They call themselves bad, and in the naming believe they have escaped. But the word was never theirs to confiscate. Authority coined it, and authority, which fears nothing so little as its own vocabulary returned to it as ornament, hands the term back gladly. The transgression that can be worn has already been priced. What once drew the lash now draws the eye, and the difference between the two is smaller than the emancipated suppose; both are forms of being looked at under a regime that permits no other...

Insurgent yet dreamy textual acts of beauty.

Vestments of the Glacial Epoch

Louis Agassiz proposed the existence of an Ice Age in 1837, and the nineteenth century absorbed the discovery with the appetite of a culture that had been waiting for it unawares. Geology now licensed a whole literature of speculative pre-history in which the warm origins of European civilisation could be imagined as having been violently terminated by a planetary freezing, the climatic catastrophe standing in for any number of cultural ones. Johann Jakob Bachofen, writing...

The Way to Dismantle Ego’s Game

(From Mindfulness in Action: Making Friends with Yourself through Meditation and Everyday Awareness, by Chögyam Trungpa)

One of the effects of meditation is that you become more open-minded, and this gives rise to an interest in working with others. In that way, meditation practice can transform your lifestyle and your relationships with other people. Then, mindfulness practice becomes a reference point in dealing with the rest of the world. So we should look further...

On Shapecels and Word-rotators

Sometime in 2021 a binary surfaced from the Twitter ecology of accelerationists, AI researchers and rationalists posting behind cartoon avatars, with the writer Roon generally credited as midwife. Humanity, by the proposal, divided into those who manipulate language and those who manipulate space; lawyers, critics, journalists and philosophers on one side of the line, engineers, mathematicians, physicists and programmers on the other.

The suffix of wordcel is borrowed...

Emptiness of E-mail

A guided meditation

Find a comfortable position. Wherever you are. Sitting, lying, standing on a train. It does not matter. Close your eyes.

Take a slow breath in. And out. Let the shoulders drop. The jaw. The small muscles around the eyes that have been bracing all morning without your permission.

In your mind, conjure the screen. The familiar one. The light of it. The shape of the window. The little envelope icon, the stylised M, the red number floating in the corner of the...

Phenomenology of da Spirit

October 1806, Jena. French cannon were breaking the Prussian army a few miles south, on the plain at Auerstedt, while Hegel sat finishing his manuscript in the smoky light of an autumn afternoon. He sent the final pages to his publisher Goebhardt at Bamberg by courier, with a covering letter that has since been quoted to death. He had seen the world-soul on horseback, he wrote to his friend Niethammer, by which he meant Napoleon, who had passed through the town that morning on...

Insulting the Meat

Charisma, Cult, and the Machinery of Belief

When a hunter among the !Kung San of the Kalahari brings home a large kill, the band does something counterintuitive. They insult it. The meat is derided as scrawny, barely worth the effort, hardly enough to feed anyone. The hunter is expected to agree, to diminish his own achievement, to perform inadequacy. Richard Lee, who documented this practice in his fieldwork, initially found it baffling. A community dependent on successful hunting...