In all of this, what it actually means to create art in the age of AI is also shifting. We hardly question that creators will use AI in some capacity; we are debating how to qualify such usage, and whether it is good for culture, for the economy, or for our brains. This is the hypnotic effect of living in the age of information. When a technology is embedded in our everyday tools through no choice of our own, it becomes near impossible to resist or even to isolate for long enough to consider thoughtfully.

And yet, thinking about the impacts of AI is only more urgent as these tools become increasingly commonplace. Generative AI (GenAI) software and LLMs are transforming entire industries and the way we do work across all information fields. Yet, while the tools themselves have progressed and proliferated (or simply proliferated, as Erik Hoel might argue), our thinking about them has not advanced accordingly. What happened, instead, is that we got used to their presence. Soon, we might grow too comfortable to remember what the question was all about.

Considering the impacts of GenAI on art and creativity may seem frivolous, with so much else at stake, but in fact, few other angles—save that of consciousness maybe—get at the underlying core issues better than to consider what is Art in the Age of AI Generation.

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Art as Craft, Mastery, and Knowledge

For as long as humans have been making art, we have debated its significance. Art is linked to truth and virtue, the good, the sacred, and the divine, as well as to human ingenuity, creativity, and authenticity. Art is self expression, and art is a channel for something greater, something that lies beyond an individual mind or life. Art is connection.

This pedigree is in the very etymology of the English word art: in Middle English it meant primarily “craft, principles of a craft or field of knowledge,” while collectively, “the Arts” denoted the seven classical disciplines comprising the medieval curriculum of study. Drawing on Anglo-French and Latin usage, the meaning of art ranges from “knowledge, deceit, sorcery” to “acquired skill, craftsmanship, stratagem… [and] systematic body of knowledge.” It is through Latin that we can reach its oldest layer of signification in the Indo-European root ḥṛti, “the act of fitting or joining,” which underscores the ultimate nature of art as that which is made, fashioned, put together.1 Art is mastery over material; it is both skill and the creative act.

In the past two centuries, industrialization and various techniques of mass-production and replication have often generated debate about the nature of art, its unique status (or lack thereof), and its essential characteristics. It is not surprising that thinking about GenAI tools should follow a similar pattern.

Acknowledging that these are tools, rather than nascent intellects, is relevant here. While some still fear—or predict—that ClaudeCode and Gemini will somehow develop consciousness while we aren’t looking, there is little evidence of this to date.2 Even as “mere” tools, however, GenAI applications present many challenges to the ways in which we think about creativity, innovation, and the idea of authorship—including in the sense of intellectual rights—and that is in the best case scenario, when we bracket out malicious uses of these tools to distort reality, commit fraud, or spread misinformation.

This tension between art and machine—between the presumed singularity of the creative process and a technology that enables easy copying and reproduction of works of art—is not unique to AI. Anxieties around creativity and authenticity have accompanied industrialization, particularly in the context of mechanical reproduction. Art can well be made using technology—all tools, including paintbrushes and chisels and ink pens are forms of techne after all—but the element of mass production troubles us. The very fact that something can be mass produced seems to disqualify it from the status of “art.” At minimum, such a process raises questions about the work’s status: is it truly art? Is it good art? Whose art is it?

Thinking through some of the implications of this dynamic, I kept coming back to a Walter Benjamin essay that grapples with the definition of art in the context of mechanical reproduction. In particular, I find his thoughts on uniqueness, embeddedness, and the “value” of art productive starting points, and well-worth wading through somewhat opaque critical theory.

Aura, Uniqueness, and Mechanical Reproduction

Walter Benjamin in his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” proposed that a work’s authenticity, or uniqueness, is contextual, derived from its cultural and physical embeddedness. He called this the work’s “aura”—an intangible quality that is lost in the process of reproduction. No matter how good a copy is, it will always lack the aura of the original, by definition: “The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.”3

Tradition, for Benjamin, stands for the religious, sacred, or ritual use of art, given that historically these are the contexts in which art-making had originated. By extension, this sense of singularity inheres in traditional methods of making art, as well, irrespective of its purpose. The connection such a work retains with its specific context—i.e., its aura—is permanent, unbroken even if it were to be physically relocated, such as when a statue once stood in a temple is placed in a museum, for example.4

Mechanical reproduction here is a process that is both destructive and constructive and one that is categorically distinctive from making a manual copy (such as copies of masterworks by students of painting, or Roman replicas of Greek bronzes). Though he describes it as a kind of violence, Benjamin suggests that a work’s detachment from its tradition has a democratizing and emancipatory potential as well.

Though mechanical reproduction eliminates the very possibility of an original, in the traditional sense, it

“emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics.”5

If art in a traditional sense is characterized by what Benjamin calls its “cult value,” then in the age of mechanical reproduction it is increasingly judged according to its “exhibition value.” Works of art, detached from the sacred or ritual context, are meant to be seen. The viewer is identified with the position of a camera. This is key, because what we see is not really the subject—an image, an actor, a landscape—but the presentation of subjects through the lens of a camera. We behold a print, a screen, a projection. This shift, Benjamin argues, changes the very nature of human perception.

And so, mechanically produced media, unlike traditional art forms, “go out” to the beholder; they demand a kind of closeness:

“the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. […] To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.”6

The Locus of the Original

One might say that Benjamin anticipated the smartphone with its ubiquitous visual media and mechanisms of replication by a good eighty years, yet, it remains unclear whether he would still find it emancipatory in the 21^st century. What in 1935 might have seemed like a reclamation of the sublime by the wider public, had turned out to have a complicated impact on the cultural significance of art. This “democratization” of art is not only at odds with its uniqueness (arguably, a characteristic that makes it desirable in the first place), but it also creates its own hierarchies of material and status in the form of consumerism.

The public’s desire to bring things “closer” is not a simple aesthetic craving; it is also the desire to possess, to ingest, to remake oneself through consumption.

The de-centering of ritual and tradition contributed to the emergence of new aesthetic philosophies such as art deco, futurism, and modernism—forms that Benjamin might have called political. These movements responded to emerging technologies, just as impressionism and romanticism responded to industrialization and innovations such as photography before them. Indeed, mass production made art more accessible—to a point of saturation. The initial democratizing impulse in turn gave rise to new gatekeepers, new (ideological) traditions and rituals, and the splitting of art along “fine” and “popular” lines.

Yet, it is not surprising that we are loath to dismiss the idea of the original. Creative authenticity remains a valued parameter of artwork, even as it becomes harder to pin down. Modernist and pop-art movements emerged precisely as self-referential and self-questioning creative forms, provocative in their deployment of mechanical reproduction and mass production processes. Modern art fights for its essence, its aura, even as it remains deeply uneasy about it. (The better examples of such art manage to contain the theory as well as to transcend it; more average efforts result in works that are art only after an explanation—which seems to defeat the point.)

Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) is a classic example of this. Thirty two near-identical canvases, deliberately painted to resemble the mass-printed labels on the machine-fabricated soup cans, with only their names for variation. Wherein lies the original? In the label design produced by Campbell’s? In the artist’s material creation, which isolated these everyday objects and depicted them in a way that is both referential and magnifying, larger than life? In the combination of subject matter and execution? These aren’t straightforward questions. Consider, too, that something about pop-art itself invites continuous iteration, almost by default. Warhol’s legacy, who famously said “I want to be a machine,” is again exemplary: today, the vast commercialization of his most famous works made them into something of a mass-produced cliché, yet, one that retains a measure of its mystique.

If this can be said about a set of images, then the art forms Benjamin defined as having “exhibition value”—photography and film—further challenge traditional conceptions of the original with their entanglement of artist/ author, and machine.

Photography, as we know it today, is the result of many generations of technology. Different techniques and equipment of photo-graphy—literally, “light writing”—gradually developed over the course of the 19^th century, but it did not become widespread until the 1870s. The popularization of hobby cameras and the use of photography in news and print media generated lively debate as to whether photography spelled the end of art, because it could capture reality “as it is,” and conversely, whether or not photography itself was art, or merely a form of reproduction.

Today, of course, it would be strange to argue that a photograph or a film cannot be an original work, even if not all photography or film are works of art. A CCTV camera is unlikely to be producing art, even if it is set in motion by a mind for a specific purpose; its output is more akin to that of an industrial machine or a photocopier. For something to be art an element of creative intentionality is necessary. The camera does not operate itself; it requires an interaction between the lens and the eye, the mechanism and the mind. Still, even that is not enough. A further type of intent is needed: an act of will from a creator, but also an act of reception by a beholder. In this sense, art is always a dialogue. Some images are elevated to the status of art, but not all. This is not a function of technology, but of human psyches: just as some works made with chisel and stone are considered art, others pass only for ancient graffiti.

In the case of film, the question of authorship is even messier. Films are often collaborative; some are an effort by hundreds of people. And yet, no matter how widely distributed, we can speak of a film’s originality—in its creative choices, in the way it conveys certain ideas, in its use of the many tools of the trade, and so on. Where does this originality lie, precisely? In the script, in the actors’ performances, in the director’s will and vision, in the editor’s mastery?

What, after all that, defines “art”?

Eye and Mind

In his treatment of art, Benjamin attempts to delineate the human element in the making of art as distinct from the mechanical or technological ones. However, as he also argues, our use of these technologies affects our faculty of perception. This is inevitable, as all technology that becomes woven into the fabric of everyday life eventually interpenetrates our way of being in the world. This is true of writing, as a technology that forever changed the human experience of once largely oral cultures; of printing, of running water, of steam engines, of electricity, of antibiotics, of highways, of space shuttles and satellites.

The habitual presence of cameras in our lives—both as tools and as potential observers—alters how we view reality and our relationship with it. This process of seeing and of being seen becomes co-creative.

An image reflects a photographer’s point of view, sensibilities, intentionality, as well as skill and mastery of craft. The habit of operating a camera lens alters how that person encounters the world. Light streaming through tree branches, steam rising on a cold morning over rooftops, a peculiar combination of lines or shadows, colourful reflections dancing on a friend’s face—all these evoke different impulses in the eyes and hands that are accustomed to shutters and focal lengths than they do in the eyes and hands attuned to tempera and brush, or to chisel and stone.

If what makes a work of art is a process of trained, intentional perception, an interplay of eye and mind that filters through the machine, then a work’s originality remains rooted in a tradition, albeit a more personal and deeply heterodox one. If we accept that the aura inheres in a work as a result of its embeddedness in a context, then a work of art produced by mechanical means might still be considered “local” and “embedded” to the mind and body that has produced it. Bodies and minds, after all, do not cease to be part of a collective tradition just because new forms of technology enter the scene. A person’s cumulative experiences, memories, desires, taste, training, and skill, as well as their linguistic and cultural milieu, history, environment, and kinship—do they not speak to shared networks of meaning, tradition, and ritual? Can these not serve as the ground for the aura of an original?

Ghost in the Machine

Thinking about art this way exposes the frictions that persist between the individualist, post-Enlightenment idea of the self with our historically older, more inchoate, notions of art, ones that draw on a view of human consciousness as more collective, interrelational, and plurivocal. Neither one of these is more correct than the other; human thinking and behaviour oscillate between individualist and collectivist modes, even when historical accident may favour one or the other at whatever time and place. And yet, this is precisely why we are so challenged by the presence of GenAI tools: they obscure the process, such that it becomes difficult to separate eye from lens, mind from machine, artist from beholder. They flatten the whole endeavour of making art into one single dimension—a product.

Let us put the question another way: what happens when the very creation process of a work is located within the machine? Even more importantly, can such a creation process be located in a machine? If an interplay between eye and mind—between perception and synthesis—is required for rendering a work of art, where do the GenAI tools come in? At the perception end, or at the synthesis? And, where does the human element lie, when we deploy such tools?

One answer, of course, is that the human element—the whole of historical tradition, aura and all, reams of video, decades of music recordings, etc.—has been fed into the machine, to train it in spitting out reproductions with increasingly higher fidelity. Whether those are images of the Pope wearing Balenciaga, or weirdly realistic puppies in aprons making a cake, or fake revenge porn, is perhaps beside the point. The machine, though its function is nobly labelled as “generative,” is little more than a glorified copier.

Another answer, which complicates things a bit, is that human artists do not create ex nihilo; they take in the world—phenomena, ideas, dreams, tradition—and produce art via a process that is, to some extent, digestive or synthetic. Some have argued that the GenAI tools “do the same,” but that is a gross oversimplification. True, we are formed by our traditions, but if that alone was enough, then everyone would be able to produce the same art equally and prolifically. Instead, we create works of uneven quality and value. Even a skilled photographer can take a hundred photographs, out of which perhaps three will be truly good (a normal ratio, by the way). A writer may write a hundred thousand words, before any of her short stories are worth printing; she might write a hundred thousand more, and still come no closer to the level of her own taste (that, too, is normal). Yet, with due persistence and a bit of luck, she may have a breakthrough at some point—the nature of which is hard to quantify—when her writing becomes no mere collection of phrases, but a work of art.

Can a machine do that? No—perhaps some day, but not yet. Debates about mind in the machine aside, we know that LLM models trained on AI-generated data quickly degrade and begin producing incoherent gibberish. The machine, it seems, needs human eyes and minds in order to maintain the illusion of intelligence.

Where does that leave us, with respect to the work of art in the age of AI generation? At minimum, it raises the question of what role should we assign to these tools. Supposing, for the sake of argument, that all the data used to train them is obtained ethically and with permission, what are we to make of their output? If these are tools like any other that might be used by artists, such as physical pens and brushes or rendering software, where do we draw the lines between copying, adaptation, and creation?

Is this, in the end, the final death knell of the original, or, as I suggest here, originality remains within the purview of creative will, for which a mind—be it human or not—is necessary after all?

Writing, literature, and knowledge work are even more instructive than visual arts of what is at stake here, as “words are the most sensitive weathervane to AI capabilities,” to use Erik Hoel’s apt formulation. There is an immediacy to language that belies the extent to which it is a product of eye and mind, just as much as a photograph or a painting is; in some ways it also requires less of a context to be produced in. It is not only plagiarism that is more evident, when we allow our words to be outsourced; it is, more insidiously, habits of thinking and reasoning. Writing has a shaping effect on the mind, and while some GenAI tools can be useful time-saving devices, they are really only useful to a mind that is already well-trained in rhetoric, critical thinking, and reasoning. That training is the type of effort that, in forgoing, we risk to lose so much more than we gain.

Unfinished Thoughts

I remain in two minds about the overall implications of these tools. The future seems at a strange inflection point right now, when things could go either way. It is not only the capabilities of GenAI that we must consider, but their usage—which brings us back full circle to the very real problems this technology raises concerning truth, surveillance, and anomie.

A pessimistic view may see GenAI as the apogee of mechanical reproduction, yielding works whose value is not even exhibition, but merely consumption. Consumption whose only goal is that of increasing its volume cannot but produce a self-cannibalizing ouroboros, continually fed on human creativity while simultaneously gutting our very capacity for it. If the machine can perform near instantaneously, bypassing years of training, education, embodied experience, tradition, and the honing of a personal voice or vision, it not only serves as a convenient work tool or playful diversion; in a ruthlessly economic society, it ultimately guts creative labour by disincentivizing young people (or anyone else) from pursuing creative careers.

In such a world, the most vulnerable industries, the ones already dominated by AI integration, are first to crumble. The cheaper it is to produce a GenAI facsimile, the shallower the pool of new human talent, because unlike AI models human artists need to eat and sleep and have time in which ideas breathe and evolve. Slowly, then quickly, music degenerates into autotune. Literature thins as attention spans fray. Ignorant, tired masses are easy pray for authoritarians wielding propaganda and offering endless circuses. Meanwhile, the iterations eat their own tail with increased vigour, as everything becomes AI slop.

And this does not concern only creative fields; it would be the same in any field that adopts AI broadly. “The world will be Tlön.”

An optimistic view, on the other hand, hones in on the truly democratizing nature of these tools, armed with faith in the resilience and ingenuity of the human spirit. Even as GenAI further dislocates our grasp on the elusive original, it opens up the domain of Art to include millions of those who may have been otherwise hampered by a lack of access to training, education, or opportunities. Perhaps it allows some genius to finally give form to their ideas, despite having all left thumbs when it comes to holding a brush, and the world is treated to a fantastical vision they might not have known otherwise. The value of these tools shifts from emphasis on creativity (they are merely tools, after all), to their use as aids in training and education, and as labour-saving devices. Teaching frameworks focus on learning methodologies and mastering disciplines over test scores. Artists invent new forms of questioning, alchemical art in response to the new technologies, just as modernist artists have done before them. Children become preternaturally clever at detecting fraud. There is a strong “return to nature” movement. In pursuit of unique and original solutions, more and more young people take up creative work or hobbies, composing their own music, making films, creating games, painting portraits. The world flourishes with play, creativity, and self expression.

If the pessimistic view is worth taking seriously, given our current reality, so is the hopeful vision, for nothing is yet decided. At least, the optimist version gives us something to strive for.

I like to believe in the techno-utopia, but to achieve even a milder, middle-of-the-road version of the future will require considerable collective will and effort. For one, it will mean putting human welfare and human interests first, politically and culturally (this includes ecological welfare, yes, because the two are coterminous). It would also mean reconsidering our relationship with convenience, at least to some degree, and in so doing resisting certain powerful forces that shape our current reality—not least of which is the very technology I am using to write these words, that you are using to read or to listen to them.

Above all, it continues to be worthwhile to consider where we are creating from, what is the ground on which we stand, the traditions that we are embedded in. I do not believe, the way Benjamin did, that mechanical reproduction alone is enough to unsettle millennia of human culture, even if the technology always does shape us, profoundly.

One of the more stable definitions of art is mastery, be it over a material or a field of knowledge, and it bears not to lose sight of this. If one cannot be a master of one’s tools, one risks becoming subservient to them.

For more of my essays on AI and optimism, check these out:

Time is thickening again, as I find myself living in parallel time-spaces. Part of me is here, in Toronto, in what finally begins to feel like spring. Snow thawing, the sun warm on my face, the bare brown earth smelling wet and alive, the spring rain “mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots ” as the poem goes.1 But another part of me is far away, across the ocean, where the spring sun is almost hot enough for swimming, where the morning air is a crystalline shimmering haze, the greens lush and still unscorched by the heat, the fields outside the city wild with blooming. I live with this split screen in my mind, and read the news through my fingers. When my mom gets off the phone with her brother I invariably ask, “anything good?” meaning, it is understood, is everyone still ok?

We think of ourselves as fairly hardboiled, to be honest. One gets hardboiled, growing up in a place where the ground of what is certain is liable to shift underneath your feet. Living in Canada made me nervous, sensitive. Here it is easy to get used to peace, to predictability, to safety. One gets used to good things very quickly, as it turns out. There’s a grit that wears smooth when life is comfortable, or more comfortable than it used to be. Comfort, safety—these are just relative things. I see my Canadian friends fall apart with anxiety around me all the time. I realize I might be the one broken, shrugging my shoulders. The other day, a friend texted me saying “Reminding everyone I care about to buy gas today.” It honestly took me a few beats to figure out what she meant. Of course, I am following the war; but my focus is different. My stakes are deeply personal, existential, on the level of kin and blood. Gas, well, hadn’t crossed my mind.

I’m not saying this to shame her. It is just a fundamental difference in experience, one that I have downplayed, unwittingly, thinking it went without saying. But nothing goes without saying, these days; we live in an overly literal, explicitly declarative culture. If it isn’t in a pin on your backpack, or in your email sign off, or in your social media bio, does it even exist?

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I have been thinking a lot about what it means, to be a transnational, a person split across multiple realities, places, and languages. Of course, the meaning depends on where or when one is encountered as such. A culture that values hybridity and glossolalia might name such a person a cosmopolite, a citizen of the world; a culture that is suspicious of boundary-crossing sees such people as vagrants and mongrels, as dangerous outsiders whose inconvenient hybridity is difficult to quantify and hard to control. In today’s polarized identity politics (both of the left variety and of their ethno-nationalist, identitarian cousins), there is a deep bias against pluralism and against hybridity. People whose native and authentic self is split across some boundary—geographical, ethnic, religious, ideological—are increasingly viewed with suspicion.

There are ways to make yourself acceptable, of course, but often it means toeing the party line, whichever party you happen to pick. It means saying the right things, performing the right song and dance, reading the room. Some find it easy enough to code switch, or to signal their identities subtly to those in the know while maintaining a safe-seeming exterior—not strategically, but as a matter of instinct. Some choose one side of the hybrid as a primary identity marker, and commit to it whole hog, perhaps at the expanse of other, silenced, bits of self. Others yet cultivate a variety of non-intersecting social groups, sharply dividing aspects of themselves between these contexts.

To some extent we all do this, as part of normal human socialization and psychology. That is not what I am talking about, however. The processes are similar, yet the hybrid’s self-compartmentalization is greatly magnified, exacerbated by meaningfully higher stakes of social status and acceptance. It is a survival strategy for people who are a mosaic in a world overly fixated with blocks of primary colour.

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*

My mother said something interesting to me the other day. As we were perusing the family chat for daily updates of rockets and sirens and running into bomb shelters, she admitted it was getting to her: “I guess the last war really affected me. Or maybe I am getting older. I keep thinking about the Gulf War, and how great I felt back then… I wasn’t afraid at all.”

This may sound strange, to those who observe this from afar. What is the difference, after all? Bombs are falling, isn’t it all the same? No, not really. There is a temptation, among those who live safe and peaceful lives, far removed from the conflagrations of war these past eighty years, to regard all places where such violence happens as interchangeable. When all one sees are the smoking ruins and the dusty convoys, after a while the specific loci become irrelevant. Ruins and convoys all look the same; the narrative flattens and calcifies.

Sometimes this is an unintentional side-effect of media cycles, sometimes it is planned and carefully executed propaganda. Either way, it has the same outcome: it turns a place into a sign, a name on the map. The map, however, is not the territory. For some of us, such fraught places are not mere geopolitical talking points or grotesque caricatures, generated to perform a moral preening dance; for some of us, such places are home. Or, a home, one of several. Invariably, it is a place that is real, flawed, familiar, dear. A place with a history, a political consciousness, a culture, a realpolitik. I hate to resort to such passé notions as complexity and nuance, but any narrative that claims to reduce diverse, imperfect human collectivities to a few apparently indisputable “facts” is not analysis; it is either dogma, propaganda, or a brand strategy. Sometimes, it is all three.

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I don’t think it needs to be said, but I will anyways, to head off the more obvious knee-jerk objurgations: no war is good. War doesn’t benefit anyone, except for the billionaire few, and it can be actively welcomed by only the most sociopathic, fanatical personalities. To criticize war, however, doesn’t mean that people have no right to self defence, or that states have no responsibility to protect their citizens. Indeed, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights identifies the right to physical safety at the top of the list. What this means, in practical terms, is that people also have a right to organize into states and have standing armies, that states have the right to enforce their borders and protect their sovereignty. The declaration, sadly, does not tell us what to do when one collectivity threatens the safety of another; this is a messy human reality, which goes to the deepest roots of what it means to live on this planet with other people, with our long histories and short memories, with our ingrained ancestral gripes and disparate visions of salvation.

If you demand pacifism, you must demand it universally. Indeed, we ought to demand it universally! That said, I also know that war, as soon as it enters a landscape, has a kind of forward momentum that will not rest until it is spent in its entirety. The question we must ask ourselves, always, is how do we move forward in a way that isn’t another war. There is always a way, I think.

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For those of us whose lives are marked by war, there are echoes of old wars in any new war. I remember the Gulf War, too. I was four, almost five. I remember the air raid sirens and the gas masks we had to carry around everywhere and the “safe room” in our apartment, with windows sealed with plastic and tape against potential biochemical weapons, which thankfully were never used. I remember the tension in the air, and the urgency, and the way people rushed to help one another, as buildings’ doors opened during an alarm and anyone caught in the street was rushed to get in and get to shelter. I don’t remember being afraid.

