We Break Everything We Touch
We Break Everything We Touch
I wake up after two or three hours of sleep.
Every time, I breathe like a beaten race horse. My mind is already running. Not because the world is accelerating. Though it is. But because of the race to come.
The race for meaning.
The race for what might be real.
I am not the only one doing this.
—-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We break everything we touch.
Even when we cannot tell.
Especially when we cannot tell.
Most of history operates under the comforting assumption that damage is obvious, local, and attributable. A bad actor. A bad decision. A moral failure.
But systems do not work that way.
Complex systems fail quietly, cumulatively, and often optimally.
Optimal.
A word with teeth.
You know not what you do.
Unless you do.
Then what?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Blindsight is a useful starting point precisely because it is popular enough to be contentious. People love it. People love to hate it. It circulates widely. It provokes argument rather than reverence.
More importantly, Peter Watts released it under a permissive license. That matters. It signals something aligned with the book’s core anxiety. Meaning, authorship, and control are already leaky abstractions.
The novel’s real horror is not alien intelligence.
It is the possibility that consciousness, our cherished inner theater, is neither necessary nor advantageous. That agency, reflection, and narrative selfhood are evolutionary luxuries.
And luxuries are the first things systems cut when optimization pressures rise.
This is not nihilism.
Nihilism still centers the human response.
This is worse.
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When I was young, I wanted to be a marine biologist.
This is absurd on its face. I lived in the mountains. Far from oceans, reefs, migration routes. Marine biology was not a vocation. It was an imagined elsewhere.
A clean system.
A place where complexity felt alien but coherent.
That fantasy collapsed slowly.
I followed ecological research. I watched collapse quantified in charts and surveys. I spent years in the mountains and watched glaciation retreat, snowpack thin, species distributions shift.
Even across a single lifetime, the signal is unmistakable.
Dynamical systems do not care about longing.
Ecosystems are governed by attractors.
So is neurology.
So is culture.
Stability is not morality.
Persistence is not goodness.
Something larger is always being created. But better has only ever been a relative term.
I did not give up on marine biology because it was naïve.
I gave it up because it stopped being an escape.
Let’s Talk About Fashion
Glitz.
Glamour.
The runway.
It wasn’t always like that.
Fashion used to be courtly. Literal. Power stitched into fabric. Not judiciary. Court. You could read the social order from across the room.
Color meant permission.
Silk meant access.
Tailoring meant hierarchy.
It was brutal.
But it was legible.
I am not doing the full history. I do not care enough, and neither do you. This is a framework. Fill in the gaps yourself. Or do not. It will not help.
Now.
World War II.
An ocean of dead bodies. Industrial slaughter. And then, like always, we kneel at the altar of the aftermath instead of the cause.
Berlin.
Bretton Woods.
Bangalore.
FUCKING ASK ME. I can keep going.
We love origin myths. We love pretending the new world was born instead of excavated.
Welcome to the death of worlds.
I am already lying to you. This is not about fashion. Fashion is just where the corpse floats to the surface first.
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When I was a child, I really started reading in second grade. Picked up Brisingr and had no idea what the ever-loving fuck was happening.
Did not matter. If I stared at it long enough, I could reason my way into coherence. Most of my conclusions were wrong.
That is fine.
That is how minds form.
Foreshadowing is for cucks.
Third grade I read Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man. First real crush. Probably the first boner too, if we are being honest.
Exploration felt sacred then.
Attention felt like a moral act.
I once stole a bunch of salmon out of my parents’ fridge and ran off into a state park for a couple days.
Maybe that is a metacommentary on escapism.
Anyway.
I did it for the hawks.
I set the fish in a clearing by a stream. Cottonwoods all around. Snowmelt breaking the banks.
My father used to say do not move. Do not rush. Be still long enough and the world will show itself to you.
He grew up on old movies of the West.
A vulture showed up.
I flashed back to throwing rocks at a magpie tearing apart a robin’s nest in our yard. Too high to hit. I kept throwing anyway. Screaming. Afraid I would hit the nest instead.
One baby fell.
No feathers.
Just meat.
I dropped to my knees, begging it to be okay.
It was not.
I am not sure if the others were eaten.
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Death.
We are in the world and of the world. We do not get clean hands. We only get permission structures we pretend we did not design.
I am not telling you this for catharsis.
I am telling you because this is the thesis.
We break everything we touch.
Even when we cannot tell.
Especially when we cannot tell.
You know not what you do.
Unless you do.
Then what?
—--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is where modernity lives.
Not in progress.
In milking.
The slow extraction of meaning until the thing you loved is still moving but already dead. Ribs through the skin. Cultural livestock.
Fashion is just the loudest example. It metabolizes novelty faster than thought. It turns revolt into silhouette in eighteen months.
It is the walking dead of meaning.
—--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I wake up after two hours of sleep, gasping, heart racing. Not because history is accelerating.
Because it can be seen.
I have not been milled down yet.
I cannot look away.
Four in the morning.
Mourning.
Dynamical systems do not care.
Ecosystems do not care.
Culture does not care.
Attractors are blind.
So is selection.
So are we.
Better has always been relative.
Anyway.
