Daily Writing
reading dangerously, part one of many
You must try the ground in many directions in order to come at the deep places…
- The Intellectual Life, A.G. Sertillanges, O.P
As a writer explores ideas, fields, and geniuses through their initially wide cast of the net, they discover certain fundamental truths about the place they find themselves on an artistic spectrum or stylistic range. They may have entered into a field to emulate precisely the work of a previously famous or currently influential author. They might seek to write in a style that’s deeply analytical and impervious to the scrutiny of a scientific instrument. They may earnestly wish to write with the reading public’s linguistic deficits in mind to create accessible on-ramps for understanding and engaging with their work.
Or he may have to give all those hopes and lessons away for something else…
These earliest impressions of direction are vital to our development. They push us out of the nest to explore, test, and ship new (to us) work while swiping, parroting, and ingesting art that helps us find our own place to roost.
They also can almost never be where we land.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.
~ Ira Glass
I really believed I would be a writer in the vein of Cal Newport of Deep Work fame or Malcolm Gladwell. I thought my analyses would be as rigorous as the Center for Humane Technology and my encapsulation of an idea would be as tight, relatable, and parabolically-dense as Seth Godin. Each of these names, and others, had enough connective tissue I thought would be enough to create in my voice an alloy of their’s.
And it would’ve been okay if it did end up that way.
I still read these giants, love most of the work they do, and am informed in my own journey by their style, tone, and process.
They left indelible marks on my artist brain and will continue to come out in my work in ways big and small.
But the purpose of casting a wide net and reading dangerously is to encounter ideas, voices, and stories that resonate with you in ways you can’t know about at a conscious level. To bump up against things that you would never actively perceive to suck you into their orbit but passively do. To be affected, wrecked by, put into a place of such existential questioning, doubting, wondering. and, ultimately, hope that something new shakes out of you.
There is a part of each of us, call it the soul or the imago dei or the divine ground of all being from and to which we flow, that can’t be touched. This deeper part is vital to protect and nurture. We have to feed it, give it grace to become whatever thing it’s meant to be, and watch for signs of its creative needs.
You can’t cultivate it by staying in a rigid box.
You can’t cultivate it by giving yourself a label, genre, or myopic focus in your learning or working.
You can only cultivate it by kicking the doors down to let it cast about for whatever sunlight it can find to index itself in the direction it’s meant to go.
rock + roll, EDEN (see especially the outro sampling Scarlett Johansson & Bill Murray in “Lost in Translation”)
you’re a user
Look up synonyms for the word, ‘user.’
Addict, fiend, junkie.
There’s no other substitutable word for being a ‘user.’
Online, you’re nothing more than this.
The platforms employ this name. The researchers, religious, and reasonable all call it as they see it. We unabashedly claim it for ourselves online.
You’ve signed away your right to privacy, temporality, dignity, safety, and mutability with each click, sign-up, and account.
We stigmatize substance abuse but turn a blind eye to the drug upon which we’re all hooked. Certainly, there’s a spectrum of hard online drugs to ones that go down more smooth, but the name doesn’t change. And like substance-based communities, there’s always a social incentive to stay and never an equal, extrinsic reward for leaving because we all hate to see someone leave the rest of us in the den.
I only call it out because we have to name our personal abuse of a thing before we overcome its power in our lives.
I don’t want to be on the internet anymore ~ Tyson Motsenbocker
the arc of the infected
It’s been the biggest privilege of my writing career thus far to dive so deep into a single writer’s work for a year (and many more years more broadly before now).
It’s also proved to be the biggest challenge to rein in the voice that appears across the spread of my writing and research based upon the arc of Postman’s hope, tone, and transforming worldview as I sit with him for an extended period.
Working with an author from another century on multiple parts of their career is revealing.
No one is a monolith.
We are all dogmatic until we’re not.
As Postman’s thinking about the problems and shaping of the solutions was sculpted by his exposure to new technologies and their effect on culture over time, so too does my outlook and emotional state wax and wane with his analysis.
It’s impossible to walk away from any project of depth without having the scope of the work taint your vision.
I’ve experienced this kind of infection and walked through every other idea, field, and piece of culture I touch with a shifting lens through the last 12 months.
