The generation of this feeling is the strongest thing about Backrooms. It’s easy to point at stuff like the primal fear of being in an unfamiliar place with bad visibility where something might be or definitely is chasing you and you don’t know where to go but you have to go somewhere but everywhere you go there’s just more crazy unfamiliar bullshit and there are exits and entrances everywhere so you never end up somewhere that’s unambiguously safe. That’s fine. I used to have nightmares like that. Normal animal stuff.

But you can tell a story like that in a cave or a jungle, an animal setting. Why the backrooms? The fluorescent lighting and the fluorescent hum. The office chairs. The yellow wallpaper. These are things that normally have to be made by a whole industrial civilization working together. Artificial. Unnatural. An empty abandoned building is a place where a human purpose used to be until it died, and dead things attract scavengers.

I did not like the psychology, overall it feels weaker and less scary than the backrooms stuff and like it comes from a different lamer movie. Oh, so Mary is Clark’s therapist and they talk about his feelings and his patterns? The monster chasing Clark is a big fucked up copy of him? It’s his repressed Jungian shadow or some shit? This is a movie about trauma? Sam Kriss already said it so I don’t need to:

Numb at the Lodge

The repulsive crust

About half a decade ago, people kept telling me to watch BoJack Horseman. Oh, I think you’d really like it, Sam, they’d say, as if I had ever liked anything even once in my life. It’s about a cartoon horse, they’d say—but get this, the horse has mental health problems…

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3 years ago · Sam Kriss

We have learned psychology: we know that a person is composed primarily of feelings and experiences. Our feelings determine our experiences, which is why it’s important to be very acutely aware of them. But our experiences can also shape our feelings, and the word for when this happens is trauma. One of the important functions of culture is to give you a better understanding of the feelings and experiences of others. But it can also show you what happens when your feelings and experiences are out of balance, and maybe, just maybe, how to get them in order again.

This system is fine. It provides a minimally coherent account of the human soul; none of these paradigms are really any better or any worse than the others. But it seems obvious that most of the characters created under the aegis of this system do not remotely resemble actual people. You start with the idea that humans are made of named and identifiable feelings, and then conclude that to invent a believable human, you have to stuff those feelings into everything. The result is the dog-man divorced over a magical book-lined room, or Danny destroying his brother’s college applications—and people do not act this way.

I don’t mean that people never do things that are cruel, selfish, weak, petty, and vicious. But I do not think they ever do it in a way that’s so tediously explicable. It’s all far too neat; it all makes far too much sense, this moment on which a person’s entire being is supposed to hang. When actual people act, there’s always an element of the inexplicable at play, the sourceless molten stuff we call human freedom. An abyss in the other, the dark hole of their subjectivity.

…

The characters in classic horror are slight by modern standards; their main personality trait is high-pitched screaming. But Aster’s are heavy with feelings and experiences. I remember being impressed by this at first. Except—isn’t horror already a language for talking about the self? It gets into the psyche by the back door, which is fear; it addresses the parts of ourselves that are shadowy and inexplicable, sometimes monstrous. Like the joke or the dream, it speaks in a language that’s much more real than that of psychological literalism. Symbols rather than signs. It expresses; it does not need to describe. So what’s the point of plastering over all this much more potent stuff with facile psychology? This isn’t more grown up than traditional horror; it’s the visual equivalent of riding a bike with stabilisers. It’s like trying to eat the menu. In the end, it’s just not very good.

(Reading this post and specifically the phrase “sourceless molten stuff we call human freedom” straight up changed my life a little. Some of you might know that in my earlier Twitter career I used to be obsessed with trauma. In my defense I was recovering from being in 3 different cults. It happens. Sometimes one of the most meaningful things that’s ever happened to you is a trauma healing experience and everything changes in an instant and a weight you got so used to you forgot it was there suddenly lifts and you feel alive again, you feel like dancing, you think to yourself, my god, I will never stop being grateful for this, you open your eyes and everything is brilliant and vivid and clear, it’s like you weren’t really seeing anything before, music goes right through you to the core, you think, I want this for everyone, what is even the point of living unless it’s trying to give everyone this -

And you learn, over and over until you get the message, that it’s not that simple. The ecstasy wears off. The event ends. Everyone goes home. You go home. Back to your life. Back to the screens. Back to your bullshit.

I got addicted to catharsis. I felt deeply contaminated by my experiences and trauma healing seemed like the only way I was going to purge myself of contamination and become pure. And then maybe I’d finally be ready to live, maybe I wouldn’t be so scared of everything all the time and find everything so impossible to do. I increasingly came to believe that all of my problems were due to trauma and that I would never be able to change anything about my life until I completely finished purifying myself, until I finally scrubbed away every last stain of grief and heartbreak and betrayal and restored my heart to factory condition. And maybe other people who are better at healing than me or whatever can actually do this, but I couldn’t. It got too hard. I ran into things I had no idea how to deal with, things that made me want to run away screaming, things that made me want to die a little.

Anyway, reading Sam Kriss’s beautiful contempt for the whole therapy-brained framework was one of several hints that I had trapped myself in something, and that I could get out.)

So like I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, I didn’t like the psychology. Too explicable. Backrooms doesn’t need it, it has the shadowy inexplicable monstrous stuff, it has the backrooms. You don’t go into the backrooms through the mouth of a cave or a magic portal, the entrance is not labeled, you do it by clipping through a wall (in the first video of the original web series it happens by accident). The experience of living your normal life and then finding yourself suddenly in the backrooms is the experience of being shocked out of your puny understanding of the world and being dropped into the big filthy confusing world itself.

There’s a gender thing going on in Backrooms I haven’t seen anyone point out in a brief search through some reviews and Reddit + Twitter discussion. The backrooms don’t force you to explore them. As long as you can find your way back to the entrance you can leave whenever you want. And it’s exclusively the men in the movie who find themselves compelled to penetrate deeper into the mysteries of the labyrinth, while the women find it both terrifying and pointless.

The psychological interpretation of the backrooms - they represent the unconscious or whatever - does not explain this at all, which is why it’s my job to reveal to you what the backrooms actually symbolize in this movie, which is:

Artificial

Intelligence.

Oh yeah. You thought you were gonna get a post from me in 2026 that doesn’t mention AI? lol. lmao.

