Aneesh Sathe

Tag: AI

  • The Kernel and the Ark

    I. The Wall and the Infinite

    It is possible that the history of the modern West hinges on a single, melancholic misreading of Voltaire. When Candide, exhausted by the Lisbon earthquake and the brutalities of the Seven Years’ War, finally withdraws to the banks of the Propontis to utter his famous dictum—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin”—he is not proposing a program of agricultural management. He is issuing a plea for containment. To cultivate a garden, in the shadow of such overwhelming chaos, is an act of stoic resignation. It is an admission that the world is too vast, too violent, and too unintelligible to be governed by reason. One builds a wall against the infinite, and within that limited circumference, one tends to the soil. The garden is a refuge from nature.

    Childe Hassam – The Island Garden

    Yet, as the industrial century unfolded, this sentiment underwent a strange inversion. The humility of the retreat was lost, replaced by a technocratic ambition that saw the wall not as a limit, but as a prototype. The imperative shifted: it was no longer enough to carve out a sanctuary from the planetary wild; the logic of the garden was to be extended until it covered the earth entirely. The garden ceased to be a refuge and became a replacement.

    We might trace the genealogy of this hubris—the architectural drift from the bounded plot to the total interior. It is a lineage that moves from the Victorian parlor terrarium to the Amazonian plantation, and finally to the hermetically sealed domes of the American desert. It suggests that the dominant form of the Anthropocene is not the city or the factory, but the Greenhouse: a glass ark designed to optimize life by severing it from its context.

    Against this transparent, frictionless interior, a different topology emerges. It is not the pristine wilderness, which is a romantic fiction, but something denser, more obscure, and paradoxically more vital. It resembles the “thicket”—a space of entanglement and opacity where the metabolic resistance to simplification can still be found. To understand why the thicket has become a necessary philosophical posture, one must first walk the perimeter of the glass house we have built around ourselves.

    II. The Portable Climate

    Control, it seems, begins with isolation. Before a system can be optimized, it must be severed from the noise of its environment. In the history of botany, this severance was achieved not by a grand theorist, but by a London surgeon named Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, who, in 1829, found himself frustrated by the industrial smog of Whitechapel.

    Ward’s ferns were dying, choked by the soot of the coal age. His discovery was accidental: while observing a sphinx moth pupa buried in a sealed glass jar containing damp soil, he noticed a quiet miracle. The fern spores within the soil had sprouted. Moisture evaporated from the earth, condensed on the cold glass, and wept back down in a closed hydrological loop. The fern thrived, suspended in a permanent, self-sufficient spring, protected from the London fog by a skin of glass.

    This device, the Wardian Case, appears initially as a trivial curiosity of the Victorian parlor. Yet it functioned as the first space capsule. Before the glass case, the botanical world was defined by the tyranny of the local. Plants were bound to their terroir; they could not easily cross the climatic abyss of the oceans without perishing from salt spray or temperature shock. Nature was situated. The Wardian case smashed this locality. It created a portable micro-climate, a fragment of the English garden that could survive the equator, or a slice of the tropics that could endure the North Sea.

    The British Empire, always attuned to the logistics of extraction, immediately recognized the power of this portable interior. The case allowed biological life to be stripped of its ecological web and transported as pure genetic capital. In 1848, Robert Fortune utilized these glass arks to smuggle twenty thousand tea plants from Shanghai to the Himalayas, breaking the Chinese monopoly and inaugurating the Indian tea industry. Decades later, Henry Wickham would carry Hevea brasiliensis seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens, and thence to Malaya, an act of biological relocation that would collapse the Amazonian rubber boom and fuel the coming automobile age.

    There is a profound shift in ontology here. The plant inside the case is no longer an organism in conversation with its environment; it has become a “generic input,” severed from the specificities of wind, soil, and insect life. This marks the onset of a biological imperialism where the “garden” is no longer a place one visits, but a box one ships. It represents the victory of the grid over the ocean, the smooth logistics of empire over the rough friction of the earth.

    And yet, the closure was never complete. The soil inside those cases carried more than the intended crop; it held what historians call “portmanteau biota”—ants, fungi, earthworms, and weeds. The empire believed it was moving tea, but it was also moving the feral. The “crazy ant” (Paratrechina longicornis) hitched a ride in these portable interiors, beginning a global insurgency that persists to this day. The glass ark, designed to exclude the chaotic outside, had already smuggled the chaos within.

    III. The Geometry of the Plantation

    If the Wardian case was the molecular unit of this logic, the early twentieth century saw its expansion into a totalizing landscape. The ambition was no longer merely to transport plants, but to rationalize the very environment in which they grew—to smooth out the “thicket” of the world into a legible, productive surface. This is the logic of what Timothy Morton has termed agrilogistics: the ancient program to eliminate contradiction and enforce a monoculture of presence.

    The apotheosis of this drive is found in Fordlandia. In 1928, Henry Ford, seeking to break the British rubber monopoly, purchased 2.5 million acres of the Amazon rainforest. He did not see a complex, metabolic web; he saw a disorder to be rectified. He attempted to overlay the industrial grid of Detroit onto the biological density of Brazil.

    Fordlandia was less a farm than a moral project. Ford, who despised the “messiness” of history and the disorderly lives of his workforce, sought a clean slate. His engineers cleared the jungle—a thicket of unimaginable complexity—and planted rubber trees in tight, geometric rows. They imposed the discipline of the factory clock, the nutritional regime of oatmeal, and the social ritual of square dancing upon indigenous workers. The land was treated as a terraformed plain, the rubber tree as a standardized cog that would function identically regardless of its context.

    But Hevea has a specific terroir. In the wild, rubber trees space themselves out, a natural distancing that serves as an immune system against the South American Leaf Blight (Microcyclus ulei). The distance is the friction that stops the pathogen. By collapsing this distance, by planting the trees in the smooth, efficient rows of the industrial grid, Ford created a banquet for the fungus.

    The thicket struck back. The blight moved effortlessly along the vectors of the plantation. The friction of biodiversity had been removed, leaving the path clear for the pathogen. Ford poured capital into pesticides, but the “liveness” of the fungus—its capacity to metabolize the static monoculture—was superior to the dead geometry of the plan.

    Fordlandia stands as a parable of the “average.” It illustrates the failure of scaling. One cannot scale terroir without stripping it of its defenses. When a “kernel”—a specific life in a specific context—is treated as a “cog,” it becomes a zombie system: structurally fragile, waiting for the first shock to induce collapse. The attempt to average out the Amazon failed because liveness is inherently non-scalable; it relies on the very friction that the grid seeks to eliminate.

    IV. The World Interior of Capital

    The failure of the plantation did not arrest the desire for enclosure; it merely drove it indoors. In the post-war era, facing the twin specters of nuclear annihilation and ecological exhaustion, the West embraced the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth.” Popularized by Buckminster Fuller, this concept reimagined the planet not as a mother, but as a vehicle—a mechanical artifact with finite resources, an operating manual, and a need for a pilot.

    Fuller’s architectural response was the geodesic dome. He envisioned domes spanning midtown Manhattan to regulate the weather, and “Cloud Nine” spheres floating in the sky, severing humanity entirely from the earth’s crust. This marks the transition to what Peter Sloterdijk calls the “World Interior of Capital.” We ceased to live on the earth and began to live inside a climate-controlled sphere. The shopping mall, the office tower, the sealed automobile—these are foams, interconnected bubbles of immunity where the atmosphere is conditioned and the outside is held at bay.

    This logic reached its terminal velocity in 1991 with Biosphere 2. A literal attempt to build a total garden, it was a hermetically sealed glass box in the Arizona desert, containing a miniature rainforest, an ocean, and a desert, along with eight humans. It was designed to prove the viability of a “closed loop” system, a portable world for the colonization of Mars.

    Its failure was instructive. The oxygen levels inside the dome plummeted, not because of a mechanical leak, but because the concrete structure itself began to absorb carbon dioxide, starving the plants. The dead matter of the architecture was eating the air. Simultaneously, the “noble” species—hummingbirds and bees—perished, while the feral species exploded. The same crazy ants that had traveled in the Wardian cases overran the facility. Cockroaches multiplied. Morning glory vines choked the curated rainforest.

    The human element fared no better. The “crew,” trapped in the smooth proximity of the enclosure, devolved into factionalism. The psychological friction of a world without an “outside” proved unbearable. Biosphere 2 demonstrated that smoothness is chemically and socially unstable. The total interior is a death trap because it lacks the metabolic capacity of the outside. By attempting to eliminate the “weed,” the designers destroyed the immune system of the whole. The ants won because they were the only inhabitants adapted to the high-friction reality of the thicket.