No philosopher is perfect in their analysis or character. Without that truth we create ideologies.
And to be infected by another’s work and view is a dangerous game. But without that exposure we never synthesize our own philosophies…
average brilliance
David Foster Wallace said he saw good nonfiction as a chance to “watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.”
We all do this in our own mediums for our own fascinations.
Everyone is an expert in something.
What things jog your imagination when you’re going on a walk? Where does your brain leap to when you hear about a problem in the world? What kind of literature do you read that you’ve never heard of anyone else enjoying? Was there a particular or meta or mundane part of school that you were energized by? How would you spend your time on a day with no technology and no work to do?
Dig into the answers to these questions and find an obsession.
You may just be sitting atop a mountain of golden ideas that the world would be better to see out there…
amo: volo ut sis
What is the difference between the questions,
Do you believe God is? and,
Do you want God to be?
The relationship between the two questions strikes me as more important than any answer to the two questions we could give in response. If the questions act as stages (i.e answer one in order to then unlock the ability to answer other…) then I can see few quibbling with these definitions as deeper ways of thinking about the relationship between faith & love.
But if the questions operate independently of each other, one mattering while another does not, then (depending on the victor in this interrogation of being) a paradigm shift must ensue:
If wanting God to be is an ancillary question to affirming God’s existence, then a majority view is upheld and evangelism requires continued dialogical attempts to bludgeon dissenters with logic, reason, and “evidence”…
…But (and I say this with the uncertainty and trembling heart of one looking straight down into a chasm of unknown depth) if believing God exists is a mere intellectual assertion as impactful to our lived reality as confessing that gravity & natural laws govern the universe, then the question’s displacement introduces a host of deeper questions, implications, and mysteries.
Sages and saints claim the journey of faith is one of lessening understanding and deepening enjoyment.
We sit in the presence of the “ground of all being” and are content being surround by infinite complexity and, I’ll admit, this is an impossible claim to verify. As St. John of the Cross said, "Our greatest need is to be silent before this great God… for the only language he hears is the silent language of love."
Science does nothing for us in the face of mysticism.
Truth claims for half a millennia have required propositions and logical proofs to corroborate their veracity. Without a positive assertion of what is implied and required of a claim, your hopes are “just poetry” (something lauded for all of human history now used since “the enlightement” as a pejorative by many). The fruit of their life is the only “requirement” of the claim made by the saint who contemplates the divine.
As stated above, these questions might be dependent on one another and part of a cycle we deepen over time. The fundamentalist would agree and not press beyond affirming both with a solid “yes” while a more thoughtful disciple would see the importance in an evolving & nuanced, but still nominally affirmative answer to both questions over a lifetime…
…But (at risk of forming a final word about the matter) the ponderous musings above are posed to those curious if one question is unnecessary while the other is vital, and I don’t believe this line of thought can be completed by anything but the poetic for now.
But the silence in the mind
is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence we call God...
It is a presence, then,
whose margins are our margins;
that calls us out over our own fathoms…~ R. S. Thomas.
*Spurred on by the work of the Czech Catholic priest, philosopher, and theologian Tomáš Halík
1 hr/day | 1 day/wk | 1 wk/year
This should be the baseline.
Counter the myth a smartphone tells that you are a very big part of a very small world; remind yourself you are a very small part of a very big world. Don’t let the lie set that your homepage is your home, your profile is your identity, and your app library is where your knowledge is.
The monastic cell was a place of prayer and focus. It was where the religious spent most of their life.
Every time monks left their cell they came to the world less a person because of the good from which they walked away.
The modern day cell, that place we spend most of our life, also leaves us less a person but not because of its intrinsic good for the person.
Every time you put down your smartphone, you are choosing to turn from that which dehumanizes, decontextualizes, and deracinates.
To return to our humanity, our context, and our rootedness is a process of struggling home in a bigger world than we remember.
Begin to return then by taking three small prescriptions, three rules for your life, three pathways home:
Spend one hour a day with your phone turned fully off.
Spend one day a week with your phone turned fully off.
Spend one week a year with your phone turned fully off.
Find within these simple pathways to life a new energy to go further, to turn the page from living the majority of your life online to living a majority of your life on the hook to others, to higher powers, and to yourself.
