History
13 entries- Aug 8Notenewest
Geographies of Time # Geology :: Climate :: Weather :: Seasons Iceland :: Singapore :: San Diego :: Japan Transformation :: Structure :: Contingency :: Rhythm Industrial Revolution :: Cold War :: 1848 :: Indian Independence Places do not experience time in quite the same way. In Singapore, climate dominates. There is …
- Mar 8EssayWorld Machines The End of Identity: AI, Plasticity, and the Divergence Machine
Over the past year, the Contraptions club has been reading through history—from Giordano Bruno and Montaigne to Spinoza, Adam Smith, and Hume. We are now using using Venkatesh Rao’s Divergence Machine …
4 min
- Dec 26Essay The Deep Dark Terroir of the Soul
This is the third and final part of the Thicket Series: Part 1: Logic of the Thicket and the Unsearchable Web Part 2: The Architecture of Resistance The history of the working subject might be best …
14 min - Dec 23EssayWorld Machines The Architecture of Resistance
The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive …
4 min - Dec 6EssayWorld Machines Four Early-Modern Tempers for a World That Can Summon Itself
This is a partial synthesis of the books read through 2025 in the Contraptions Book Club. We live in a moment when the whole of human culture has become strangely available, no longer just an archive …
8 min