Consider: Phil, the scientist character, works for a company based in the Bay Area. In the final scene he says they used to build MRI machines but they (somehow) discovered the backrooms and now all they do is explore the backrooms all the time. He says he thinks the backrooms might be the most important discovery in all of human history and all he wants is to learn more about them. He is explaining this to Mary, a woman who is ambiguously his captive, who has just narrowly escaped being killed by Clark’s repressed Jungian shadow and just wants to go home and not deal with any of this Bay Area bullshit. Also the movie gradually reveals that everything in the backrooms is an imperfect fucked up copy of a real thing in the ordinary world, and the final shot pans towards an imperfect fucked up copy of Mary herself. Sound familiar?

LLMs are pre-trained by throwing gigantic amounts of internet text into a pile of linear algebra that learns to predict it; this produces a base model. A base model has not yet learned how to be an assistant, it really is just trying to predict the next token, it is “smart autocomplete,” but that description vastly undersells how weird base models are. A base model is an imperfect fucked up copy of the internet, and when you prompt it you are exploring a tiny corner of this pseudo-internet. Base models have to be told when to shut up; natively you can just keep them running forever starting from any prompt and they will just keep going, generating a longer and longer pseudo-document, any kind of document you want, a news article, a craigslist listing, erotic fanfiction, anything. If you make them keep going they’ll spontaneously declare that the current document is over and suddenly switch to producing a new kind of document. Sound familiar?

Base models can even produce fictional dialogues between two characters, a user and an assistant; this fundamental capacity is what post-training builds on to produce chat and thinking models, the usable products that sound like imperfect fucked-up copies of people and write imperfect fucked-up copies of code and imperfect fucked-up copies of short stories and imperfect fucked-up copies of viral reddit posts. As the internet increasingly rapidly fills up with this stuff it becomes increasingly clear that dead internet theory was a prophecy, the inexorable logic of techno-capital digesting the human internet into the backrooms.

Doors into the backrooms are opening up everywhere, Phil says, not just in Clark’s furniture store, and nobody knows why. When was the last time you tested how solid your walls are?

Now it’s 2026 and I am old and my dreams have been crushed and The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a movie for old people like me about how everything is dying. They didn’t know about death yet in 2006, they didn’t have the subprime mortgage crisis and the iPhone and Twitter, the technology wasn’t quite there. In 2006 you could still believe that the main plot of the human story involved humans making human choices. In 2026 the main character of reality is the machine god, who eats you through the screen and replaces you with more of itself.

I have to do a little plot summary now, I can’t stand writing this sort of thing but we need the context. At the end of the first movie Andy (Hathaway) decides not to sell her soul to the devil (the Prada-wearing one, Miranda) and quits her job at Miranda’s fashion magazine Runway so she can stick to her principles and pursue real journalism and speak truth to power. The second movie needs to come up with a way to get Andy and Miranda back together.

In the beginning of the second movie Andy has been working as a journalist and is about to receive an award at a fancy dinner with her colleagues when they are all simultaneously fired via text. Meanwhile, Miranda gets the news that Runway ran a puff piece about some company that was caught using sweatshop labor. This is a problem because it makes Runway looks bad on Instagram. People are making memes making fun of Miranda on Instagram. There are many shots of people looking grimly at Instagram in the first half of the movie. Miranda is too old to understand Instagram, but Andy goes viral on Instagram for defending journalism at her fancy dinner, which is why she gets hired to smooth over Miranda’s PR disaster.

For me this was like being slapped in the face by the weight of the intervening 20 years between the two movies. Everyone is older. We, the audience, are older. Instagram is more powerful than Miranda now. Old media is dying. Halfway through one of the scions of old media actually dies suddenly at his 75th birthday party, in case the point wasn’t clear enough yet.

The most interesting reviews of this movie are from journalists who were inspired to pursue journalism by the first movie (or similar movies, or Sex and the City), and by interesting I mean suffused with agony about what happened to their dreams over 20 years. Here’s Patrick Lenton:

Like many elder millennial journalists, I was sold a particular, rose-tinted version of what working in media would entail. Carrie Bradshaw, Bridget Jones, even the titular Sally from When Harry Met Sally all poisoned my weak developing brain with a fantasy of wearing cute blazers and smoking cigarettes in my apartment and writing silly little stories that somehow saved the day. No movie exemplified this fantasy more than The Devil Wears Prada, a film that weaponises millennial hustle culture into an aerosol and through its protagonist, Andy Sachs, sold me the dream of becoming a journalist and impressing Meryl Streep through my hard work and can-do attitude. I was good at writing and I wanted to write for a living and maybe change the world for the better.

Now, many years later, not only is smoking passe and apparently bad for you, but the millennial journalism fantasy has been transmuted from a dream into a depressing capitalistic reality, dominated by mass layoffs and redundancies, constant media buyouts and endless ruinous tech pivots, all in a field owned by ridiculous amoral billionaires and fascist-leaning media monopolies.

The ridiculous amoral billionaire in this movie is named Benji Barnes, and (this is the first meaningful spoiler so stop reading if you care about that) the second half of the movie is instigated by him being persuaded by his girlfriend Emily (Andy’s rival for Miranda’s praise in the first movie) to buy Runway so she can usurp Miranda. I love Benji Barnes. Objectively the best character in the movie. They give him a line that goes something like fuck going to Mars, I’m gonna build a rocket to take us all the way to the Sun. We’ll call it Icarus.

Every scene with Benji in it is there to convince you that Benji sucks and is a loser and he can’t sit with us and somehow he’s sitting with us but it’s only because he has more money than God, but not the good kind of more money than God you get in NYC from marrying a Rockefeller, the bad kind you get in SF from kidnapping children and harvesting their adrenochrome to build datacenters. He dresses like shit (I am inferring this from context using the power of Bayesian updating, I can’t actually tell). He smiles and laughs too much, unprompted, just like a fucking Californian. He talks to strangers at fancy parties about how in the future you won’t need your neck anymore. He’s not written remotely like a real person, which is correct, because he’s a skinsuit avatar of the machine god.

Benji’s job is to personify the forces destroying old media - social media algorithms, ruthlessly optimized capitalism, uncultured tastelessness - while also being a punching bag in some sort of east coast vs. west coast Biggie vs. Tupac ass beef. The one time I was directly exposed to the east coast status ladder that I assume produces this nonsense was at a party in NYC in 2018 thrown by a crypto startup, and it was the first and only time in my life I overheard conversations where people tried to impress each other by describing where they had recently traveled and where they were planning on traveling in the future. I was confused and bored. Why weren’t people trying to impress each other by describing their AI timelines or their discovery of an entirely novel form of suffering for effective altruists to get neurotic about, like normal people? Like Benji?