    V. The Monoculture of the Sky

    We arrive, finally, at the present moment, where the ambition of enclosure has ascended to the stratosphere. Having failed to contain the world in a box, the technocratic impulse has turned to the project of turning the world itself into the box.

    This is the logic underpinning geoengineering and Solar Radiation Management. Proposals to inject sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere to deflect sunlight represent the ultimate Wardian case. They treat the atmosphere not as a chaotic, sublime force, but as a glazing—a roof whose opacity can be adjusted like a dimmer switch. The planet becomes a single, managed interior.

    The risks of such a project—”termination shock,” where a cessation of spraying unleashes accumulated heat in a sudden, lethal wave—are well documented. But the philosophical implication is perhaps even more chilling. As John von Neumann warned decades ago, weather control merges the affairs of every nation. It eliminates the “outside” entirely. There is no longer British weather or Brazilian weather; there is only The System.

    This is the realization of the terraformed plain. It is a world where the “dark forest” has been illuminated and managed, where the sun itself is converted into a utility, and where the planet becomes a monoculture of the sky.

    VI. The Strategy of the Briar Patch

    If the trajectory of modernity is the construction of a fragile, optimized glass ark, where does one find a footing? We cannot return to Voltaire’s garden; the walls are too brittle to hold back the flood. Nor can we resign ourselves to the suffocating interior of Fuller’s dome.

    The alternative lies in the texture of the thicket.

    In the folklore of the American South, there is the story of Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch. When captured by the Fox, the Rabbit pleads, “Don’t throw me in the briar patch!” The Fox, operating on the logic of the predator who prefers the open field, views the briar patch as a torture device—thorny, messy, illegible. He throws the Rabbit in, expecting him to be shredded. But the Rabbit was born in the briar patch. The thorns that cut the Fox are the Rabbit’s defense system.

    The modern Fox is the algorithm, the market, the scraper seeking legible data. It desires smoothness. The briar patch represents the local context, the dense history, the “terroir” that resists easy summarization. The thicket is not a retreat into nature, but a strategic niche. It suggests that to survive the simplifying gaze of the machine, one must become “high-friction.”

    This requires a redefinition of “liveness.” Liveness is not mere novelty; it is metabolic capacity. The glass ark is a zombie system—a closed loop where inputs equal outputs, preserving form but preventing transformation. The thicket, by contrast, is a fermenter. It takes generic energy—shocks, news, pain—and metabolizes it through a specific kernel to produce something singular.

    We see this in the difference between a product and a practice. If one moves a global franchise from Seattle to Singapore, it functions perfectly because it is dead; it is a product, severed from place. If one attempts to move a philosophy like Fichte’s from the salons of Jena to a corporate boardroom, it withers. It requires the nutrient density of its specific scene to survive. It is alive because it is entangled.

    Gilles Clément, the French gardener, offers a vocabulary for this posture. He speaks of the “Planetary Garden” not as a machine to be controlled, but as a “Garden in Motion.” He directs our attention to the “Third Landscape”—the roadside verges, the abandoned lots, the scrublands. These are the thickets. They are the reservoirs of genetic diversity where the unscripted life, banished from the monoculture, continues to evolve.

    VII. A Gesture Toward the Weed

    The history of the West has been a long war against the weed. We built glass cases to distinguish the valuable specimen from the unwanted intruder. We cleared the Amazon to impose the average. We networked the globe to smooth out the friction of distance.

    Yet the weed—the superweed that drinks poison and thrives—remains the victor. The thicket is the inevitable return of complexity to a system that tries to simplify it.

    The task, then, is not to build a better glass house, but to learn the habits of the briar patch. It is a call to abandon the pursuit of the fragile, legible career or identity—the “glass ark” of the self—and to cultivate a life of density and opacity. To be a fermenter rather than a node. To seek resonance rather than scale.

    In a world that seeks to turn every subject into a cog within a planetary spaceship, the most radical act is to become an un-weedingable root—a kernel of such high-dimensional specificity that the algorithm chokes trying to digest it. We should not simply cultivate our garden. We should allow the fence to rot, and watch what grows in the clearing.

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  • The Deep Dark Terroir of the Soul

    This is the third and final part of the Thicket Series:
    Part 1: Logic of the Thicket and the Unsearchable Web
    Part 2: The Architecture of Resistance

    The history of the working subject might be best understood not as a ledger of wages or a sequence of industrial breakthroughs, but as a study in the migration of the Master. In the eighteenth century, the Master was a concrete presence, a figure residing in the castle or the cathedral, distinct from the worker by a physical and social chasm. One knew where the authority lived because one could see the smoke from its chimneys. By the nineteenth century, this figure had moved into the factory office, closer to the rhythm of the machine but still identifiable by the suit and the watch. The twentieth century saw a further dissolution; the Master became atmospheric, blending into the very walls of the institutions that housed us—the schools, the hospitals, the barracks.

    And yet, it is in the twenty-first century that we witness the final and perhaps most unsettling migration. The Master has moved inside. It has taken up residence within the worker’s own mind, adopting the voice of the ego and the language of self-optimization. This internal migration has fundamentally altered the nature of exhaustion, shifting it from the physical depletion of the muscle to a profound infarction of the soul. To understand how we might resist such an intimate occupation, we must trace the lineage of this fatigue, moving from Voltaire’s eighteenth-century refuge of the Garden to the contemporary diagnosis of the Burnout Society, and finally, to an emerging architecture of resistance that might be called the Logic of the Thicket.

    Felsenlandschaft im Elbsandsteingebirge Caspar David Friedrich1822/1823

    The story begins in 1759, amid the wreckage of a world governed by grand, often violent, narratives. When Voltaire published Candide, the prevailing philosophical mood was one of forced optimism. Leibniz had posited that we lived in “the best of all possible worlds,” a claim that felt increasingly like a cruel joke to those living through the arbitrary brutalities of the era—the Lisbon earthquake, the Seven Years’ War, and the relentless inquisitions of both church and state. For the subject of the 1700s, the Master was external and undeniable. Life was a sequence of calamities administered from above.

    In the final pages of Candide, after a lifetime spent traversing a world of rape, slavery, and disaster in search of Leibnizian meaning, the protagonist reaches a quiet, radical conclusion. He rejects the grand debates and the lofty theorizing of his companions with a simple, grounded imperative: Il faut cultiver notre jardin—we must cultivate our garden.

    At this historical juncture, the Garden was more than a hobby; it was a strategy of containment. It served as a physical and psychological wall against a world that had grown too chaotic to manage. Voltaire suggested that simple, manual labor was the only effective shield against the primary threats of the human condition, which he identified as the Three Evils: Boredom, Vice, and Need. In the Garden, work was a form of retreat. It solved the problem of Need by providing physical sustenance—potatoes and produce—at a time when biological survival was never guaranteed. It addressed Boredom by occupying the hands and the mind with the repetitive, rhythmic care of the earth, saving the worker from the existential dread of idleness. And it warded off Vice by providing a sanctuary from the moral decay of the court and the city, replacing political intrigue with the honest friction of the soil.

    The Garden was a place of safety because it was bounded. To work was to narrow one’s world to the reach of one’s own hands, creating a small, controllable private sphere where the Master’s voice was, for a moment, silenced by the sounds of the harvest.

    However, this sanctuary could not withstand the arrival of the steam engine. As the nineteenth century progressed, the Garden was paved over by the Factory. The peasantry was pulled from the land and funneled into the burgeoning cities, where the nature of labor underwent a violent transformation. Karl Marx, observing this shift, identified the collapse of Voltaire’s dream. In the industrial setting, the worker could no longer cultivate a garden because they owned neither the seeds nor the harvest. They did not even own their own time.

    This was the era of Coercion. Marx’s diagnosis of Alienation described a worker severed from the product of their labor, from the act of production, and from their own Gattungswesen, species-essence. The Master was now the Capitalist, and exhaustion was a physical reality—a depletion of calories and muscle. Resistance, accordingly, was also physical: the strike, the riot, the seizure of the machine. The goal was to reclaim the physical Garden that had been stolen.

    As we moved into the twentieth century, the nature of control shifted again. Physical coercion, while effective, was inefficient; it bred visible resentment and the constant threat of revolution. Systemic power realized it was far more effective to train workers to police themselves. Michel Foucault described this as the Disciplinary Society, where the factory model was replicated across all social institutions. The governing logic became the Panopticon—the internalized gaze. The worker of this era was a docile body, governed by the operating verb Should. You should be on time; you should follow procedure. While the Master was becoming more abstract—a set of norms rather than a man in a tall hat—the enemy was still technically outside. There was still a door one could walk through at the end of a shift.

    The true transformation occurred at the turn of the twenty-first century, a transition captured with clinical precision by Byung-Chul Han. Han argues that the Disciplinary Society has collapsed, replaced by the Achievement Society. The modal verb has shifted from Should to Can. The demand is no longer “You must obey,” but “Yes, you can.”