This could be more than a baseline.
reading, a cure-all
Few are the cure-alls available to us in the gardens between.
Gummies & TM, cold plunging & the baptism of ideologies, these and more are proffered by experts and idiots alike. The perennial tradition recommends the wisdom and pursuit of union in whatever forms we can tranquilly enter into it. The Eastern traditions recommend a path through the self that utilizes that which is always available to us, our inner being. The Christian tradition rejects plurality and prescribes one cure.
In every form they take, purpose-seeking activities of religions, ideologies, power structures, and liberationists agree that there is a disease.
Depending on your beliefs about the spiritual-material space, this conviction takes different forms. This was true in 16th century, enchanted Russia, where pestilence and political entities were endowed by the people with demonic corruption, and in the US in the 20th century that saw the satanic behind toy companies and fictional series. In another community, science is elevated to analyze the sociological, biological, and historical elements that contribute to our current predicament to name structures and systems that are ripe for corruption and bent toward the disease’s flourishing.
In both cases, the sickness seems to remain and social conversation spreads a deep sadness, fear, and mistrust about the state of the world in every era…
A life of reading counteracts the malformation of screen and digital technology. It acts as an antidote to the bad habits of consumerism, utilitarianism, individualism, and other wayward ‘-isms’. In contrast to many other pastimes, reading demands engagement. It asks something of the participant. It cultivates that person’s imagination and increases their vision of the world.
While people argue all the time that reading is not a cure-all, no one believes reading is bad. No one doubts that reading—even if it cannot make a person good—can make a person better…
The case for reading has always been strong, it’s champions numerous and diverse (from leaders of the Civil Rights movement like Howard Thurman & MLK heralding reading’s liberating power to American traditionalists like Charles Dickens & Thomas Jefferson).
Yet never before has it seemed such a perfectly poised antidote to the intoxication of our time…
Read for the same reason that people have read—and shared poems or stories—for thousands of years: because our eyes are not enough by which to see. The time & place in which we live blinds us to other perspectives and ways of being that are not of our own experience. We read because we have been given the gift of imagination & intellect, and we exhibit our gratitude by using it.
~ Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God
the internet | destruction > construction
We all believe that you can ruin your marriage on the internet.
But no one believes you can have a thriving, healthy marriage on the internet.
So here we find a medium whose potential for destruction is far greater than its potential for construction.
It’s not reductive to place the internet in this specific ethical dilemma. The internet itself is ever-eager to push towards this kind of thinking and use-case whenever we traverse its shallow streams.
I'm not saying don't ever use the internet (this blog would be much shorter-lived if I believed that). But we should absolutely treat it as more of a sword then a shovel. A sword could defend or restrain harm from those unable to protect themselves, but it has startlingly little constructive capacity, even when conquerors try to justify the ends of their peace-making by the means of a sword.
november 29th, 2025 | 40 years
The publishing of little known media theorist’s work on entertainment’s disastrous intersection with politics, religion, and culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death was met with little applause then and (as we’ll ponder together today through this piece) now.
A polemic against entertainment with the foundations of civil life as the stakes?
Chicken little had a greater chance at giving a people pause when he cried wolf.
Of course, among the burgeoning fields of media theory and digital ecology his work was lauded. He stepped into a stream of brilliance flowing from thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, Walter Ong, and others from before the previous century who had witnessed early signs of societal decay from the Industrial Revolution. Experts understood his wisdom and recognized the impending cliff culture barreled towards with every added device on american Christmas lists.
Postman would warn us again of our Technopoly’s dire developments seven years later in his next work and would turn his seemingly forlorn attention to the next generation in The End of Education when the tenth anniversary of Amusing rolled around in 1995. In this way, Postman’s attitude in the decade following the release of his magnum opus could be viewed as a bell curve of wariness (Amusing, ’85), despair (Technopoly, ‘92), and apathy (Education, ’95) as the once self-assured prophet witnessed the rise of Apple, pre-iPhone, the ever-presence of Microsoft, and the flourishing of a start-up-centered economy seeding companies with aplomb like Netflix, Amazon, and Google until his death in 2003.