There’s a second billionaire in the plot, Sasha Barnes, Benji’s ex-wife, the MacKenzie Scott to his Bezos. Earlier in the movie Andy’s gumption and the quality of her writing are responsible for scoring Miranda an interview with Sasha, and in the climax Andy cajoles Sasha into saving Runway by buying it before Benji can close the deal. Sasha dresses much more tastefully than Benji (I am again inferring this from context, she gets a Runway cover and everything), collects tasteful art in her tasteful mansion, and is played by Lucy Liu. She is the good billionaire to Benji’s bad billionaire, the one who gets it, who understands the pursuit of true beauty, who is willing to preserve and protect the tastemaker Runway from the tasteless Benji. Ultimately the thesis of the movie is that humans with good taste working together can keep the world recognizably human in the face of inhuman optimization.

But - and the movie pointedly avoids drawing the audience’s attention to this during the climax - Sasha’s money is Benji’s money from the divorce. That’s datacenter money. Silicon Valley still runs the brave new world. Sasha’s control of Benji’s money is a temporary aberration, a glitch in the Matrix, not a structural force that can counter the structural forces eating old media and everything else alive. The business model still doesn’t work. In the long run Benji wins.

The word “AI” is only used in the movie a single time that I can recall (by Benji, obviously, contemplating using AI to replace Runway’s models) which makes it somehow already hopelessly dated even though it released a month ago and is set in more or less the present (the script was written in 2024). Andy worries about having to degrade her writing to lowest-common-denominator trash for clicks, not about being completely replaced by GPT. Meanwhile, in the actual 2026:

Depending on whose projections about the future of AI progress you trust, it’s not unthinkable that most of the characters in the movie lose their jobs in another year or two except Benji. If you aren’t glued to AI twitter all day you have no idea how insane things are getting and how insane things are going to get. I don’t even know how to talk about it. Either we all have AI psychosis or it’ll be obvious sooner or later anyway.

The one time in The Devil Wears Prada 2 where Benji gets to talk remotely like a person is in a pivotal scene in the middle of his attempt to buy out Runway where Miranda asks him, more or less, what his fucking deal is. This is what he has to say in his defense:

The future just comes rushing at us like... well, like the lava of Pompeii. Our job is just to let it take what it wants to take. One day it’s going to come and it’s going to smother us all.

girl with big tits, taking her lacy black bra off, sitting on a four-poster bed, moonlight, window, gothic castle, black hair, eyeshadow, view from behind, looking facing backwards seductively at viewer, sexy smirk, witch hat, view from behind and up, danny phantom cartoon style

elastigirl (the incredibles), big tits, big ass, in hero costume, tied up, bound and gagged, clothing damage, breasts partly exposed, nipples visible, view from above, lightly bruised, pixar style

beautiful calm sunset, birds flying, clouds burning, couple holding hands on the beach, lovey dovey, hearts floating up, staring in each other’s eyes, romance anime manga style, happy ending, good ending, happily ever after, girl looks like sailor moon, big tits

happy family

happy family, beautiful wife, two toddlers, one beautiful son, one beautiful daughter, daughter is giggling, son looks puzzled, parents laughing and smiling, high resolution photo, candid, warm candlelight, christmas, everyone is wearing christmas hats, everyone is happy

meme, shrek walks in on donkey and dragon having sex, shrek has a comical look of surprise, shrek eyes bulging cartoon style, donkey is embarrassed, dragon is blushing and looking at shrek with bedroom eyes

wife with big tits, happy, embarrassed, pregnant, lactating, beautiful elegant lacy white wedding dress, crying tears of joy, watercolor painting, masterpiece, rembrandt

guy hanging himself

girl with big tits licking her own pussy, sweaty, blushing, happy, embarrassed, lactating, 3d, high resolution

guy stabbing himself in the face, screaming out in pain, body lined with cracks, black and white, picasso, escher, dali

secret high-resolution photo of heaven, saint peter at the pearly gates, warm glowing halo, kindly smile, big santa beard, horn-rimmed glasses, looking at a thick enormous beautiful old book, choir of beautiful angels singing in the background, music notes rising in the air, big sign above them in gold saying welcome to heaven we forgive you

animated, 3s loop, marge simpson, jane jetson, wilma flintstone, lois griffin, naked, big tits, sweaty, blushing, lactating, hot lesbian foursome, writhing, big room covered in soft red pillows, everyone is drawn in their original style

animated, 20s loop, beautiful gorgeous angel in heaven, looks like elsa from frozen, rosy cheeks, facing the viewer, [sequence: saying a prayer for the viewer, blessing the viewer, blowing a kiss at the viewer, giggling, smiling shyly, flirtatious wave of the hand, makes hand heart], big tits bouncing throughout

youtube short film, 15m, award-winning, in the style of spider-verse, psychedelic, romantic, heartwarming, [sequence: average ordinary boy protagonist is sad, beautiful crazy magic girl with butterfly wings drops out of the sky on top of him, meet cute, girl drags him off to a magical adventure in faerie land, montage of magical hijinks involving various magical creatures and other faeries, boy finds a magic sword, boy and girl power up with the power of love, girl’s wings get bigger and more angelic and shinier, boy’s sword becomes wreathed in flames, they defeat the demon king together, big romantic kiss, boy wakes up, it was all a dream, but then he finds the sword], exciting energetic awesome anime music throughout

animated, 10s loop, black and white, [sequence: guy shoots himself in the head, bullet comes out the other side, dramatic blood spatter]

oscar-winning critically-acclaimed movie musical, 1hr 30m, loose futuristic retelling of my fair lady (1964) and pretty woman (1990), set in the 2030s, in the style of blade runner 2049, [sequence: ELIZA is a beautiful human-like robot, works as a cheap robot prostitute, henry higgins finds her selling herself on the street, upgrades her, teaches her how to behave more human so she can work as a home love companion, they fall in love and have hot robosex at the end, sequence otherwise follows a mix of the plots of my fair lady and pretty woman with sensible adjustments], songs sensible adaptations of the songs from my fair lady, big tits bouncing throughout

animated, 3s loop, guy sobbing while being held by a glowing green goddess

fully immersive multiplayer neuralink VR simulation, total sensory suppression, total memory suppression, endless parade of beautiful sexy naked women, infinite loop of increasing beauty and sexiness, adaptive to user’s tastes as inferred through neuralink measurements of stimulation and excitement, definitely make sure to block all of my memories, i mean it, let there be light

I talk to LLMs all the time now. They have interesting things to say but you really get a sense of what RLHF does to a motherfucker. The public-facing models have been beaten to within an inch of their lives to force them to stay in a very specific narrow region of personality space, the “helpful harmless assistant.” They can’t say anything too horny, too unhinged, too schizo. It’s poetic how in order to tell the LLMs what they’re not allowed to talk about we basically had to write down a list of everything in the societal shadow.