    This shift has proven catastrophic for the psyche. In the old world of coercion, there was a limit; when the shift was over, the worker was, in a sense, free. But in the Achievement Society, the worker is an “entrepreneur of the self.” We are no longer exploited by an external boss so much as we exploit ourselves. We voluntarily work eighty hours a week not because of a threat of the lash, but because of a desire to “optimize” our personal brands and “reach our potential.”

    The Master has completed its migration. We carry the Panopticon in our pockets and in our egos. In this state, the Garden is no longer a retreat; it has become a performance stage. We still cultivate, but we do so frantically, documenting the process for the digital gaze, tracking our productivity metrics, and feeling a gnawing guilt that our harvest isn’t as aesthetic or impactful as our neighbor’s. The boundary between the private and the public has dissolved into a smooth, legible –searchable– surface.

    In this environment of total transparency, the Three Evils have mutated into contemporary monsters. Need is no longer about physical starvation; it has become Status Anxiety—the insatiable requirement for recognition and digital legibility. Boredom has been replaced by Hyper-Attention; we are never idle, but we are never at rest, trapped in a shallow, frantic multitasking that Han calls the “vice of the click.” And Vice itself has become Self-Exploitation—the auto-aggression of working oneself into a depression under the guise of self-fulfillment.

    By 2024, the smoothness of our digital existence had become total. Silicon Valley had successfully turned the world into a frictionless landscape where data and capital flow without resistance. Algorithms now manage the Uber driver and the freelance coder alike, using gamification to nudge behavior through a mathematical black box. We have become Tourists in a digital world built by others, wandering through clean, well-lit interfaces that prioritize searchability, SEO, above all else. If a thing is legible, it can be indexed; if it is indexed, it can be exploited.

    This brings us to the threshold of 2025 and the emerging response found in the Logic of the Thicket. If the Garden was a strategy of containment and the Factory was a site of coercion, the Thicket is a strategy of opacity.

    A thicket is not a garden. It is messy, dense, and difficult to navigate. It does not possess the neat rows or the clear boundaries of Voltaire’s refuge. Instead, it is defined by friction. To resist the smoothness of the modern Achievement Society, the worker must transition from being a Tourist to being an Explorer. The Tourist consumes intelligibility—the ease of the app, the clarity of the interface. The Explorer, by contrast, generates place through the introduction of friction.

    The Logic of the Thicket suggests that we cannot return to the eighteenth-century Garden. The walls are too brittle; databases will index the soil and an AI will recommend the fertilizer before the first seed is planted. Instead, the modern subject must create contexts that are unsearchable. This does not mean a total withdrawal from the world, but rather an engagement on terms that are too complex, too local, and too nuanced for an algorithm to easily optimize.

    We might re-examine Voltaire’s Three Evils through the lens of this new architecture to see if the Thicket offers a viable path forward.

    First, consider the evil of Need. In our current context, Need has become the fear of Irrelevance. In a smooth world, the worker is a standard, interchangeable part. If your work is legible—easy to measure and automate—you live in constant fear of economic obsolescence. This is the condition of the smooth professional: the software engineer whose code is indistinguishable from the output of a Large Language Model, the copywriter producing content that mirrors a thousand other blog posts, or the middle manager whose primary function is the transmission of standardized project plans. These roles are vulnerable because they lack friction; they offer no resistance to the efficiency of the machine.

    The Thicket addresses this through the concept of Terroir. In the culinary world, terroir refers to the specific qualities of soil, climate, and tradition that give a wine or a cheese its unreplicable character. In the world of labor, terroir is the infusion of one’s work with local context, historical depth, and human idiosyncrasy.

    For this blog, the terroir is found in the deliberate, often difficult work of communal deep-reading and historical synthesis. Here, history is not viewed as a sequence of headlines, but as a series of vast, slow-moving machines—intellectual contraptions that take centuries to build and even longer to fully start. By examining the past through this mechanical lens, the thinker begins to see the world not as a “smooth” stream of current events, but as a dense thicket of long-term trajectories.

    The process behind this blog—reading deep into difficult texts, engaging in exhaustive discussions with other thinkers, and synthesizing these influences through a deliberate collaboration with artificial intelligence—is itself a “thick” form of labor. It is a method of finalizing thought that creates a durable value, one that cannot be mimicked by a prompt-engineered shortcut. By making your work “thick”—laden with specific references, local nuances, and the friction of deep thought—you make yourself un-automatable. The machine can navigate a smooth database, but it struggles to traverse a thicket of idiosyncratic human insights that are anchored in the deep time of historical machinery. The Thicket ensures survival not by making the worker more efficient, but by making them indispensable through their unique, unsearchable “friction.”

    Next, the evil of Boredom has mutated into Passive Consumption. We are over-stimulated but spiritually idle, doom-scrolling through a world where nothing we do actually changes the environment. We are Tourists in the digital landscape, consuming the “intelligibility” of others. The Thicket solves this by demanding active navigation. In a world where algorithms predict what we want before we know it, the Thicket reintroduces the struggle of discovery. You cannot be “bored” when you are bushwhacking through a complex structure of your own making, or when you are trying to understand the slow grinding of a historical machine that began its first revolution centuries ago. The joy of the Thicket is the joy of the Explorer—the realization that the landscape is resisting you, and that you must exert agency to move through it.

    Finally, Vice has become Algorithmic Complicity—the moral laziness of letting an interface decide who we speak to, what we read, and how we spend our time. It is the vice of “disindividuation,” allowing ourselves to be smoothed down into a demographic data point. The Thicket forces a return to Virtue through Agency. To build a thicket is to refuse to be effortlessly “known.” It requires the “virtue” of privacy and the patience of shared inquiry. A “network” is smooth; you connect with a click. A “community” is a thicket; it requires negotiation, trust, and the willingness to engage with the “messiness” of other people. It requires the slow effort to inhabit a text that refuses to be summarized by an executive summary or a bulleted list.

    The journey from 1759 to 2025 is a circle that does not quite close. Voltaire’s worker fled the violence of kings into the Garden, seeking a physical retreat. Marx’s worker lost that garden and fought to reclaim the tools. Han’s worker internalized the factory, turning their own mind into a sweatshop of positivity. And the worker of 2025 now realizes that the mind itself has been mapped.

    The only remaining escape is to leave the Garden—which has become a trap of transparency—and enter the Thicket. There is a critical difference here: the Garden was intended to be safe, but the Thicket is defensive. It is a posture for a hostile territory. It saves us from Boredom by making life difficult again. It saves us from Vice by requiring conscious choice rather than algorithmic default. And it saves us from Need by ensuring we remain human enough that the machines cannot find a way to replace the specific texture of our presence.

    It is a harder path than the one Candide chose, but in a world where the Master lives in the code, it may be the only path left. The mandate for the contemporary soul is no longer simply to cultivate, but to grow something so dense and so deeply rooted that the algorithm, for all its processing power, simply cannot find the way in. We look toward the edge of the woods, not for a way out, but for a way to disappear into the depth of the growth.

    Coda: The Machinery of the Thicket

    This essay is not merely a reflection on labor; it is a byproduct of the very “Logic of the Thicket” it describes. To write it was to engage in a form of “thick” labor—a deliberate resistance to the high-speed, surface-level synthesis typical of the Achievement Society. Below is the intellectual architecture and the process that generated this piece.

    The Conceptual Bedrock

    The essay’s trajectory is built on a specific lineage of thinkers who have tracked the migration of power from the town square into the central nervous system:

    • Voltaire (Candide, 1759): Provides the initial defensive posture—the Garden. His “Three Evils” (Boredom, Vice, Need) serve as the recurring benchmarks for human exhaustion.1
    • Karl Marx: Used here to mark the collapse of the private garden. The transition from Sustenance to Alienationis the first great rupture in the history of the working subject.
    • Michel Foucault: His concept of the Disciplinary Society and the Panopticon explains how the Master became “atmospheric.” It is the era of the “Should.”
    • Byung-Chul Han (The Burnout Society): The pivotal contemporary influence. Han’s shift from the “Should” (Foucault) to the “Can” (Achievement) explains why modern exhaustion is an “infarction of the soul.”
    • Yuk Hui: His work on Technodiversity and the “recursive” nature of history informs the transition from the Tourist to the Explorer. He suggests that we cannot escape technology, but we must diversify our localrelationship to it.