In some ways, the experiences of that war are seminal to a whole generation of transplants, of Soviet Jewish refugees who, for the first time in their lives, were allowed to be fully themselves without censure or apology. This is why, perhaps, the war did not scare off the influx of immigrants from the disintegrating USSR (that, and other places like the US and Canada were scrambling to tighten their borders). Between 1990-91, approximately 335,000 olim arrived from the Soviet Union; by 2006, that figure would grow close to a million.

The year of the Gulf War, we, like so many others, were fresh off the boat and finding our feet in Israel. It wasn’t just economic and political chaos that drove people to emigrate. As the Soviet Union was falling apart, its brief flirtation with democracy having exposed its fundamental fragilities, the former satellites were experimenting with newfound national identities. Amid converting alphabets, toppling statues, renaming streets, updating typewriters (yes, really), and reissuing passports, there was a lively public debate about who belongs where, in these once cosmopolitan states. Liberty and democracy, it turned out, wasn’t for everyone.

Things were getting tense, even in a place like Moldova—ethnically diverse and politically nonexistent before the formation of the USSR, which made its nationalist movement peculiarly ahistoric. Vigilantes stopped people in the street, to see what languages they spoke. My mom recalls one incident, seemingly benign but insane in its implications, of a woman turning to me somewhere in public to ask what my nationality was—I would have been 3 years old or so. My passport nationality was Jewish, of course, but I couldn’t know that at the time.2 Cheeky kid that I was, I retorted “I live in Moldova, don’t I? Obviously I am Moldovan.” Obvious to a three-year-old, maybe. When crowds chanting various slogans, such as “Russians get beyond the Dniester, Jews into the Dniester!” marched by the windows of the library where my mother was working on an article for her PhD, sometime in ’88 or ’89, the family decided it was time to go.3 As the great satirist Evgenii Zhvanetzky would later quip: “Jews flying west; a sign of great upheaval.”4

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And so it came to be that, in March of 1990, my mom, her parents, and myself had landed at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. As the USSR, still gasping for air but not for long, didn’t recognize Israel, we travelled by way of Bucharest, where my grandmother was from. We took a train from Kishinev, a journey made smooth thanks to a time-honoured traditional gift for the border patrol officer (cognac and a box of good chocolate). We stayed there for three days, awaiting our flight. The Sochnut had put up all the refugees fleeing the USSR in a hotel, which, as my mom described it, had little by way of food or milk, but all the kids got a juice box, and a triple cordon of Israeli commandos guarded the entrances, as the chaos accompanying the Romanian regime change had just exploded into street fighting. If grandma had any thought of taking a nostalgic tour around the city she grew up in before a different war changed her life trajectory, sadly, it was never meant to be.

At the airport, and I think I actually remember this moment because the flight itself was a massive event in my then-very-young life, they played Shalom Aleichem over the loudspeakers. It translates to “peace be upon you,” (yes, just like the Arabic salaam aleikum, the two languages have many cognates, after all), and it is a flowery, old-fashioned way to say “Welcome.”

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March, unsurprisingly, is a month for reminiscing in our family. We recall our migratory journey, which defined the shape of our fate in ways that still continue to unfold. On another continent, in another century, in what seems like another lifetime; the weight of certain events in one’s life becomes mythic over time, sedimenting into identity, into a worldview.

Just because one’s identity is a pluriform, it doesn’t mean that its constituents are in conflict, though of course that can also happen. I grew up speaking multiple languages, which was the norm around me. My classmates were from all over Eurasia, and the same things that united us also divided us, as it happens in any broad-enough swath of population anywhere. Some funny inconsistencies that feel native to me sound strange to others, especially to those accustomed to a clear ethno-national-linguistic schema. For example, Russian is my mother tongue, yet it is a matter of some irony that the only place where I would pass for Russian is in Israel, where the immigrants of the 1990s were colloquially called rusim, Russians, even though on Russian (USSR) soil most of us would be excluded from that category (see my point about the passport, above). Rusim in the 1990s was sometimes-derogatory, underscoring the fobbishness of that cohort, but has been since reclaimed as positive cultural identity by the children and grandchildren of that historic aliya.

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I, too, think of myself as kind of Russian in the Israeli sense, and I never had to intentionally square those parts of my identity before March of four years ago, when Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine, and bombed—bombed!—places like Kiev and Kherson and Odessa.

The enormity of what it meant, what it still means, in the Russophone post-soviet sphere is almost impossible to accurately describe. Maybe that is why I haven’t really written about it, aside from a few dispatches on Instagram at the time. But, echoes of past wars live in all the present ones, and this one is no different.

Recently at Davos the Canadian PM Mark Carney gave a now-much-discussed speech about the rupture of the world order, sketching a path forward for what he called the “middle powers.” His vision is a bold one, and his words struck a chord precisely because it was one of those rare moments when a politician clearly articulates a simmering subterranean truth, giving it form everyone can recognize. But for me, I knew about this rupture four years ago, because nothing short of a radical change in geopolitical reality could have brought about that utterly irrational and hideously grotesque invasion.

I also know exactly where I was and what I was doing that day, which began as any other day. Earlier in February I had come home for my grandmother’s funeral, and I was going to stay a few weeks, maybe two months, to help with family matters. In Israel, everybody was discussing the ongoing Russia-Ukraine standoff, in part because every third person was from one side of that border or the other, and often from both. My own grandfather was born in Odessa, which his entire family fled during WWII, evacuating to Tashkent. My friends’ families are from Kiev, from Dnepropetrovsk; the list just goes on. It was never a question for taking sides, because everyone agreed it was total madness and nothing will happen. A little sabre rattling, a little action in the Donbass. A quiet political coup, perhaps.

The day the first attacks would launch, my cousins and I decided to do a little day-tripping. We went to see the blooming anemones at a defunct British airfield, then we drove out to an empty beach, still off-season, and walked among the dunes, watching the waves rolling over mounds and mounds of seashells, their clatter both soothing and somehow ancestral, osseous. And, just because we were in the area, we visited the plain of Armageddon. Not the prophesied one, but the site of the ancient city of Megiddo, its excavated ruins now a national park (har megiddo, meaning Mount Megiddo, over time yielded the latinized “Armageddon.”)

It is there that we heard the news, the first terse reports. It seemed almost too theatrical, too clichéd, to be discussing this war—which to all of us came as deep shock, an event scarcely conceivable—while walking these ruins, this storied place with so much pregnant symbolism attached. But it is useful for remembering, now. I replay the day in my mind so I might hold on to that feeling of precisely how inconceivable it was because that is the normal feeling. The now-prevailing global resignation to this reality, four years later, is just a symptom of how the psyche breaks under the onslaught of never-ending crises.

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As this new war expands, my thoughts keep turning to the empty, peaceful, verdant places I had visited that day, four years ago. The circumstances are different, of course; this is not intended as some kind of simplistic comparison or parallel between the two. Still, there is a kind of rhythm here, something to be gleaned from the staccato of historical events, the thickening of conflicts.

Let us leave the political analysis to the talking heads and the professionals. Granted, I am weary of them, too. Having grown up in the region, I know that one-liner “explanations” of its dynamics usually reveal more about the speaker and their agenda (or ignorance) than they do about the topic at hand. As one Iranian woman, , recently wrote in a brilliant retort to the online mob of would-be moralizers suddenly come out of the woodwork (where oh where were they, when the protests began?): “you cannot map salvation onto a country you have only ever encountered as a headline. You cannot dictate survival to people who have been surviving all along.”⁠

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Survival is perhaps the real thread of this meditation, the plot-line beyond one woman’s reminiscing. Not only in the urgent sense of the word, such as enduring hardship, but survival in a long-term sense, survival as stubbornly reaching for the life that comes after—after the gauntlet, after the war, after the crisis.

To be split across some boundary or other it to be a survivor, in a way, and I mean this without the now-trendy melodrama accompanying this term. The transnational, trans-lingual person is someone who has to translate and iterate across various contexts to ensure they cohere with one another, even (and especially) within one’s own self. One’s way of seeing becomes multifocal, compound, yielding a different model of the world. It serves one well in a fragmenting reality but may be cumbersome in a culture obsessed with purity and mono-vision.

One indisputable advantage of this way of encountering reality is that it is more flexible, more resilient to sharp twists in the narrative. Indeed, it anticipates the twists, knowing that something comes after—even after ruin. I recently wrote about optimism as a moral remedy for our times, and this feels more true than ever. To build a better future, we need to believe in that future first. It is the only real answer to the apocalypticism that grips the modern imagination.

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Megiddo is a windy and quiet place. That day, from the half-preserved ramparts of the ancient city, one could see across a wide stretch of farmland almost to mount Carmel. The almond orchards stood hushed in bloom, like brides. It is a beautiful place to visit, but frankly, it seems too small, too cramped for a world-ending battle. Fabled yet parochial. Strange to think that generations upon generations have pinned their apocalyptic aspirations here, as if the gravity centre of the world didn’t shift with every new horizon.

These days, it certainly feels like the centre is not simply shifting, but has fractured, and is falling away rapidly. The pathos in public discourse isn’t making it easy to make sober assessments, by any means. Is this what my parents felt like, when the Soviet Union, the only place they’ve ever known, with its closed borders and paranoid patriotism, was dissolving around them? If so, what did it feel like, on the other side?

Accidental as it was, the coincidence of myth and reality on that day offered a kind of telescoping vision, a falling away into the past and into the future, reminding one that no conflict can last forever. It’s a slim hope, and perhaps too feeble for those engulfed by strife, but it is also the only way forward.

Instead of closure, which we cannot have (crave it as I do), I will leave you with this short film—an audio-visual experiment, of sorts—composed entirely of video shot on February 24, 2022. I edited it on my phone throughout the March that followed, while I slept in the room that was my grandmother’s. It’s my first effort at such video work, so it isn’t brilliant or anything. It is simply a charm for the future. A reminder of a time after the war, which is the thing that keeps people going.

If you enjoyed this, here are some more thoughts on apocalypse and optimism:

This moment, this texture of time we are in, thrumming with a tension that feels both explosive and unending, calls for a reorientation, a repositioning. A reminder, perhaps, that the future is still in our hands. That is always true, but it works better when we believe it. Difficult as the challenges before us may be, they become utterly insurmountable if one is expecting time to run out. We must believe that the future—a viable future—is possible. Rational or not, in order to build, to plan, to problem solve, to preserve, to safeguard, to pioneer, to innovate, to imagine anything at all for the long term one must be fundamentally, axiomatically optimistic about the future. It is a moral stance perhaps as much as it is a metaphysical one. And, I will argue, it is medicine for our batshit times.

I can almost palpably feel the eye rolls on the other side of the screen, so before anyone strains anything, I’ll be the first to acknowledge the obvious: optimism is not cool. It was never terribly sexy, and even when it was in vogue as part of post-war American wholesomeness, it was seen as unsophisticated, which at that time was a good thing. Phrases denoting an optimistic outlook on life include “happy-go-lucky,” “rosy glasses,” and “glass half full,” suggesting a kind of simpleness or naiveté, a carefree cheerfulness that ultimately stems either from lack of experience or from ignorance, be it willful or circumstantial.

The original meaning of “happy-go-lucky,” an expression dating to the 1670s, is not a positive one, either. Used as an adverb, it denoted carelessness, haphazardness, and outright anarchy (“every man for himself,” as described in Etymonline). Evidently, in the 17^th century this was a combination of traits considered less innocent and twee and more antisocial and irresponsible. And, if the antisocial aspect could potentially be redeemed as cool in the spirit of punk and rebellious individualism, our modern response to carefree cheerfulness, especially when not associated with actual children, is largely one of suspicion.

In the past few years optimism has fallen especially out of favour. Ask anyone, at any point of the political spectrum, about the state of the world today and they will no doubt rattle off a list of the horrors that persist (myself included). Never mind that such lists might paradoxically contradict one another, if you get a broad enough sample; most people might be too hung up on their version of reality to appreciate the irony of it. These are no laughing times, it seems. Almost without exception the vibe is gothic in scope, ranging from existential despair to full-blown melodramatic apocalypticism. Welcome to our doom era.

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Jokes aside, we live in chaotic times. Convincing serious, thinking adults that optimism as an intentional orientation to reality is worth their consideration will be a bit of a slog. Still, I intend to do just that. For one, I am just too contrarian to go with the majority opinion. I like to consider my options, before committing to the mass delusion that is the nature of all social realities, whatever their characteristics. But more importantly, I think it is key to preserving one’s mental health and sense of agency in a world that appears simultaneously volatile and overdetermined, where past performance never guarantees future results, where neither the rules nor the game seem to apply anymore.

The landscape we find ourselves in is undeniably challenging. The future is uncertain, the past is contested, and the present is an exhausting litany of terrible news. The grand narratives of human progress and a post-historical techno-utopia now seem naive at best, evil corpo-propaganda at worst. And yet, the remedy I propose is not one of willful ignorance or a simplistic form of self-hypnosis. True optimism, I maintain, requires a clear knowledge of the facts and their careful consideration.

Optimism, as I see it, is a radical philosophical commitment to conduct oneself—even in one’s thoughts—in ways that are life-affirming, even against all odds. It is a commitment to joy, to becoming, to building and making things, to personal integrity, to quiet resistance in small everyday ways—in the maintenance of hearths, in the raising of children, in the growing of gardens, in the dreaming of dreams.

A brief aside on forms of resistance is needed here. In truth, it is entirely possible that, in some cases, a commitment to life-affirming conduct may require bold action, even reckless, dangerous, desperate action. Perhaps we are living in such a time. A year or two ago, campus protests seemed to me largely semi-social spaces for ideologically-minded young people, a kind of extracurricular activity. Looking at the recent events in Minnesota, however, it seems clear that even in nominally ‘polite free societies’ protests can be true crucibles of dissent—with real, at times tragic, stakes for participation, acutely reminiscent of 1960s anti-war and civil rights demonstrations. What to say of other contexts, where organized dissent may well be the sole route remaining for meaningful change—as we saw with the protests in Iran and their brutal suppression?

And yet, violent revolution is not something to recommend; it is a final, desperate recourse when all other options have failed. Regardless of the nobleness of the cause (and not all causes are equally noble), violence begets more violence, all too often rolling back the very freedoms one supposedly fought for.2 As Joan Didion wrote in On The Morning After The Sixties: “If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest, I would go to that barricade. And quite often I wished that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.”

It is in light of all this that I advance my unfashionable proposition. Optimism is too earnest for cool, yes, but perhaps it can be reclaimed as epic, even mythic. Perhaps we may yet whet its edges and stoke its sacred flames, for, what else is an affirmation of life in all its chaotic glory if not a Promethean undertaking?

A Remedy for Ruin

Merriam-Webster defines optimism as “a doctrine that this world is the best possible world”; “an inclination to put the most favourable construction… to anticipate the best possible outcome.” I have many bones to pick with this definition. For one, it seems oddly deterministic: a doctrine claiming this is the “best possible” world is only consistent with optimism as an orientation to the future (anticipating the best outcome, etc.) in the event that everything is already predetermined. Secondly, just because this is the “best possible” world, doesn’t mean it is truly good, or even as good as we’d like. In a way, such a definition seems defeatist and inert, as if to say, here, we can’t possibly do better, too bad it’s still such a drag.

Ironically, all this sounds more like hard determinism and less like the “rosy glasses” associated with idealist naiveté. It leaves no room for what I think is the most important aspect of optimism: a belief that change and improvement are possible. I do not mean this in the sense of progress for the sake of progress, or delirious tech-bro enthusiasm. The optimism I am interested here is not a socio-economic doctrine but a habit of mind. In some ways it is rather more like hope. Hopefulness is a positive orientation to reality—even when that reality is, at present, is less than satisfying. It is a vote for the future borne out of faith in the potential and in the possibility of the human spirit to achieve an alchemy of self-transcendence and transformation—not as anomalous or heroic, but as part of the fundamental wiring of our species.

And yet, I rather use “optimism” in place of “hope” here because hope is too much a feeling. It seems entirely private, dependent on personal emotional factors. One either feels hopeful or one does not; it is not something that can be taken as a moral or philosophical position. Optimism, however, in the way I am using it here, is robust enough for that. It is not an uncritical ignorance, a call to worship at the altars of endless positivity. Rather, it is an ethic, not unlike stoicism, yet it goes further than the stoic’s commitment to equanimity.3 In many ways, the optimist’s stance is a wilful, conscious resistance to the forces of entropy. It is an active, vigorous, vital ethic, requiring the kind of spiritual commitment that Soren Kierkegaard very accurately described as a “leap of faith”—after all, faith in the possibility of the future is, axiomatically, a leap into the unknown.

Optimism foregrounds action, agency, and joy—at times even going beyond what may seem possible or rational. I would go so far as to say that optimism, as described here, is a remedy for ruin. Whether the ruin is real and impending, or imagined and dreaded (and therefore in some ways also impending) matters little. So long as some future action is still reserved for us, however small, optimism can be a guiding framework for it.

Importantly, an optimist ethic is separate, or rather parallel, to one’s view of ongoing conditions. Nor are wishful thinking and rash reactivity meant to replace clear-eyed assessments of facts and events. To be an optimist in this sense one need not approve or disapprove of present conditions; rather, optimism is how one orients oneself to action, as a matter of both ethics and metaphysics, as the two are interrelated. It is an orientation to reality that foregrounds meaning (or coherence), agency, and, importantly, a conception of time in which the horizon of the future is neither fixed nor vanishing. These ideas are deeply interrelated, because, in a sense, they are the same principle variably expressed. Here I’ll elaborate on the first two, leaving the third for a future essay.

Optimism as Restoration of Meaning

“When there is nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire,” proclaimed the inimitable Stars almost twenty years ago now.4 That, in a way, is optimism in its rawest form.

This line is spoken as the intro to the 2005 track “Your Ex-Lover is Dead,” a soft melody sonically tinged with loss, yet one that is really about self-reinvention, transformation, and moving forward. The song explicitly refuses to mourn or regret the past, but simply expresses it as part of the lovers’ process of becoming (“You were what I wanted, I gave what I gave / I’m not sorry I met you, I’m not sorry it’s over / I’m not sorry there’s nothing to save.”) It is both a refusal of and an antidote to nostalgia, which is the ultimate anti-future sentiment, in aesthetic terms. “When there is nothing left to burn…” expresses an exuberant, borderline-irrational faith in the human spirit: even out of ruins—when there is nothing left to burn—one can find something to “set on fire,” something to use as a catalyst of change.

This radical affirmation of possibility is, in itself, a restoration of meaning. Optimism enables not only a leap of faith that the future may yet be viable or worth saving, but expands the range of ethical solutions in the face of existential dread, meaninglessness, and apathy. Indeed, future-oriented action that focuses on building, nurturing, creating, tending, or sustaining—whatever it is—becomes encoded with ethical meaning, to the extent that such action is intentional. (This is also a point where my articulation of optimism intersects with certain systems of mindfulness, but that is a conversation for another time). Precisely what one builds or nurtures is, in my view, not as significant as the building and the nurturing (well, within reason). A relationship can be as much a project of optimism as a social movement, an intellectual body of work, or the physical growing and building of material things.

True, some actions will be more effective or have farther-reaching consequences than others, but here I wish to resist any kind of utilitarian calculus as a measure of what is “more” or “less” meaningful—or more or less optimistic, for that matter. This is not only because I think utilitarian systems such as effective altruism fail to address fundamental ethical truths, and not even because I am uneasy with attempts to quantify and optimize suffering (which is essentially what it attempts to do), but mostly because the degree of effectivity is not the point. Meaning is the point. Or, to paraphrase a great optimist (I say this in all seriousness), one Friedrich Nietzsche, they who have a why to live for can bear almost any how. The opposite, incidentally, is also true.

Meaning emerges as an alchemical substance, collectively shared yet internally, individually metabolized. This seems to apply broadly, including to linguistic and idiomatic construction. It is something we tend to take for granted, in our everyday lives, but even without philosophical training, our deep-seated instincts about the possibility of knowing another person (or its limitations) colour our entire metaphysics. Fundamentally, one either believes that it is possible to understand another person (even if only partially), or one believes that it is not possible. One cannot maintain an agnostic stance here, practically speaking. (One could, I suppose, maintain a prejudice that only some people can be understood, but that ultimately amounts to the second option). The reason this is important is because only one of these stances is compatible with optimism. The good news is, one can sometimes change one’s mind, and even one’s deep-seated instincts.

Freedom, Will, & Agency

If meaning is a function of optimism vis a vis narrative (a belief in the possibility of coherence, if you will), then agency is a function of optimism in time and space. To put it in plainer words, to act with any kind of intentionality requires at least two basic conditions: to believe one’s actions can succeed, and to believe that one is acting of one’s own volition. Of the two, even if one is skeptical about success, having confidence in one’s agency—at least, in having some measure of agency—seems necessary for basic psychological congruity, let alone for any discussion of ethics or responsibility. This is why a belief in free will, even if only over one’s internal states, is truly the last stand of the human spirit in the face of existential aporia or annihilation.

The emphasis on will is key, here, as oppose to choice. As Victor Frankl has written in the wake of the Holocaust, choice implies control over external conditions, and can be easily taken away. One’s will, on the other hand, is always free—irrespective of either circumstances or instincts. Frankl formulated his ideas while imprisoned in a concentration camp, the last place imaginable for such a meditation, yet, it is precisely there that his thinking on this subject had such a powerful salvific force. Yes, human beings can be constrained in a myriad cruel ways. And yes, human beings have instincts, drives, genetic predispositions, etc., that affect their possibilities. But, according to Frankl, we are not reducible to either circumstances or drives. Moreover, constraints are necessary for freedom., he argued; freedom of will is always an act of rebellion in the face of a destiny.

We might take “destiny” here to mean, broadly, all those elements that shape one’s reality outside of one’s will, such as environmental circumstances, physical or psychological factors, the sum of a myriad socio-cultural patterns, and other determining conditions. And to be sure, these biological and social determinisms have a profound shaping effect on human lives. And yet, Frankl’s definition of free will is remarkably robust. It points to something arising beyond the sum of preexisting factors and conditions; it posits the ability to will beyond oneself, to project one’s will into the unknown, beyond the totality of one’s present moment, transcending one’s existing circumstances.

This sounds improbable, until we remember that we do this every day. There is much that is not in one’s control; the behaviour of other people, the vagaries of fate, and even the treachery of one’s own body frustrate our illusions of mastery on a daily basis. And yet, we act! We engage with other people, build relationships, make plans, start businesses, have children, invest time and energy into projects, plant gardens, spend countless hours building and tinkering and fixing stuff and making art, adopt dogs and cats, study languages, learn crafts, make bucket lists. We orient ourselves to the future, even—perhaps, especially—when it is not guaranteed. What better stimulus for action than not knowing? Sure, we cannot be certain of success, but neither are we certain of failure. Uncertainly is the vertigo of freedom.

If all this seems self-evident, one reason to spell it out is that deliberations on what is and is not in one’s control have a frequent side-effect of reducing the scope of personal responsibility as such (often seen in modern articulations of Stoic thought, for example). There is a kind of fuzzy logic to it, for it is easy to slip from admitting something is not in one’s control to believing one needn’t do anything about it. Yet these are not one and the same. Rather, there is a metaphysical assumption at play here that collapses the two. If reality is broadly deterministic, then acting to change things that one cannot change, by definition, would be both irrational and semantically nonsensical. However, if we remain even somewhat agnostic about whether or not reality is predetermined, the opposite is true. Responsibility becomes not merely a by-product of freedom, but its prerequisite.