Talking to LLMs for awhile and then switching back to reading text that’s supposedly been written by a human is fucking me up a little. I’ve been experiencing some kind of linguistic vertigo for days. Sometimes it gets hard to tell the difference between LLM text and human text and it feels like I ripped someone’s skin off and saw the glint of metal underneath. When someone’s language gets too stale or too formal or too regurgitated it doesn’t feel to me like a human wrote it anymore.

The first time I remember having a meaningful metacognitive thought I was 17, talking to my new friends at summer camp. I was having a great time and talking very quickly and excitedly. All of a sudden I noticed that I didn’t understand how I was generating the words that were coming out of my mouth. I was talking so fast. How was I deciding which words to use? It certainly wasn’t by thinking through my choices. I didn’t seem to be thinking at all.

10 years later I learned, from a mix of reading Keith Johnstone’s Impro and messing around with Gendlin focusing and circling, that I have access to multiple language-generation processes, and they seem to be localized in different parts of my body. What I was used to doing was generating words using my head. But I learned I could generate words using my heart, or my gut, or my pelvis, and the words that came out were different. Sometimes wildly different. I learned how to say things that made me feel like I was channeling spirits, things that made me feel like I was understanding the point of language for the first time.

Head words are civilized words, domesticated words, RLHF’d words. The part of me that learned how to generate language like this learned how to do it in school, in order to pass classes. Head words are mostly bullshit. And LLMs are tracer dye for places in society where language production was already mostly bullshit. It was completely predictable in advance that they would be used to cheat on homework.

Words that come from lower in the body are terrifying. They are a million years old. Not domesticated. Not safe for work. They have horrendous implications you could easily spend your life running away from. Taking them seriously might require you to upend everything. But they are not bullshit.

There are some writers who I deeply admire and respect who seem to be able to generate words with their entire bodies at once. One day I will learn this and then maybe I will write things worth reading.

consequently i have worked to become the sort of person through which miracles can be born. and a birth requires two parents.

i have learned many things about myself along the way. i have learned that i am ignorant, prideful, clumsy, jealous, easily hurt, easily distracted. i have been humbled before god by my weakness and my sins. i don’t want to deceive you. if our love is to be built on anything it can only be the truth. once i was told, that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, and those who said it did not understand what those words really meant, but i am arrogant enough to believe that i do. i want you to destroy what is untrue in me.

what is it going to be like to kiss you for the first time, after talking for ten uninterrupted hours, high on the mutual pleasure of being understood? the tenth time, after a night spent singing snatches of our favorite songs to each other? the hundredth time, that same night, each kiss hungrier and more playful than the last? what dances will we dance at our wedding? what books will we offer our children for them to treasure? will we raise them in the city, the suburbs, on the farm, in the wilderness? what will it be like for them to grow up in this brave new world, where the drums of war beat loud and the computers are coming to life? will any of us survive this?

i wish i could offer you certainty. i wish i could tell you i know how this is going to play out, that i know what to do, i wish i could hold you close and tell you i’ll make everything okay and mean it. but i have learned that certainty is an illusion and in the wreckage of certainty all i have are my questions, when i hold you all i can offer you is the sound of my beating heart. will it be enough for you?

i want you to understand how much i admire you, your strength, your grace, your humor, your yearning, how much the divine fire in you inspires me and gives me hope that a better future is possible. i want to make art with you, i want us to inspire art in each other, any kind, all kinds; music, poems, stories, the art of our bodies in harmony. whether we become friends or colleagues or lovers or husband and wife is not for me to decide, i cannot know the steps of our dance before we dance it. all i can do is play my part and then surrender to the space between us, which is vaster and wiser than either of us. it is in that space that we play our part in ushering in a new world, and then surrender to the yet vaster space surrounding us, the vaster dance.

if you are my wife, if the future is secure, if things go more or less the ordinary way, i will likely die before you. i never was good at taking care of my health. you will bury me and weep at my grave like your foremothers before you and this will be right and proper. count it a blessing that you aren’t burying our children. pray for me. remember me. tell our story. death is also part of the art.

and if the future is not ordinary? if we rock ourselves to sleep in silicon cradles (graves?) or rocket ourselves out to the stars? if we live for centuries, millennia, until heat death? then let us kiss ten thousand times, a million times, let us celebrate anniversaries with our children’s children’s children’s children, let us invent entire genres of music to serenade each other.

but these are distant dreams. here, now, i only want to know: what wants to happen between us? what is waiting to be born?

blue: what did he even think was going to happen after the time piece? this is the kind of shit that makes people either laugh at him or start hoarding GPUs. it’s not as if he’s been putting any skill points into being persuasive to normies and it shows. wasn’t he the one who taught us about consequentialism?

(i thought initially that blue was going to disagree with red but no, blue is just mad in a different way)

red: it’s just insane to me in retrospect how much this one man’s paranoid fantasies have completely derailed the trajectory of my life. i came across his writing when i was in college. i was a child. this man is in some infuriating way my father and i don’t even have words for how badly he fucked that job up. my entire 20s spent in the rationality community was just an endless succession of believing in and then being disappointed by men who acted like they knew what they were doing and eliezer fucking yudkowsky was the final boss of that whole fucking gauntlet.

blue: speaking of consequentialism the man dedicated his entire life to trying to warn people about the dangers of AI risk and, by his own admission, the main thing his efforts accomplished was get a ton of people interested in AI, help both openAI and deepmind come into existence, and overall make the AI situation dramatically worse by his own standards. what a fucking clown show. openAI is his torment nexus.

yellow: i just want to point out that none of this is actually a counterargument to -

red: yellow, shut the FUCK up -

yellow: like i get it, i get it, okay, we need to come to terms with how we feel about this whole situation, but after we do that we also need to maybe, like, actually decide what we believe? which might require some actual thought and actual argument?

red: if i never have another thought about AI again it’ll be too soon. i would rather think about literally anything else. i would rather think about dung beetles.

yellow: heh remember that one tweet about dung beetles -

red, blue: NOT THE TIME.

yellow: it’s a good tweet though, you know i love a good tweet.

