And then they create us
Philosophy of technology, printed in public. Essays on what the clock, the codex, and the feed do to the people holding them.
The Plates
8 plates in the run
Seven Seconds
A notification costs seven measured seconds of cognitive processing. The bell has been engineering attention for nine centuries...
The Feed Made You
A randomised study in Nature moved 4,965 people's beliefs by reordering their feeds. Switching the algorithm off did not switch...
You Now Have Three Brains
Kahneman gave us System 1 and System 2. A new paper adds System 3: the model you think with. The count will not stop at three.
Digital Amnesia Is a Measurement Now
Tertiary retention spent forty years as theory. Two systematic reviews just gave it a sample size.
The Computational World Picture
Heidegger said modernity turned the world into a picture. Hui says computation now produces the world it pictures.
Cosmotechnics Is a Land Claim
Technodiversity used to be a philosophical programme. Data centres on Native land turned it into a territorial one.
The loop runs in both directions.
Silent reading did not exist until the codex made room for it. The mechanical clock invented time you could waste. Every tool does a second job, quietly, on the person holding it: it rebuilds their attention, their memory, their sense of what counts as thinking. The essays here supply words for that second job while it happens to us.
The Attention Script arrives this autumn.
A long-form series on attention: the monastery bell, silent reading, the mechanical clock, the feed. Essays land at the Substack first; the plates here archive the run.
Subscribe on SubstackA risograph never prints the same sheet twice. The drum drifts, the registration slips, the machine leaves its fingerprints on whatever it carries. This site is set that way on purpose. Every essay is a plate. The reader is the substrate.
ED. ∞ — EVERY IMPRESSION DIFFERS