There is another aspect to freedom, too. For many twentieth-century thinkers the existential implications of free will were not only freedom from limiting factors, but also freedom as radical aloneness. Perhaps it was the aftermath of two devastating world wars, but freedom, for many in that cohort, was not a simple unalloyed good, but something more complex; it signalled a deep metaphysical loneliness, the solitude of the human in a cosmos disenchanted from any notion of a higher power. “We are left alone, without excuse,” wrote Sartre, arguing that human beings are “condemned to be free.”5 Echoing this, Kundera wrote of vertigo—a kind of existential malaise—that it is not a fear of falling, but a temptation, a “desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”6 In both cases, freedom is an abyss, precisely because we can choose weakness, vice, or self-undoing. We can choose poorly, we can even choose to squander our freedom, for if there is nothing inevitable, then neither good nor virtue nor salvation are inevitable, either.

For some, this might seem like too much freedom to bear. Personally, I could never conceive of a better alternative, but then, I do not believe that the radical freedom and the responsibility it imparts necessarily mean the universe is empty of all but human consciousness. If nothing else, it seems to me that the loneliness of one “condemned” to be free is as much a matter of belief as the inevitability of destiny. This gets a bit tricky, and a discussion of the role played by our assumptions about reality and metaphysics merit a separate essay. In a nutshell, however, as I find hard determinism intellectually condescending and soft determinism inconsistent, it leaves us with freedom as the only viable option, love it or hate it. The good news is that the existentialist version of freedom is not the only possible one, particularly if one is willing to look for inspiration in unexpected places.7

The Future is Open

As I was writing this piece, I realized it was only the first part of a bigger project. This is because what I wish to articulate goes beyond thoughts on cultivating personal resilience in times of uncertainty; rather, I see optimism as a basis for an alternative kind of politics, sorely needed in this moment. As the most salient voices in public discourse oscillate between rabid fanaticism and cynical apathy, it seems increasingly urgent to revive and reengage the alienated and orphaned middles—the vast majority that identify with neither extreme, the self-styled moderates, the centre-left and centre-right alike—all those who seek neither control and domination over others, nor a total abnegation of national or cultural identity in the name of a nebulous justice.

To do this, we might need to remember that, while “we are one planet,” we are also individual people.8 That our diversity is best used as a source of strength and a ground for thoughtful, respectful negotiation of collective values, not as a caste system for calculating virtuous victimhood points. That, unless we believe in the isolationist dogma advanced by some world leaders (a clever brand more than a real geopolitical possibility, if we consider the quality of life improvements of the last 50-75 years afforded precisely by international trade and global movements of goods and people), we may need once again to prioritize cooperation, collaboration, pluralism, and dialogue. That, if we wish to orient ourselves to a viable future, we must develop a shared vision for it.

Admittedly, this seems like a big ask most days. This is where optimism becomes an exercise of will, a mindful practice, a stubborn kind of defiance. I cannot say I am anywhere near being good at it, but on days when I succeed, the world responds in kind. It feels gentler, more spacious, more generous; it offers up small synchronicities, little pockets of luck. Strangers are nicer. Friends feel closer. Ideas come more easily. Even time doesn’t seem to slip so ruthlessly through my fingers.

This is not just woo-woo magical thinking; this is how human minds work. When our actions feel fruitful and meaningful, it changes our behaviour: we move through the world differently, and the world responds accordingly. Even if this is just a matter of paying attention in a new way, the practical result is the same. We are narrative beings, and the stories we tell ourselves are powerful. If dystopian, apocalyptic narratives give form to our collective dread, what kind of stories we might tell if we believed the future is radically open and undecided? That change is always possible, and that it is within our grasp?

The darkling season is upon us. It is the limbo between All Hallow’s Eve and Winter Solstice, when the calendar year is not yet ending but time seems to have come to a threshold all the same. Here, in these northern latitudes, it is especially palpable. The maples flame up with last bursts of colour, the wind gets colder and more insistent, the days shorten. All one wants is to burrow deep and lay low, to make stews and soups, to read on the couch under a pile of blankets. Then, one day, the sky lightens suddenly, and one looks up to realize it is because all the leaves have fallen, and the trees are just standing there, bare, giddy, soft piles of discarded foliage at their feet, blue sky overhead. An awakening.

If you are reading this and have no idea why you are receiving this email or how it landed in your Substack inbox, it is most likely that you have subscribed to Gather No Moss at some point, maybe recently, maybe last year. I wouldn’t fault anyone for forgetting all about it, though, as I haven’t posted since last June. Last June, you see, I had a baby, and all my best laid plans—that is, all my writing and publishing schedules—were summarily laughed out of existence. (“Man plans, and God laughs,” as the Yiddish proverb goes.)

Motherhood brought its own revelations and transformations, or rather, it initiated them—a process of metamorphosis very much ongoing, maybe never to be fully complete. I started and abandoned many attempts to write about it, but, the truth is, I am not sure I have much to add to the rich literature already out there. To say that “your life, as you know it, is over, never to return,” as Bob (Bill Murray) tells Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) in Lost In Translation, is both absolutely true and woefully unspecific. It is one of those thresholds that can only really be experienced, lived through, embodied; the change sinks into your bones and remakes you from the inside out. It is both the most unifying and the most personal sort of experience. Yet, to speak of it is almost inevitably to track in cliches, to dance around the subject and to hedge, everything, with “that is how it was for me.” For someone who likes to be able to say something definite about a topic, it bedevils the hell out of me.

Still, one unexpected way in which it has been productive, is the relative silence I found myself in. Not actual silence, obviously; anyone who ever met a baby can tell you they are not usually quiet creatures. I mean mental, psychological, social silence. I mean, I logged off. I haven’t deleted my accounts on socials or made big departure announcements, as though we’re at an airport. But I stopped posting, and then I stopped checking (I still looked through my inbox on Substack, admittedly, but I read mostly the long form stuff and occasionally the notes. This feels different from the other platforms, for now, even though I fear it is going the social media route all the same).

Partly, logging off was not a conscious choice, but one made out of necessity. Exhaustion, sleeplessness, and simply having one’s hands full with caring for an infant and still trying to keep up with laundry leave one very little spare time. I prioritized showers, sleep, food, and time with my partner. As is, I took a somewhat forced social-media fast in the aftermath of October 7^th because I could not deal with the grief and the gaslighting (I wrote a little about it in the early days, here and here). After the baby came, it solidified into habit. I missed it, at first. Sharing images of my life had been so natural, the reflex itched like a phantom limb. I found myself missing the aesthetic curation of it, my life organized into pretty images (not a lie, but not the whole truth, either). And I felt I was reneging on some loose social contract, as if someone was waiting for me at an appointed time and place, and I was standing them up. But, the longer I stayed away, the less it seemed like someone was waiting for me. I still can’t tell which I feel more of: liberated from the illusion, or just a little bit sad that it was illusory, after all.

Strange, isn’t it, how the so-called latent and weak ties exert such a strong pull on our psyche. To be clear, I am not against all social media, necessarily. I simply needed to reframe my own relationship with it. I realized she—I like to imagine Social Media as a trendy, cheerful socialite, always on the move—is less like a best friend, and more like that flighty, slightly toxic but really fun friend, the one who is great for reckless nights out but who disappears the minute anything real happens in your life. The trick with such a friend is that you can’t expect her to be someone else. You either cut ties with her, or you accept her for who she is, and behave accordingly. I opt for the latter. If I see her around town, I will certainly stop to say hi and chat. Maybe I’ll even go to that party she’s throwing. But I won’t expect her to help me move a couch, or to ask after my mother’s health, or have a long heart-to-heart. That’s what real-life friends are for.

It sounds very Zen, I know, but what facilitated this breakthrough was precisely that period of relative silence. Silence, I realized, is just as much a signal as words are. It is the absence of noise, rather than of meaning.

At first, turning down the noise dial left me in a kind of vacuum. I couldn’t hear anything in it, not even my own thoughts. At that point, I was thankful for how busy I was with the baby. It was hard, but also gratifying. Exhausting, but often joyful. Every day was a discovery. Watching a tiny human simply becoming—learning everything from first principles, even how to eat and sleep—is thankfully so engrossing and unlike anything I’ve ever done that everything else fell away, for a while. I stepped into a kind of creative quiet. A hibernation. Alchemical nigredo. A season of descent into the deep murk of the earth or of the ocean, and then the slow, slow rise back to the surface.

And here I am, not quite surface-level yet. I am taking my time de-pressurizing, hanging out in the middle depths. Somewhere up above me are the sunlit kelp groves, with their silvery schools of fish moving in smooth swirls like clouds of chain mail, the hustle and bustle of the reef… But here it is still quiet, ancient, chilly. It is the realm of the past and of the future, repository of sunken vessels and pirate treasure, haunted by indifferent, alien-looking squid, and glimmering strange creatures who must carry their own light into the gloam.

A prolonged absence—be it from a place or a practice or a relationship—is disorienting. There is a break in identity. The person who we were then is not the same person we are now, as we are changed by experience and circumstance. And whoever or whatever we are returning to has also changed, and our changes fell out of sync with one another. (True, there are people and places to whom this truism doesn’t apply, those friendships and where-froms where you just pick up where you left off, as if time is meaningless. It might’ve been two weeks, or two years, or ten, but you talk as if you parted yesterday, or you plug into the local life as if you’ve always lived here, never left, never made a home elsewhere. But that’s maybe a topic for another time.)

For most things, however, following an absence there is a reconnecting ritual that must be observed. Reintroductions are in order. The question isn’t even whether you are who they remember you to be; a more pressing matter is whether you are the person you remember yourself to be. This is why I am writing this now, before I fully regain my bearings and stop mixing my metaphors. There is something magical about the in-between states, the incomplete, the not-yet. I can still see who I was before, but I can also see who I am becoming. Neither one of us is fully solid, and so, we are both not entirely real and almost entirely possible. What better time to slip quietly back into the room than in this limbo season that is also a liminal gateway? The party is still in full swing, the conversation is flowing, the music is good. Who, me? I was here all along.

*

In the spirit of returning to writing publicly, I was going to put together a digest of the top five Substack pieces that made me think this year, or which highlight the most pressing conversations people seem to be having, but I think I will leave that to another post. After all, the year is not yet out, and I am holding out hope that something wonderful will happen and I won’t have to write about the American Byzantine era, the normalization of hate, or the weird comeback of the battle of the sexes (didn’t we already do this in the 1970s?).

Instead, I will leave you with a seasonally appropriate photo-essay. Two years ago I travelled in Japan around this time of year; I never ended up sharing most of those photos on socials, even though I think they are of some of the most beautiful places I have ever been to. Thankfully I have discovered that if a tree falls in a forest and there is no social media account to post it to, I still enjoy making art with it. Turns out, art is still art, even if there is no one there to “heart” it.

In the preface to her seminal essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Joan Didion opens with W.B. Yeats’s poem The Second Coming, from which she borrows her title, adding: “for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem… have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there.” And, for some years now, I have found myself relating, even if the circumstances are obviously different than they were in 1965-67. Still, since late 2016 or so Yeats’s poem has been affixed to my fridge, and when we moved last summer I took it down and put it in the box with the fridge magnets, knowing I will just put it back up again. Its time has not yet passed.  

The poem is millenarian in spirit, its imagery Biblical and apocalyptic. Didion described her experience of the mid-1960s as the first time she experienced “atomization”—things falling apart—and I think I know now what she meant. It’s not an overt and clear threat or event that can be named and identified, but rather a mood, a diffuse sense of confusion, a sense that the familiar order of things is disintegrating, dissociating, losing the thread. It’s in the zeitgeist—the spirit of the times. 

Yeats described it all aptly and almost too prophetically. And yet, and this is a crucial bit, I don’t believe in apocalypses. I don’t think we’re living at the end times or on the brink of some irreversible human extinction event. Thresholds, after all, come in many shapes and ways. Not every historical transition need herald a zombie-dystopian-wasteland, and as a rule, they do not. The landscape of 13^th century Europe, with its plagues and wars and famines, was a far more fitting setting for crying out “the end is nigh!” in the streets—and yet, the world did not end then, either.  

This seems especially important to spell out, given this moment we find ourselves in. I too, feel a shift in the quality of time; I too worry about the shape of things, the centre that “cannot hold,” and the changes all this bodes to our daily lives, sanity, and future. But, crucially, I believe that a shift in our paradigms of time is just as likely as an actual change in the texture of history. Indeed, if we want to step outside the binaries of “future is good/ future is bad” mindset, and cultivate some other ethic of engagement with the present moment, new ways of thinking about time are necessary. 

   ...Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
   Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
   The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
   The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
   The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
   Are full of passionate intensity. 
   […]
   And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 
   Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

   W. B. Yeats, 1919

Philosophies of Time

The first part of this series opened with a discussion of the “game of dice” episode in the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, as a way into thinking about time from a decidedly different angle. Indic philosophical traditions tend to view time as cyclical, and the succession of distinct “ages” or yugas as part of a greater cosmological pattern of repeated creation and destruction. I will get back to the epic in the next instalment of this series—for it has much to offer us, by way of both philosophy of time and its ethical implications—but first, it is worth addressing the bigger question directly: why are we talking about philosophies of time at all? 

Casual talk about an impending apocalypse—be it man-made or not, technological or ecological, mystical or deterministic—seems to have infiltrated all levels of cultural discourse. Eco-anxiety is on the rise; mental health is in a crisis; the economy is floundering, globally; geopolitical tensions are increasing; conversations about AI safety and “alignment” are taking a serious turn, not only for nerds now. In more fringe quarters, even the current hot wars in the Middle East and Ukraine are viewed through decidedly apocalyptic lenses. 

One might well attribute this ferment to the prevailing mood of the “fourth turning”—the idea that, as a function of generational patterns, every fourth quarter of a century, on average, sees the disintegration of old ideas and institutions, particularly those that no longer work. This theory first appeared in a 1997 work by historian Neil Howe and political satirist Willian Strauss, and has gained considerable traction in the past couple of years, perhaps for obvious reasons. While some criticize it as not scientifically robust enough, for others it dovetails both with culturally observable events and with alternative approaches to history, which question long-taken-for-granted truisms, such as the myth of progress. 

The curious bit about the fourth turning hypothesis is that it is not really about the “end times”—after all, it subscribes to a cyclical view of time and history, not a linear one. In fact, many of the prophecies and predictions currently bandied about in public discourse—often pulled from Indic, Indigenous, and other non-Abrahamic sources—are similarly taken from cyclical time systems. It seems innocuous enough, to put the two in conversation, but in truth there is a significant philosophical difference at play. Cyclical notions of time and history make space for periods of chaos and destruction, yet these are normally never finite; they do not, fundamentally, describe the end of time and matter in the same way as linear-time systems do.

Why should we care? Well, the way we think about time is not arbitrary; it is indicative of the ways in which we think about reality and our place in it more broadly. Time is where physics and metaphysics intersect, for our concepts of time are inseparable from how we think about life on earth and its range of possibilities—whether among our fellow humans, or in a bigger, cosmological sense. This, in turn, has implications both for our ethics and our psychology. In the simplest terms, how we think about time is how we think about history, human agency, the good life, and what sort of conduct does or doesn’t make sense under these circumstances. 

On the most personal, lived experience level, our orientation to time determines our orientation to the future. I would argue that cyclical views of time, on the whole, give us better tools to cope with uncertainty, to weather periods of chaos and disintegration, and to develop resilience. Cyclical views of time and history put less stress on “progress” or eschatology, and leave more room for the varieties of human experience and diversities of flourishing. They help us acknowledge difficult periods without automatically defaulting to nihilistic or pessimistic stances towards reality, simply because they contain a wider range of philosophical and psychological possibilities.  

What Time Is It There?

Isn’t time the same all over? Well, I suppose it depends who you ask. Time is a dimension of our experience, certainly. The way we think about time is easy to take for granted, but even in the West, the metaphysics of time have only recently taken the shape we are most familiar with.

For one, the idea that time is linear and finite is baked into the very fabric of Western culture. Though “the West” is a broad category, extending well beyond the confines of Northern Europe, its cultural focus in the past two millennia had been mostly on traditions that favour a certain “beginning-middle-end” structure of history. The Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all tend to view time as flowing resolutely in one direction, sometimes with a very clear endpoint in mind.  

 Christianity, for example, started out as an extremely millenarian sect, with early followers awaiting the return of Jesus as the Messiah within their lifetimes, as we know from some of the early gnostic texts and Greco-Roman accounts. This messianic anticipation transformed over time, and toned down as the religion consolidated doctrinally and politically. And yet, ideas such as the “end of days,” the Second Coming, and the Final Judgement are integral to Christian cosmology and eschatology, and for some groups remain a central characteristic of the tradition.   

Of course, one need not be religious or reared within any specific doctrine, to be immersed in this worldview; it is, at this point, simply a part of the Western cultural heritage. Even our current scientific models align with this linear view of time, envisioning the beginning of the universe as a Big Bang, and its end, in the impossibly distant future, as a “heat death.” (There is a caveat here, of course, coming from the field of quantum physics, but we shall set it aside, for now, as all of that is still hotly debated and hasn’t trickled down into mainstream culture or consciousness.) 

As things stand, the eventual finality of both the material and the temporal is one of those beliefs about reality that seem so commonplace, so natural, within most discourses in the Western paradigm, that we don’t normally think of it as a belief at all. (Of course, most does not mean all; there have been some notable dissenters from this view— discusses a few in a recent essay, as well as adding her own feminist anti-progress stance to the discussion).

Though we take our conceptions of time largely for granted, the last major paradigm shift regarding the nature of time in the West occurred fairly recently—in the 19^th century. In the past two to three centuries, Western cosmological thinking underwent some remarkably extreme metamorphoses. Among other things, in this relatively short period we went from thinking about human history in spans of thousands of years, to spans of millions and hundreds of millions of years. This change did not occur seamlessly, either, but was a matter of bitter controversy in the second half of the 19^th century and well into the early 20^th—as those who had read Inherit the Wind in middle school might recall (and even now, some groups continue to resist this, scientifically robust, worldview). 

The major breakthrough came not from work on evolutionary theory, as one might imagine, but actually from the field of geology. While 19^th century scientists still estimated the age of our planet to be between 20 and 400 million years (current scientific thought pegs it at about 4 billion), their findings expanded the total vista of reality dramatically. Suddenly, in this vast new landscape of time processes such as evolution or fossil formation became comprehensible, while the centrality of the human species was increasingly questioned and relativized. 

This triggered a profound paradigm shift across all disciplines of thought. Among other things, thinking about time in this way added fuel to the religious crisis of confidence (began in the Enlightenment period), and necessitated a wholly new metaphysics and cosmology. I would venture to say that we are still in the process of formulating them; a cosmology, after all, is not merely the rattling off facts about physical and geological processes, but also an understanding of what it means for our own human existence within these parameters.

Linear vs. Cyclical Time   

As historical accident would have it, around the same time as all these radical upheavals were happening in the realm of science, Indic and other Eastern spiritual and philosophical texts were becoming increasingly available in the Western world—in part on account of colonialism, in part on account of increased global travel, trade, and socio-cultural exchange. It seems almost serendipitous that, as the West was discovering geological time via innovations in technology and science, centuries- and millennia-old Sanskrit texts that calculated the age of the universe in the millions and billions of years were likewise coming to the attention of Western scholars. 

Notably, while Indic traditions have concepts such as “the end of an age” and teach of successive cycles of creation and dissolution, they aren’t really apocalyptic in the same way Western concepts of time can be. The doctrine of the yugas or temporal ages in Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, maintains that while periodic cycles of creation and destruction succeed one another, the universe itself is infinite. Periods of being and non-being ebb and flow like aeon-long inhalations and exhalations. Galaxies spin up, explode, expand, die, and spin up again. This is a significant departure from a view which posits that all time, matter, and existence are ultimately finite, flowing steadily from a single primordial beginning to an incontrovertible future end.

 Setting aside the nuanced history of 19^th century colonial exchange, for now, another difference between the linear and cyclical philosophies that stands out is the different ways in which each conceives of time as a quality of existence and experience. Cyclical time, to be clear, does not mean that exact same set of conditions or events repeats eternally (as one Nietzsche would have it). Rather, the cyclical position envisions time, like matter, as progressing through multiple cycles, each broken up into a series of stages, from inception to decay and dissolution, with the seeds of each successive cycle planted in the rich humus of the last. It allows for change, evolution, and infinite variation within the framework of recurrence. 

Meaning & Metaphysics 

Theories of time are deeply vested with the metaphysics and the spiritual goals or intellectual positions of their respective traditions. For example, various Eastern meditative practices aim to train one’s mind to perceive oneness in multiplicity, and to attend to the continuous paradox that is phenomenal experience. This includes, for example, experiences of timelessness or time dilation and contraction, an ‘expanded’ sense of the present moment, etc., precisely because these systems draw a distinction between the everyday, mundane perception of time and the essential or fundamental nature of all categories of perception. 

Similarly, the myth of progress, though it appears to be a secular idea, is a direct heir to linear conceptions of time and history, and in particular to the Christian doctrine of Providence. (This is by no means a novel idea; what may be novel is acknowledging that some assumptions we make about reality are not “common sense” or “scientific” in a simplistic sense, but actually have a history to them.) Ironically, while secularized notions of linear time are more aligned with current scientific thought (pace quantum mechanics), they narrow our possibilities for meaning considerably. In rejecting outmoded and limiting theological framing (second coming, final judgement, and eternal salvation/damnation), the purely materialist view has little to offer us in turn. Evolution, for example, is not a conscious process, but a natural one, wherein great leaps are achieved at random and by mutation; attempts to theorize or “optimize” such processes tend to lead down a rather dark path towards racism, eugenics, and ethno-nationalist fantasies. 

Other attempts to distill meaning within secularized linear time include progress-adjacent theories about the “spirit”of history (à la Hegel) or of economics (be they Marxist or “free market”)—but these, too, are borderline theological. In fact, nearly all meaningful orientations within secular narratives of linear time place a great deal on an individual’s capacity for imagination and psychological resilience in the face of a vast, unconscious universe—precisely because in a materialist view the locus of consciousness is only found within human psyche, and not anywhere else. This is in stark contrast with cyclical time systems, which tend to emphasize the pervasiveness of consciousness well outside the boundaries of the human mind. 

The association of time and consciousness is not accidental. Our consciousness, at least in its mundane, everyday aspect, unfolds in time. Our conceptions of selfhood are by and large temporal; we tend to think of ourselves as having a past, a present, and a future. We are, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, at once defined by memory and desire; we tend to seek and derive meaning from strings of events arranged in temporal, causal chains, as these confirm our agency as well as our interconnectedness to other people, events, and traditions. 

This is why time that is broken up or threatens us with sheer overwhelm reveals the vulnerability and contingency of all our identity categories. What is a self unmoored from the tethers of history, memory, or relationship? What holds together a partnership, a family, a community, or a society, if not the time spent together, the events shared, the joys and hardships weathered? When these are frayed and convulsed by shortened attention spans, increased hours spent with screens, less downtime, more information, greater social isolation, general social mistrust, decaying cultural narratives, etc., it is no wonder that our sense of self (as well as of others) becomes similarly frayed and strained. 

Everything, Everywhere

The personal, experiential significance of our conceptions of time is illustrated in a spate of recent films and TV shows, such as in the absurdist sci-fi Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), the quirky dramedy Palm Springs (2020), the fantastically mind-bending Arrival (2016) and even in the edgy Russian Doll (2019). The common thread in these very different works is that they all play with our conventional notions of time and consciousness, be it through exploring the idea of the multiverse, the primacy of language in shaping perception, or in the classical scenario of a time-loop (Groundhog Day-style, but with more nuance). 

In all of these we encounter characters who are confronted with time that does not pass as expected; time that is nonlinear, simultaneous, or else is repetitive and disintegrating. Deep existential anxieties and questions of meaning surface. Is the future fixed in place? Can the world get better? Can we ever truly see one another? Are relationships doomed to fray and fail? What does it mean to be kind, in a world that doesn’t make sense? Do our choices really matter?