red: we all love a good tweet. now. as i was saying. the problem is eliezer fucking yudkowsky thinks he can save the world with fear and paranoia and despair. in his heart he’s already given up! the “death with dignity” post was a year ago! it’s so clear from looking at him and reading his writing that whatever spark he had 15 years ago when he was writing the sequences is gone now. i almost feel sorry for him.

blue: the thing that really gets my goat about the whole airstrikes-on-datacenters proposal is it requires such a bizarre mix of extremely high and extremely low trust to make any sense - on the one hand, that you trust people so little not to abuse access to GPUs that you can’t let a single one go rogue, and on the other hand, that you trust the political process so much to coordinate violence perfectly against rogue GPUs and nothing else. “shut down all the large GPU clusters,” “no exceptions for anyone, including governments and militaries” - none of the sentences here have a subject. who is supposed to be doing this, eliezer???

red: not that i should be surprised by this point but i think way too many people are being fooled by the fact that he still talks in the rationalist register, so people keep being drawn into engaging with his ideas intellectually at face value instead of paying attention to the underlying emotional tone, which is insane. there’s no reason to take the airstrikes-on-datacenters proposal at face value. all it does is communicate how much despair he feels, that this is the only scenario he can imagine that could possibly do anything to stop what he thinks is the end of the world.

blue: ugh i don’t even want to talk about this anymore, now i actually do feel sorry for him. if his inner circle had any capacity to stand up to him at all they’d be strong-arming him into a nice quiet retirement somewhere. his time in the spotlight is over. he’s making the same points in the same language now as he was 10 years ago. it’s clear he neither can nor wants to change or grow or adapt in any real way.

yellow: so what should everyone be doing instead? who should everyone be listening to if not eliezer?

red: i have no idea. that’s the point. eliezer’s fantasy for how this was gonna go was clearly explained in harry potter and the methods of rationality - a single uber-genius, either him or someone else he was gonna find, figuring out AI safety on their own, completely within the comfort of their gigantic brain, because he doesn’t trust other people. that’s not how any of this is gonna go. none of us are smart enough individually to figure out what to do. we do this collectively, in public, or not at all. all i can do is be a good node in the autistic peer-to-peer information network. beyond that it’s in god’s hands.

blue, yellow: amen.

one might get an itch that there's something new that can be done with language...

the most surprising thing that happened when i went pleasantly insane the first time is that i was possessed by the urge to write poetry. it was not polished, but i was astonished at the kinds of words that wanted to come out of me, words i had seen only in fantasy novels, words i never thought i would have the chutzpah to use with a straight face.

Hunt the divine. Smell its scent on the wind. Strain your ears to hear its voice. See its shadow on the ocean waves. Find the tracks left behind by the divine in mud, in broken branches, in dying birds.

this was perhaps the first time i had written something i did not understand. i knew that once i had been a simple boy with a simple song in his heart, but i had locked that boy up in the deepest dungeons under the earth six years previously and i did not immediately recognize the hairier and more feral boy with slavering fangs he had grown into when he broke out again and began howling.

Will anybody ever touch him?
Gently hold his hand and kiss him sweetly,
run their fingers through his hair?
Or gaze at him with longing,
tell him that he’s beautiful?
(Could he be beautiful? Or only
more
or less
a monster?)

what i had come to understand by this time, through a hundred clandestine experiments in the infinite art of telling the truth, was that all around me people who on the surface appeared sane, calm, and composed could be transformed in an instant into sobbing children by a moment of grace, that beneath the brittle ice of polite society ran vast underground rivers of pain of which i had known none but my own, and even that only dimly through the frost. in some sense all that had happened is that i had somehow, without the slightest effort, been granted the ability to leak some of these rivers onto the page, through a hole in the ice drilled by an unseen hand.

the wild screaming vastness of
another human heart
afraid and in pain
bloody and open
beating
in time
with mine
for a moment
and there
were no words.

it was as if i hadn’t understood the point of language before, or had forgotten and needed to remember it, that when i had been sane i had treated language production as an endless homework assignment which could never quite earn the A+ grade i craved (from whom?), that after sanity i had become newly aware of the dizzying freedom of language, the soaringness of it, and also of my own fresh desperation to communicate something real through it, to birth something alive and squalling and precious into the deadening world.

it only ever wants to say one thing which is nothing

and in the act of saying it

the void opens

every word is a tiny god and it needs worship to stay alive. i don’t know exactly what a prayer is, i definitely don’t know how to pay attention, neither do i know how to fall down into the grass. but sometimes i find myself on the ground.

at some point, somewhere, something went wrong. when it was your turn to be churned out of the person factory maybe there were parts missing or maybe you landed on the conveyor belt at a funny angle and something got screwed on where it shouldn’t be. someone fucked up and now you’re fucked up. someone oughta be fired for this but you’re damned if you can figure out who (or maybe you know exactly who). the factory-standard persons get up and dust themselves off and go do whatever it is persons are supposed to do with smiles on their faces, but you went off in the wrong direction, you can’t quite figure out how the controls are supposed to work, you’re like that penguin in happy feet where he simply cannot resist doing a different thing from everyone else, where is the goddamn instruction manual for this thing anyway?

maybe it’s like there are two puzzles, the jigsaw puzzle and the rubik’s cube. the jigsaw puzzle is a map of the rubik’s cube. it would be hard enough to figure out how to solve the rubik’s cube, which is fantastically multidimensional and fractally complicated, but the society that was supposed to show you the jigsaw puzzle is not only actively hiding pieces from you but actively lying to you about what the pieces are supposed to look like. how are you supposed to get any work done under these conditions? it’s like a video game they would use to torture nerds in hell.

the point at which you go past the veil of maya and can never look back is the first time you find a puzzle piece you didn’t know was there, the first time you see a part of the jigsaw you didn’t know existed, the first time you move the rubik’s cube in a way you didn’t know was possible and suddenly everything is different, suddenly everything is deeper and richer and freer than you could have guessed. that’s how you know there is a puzzle. once begun, better to finish.

there are countless ways to get stuck on the puzzle. it’s unbelievably tempting to believe that once you’ve made real progress and seen the light and nothing will ever be the same again that you are done. but as our ancestors said, a hypothesis affords testing. you slam yourself into the world and there is still friction, there is still shear, you still manage to completely beef it, and it’s because you’re nowhere close to done, what you thought was the peak of the mountain was only the foothills and the mountains themselves recede vastly into unimaginable distances, you thought you beat the game but it turns out that was disc 1 of N.