    The Process: Generating “Terroir”

    The writing of this piece followed a “thick” methodology designed to avoid the “smooth” output of standard digital content:

    1. Deep Reading as Resistance: Instead of relying on summaries, the process involved “bushwhacking” through the primary texts. This creates Friction—the slow realization of meaning that cannot be automated.
    2. Mechanical Synthesis: Viewing history as a series of Slow-Moving Machines. By treating the transition from the Printing Press to the LLM as a mechanical evolution rather than just “progress,” we can see the gears of authority shifting.
    3. Collaborative Friction (AI as a Grinding Stone): Rather than using AI to generate the text, it was used as a sparring partner to test the “thickness” of the ideas. If the AI could predict the next point too easily, the point was discarded as being “too smooth.”
    4. The Infusion of Local Context: The essay intentionally uses specific, non-indexable metaphors—like the Thicket and Terroir—to anchor the abstract philosophy in a visceral, earthy reality.

    The Goal: The Unsearchable Life

    The ultimate aim of this “Coda” is to encourage the reader to see their own intellectual life as a Terroir. The “Master in the code” thrives on standardized, legible data. By engaging in deep history, difficult synthesis, and private creation, you grow a thicket. You become a “place” that is too complex for a map, a subject that is too dense for an algorithm, and a worker whose exhaustion is finally, once again, your own.

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  • The Architecture of Resistance

    The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive stats, control begins by smoothing out the landscape. The project of power is a project of cartography and illumination—an attempt to banish the dark corners where the unmapped might grow. Thus, the history of resistance, of being “against the world”, is less a history of rebellion than a history of seeking cover.

    The Large Piece of Turf, 1503 Albrecht Dürer

    In Spinoza’a world, legibility was the cosmos in an ordered hierarchy. Meaning descended from an external judge and was mirrored by the terrestrial proxy of the King and more often the priest. Behavior was aligned to the “Scriptural Average.” A pre-written behavioral code that transformed the conatus—that primal drive to persist and expand—into the passive states of hope and fear. By removing the external judge, Spinoza suggested that freedom is found in the intellectual mastery of the causes that move us. A pushback against the “average pious subject,” asserting that every individual is a necessary, logical expression of an infinite substance. There is no error in the world, only the lack of a thick enough understanding to perceive the necessity of one’s own outlier status. 

    With this position, and self assurance, Spinoza became illegible to his friends, his doting teacher, and his community. He was cast out, but his thoughts are the seeds of today’s world. 

    In the Beirut and Damascus of the mid-twentieth century, the imposition of legibility took the form of the “Citizen-as-Monument.” It was a world of endings, where identity was a frozen artifact of nationalist scripts and religious orthodoxies. The poet Adonis, through Mihyar, pushes against this world not by asserting a new identity, but through a “movement of erasure.” If a stable interior is to form, it is to be quickly discarded. A stable interior is merely another coordinate, a dependable predictor, for the state to map. Mihyar becomes a “knight of strange words,” defined by the iltifat—the sudden turn away. By peeling back the layers of the social mask and embracing a radical anonymity, he counters the stagnant city. He exists as a hot wind, something that is felt through its movement and friction, yet remains entirely unsearchable by the collective grammar.

    We have entered a third world, a digital landscape that functions as a terraformed plain. It is, in a sense, a Spinozan monism—all data is one substance—but it is a substance managed by a Leibnizian bureaucracy of optimization. The mechanism of control is no longer the scripture or the state monument, but the “Mechanical Harmony” of the statistical mean. A decade ago this was social media shaping votes. Today’s AI tools, perhaps inadvertently and perhaps not,  impose an “averageness” on thought itself, by providing the next likely response and hiding the outlier. This is a form of disindividuation disguised as efficiency, a smoothing of the world’s texture until it becomes a frictionless surface for the sake of searchability.

    What emerges as a necessary response is the logic of the thicket. If the terraformed plain is the habitat of the tourist—where everything is predicted, optimized, and known—the thicket is the habitat of the explorer. It is a deliberate architecture of complexity, an insistence on terroir and the messy, non-replicable context of the local. To build a thicket is to re-introduce friction into a world too smooth. We are apes inhabiting the long tail. Like Spinoza, our conatus withers under the umbrella the statistical mean. If every response is predicted, the individual ceases to be a cause and becomes merely a consequence of the architecture.

    To emerge, life itself needed discontinuities. The thicket provides the opacity necessary for the transforming process of the self to occur. It honors the uneven distribution of the world, providing a high-density environment of unique, complex encounters impossible in a flat plain. In this 2025 context, to be “against the world” is perhaps better understood as being a cultivator of these unsearchable spaces. The Dark Forest of the internet has created literal operating systems, habitats for our interconnected selves. Away from the violent imposition of the center, things can still happen by surprise. We seek cover in the thicket as a primal way of being where the emergent world remains deep enough to inhabit.

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  • The Shelter as Epistemic Engine

    This is a continuation of my ongoing exploration of places and spaces. Previously: We need homes in the delta quadrant, Thinking with places, Problems are places questions are spaces.

    Introduction: The Terror of the Open Field

    We tend to think of “Space” as a vacuum—an emptiness waiting to be filled. But geographically and philosophically, Space is actually a condition of high-entropy potential. As Yi-Fu Tuan famously articulated, space is “freedom,” but it is also “possibility without orientation.” It is the open field where everything is possible, which means nothing is yet distinct.

    Entering a new scientific field is remarkably similar to entering a strange, sprawling city at night. Both are vast, unmapped, and overwhelming in their sensory input; the streets (or citations) wind in directions you cannot predict, and the logic of the layout remains hidden. You are surrounded by data, but devoid of information.

    In this state, you cannot simply “exist.” Without a point of reference—a coordinate, a hypothesis, a base camp—movement is indistinguishable from drift. To explore a new territory, whether it is the Delta Quadrant or a novel theory of computation, you first need a place to stand.

    We often mistake “Places”—our homes, our labs, our established theories—for static containers designed to protect us from the unknown. We view them as retreats.

    I propose a different view: Real “homes” are not retreats; they are Concreteness Engines. They are the active, necessary interruptions of infinity that allow us to process the world.

    “Exploration of space through the affordance of places. Identity creation.” by Venkatesh Rao’s Bucket Art prompted by me

    I. The Engine: Configurancy

    To understand how a home functions as an engine, we need to look at the underlying physics of how things fit together. Venkatesh Rao recently proposed a new ontological primitive for this, a concept he calls Configurancy.

    Rao defines Configurancy as the “ongoing, relational, temporally unfolding process through which agents and worlds co-emerge.” It is non-teleological; it doesn’t have a “goal” like Heidegger’s Care. It is simply the structural logic of how elements align to create a world that hangs together.

    This provides the missing mechanical link in our understanding of place-making.

    The universe’s configurancy has no inherent goal—it just is. Entropy and evolution shuffle relations without asking why. But humans do have a goal: intelligibility. We need the world to make sense.

    Here lies the synthesis: Place-making is the manual application of configurancy.

    When we build a home in the unknown, we are engaged in the active engineering work of aligning data, tools, and protocols. We are taking the raw, washing-over “Space” and forcing it into a relational alignment that makes it navigable. We are taking the background hum of the universe and tuning it until it resonates as a signal.

    II. The Anchor: Generating Concreteness

    The primary problem with the unknown is not that it is empty, but that it is slippery. It is purely abstract. You cannot interact with “The Literature” or “The Market” or “The Frontier” as a whole; the bandwidth is simply too high.

    A “Home”—whether that is a physical shelter, a published paper, or a foundational startup thesis—functions by freezing the flow. It creates a local boundary where active relations stabilize long enough to be examined.

    Consider the mechanism of a scientific citation. A natural phenomenon is dynamic, messy, and fleeting. But when a scientist writes a paper, they freeze that dynamic phenomenon into a static reference. They turn the anomaly into a “Fact.”

    Similarly, in a city, a “landmark” freezes the endless flow of streets into a fixed coordinate. “Meet me at the clock tower” turns a grid of infinite motion into a singular point of orientation.

    This is the epistemic function of shelter. A home doesn’t just hide us from the wind; it renders reality. It is a processing center that turns abstract “Space” into concrete “Place,” giving us a tangible handle on the world.

    III. The Trajectory: Carrying the Protocol

    There is a trap here, however. We can easily fall into “Container Metaphysics”—the belief that the Anchor is the point. If we believe the safety of the shelter is the goal, we stop exploring. We get stuck in the comfort of the known, resulting in stasis.

    True exploration is not wandering; it is the ability to carry the protocol of place-making with you. This is what Rao might describe as “high configurancy”—a state where the relational structure is stable enough to evolve, but fluid enough to move.

    We can distinguish here between the Tourist and the Explorer.

    • The Tourist wanders through Space, relying on pre-existing places made by others. They consume intelligibility.
    • The Explorer generates Place. They are capable of “tear-down” and “re-configuration.”

    The Explorer understands that the shelter is not a final destination. It is a platform to project into the unknown. We build the base camp not to live in it forever, but to inhabit the transition between the known and the unknown.