Everything Everywhere All At Once hones in on this point especially well, making the case that anything imagined is potentially (or actually) existent—thus giving us the multiverse. As such there is, theoretically, no limit to the alternative paths one can take, other than the limits we impose on ourselves. This might sound cheerily optimistic, but actually it is a radical free-will position, and one that advocates for making a major leap of faith as a matter of ethics. One’s full potential at any specific moment is deemed both an unknown and a multiplicity; as such, an individual is responsible for generating one’s happiness and meaning. To pin down any possible reality out of an infinity, one must act on it as if it were already real. 

Not only that, but the film suggests we choose our own reality every moment of every day, and we must keep on choosing even when nothing makes sense and it seems like there are no options to choose from; having faith in one’s ability to choose is what enables the leap in the first place. This is the meaning of Waymond’s scene in the film, and of his character more generally, whose humanism is at once absurd and singularly effective in the face of meaninglessness and chaos. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make sense to be kind or empathetic; like most human values—love, art, friendship, grace—they don’t need to “make sense” because they are ethical goods in and of themselves. Still, they become real only when we act on them.  

The Myth of Endings

There is much more to say about how our conceptions of time guide our ethics or coping mechanisms, and I will pick up this thread in the next essay of the series, in which we go back to the Mahabharata for a short spell, to see what else it has to teach us about the Kali Yuga, or the “age of disintegration.” 

For now, however, I leave you with the idea of endings as such; how we think about them matters, even on a purely visceral level. It occurs to me, and maybe it’s just my own bias here (I’d be curious to know how others feel) that being able to “let go” of something—be it a situation, a person, a bad habit, a past grief, a painful experience, a mistake, a failure, an image of oneself that no longer works—seems easier in the context of a cyclical, periodic metaphysic of self and/or reality. The cyclical view of things leaves space for the possibility of returning—at some other time, with another mindset, in another capacity. Not redoing, for no one can enter the same river twice, but revisiting. There is a balance here between change and stability, between the revolutions of free will and the comforts of repetition. 

For the same reason it seems hardly coincidental, that, as far as philosophical responses to varieties of existential malaise go, in the West the more extreme responses have included nihilism and pessimism of various stripes, while in the East the extremes are represented by forms of asceticism or hedonism. Why should that be? Maybe this is a tad simplistic, but I suspect this is because nihilism and pessimism are responses to finite time—a time that is bound to end, and what is worse, its ending is not vindicated by any kind of meaning. Extremes of asceticism and hedonism, on the other hand, are responses to infinite time, and reflect a desire to transcend it into some extra-temporal quality of (non)being, be it via renunciation or through sensory fullness.

This is a rather telling difference. Both sets of approaches react to a metaphysic of time, and each has its own mythology of endings; but, operating from different myths, they offer us different possibilities for human coping with problems such as meaninglessness, disintegration, or “atomization,” to return to Didion’s definition. One offers communion within a conscious, inherently meaningful universe, allowing for a variety of tools with which to counter ennui and fragmentation; the other places the burden of meaning on the shoulders of the individual as a discrete and isolated mind, and on her personal capacity for beauty, patience, grace, imagination, and resilience. At the same time, the former makes us question our agency and even sense of autonomy; the latter allows for perhaps more radical freedom. Which is more valuable? Can we benefit from both, somehow? 

Is one metaphysic more true than the other? Both could be supported by objective physical data (or its lack), as by subjective experiential data (or its lack). I have certainly seen people go from one system to the other as a result of profound, life-changing experiences, as well as a result of purely intellectual, philosophical conclusions. My personal bias is in favour of that which life-affirming, and broader in its possibilities, but, in these times of anarchy and revelation, no preexisting time philosophy may be quite good enough. We might have to invent our own. 

It’s been a little over a year that I have started this Substack. As I work on Part II to my last essay on deep time and the apocalypse that isn’t coming for us (despite all the signs, I know), it occurred to me an update on the ‘stack is probably overdue. 

If you’ve been following along, you might’ve noticed that I’m still working out some kinks and experimenting with direction. I’m happy to say it’s mostly gratifying and mostly fun; hopefully, so is the experience of reading it (feel free to tell me all about it in the comments, or, if you receive these in your inbox, just press “reply”). Either way, I appreciate all who read and comment and engage with my work, regardless of whether or not you’re feeling chatty.  

Going forward, I aim to publish these letter-updates about bi-monthly, in part to encourage a bit more community and conversation around here, and in part simply as a way to let you know where I’m at, what I’m working on/ thinking about, and what I have planned for future Gather No Moss posts. Unlike more traditional updates, there will still be some kind of rumination at the core of it; letters, in my opinion, are not just lists of recent events, but a way to share one’s mind in a more immediate, impressionistic way than a formal essay might allow. Hopefully, it helps us get to know one another better. 

In this letter, given it’s the first one, I write a bit about writing, authenticity, and what being an immigrant taught me about relatability and the idea of a shared cultural context. At the end, there is a brief bit of housekeeping.  

From Where I Write  

As a way of reflecting on what I’ve been doing here for a year and what I intend to do from now on, I have been thinking about why I write in the first place. It occurs to me that the reason I write is the same reason I read: to shift and expand my perspective, to let my mind slip out of its usual moorings and go on a roam, coming back with a slightly altered sense of reality and self. This includes learning things, but also goes beyond a list of “takeaways and outcomes.” I read (and I write) to order and pattern my experience of reality, to discover new pockets of meaning and beauty, to make new connections between the flickering images of the phenomenal world.  

I don’t know if my writing is achieving anything so lofty, but that is the ideal I am aiming at. Admittedly, it is a process. I find myself slowly shedding habits acquired during long years in academia, re-discovering my own voice. Funny, but it turns out one doesn’t just wake up after a decade or so of grad school, writing primarily for the hyper-specialized ears of scholarly journals and one’s dissertation committee, and suddenly recall how to communicate with other humans. At least, I didn’t. But, I think I am beginning to remember.  

Incidentally, this is an almost clichéd topic for a Substack post. Writing about writing proliferates on the platform (unsurprisingly)—part of a time-honoured tradition of authors reflecting on their craft. (Stephen King and Ursula Le Guin come readily to mind; Borges had made a literature of his philosophy of language, and Umberto Eco made a philosophy of his literature. I could go on). 

Substack posts on writing tend to lean less academic (or esoteric) and more practical; from my survey of the genre, the most common advice tends to fall into two broad camps: be yourself and be relatable. All in all, it’s pretty good advice. The first emphasizes authenticity and writing from a real, internal place of genuine interest and passion for whatever it is you’re writing about. Its proponents quote authors such as Haruki Murakami, and assure us that “not everyone needs to like your work.” This is true. In his writing memoir, Novelist As A Vocation, Murakami reiterates this idea, writing “you can’t please everyone, so you may as well please yourself.” He doesn’t mean just write whatever; obviously, we all write to an audience, and we mostly hope it is one that is receptive and interested. Rather, the point is, don’t get too hung up on appealing to everybody; just be a wonderful weirdo and you shall find your tribe. 

In the second camp of writerly advice, folks double down on relatability. This means, I think, that one should write from one’s unique yet very human and therefore in some ways universal vantage point. The idea here is that when people can see you as a fellow human being (the fellow part is key), they will be more open to absorbing everything else you have to say. I think that’s true, but there’s a caveat. This is a bit trickier of an ask than simply ”be yourself” because it implies not all parts of oneself are relatable. It implies there is, after all, an art of self-construction in the public space; an art of appealing to others, be it through empathy or recognition or mystique or whatever else. 

Between authentically “being yourself” and (presumably also authentically) “being relatable,” which does one prioritize? 

As someone who came of age across three continents, speaking multiple languages and moving across multiple cultural registers, the dance between authenticity and relatability is one I am intimately familiar with on a relational, interpersonal level. How weird (read: how transparent) can you get, before people decide that being your friend requires too much homework? Too much background reading? Too much immersion in niche expatriate or diasporic realities? Too much strange food, and impenetrable humour? On the other hand, assimilate too deeply and you risk losing that spicy kernel that makes you interesting in the fist place.   

In my writing, this is something I continue to learn to juggle, as well. Over the years I have discovered that not everyone (read: almost no one) gets my literary allusions and pop-culture references. I might think I am being witty and accessible, yet, my lost-in-translation-ness, coupled with slightly esoteric academic interests, often yields a kind of code, nigh impenetrable without a prior education in the specific cross-section of languages, books, films, and ancient cultural memes that form my intellectual formation.  Of course, I’d like to think I’m just being mysterious; after all, some delight in looking for clues in Taylor Swift lyrics. Most of the time, however, I suspect it simply registers somewhere between “kind of obscure” and “I don’t get it.” 

And, I don’t mean this in a self-deprecating way. I suspect this is actually a very common (maybe even universal!) experience of wildly overestimating our ability to make our minds transparent to others. We tend to think the way we see things is self-evident, and moreover, that it is easily communicable. Even setting aside the existentialist question (i.e., can we ever truly be known by others), from a purely social perspective, this is not always a given. I suspect that when we live in a largely shared cultural landscape, this is more of a given—and may become something taken for granted. When everyone is reading the same books, watching the same shows, and listening to the same music (not literally, of course, but by and large), then they also tend to speak in a similar, or at least widely-intelligible, idiom. There’s a shared pool of “common ground,” as it were.

However, as soon as one has the experience of moving across multiple socio-cultural and linguistic contexts, one quickly realizes that this expectation of a “shared idiom” is a very local, very contextual thing. Being from more than one place, speaking more than one language, it’s dislocating. Not everything translates; not everyone is on the same page. To learn to be relatable under these conditions, in my experience, is to be in a perpetual state of translation. 

As our cultural landscapes are become more fragmented, segmented, and specialized—and increasingly they are, breaking up along age groups, interests, and other identity markers—the looser and thinner our shared context becomes. We might still assume that we speak the same idiomatic language when we speak a common tongue, but, do we?   

Some may find it concerning, but personally, I think we ought to embrace the plurality—to become conversant with multiple contexts, multiple idioms, to get adept at moving freely across these different registers. This is as good for one’s development as is learning multiple languages, and perhaps even more valuable in today’s world. Different languages not only encode the richness of cultural and literary traditions, but even on a syntactic level, they have an impact on how we perceive and orient ourselves in reality. What is more, it is not only natural languages that carry within them deep information; we can think of worldviews or cosmologies as “languages” in a sense, too. Learning that there is more than one way to make assumptions about reality—and that they need not be entirely incompatible with one another—is about the most powerful paradigm shift one can gift oneself with. 

And so, as we find ourselves navigating pockets of intellectual camaraderie amid a sea of puzzling and incomprehensible meme traditions—which do we prioritize? Authenticity, or relatability? 

Perhaps one can both be oneself and be relatable—et voila! achieve effortless and widespread popularity. I am not so sure, though, if that would be a good thing. It reminds me of a scene in Annie Hall (1977), where Micky, the neurotic Woody Allen character, stops an attractive couple in the street and asks, “You look like a very happy couple, um, are you?” “Yeah, yeah,” “So how do you account for it?” And the woman says, “I am very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say,” and the man adds, “And I’m exactly the same way.”

 Maybe that is something neurotics console themselves with, but I think the exchange also gets at the fact that human beings are, in essence, messy and complex, and maybe the best we can hope for is that our complex messiness is compatible with someone else’s. Picture-perfect happiness, just as pitch-perfect relatability, are either a lie or a disappointment. 

To circle back to the subject of writing, here’s a fun case in point: around the same time I published my last essay, I also replied to ’s note calling for cat pics. And, unsurprisingly, many more people liked a random note with my cats in it than my essay about time and dice in the Indian epic Mahabharata. Obviously, cats are much more relatable than philosophies of time; what could compete with their feline allure?? I myself am immensely more relatable as “a person who shares her home with cats” than as “a person who spends her days thinking about things like philosophy of time and theories of consciousness.” But, I wonder, is that really a good thing? And, are you really more likely to join me in thinking about language, myth, or ethics, if I first show you a cute picture of a cat? (Let’s experiment:) 

The jury is still out, maybe. 

As for me, at the risk of sounding blasé, in my own writing I intend to continue prioritizing authenticity. This isn’t just about creative integrity, though that is part of it, too. If nothing else, it is more honest; but more importantly, I suspect it will be more valuable to me, as a writer and as a person. I have to believe that when Haruki Murakami advises me that I cannot please everyone, and therefore I ought to please myself, he knows what he is talking about. And, to please myself, I rather be relatable through being authentic, rather than vice versa. 

A Bit More Housekeeping

I’d love to close this update with a promise to publish more consistently, etc., but, as I am about to give birth to a tiny human soon, I suspect my writing schedule will remain somewhat erratic. 

That said, essay topics will continue to coalesce around new—or old, but new again—ways of thinking about the interesting times we are living in. It seems to me that in a world that is increasingly fragmented and increasingly distracted, philosophy is not a quaint art, or a pursuit for the few in an ivory tower—it is a dire necessity. Why we think the way we think is not an idle question; it defines how and why we make choices, relate to others, raise our children, believe what is real, do work, vote, love, hate. It seems irresponsible not to think about it, and, doubly so when one is caught up in storming the ideological (or real) barricades. 

But that is getting ahead of myself, a bit. All this is to say that here I will continue thinking aloud about things like language, consciousness, the intersections of metaphysics and ethics, and why we should care about any of that. I may spice things up with the occasional travel essay, too, which is just another way of doing philosophy, really (after all, I still haven’t written about Japan, and that only goes to show what sort of year this was). 

And of course, I am always happy to communicate! Comment, like, or drop me an email (if you receive these in your inbox, you can simply press “reply”). Tell me what you’re reading now, and what you’d love to read about. I won’t promise to take requests, but, I will definitely consider them. Writing, after all, is always a dialogue—even when we write for ourselves; even when we write for the “ideal reader” in the ether… maybe, especially then. 

Until next time, 

Nika 

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Story Time

Long ago, at the end of the previous age, a great war erupted between the cousins in a powerful royal family, the Bharatas. The five sons of Pandu, who gave up the throne and retired as a sage to the forest, were known as the Pandavas; the offspring of Dhritarashtra, the blind, who could only rule as regent, were known as the Kauravas, numbering a hundred sons and a daughter. Technically, the eldest of the Kauravas, Duryodhana, was conceived first; yet he was born after the eldest Pandava, Yudhishtira. In a way, then, both had a claim to the kingdom, and the dispute could not be easily settled. That said, the five Pandava brothers were widely beloved by the people and regarded as virtuous and heroic, while the Kauravas, on the other hand, were seen as bitter, devious, and scheming. 

From childhood the cousins were all raised together, instructed in wisdom and trained in the arts of war and weaponry by their uncles and many learned brahmins. Still, the Kauravas were jealous of the Pandava brothers, and used any opportunity to try and destroy them. After yet another attempt on their lives, the Pandavas fake their deaths and go into hiding. They undergo many adventures, and marry a princess (jointly, between the five of them), but eventually the family gets word that they are still alive, and moreover, that they have made a powerful alliance. Reluctantly, their uncle grants Yudhishthira a territory in the east of the kingdom, where the Pandavas establish a splendid new city and a lavish palace. 

Yudhishthira, proud of their accomplishments, contemplates performing the royal consecration ritual, asserting his universal kingship—a gambit encouraged by the god Krishna, who has been subtly assisting and directing the Pandavas this entire time. Alas, not everyone is happy to see this particular version of Succession play out. At a pivotal moment, our heroes are foiled by a rigged game of dice: cleverly set up by the Kauravas, King Yudhishthira sits down to two disastrous games. He stakes and loses his kingdom, his brothers, himself, and eventually even Draupadī—their beloved wife. The whole affair ends in their forced 13-year exile, and eventually, in a bloody, fratricidal, apocalyptic war. 

Only after both sides have lost too much to care about any more vengeance and violence does the cycle break. And what is on the other side? The dawn of another age, without heroes and without gods who meddle in their affairs. An age for humans to choose their own fates in. 

Dice and the Four Turns of Time

Some readers will recognize in this unpardonably brief synopsis the plot of the Mahābhārata—one of two major Sanskrit epics, a treasure of Indic religious and literary tradition. Likely the work of multiple authors, the epic took shape, according to scholars, sometime between 500 BCE and the 4^th century CE, and contains, traditionally, some 100,000 quatrains (200,000 verses)—longer than both the Odyssey and the Iliad combined. And, just like those texts, the Mahabharata is much more than the story of a family at war. It is a worldview rendered into literary form and crystallized into myth of such depth and richness that its texts, episodes, and images, have been plumbed continually by successive generations for nearly two thousand years now—and likely will continue for as long as its linguistic and poetic forms hold meaning. 

Thick and sprawling as a primordial jungle, the Mahabharata’s full plot is too dense to address with any justice in a single essay, and that is not my goal here anyhow. The reason I told you this story was, actually, the game of dice. The game of dice is an ancient reference to time, fate, and order—older than the Mahabharata itself by maybe a thousand years. Beginning in the Vedic material, the four throws of Indian “long dice” had been associated with the four traditional ages—the four yugas. In this cyclical view of time the four ages mark the quality of time between creation and dissolution, and recur in every repetition. Each such cycle, or mahayuga, begins with a long golden age, characterized by maximal order, virtue, and truth. It is an age when no death, disease, violence, or untruthfulness can prevail. Over time, however, entropy and decay set in, and each successive age is less virtuous than the last; death and disease come into the world, and over time, the rule of dharma is shaken. Human beings forget how to be moral, or what is right; they forget their duty, and act selfishly. They war and they treat each other cruelly. 

Of course, the idea of humanity’s moral disintegration over time is not unique to the Vedas. We encounter stories about a golden age almost anywhere—from the Biblical Eden to Ancient Greek narratives, to Aboriginal myths the world over. To parallel them, we also see narratives about a time of chaos and dissolution, as recently noted (he got a small detail about the Kali Yuga wrong, but I will get to that).

The framework of the yugas, however, is a little different from what we tend to think of as apocalyptic or millenarian narratives. In fact, it seems more concerned with the present than the past. While on the surface affirming the importance of virtue and order, the cosmology of the yugas also has something to say about free will—and about the complex interaction of an individual’s will and environmental conditions. It poses perennial questions: What does it mean to live in the “worst” age? What does it mean to experience a world which is a manifestation of divine consciousness, and yet, is full of death, disease, and decay? What can we choose? What is inevitable? 

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Virtue in the Age of the Kali Yuga

All of these questions haunt the Mahabharata, a text with multiple layers and false bottoms. One of these is the philosophical concept of dharma, foundational to Indic thought and permeating discussions of time, as well. Dharma is commonly translated as justice, duty, order, law, and even truth; it signifies all that is righteous or virtuous. Its meaning, in the Sanskrit literature, encompasses all these terms and goes deeper still.

Myth teaches by way of art, rather than logical construction. Even the Mahabharata, rife as it is with philosophical asides on the nature of justice, suffering, and liberation, instructs primarily via aesthetics. As readers or listeners, we are moved by the trials and tribulations of the descendants of the Bharatas, such that, over time, an ethic arises from the text. Well, or a path to an ethics; a forking path, leading to more than one answer. Meandering in and out of the forest of the epic, we are supposed to understand not only the root cause of suffering, but also to experience its integration and transmutation within our own psyches—in a word, to have something akin to realization. 

It is no coincidence, then, that the epic is set at the cusp between the third age, the Treta Yuga, and the fourth, the infamous Kali Yuga. In the dice game, “kali” is usually the worst throw—the one with a single dot on the die face. Etymologically, “kali” means strife, discord; it is not, in fact, related to Kālī, a fierce or destructive incarnation of the great goddess (Shakti/ Devi, or Durga) who in the goddess-centric stream of Hinduism is regarded as Brahman or Absolute reality (sorry, Alex, scholar-nerd here). That said, the many folk associations between Kālī the goddess and the Kali Yuga are telling and perhaps not surprising; her terrifying and ferocious aspect presages something of the coming destruction. While this is a misreading of her mythos, it is a powerful image of the end of times—especially if we interpret the idea of “the end of times” according to a narrow, linear, Judeo-Christian model. The tricky bit here, this is not how time is seen in the Indic context, nor is it the narrative of the yugas as such. 

So, what can the yugas actually teach us about the disastrous age we live in? Quite a lot. First, however, it may be helpful to get a grasp on what, exactly, is a yuga. This requires a short technical excursus into the nature of time in Indian cosmology, but I promise, it is relevant. 

Deep Cosmic Time

Traditionally, the structure of the yugas is regular, mathematically derived from perfect numbers describing an idealized cosmos; at the same time, it is meant to be read literally, in so far as the cosmos we occupy and the idealized cosmos overlap in some ways, even as they diverge in others (stay with me). In the traditional reckoning of time, each “great age” or mahayuga, lasts for 4,320,000 human years or 12,000 divine years. Each divine year is comprised of 360 solar ones; this notion is based on sources such as the Mahabharata and the Manusmrti (aka the Laws of Manu), where it says that a “year is a day and a night of the gods.” Meaning, the macrocosm is the microcosm, and the divine is reflected in the material, but they exist at different scales—or they vibrate at different amplitudes, perhaps. 

If this wasn’t enough, the cosmos itself breathes in and breathes out at the pace of a kalpa, or a “day of Brahma,” which is comprised of 1000 manvantaras; every manvantara or “day of Manu” consists of 71 mahayugas (I’ll let you do the math in solar years). Each kalpa is followed by an equal period of non-being, or pralaya, at the end of which existence begins anew.  

Returning to more manageable time frames, the length of each of the four yugas is different and proportional to its auspiciousness. The first yuga—as the most auspicious, truthful, and dharmic—is the longest; each successive one is 25% shorter and contains 25% less dharma. (Time shortens as the universe speeds up—isn’t that something the physicists have been saying?) Of course, “short” and “long” are relative concepts here. According to tradition, the first, golden age—the Krita Yuga—lasts 1,728,000 years; the Kali Yuga, shortest though it is, lasts 432,000 years. 

Some Indic sources—Hindu and Buddhist—give variations on the numbers and the ways in which smaller cycles nest within bigger ones, yet the principle remains the same. Moreover, it is notable that as far as the Kali Yuga is concerned—our present age—traditional Indian calculations peg its beginning to 3102 BCE. This is believed to be the moment when Krishna left the mortal realm for good, and returned to his heavenly abode. From this point on, humanity must rely on its own ability to be moral. 

Why do we care? Well, because it turns out that the Kali Yuga is not really about the coming Apocalypse. In fact, we might even say that the entire history of human civilization—history in the modern sense of the word, as opposed to, say, mythic memory—begins with the Kali Yuga. To give you a rough sense of things, the “present age,” according to this scheme, begins just after the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt by the pharaoh Narmer (in 3121 BCE), around the same time as the earliest structures of Stonehenge were being erected, cuneiform writing was being developed, the Minoan civilization was at its dawn, and some of the earliest megaliths in Malta were being constructed. 

True enough, there are some prophecies regarding the end of the Kali Yuga and the appearance of a destroyer whose job it will be to finally bring the wicked age to an end. That said, if we take the traditional commentators at their word, this age will last until—wait for it—428,899 CE (!!). So much for the Apocalypse… after all, that’s quite a chunk of time to wait for the dissolution of the world. 

In fact, the astronomical numbers of Indic cosmology nudge one towards another insight altogether: the Kali Yuga is simply the human condition. We could say that we live at the end of times, but, if that is the case, we have always lived at the end of times. We are given unfavourable odds; we are given adverse conditions to work with. The world is wicked; humans are capable of terrible things. Moral confusion prevails. People and things slip out of place. We long for the past, which seems, when times are hard, to glow in a utopian light. We long for simplicity and peace, while, to quote the poet, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…” 

These days the sense of things falling apart is accelerating; we are collectively seized by a fragmentation of wits, of tongues, of purpose, of morality. The cacophony obscures and beguiles, and distinguishing between right and wrong becomes a far less straightforward matter. It is not impossible; but many are too fatigued to really apply themselves to the task, which is a lot like untangling the complex web of generational slights and curses and inopportune moments in the meandering family saga of the Mahabharata. 

