I started writing here for a few clear reasons, back in 2022. In the first instance, I thought substack could function as a kind of repository for posterity. I had a few archival pieces I’d written for close friends that were sitting in my dropbox, and merited some kind of appropriately scaled, low cost outlet. By putting them here, I would have a URL I could give the rare person who might be interested.

In this series of posts on simulation, I’ve been doing something of a David Byrne by wondering, ‘well, how did we get here?’ One signature of simulation’s 2025 ‘here’ was conveyed by three emoji. In the combination of these three characters, so much is compressed – to the point of collapse.

In this series of posts I’ve been exploring simulation: its pervasion of reality, over time, its eventual-possible takeover and replacement of ‘reality’. By 2025, it seems simulation may actually be the Great Replacement of reality; but simulation may not be a great replacement for reality. What if we traded the milk cow of materiality for the magic cucumber of simulation? As in: what if this has already happened, and the cow is gone?

It’s interesting to regard 2025 as the full-blown, stage four, 3SD ‘binfire of the manatees’. Looking back, everything was an involuting simulation of the world consumed by fire – by 2015?

, or: why most people preferred simulation to reality by 2025

Hello all, I’ve been working on a bigger post here, which I think should be out next week. What I’ve been trying to do is think through the point at which the integrated spectacle of pure simulation we live online spirals into an increasingly precarious materiality.

The worlds we live in now are mediated by digital architectures. Little of life as we navigate and experience it would exist without two pipes: the pipe delivering the goods (90% via shipping), and the pipe streaming signs through screens in hands. We live the pipe dreams of the piped society, and we will live its consequences.

This is an audio version of a longer piece about disruption – taken from more scholarly work I then decided not to use.

The years 2020-2021 did so many things to us. In many ways they’re not over: the pandemic ‘continues’, commensurate with its repression from consciousness and cultural memory. This itself is an interesting and paradoxical moment that bears precise repetition (because you may be already repressing it): the pandemic ‘continues’, commensurate with its repression from consciousness and cultural memory. ‘What pandemic?’/It continues1.

“Things happen over people’s heads and through them.” – Adorno, History and Freedom “The uncertainty of existing, and consequently the obsession of proving our existence, prevail over desire that is strictly sexual.

This is a small-ish bridge post, the initial purpose of which was to be a paragraph getting to the listicle I promised at the end of the previous post. Said listicle has been generated, but it ran long, and the cumulative post would have been ‘beyond email limit’, as substack warns me from time to time.