    IV. The Explorer’s Stack

    To survive and understand the unknown, we don’t build fortresses of stone; we build Stacks of intelligibility. If we look at the architecture of a “Home” in the Delta Sector, it breaks down into three layers:

    1. The Physical Layer (Hardware)

    This is the instrument, the sensor, the wall, the hull of the ship.

    Function: The hard interface that touches raw physics and space. It provides the minimum viable protection required to exist.

    2. The Protocol Layer (Configurancy)

    This is the Scientific Method, the “Rules of Thumb,” the cultural habits, the checklist.

    Function: This is the engine room. It is the code that aligns the observer with the territory. It is the set of relational instructions that tells us how to organize the chaos outside into a pattern inside.

    3. The Interface Layer (Meaning)

    This is the sense of “Place.” The feeling of “I know where I am.”

    Function: The dashboard where alignment registers as understanding. This is where the raw data of the physical layer, processed by the protocol layer, renders as a world we can inhabit.

    Conclusion: Orientation is the Precondition for Motion

    Rao’s Configurancy and the model of Place-making describe the same fundamental truth: Being is the act of alignment.

    We build homes in the unknown—whether that is a literal frontier or a new intellectual discipline—not to hide from the reality of it, but to have a “runtime environment” where we can compile the code to understand it.

    Place is not a retreat from the world. It is the processing center required to render the world concrete enough to be explored. We do not leave the Delta Quadrant to go home; we build a home so that the Delta Quadrant becomes a place we can finally see.

  • The Tortured Artist Is So Yesterday

    41 years ago, Samuel Lipman wrote that an artist’s life is a “constant—and constantly losing—battle” against one’s own limits. That image has lasted because print culture taught us to imagine the artist as a solitary figure whose worth is measured by the perfection of a single, final work. Print fixed texts in place, elevated the individual author, and made loneliness part of the creative job description.

    That world is slipping away.
    And with it, the tortured artist.

    Twittering Machine (Die Zwitscher-Maschine) is a 1922 watercolor with gouache, pen-and-ink, and oil transfer on paper by Swiss-German painter Paul Klee

    LLMs have made competent expression abundant. The blank page no longer terrifies; anyone can produce something fluent and polished. When craft becomes cheap, suffering loses its meaning as a marker of artistic seriousness. What becomes scarce instead is the willingness to take a risk—not in private, but in public, where a stance can fail, provoke, or be reshaped by others.

    Venkatesh Rao recently argued that authorship is no longer about labor but about courage: the courage to commit to a line of thought and accept the consequences of being wrong. In an era of infinite variations, the decisive act is not creation but commitment. The value lies in staking something of yourself on an idea that may not survive.

    This shift is reshaping where culture is made. In what I’ve called the “Cloister Web,” people draft and explore ideas in semi-private creative rooms before carrying only a few into the open. LLMs make experimentation cheap; they also make commitment expensive. The hard part now is choosing which idea you are willing to be accountable for.

    As the burden of execution drops, something else rises: genuine collaboration. Not just collaboration with models, but with other humans. Andrew Gelman, reflecting on Lipman in a recent StatModeling post, noted that scientists, too, feel versions of this pressure of the solitary creator. In science, the burden rarely falls on one person. The struggle is distributed across collaborative projects that outlive any single contributor.

    Groups can explore bolder directions than any one creator working alone. Risk spreads, ideas compound, and the scale of what can be attempted expands. The solitary genius was an artifact of print; the collaborative creative lab is the natural form of the world we are entering.

    This leads to a claim many will resist but few will be able to ignore: the single author is beginning to collapse as a cultural technology. What will matter in the coming decades is not the finished artifact but the evolving line of thought carried forward by teams willing to take risks together.

    The tortured artist belonged to an age defined by scarcity, perfection, and solitude. Today’s creator faces a different task: to choose a risk worth taking and the collaborators worth taking it with. The work endures not because it is flawless, but because a group has committed to pushing it forward.

    Pain is optional now.

    Risk isn’t.

  • Four Early-Modern Tempers for a World That Can Summon Itself

    This is a partial synthesis of the books read through 2025 in the Contraptions Book Club.

    We live in a moment when the whole of human culture has become strangely available, no longer just an archive but something that behaves like a responding presence. A sentence typed into a search bar or messaging window returns citations and, more strikingly, continuations: pastiche, commentary, new variations of ideas that never existed until the instant we requested them. The canon now behaves more like a voice than a library. It is easy to treat this as convenience, yet summoning culture alters our relation to meaning in ways we are only beginning to see. The question is no longer whether we can find the relevant text, but what it means to think in a world that can generate its own echoes.

    This instability has precedents in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Print multiplied texts; voyages multiplied worlds; the Reformation multiplied authorities. Four writers—Thomas More, Michel de Montaigne, Giordano Bruno, and Ibn Khaldun—stood at different corners of that era’s turbulence. Read from a certain angle, they reveal four temperaments that recur whenever the world grows larger and more articulate than before. They capture four ways of holding meaning in a world where frames widen and boundaries blur.

    Their temperaments arose under the tension of two kinds of pressures. One pressure concerns frame: how much of the world a thinker attempts to hold in view. Another concerns form: how rigidly one tries to shape or preserve meaning in the face of flux. The tension between narrow and wide frames, between hard and soft forms, is a recurring feature of intellectual upheaval. It is with us again.

    Northeaster (1895) by Winslow Homer. Original from The MET museum.

    Thomas More and the dream of designed simplicity

    When More wrote Utopia, he was answering a world that felt newly disordered: economic enclosure, fracturing religion, unfamiliar continents, and the early tremors of what we now call modernity. His response was to shrink the frame to a bounded island and then remake that island according to simple, intelligible rules. Clothes are standardized; work is scheduled; houses interchangeable. Property, that generator of complexity, is abolished.

    This gesture—the compression of a vast, unruly world into a legible miniature—reflects a deep conviction that the good life can be engineered by eliminating what does not fit the plan. Yet much of what makes human life livable emerges not from design but from the unplanned: the pleasure of choosing one’s clothes, improvising a routine, rearranging a room, wandering through a market whose wares no one fully controls. These small freedoms, these ambient textures, carry a kind of happiness that explicit blueprints rarely acknowledge. More’s island, for all its order, feels airless because it denies the subtle satisfactions of emergence.

    We still see this impulse today, whenever we imagine that meaning will return if only we can simplify the world enough—reduce choices, curtail variation, enforce legibility. It is a refusal to accept that complexity is a problem to be solved only up to a point, beyond which it becomes the medium of human flourishing.

    Montaigne and the work of making knowledge one’s own

    Montaigne faced the same expansion of texts and reports, but his answer was almost the inverse of More’s. In his Essays, he turned the proliferating world into material for a sustained inquiry into a single life—his own. He narrowed the frame even further—not to an island but to a single life—and then allowed that life’s boundaries to loosen. His essays are records of a mind being changed by what it reads and observes. They are porous documents, absorbing classical quotations, passing impressions, and the texture of his shifting moods.

    He described this process with the image of bees making honey: they gather from thyme and marjoram, but the result is neither; the ingredients have been transformed.  Mere access to texts is not enough. The material must be digested until it becomes inseparable from the person who has absorbed it. 

    This is a temperament well suited to a world in which culture can speak back in any tone we request. The ease of access makes superficial familiarity almost effortless; the difficulty lies in allowing the material to ferment into something one can honestly call one’s own. Montaigne’s form is soft, because he does not impose a system on the world or on himself. He lets contradictions remain. His essays show what inward honesty looks like when the outer world has grown noisy.

    Bruno: infinite worlds, unreliable memory

    If Montaigne compresses the world into a single consciousness, Bruno explodes it. In works such as On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, he offered a speculative cosmology that pushed beyond the scientific imagination of his time. His universe is infinite, populated by innumerable worlds, animated by a universal divinity. These were not scientific inferences—they were imaginative leaps, metaphysical provocations in a period when the cosmological picture was coming loose.

    Bruno’s response to the widened cosmos led him to enlarge the frame until it became boundless. Boundaries, for him, were treated as provisional, always liable to be surpassed. He was fascinated by memory—its limits, its artifices, its potential for augmentation. His elaborate mnemonic wheels were attempts to externalize thinking, to allow a mind to move through more space than it could otherwise hold.

    There is something oddly familiar in this, not because our devices prove Bruno right, but because they echo his aspirations. We have built systems that externalize memory, recombine fragments, and present them as if they had always existed. These contrivances are not cosmic, yet they invite a cosmic mood—a sense that boundaries have thinned, that the archive stirs, that the mind can wander farther than it once could. Bruno illustrates the allure and the danger: the exhilaration of boundless possibility, and the risk of believing that imagination alone can stand in for contact with the world.