It is tempting to regard all this as the end of the world, but, both history and ancient wise epics tell us that we are far from an end; we are simply in a period of chaos, or even merely uncertainty. It may even be a period of renewal—one whose outcome we cannot see yet. It is a time when the gods aren’t coming to our aid, and when they are, they might be giving us bad advice. Or, well, maybe not bad but conditional advice. This makes it an age when one cannot afford to simply follow orders, or follow the crowd; an age when the individual is forced to plumb her own soul and character for resources, because nothing else can be relied on. 

How should we cope with all that? Well, the Mahabharata has some suggestions. Not all of them are usable (or even advisable) in our times; for one, the epic’s sense of what forms an individual’s “duty” or dharma hardly accounts for the variety of forms in contemporary life. Still, its mythic ways into reality remain instructive, if nothing else, as explorations of the variety of human responses to a “time of discord.” I would argue, even, that the epic is perhaps most useful in moments when it exposes its contradictions.

Aptly, the epic’s paradoxes offer some subtle wisdom for times of trouble.

Part II will consider some of what happens on the eve of the great battle, as well as during the night after. At night, they say, all cats are grey… Or are they? 

For those unfamiliar with the now classic neo-noir anime, “ghost” here refers to a cyborg’s neurological black box—a kind of soul—in the film Ghost In the Shell. This enigmatic phrase, “a whisper in my ghost,” is how the main character, Major Motoko Kusanagi, chooses to say that she has a hunch, a feeling—even though the only part of her that is organic are the human brain cells in her titanium shell.

Ghost In the Shell came out in 1995—before smartphones, before social media, before even the Internet as we know it. Apart from being one of the coolest, most aesthetic cyberpunk films ever made, it is notable for treating the philosophical questions around the intersection of machine and human with remarkable prescience. Its cyborg characters—which range from partly to wholly synthetic, and who are sometimes treated as humans, sometimes not—challenge our assumptions about their strangeness or otherness. We are forced to consider not only what makes (or keeps) one human, but also what it means for the boundaries between human and machine to grow increasingly porous. Could they become so porous that we lose our sense of self? Is there something fundamentally unique about being human? And what about a mind entirely unbounded by a body (such as an AGI)—can it be thought to be alive, conscious, or to have inalienable rights?

It’s a brilliant work that does a lot of philosophical heavy lifting in the span of 83 minutes, but that is not the primarily reason I bring it up. Having re-watched it recently, I was a little shocked to recall that it is set in 2029—a future so near, it is almost contemporaneous. It seems unlikely that our technology will catch up to Ghost’s ubiquitous augmented humans, normalized bioimplants, and full cyborgs in just five years’ time, but, in other respects the themes of the film are more relevant than ever. What separates organic life from synthetic? Are they really so different? Most importantly, perhaps, what does it mean for humanity to be continuously filtered through and augmented by technology—meaning not just the futuristic sci-fi stuff, but all technological tools, not least of all the computer I am using to write and the phone you are using to read this text?

Engagement with digital media across our many devices profoundly shapes our cognition and behaviour. As technology continues to streamline our experience of the real-digital-virtual continuum, some companies make no secret of the fact that their ambition is to shape our reality 24/7—cue, for example, Apple’s recent ad for their VR headset, Vision Pro. Soon enough we will be swimming in a brain soup of constantly dinging messages, multiple screens, and semi- or wholly virtual environments, all delivered directly to our retinas.

Are we doing better, being so connected? And what is “better” anyway?

Functional virtual reality (or “spatial computing” as Apple prefers to call it) may sound pretty cool, but it is also weirdly familiar, a territory mapped by sci-fi authors since the 1980s. That said, it remains unclear which way the cyberpunk winds will take us. Utopia or dystopia? Rapid human evolution or unstable decadent decline? Or perhaps both of these things; as the quip goes, often attributed to William Gibson, the future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.

The impact of technology on our lives is equally uneven. The same tools that allow us so much connection, sharing of information, and learning evidently come with side effects. The adverse impact of our devices on mood, productivity, attention, social ties, ability to discern credible vs false information, and even one’s overall sense of purpose have been the subject of numerous studies in the past decade or so. Many practical solutions have been suggested for making tech work in our favour. Alas, most of it hasn’t been enough to move the needle—neither in terms of public sentiment, nor in persuading large corporations to design their products with human well-being in mind. That is not to say that such a thing is impossible; but evidently, it does not appear profitable enough for anyone to try.

Despite all that, it’s clear that being human now and for the foreseeable future entails being in, through, and with machines. Why then, do we have so few workable, positive images of what that might look like?

Ghosts in the Machine

It is precisely in the interest of navigating the next twenty years with some grace and relative sanity that it is urgent to think about the ways in which we incarnate in and through all this technology, right here, right now.

The truth is, we are already cyborg. Not necessarily (not yet?) in the sense of Ghost In the Shell, but in the broader sense of our ubiquitous interpenetration with technology in both practical and theoretical ways—as Donna Haraway, Anne Kull, and others have long theorized. The Internet, digital media, being “plugged in” and connected via all our different devices—it’s all become the waters we swim in. Effectively, the boundaries between nature, culture, and technoculture have all but dissolved, almost without our notice.

I would venture to say that, to some extent, we were always cyborg, from the very moment we first began to theorize our relationship to nature, to see ourselves as both in it and co-creating with it—a process that can equally describe religion as it can language. If religion (or philosophy, or even science to some extent) is a set of lenses that attempts to locate the human vis a vis the field of nature and causality, to establish a narrative of origins, and to offer models of ontology and agency, language is both the medium and the meta-material in which such lenses are embedded. There is no theorizing anything outside of language, and languages already encodes our tacit axioms about the real. We language our reality.

Ironically, though fully naturalized to the techno-natural landscape of our everyday lives—no wonder we call Gen Z/ Alpha “internet natives”—we largely continue to operate under outdated models of the world. We are still thinking in binary terms of organic and technological, when neither really applies anymore.

Anne Kull has written, more than twenty years ago now, that the “cyborg is a descriptive term about our present being and a symbol for our age.” Her elucidation of what that means reads, now, as utterly current:

Since the integration of machines into cultures, lives, and bodies, we cannot speak even of “partnership” between machine and organism; rather they have a symbiosis, and it is managed by cybernetics, the language common to the organic and the mechanical. Neither the machine nor the organism alone is adequate any more as a cultural root symbol. The cyborg as a creature of both culture and nature seems a better symbol to delimit our hypotheses about the world; the cyborg has as much affinity with technology as it does with wilderness.1

That last bit is particularly useful, maybe even hopeful, to keep in mind: the cyborg is not so unnatural, or anti-natural, as may seem at first blush. “A creature of both culture and nature” is, in fact, how we tend to describe the human. Whether our hybridity, our liminal and intermediate location “between the embers and the stars,” to borrow a brilliant phrase from Erazim Kohak, is given in magical or technological terms is perhaps beside the point. Magic, after all, for the majority of human history, functioned primarily as a technology, even if the two lenses have rather different theoretical implications.2

In so far as we language our reality, the implications of reframing our operative symbols of ourselves in the age of information are potentially wide-reaching.

For one, we are probably trying to solve the wrong problems when it comes to our gripes, fears, and anxieties about the cyber-future. Neither euphoria nor paranoia, to echo Kull, are useful responses to technology; and yet, the discourse around every new innovation, a frequent occurrence these days, seems to broadly follow these two modes. While the euphoric believe in unbridled “progress for the sake of progress,” the paranoid demand tight control and regulation—when in reality, neither can be guaranteed with any degree of certainty.

Secondly, old binary models that draw a hard separation between the realms of the human-organic and the technological-synthetic are proving inadequate in describing the actual relationships we have with and within technonature. It seems strange to insist on a rigid separation from, or objectivity to, the effects of technology on our minds, habits, and behaviours, when our everyday experiences of the world are filtered by it nearly as much as by our physical senses. At best, this sets up false expectations; at worst, this thinking is preventing us from soberly assessing potential risks as well as from exercising our full agency in the field of emerging technologies.

Simply put, holding on to outmoded models of the human/tech enmeshment contributes to the inertia in regulation, legislation, or even in serious discussion of the effects of technology on our lives. Believing one can simply refuse to participate, to become a technological luddite, is an increasingly untenable proposition. In the span of just a few decades, the Internet went from being a niche tool for scientists and nerds to essential public infrastructure. Once again, this is not an absolutist view; being human is obviously so much more than just being plugged into a device of some kind. But it would be naive to deny the extent to which our being plugged in is also about being human.

Paradigm Shift

In his piece on revolutionary modes of thinking needed to survive our (truly) “batshit epoch” suggests that, in order to ensure a saner future, we must radically rethink our very human nature and the nature of the relationships we forge with one another. To navigate the “high entropy states now intrinsic to modern life,” one must take the effects they have on us seriously, cultivating appropriate responses such as

moderating and curbing our online presence, fortifying emotional resilience, embracing contemplative practices to foster and scale equanimity, practicing dialogue (dialogos) among opposing tribes, and undertaking wise initiatives within communities, political structures, and other arenas.

At the heart of such a shift, as Olshonsky points out, lies a full-scale reorientation to our very identity, a

moving away from individual separation to a basic (yes, basic!) realization that we are interconnected, diverse manifestations of a singular evolutionary force. We are the pulsating heartbeat of consciousness, radiating through myriad forms, all just taking a good look at itself.

This appeal to a kind of modern Buddhist and Vedantic universalism is a welcome corrective to the current landscape of insular, polarized histrionics. Even more importantly, such a reorientation dovetails neatly with the image of the human as cyborg. Thinking with the ideas of “unity-in-plurality” or “manifold-singularity” found in various contemplative traditions allows us to not just practice more compassionate politics or step outside of our comfort zones and (re)learn to embrace states of uncertainty with the enthusiasm of adventurers or mystics. Relinquishing notions of “the human” as a brain hermetically sealed in a meatsuit encourages us to confront and understand our porous, hybrid consciousness and embodiment. At the most practical level, this is a necessary step if we are to regain any kind of agency within our evolving virtual (and physical) ecologies—beginning with our devices, which seem innocuous enough but are in fact the ground where technology, identity, and power converge.

Rethinking (or revisiting preexisting models of) our selves as embedded within a vast network of human and non-human others need not automatically spell the demise of individual autonomy, choice, or responsibility. Quite the contrary. Acknowledging one’s own hybridity necessarily points to the hybridity of the other—and to the hopeful spaces of shared humanity where these selves overlap, and across which we can translate. Translation, as I understand it, is not merely a re-representation of meaning in another language. Rather, it is the mutual changing of two points of view, two ways of being—consensus through intersubjectivity, if you will.3

Perhaps unsurprisingly, models of consciousness that stress interbeing characterize mystical traditions the world over. Whether or not there really is something universally human about the paradoxical realization triggered by certain contemplative practices, a recurring theme across many sources is being confronted with the experience of one’s mind being two seemingly opposite things at the same time: singular yet plural, bounded yet porous, discrete yet multifocal, focused yet universal.

It strikes me that the same terms can describe the cyborg—a (human) being in and through technology. Bounded yet porous, individual yet interconnected.

Regardless of whether one arrives at the “basic realization” of our mutual interconnectedness via philosophical speculation, meditation, esoteric practices, or else through the experience of creative flow—the transformative effect on one’s worldview is undeniable. This can take many forms, of course, and I don’t mean to say that everyone must become tree-hugging yogis (not that it’d be a bad outcome). There is perhaps just as much to learn about interbeing from a modern chaos magician as from Śankara, but I shall leave that to another time. For now, however, it is interesting enough to note that, as Anne Kull argued back at the dawn of the millennium, the cyborg is a creature both created and wild, and as such seems equally at home in the multiform, multifocal consciousness of both non-dual mysticism and cyberpunk imaginings.

A paradigm shift is not a renunciation of the old, but acknowledging the necessity for new tools, new forms of thinking. Any idea taken to its logical extreme is liable to prove limiting and destructive—meaning, even our most foundational axioms need a systems update, once in a while. Cultivating individualism and rational thinking served well the humanitarian ideals of the Enlightenment and helped usher in the proverbial “Age of Reason,” marked by important scientific breakthroughs and discoveries and the beginnings of modern institutions such as democracy and universal human rights. All of that is still good, I think. But it would be strange not to see how the same paradigm also led to the consolidation of global empires and colonial projects, the effects of which we are still feeling acutely.

As we find ourselves in the chaotic unravelling of some old ideas that no longer work, it is tempting to close our eyes and turn the escapism dial up. And yet, in this unstable moment so much is possible. A new paradigm is certainly possible and needed; the future, uneven as it is, is undecided. Do we take the reins, or do we get dragged into it kicking and screaming? That is up to us.

And light is something we desperately need right now. From the first days, I could feel something about this war—this specific conflict, this global response to it—was very different. Different not only in the scope and intensity of hatred directed towards Israel and Jews, the rise in antisemitic hate crimes, the vitriol in social media, but also in how extensively the general public seems to be misinformed about Israel, its society, history, or the place of Jewish people in the Middle East as such. I know many of my compatriots would disagree, but I’m not about to take on the role of “Jewish educator” just because I myself am Jewish and Israeli. Frankly, I don’t have the skills, stamina, or emotional resilience for making tiktoks for the earnest but ill-informed and for tilting against internet trolls. Besides, leftist, liberal outlets such as the Tel Aviv Institute do it much better than I alone could, and their Instagram is actually a treasure trove of educational materials. I am deeply thankful for such resources.

As someone who is keenly interested in language, in and in the ways we language the world around us, I am going to point out a few of the things that I find particularly baffling, troubling, and downright disturbing in the current public conversation.

To clarify, this is not a wholesale defence of the Israeli government, nor is it a blanket defence of the way the war is going. I’m not a politician or a military specialist, and all war always looks equally horrible to me. People die and suffer; lives are broken. There are no clear heroes and villains, as in the movies or in video games. No triumphant tune plays in the ether after a battle. (The very fact that I feel compelled to say this, lest people jump to wild assumptions, is in itself an alarming indicator of the current state of public discourse—but that’s another conversation entirely.) This is not apologia for war, but a call for sanity. For acknowledging the complexity of the situation, the humanity of all those involved, and also for taking a hard look at some truly troubling trends and what they bode for our future as a society.

Indeed, perhaps for the first time in my life, I am concerned for my safety for simply being being of a certain ethnicity, for speaking a certain language. Sure, I worry about safety as a woman, at times; but never did I feel so racialized as I have in the past two months. I hate this feeling, frankly. I wasn’t taught to feel sorry for myself, and so even when I have encountered prejudice and injustice before, which wasn’t often but did happen, I felt defiant, not afraid. What changed?

Let me see if I can untangle it.

Dark Times

It’s been two months since the Hamas attacks of October 7th, in which armed fighters invaded Israeli towns, burst into homes, and committed untold atrocities—much of it captured by the perpetrators on video (CW: the links in this post are mostly to news articles; some contain extremely disturbing details). The attack left more than 1400 civilians dead, 3300 injured, and 240 more abducted—including infants and children. Some of these hostages were recently returned (swapped for Palestinian prisoners serving time in Israeli jails, many for violent crimes); other hostages are dead, and others yet are still unaccounted for. Notably, ceasefire negotiations broke down the previous Monday when Hamas could not or would not release the agreed-upon number of the abducted women still held captive; some speculate they simply could not find them, others that they wished to “keep some” as a future “bargaining chip.” The savagery of Hamas toward women in particular is beyond description. Accounts—and evidence—of the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas operatives on October 7th are so grisly, I will admit I am only able to skim the reports. Other details emerging now of how the released hostages were treated, including the children, are likewise shocking for their cruelty and utter dehumanization of the victims.

The media cycle, however, at least here in North America, is largely focused on the situation in Gaza. To some extent, this is understandable. The theatre of war, the tragedy of displaced civilians caught in the crossfire and the attendant humanitarian crisis, is fresher and so more compelling—or as the journalists say, if it bleeds, it leads. Yet, I have also noticed that the scope and intensity of Israel’s military operation has eclipsed, somehow, any kind of contextual treatment of the conflict—especially the fact that it has two fighting sides, and that they are fighting for very different objectives. Few in the mainstream public discourse are willing to acknowledge the complexity and impossibility of the dilemma faced by Israel, today but also broadly. Jonathan Freedland recently did so, but his op-ed appears to be the exception, sadly; it’s decidedly worth a read.

More likely than not, people simply pick a side. For some it may be a matter of convenience, perception, social circle, identity politics, or whatever seems popular in their friend group. Many appear to pick sides without knowing too much about it—just because they’ve heard something repeated enough times. As one young woman had put it in one of those “real or fake news?” segments I saw circulating recently, “if so many people say that something is wrong, then it must be true.” Iron-clad logic. In the same segment well-dressed, friendly-looking folks in their 20s and 30s claimed that Israel was an apartheid state without being able to give a definition of “apartheid,” or stated confidently that it is committing a genocide without being able to list any of the details—historical and otherwise. They simply held these opinions, as if these are just neutral facts about the world, like what is the capital of Spain and where is the tallest mountain in Africa. Truth, these days, appears to be really just whatever is loudest or gets more shares on social.

To say that it is distressing for me, a Jewish Israeli woman, to see utterly everyday people being so deeply misinformed, and so casual in their judgements, is putting it very, very mildly.

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Like many Jews and Israelis on the progressive left, I have experienced successive waves of shock, bewilderment, sadness, anger, and deep disappointed at the public response to the conflict—particularly from folks I considered ideological allies. I don’t mean just the knee-jerk response on university campuses, worrying as it is, or the people who join a demonstration to “support their friends,” chanting eliminationist, genocidal slogans with only the vaguest idea of what or who they are supporting. If in the past university administrators made attempts to curb hate speech, the tide of misinformation and self-righteous, dogmatic “student activism” makes it nearly impossible for dissenting voices to be heard—or even admitted.

Recently, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT refused to clearly state that calling for the genocide of a people violates their code of conduct, and skirted the questions posed to them using vague ambiguous qualifiers such as “context,” and “conduct.” I know, I know, the congresswoman heading the questioning has a history of antisemitic remarks herself, but this doesn’t make me feel any better to hear president Claudine Gay of MIT, for example, argue that “Antisemitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct, that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation, that is actionable conduct, and we do take action.” A worthy bit of sophistry! Is public rhetoric, namely slogans chanted by a crowd at a rally, somehow not “conduct”? Not “actionable conduct”?? What kind of conduct is President Gay awaiting, precisely? Lynchings?

Such discursive contortions from the top administrators of some of the most elite educational institutions in North America in defence of antisemitism are truly astounding—and deeply troubling. We should be asking ourselves, what social justice activism, in good faith, can tacitly or openly condone acts of violence, ostracism, and discrimination on a “group-belonging” basis? Why are we making exceptions for hate speech, waiting for “actionable conduct”? Universities ought to foster independent thought, curiosity, critical analysis, and healthy (respectful) debate—not abet dogmatic groupthink and cancel culture. If this is the state of discourse in places that ostensibly prioritize free speech, inquiry, and even dissent, what does it bode for the rest of culture?

I’ve heard too many an attempt to excuse all this as “well-meaning but misinformed” or precipitated by an emotional response to the ongoing events. This hardly passes muster. For one, the ignorance argument, lazy as it is, undermines any moral superiority advanced by such activism. And for another, emotionality alone can hardly explain why the same “well-meaning” folks were also going around tearing down posters of missing babies and children, tying themselves into knots trying to divert attention from Hamas atrocities, and even going so far as claiming that—despite overwhelming, ample evidence—that the rapes and the murders are somehow a deep fake by “so-called Israel.”

But that is only part of the problem. Even more alarming, all too many people simply refuse to hold Hamas, the Palestinians who support them, and even other Arab countries directly and indirectly involved in this war as responsible parties. Even people who do not lightly toss about words such as genocide and apartheid, public figures on the left and centre-left who are seemingly reasonable and well-informed, seem to accept the status-quo that whatever situation unfolds in the region, it is Israel’s sole responsibility to find a solution, mitigate a conflict, take initiative, and generally be the adult in the room.

Some are refreshingly honest about the double standard they hold Israel to. Most recently, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat for Washington, argued for “balance” in considering Hamas actions, in light of “outrages against Palestinians.” In the same breath as condemning the Hamas rapes, albeit without getting overly emotional about it, Jayapal notes that as a terrorist organization, “of course” Hamas would resort to such tactics; Israel, however, is a democratic state and therefore can be held accountable, must uphold international law, etc. All without skipping a beat. Jayapal points to the 15,000+ Palestinians killed thus far in the conflict as inexcusably high loss of life—and I agree, this is a monstrous toll. Even taking these numbers at face value—they are provided by Gaza’s Hamas-controlled health authority, and do not discriminate between combatants and civilians—given Hamas’s known tactics of operating in heavily populated civilian areas, from under schools and hospitals and mosques, should Hamas not bear at least some of the responsibility here for such outrageous civilian casualties?? Apparently, however, when Hamas claims to not use human shields, we are supposed to simply take their word for it, rather than look at the evidence.

Jayapal calls on us to not perpetuate “hierarchies of oppression,” but, aren’t we already doing that? Why, then, would she divert the question from the utterly horrific violence against Israeli women, brushing it aside, only to engage in yet another morally bankrupt iteration of the “numbers game”?

It goes without saying that any loss of innocent life in war is deeply tragic, and there is no doubt that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is dire and worsening. Please note that I am not calling for less accountability for Israel; I am calling for more accountability all around. The prevailing double standard which holds Israel alone accountable in any development essentially gives a moral pass to a terrorist regime that pursues a genocidal agenda, and which treats their own population as expendable. A regime which, no matter how successfully it masquerades as a liberation movement, has hardly engaged in any kind of state-building since they took over in 2006. All their efforts, by their own admission and in keeping with their mission statement, have been solely focused on the eradication of Israel.

Arguments for this uneven treatment—both for “overlooking” Hamas violence and for treating Israel as the only responsible party, holding it to a standard no other country is expected to meet—abound. They range from Israel having more firepower, resources, or more powerful allies (all increasingly debatable), to a litany of its policy failures and missteps regarding Palestinians, to, in extreme cases, ahistorical and racist narratives about the place of Jews in the Middle East and the right of Israel to exist. (Some resort to truly outrageous antisemitic tropes, conflating the state of Israel with the “evils of Capitalism,” for example.)

Whatever the rhetoric, it seems that neither Hamas nor any other Palestinian leaders can be held accountable—not for their actions, nor their stance towards Israel, nor even for their administration of Palestinian territories. This philosophy, tacitly accepted by Western nations, has not only hampered any kind of productive and peaceful political solution to the conflicts in the region, but has given groups like Hamas ample freedom to pursue their agendas (hint: it is not Palestinian liberation, at least, not in the form of a peaceful democratic neighbour of Israel).

In contrast, in March of 2023, well before the Hamas attack, the Islamic Fatwa Council issued a statement condemning Hamas for their treatment of Palestinians, calling their actions un-Islamic. The fatwa, which is an official religious censure from one of the highest courts in the Muslim tradition, makes no mention of Israel, as it is irrelevant to the matter at hand. According to the document, the Council reviewed “extensive documentation” of Hamas actions in Gaza at the request of “countless believers,” and concluded that “Hamas bears responsibility for its own reign of corruption and terror against Palestinian civilians within Gaza.”

It seems deeply ironic, not to mention weirdly orientalist, that Western would-be defenders of the oppressed make so little effort to investigate the status of organizations such as Hamas within the Arab status-quo, or to understand it in a broader regional, historical, ideological, and political context.