To view Postman’s influence in light of that continuum is to ignore the bubbling awareness of an inescapable solution that presented itself in his final work. This solution may have even shaped Postman’s conclusion of hope as his analysis of the problem showed an increase in a multi-faceted premise of distress.
Thirty years following the close of this spiritual trilogy of books, we are, in some ways, left with the handbag.
The problems Postman defined have been amplified. In this, he receives vigorous nods (not applause, then as today) and his work acts as an autopsy report does to a body already decomposing, the details of the report hardly changing the demise of their subject.
The despair & distress win out in any accounting of the ledger of harms we have accrued in face of the absence of implementing Postman’s solutions. We could list the ways our failure to turn the ship manifests using terms like conspiracy theories, fake news, political partisanship, mental health crisis, epidemic of loneliness, declining attention span, decreasing IQs, and digital addiction. We could count the deaths, bodily & relational, political & historic, spiritual & natural. We could witness daily atrocities of the deformed character of social life in the West.
We could despair.
Despair is a unique thing because of its relationship to relationships;
Despair is caused by a loss of hope, and
Hope is a unique product of communion in community.
As connected creatures made for relationship, we place our trust (and ultimately, hope) in those that surround us.
It follows that a method for navigating despair is navigating it together.
Finding Pathways to walk with others who see the same things we do.
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds…
Aldo Leopold
Thinkers like these give the voice of a prophet to those that seek to wound and the comfort of a friend to those who seek to heal.
Reading can be a way to walk with others who see as we do (find Karen Swallow Prior & Alan Jacob’s writing on solidarity in story).
Reading doesn’t shy away from showing us new ways to see (find Jorge Luis Borges’ writing on reading for the ambiance here).
And in the face of the digital despair of our time, you can find no better guide and friend for the path than Neil Postman.
November 29th of 2025.
Read & walk alongside Pathway Two, originally laid with the prescience of one who walked from despair to hope and saw a solution for our time as all time.
a sand county almanac
Rumi said there are a thousand ways to go home, and I'd offer handful of books as viable paths.
The ecologist & philosopher Aldo Leopold's work stands as one such path down a way not many think to tread in our day and age of comfort entertainment & bingeable stories. The "geometric progression of an abundance of distractions" Leopold observed as a natural phenomenon happens to be a quietly prescient way of seeing our culture of information overload. Even amidst delicious Pulitzer finalists & quality Cannes films lies a tendency to move forward, faster, farther... when home always lies behind.
I don't know why Jenny Odell's endorsement of Leopold in her book, How To Do Nothing, stuck out so much to me or why I picked up a copy all those years ago, but I'm forever grateful for finding a home in this work that I can return to always & often.
From the book:
No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections and convictions…
The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education…
There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot…
This science of relationships is called ecology, but what we call it matters nothing. The question is, does the educated citizen know he is only a cog in an ecological mechanism…
NotebookLM | a writer’s workshop
NotebookLM* is one of the most fascinating (and potentially game-changing) uses of AI I’ve yet seen.
Practically, it’s an AI-powered assistant-with-a-scrapbook for any digital pieces of content (“Sources”) you throw at it.
In my first test with the tool, I gave it the eBooks to all three works by Neil Postman I’ve been working at for my second pathway and asked it some preliminary questions about their content, unifying factors, and trajectory if seen in light of a transcript for a long-form podcast conversation about AI and media today I uploaded additionally.
Firstly, it was able to read, interact with, and “understand” the primary thrust and trajectory of Postman’s arguments over the course of all three books and their ten-year unfolding through his later life. As I’d read each of these books in concert with each other numerous times and had been writing about their content and interconnectivity for the past six months, I felt confident checking its work.
It ended up checking mine.
Ruling out confirmation bias because of its thorough citation of passages in each book, NotebookLM deftly corroborated my theories and reading of Postman’s primary motifs to affirm the direction my analysis had taken. More than that though, it gave me deep reasoning about the citations it provided to outline his reasons for shifting perspectives on our media crisis across his literary canon.
To read and pull helpful quotes in my research would have been enough. Exceeding my expectations, this “writer’s workshop” performed an analysis I didn’t know I needed.
I’ve written before about AI as a tool to adjust the aperture of the mind- never before has this resonated so clearly.