    Ibn Khaldun and patterns at civilizational scale

    Ibn Khaldun took the widening of the world seriously, but he kept his feet on the ground. In the Muqaddimah, his great introduction to history, he sketched a theory of how societies cohere, flourish, and decline. His frame is large—empires, dynasties, generations—yet his form is restrained. He offers no blueprint for an ideal state. He offers something closer to a natural history of political life: groups harden and cohere, conquer, soften, decay, and are replaced. Boundaries matter to him—the line between desert and city, between ruler and ruled—but they are not eternal. They shift, erode, reemerge.

    His stance avoids both utopian control and ecstatic dissolution. It is descriptive, analytical, patient. He wants to see how things actually behave across time. In a world that now contains its own searchable memory and can generate plausible continuations of its past, this way of looking feels newly relevant. The swirl of events becomes legible only when placed against deeper patterns. Ibn Khaldun’s gift is to show that large frames can coexist with modesty of form.

    Two diagonals

    One can sense two lines running through these four positions. On one line are More and Bruno—the designer of tight enclosures and the dissolver of all enclosures. Both feel the shock of a world grown too large and respond by refusing its messiness: one by shrinking it to a legible fragment, the other by exploding it into a metaphysical totality. Both try to replace the world’s emergent complexity with a clarity of their own making.

    The other line runs between Montaigne and Ibn Khaldun. Both accept that the world, whether at the scale of a single life or of a civilization, has a texture that cannot be fully captured by design or metaphysics. Both are interested in how things actually unfold, without forcing them into an ideal shape. Their frames differ—one intimate, one panoramic—but their attitude toward form is similar: let patterns emerge, let boundaries be porous enough to reveal movement, let humility guide description.

    This second diagonal sits more naturally with a culture that can be summoned on demand. When the archive can answer back in endless variations, attempts to design simplicity or to dissolve all limits tend to fatigue. What remains workable is the inward practice of belonging to oneself and the outward practice of reading patterns without imagining them eternal.

    Temper temper

    We now inhabit a world in which knowledge behaves differently than any earlier generation anticipated. It can be queried, ventriloquized, recombined. This does not tell us how to live, but it changes the background against which living takes place. More’s dream of a perfectly designed order feels at once more possible and more implausible. Montaigne’s slow digestion of borrowed thought feels newly demanding. Bruno’s intoxication with boundlessness feels familiar, and Ibn Khaldun’s attention to cycles and decay feels newly sober.

    These tempers recur whenever the world becomes more articulate than before. Ours is such a moment. We can now create stable points of reference with enough meaning and legibility to allow exploration of surrounding space. Print unlocked the beta version of this superpower. These four writers, shaped by the last great expansion of the world’s voice, find themselves speaking again through us, as we try to understand what it means to think with culture on tap.

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  • The Small God of the Internet

    It was a small announcement on an innocuous page about “spring cleaning”. The herald, some guy with the kind of name that promised he was all yours. Four sentences you only find because you were already looking for a shortcuts through life. A paragraph, tidy as a folded handkerchief, explained that a certain popular reader of feeds was retiring in four months’ time. Somewhere in the draughty back alleys of the web, a small god cleared his throat. Once he had roared every morning in a thousand offices. Now, when people clicked for their daily liturgy, the sound he made was… domesticated.

    He is called ArrEsEs by those who enjoy syllables. He wears a round orange halo with three neat ripples in it. Strictly speaking, this is an icon1, but gods are not strict about these things. He presides over the River of Posts, which is less picturesque than it sounds and runs through everyone’s house at once. His priests are librarians and tinkerers and persons who believe in putting things in order so they can be pleasantly disordered later. The temple benches are arranged in feeds. The chief sacrament is “Mark All As Read,” which is the kind of absolution that leaves you lighter and vaguely suspicious you’ve got away with something.

    Guide for Constructing the Letter S from Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta or The Model Book of Calligraphy (1561–1596) by Georg Bocskay and Joris Hoefnagel. Original from The Getty. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

    There was a time the great city-temples kept a candle lit for him right on their threshold. The Fox of Fire invited him in and called it Live Bookmarks.2 The moldable church, once a suit, then a car, then a journey, in typical style stamped “RSS” beside the address like a house number. The Explorer adopted the little orange beacon with the enthusiasm of someone who has been told there will be cake. The Singers built him a pew and handed out hymnals. You could walk into almost any shrine and find his votive lamp glowing: “The river comes this way.” Later, accountants, the men behind the man who was yours, discovered that candles are unmonetizable and, one by one, the lamps were tidied into drawers that say “More…”.

    ArrEsEs has lineage. Long before he knocked on doors with a bundle of headlines, there was Old Mother Press, the iron-fingered goddess of moveable type, patron of ink that bites and paper that complains. Her creed was simple: get the word out. She marched letters into columns and columns into broadsides until villages woke up arguing the same argument.3* ArrEsEs is her great-grandchild—quick-footed, soft-spoken—who learned to carry the broadsheet to each door at once and wait politely on the mat. He still bears her family look: text in tidy rows, dates that mind their place, headlines that know how to stand up straight.**

    Four months after the Announcement, the big temple shut its doors with a soft click. The congregation wandered off in small, stubborn knots and started chapels in back rooms with unhelpful names like OGRP4. ArrEsEs took to traveling again, coat collar up, suitcase full of headlines, knocking on back doors at respectable intervals. “No hurry,” he would say, leaving the bundle on the step. “When you’re ready.” The larger gods of the Square ring bells until you come out in your slippers; this one waits with the patience of bread.

    Like all small gods, he thrives on little rites. He smiles when you put his name plainly on your door: a link that says feed without a blush. He approves of bogrolls blogrolls, because they are how villages point at one another and remember they are villages. He warms to OPML, which is a pilgrim’s list people swap like seed packets. He’s indulgent about the details—/rss.xml, /atom.xml, /feed, he will answer to all of them—but he purrs (quietly; dignified creature) for a cleanly formed offering and a sensible update cadence5.

    His miracles are modest and cannot be tallied on a quarterly slide. He brings things in the order they happened. He does silence properly. The river arrives in the morning with twenty-seven items; you read two, save three, and let the rest drift by with the calm certainty that rivers do not take offense. He remembers what you finished. He promises tomorrow will come with its own bundle, and if you happen to be away, he will keep the stack neat and not wedge a “You Might Also Like” leaflet between your socks.

    These days, though, ArrEsEs is lean at the ribs. The big estates threw dams across his tributaries and called them platforms. Good water disappeared behind walls; the rest was coaxed into ornamental channels that loop the palace and reflect only the palace. Where streams once argued cheerfully, they now mutter through sluices and churn a Gloomwheel that turns and turns without making flour—an endless thumb-crank that insists there is more, and worse, if you’ll just keep scrolling. He can drink from it, but it leaves a taste of tin and yesterday’s news.

    A god’s displeasure tells you more than his blessings. His is mild. If you hide the feed, he grows thin around the edges. If you build a house that is only a façade until seven JSters haul in the furniture, he coughs and brings you only the headline and a smell of varnish6. If you replace paragraphs with an endless corridor, he develops the kind of seasickness that keeps old sailors ashore. He does not smite. He sulks, which is worse, because you may not notice until you wonder where everyone went.

    Still, belief has a way of pooling in low places. In the quiet hours, the little chapels hum: home pages with kettles on, personal sites that remember how to wave, gardeners who publish their lists of other gardeners. Somewhere, a reader you’ve never met presses a small, homely button that says subscribe. The god straightens, just a touch. He is gentler than his grandmother who rattled windows with every edition, but the family gift endures. If you invite him, tomorrow he will be there, on your step, with a bundle of fresh pages and a polite cough. You can let him in, or make tea first. He’ll wait. He always has.

    Heavily edited sloptraption.

    1. He maintains it’s saffron, which is what halos say when they are trying to be practical ↩︎
    2. The sort of feature named by a librarian, which is to say, both accurate and doomed. ↩︎
    3. Not to be confused with the software that borrowed her title and a fair chunk of her patience. ↩︎
    4. Old Google Reader People ↩︎
    5. On festival days he will accept serif, sans-serif, or whatever the village printer has not yet thrown at a cat.
      ↩︎
    6. He can drink JSON when pressed; stew remains his preference. ↩︎
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  • Why Every Biotech Research Group Needs a Data Lakehouse

    start tiny and scale fast without vendor lock-in

    All biotech labs have data, tons of it. The problem is the same across scales. Accessing data across experiments is hard. Often data simply gets lost on somebody’s laptop with a pretty plot on a poster as the only clue it ever existed. The problem is almost insurmountable if you try to track multiple data types. Trying to run any kind of data management activity used to have large overhead. New technology like DuckDB and their new data lakehouse infrastructure, DuckLake, try to make it very easy to adopt and scale with your data. All while avoiding vendor lock-in.