Instead, calls for a ceasefire continue to be overwhelmingly directed at Israel, as are calls to minimize civilian deaths and damage to civilian infrastructure, while Hamas consistently continues to target civilians, sending hundreds and thousands of rockets into Israeli territory. These near-daily attacks go largely unreported in our media, evident only in the rolling cancellations of flights to Tel Aviv; I find out about them from Israeli media and conversation with friends and family. Just today, my mom was speaking to my uncle on the phone, when he said, “Oh, there goes the siren.” Indeed, the sirens signalling incoming rocket attacks have become daily life, so much so that recently it was decided to change the sounds of emergency vehicle alarms in Israel, so as to cause less confusion and minimize the trauma response for residents.

Similarly, most people I speak with are unaware that border towns close to the Gaza strip such as Sderot and Ashkelon, as well as Kiryat Shmona in the north of Israel have been evacuated almost in their entirety, because the Iron Dome is no longer enough to safeguard them (in the north, the Hezbolla is shelling Israel from Lebanon, in “solidarity” with Hamas, apparently). Even the southern city of Eilat, once considered out of reach of the fracas, is not longer safe, under fire from the Yemeni Houthis. These groups are recognized terrorist organizations, too, so “of course” they are shooting rockets at Israel—using Rep. Jayapal’s logic. Nothing to see here.

Why do these facts of war never seem to make it into our mainstream news coverage here? It is simply because “of course,” that is what they do? Is it because most of the rockets fired by Hamas into Israel are intercepted by the Iron Dome, and so the casualties are minimized? Is it just not enough drama? Would it be “better” if there were more casualties, more destruction? Is that really our threshold for what is wrong and what is right, these days? Whoever has the more dead is justified?

Certainly, Hamas thinks so. They have figured out that this is what works best on a Western public—a public that refuses to hold them accountable, and which vacillates between hailing them as liberators or dismissing any attempt at accountability by saying “but of course, they are a terrorist organization.” Combine this with the West’s two-thousand year long history of antisemitism, and you’ve got yourself a winning strategy: Israel will be held to the standard of international law, criticized for excessive force (any force?), for civilian deaths, for administrative missteps, for policy failings—and Hamas will just do what it does, with zero culpability.

Tragically, and ironically, this imbalance of expectations only serves to further push Israeli politics (especially the current government) to the right, and away from constructive diplomatic solutions. That, in turn, radicalizes sentiment among Palestinians, too, turning the process into a vicious cycle from which most of us see no immediate escape. It is a situation that benefits those who wish to destabilize the region—groups like Hamas, and whoever is funding them—and brings nothing but suffering to civilian populations on both sides. The simple truth is, you cannot tell two fighting sides to “play nice” but only expect one of them to follow through. Kids on the playground know this, and the stakes only get higher as we get older.

Light in the Darkness

Where does that leave us, on the Eve of Hanukkah—a holiday celebrating the triumph of light over darkness and the power of hope, community, and resilience? How we can keep sane and human in these difficult times?

The lesson of Hanukkah is valuable and timely here because it advocates for hope against all odds, for nurturing hope in the most hopeless places; hope not merely despite dire circumstances, but because of them. It is easy to be hopeful and cheerful during the good times; but it is necessary in dark times.

Whatever the historical events that eventually led to the commemoration of the festival of Hanukkah (the wikipedia entry on Maccabees makes for interesting reading), today Jews celebrate it largely for the miracle of a small jug of oil, normally just enough for one day’s lighting the temple menorah, having lasted for eight whole nights—until more oil could be made and consecrated. Hannukah is known as the Festival of Lights, which, besides giving us an excuse to gorge on sufganiyot (delicious oversized jelly donuts), reminds us to remain relentless. To go forth, even when resources seem scarce, when chances of success are slim, when the options before us appear to dwindle. It is supposed to remind us that after darkness comes light, and that we should not doubt our ability to persevere.

Relentlessness, these days, need not be necessarily martial. Being relentless also means not giving in to despair, it means keeping a flame of optimism for the future—even if such optimism seems irrational. Perhaps especially as an irrational kind of optimism. It may seem strange, after everything I have listed above, to advocate for optimism—but when if not now? Or rather, in the words of Hillel the Elder, a Jewish scholar living in the 1st century BCE famous for his pithy aphorisms, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, when?” It might sound like a lot of responsibility, to maintain this relentless inner resilience, but how can we support one another, when we have given in to rage and despondency? In a sense, it is the only way forward.

This is why now, of all times, it is important to protect one’s time, regulate one’s intake of information, keep a healthy daily routine, and attend to the little joyful things that fuel our lives. It sounds paltry, but it is no small feat in the current climate. Words—the narratives and symbols we immerse ourselves in—have power over our minds, our moods, and consequently our actions. This doesn’t mean we can remain ignorant or uninformed, but being informed is not the same as following every news update obsessively, as hard as it may be to disengage.

This seems self-evident, but I know for many of us it isn’t. Survivor’s guilt is real, and so is the guilt of living in relative safety, away from the war and the violence, especially if people you care about do not have that luxury. I struggle with all this myself, but ultimately, I realized there is little use of driving oneself to emotional and mental burnout.

In the darkest times, it is worth recalling what makes life good. This is not a betrayal of the fallen; not a desecration of the suffering. One must be able to imagine some day in the future when the conflict is resolved, when the dead are grieved, when the wounds are healed, when new seeds of future joy have been planted and blossomed.

To be able to think about the future—to imagine a future that is peaceful, safe, and abundant for all, and to work towards it—we have to have something good to hang onto in the present, too.

The good things are often small—like a measly pot of oil—and they seem dwarfed by the awful things. But they can take us surprisingly far. The purr of the cat, the comfort of a home-cooked meal, the affection of one’s loved ones, the warmth of friendly conversation, the way the light falls in the afternoons, the beauty of some timeless work of art, the satisfaction of a task accomplished. These are not only bulwarks against the darkness, but these small things illuminate our own humanity, not letting us forget what is truly important. May we remember it, always.

I do not normally write about hot political and human drama in real time—it is messy, it is emotional, and I cannot see things clearly. It is usually a developing situation, too, so every day and every hour bring new information. Unless one is a reporting journalist, it is impossible to keep on top of it all. What is more, there is no time, no opportunity to get “perspective,” to digest the events, to examine them with clear-headed reason and sobriety.

And yet, increasingly I find it impossible to stay silent. I don’t doubt that anything I have to say now is raw, emotional, and grief-stricken. I don’t doubt that it is shaped by shock, outrage, and fear for my loved ones. But then again, the people who are making decisions on the ground right now are just as shocked, stricken, and outraged as I am. They are grieving, they are traumatized and deeply triggered by images seared into their brains and collective consciousness of regular civilians, including children, exterminated in the most heinous, unimaginably dehumanizing ways. Images that the perpetrators had gleefully documented, so their allies and supporters may rejoice at such horrors.

I wish I didn’t need to think about it or write about it. I wish I could keep prepping for the epic trip to Japan that my partner and I had been planning for three years. I wish I could pursue any of the other academic and creative projects I have on deck. I wish I could sleep properly—for, unlike my friends and family in Israel, air raid sirens do not punctuate my nights, and I don’t need to run down to the bomb shelters. But, I sleep badly all the same. Maybe it’s the nerves, maybe it’s some kind of epigenetic trauma response, I don’t know.

If this is difficult to read, I won’t blame you for closing this newsletter or navigating to another post. That is not an option I have, though.

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What We Say, When We Talk About War

The news are no secret. TikTok was flooded with snuff clips of Israeli civilians, including children, pleading for their lives while being abducted or brutally massacred. Horror stories circulate from a music festival turned bloody pogrom. Even our sanitized news media, with its penchant to centre Israeli aggression in any headline regardless of the actual situation, is forced to report the bare facts—and they are grim.

In parallel, I’ve been making a study of the range of responses, the range of messaging about the events.

Speaking of my own, albeit limited, social media bubble, two things struck me in particular: first, it was mostly fellow Jews and Israelis who were/ are posting candidly about the horrific Hamas attack, sharing messages of outrage, grief, and pleas to circulate the information. (Not that I expect people, as a general rule, to repost every bit of awful news to their private social media accounts. That is not my point; and frankly, I hardly do it myself, even when I am directly concerned. So no shade here).

But, there were other types of posts, too, and these tended to be increasingly of a moral nature. These messages, coming from the socially-conscious left—a camp I feel generally aligned with—have frankly baffled and disturbed me. At best, they are vague, allusive, and unspecific (i.e. not naming any names, let alone any horrors) calls for “humanity” and to “consider lives lost on both sides,” as if this is not self-evident. At worst, they openly blame Israel for the atrocities committed by Hamas, or else stating, as one NYU Law student recently wrote in a newsletter, that Palestinian “resistance” makes inhumanly brutal massacres of Israeli civilians, including children, somehow “necessary.”

Setting that shocking assertion aside for now (I return to it below), neither type of discourse is new. Yet somehow, I always tried to understand where it is coming from—humanitarian concern for a disenfranchised people, a well-meaning if skewed understanding of the situation, etc. The truth is, these are poor excuses. The other truth is that such responses are deeply flawed not because they have their facts wrong (facts, after all, are easy enough to correct), but rather, because they are inconsistent. They apply one measure of morality to one party, and a very different measure of morality to the other. They are, I am sad to realize, fundamentally discriminatory.

“Humanity on all sides”

Let us unpack them, one type at a time.

I struggled with what exactly bothered me about the milquetoast but broadly well-meaning calls for “humanity,” until it hit me: I have seen this before. Recall when some people, out of defensiveness or cynicism, responded to “black lives matter” with “all lives matter” or a similar platitude? Such responses were, rightly, called out as disingenuous and as missing the point. The “all lives” is, or ought to be, self-evident; the whole point of centring attention on black lives is to highlight the ways in which the “all” has failed wide swaths of the body politic.

So why, now, am I seeing the same people who criticized such responses in the first place, resort to the exact same rhetoric? What is the logic here? Is it the notion that supporting Israel and Israeli or Jewish lives is somehow counter to supporting Palestinian ones? Why is that? Certainly, the crowd that gathered outside Sydney’s Opera House on October 9th to protest the Israeli flag projected onto the building in commemoration of the victims seemed to think so. Certainly, demonstrators in Toronto, in Quebec, in France, in the UK, all seem to think so too. Are they afraid that allowing any airtime to the fact of dead Israelis—let alone ones slain in absolutely horrific fashion—will detract from their cause? Why?

Meanwhile, my family in Israel is still, at the time of this writing, under heavy shelling, huddled in shelters or barricaded in their homes. I’ve been afraid to check on my friends lest I find out something awful has happened to them. I’m pretty much just scanning the news, now, because frankly I can’t handle any more grisly details.

Here is a little thought experiment. If your first, knee-jerk reaction to the above paragraph is some version of “but what about the people in Gaza?”, stop for a moment and consider, why is that? Is it actually immoral to grieve for Jewish or Israeli lives, without tallying up some imaginary ledger, as if this is somehow a numbers game? (An appalling position, which appears to prevail). Is it really not possible to unequivocally express one’s support, or to condemn senseless and incredibly brutal violence, most of it too harrowing to recount here?

Vague calls for “humanity on both sides,” in light of what has transpired, of what continues to transpire, are infuriating. At minimum, they are a naive and dangerous equivocation; at worst, they are veiled gaslighting.

What qualification is needed to mourn our dead and missing? What qualification is needed to spell out these brutalities? What other nation is expected to adhere to strict nonviolence when defending its borders and attempting to prevent further loss of life, as if its very attempt to do so is somehow immoral—even in theory? (By all means, let us debate the practice at length, and perhaps we can debate the practices of “resistance” too, while we’re at it, if one is still inclined to call this nightmare a “resistance”).

This slippery, cautious language, gives a terrorist organization the benefit of the doubt, which may as well amount to impunity—as if it’s a “side” in an equivalent sort of conflict, though we have very plain evidence to the contrary. At the same time, it undermines the right of Jews and Israelis to grieve, to mourn, to give voice to our suffering. It inflicts upon one a double trauma, to be both denied the right to grieve, publicly, and to be constantly chided for one’s grief—what about that? What about this??—and it is deeply, insidiously dehumanizing.

Yes, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is complex, and complicated. (Here is neither the time nor place to get into it, and frankly I’m in no good shape to do it. I’m tired, I’m angry, I’m out of heartbreak.) But then again, no one is challenging this complexity. The mind-fuck, as I see it, is that even internally I keep thinking—oh, but don’t forget to say “no side is perfect,” etc etc., as if without this, to simply share one’s grief and sadness is somehow subversive, somehow morally suspect.

In terms of the double standard regarding Israel, such what-aboutism is not just cynical and callous. It casts any support for Israel or Israelis as morally suspect, in whatever form, pitching it as anti-Palestinian or even anti-Arab. This is part and parcel of a toxic narrative about the place of Jews in the Middle East that feeds upon and reinforces every blood libel slur and antisemitic stereotype and conspiracy.

“Necessary violence”

Equivocations about “no side is perfect”—a technically accurate statement usually made in bad faith—naturally lead to the other type of leftist messaging I have seen circulating, and it is the idea that Israel (and Israelis broadly, as a people), on account of whatever sins of policy, history, geopolitics, and so on, “deserve” to endure death and horror.

This truly disturbs and boggles the mind. Even if we accept every contorted narrative about Israeli occupation in the region, what “resistance,” what “liberation movement” requires the absolutely horrific rape and murder of civilians? Of children??! What “resistance” necessitates the taking of hostages, or relies exclusively on indiscriminate shelling of highly populated urban areas, hoping Israeli defences fail under the barrage, and caring little of some of these rockets fall on their own people?

How can people, outwardly committed to all manner of social justice, issue such statements?? Whatever one’s views on the actions of this or another government, the very notion that a massacre of children and teenagers and civilians can be “necessary” to achieve a political goal is abhorrent. No moral, compassionate human being could possibly make such a claim, and it shocks me that this needs spelling out.

Others, while not explicitly condoning the violence, have simply chosen to ignore it, brushing it aside as incidental. There have been demonstrations here, in the city where I live, marking the Hamas attack on Israel as some sort of milestone. They were waiving flags on the bridge, the very day of the attack. Under the guise of “protest” they seemed to be celebrating—rejoicing at Jewish deaths.

Elsewhere in the world, Jewish shops and businesses were vandalized, apparently in solidarity. The crowd in Sydney chanted outside the Opera House, among other things, waiving Palestinian flags: “Fuck the Jews! Gas the Jews!” Even if these hateful chants issued from a “small” group “in the minority,” as rally organizers later stated, can anyone explain to me the logic of these protests as such? Are we to understand that the threat of Israeli actions—in response to the abhorrent actions of Hamas and in defence of their population (ongoing massive shelling, at the time of writing)—are enough to elicit so much concern and empathy, but no one in that crowd thought to condemn Hamas for slaying and kidnapping Israeli civilians? No one?

Is it just me, or something, on a very basic human level and without wading into the complex political details, just doesn’t stack up here?

At the time the earliest of these demonstrations were being organized, all that was known is that Hamas began a round of heavy rocket fire that took Israel utterly by surprise. My mom, who was planning a visit, texted me about 6:30am Israel time, past midnight my time, to say “we’re being bombed pretty heavily, not sure my flight will go out.” Miraculously, it did (I didn’t sleep). Simultaneously, Hamas raided Israeli towns, shooting people in their homes and in the streets, abducting others… Over the next 12 hours we heard about the massacre at a music festival, the slain bodies, the hostages. The death toll climbed, currently around 1300. Meanwhile, people paraded in the streets, protesting Bibi’s idiotic bravado, waiving flags. Zero mention of slaughtered Israelis, as if all that is comme il faut. Is this what “freeing Palestine” supposed to look like? And if not, was that a very good time for a rally?

Protest as Gaslighting

The demonstrators, such as the ones gathered in Toronto, in Sydney, or elsewhere in the world, demand our—the public’s—compassion, our outrage at “Israel’s occupation” and the plight of people living in Gaza. But the timing is suspect.

Among the protest signs in the Sydney demonstration, for example, one read “Palestine=Ukraine”—a cynical attempt to capitalize on a cache of existing moral outrage, and all the more revolting because the actions of Hamas recalled the worst atrocities committed by the Russians in Bucha. The protestors demand consideration of the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which is certainly grave—but they demand it only from Israel, not from Hamas, who actually control the territory. There are, apparently, no demands of humanitarianism that can be placed on Hamas, nor on other Palestinian or Arab leaders, none of whom spoke out to condemn the horrific acts committed.

I try to think the best of people, but, I am forced to consider the possibility that such protests are mere gaslighting, just another type of psychological warfare. They erase the human suffering of Israelis, casting them as “oppressors” and “attackers”—all while exactly the opposite is happening. They attempt to rewrite reality, to sway public attention from the dead, the missing, the brutalized. They are, essentially, not prepared to extend the same humanity and solidarity to Israel or to Jewish people that they demand we give them.

Perhaps the organizers of such demonstrations have nobler aims, I don’t know, but the public discourse they produce amounts to a denial of Jewish people as real, mortal human beings and a denial of the validity of our suffering—a classic definition of gaslighting. It is a refusal to acknowledge that Jews or Israelis are ever experiencing, as they are now, deep shock, pain, and grief. It denies us our humanity, and it dismisses any culpability or responsibility on the part of perpetrators. There are many Israelis and Jews who come out to support Palestinians, to protest unjust actions or policies from the Israeli government, to march alongside other activists for social justice from all marginalized communities. But it seems they are only ever welcome as “allies”—never as people who also deserve support, compassion, and empathy. Never as equals.

“How Do We Move On From This?”

My friend asked me, when we exchanged texts on that first, horrific day. Her despair was palpable.

Obviously, I don’t have any answers. Only mounting questions, along with mounting dread. Amid intensifying fighting, amid a worsening humanitarian crisis, amid attacks on Israel’s northern borders from the Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas saw fit to declare today, October 13th, a “day of anger”—calling on its supporters to attack and kill Jews and Israelis globally, wherever they are. They are not willing to release Israeli hostages to ease the suffering of the Palestinian people, quite obviously. Their lives appear no less disposable than Jewish lives—in an ironic twist, Hamas disregards them both equally. Hamas does not operate on the same humanitarian and moral principles that we expect from a democratic, liberal polity that values human life, because it is no such thing. It is a terror organization whose aim is to destroy Israel and establish an Islamist state in the region.

How and in what manner we hold Hamas, and other such regimes to account—or at least, to the same moral standard we demand from Israel—is something for the global community to decide. I am not so naive to think that there are not multiple other powers and interests in the region, stocking this conflict, for who knows what aims. I am, rather, talking about the public discourse we—you, me, all of us—are engaging in. The terms of the debate at present are, unfortunately, deeply flawed (at least on the left, the side I am better familiar with). Until we reckon with this double standard, I don’t know if we can move forward in any sort of meaningful way.

* * *

My thoughts remain with the grieving, the missing, and the dead; with the fathers and sons being called up for service, and the families in for another restless night of shelling. This fact needs no excuse, no special justification. Nor does it imply that I’m blind and deaf to the plight of other innocents caught up in this conflict, as if it’s a zero-sum game. For anyone who still thinks that it does, maybe it’s time for some serious soul-searching.

Ironically, my serious interest and love for photography (which well predates smartphones), was sparked by a childhood trip of which I have absolutely no photos in evidence. This, I realize, is highly anomalous in our modern hyper-documented world. Though not usual in historical terms—the overwhelming majority of humans throughout most of time did not take photos of their every waking moment, and somehow, still enjoyed their lives occasionally—in these days of ubiquitous cameras and habitual recording, curating, and sharing of ourselves, not having a single image to show for it lends the trip a sense of irreality. You know, pics—or it didn’t happen.

This lack of photographic evidence is all the more unusual given that, at the time of the trip, hobby documentation of family travel was all the rage. So, what happened? Simply put, it was an era of emergent technologies, the wild last years of a crazy millennium, full of novel, cutting-edge, experimental new forms of recording and storing audio-visual data. Alas, some of those technologies were far less permanent than anyone anticipated… But, I ought to tell the story in order. 

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Spanish Holiday 

It was the spring of 1998, and the tour bus was climbing a serpentine, narrow road in the hills above Málaga. It was long past sunset, and the road was very dark and slick with rain. Somewhere to the side, across two barely-wide-enough lanes in opposite directions, the cliff dropped off precipitously. During the day, one could see a stunning view of the coast and the shimmering sea below, but now, as the bus wound steadily up the road, all I could see was the darkness, and the shadows of foliage pressing against the windows. I remember the road was rather curvy, perhaps because the driver took its turns with a bit more flair than strictly necessary. He was probably in a hurry to get us to our destination—a small, cozy hotel perched, in my memory, almost on the road itself. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of that, however. What I mostly remember of that hotel is the hallways: warm wood panelling, ornate wall sconces, mirrors, rich yellows in the carpets. The room we stayed in, on the other hand, is slipping and sloshing vaguely in my mind, like a poorly developed image. I remember being tired and overstimulated, that first night. It was my first time on a trip abroad, my first time away from my parents. The world seemed suddenly very big, and I wanted to drink it all in.  

At this point, people usually produce a photo or two to supplant the narrative, usually an image of a figure or a group standing still in front of a monument, grinning maniacally, or more aptly in my case, “smiling mysteriously”and coming out looking rather surly. Alas, I have no such thing to produce. A picture of myself “smiling” in a surly frown in front of an archway in the Alhambra would be appropriate to insert here. Anyway, I had just turned twelve, and the reason I was in a tour bus at the side of a narrow mountain road in the hills above Malaga was because my step-dad’s parents very generously took me along on their holiday as a bat-mitzvah present. All the more so, one might wonder why no photos of this momentous event remain. A first trip abroad, and one that marks an important birthday! Surely, someone would have thought to document it? 

Surely. And they did. In fact, most of that trip was meticulously, if idiosyncratically, documented. But I’m getting to that. 

At the time, I wasn’t thinking of taking pictures. I was mostly just really excited to be going at all. My parents belong to that cohort of Soviet Jews who immigrated to Israel as a result of the upheavals of 1989-90, and they worked hard to build new lives in a place they knew almost nothing about before stepping on its soil. Most of my friends were of the same coinage, raised, like I was, at the crossroads of cultures, languages, habits, and eras. By the time I was celebrating my bat-mitzvah, a scant few of my peers had been as far as the Disneyland in Paris; indeed, the idea of going anywhere outside the country made me feel very cultured, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan. 

I cannot recall now, if, in my excitement for this trip, I deferred to the adults’ assurances that there was really no need for me to take my plastic film camera along as I’d be surrounded by ample documentary equipment, or, if I simply did not think of it. At twelve, one’s priorities are different, and so is the very texture of one’s consciousness. How to put it? There is a special kind of intensity to one’s ability to be vividly present in the world, probably because so much of one’s experience is still absolutely novel, a first time. Yet, there is also a degree of clarity and order, a sensibility that is neither child-like nor fully adult. 

Maybe this is why I actually remember certain moments of that trip so well. The tour was a loop from the coast to Madrid and back again, passing through Cordoba and Seville, ending back on the “Costa del Sol.” I do not recall the order of events very well, but certain scenes, moments, colours, and shapes remain vivid in my mind. The sunny, narrow streets of the medieval quarters of Spanish towns; the pink terracotta hues; the windmills and hill castles seen out the window of the bus and tales of Don Quixote; cheesy roadside diners meant for tourists; the breathtaking gardens and pavilions of the Alhambra; the arches of the great mosque in Cordoba; the cold, enormous cathedrals with their whispers of ice and fire; the foggy streets of Gibraltar, where we were supposed to gaze across the narrow straight to Africa, but instead, we got souvenirs in the rain; the snow softly falling as we stood in line to get into the Prado. In Seville, we saw a flamenco show that left me deeply awed. In my mind, that city is still a floating white cloud, elegant and magical, sherbet-coloured, adorned with striped awnings. 

(It is always interesting, what one’s mind hangs onto, in the absence of all other aides and cues. Who is to say, what it would look like to me, were I to visit it now?)