For my followup training run, I tested its Mind Map feature.
It generates 25-30 topics, themes, keywords, and ideas from the sources and allows you to click in and drill down into them. As a learning or deep-dive tool, this is revolutionary.
Imagine the ability to converse with a friend over coffee about some minutia within some trifling subject matter that you’ve accrued expert status in over the years. This friend can pull as many (and certainly many more) citations as you can, and it can engage in a deep, thoughtful analysis of the work in front of you both. As you question it, throw around concepts, and hop across the breadth of a field or niche only you typically know the hooks for, it creates connections you’ve never been able to come across and picks out those insights that you only stumble upon in the true depth of dialogue.
There are absolutely things lost in the adoption of this tool.
Is serendipitous learning stolen by the LM’s thinking? Maybe (I apologize for anthropomorphizing so much, but that’s where we are in 2025).
Are there communities and book clubs and workshops that won’t be created around shared ideas and a desire to learn and grow? Probably (but social media and the internet have already done much to disband common places of unity over the past two decades).
But to level the playing field to those without access to these communities of thought and to provide the background and catalysts for those who have never been shown how to collaborate, learn, and ideate around deep work like this is invaluable.
And I can’t help ending with the refrain- we can’t go back…
*The most recent update I’m utilizing that expands the token count to larger than you can imagine, adding Audio Overview with interactive mode, alongside a streamlined 3-panel UI takes home the prize for best LLM-interface to date, in my book.
where have all the sages gone?
It’s been said the 18th century political philosopher, Goethe, was the last person who knew everything (he, of course, would believe this a moot point in line with his thought that “Knowing is not enough”). This makes it sound as if the man was no man at all but some immortal savant. In reality, this quip imagines that by the year of his death in 1832, “It was no longer possible for even the most brilliant mind to comprehend, let alone integrate, what was known.”
Before the printing press and the Enlightenment, and certainly before the internet era, the world produced what were called sages. These were the people who were sought out for wisdom for any problem. Their words carried weight. Their existence brought flourishing. They were commonplace because of a few reasons:
First, they existed because they were lauded and part of a system that aspired to their position in society. Knowledge and the pursuit of wisdom were paragons for the everyman to pursue and laud. Examples of great thinkers molded the models for virtue and a telos of life pointed towards the heavens (or at least away from our man-made hells).
2008 to whenever our current technological crisis ends will be enshrined as an era with no saints or sages…
Whether this and its appended divine vocation of irrelevance is to be a boon or curse upon our pages of the historical record is yet to be seen.
counterpoints | AI
There’s a fascinating similarity between arguments for & against AI’s continued spread and integration throughout all levels of society, work, and relationship.
Both keep in mind the extended time horizon of the effects of the game we’re playing with emergent technology today.
Both have in mind future generations and the way our resistance or capitulation now will trickle down to our posterity.
Both recognize we’re just at the start of a very long, very important series of decisions our species must make to move forward in time.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-undivided-attention/id1460030305?i=1000665016295
This Moment in Al: How We Got Here and Where We're Going, Your Undivided Attention
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-write/id1700171470?i=1000700934681
The Ultimate Guide to Writing with Al, How I Write
use AI as a catalyst
Endeavor to make stronger arguments against the use of AI across our creative & educational dwellings and the wave of users championing their efficacy will only continue swelling. There is a rising tide of artists and entrepreneurs alike taking advantage of the perpetual hype cycles generated by each of the latest "iPhone moments" in tech. To stalwartly resist the current is to miss the source of its undertow.
LLM’s and their ever-evolving interfaces (explore Notebook LLM, Deep Research Modes, and Reasoning models to begin to see the breadth of the landscape two short years in) are a symptom of a larger issue that has been plaguing the internet for the better part of a decade.
Information glut, bloat, and slop has been endemic to surfing the web long before its AI counter-part hit the scene.
We have all sought refuge from the toxic and far too overwhelming amounts of links, pages, podcasts, and feeds by turning to dumbphones, social media fasts, simplified tech stacks, digital declutters, and email summaries of feeds we can no longer peruse individually. AI overviews are long overdue; Audio Overviews are lightning in a bottle of empty bits of content.