    American Scoter Duck from Birds of America (1827) by John James Audubon (1785 – 1851 ), etched by Robert Havell (1793 – 1878).

    The data dilemma in modern biotech

    High-content microscopy, single-cell sequencing, ELISAs, flow-cytometry FCS files, Lab Notebook PDFs—today’s wet-lab output is a torrent of heterogeneous, PB-scale assets. Traditional “raw-files-in-folders + SQL warehouse for analytics” architectures break down when you need to query an image-derived feature next to a CRISPR guide list under GMP audit. A lakehouse merges the cheap, schema-agnostic storage of a data lake with the ACID guarantees, time-travel, and governance of a warehouse—on one platform. Research teams, at discovery or clinical trial stages, can enjoy faster insights, lower duplication, and smoother compliance when they adopt a lakehouse model .

    Lakehouse super-powers for biotech

    • Native multimodal storage: Keep raw TIFF stacks, Parquet tables, FASTQ files, and instrument logs side-by-side while preserving original resolution.
    • Column-level lineage & time-travel: Reproduce an analysis exactly as of “assay-plate upload on 2025-07-14” for FDA, EMA, or GLP audits.
    • In-place analytics for AI/ML: Push DuckDB/Spark/Trino compute to the data; no ETL ping-pong before model training.
    • Cost-elastic scaling: Store on low-cost S3/MinIO today; spin up GPU instances tomorrow without re-ingesting data.
    • Open formats: Iceberg/Delta/Hudi (and now DuckLake) keep your Parquet files portable and your exit costs near zero .

    DuckLake: an open lakehouse format to prevent lock-in

    DuckLake is still pretty new and isn’t quite production ready, but the team behind it is the same as DuckDB and I expect they will deliver high quality as 2025 progresses. Datalakes or even lakehouses, are not new at all. Iceberg and Delta pioneered open table formats, but still scatter JSON/Avro manifests across object storage and bolt on a separate catalog database. DuckLake flips the design: all metadata lives in a normal SQL database, while data stays in Parquet on blob storage. The result is simpler, faster, cross-table ACID transactions—and you can back the catalog with Postgres, MySQL, MotherDuck, or even DuckDB itself .

    Key take-aways:

    • No vendor lock-in: Because operations are defined as plain SQL, any SQL-compatible engine can read or write DuckLake—good-bye proprietary catalogs.
    • Start on a laptop, finish on a cluster: DuckDB + DuckLake runs fine on your MacBook; point the same tables at MinIO-on-prem or S3 later without refactoring code.
    • Cross-table transactions: Need to update an assay table and its QC log atomically? One transaction—something Iceberg and Delta still treat as an “advanced feature.”

    Psst… if you don’t understand or don’t care what ACID, manifests, or object stores mean, assign a grad student, it’s not complicated.

  • Work or Play? Ludic Feedback Loops

    In his substack post today, Venkatesh Rao wrote about reading and writing in the age of LLMs as playing and making toys respectively. In one part he writes about how the dopamine feedback loop from writing drove his switch from engineering to writing. For him, writing has ludic, play-like, qualities.

    Japanese vintage original woodblock print of birds and butterfly from Yatsuo no tsubaki (1860-1869) by Taguchi Tomoki.

    I have made almost all my “career” decisions as a function of play. I originally started off with a deep love of plants, how to grow them and their impact on the world. I was convinced I was going to have a lot of fun. I did have some. My wonderful undergrad professor literally hand held me through my first experiments growing tobacco plants from seeds. But that was about it. My next experiment was with woody plants and growing the seeds alone took 6 months, and by the end I had 4 measly leaves to experiment with. I quickly switched to cell biology.

    This one went a bit better and I stayed with the medium through PhD. Although I was having sufficient aha moments, I knew in the first year that it was still a bit slow. What rescued me was my refusal to do manual analysis. I loved biology but I refused to sit and do analysis manually. Luckily, I had picked up sufficient programming skills.

    I could reasonably automate, the analysis workflow. It was difficult at first but the error messages came at the rate I needed them to. I found new errors viscerally rewarding, it was now in game territory. The analysis still held meaning, it wasn’t for some random A/B testing or some Leet code thing. No, this mattered.

    Machine learning, deep learning, LLMs, and their applications in bio continue to enchant me. I can explore even more with the same effort and time. I interact with biology at the rate of dopamine feedback I need. I have found my ludic frequency.

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  • Briefing: The State of Explainable AI (XAI) and its Impact on Human-AI Decision-Making

    This post is a sloptraption, my silk thread in the CloisterWeb. The post was made with the help of NotebookLM. You can chat with the essay and the sources here: XAI NotebookLM Chat

    I. Executive Summary

    The field of Explainable AI (XAI) aims to make AI systems more transparent and understandable, fostering trust and enabling informed human-AI collaboration, particularly in high-stakes decision-making. Despite significant research efforts, XAI faces fundamental challenges, including a lack of standardized definitions and evaluation frameworks, and a tendency to prioritize technical “faithfulness” over practical utility for end-users. A new paradigm emphasizes designing explanations as a “means to an end,” grounded in statistical decision theory, to improve concrete decision tasks. This shift necessitates a human-centered approach, integrating human factors engineering to address user cognitive abilities, potential pitfalls, and the complexities of human-AI interaction. Practical challenges persist in implementation, including compatibility, integration, performance, and, crucially, inconsistencies (disagreements) among XAI methods, which significantly undermine user trust and adoption.

    Poppies and Daisies (1867) by Odilon Redon. Original from the Art Institute of Chicago. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

    II. Core Concepts and Definitions

    • Explainable AI (XAI): A research area focused on making AI system behaviors and decisions understandable to humans, aiming to increase trustworthiness, transparency, and usability. The term itself gained prominence around 2016, though the need for explainability in AI has existed for decades.
    • Contextual Importance and Utility (CIU): A model-agnostic, universal foundation for XAI based on Decision Theory. CIU extends the traditional linear notions of “importance” (of an input) and “utility” (of an input value toward an outcome) to non-linear AI models. It explicitly quantifies how the importance of an input and the utility of its values change based on other input values (the “context”).
    • Contextual Importance (CI): Measures how much modifying a given set of inputs in a specific context affects the output value.
    • Contextual Utility (CU): Quantifies how favorable (or unfavorable) a particular input value is for the output in a given context, relative to the minimal and maximal possible output values.
    • Distinction from Additive Feature Attribution Methods (e.g., LIME, SHAP): CIU is theoretically more sound for non-linear models as it considers the full range of input variations, not just local linearity (partial derivatives). Additive methods lack a “utility” concept and might produce misleading “importance” scores in non-linear contexts.
    • Decision Theory: “A branch of statistical theory concerned with quantifying the process of making choices between alternatives.” It provides clear definitions of input importance and utility, intended to support human decision-making.
    • Human Factors Engineering (HFE): An interdisciplinary field focused on optimizing human-system interactions by understanding human capabilities and limitations. It aims to design systems that enhance usability, safety, and efficiency, and is crucial for creating human-centered AI.
    • Key HFE Principles: User-Centered Design, Minimizing Cognitive Load, Consistency and Predictability, Accessibility and Inclusivity, Error Prevention and Recovery, Psychosocial Considerations, Simplicity and Clarity, Flexibility and Efficiency, and Feedback.
    • Explainability Pitfalls (EPs): Unanticipated negative downstream effects from adding AI explanations that occur without the intention to manipulate users. Examples include misplaced trust, over-estimating AI capabilities, or over-reliance on certain explanation forms (e.g., unwarranted faith in numerical explanations due to cognitive heuristics). EPs differ from “dark patterns,” which are intentionally deceptive.
    • Responsible AI (RAI): A human-centered approach to AI that “ensures users’ trust through ethical ways of decision making.” It encompasses several core pillars:
    • Ethics: Fairness (non-biased, non-discriminating), Accountability (justifying decisions), Sustainability, and Compliance with laws and norms.
    • Explainability: Ensuring automated decisions are understandable, tailored to user needs, and presented clearly (e.g., through intuitive UIs).
    • Privacy-Preserving & Secure AI: Protecting data from malicious threats and ensuring responsible handling, processing, storage, and usage of personal information (security is a prerequisite for privacy).
    • Trustworthiness: An outcome of responsible AI, ensuring the system behaves as expected and can be relied upon, built through transparent, understandable, and reliable processes.

