the printer did not experience their work as heroic. The volume increased; the drama migrated elsewhere. The question is not whether AI produces more decks but whether the act of producing them remains the organizing friction of your workday or becomes, like typing, something you do without thinking about the fact that you’re doing it.

I should say plainly that this is not “best of all possible worlds” optimism — not the complacency Voltaire satirized in Candide. It is something more modest: the digital world will become good enough to stop commanding our attention, in much the way that plumbing became good enough that we stopped thinking about plumbing. To continue with Voltaire, we can turn our attention to tending our own garden.

The cost of the alternative is worth stating plainly. If Leibnizian platforms dominate and sustain our current monopolies, we may extend the Gramsci Gap indefinitely, mistaking a transitional condition for a permanent one. There is a subtler danger as well. Even if AI reaches the infrastructure layer, it matters enormously how it arrives there. Infrastructure monopolies — AWS, payment gateways, chip manufacturers — can be just as extractive as attention monopolies, perhaps more so, because their extraction is invisible. You don’t resent your cloud provider the way you resent your social media feed, but it takes its cut of everything just the same. The danger is not that AI fails to reach the infrastructure layer but that it arrives as natura naturata — a finished product owned by three firms — rather than as natura naturans. The Gramsci Gap’s monsters don’t disappear in this scenario; they simply put on boring clothes and move downstairs. The Spinozan completion matters precisely because it resists this capture: a generative process expressing itself through many modes is harder to monopolize than a finished product shipping from a single source. If the Spinozan model holds, the end state looks something like this:

There is a deeper version of this concern, one that Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology helps articulate. Arthur argues that technologies never truly complete themselves — they structurally deepen, adding sub-systems to handle the problems their own operation creates. By this account, AI will not make the digital stack boring so much as it will stratify its complexity: simple and quiet on the surface, more intricate than ever underneath. The drama doesn’t disappear; it becomes specialized, experienced only by the shrinking class of people who maintain the infrastructure everyone else has been trained not to notice. This is already how electricity works — boring if you’re making toast, extraordinarily complex if you’re managing the grid. So the claim is not that AI will make technology boring in some absolute sense, but that it will make technology boring for most people most of the time, while concentrating its complexity — and therefore its power — in the maintainer layer. Whether that stratification remains legible and governable, or whether it produces a new priesthood of infrastructure lords, is a question the Spinozan model at least poses correctly, even if it does not guarantee the right answer.

On the length of transitions

The DM, by the accounting of our framework, has a four-hundred-year operating life. We are just twenty-five years into its deployment. For context, that span would carry you from today to roughly the early-25th-century era depicted in Star Trek: Picard. The MM created numerous complete stacks (e.g., electricity, plumbing, the combustion engine), but each completion took decades to propagate through the existing infrastructure. The printing press took a century to de-dramatize knowledge access across Europe. In that case, as profits do in the Christensen framework, the drama moved to another part of the value chain — spawning the Reformation, the Wars of Religion, and the Westphalian nation states.

The trajectory, as I see it: screens give way to voice, voice gives way to ambient computing, ambient computing gives way to companions — droids that we treat more like people than objects. Each step pushes the technology stack further down the pace layers, further from fashion, past infrastructure, closer to culture and perhaps even a new notion of nature.

I notice the early signs already. The conversations I have with Claude are of a quality I find genuinely stimulating — more so, if I am being honest, than all but the best of what I encounter scrolling through feeds — and they take a fraction of the time. High return for invested attention. This is what de-dramatized digital life feels like in its preliminary form: not less technology, but technology that has found its level.

And before I get accused of optimism — I am aware that in 2026, any suggestion that a technology might produce something other than misery reads as optimism — I’m sure there will be many suitors that will crop up to monopolize our time. As the printing press example suggests, de-dramatizing one layer tends to push the drama elsewhere. Where the new drama emerges — and it will emerge — is something we need to track over the course of the DM. This is not a return to pre-digital sociality, which would be nostalgia of exactly the kind our framework regards with suspicion. It is a new configuration, one that the DM has not yet produced because the Gramsci Gap’s monsters have been eating all the bandwidth.

My hope is that Star Wars and Star Trek are dispatches from the far side of a long transition we have only just begun — a transition in which the most revolutionary act may turn out to be making technology so powerful that it becomes, at last, perfectly boring.

Originally published in The Schematism. Subscribe to get new essays by email.