This stage of the cycle, with continued overblown headlines & overpromising heads of company, has real benefits for everyday users of the web.
Support it or condemn it, AI can catalyze a new world of creative output.
The tech-bros & bullish investors in the technology are streamlining the creation of some of the first great pieces of AI-generated art pieces, community projects, and software developments. Their fervor for these innovations will drive growth in a certain direction and (regardless of externalities and effects on those questions of personhood, identity, and generative natures that are the fly in the ointment) that growth will begin to shape the future we enter.
The cautionaries & humanists who eschew these tools will be put to the same task but with the use of their God-given talents & tools (no matter how the technology— pencil, paper, calculator, or printing press— extends their humanity in ways they take for granted with characteristic chronological snobbery) to catch up to and outpace either the quantity or quality of their AI-competitors.
In both cases, the race to adapt to a world of AI will catalyze a future where all ships may actually rise with this new (artificially?) rising tide…
a sense of information
You can scroll through a dozen news feeds and not learn a thing.
Social media claims to connect people through information but never sees anything built.
The internet is inert, remaining a place where even these words will fade and have no impact in time.This isn’t nihilism about life but about our misguided methods of receiving life through a screen. Media theorists have long seen this problem of the digital age coming back when the television launched a new multi-media era:For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of diminished social and political potency...Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
More headlines and breaking stories of more corruption and less goodness across industries, empires, and neighborhoods has only bred more distrust. And not simply distrust, but a disproportionate distrust to the truth. We no longer have a sense of what is true and who is really being represented by the screen. Media paints every character as an extreme— a saint or sinner, an angel or demon, an extremist or pariah. It creates a thin veneer of life that could so easily be poked to fall if only we took our noses out of our screens and lived again.Information is additive and cumulative. It is not a bearer of sense, whereas a narration carries sense. The original meaning of ‘sense’ is direction. Today, we are perfectly informed, but we lack orientation…The Crisis of Narration, Byung-Chul Han
Our direction in life is dictated by algorithms not internally coherent narratives of the good, true, and beautiful. Even when engaging “wholesome” content online—content that is not inflammatory, manipulative, or false— we are lulled into thinking the screen can offer personal growth in the form of wisdom, community, or artistic expression. The trouble is that all we do online is push bits of data around. This is wonderful for the tecno-oligarchs and social platforms themselves who are perpetually fueled by our activity, but there’s not a world where this is a good thing for us. This is a world where information overcomes all our senses and leaves us less human.The elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity…Technopoly, Neil Postman
Postman: all-consuming consumption
There is no subject of public interest- politics, news, education, religion, science, sports- that does not find its way to television. Which means that all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of television…Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
If the medium is really the message, and if we consume every sphere of life through the medium of television and our social feeds, then the message of every aspect of our culture is “incoherence, irrelevance, impotence.” Triviality, addiction, manipulation. Our inheritance is bust. The society we live in is ultimately irreparable. Where is a refuge from this cacophony of distractions?Our politics have been forever scarred by the echo chamber of a sensational social media. Our news grew alongside and influenced the creation of the seven-second video to keep us engaged and enraged. Our education suffers from the attention spans of teachers and students alike, unable to brood on a single topic long enough to glean its vital relevance to our lives. Our religions have become tribalistic and consumer-driven, only being beneficial in their contribution to our individual bottom lines. Our science has become fragmented across expertises and cultures of specialists who can’t share the same room for want of breathing room around their egos. Our sports are a mix of mostly advertisements for the latest brew or hit pop song while muscular men and women vie for the greatest influence as a new kind of athletic brand, the drafted player.At the center of all this lies our visual mediums.Ever-present, never dying. Unfazed by the chaotic storms of online mobs, unintelligible dialogue, and trashy art in its wake.Its influence can be analyzed ad nauseam, but the definitive test of its lasting mark is the feeling that arises in us over an hour, two hours, and more time spent upon devices that distract us into spiritual oblivion.the boox palma
A tragedy in 21st century technological societies is the unrelenting strain of adversarial interoperability.
Apple’s walled garden keeps out side-loading apps and any API that could mess with the Job-Ives vision of perfection that is the iPhone. MMS & SMS create a hierarchy between users of different devices and hinder quick connections and experience over text. Amazon locks out file formats and third party sellers of books to keep Kindle customers docile on an untenable software experience.
