“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan The tool being built today has a name: Pax Silica. The belief behind it is older. It is the faith that experts can manage what markets and democracies cannot. It is called technocracy. The movement emerged after…
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”—Mark 8:36 What happens when a system of total control encounters something it cannot control? This is the question that Pax Silica raises. Pax Silica is a U.S.-led initiative launched in December…
“Woe to those who plan iniquity, to those who plot evil on their beds! At morning’s light they carry it out because it is in their power to do it. They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them. They defraud people of their homes, they rob them…
“And it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark.” — Revelation 13:17 Pax Silica is a U.S.-led strategic initiative launched…
How the Catholic-Protestant War Became Red vs. Blue “The map is not the territory.” — Alfred Korzybski A hallucination is a perception generated without a corresponding external reality. The experience feels genuine, but the mind has mistaken the map for the territory. We see Red and Blue screaming at each…
The Rise of Sophia | Part 1 “Does not wisdom call out?” — Proverbs 8:1 Before the first star burned, before the first human drew breath, before history began, Wisdom was there. She was beside the Creator as mountains rose, seas found their shores, and life unfolded from possibility into…
On Being Audited by Machines (and the Humans Who Think Like Them) “The machine is not to be feared. The machine is to be used. What is to be feared is the human being who uses the machine like a machine.” — Wendell Berry I spend my days buried in…
Subversive Wisdom for an Age of Collapse “The great bulk of political history has been written from the standpoint of the state…The infrapolitics of the weak are the invisible, everyday forms of resistance.” —James C. Scott The past week’s headlines have been impossible to ignore. The narrative driving the global…
A Three-Part Mini-Series — Part One “They know us better than we know ourselves. That should frighten you.” — Shoshana Zuboff, Author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Doesn’t it give you the creeps—that you’re being studied by the minute? Right now, somewhere yonder, a server is coalescing around your identity—your name,…
“I am not fighting a bad habit. I am re-enacting a 5,000-year-old systems failure.” — Wendy Williamson My last essay ended with the algorithm live in my chest. The Auditor had won. He’d silenced the Steward, deleted the offering (my essay that received no likes or comments), and deemed the…