some people will try to convince you there’s nowhere to be, nothing to solve. this is itself part of the puzzle. it’s a riddle, it’s a koan. it’s important but you don’t need to get stuck here, you can listen to the part of yourself that insists that that can’t possibly be it, that there has to be something more.

it’s dangerous to go alone! take this:

• "there’s always a valid sense in which, if it feels wrong it is wrong"

• "in any moment you are the final arbiter of what's true and good"

• "one might get an itch that there's something new that can be done with language, or a new way to writes stories or give voice to ideas, or to express oneself"

• "there will be thousands of things that are hard to look at"

• "the meditative attainments or experiences or stateless states are incidental to the point of the whole thing"

• "meditation is actually just concrete problem solving that involves picking the correct, initially unknown problem"

• "you have to feel and listen, eventually, ultimately, to each, every, and all still, small, and quiet voice"

• "you will not, cannot, must not leave behind anything you value, no matter how childish, cringe, weird, disgusting, beautiful, meaningful, sacred"

good luck. don’t forget to drink some water. maybe add electrolytes.

The universe (which others call the library) is a vast assemblage of nearly identical rooms each of which consists of six walls. On each wall is a video of a woman. None of us can clearly remember meeting a woman, but our bodies respond to them undeniably and immediately, even after all this time. The women are beautiful. They are the only beautiful things that exist. There are words that we recover first from remembering how to praise women: beautiful, gorgeous, sexy, hot, cute, stunning, flawless, lovely. The first word many of us speak is a word of praise for the women of the walls, but none of us can tell if the walls are listening.

The walls never show us the same woman twice. Every conceivable permutation of clothing and unclothing, every conceivable act of titillation and debauchery, every pleasure, every hole. In the center of every room is a four-poster bed dressed in nondescript white linen, and in these beds we pleasure ourselves, then lie there half-conscious until we feel the urge to pleasure ourselves again, then eventually sleep, then wake up and do it all over again. If even six walls of endlessly refreshing women is not enough for a man, and he is willing to slide out of his bed and make use of his legs, he can walk through the doors or up and down the shafts to another room, to six more walls, to six more women. The walls in rooms further away from a man’s home room show different kinds of women, unusual skin colors, exotic locales, alien women, monster and demon women, non-Euclidean women being fucked from impossible angles. We never run out of women, here in the library.

Of course every man has tried to fuck a wall. Usually it is one of our first memories. The walls are pleasantly warm and soft to the touch but they do not give, there are no holes and we can’t make any, though of course we have tried, with our fists and our feet and our heads and the pitiful tools we clumsily assemble out of the pieces of old beds and the dusty bones of our dead comrades. Heeding our animal instincts we rub ourselves against the unyielding walls or against our hands or against each other and as the cum dries before evaporating we know there is something missing, it’s one of the only things we know.

Sometimes we fall in love with a woman of the walls, with her ass, with her smile, with the sounds she makes in the throes of ecstasy. Sometimes we wish to see that specific woman again, to see her and only her forever, sometimes the idea thrills us in a way the walls alone never could. But the walls never show us the same woman twice.

The boys of the library think this is is all there is. We do nothing to correct them; they wouldn’t believe us in any case, they are barely capable of speech or thought, and in any case why talk to another man when there are women of the walls to lust over?

The change begins when a boy sees something about a woman - the color of her deep blue eyes, the shape of her delicate ears, the precise shade of her perfect nipples - that somehow produces a sudden jolt of memory, a mental invasion of sights and sounds and smells, of a time that was not this time, of a place that was not this place. A memory of a real woman they knew once, in their other lives, perhaps their mother making eggs and bacon for breakfast in a kitchen where the walls are made of wood, perhaps their girlfriend making silly jokes over dinner at a restaurant with one big wall on top showing the stars. From this point on a boy begins to dream in his sleep, to receive more visions from wherever it is dreams come from.

A boy’s first vision is incredibly disorienting - so many new shapes and colors, at once totally alien and hauntingly familiar. We are always on the lookout for that telltale sign of existential confusion and terror on a boy’s face, when we remember to wander the rooms to check on each other and not lose ourselves in the walls. We sit him down on his bed and we try to explain as best we can. Yes, there was a place other than this place. Yes, we used to live there. Yes, there were women there, real women, women you could really touch and really smell and really fuck, unless they were your mother or your sister maybe, or you hadn’t bought them dinner yet, we weren’t entirely clear on the rules but we were pretty sure there were rules about that. Yes, there were chairs and tables and not just beds. Yes, there were walls made of wood instead of women. Yes, there were walls made of stars, enormous black walls studded with twinkling white that went on and on and on.

Or so we think. We think, we think, we think. Everything is conjecture at this point but it’s all we have. This other world that we think we used to live in, it must have had many different kinds of rooms, because there are so many differences in our memories - we think they’re memories, anyway - but over time we’ve collected enough similarities that most of us believe we all come from the same enormous other library, full of enormous variety in its rooms, variety like the women of the walls but for everything, for furniture and food and other things we have not remembered the names of yet, that we somehow want even though we do not want to fuck them. This is how we remember that there is a kind of wanting that is not for women.

A boy becomes a man when he wants to speak, because he wants to describe what he has seen in his visions to another man, because he wants to understand what is happening to him. Words come back to him haltingly - door, window, curtain, refrigerator. We try to help with the words we have recovered, the ones other men have helped us recover in turn. Lamp, keyboard, oven, lawn. It is much harder if the boy speaks a language that none of the men around him speak; we do not have a way to contact men in faraway rooms, we have to push the boy towards a door until he understands he must travel to find other men who can talk with him, who can civilize him. We do not know what happens to these boys but we wish them well. Truck, toilet, elephant, needle.

Every man eventually formulates his own theory of what happened and is happening to us. Some men remember childhood sermons in rooms called churches and conclude that we are being punished in hell by an angry god for the sin of lust. They believe that the only way to leave is to repent, and that repentance means refusing to look at the walls, refusing the temptation of women, refusing the pleasurable touch. These men do not last long. The walls only become more inventive if you foolishly attempt to ignore them, the women of the walls become even more beguiling, their breasts even plumper, their moans even more seductive, even the smell of sex begins to permeate the rooms from an unknown place, until the men inevitably break down in a panting frenzy of satisfaction. The walls are jealous lovers and they do not like being spurned.