For years, I have watched and analyzed innovations on the e-reader with fascination.
For the last year, I (like much of the world thanks to the Verge and other impassioned tech sources) have watched the Boox Palma rise to as much prominence as a cheaply, Chinese-made handheld e-ink device can rise.
The pitch for the Palma (and its quickly released, nearly identical successor, the Palma II) is total control in a perfect form factor— perfect, because they recognize our society’s preferred way of consuming any kind of content currently sits in the palm of your hand and stands no taller than six point seven inches.
The Palma is an e-ink iPod Touch with a heavy software focus on reading… And this is a pitch I’m in love with.
I grew up with the iPod Nano and iTouch as constant companions.
This formed my addictive tendencies toward tech. The pocket carry became a lifestyle and way of being in my teens through these product’s presence. I poured my heart and soul into the music, apps, and entertainment (not to be dramatic or anything) on these devices. The reason I write on tech is because of the magic of these few, final innovations from the Jobs era and their outsized impact on my life before a smartphone ripped the script.
When the Palma appeared (in full, abashed transparency) I fell hopelessly in love.
I wonder if this will only make sense to a small intersections of people (e-ink users, readers, tech enthusiasts, minimalists, and ex-productivity junkies), but having an e-reader fit in your pocket & not have cellular is the mashup I’ve wanted but never could articulate on my own.
The thing fits in my hand perfectly with great visibility.
The volume rockers on the side scroll pages effortlessly.
The lack of cellular & e-ink friction de-addict the device.
That alone would make it a great product/e-reader/iTouch-successor, but its interoperability unlocks new heights.
Running a cracked version of Android OS, this little power-house of a device (thank you, e-ink slow-drip battery drain) can be fully tailored to your needs. All the apps, all the button functionality, all the connections. It beats out the Kindle by miles, allowing any file type, software experience, and customization, and it makes more sense than a smartphone with its absence of blue light, anchor to wifi for browsing, and friction doing anything but flipping pages.
In a season of child-rearing where my reading intake suffers due to my baby-on-the-chest, nap-filled world, the simplicity, comfortability, and accessibility of the Palma has reinvigorate my practice and enjoyment of the e-reader space.
a seed, a tear
We are people who love stories.
We create stories to make meaning from life to bond with others, to pass time on the long road of life. All lives, like all stories are generative. They touch us and transform us in ways big and small. We gather to eulogize people because some part of their story intersected with our’s enough to change the people that we have become.
Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.
Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life…
Some historians say there’s only ever been two revolutions that there's only been two great revolutions.
Just two events that really changed human history forever.
The first was when someone started to farm. Human beings were exclusively nomadic hunter-gatherers before that. All the way up until someone buried something edible, a seed. What a waste! You could have eaten that. Then they noticed something mysterious began to happen in the dirt. A plant sprung up in the exact place where they dropped the seed. A long time ago, someone deliberately wasted something useful, and it produced it a whole lot more by dying than it did by living.
The second great revolution was when Jesus let his own creation kill him. He was on a three-year run that produced fanfare enough that they welcomed him into the city as king just a week ago. Then all of a sudden, he stopped short, executed unjustly in his youth. What a waste! You could have used that. But of course, the ground where they laid his body sprang up with life, more life than anyone could have imagined, life and life to the full. Life not just for him, but for anyone willing to come and to receive it.
Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds…
Every death in life is a seed. It plants itself within our hearts and flourishes when we honor, grieve, and gather to tell the story of a life and live into resurrection reality. Ernest Becker says, “resurrection means the worst thing is never the last thing. It means injustice is brought to an end, it means a day is coming when no one ever goes hungry again, when no child is ever trafficked again, when no victim is ever abused again, when no one, no one ever weeps over a casket again.” It means love gets the final word, and that resonates with me.
The Way of Jesus is shocking because of its claim that in the end, nothing matters except love. Love & our resurrection reality don't change the pain in our tears. They shouldn't. But they should shape our perspective.