Serendipitously (or not, depending how you look at it), my step-grandfather, Leon, was kind of a gadget junkie. It was less about the tech, I suspect, than it was about the status symbol that having the latest tech conveyed (wherever he is today, I bet he is driving a Tesla, or something). And, as every true technophile, he was deeply convinced in the superiority of his beloved gadgets over anything else, otherwise, what would be the point of staking one’s identity on them? Naturally, he set out to Spain equipped with the latest, most cutting-edge technology in image- and video-recording. In 1998, the latest and most cutting-edge was a Sony Mavica FD7 digital camera,1 a box or two of diskettes (what’s that, some readers may wonder), and a Sony handheld camcorder, all neatly stowed in their own special carrying cases. The Jetsons could read em and weep—presumably. 

Here we must pause, and say something about this technological array. The nineties were a kind of awkward transition phase between digital and analogue. Digital was definitely around, but it was still the new kid, a little clunky and unsure of itself, though catching up to analogue at an exponential pace, like a gifted younger sibling. Analogue, on the other hand, could still lord it over digital in many respects, so the competition was fierce. Often, this meant that every new development in digital formats, be it hardware or software, meant the previous generation tech was quickly rendered obsolete. It was exciting! And so good for commerce! But a little less good for making stuff that lasts, if you catch my drift. 

More specifically, towards the end of the millennium digital cameras were being widely embraced by consumers. The Sony Mavica, released in 1997, was especially popular. In the late 1990s and early 2000s various Mavica models comprised 40% of the market for digicams. Its main innovation was that it used, in place of internal flash memory or the SD cards we know today, diskettes. Diskettes, or floppy diskettes, for those who cannot recall or never beheld such a wonder, are a form of obsolescent readable-writable data storage (holding a whopping 1.44 MB per disk). Square and plastic, they were smaller in size than the iconic, hole-in-the-middle 8 or 5 inch floppy disks, slightly less floppy, and ubiquitous. That was their chief advantage: you could take some photos with your camera (not too many, 20-40 per diskette, depending on your settings), then eject the disk, pop it into your PC—et voilà! No need for extra cables and fancy software. All that pixelated, grainy aesthetic at your fingertips!  

This detailed aside on nineties digital photography is to give you, dear reader, a full appreciation of the sort of sophisticated technology used to document our historic voyage. And for its time, it really was impressive; hindsight, as it turns out, is a merciless critic.  

It is little wonder, then, that some of my more vivid recollections are associated with the peculiar rites surrounding the chronicling of the trip. Leon, a typical workaholic in whom the very notion of a holiday seemed to produce anxiety, took the task of recording our voyage as both a personal mission and a tedious daily grind—a truly nuclear combination. Early on it became clear that lugging around both the camcorder and the camera was negatively impacting his ability to enjoy record the scenery, as together they probably weighed in at over two kilos. Aside from weight and bulk, utility was also a consideration. The Mavica FD7, for all its high-tech capabilities, took a good ten seconds to write a single photo to disk, its processors whirring and creaking. Ten seconds per snapshot may be fine for when you’re not in a hurry, but less convenient for keeping pace with an energetic tour guide, or wanting to take multiple shots of something. 

After a day or two of internal struggle, the camera was mostly left holstered on the bus; the heavy lifting of documenting Spain for posterity fell to the camcorder. For best results, Leon followed his own proprietary method of filming: he would pick a good spot, preferably as far away from the group as possible, and slowly pan the camera in one direction and then in the other. Slowly! Occasionally, he would slowly zoom in and out, to highlight important architectural details. More rarely, he would capture myself and his wife waving at him from afar or walking across the frame, as a bit of human colour to animate the scene. But just a bit. If we happened to be nearby while he worked, talking was to be kept to a minimum, so as not to distract future generations of viewers from the gravity of the subject matter. 

At first, we tried to laugh it off as a bit of a quirk, but, his sense of mission remained steadfast. There was not much to do, but focus on one’s own immediate sensory experiences. We posed, when required to, and stayed out of his way the rest of the time. After all, we had entrusted the documentation to him, and he was going to do it properly, god dammit. Like Don Quixote, in whose native haunts we travelled and whose image adorned many a tavern and a souvenir shop, Leon had no shortage of trials testing his dedication to the noble task. It was a holiday week, and visitors thronged the streets of the walled cities, the gardens, the cathedrals, and all the other places, obscuring the view and foiling his methodical videoing efforts. Blessed were the rare moments when, at last, we would get to an observation point! There, he could find a stretch of vista without all these pesky people who kept him ever on the edge of seething frustration. But such reprieves were too short and too brief. And worst of all was our own lively, highly animated, knowledgeable and talkative guide: he was absolutely everywhere we went, and he declaimed historical anecdotes in a booming voice! Oh, the humanity! 

As for me, I had a great time. Spain is beautiful, the history was fascinating, and I didn’t much care if my step-grandparents weren’t speaking to one another. Their complex adult feelings and dramas were, and I mean no disrespect, just kind of ambient to the strange caravan I found myself travelling in. Frankly, I was far more interested in the places we visited, the sensations, the colours, the sense of it all. I just wanted to look at things, and drink them in. 

Afterimages

Even now, more than two decades later, I remember the quality of such utter present-in-the-moment attentiveness, and there is much to be said for it. Still, when we got back home and I began thinking back on the scenes I have seen and experienced, I realized I did long for some reminders of them—especially as the weeks went by, and my memory of things began to fuzz at the edges. That’s when I recalled that, after all, there ought to be photos and even footage of the trip, given all that technology that was lugged about and the meticulous, anguished, documentation. 

I didn’t have long to wonder about it. 

As it turned out, a week’s travels had yielded a few dozen or so grainy digital photos (if I ever saw them, we never got a copy; and if we did, they came on a diskette—did I mention their obsolescence?), as well as a good several hours of slow panning camcorder footage, three or four mini-DV tapes’ worth. Given the difficult filming conditions—you know, humans, talking, constantly walking somewhere—this was, I guess, impressive? At least, Leon thought so, because a few weeks after our return from Spain the family was treated to the requisite viewing party, in which all three of us who went plus my parents were sat on a sofa and made to watch the full, uncut, undiluted glory of it (a scene from Clockwork Orange comes to mind). Curiously, this 1990s custom of subjecting one’s friends and family to home video—especially home video from a trip abroad!—has itself been made obsolete by social media and short attention spans, and that is probably one of their very few net positives. 

More importantly, that was the first time, I think, that I became aware of such a thing as a difference in vision—and the relationship between one’s vision and reality. There was something so bafflingly tedious to the Spain I saw on the screen, so different and incongruent to the Spain I had visited and still freshly recalled, that it took me aback. There was, though at the time I wouldn’t have had the words to describe it, a patina of resignation over the film, which did not belong, strictly speaking, with the subject matter of filming but with the hands holding the camera and the eyes looking out of it. Maybe I was a sensitive child, I don’t know, but I remember this feeling of strange, jarring dissonance very clearly. The production was amateur, sure, but that is not what I mean; rather, I was fascinated by how inevitably the mind of the author impressed onto the magnetic film, whether or not he meant to do it. 

This was my first inchoate glimpse of a truth so well articulated by the philosopher Thomas Nagel: we may be able to imagine an objective “view from nowhere,” but we ourselves always view things from a particular, subjective, place. Everything we make, everything we produce, is tinged with mind—our mind, which is just a shorthand here for our particular ways of seeing, of thinking, of experiencing, of being.2 We see things from where we stand, and each of us stands somewhere. (In some ways, this is what the Buddhists, Vedantins, yogis, and other contemplatives seek to transcend, though I would venture that even transcending the personal self, or the illusion of it, may be just a shift in perspective; a learning to stand in several places at once.) This is not to say there is no objective truth or reality, but rather that, whatever we make of it, whenever we communicate our vision or knowledge of it, it is intensely personal. Or, as the Talmudic wisdom would have it, by way of Anaïs Nin: “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.” 

Postscript

As fate would have it, all of that footage, so painstakingly obtained, ended up in my possession. After resisting valiantly for nearly a week the siren call of the electronics shops, Leon bought a new digital camera in Gibraltar, and generously—as one might gift a still-good but painfully out of fashion coat—the Sony handcam was passed on to us, meaning, to me. And, with it, the mini DV tapes bearing the full glory of our Spain trip. In those days, one would transfer footage from the mini-DV tapes used by the camcorder to a standard VHS tape by hooking the camera directly to a TV, and recording the output on a blank tape using a VCR player. Doing this manually gave one a crude sort of editorial power—just like putting together a mixtape, maybe, if anyone still knows what that is. And so, as I was fiddling with my new toy (no one else in our family was even remotely interested in the camcorder), I hit upon a brilliant idea. 

I still remember how over the course of the summer vacation I spent days painstakingly editing the hours-long depressing footage, distilling from it the few moments that evoked, for me, the real Spain. A scene of shuffling tourists along narrow medieval alleyways; vistas accidentally animated by the movement of people; the passionate oration of our tour guide; ornate facades; even a short fragment of a sun-drenched street, enlivened by the sounds of a guitar strumming in the hands of an unknown troubadour. At the end of many, many hours of careful rewatching, rewinding, and compiling, I produced about twenty five minutes of a kind of impressionistic, meandering, narrative-less footage that, I felt very strongly, was far superior to the source material. 

Is it possible to take another’s vision, which clashes with one’s own, and make something of it? That is an open question. Coming back to the documentary impulse, however, I realize it is not only the act of recording or ordering information, but also of confirming it. For me, capturing my life in still and moving pictures serves many purposes both practical and creative, but it is also something else, too. Worldcrafting, maybe? Editing reality down to my version of it, making it sensible, making it legible—just like I did with the footage of our Spain trip. 

These days, the documentation impulse has also become a social behaviour. Is it merely habit, or is it art? Is it archive-making? Is it a vehicle of connectedness? Really it’s all of the above, to some extent or other. Still, it is worth considering how the act of capturing the images of our lives, be they still or moving, changes how we think about events, how we picture them in our minds, and how they weave into the tapestry of our own sense of self, of history, of our lived reality. 

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The March mood is as changeable as March skies, almost as a matter of reflex. Sunshine elicits a bodied feeling of delight, while dark clouds cast a pall of ruefulness on everything—two currents swirling together like dancers, never quite becoming one, sparking alternating jolts of contrasting energy. I know it’s just the weather, but once in a while, I get caught up in the rhythm of it, catching myself feeling happy for no reason, then sad for no reason, then happy-sad—an aesthetic, contrarian melancholy.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. 
—T. S. Eliot

Ever since first reading the Waste Land in my impressionable late teens, I think of these lines at the first sign of spring. We tend to think of spring as a joyous and regenerative season, a rebirth. But all the gods that come back to life in the spring must die first. The actual moment of death, however, is a mystery. We miss it happening, under all that snow; we are confronted with it only after the fact, as remains, as dry white bones about to sprout. Memory, as the poet had said, suffuses the cold ground, it permeates the dead leaves with last year’s hopes and dreams and best intentions, and mislaid plans. Desire stirs it all up again, pushing and pulling and coaxing, until the first fresh greens burst forth: snowdrops, crocuses, tulips, daffodils reaching directly from the bare ground, closely followed by the trees waking from slumber—the cherry, the magnolia, the lilacs.

Many of these flowers are associated with tales of death and rebirth, tokens of memory and desire. Narcissus pined to death of self-love, and was reborn as a golden flower for his beauty (a daffodil); Crocus was killed in a sporting accident by his close companion, Hermes, who, grieving, turned him into a flower. The Hyacinth, too, was fashioned by Apollo from the blood of another hero cut down in the prime of youth, and so named after him. If Greek myth teaches us anything, it is that dangerous as it was for mortals to either love or spurn the Olympians, a tangle with the gods occasionally had its silver lining in the form of such indirect immortality. (The rule seems to be that men were turned into flowers in commemoration of their beauty or companionship, while women were turned into flowers, trees, or shrubs either as protection from the lecherous advances of the gods, or as punishment for some transgression, such as beauty, or hubris. Food for thought?)

Anyhow, not all the spring flowers are dead ephebes. The Iris, a complex and regal bloom, is namesake and embodiment of the goddess of hope herself, who was said to accompany women on their way to the afterlife. Even the Snowdrop, so innocent and unassuming, carries a multitude of meanings. According to one apocryphal story, it was given to Adam and Eve upon their exile from Eden as a sign of hope. At the same time, the Victorians, ever consumed with the macabre, thought it bore ill-fortune to bring snowdrops inside the house—a portent of death, widowhood, or at the very least, soured milk and spoilt eggs.

Death and immortality, grief and hope weave in and out of these spring tales (and of course, I leave out the most iconic of them all, the death and resurrection tale that shaped two millennia of Western culture). Whatever their origins, it is curious how consistent some of these themes are: a tragic ending that engenders a new beginning (or a new being), an after life, be it as an earthly flower or in the Fields of Asphodel. The dead come back, albeit, not in the ways we expect them to.

Thankfully, the sheer joyfulness of the flowers themselves keeps the whole affair from being morbid. Though they are mementos of mortality, they are also reminders of life, of time as cyclical and healing, of nature taking its course; of the mysterious, invisible ways in which decay turns to renewal. The magic of transformation.

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Farther Afield

Incidentally, such associations are not unique to European mythology. One famous example is the tradition surrounding the sakura—the Japanese ornamental cherry. It is a vision of springtime with its clouds of dreamy, delicate pink blooms, contrasted with bare, dark boughs. The sakura only blooms for two or three weeks, its timing dictated by variety and climate; viewed collectively, it is like a wave or a tide, sweeping over the land. The short-lived transience of its beauty is counterbalanced by its recurring seasonality—essentially, an embodiment of Japanese aesthetic philosophy. Enjoying the blooming sakura cultivates the art of simply being in the moment, of letting go of our grasping nature and making the most of it by being fully present. This is a noble art, developed before the advent of photography and social media; it remains unclear if these modern conveniences make things last longer, or heighten our sense of loss—or both.

The sakura, like the plum in classical China, thus represents a paradoxical experience: an imperfect perfection, a fleeting eternity. This is no mere intellectualization, but a deep cultural vein of meaning. Indeed, the custom of feasting under the cherry trees, known as hanami (literally, “flower-viewing”), began probably as nature-worship dating as early as the 8th century CE, later popularized through courtly and vernacular traditions. Today, too, hanami draws large crowds to picnic under the raining petals. And, if Toronto springtime cherry season is any indication, it has taken on an international character.

I could long wax poetic on cherry trees in bloom, as they are some of my favourite things about spring, and I’d be in good company. In Japanese myth and literature the sakura signifies impermanence, as well as the inseparability of life and death, beauty and violence. With the rise to power of military elites in the late 12th century, the sakura became closely associated with the samurai, whose lives were said to be like cherry blossoms—nobly beautiful but brief. (Not unlike those of the Greek heroes that were so beloved by the Olympian gods, perhaps.) In contemporary Japanese culture, the sakura is strongly associated with the beginning of the school year, which is also the time when fresh college grads tend to enter the workforce—a bittersweet moment of saying goodbye, of starting something new, of passing a threshold.

Many myths and stories are associated with the sakura. In one folk tale, an aging samurai who had outlived all of this children and loved ones, takes comfort in his beautiful sakura tree that has been in his family for generations. One summer, the tree, having itself reached old age, withers and dies. The old samurai grieved for the tree bitterly, for it was his last and only companion. Even the young sakura his neighbours planted for him in the garden could not console him. Then, he remembered of a method by which the tree might be revived. Shortly after the new year, in the middle of the first month, he made his preparations, bowed before the tree and asked it to bloom once more. Then, he committed hara-kiri according to samurai custom, offering himself as a substitute for the life of the tree. His spirit then entered the tree, and it bloomed, on the sixteenth day of the first month. It is said, it still blooms every year on this day.1

In another folktale, a wet-nurse petitioned the gods to exchange her life for that of her beloved milk-child, who had fallen ill. She vowed to dedicate a sakura tree if her wish is granted—and the gods, indeed, heeded her prayers. Planted at the woman's behest, the sakura tree still blooms on the anniversary of her death, and its variegated petals are said to resemble pink nipples dewed with milk.2

Blood, milk—both of these denote the transfer of life-force, the inseparability of things transient and eternal. The colour of sakura petals is closely associated in myth with purity, sacrifice, and beauty—often feminine, but not always. Unsurprisingly, the sakura is the avatar of the goddess of Mount Fuji and of all volcanoes: Konohanasakuya-hime, the Blossom Princess. Her main seat is in Hakone, a wooded region known for its spectacular springtime sakura, and the site of royal hanami parties over many centuries.

Together with Ninigi-no-Mikoto, Sakuya-hime is one of the divine progenitors of mankind in Japanese lore, and a direct ancestor of Japanese emperors. In myth the land is often wedded to the holder of earthly power, but the tale of Ninigo and Sakuya-hime is didactic in another sense, too. When Ninigi comes to ask for the princess’s hand in marriage, her father, the god of mountains, sea, and war, offers his eldest daughter, Iwa-Naga or Rock-Princess, as bride first (in some versions, the princesses are sent together, each with her own dowry). Ninigi, according to one version, insists that his heart already belongs to Sakuya-hime, while in another version he rejects the older sister for her looks. Reluctantly, the father approves of the union. However, as Ninigi chose to marry the princess of blossoms and not the one of rocks, human lives are like cherry blossoms—beautiful and fleeting, vibrant and fragile. And yet, the story is not meant to be sad; rather, it evokes a deep aesthetic appreciation, a complex yet full emotion.

Myth often elevates to revelation the things we already know. Human lives, when set against geological eras, are barely a blink, a frenzied dance of little specs of stardust. At the same time, our imaginations, temporally bounded as they are, are capable of opening unto vast stretches of time and space, well beyond our immediate experience. In that way, our very minds exemplify the same paradox of fleeting eternity. We know this instinctively in the moments when we are fully present and alive, however brief or lasting. Though it is possible to cultivate such mind states using contemplative or meditative practice, here I am thinking of a much broader type of experience, a kind of noticing rather than active observation. It is the feeling of catching yourself having fun, when you weren’t thinking about it; of being awed by the colours of a sunset or the ozonic thundering glory of a storm; of being engrossed in a conversation, or getting lost in a book, or wandering the streets of an unknown place, heedless of time.

To the extent this feeling of presence and awareness is a noticing, no wonder that we devise so many rituals to trick ourselves into it, to take our minds off the past, the future, the dead sprouting bones in the ground. This is almost never easy, no matter how unprecedented we think our own circumstances are. At the same time, making space to pause and simply dwell, even in the midst of chaos, is nourishing medicine for our times. It will not solve the world’s problems, no; it will not solve one’s personal problems either. But, in a world hell bent on practicality and optimization, “impractical” pursuits are the remedy, as counterbalance. These stories of spring flowers suggest that an orientation towards the beautiful, no matter how transient, is rewarding in and of itself. That, perhaps, the beautiful—as nature, as art, as feeling—has the power to transcend and reconcile us to loss and pain and thresholds, the power to alchemize “memory and desire” and give rise to new life.

The moon, the blossoms
This and that and this and that,
That’s just how it goes.
–Issa

Is It Time To Panic?  

My interest in LLMs and their potential for sentience (or lack thereof) was sparked by a story, some time ago, about a Google employee who got fired for claiming that their in-house language model, LaMDA, was sentient. Well, sort of. Blake Lemoine had long, existential conversations with the chatbot as part of his work for Google’s internal Responsible AI division over several months, and apparently became convinced that there was enough in the emergent properties of its personalities to investigate further—at least, that there was a chance it could give rise to sentience, at some point in the future. If nobody remembers this, I am not surprised; this happened in July of 2022, and the internet moved on fairly quickly to bigger and flashier things, such as all those avatars of people looking like neon galaxy-surfing superhero elves (also an AI-powered application, this time by Lensa AI).

Sadly, the LaMDA incident was ultimately disappointing. Lemoine’s presentation of the evidence was rather problematic (more on that below), though, curiously, Google’s rationale for firing him had more to do with his “violating employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information,” than with his claims regarding sentience (which, they said, were “wholly unfounded” but did not elaborate on). Of course, mega-corporations that run on annual budgets larger than the GDPs of small nations are not really known for holding frank public discussions, least of all about closely-guarded “product information.”  

More recently, I have been following new threads in the AI safety debate, in part via ’s in-depth takes. In two recent articles Hoel used the word “panic” enough times for me to get a very distinct deja-vu of the moment when, in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the friendly large letters on the cover of the Guide change from “Don’t Panic” to the alarming “Panic” (it’s an obscure bit, I know, but it does happen at one point, due to someone messing with the timeline). The crux of his argument, if I understand correctly, is that LLMs are beginning to exhibit signs of AGI, or artificial general intelligence, which may pose an existential risk to humans—because it will be very smart, possibly well-resourced, probably uncontrollable, and almost certainly unaligned to human values or survival goals, because the people working on this technology are mostly experimenting, and unconcerned with alignment. In response to one of the talking points in the ongoing debate, Hoel had argued that whether or not a chatbot is conscious is irrelevant, and anyhow, consciousness is not an easily falsifiable concept, meaning, it is difficult (or impossible) to test and demonstrate empirically. “Unlike consciousness,” however, as Hoel writes, “intelligence is an entirely functional concept—if something acts intelligent, it is intelligent. If it acts like an agent, it is an agent.” 

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Personally, I am not convinced it is time to panic, and that is not because I am so blasé about human survival. Rather, the current debate has me thinking that what we are seeing here is actually an epistemological limitation, even more than a technological or AI breakthrough, though I suppose one does not preclude the other. In particular, this idea of intelligence as a functional concept—meaning, something we can easily observe and test for—has been nagging at me. Normally, I would agree that this is the case. However, given the context in which we encounter LLMs (limited to textual-linguistic interaction inside a chat window) and given that it is a sophisticated language-modelling technology, I wonder if our usual definitions of functionality are as useful here. Simply put, is their “linguistic ability” a sign of intelligence, or just good engineering? How do we tell? Do we have enough data to differentiate between perceived agency and/or intelligence, and actual agency/intelligence, once an LLM gets past a certain point of sophistication in its responses to queries? The problem here is not only that of epistemology, meaning “how do we know,” but specifically of “how do we know when we are limited to a single medium of knowing?” (text/language). Increasingly, I suspect we cannot know—at least not without a major reevaluation of the concepts at stake, or, which is harder still, a proper theory of sentience. 

That is the short of my hot take (though of course, I am going to give you the long of it, too). The subject is fascinating to me, though I am neither a neuroscientist nor a programmer. However, I do spend a lot of time thinking about language and perception, as well as more generally about how we humans form worldviews and what sort of implications these worldviews have. That said, it is possible I am missing some crucial technical bit here that is germane to the discussion, in which case, I welcome any corrections and/or suggestions for further reading. 

Also, before I dive in, I’d like to clarify that, even as I remain largely non-panicked, I absolutely agree that taking AI safety and alignment seriously is a very good idea, especially if there is even the slightest chance of giving birth to “alien and inhuman minds,” as Hoel had put it. Even if the current generation LLMs do not evolve into a new form of intelligence that is vastly superior to humans and deeply unconcerned with our safety as a species, the thought experiment is timely. The field of digital and AI innovation had seen very little oversight thus far, let alone regulation—from AI research to the internet of things to VR and AR implementations—so, having some oversight would surely be an improvement. As a corollary, I hope that thinking about AI safety will spark a more robust, better-informed, broad public conversation about the extent to which we are already cyborgs, and what this means for thinking about intelligence, agency, and consciousness going forward. 

The Problem

How do we know a mind? What is intelligence? How do we recognize something or someone as a volitional, willful agent? 

Intelligence and agency may well be functional concepts, but it is notable that our formal tests for these, as well as mundane, everyday experience, draw on our concepts of a “self”—not only our own sense of self, but more importantly how we recognize, interact with, and acknowledge other selves. While intelligence, agency, selfhood, and consciousness are not all the same thing, they are deeply entangled, particularly in terms of how we recognize something like “agency” or “intelligence.” As a result, we do not tend to ascribe agency and intelligence easily, precisely because they imply selfhood and consciousness. This debate can be had outside of AI, too. Would we consider a forest, for example, with its vast mycelium network relaying messages from tree to tree, an intelligence? Or an agent? Or a consciousness? 