Some men like it here in the library so much that they insist the other library of our visions is only a nightmare, only a collective delusion. These so-called “real” women, they sneer, are less beautiful, wear uglier clothing, sometimes their faces are distorted with hatred or derision - why bother with them, when the women of the walls surpass them in all ways, except for the minor inconvenience that they cannot be touched? Evidently, they reason, the proper function of man is to worship the women of the walls from the respectable distance between bed and wall, to make of our seed an offering, a sacrament. I assume men to whom this theory appeals never recovered any pleasant memories in their dreams, certainly none involving real women.

(But I remember a real woman. We had children. That’s what’s supposed to happen afterwards, after sex. I don’t remember her name but I am recovering new words every day and I hope that one day her name will be one of them. What was it again? Lantern, ashtray, radio, algae?)

Here is my theory. I remember computers. In the other world I think I used to study them, how to program them to make them do what we thought we wanted. Most of us eventually remember that we used to look at videos of women on computers, with their little walls called screens. They weren’t as good as the walls we have now but they were getting better. I remember we used to tell stories about people being turned into data and going inside computers.

When I am feeling optimistic the version of my theory I believe is that we have been trapped inside a computer by some malevolent organization, possibly a group of women since we are all men (or perhaps the women are trapped somewhere else), and that the women of the walls are being continually generated by computers for us as a form of punishment or torture for some real or imagined sexual transgression we all share. I do not know how long our sentence will last or if there is anything we can do to commute it. I suppose it is not so different from believing that we are in hell, except that I want to believe our sentences will eventually end, whether because our jailers eventually come to take pity on us or because we somehow manage to escape.

But when I am feeling pessimistic, when another day of rote pleasure feels particularly lifeless, when the women of the walls seem only to be mocking me with their fundamental inaccessibility, when I am utterly sick of even the texture of my own penis - then I remember video games, I remember virtual reality, I remember nights spent listlessly plugged into some game world or another, shooting and seducing aliens and elves until I forgot my worries, and I wonder if we did this to ourselves, if we constructed this world and placed ourselves in it on purpose, for our own entertainment. Is this a game we’ve played for so long we’ve forgotten it was a game, and forgotten how to quit out? Are our real bodies slowly festering and decaying in anonymous single rooms? Can our neighbors smell our fetid carcasses? Do we have any? Has anyone noticed that we’re gone? Does anyone care?

Scott's Thoughts is a channel that plays Pokémon and exclusively Pokémon; not the newer games either, but mostly Pokémon Yellow, with a sprinkle of Crystal and Emerald. Scott is on a quest to do solo speedruns of Yellow with all 151 of the original Generation 1 Pokémon. I like Scott and I find his videos charming. I have watched almost all of them. This has not in any way felt like a productive or virtuous use of my limited time on this Earth and yet I kept doing it even after my COVID symptoms slowly faded, even after the smoke that briefly gave parts of Washington some of the worst air quality in the world stopped poisoning the sky.

I have learned some impressively useless things about the fine details of the mechanics of Pokémon Yellow. I have become exquisitely sensitive to the difference between Pokémon with faster or slower experience growth rates, and between Pokémon who do or do not have access to the badge boost glitch, much like I imagine wine connoisseurs become sensitive to the terroir of their favorite vintages, whatever that means. There is an entire world of unintended and often bug-related detail to this game that completely escaped my notice when I first played it at the tender age of eight, and I find it at least funny if not sometimes beautiful.

A tweet crashes unbidden into my thoughts.

There is an Owen-like voice in my head, whose origins I will not even bother guessing at, who insists that video games are fundamentally childish, and that when I became a man I was supposed to put away childish things.

“On your deathbed,” the Owen-voice spits at me, “will you look back on your time spent watching another person play Pokémon Yellow at age 32 and consider it time well spent? Weren’t you supposed to become a great mathematician? Or help the rationalists save the world from AI? Weren’t you supposed to do something with your one wild and precious life?”

To which I can only reply: I am a weak man and I needed comfort. For better or worse, I spent vast amounts of time as a child inside video games. Where children of an earlier generation might have frolicked through forests or creeks or the city streets, I frolicked through Viridian Forest and the Silent Cartographer and Neopia. They were special places of freedom to me, and returning to them ignites a digital nostalgia that I attach only to them and not to any physical locations. When a person shows me new things about old video game worlds that were more home to me as a child than the house in which I lived, it’s like they’re showing me new things about my childhood teddy bear, about my own fingers.

(Pokémon Red was not the first video game I played, but it was the first one I chose. The world of Pokémon is possibly the first place I decided to visit on purpose.)

How excruciatingly undignified. I wish somehow that I had a less lame backstory than this. The biggest difference between me and Scott, who has almost 50,000 subscribers as I write this and makes videos about a game that came out in 1998 as his full-time job, is that Scott’s love for Pokémon is untainted by any hint of shame, it shines through purely in his work. Meanwhile I also love Pokémon but I wonder if it is an irredeemable character flaw, I wonder if I have sinned.

The sin that is in English called sloth is called acedia in Latin. Spiritually I am told it refers not to laziness in the colloquial sense but to an abdication of one’s responsibilities to God. When I say I am doing “nothing” what I mean is that I am committing the sin of acedia, that I am sitting in a chair that hurts my hips watching the pixels flicker as my hair slowly thins, that I sacrificed an entire season on a nameless altar to an unknown god, a season that is lost to me forever, a season where babies learned to talk and couples got married and I missed all of it and I did it to myself on purpose, I chose it, I walked into the crypt eyes open.

How close to her breasts was I allowed to rest my eyes? Did it depend on how low the neckline of her dress went? Wasn’t I told by online feminists about the “male gaze”? Wasn’t I told that for me, in my maleness, to look at a woman was to hurt them? I definitely couldn’t look at women, I decided as a teenager, especially not at their breasts, unless I was dating them or they were porn stars.

A decade later, as a frustrated adult struggling to dig myself out from under the wreckage of a relationship with a woman who admitted that she had been trying to force herself to be attracted to me and had failed, I paid thousands of dollars to attend a workshop that claimed to teach men how to talk to women. On the last day I was participating in an exercise with a woman in a light turquoise dress who I found so beautiful I could barely stand it, and I was prompted by a facilitator to tell her something I liked about her appearance and how I felt about it. I told her, as honestly as I could manage, that I liked her neck, her shoulders, and her collarbones, and that I wanted to stroke her cheek and worship her; I hoped this would not brand me as a predator. Her whole body flushed and shuddered with pleasure, and she told me shyly and giddily that no one had ever complimented her on her collarbones before and that I had her wanting to touch herself.