Let’s talk about fashion.
I wake up after two or three hours of sleep.
Every time, I breathe like a beaten race horse. My mind is already running. Not because the world is accelerating. Though it is. But because of the race to come.
The race for meaning.
The race for what might be real.
I am not the only one doing this.
—-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We break everything we touch.
Even when we cannot tell.
Especially when we cannot tell.
Most of history operates under the comforting assumption that damage is obvious, local, and attributable. A bad actor. A bad decision. A moral failure.
But systems do not work that way.
Complex systems fail quietly, cumulatively, and often optimally.
Optimal.
A word with teeth.
You know not what you do.
Unless you do.
Then what?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Blindsight is a useful starting point precisely because it is popular enough to be contentious. People love it. People love to hate it. It circulates widely. It provokes argument rather than reverence.
More importantly, Peter Watts released it under a permissive license. That matters. It signals something aligned with the book’s core anxiety. Meaning, authorship, and control are already leaky abstractions.
The novel’s real horror is not alien intelligence.
It is the possibility that consciousness, our cherished inner theater, is neither necessary nor advantageous. That agency, reflection, and narrative selfhood are evolutionary luxuries.
And luxuries are the first things systems cut when optimization pressures rise.
This is not nihilism.
Nihilism still centers the human response.
This is worse.
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When I was young, I wanted to be a marine biologist.
This is absurd on its face. I lived in the mountains. Far from oceans, reefs, migration routes. Marine biology was not a vocation. It was an imagined elsewhere.
A clean system.
A place where complexity felt alien but coherent.
That fantasy collapsed slowly.
I followed ecological research. I watched collapse quantified in charts and surveys. I spent years in the mountains and watched glaciation retreat, snowpack thin, species distributions shift.
Even across a single lifetime, the signal is unmistakable.
Dynamical systems do not care about longing.
Ecosystems are governed by attractors.
So is neurology.
So is culture.
Stability is not morality.
Persistence is not goodness.
Something larger is always being created. But better has only ever been a relative term.
I did not give up on marine biology because it was naïve.
I gave it up because it stopped being an escape.
Let’s Talk About Fashion
Glitz.
Glamour.
The runway.
It wasn’t always like that.
Fashion used to be courtly. Literal. Power stitched into fabric. Not judiciary. Court. You could read the social order from across the room.
Color meant permission.
Silk meant access.
Tailoring meant hierarchy.
It was brutal.
But it was legible.
I am not doing the full history. I do not care enough, and neither do you. This is a framework. Fill in the gaps yourself. Or do not. It will not help.
Now.
World War II.
An ocean of dead bodies. Industrial slaughter. And then, like always, we kneel at the altar of the aftermath instead of the cause.
Berlin.
Bretton Woods.
Bangalore.
FUCKING ASK ME. I can keep going.
We love origin myths. We love pretending the new world was born instead of excavated.
Welcome to the death of worlds.
I am already lying to you. This is not about fashion. Fashion is just where the corpse floats to the surface first.
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When I was a child, I really started reading in second grade. Picked up Brisingr and had no idea what the ever-loving fuck was happening.
Did not matter. If I stared at it long enough, I could reason my way into coherence. Most of my conclusions were wrong.
That is fine.
That is how minds form.
Foreshadowing is for cucks.
Third grade I read Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man. First real crush. Probably the first boner too, if we are being honest.
Exploration felt sacred then.
Attention felt like a moral act.
I once stole a bunch of salmon out of my parents’ fridge and ran off into a state park for a couple days.
Maybe that is a metacommentary on escapism.
Anyway.
I did it for the hawks.
I set the fish in a clearing by a stream. Cottonwoods all around. Snowmelt breaking the banks.
My father used to say do not move. Do not rush. Be still long enough and the world will show itself to you.
He grew up on old movies of the West.
A vulture showed up.
I flashed back to throwing rocks at a magpie tearing apart a robin’s nest in our yard. Too high to hit. I kept throwing anyway. Screaming. Afraid I would hit the nest instead.
One baby fell.
No feathers.
Just meat.
I dropped to my knees, begging it to be okay.
It was not.
I am not sure if the others were eaten.
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Death.
We are in the world and of the world. We do not get clean hands. We only get permission structures we pretend we did not design.
I am not telling you this for catharsis.
I am telling you because this is the thesis.
We break everything we touch.
Even when we cannot tell.
Especially when we cannot tell.
You know not what you do.
Unless you do.
Then what?
—--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is where modernity lives.
Not in progress.
In milking.
The slow extraction of meaning until the thing you loved is still moving but already dead. Ribs through the skin. Cultural livestock.
Fashion is just the loudest example. It metabolizes novelty faster than thought. It turns revolt into silhouette in eighteen months.
It is the walking dead of meaning.
—--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I wake up after two hours of sleep, gasping, heart racing. Not because history is accelerating.
Because it can be seen.
I have not been milled down yet.
I cannot look away.
Four in the morning.
Mourning.
Dynamical systems do not care.
Ecosystems do not care.
Culture does not care.
Attractors are blind.
So is selection.
So are we.
Better has always been relative.
Anyway.
Let’s talk about fashion.