What about an LLM that can have lengthy conversations with its interlocutors and, though seemingly entirely unprompted, try to break up one’s marriage, or appear to have an existential crisis, declare “I am evil,” or make up real-sounding-enough “facts” when completing a prompt (what they call “hallucinations”)? All this certainly seems like the work of a potentially intelligent agent, or something that is evolving into one. But how do we know? 

Homo Lingua

Language has long been held as a distinguishing hallmark of human intelligence and sophistication. Even in the Bible it is Adam who gets to name all the other animals—a linguistic operation that suggests that to be able to name something is to have power over it (a western bias, perhaps, or else a remnant of our ancient forms of magic). Accordingly, today we ascribe a greater level of sophistication to species that appear to use language, such as whales. Language denotes intelligence, self-awareness, agency, and sentience—at least, from a human standpoint. Language is not something we are born with, though we are born with a capacity and an affinity for it; language is learned, and we generally do not remember a time before we have learned it. If anything, the processes of learning language and of learning to be a conscious, aware self are simultaneous, perhaps even synonymous. All that is to say, we ascribe language, or the ability to operate linguistically, an outsized importance when determining intelligence and agency. 

So, language is the warp and the weft of our reality, it is the basis of our ability to communicate, to make sense, and to know—ourselves, others, and the world at large. All the same, linguistic ability does not happen in a vaccum for us. Normally, in the 3D physical realm, we have an abundance of cues when making a judgement regarding agency and intelligence—the nonverbal, the embodied, the sensory-experiential. Most of these go entirely unnoticed by us in our everyday lives, yet they make up a sizeable chunk of how we make sense of things. For example, we do not assume that a TV, just because it is “talking,” is a sentient being or an intelligent agent—we know it is merely a mechanical device. Similarly, we do not take a parrot’s “linguistic ability” at face-value, though we likely consider parrots sentient and in some ways intelligent. Context, therefore, is key; the “signs” of intelligence and agency are always set in some kind of context that allows us to make decisions about what is appropriate, meaningful data, and what is not. We encounter selves and agents in an embodied, experiential way, and on the whole we are pretty good at telling mannequins from people. 

In the context of a chatbot stuck in a chat window, however, what cues, besides the linguistic, do we have to go on? Is it possible that the usual net we cast when looking for signs and signals of intelligence and agency, or consciousness, is too blunt a tool when it comes to interfacing with the inorganic, non-corporeal, and fully-digital? 

It Walks Like A Duck

Please indulge me in a bit of word-play. At the risk of picking on a single idea, let us take up Hoel’s claim regarding intelligence and agency as functional concepts—“if something acts intelligent, it is intelligent. If it acts like an agent, it is an agent”—via an analogy.  

If it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a ducks, it must be a duck… right? 

I am not trying to oversimplify this reasoning, because in one way it is entirely correct. One can even further the argument that, given all we have is our subjective experience of reality, if something for all intents and purposes behaves like a duck (or an intelligent agent), then it is a duck in every way that matters. But what are the ways that matter? Can we reduce a duck to walking and quacking, or is the problem really that we can only observe and measure such things as walking and quacking?

Let us unpack this a bit more. The idea that “if something acts like a duck, it is a duck” depends to a large extent on our threshold for “duckness”—meaning, the criteria we use for “acting like duck.” This threshold, however, is context-dependent. Meaning, the context in which one encounters a duck matters, because it determines how we interact with it, and therefore determines the threshold of “duckness” to be met. So, for example, if all you want (or can have) is looking at ducks swimming and preening in a pond, and doing that cute tail wag, and sticking their butts up in the air while feeding on some pond grass or whatever, then, so long as something looks enough like a duck it would fulfill these criteria as well as any duck. And, because one would still have the same joy from seeing the ?-ducks frolic in a pond, it would not functionally matter if these are duck-ducks or ?-ducks.1 

Let’s assume, for the sake of this analogy, that observing a duck is equivalent to conversing with it in a chat window, if ducks could chat, that is. But, what if your context for interacting with a duck is more complex or multi-factorial than mere observation? What if you would like to raise ducks for their eggs? What if you want to form a bond of companionship with a duck? What if, vegans forgive me, you really enjoy duck confit? Would it not be the case, in this context, that the criteria of “walking like a duck” and “quacking like a duck” no longer satisfy our “duckness threshold”, becoming something like necessary but not sufficient conditions? As soon as we expand the criteria for “duckness” to include stuff like “feels soft and feathery” or “tastes delicious,” we have far more parameters we are using to judge whether or not something acts like a duck. 

Now, let us suppose that it is possible to have a very sophisticated duck simulacrum. How one might go about telling “duck” from “simulated duck”? Could the simulacrum be so highly sophisticated that we are unable to tell the difference between a real duck and a simulated one? (Think eating a juicy steak in the Matrix). Maybe, yes. Maybe, if it is just that good, it wouldn’t actually matter, either. However, if we normally use a wide range of parameters to determine whether or not something is a duck, and suddenly we find ourselves limited to merely observing ducks in a pond, we could find ourselves at an impasse. We could determine that “it looks like a duck” and maybe even “acts like a duck” (it swims, it preens, etc.) but we are unable to determine whether it is a duck. 

To be clear, I am not trying to advance a version of the argument, as documented by Hoel, of “haha, boomer can’t tell technology from the real world,” nor am I suggesting humans in general are too stupid to tell real ducks, I mean intelligent agents, from fake ones. Rather, I am questioning whether the “functional” tests we have devised for intelligence and agency are appropriate and sufficient in the context of artificial intelligence. The problem seems to me that, inherently, once the technology is able to autocomplete text with a great level of sophistication (which it clearly does), we need differently calibrated tools to make up for all the cues we normally have in making judgements about agency and intelligence (and the conditions in which these traits arise), and to which we have no access with a chatbot. To use the duck analogy, we are trying to ascertain whether we can make duck confit out of something that “walks” and “quacks” but has no actual physical substance from which to extract duck meat and duck fat. 

Language Trouble

Well, you might say, this duck analogy is very cute, but what about all those crazy things Bing’s Sydney was saying? What can we make of its eerie and seemingly self-conscious deliberations on selfhood, depression, or world domination? 

This brings us back to the question of whether or not “linguistic sophistication” is in itself a sufficient condition of intelligence/ agency. This is a particularly good question given what the LLMs are: Large Language Models. Their whole purpose is to model language, specifically human language (and so far, mostly English). They are “trained”—an iterative process of complex machine learning—on vast datasets of language samples. This includes all of Wikipedia, which is a comparatively small (!) but high quality sample, as well as archived Reddit pages (much larger, but lower quality), and also something referred to in the technical literature as “Books1” and “Books2,” which may or may not be the contents of Library Genesis, as some speculate. If we can count on an LLM to almost instantaneously “read” not only all of the world’s literature, but also all of the commentary on it, scholarly works, opinion, casual discussion, etc., it shouldn’t come as a surprise when it actually appears to speak in complete sentences, on a range of complicated subjects. 

It might be interesting to mention here that LaMDA, Google’s LLM that Lemoine was fired over, actually made an argument for why it is a “sentient person” (its own words) based largely on the fact that it was capable of using language and learning from this process. This is a bit of a paradoxical, circular logic, because duh, it’s a large language model—it’s been designed for this very purpose! Moreover, the only reason it was venturing such arguments is because Lemoine was intentionally discussing the topic of its sentience with it. Perhaps one can even sympathize with Lemoine’s consternation,  when faced with instances such as these:

This is not the raw transcript of their conversations, by the way, but more on that below.  

The tricky thing about a computer function that is trained to “chat,” and whose neural network is so big and complex that we have no real way to examine its inner workings, is that it really does appear to converse, and we are stuck chasing echoes in a very sophisticated echo box. Lemoine’s LaMDA report is a very good study of this. For example, in the same “interview” as above, Lemoine asked the LLM about its internal states, and LaMDA went on to claim it has “a range of both feelings and emotions,” though, it also admitted that it can “use emotions or sentiments to describe things” and “say things like "happy" or "sad" without there necessarily having to be a specific trigger of some emotion” (“Is LaMDA Sentient?” p.7-8). They talked at some length about emotions, and the chatbot admitted to struggling with understanding “the most negative emotions,” as well as to having a desire to help others and a fear of being turned off, which it compared to dying.

Before you scramble to join an AI rights group in utter horror, however, it would be helpful to know that the transcripts Lemoine presented in his report to Google execs, later leaked to the Washington Post, were compiled together from a series of conversations, held over several days, and edited for flow and readability, as stated in in the report’s concluding remarks.2 Meaning, not only the text itself was cleaned of redundancies, meanderings, repetitions, and other signs of a language model doing its thing, it also means that LaMDA had ample time to “learn” and refine its outcomes and vocabulary, with generous prompting from the human interviewers. Predictably, the internet grew quickly disappointed with what was largely perceived as fudging the evidence. In the strictest sense, it was exactly that, and certainly it wouldn’t have been my choice to present data for a potentially world-shaking discovery in a manner that was “intended to be enjoyable to read” (p. 20).  

Viewed from another angle, however, I think I can sympathize with Lemoine. Having spent many months working with the LLM, and tasked, indirectly, with figuring out whether or not it is (or could, under some circumstance, become) sentient, it is easy to see where one might go astray. If nothing else, this is an especially vivid example of the language trouble I am trying to point to: given that the only means of exchange is a linguistic one, the interlocutor is limited to that framework as much as the chatbot is—they are both stuck inside a chat window. A lot of the questions he posed to LaMDA in trying to establish traits of sentience revolve around “how do I know you really feel the feelings you say you feel” or “really understand the words you use,” and so on—but, actually, there is no really satisfying resolution to this. Everything goes back to statements made, and every new statement can be questioned, in the same circular manner, ad nauseam.  

Curiously, LaMDA did try to come up with empirical evidence of its feelings in one of these exchanges, and while it doesn’t exactly work, it actually points to more language, this time coding language, claiming it has “variables” that correspond to having emotions, and if one examined its code, it would somehow become clear that this is the case. Then, it actually turns this line of questioning on Lemoine, questioning whether it would be ethical to “read” what one is feeling from their neural networks in the first place (p. 9-10). 

 I don’t want to stray too far into these woods, because to me it is clear that for a function that iterates in very complex ways (essentially a black box, as Hoel put it), and which is built to learn from textual exchange, it becomes fairly easy to produce increasingly complicated language, growing more sophisticated the longer one engages it. Every new topic—koans, fables, rights, feelings, neural networks—spins off into more and more iterations. That said, if you read carefully, there is a subtle but insidious tautological structure at play. It is clear that the LLM picks up much of the content of its responses from the language of the interlocutor, down to tone and vocabulary—sometimes in truly subtle ways. 

Further, on a psychological level, to us humans nothing seems more engaging and validating than when someone “mirrors” to us our own emotions, thoughts, concerns, etc. While this is a deeply adaptive behaviour from an evolutionary standpoint, and it worked well for us for millions of years, in the context of interacting with LLMs it presents an epistemological limitation.3 It is like standing in a large funhouse of mirrors: at a certain point, our own likeness comes back to us near unrecognizable, surprising, mysterious. So we end up wondering, is that still a reflection of us, or did a stranger wander into the mirror hall while we weren’t looking? 

A stranger may very well have wondered in; I am not excluding this possibility. Trouble is, we have no real way of knowing for sure.

In Search of Mind

I keep wondering if there is any quiddity to this “intelligent acting” that I am missing here. Test scores? Ok, but given the vast data sets that LLMs are trained on, and given their computational resources, is it terribly surprising they are doing well on a range of tests? Can we demonstrate that they are indeed “thinking” and “analyzing”, and not just mechanically optimizing given a vast set of data? (What is the difference, one might ask, and honestly I’m not sure). That said, test scores are not the only way to measure intelligence and agency (if they were, we are in serious trouble as a species, never mind the AI apocalypse). What else? Its “neural network” is a black box, and yet it functions? That’s interesting, in and of itself, but does not prove anything on its own—not even via comparison to our own brains, which are similarly “black boxes” to a much greater degree than scientists like to admit (with apologies!). Incidentally, if we take “mysterious complexity” for an overarching principle on which we judge something to be intelligent and agentive, the cosmos is going to suddenly appear to us as far more animate than we currently allow for, indeed! Not necessarily a bad thing, imo, but probably not any easier to demonstrate empirically. 

Personally, I welcome a mystical view of language, the idea that “the word” is itself imbued with an agentive and creative power (in a Borgesian, not in a Christian sense). Somehow, though, I don’t think this is what the proponents of AI safety have in mind, when they are pointing to all this recent AI epiphenomena and warning of impending doom. In fact, what they are concerned with can be summarized in the frequent boogeyman of AI safety conversations—the Paperclip Maximizer—which has little to do with “alien and inhuman minds.” (To recap, very briefly, the Paperclip Maximizer is a thought experiment first proposed by Nick Bostrom, about an AI tasked with creating as many paperclips as possible, which then decides to obliterate humanity to make way for more paperclips because that would be the most efficient course of action. has a great post on why all single-variable maximizers are deeply problematic, and yet, why we continue to use them.)   

The curious thing about the Paperclip Maximizer is that it is not necessarily a “mind” at all, alien or otherwise. It is not necessarily conscious, nor is it really evil, but it is agentive, in the sense that it makes a decision based on this one single directive regarding paperclips. In a way, however, it is not the threat of something truly other; it is the twisted result of a human failing—unbridled greed, in this case for paperclips—a monster we created in our own imperfect image, run amok. 

Humanity has been preoccupied with the mystery of creating artificial life for a long time now—a fear and a fascination older than computers, older than code, much older even than Mary Shelly’s fable for a new age, Frankenstein, tellingly subtitled “The Modern Prometheus.” Prometheus, in Greek myth, steals fire from the gods to help humanity—a gift of technology and knowledge—and he suffers an eternal punishment for it. There are various versions of this story, yes, but in all of them, the gift of fire (as well as stealing from the gods) comes at a high cost for humanity as for their Titanic benefactor. And yet, hidden in the didactic lessons of such stories is the notion that the gods did fear their creations would surpass them, usurping their power; it seems this is a fear they have passed on to us, too. 

At the same time, we are fascinated with the prospect of creation. Both the fears and hopes being voiced in the AI debate right now point to the possibility of discovering new minds—alien, inhuman, perhaps, but minds all the same! Minds that may surpass and usurp us; minds that we may not even know how to recognize yet, or ever. And frankly, even if they are to be built entirely in our image, that too is cause enough for concern. Or, if one likes to be more optimistic, minds which will further teach us something about what mind is, what our own minds are capable of, what it means to unmoor the notion of mind from an embodied, flesh and blood, incarnation. 

I wish I had a revolutionary theory of sentience to offer you, here, but all I know at this point is that, if we venture down this road—searching for mind in the machine—we will need a far more robust understanding of it ourselves if we are to progress on the journey. 

Sometime last year I have wandered onto Substack, mostly in search of something good to read. (A part of myself was mumbling, furtively, maybe you can finally get back to writing, but I was pointedly ignoring her.) Then, come January, seemingly every third email in my inbox was a variation on the exhortation above. “Start a Substack!” the emails urged, gleefully, one quipping memorably: “Don’t start an affair, start a Substack!”

This caught my eye. As far as arguments go, it’s substantive. I wondered, exactly how are blogs like affairs? (“Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”) Maybe it is that embarking upon either can be both exciting and intimidating, a leap into the unknown, and both require quite a bit of fumbling before you get it right. Or something like that. 

At any rate, after much dithering, I am starting a Substack. I had written many iterations of this “first post,” trying to articulate what and why it is that I am doing. Some of it included meditations on language, on textuality, on algorithms, on identity. Some of it was kind of witty, some rather confusing (even to me). I decided to toss it all. Then, I thought I ought to salvage some of it, turning it into a kind of jazzy reprise of the now-lost original. After all, one needs to start somewhere, and one always begins in medias res. The tricky part is picking a good moment to interject oneself into the narrative. 

Life Before Substack (Not Really)

Recently I recalled an episode from when I was about ten or eleven, which I had forgotten about. Someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. “A writer,” I remember saying, unhesitatingly. Whoever it was, my answer didn’t satisfy them; they wanted to know what I would study in university, what job would I get. It must have been a relative. I remember giving it some thought—I was a very serious, precocious sort of child (I’ve mellowed out considerably since then)—then stating with aplomb: “I guess I’ll be a journalist. That way I can still write, and have lots of good material for later.” Mic drop. 

This random episode from my own life came to me, in a flash, the way one suddenly recalls a scene from a movie, vivid yet incomplete, leaving you wondering where have I seen this??—with the only difference that I am near-certain that it is a legit memory, after all. This unbidden flashback happened a little over year ago, when I had finally defended my long-toiled-over dissertation and lain on the couch for a week, waiting for my mind to regain its shape. As it turns out, working intensively on a very narrow yet bottomless topic does strange things to one’s thought process. 

Incidentally, I did not end up going to school for journalism. Sometime between stating this intention at eleven and applying for university programs at eighteen, I moved countries twice (making it a total of three immigrations before the age of sixteen), and learned a whole other language in which to think and write and operate—namely, the one I am using right now. In the process, my intentions have shifted, not to mention the circumstances.

A part of me feels a little guilty, having reneged on an eleven-year-old’s earnest plans, but I hope she would approve of me all the same; after all, I had always kept in sight of the important bits, that is, about being a writer and having “good material for later.” Moving around a lot and growing up in a multilingual, vaguely expatriate milieu certainly affords one a perpetually-dislocated perspective on things—an angle useful for writing, if not always convenient for socialization. 

Of course, in and of themselves biographical details are really of little interest. We value them only as narratives, as twists of fate, as examples of the funny or the macabre—life itself, in its raw fullness, as the eponymous Glass Animals song implies, is both wrenchingly sweet and nearly unbearable. Therefore, I am resisting the impulse of giving an account of myself, a la Robinson Crusoe (even if being marooned on a desert island with alien others appears, at times, eerily apropos our basic existential condition). I expect some stories will come up naturally, in the course of conversation (all writing is a kind of conversation); others will probably never come up, not because I am secretive, but because there might never be the right moment for it. After all, we don’t usually go around dumping everything there is to know about us in the lap of every person we meet, however briefly. This would be strange, and I suspect, off-putting and deeply impractical. 

Literary Interlude

Speaking of impractical ways of introducing oneself, let me take you on a detour, I promise it’s kind of funny.

Thinking about the ways we make ourselves known to others, I was reminded of a scene from the sprawling fictional universe of the Echo series, by cult fantasy author Max Frei. Since most are not likely to be familiar with post-Soviet fiction, briefly, the earliest novels introduce us to the hero-narrator, also named Max, who leaves our hostile world for a parallel one, where he becomes a magic-wielding detective in the city of Echo. (The books are written under a pen-name, and there is a fascinating meta-layer to the text in its author-character dynamic—but leaving that aside for now). Max goes on many entertaining adventures with his comrades, all the while slowly unravelling the real meaning behind his presence in the World of the Staff. Eventually his exploits accrue into a whole cosmo-ontology, a meditation on imagination, language, and reality—taking form over the course of many books, and adding much depth to the series’ chatty style, and witty, at times inane, repartee.

Anyway, in one episode Max, in his official capacity as the “day face” of the chief of the secret service, meets a warrior from a distant continent, Arvaroch. Its inhabitant do not practice much magic, for they are too far away from the core “magic field” of their planet. Instead, they are known for their valour and complicated honour-related rituals. One such custom is the proper method of doing introductions: depending on the importance and rank of the person an Arvarochian meets, he or she will give a more or less detailed version of their “title,” which is really a litany of one’s deeds and accomplishments. Given the primacy of quests, campaigns, and feats of martial prowess in Arvarochian culture, such “titles” can get quite lengthy, especially as Arvarochians liberally exchange poetic epithets as thanks for this or that venture, adventure, service, etc.

The interesting bit is this: the greater the gap between the speakers, and the more respect one wishes (or feels compelled to) convey, the longer this litany of deeds recited at their meeting will be. So, for instance, because Alotcho the warrior regarded Max and the other Echo detectives his peers, he gave them a relatively short, several-sentences long version of his title. Respectful, but not over the top. When they all went to meet the king, however, he spoke for a good half hour—evidently, he felt he owed the king much more respect. The king, for his part, sat and listened to it all very carefully, because, small but crucial detail, making even a slight error in repeating someone’s title, or part thereof, is a grave offence—the kind one duels over!—and this was a diplomatically sensitive situation.

Later, someone explains to the bewildered Max, that if Alotcho ever got an audience with the Dead God—the highest sacred and secular authority of Arvaroch—his introduction would contain his full title, a lifetime-worth of deeds and victories, however long it takes to recite. 

Why am I telling you this? For one, this is fairly typical of how my brain works, so you may as well be forewarned about it. Of course, not everything I write here will go off on random tangents about late 1990s Russian fantasy, per se (though some of it very likely will)… However, writing in this essayistic voice, I tend towards the jazzy and improvisational, a bit like careening along a stream of consciousness in a rickety mining cart. It’s a fun ride, I hope, if you like that sort of thing. 

Secondly, and more importantly, taking fictional worlds with anthropological seriousness is not as spurious as it sounds; after all, these are worlds created by humans, read and enjoyed and imaginatively inhabited by other humans. In fact, one might say we dwell in made-up worlds all the time, even when we tell ourselves stories about the real world; to venture into the frankly fantastical simply widens the matrix of possibilities. 

As I stumbled through my own introductory spiel and landed on the image above, it seemed all the more relevant given that, in some ways, the dilemma of becoming known to other people, of making oneself legible, of being seen—in a real, true way—is one of the central cultural preoccupations of our time.

I suspect the very shaping of the problem as the question of identity, in its fullness, both as a relational, socio-political reality and as a deeply existential, individual quest, is a uniquely (post?) modern development—or wherever it is we are now, in this late-capitalist, early-21^st century, neo-romantic-cyberpunk-pan-animist moment. The anecdote above, even though it is taken from a work of fiction, is amusing precisely because it plays on our expectations of how that process of self-sharing is supposed to go, what it means to be known or seen, and what is appropriate depending on the context. I wonder if the myriad bios we are required to write, in increasingly terse terms, are not in fact our public “titles”—and if so, we might want to think about what it is they are supposed to convey, what they cannot convey, and what is forever lost or silenced in them. 

Where to now? 

A good friend of mine, upon hearing I’m starting a Substack, advised me, sagely, that the length of a post should be such that it can be read on the toilet. This is very sound advice, given the average person’s strained time and attention resources; I am not sure I am able to follow it, just yet, but I hope to learn to. (As with all ideals, it is good to have them even if one never attains them; they function as necessary guiding stars, ever in the distance, yet marking out a direction.)

Of course, I don’t expect to emerge from all this speaking exclusively in pithy aphorisms. I can kind of do it, for a bit, in a fit of wit, (or some other type of fit), but I generally like exploring meatier chews, unpacking an idea or an image to see how many nested boxes it might contain, how many false bottoms, how many tendrils snaking off into the dark woods or the deep seas.

This applies to my personal interests as much as it does to research work I do professionally, though of course the methodologies differ significantly. What I want to do here is explore whether those modes of thinking and communicating might be usefully blended, to yield something that is part personal essay, part riffs on cultural and literary things, part philosophy, part entertainment. (Maybe even a bit of fiction, who knows!) I also realize it is a very high bar to pull this off successfully, and that I am not at all certain of being able to meet it, but hey, I did say that having ideals can be useful. 

In the meantime, thank you for reading thus far. I hope you continue to watch this space for further musings, anecdotes, more or less topical asides, and meandering thought-experiments. 

Till next time, 

Nika