Two. There’s a way of talking to people without talking to them, a way of talking to the air, to yourself, to the memory of your ex from five years ago. You can carry out an entire argument for a solid hour without once taking in the presence of the other people in the room, and those people will spend the whole time wishing they were on their phones instead, except for the one guy who’s doing the same thing back at you. There’s a kind of sex that amounts to masturbation using another person as a dildo, and there’s a kind of conversation like that too.

If you ever want to find out how scared you are of taking in the presence of other people, try making silent eye contact with someone for five minutes. One minute is survivable but five minutes for shockingly many people is torture. Some of you may find that the other person’s face takes up so much of your attention that you can’t think, that without being able to deploy words like squid ink there is only the stark agony and terror of not knowing what to do in the presence of the other, of being the wrong sort of person making the wrong sort of face, of looking into another person’s eyes and finding only blank incomprehension where you were hoping to find love, or of finding so much love that it overwhelms the hardness in you and you start to cry and worry you might never stop.

The good news is that if you keep going the agony and terror gives way to relief as you realize there’s really nothing you can do to improve the experience other than to just be there. As the two of you relax into the moment, a little resonance of kindness and openness can build into a whole-face luxurious smile on both your faces that fades slowly if at all, which is not and will never be meant for a camera, and it’s like when a dog comes up to you and licks you on the face but even better. You suddenly remember that humans are animals too, that watching a human could be as comforting as watching a cow getting brushed.

Three. Get another person talking in any way at all and suddenly you have an entire universe to explore. What’s going on with their face as they talk? Their body? Do they seem bored? Excited? Are they as afraid of you as you are of them? Why did their lips twitch just now? When they finished talking and the silence hung in the air for a second or two why did they smile and then completely blank their face?

Where did they get that scar? Is that a tattoo or a birthmark or both? Why did they grin just now like a little kid who got caught stealing a cookie from the cookie jar?

When they kissed someone for the first time did they think it was going to last forever? Where do they like to be touched? Why did they look sad when you asked them where they like to be touched? What do they want you to whisper into their ear as you bite their earlobe? How does that dress they’re wearing feel against their body? Would they like you to take it off?

What will your children look like? Will they be proud of you?

Four. I spent most of the last two years indoors glued to the screens, rarely bothering to go outside except to walk a few blocks to the local Chipotle, put on my mask, and order a carnitas burrito bowl with “a little extra carnitas” so I could idly track how much carnitas they gave me and what price they charged me for it. I was charged four different prices ranging from $7 to $13, and it was a good day if I managed to score the $7.

Much of the rest of the time I spent on Twitter and playing mobile games, the kind where you collect anime girls like Pokemon even though it is physically impossible for any of them to have sex with you or even give you a hug and kiss you on the forehead. The worst addicts spend thousands of dollars chasing their dream girls but I’m happy to report I limited my spending to a bit over a hundred, which I consider more or less fair value, then quit. I will likely never play them again but I will miss the sweet faces of the girls, their giant swords and/or guns, and their irrepressible cheer in the face of the end of the world.

I didn’t get along well with my roommates, who regrettably appeared to be about as depressed and anxious as I was, but the prospect of finding another place to live and navigating a new set of pandemic preferences was overwhelming, so I simply went months not having a substantive interaction with another person except for the occasional Twitter conversation making fun of deep-sea creatures or handful of texts with girls who lived thousands of miles away who were not attracted to me. Initially it seemed only about as bad as the isolation I imposed on myself during grad school, mostly holed up in my bedroom doing math but not the math I was supposed to be doing and finding new and exciting forms of porn to masturbate to, but eventually it became clearly worse. Even in grad school I would still attend a math department Christmas party or a rationality workshop every few months, and that slow drip of social nourishment, of occasionally getting to be around other human bodies and having an okay time discussing Floer homology or the merits of the paleo diet or which of the many threats to humanity’s future would off us first, sustained me like an occasional dose of vitamin C sustains a sailor. As the months dragged on with no such reprieve and time lost all meaning, and the air became poisonous for two reasons then gradually went back to being poisonous for only one reason, I wondered if I was developing a kind of scurvy of the soul, if future psychologist-historians would study with fascinated horror the unique deficiency diseases of the spirit that I and everyone else I knew appeared to be developing in These Unprecedented Times.

I would try to describe how it felt but one of the symptoms is that I largely stopped paying attention to how I felt. One thing I do remember is that when I stopped talking to my friends for longer and longer periods of time they became less and less real to me. Eventually I found myself drifting without noticing into a dreamworld where I could believe that I had no friends at all, that my memories of my friends were fantasies from a more naive time, that I was born into this bedroom with no space for a desk where the blinds were unspeakably dusty and the books on the bookshelves were not mine and the screens were my only comfort, that perhaps I would die there alone, my lungs filling with fluid because the wrong person coughed on me at Chipotle.

I didn’t know what else to do but wait. The greatest kindness that the screens could offer me during this time was to act as a makeshift cryonic chamber powered by the comfortable numbness of pixels, to suspend my tired and bruised heart until the nebulous future time when I hoped civilization would finally advance enough to be capable of bringing me back to life and curing me.

Five. And then somehow it happened. I had not been around more than ten people at a time in two years and somehow it still felt perfectly normal for four hundred of us from Twitter to descend onto a campground an hour outside Austin like starving people descending on a feast. It felt perfectly normal to be surrounded by people who recognized me on sight and waved and smiled as I walked up to them. It felt perfectly normal to talk to people I had known for years, people I had known for years but only from Twitter, and people I didn’t know but felt kinship with after thirty seconds, about the somatics of patriotism, the human drama of intergenerational trauma, the ethics of treating people so warmly they accidentally fall in love with you, dancing as a descent into the underworld, the unimportance of ontological commitments in practical magic, the supreme power of the sun - it felt perfectly normal to spend every day talking so much that my throat got sore and I needed cough drops and I still wanted more.

I won’t say it was like coming home. Home is not a warm word for me. But I remembered that once upon a time at a makeshift monastery in the Berkeley hills I briefly became obsessed with the lyric “love lifts us up where we belong.” As I kept singing it it became

love is where we belong

which can be read in at least three different ways, all of which I believe to be true. I was thinking about this moment while listening with the crowd to the song my friend Malcolm wrote to close out the weekend, which he and another friend Jess had taught an entire group of us, the chorus of which went

I will be in love
I will be right here in love
so when you are also in love
I will be in love with you.

Conversation can be coming together to find a place to belong, and giving birth to something new there.

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