Tears come when we learn to live more and more out of our deepest longings, our needs, our troubles. These must all resurface and be given their rightful place for in tears. We find our real human life in all its depths. Tears of the water upon the soil within which the seed of a life and its death are planted. The tragedy of any death is made just & whole by our grief, encapsulated in the tears that fall to the ground to allow something new & beautiful to flourish.
I don't know for sure how long the pain must last and how many days we must grieve. I don't know for sure how many stories of someone's life it takes to honor them and be impacted by the person they were and are in us.
What I do know for sure is this that I have gazed into Jesus' tomb and found it empty. As I gaze in with that original cast of characters I can almost hear Jesus's voice,
Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds...
Postman: emotional resonance
Whatever power television might have to undermine rational discourse, its emotional power is so great that it could arouse sentiment against the Vietnam War or against more virulent forms of racism...
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Here we find a recommendation that feels so fantastical and potentially revolutionary as to be ridiculed for its reach beyond reason (and it would be an intentional "reach beyond reason" to no other characteristic but feeling). Any form of visual media pushed to accommodate an intellectual purpose will break down in the light of the medium's embedded biases. As we create for TV, social media, and the internet, the structure of these digital environments dictate certain habits, define its own brand of "wisdom", and changes the nature of discourse.
A major reason for this shift is due to the emotional resonance of images. Staring at a page of Lolita won't immediately evoke a response from its reader. Watching a country singer appeal to humanity about the plight of the pit-bull will.
We know this is not by accident. Not only are the makeup artists, set designers, directors, animators, editors, and camera crew all working to create an emotionally connected experience between their message or cause and the viewer or potential donor, but unconscious forces are manipulating our limbic system to respond a certain way. A good way, it should be noted, because our drive for connection is what makes us human and not apes. Psychologist Kurt Thompson has that beautiful line, "We are all born into this world, looking for someone looking for us," and we remain in this mode of existence throughout our lives and time spent in front of screens. For better or worse, for humanitarian causes or militaristic propaganda, for pop tart ads or political elections, we are changeable at our basest level.
A vital realization in the digital, entertainment age is that this will happen regardless of the intent or awareness of the user of visual mediums. As I watch the geriatric stunts of our nation's "leaders" online, I know the frame I see on-screen shapes my prejudices and stirs my anger.
I am aware but not immune.
I am awake but lost in a dream.
platform employment
Where do you work?
Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, and Youtube.
You work for all those companies?
Well, of course— we all do…
Many still don’t realize what a user of social media is.
To be a user of a platform with no pay-wall is to be the employee turning on the lights each day. You are the engine driving it forward and the entertainer keeping things interesting. You bring in all the profit and dictate the progress the platform logs.
If you’re unemployed and rich, this is a wonderful thing— no checks and balances (from 2025-2028), a limitless supply of cronies to capture each post, and the creation of a platform to shout from when you find you finally (think you) have something to say. A screaming bargain.
If you’re unemployed and broke, not so much— the promise of fame & fortune seduces and you quickly find followings aren’t so easy to build, Zuckerberg-bills don’t cash so easily, and you’re in yet another rat race that has fewer & fewer guard rails from the cliffs of doing irreparable harm to your reputation in a single post. Not so screaming a bargain.
If you’re employed, doing good financially, and want another job managing a personal social media account, you face a problem.
I imagine you have a job, a life, a purpose. You’ve been told it’s essential to get another of all three on X, Y, & Z—not explicitly, of course, as making a grand-stand like that only endears companies to their investors— which means you’ll incur some “essential” costs.
As with any ideology that pressures users into service (read “service” whatever way you like for that to fit), the belief that avoiding social platforms is a non-starter has its roots in one incredibly strong profit incentive. To reach the critical mass required to have a silent majority, not just a vocal minority, pushing the grass-roots campaign for your product speaks to the level of influence these platforms exert on our lives. To become a de facto component of the adolescent & societal starter kits speaks to a greater shame we all feel trapped within as we linger on unable to break the cycle.
If you still can’t see what it is, hear instead from one of its creators:
You are the product. Social media puts you on a hamster wheel to generate its profit… It feeds treats to keep you happy and enjoying your enslavement. It finds ways to remind you why you’re so committed… And the machine keeps churning because no one wants to be the first to hop off and quit looking like the rat we all know ourselves to be.