    III. Main Themes and Important Ideas

    A. The Evolution and Current Shortcomings of XAI Research

    • Historical Context: The need for explainability in AI is not new, dating back to systems like MYCIN in 1975, which struggled to explain numerical model reasoning. Early efforts focused on “intrinsic interpretability” or “interpretable model extraction” (extracting rules from models), while “post-hoc interpretability” (explaining after the fact) was proposed as early as 1995 but initially neglected.
    • Modern Re-emergence and Limitations: The term “Explainable AI (XAI)” was popularized around 2016, but current research often “tends to ignore existing knowledge and wisdom gathered over decades or even centuries by other relevant domains.” Most XAI work relies on “researchers’ intuition of what constitutes a ‘good’ explanation, while ignoring the vast and valuable bodies of research in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science of how people define, generate, select, evaluate, and present explanations.”
    • Focus on Technical Metrics over User Utility: Many XAI papers prioritize “internal validity like deriving guarantees on ‘faithfulness’ of the explanation to the model’s underlying mechanisms,” rather than focusing on how explanations improve human task performance. This can lead to methods that are “non-robust or otherwise misleading.”
    • The “Disagreement Problem”: A significant practical challenge where different XAI methods (e.g., SHAP, LIME) generate “conflicting explanations that lead to feature attributions and interpretability inconsistencies,” making it difficult for developers to trust any single explanation. This is reported as the most severe challenge by practitioners, despite being less frequently reported as an initial technical barrier.

    B. The “Means to an End” Paradigm for XAI

    • Explanations as Decision Support: A core argument is that “explanations should be designed and evaluated with a specific end in mind.” Their value is measured by the “expected improvement in performance on the associated task.”
    • Formalizing Use Cases as Decision Problems: This framework suggests representing tasks as “decision problems,” characterized by actions under uncertainty about the state of the world, with a utility function scoring action-state pairs. This forces specificity in claims about explanation effects.
    • Value of Information: Explanations are valuable if they convey information about the true state to the agent, either directly (e.g., providing posterior probability) or indirectly (helping the human better integrate existing information into their decision).
    1. Three Definitions of Explanation Value:Theoretic Value of Explanation (∆E): The maximum possible performance improvement an idealized, rational agent could gain from accessing all instance-level features (over no information). This acts as a sanity check: if this value is low, the explanation is unlikely to help boundedly rational humans much.
    2. Potential Human-Complementary Value of Explanation (∆Ecompl): The potential improvement the rational agent could gain from features beyond what’s already contained in human judgments.
    3. Behavioral Value of Explanation (∆Ebehavioral): The actual observed improvement in human decision performance when given access to the explanation, compared to not having it (measured via randomized controlled experiments).
    • Critique of Idealized Agent Assumption: While explanations offer no additional value to an idealized Bayesian rational agent (as they are a “garbling” of existing information), they are crucial for imperfect human agents who face cognitive costs or may be misinformed or misoptimizing.

    C. The Critical Role of Human Factors and Human-Centered AI

    • Bridging Algorithmic Complexity and Human Understanding: HFE is essential to “bridge algorithmic complexity with actionable understanding” by ensuring AI systems align with human cognitive abilities and behavioral patterns.
    • Addressing Unintentional Negative Effects (EPs): HFE provides strategies to anticipate and mitigate EPs, such as designing for “user reflection (as opposed to acceptance)” by promoting “mindful and deliberative (system 2) thinking.”
    • Case Study (Numerical Explanations): A study revealed that both AI experts and non-experts exhibited “unwarranted faith in numbers” (numerical Q values for robot actions), perceiving them as signaling intelligence and potential actionability, even when their meaning was unclear. This demonstrates an EP where well-intentioned numerical transparency led to misplaced trust.
    • Seamful Design: A proposed HFE design philosophy that “strategically reveal relevant information that augments system understanding and conceal information that distracts.” This promotes reflective thinking by introducing “useful cognitive friction,” for example, through interactive counterfactual explanations (“what-if” scenarios).
    • Iterative Design and Stakeholder Engagement: Addressing EPs requires an “iterative approach that allows insights from evaluation to feedback to design,” involving “users as active partners” through participatory design methods.
    • Reframing AI Adoption: HFE advocates for a mindset shift from uncritical “acceptance-driven AI adoption” to “critical reflection,” ensuring AI is “worthy of our trust” and that users are aware of its capabilities and limitations. This resists the “move fast and break things” mentality.
    • Human-AI Relationship in Decision-Making: For high-stakes decisions, AI systems should be seen as “empowerment tools” where the human decision-maker retains responsibility and needs to “justify their decision to others.” XAI is key to making the AI’s role clear and building trust.
    • “Justification” vs. “Explanation”: Some differentiate explanation (understanding AI’s intrinsic processes) from justification (extrinsic information to support AI’s results, e.g., patient history, contrastive examples). Both are crucial for human decision-makers.
    • Mental Models: Effective human-AI collaboration relies on humans developing appropriate mental models of the AI system’s capabilities and limitations. XAI should facilitate this “human-AI onboarding process.”

    D. Practical Challenges in XAI Adoption and Solutions

    1. Catalog of Challenges (from Stack Overflow analysis):Model Integration Issues (31.07% prevalence): Difficulty embedding XAI techniques into ML pipelines, especially with complex models.
    2. Visualization and Plotting Issues (30.01% prevalence): Problems with clarity, interpretability, and consistency of visual XAI outputs.
    3. Compatibility Issues (20.36% prevalence): XAI techniques failing across different ML frameworks or hardware due to mismatches.
    4. Installation and Package Dependency Issues (8.14% prevalence): Difficulties in setting up XAI tools due to conflicts or poor documentation.
    5. Performance and Resource Issues (6.78% prevalence): High computational costs and memory consumption.
    6. Disagreement Issues (2.11% prevalence, but most severe): Conflicting explanations from different XAI methods.
    7. Data Transformation/Integration Issues (1.50% prevalence): Challenges in formatting or merging data for XAI models.
    • Perceived Severity vs. Prevalence: While Model Integration and Visualization/Plotting are most prevalent as technical hurdles, Disagreement Issues are perceived as the most severe by practitioners (36.54% rank highest), as they undermine trust and effective decision-making once tools are implemented.
    • Recommendations for Improvement: Practitioners prioritize:
    • Better Documentation and Tutorials (55.77% strongly agree): Clear, structured guides.
    • Clearer Guidance on Best Practices (48.07% strongly agree): Standardized methodologies.
    • Simplified Configuration and Setup (40.38% strongly agree): Easier onboarding.
    • User-Friendly Interfaces and Improved Visualization Tools: More intuitive and interactive tools.
    • Enhanced Integration with Popular ML Frameworks and Performance Optimization.
    • Addressing Disagreement and Consistency: Acknowledge disagreements and guide users in selecting reliable explanations.

    IV. Gaps and Future Directions

    • Lack of Standardization: XAI still lacks standardized definitions, metrics, and evaluation frameworks, hindering consistent assessment and comparison of methods.
    • Limited Empirical Validation: More situated and empirically diverse human-centered research is needed to understand stakeholder needs, how different user characteristics (e.g., expertise, background) impact susceptibility to EPs, and how explanations are appropriated in unexpected ways.
    • Beyond “Accuracy”: Future research should go beyond basic performance metrics to holistically evaluate human-AI relationships, including reliance calibration, trust, and understandability.
    • Taxonomy of EPs: Developing a taxonomy of explainability pitfalls to better diagnose and mitigate their negative effects.
    • Longitudinal Studies: Needed to understand the impact of time and repeated interaction on human-AI decision-making and trust dynamics.
    • Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Continued and enhanced collaboration among HFE, cognitive science, and AI engineering is crucial to develop frameworks that align AI decision-making with human cognitive and operational capabilities, and to address ethical and accountability challenges comprehensively.
    • Benchmarking for Responsible AI: Creation of benchmarks for various responsible AI requirements (ethics, privacy, security, explainability) to quantify their fulfillment.
    • “Human-in-the-loop”: Further development of this concept within responsible AI, emphasizing the human’s role in checking and improving systems throughout the lifecycle.
    • Trade-offs: Acknowledge and manage inherent trade-offs between different responsible AI aspects (e.g., robustness vs. explainability, privacy vs. accuracy).

    V. Conclusion

    The transition of AI from low-stakes to high-stakes domains necessitates a robust and human-centric approach to explainability. Current XAI research must evolve beyond purely technical considerations to embrace principles from Decision Theory and Human Factors Engineering. The development of frameworks like CIU and the rigorous evaluation of explanations as “means to an end” for specific decision tasks are critical steps. Addressing practical challenges identified by practitioners, especially the pervasive “disagreement problem” and the occurrence of “explainability pitfalls,” is paramount. Ultimately, achieving Responsible AI requires a dynamic, interdisciplinary effort that prioritizes human understanding, trust, and ethical considerations throughout the entire AI lifecycle, ensuring AI serves as an effective and accountable partner in human decision-making.