"How do we write, create, remember when tools are discontinuous archives replaced every few years?"

Internet as carnival time (Bakhtin): cyclical, regenerative, collective, inversions, acceleration & simultaneity. Classical body: closed, completed, finished. Grotesque body: open, in process.

The wrong metaphor doesn't just fail to describe — it actively obscures. Makes you feel like you're doing it wrong.

Exformation (Tor Nørretranders): the hidden background of experience, associations, memories, culture, bodily knowledge that makes meaning possible. "We think we're communicating with words, but we're really communicating our entire worlds." When society loses shared stories, loses shared exformation — words no longer rest on same ground.

A reckoning with what it costs to hold things together, and what becomes possible when you stop holding so tight.

The question isn't "how do I hold myself together" but "what are the conditions under which coherence emerges?"

Maybe that's why "are you okay" is so destabilizing. Not just because it sees your effort. But because it breaks the contract. It admits that the performance is a performance. And if one person stops pretending, the whole fragile architecture of mutual pretending is exposed.

The loneliness of hypernormalization: thinking your incoherence is personal, individual, your failure to hold — when actually the incoherence is shared but we've lost the language and trust to name it together. Everyone managing their own wobble in private, which makes the collective wobble worse. What would it look like to stop performing holding... See more

Context accumulates rather than depletes. "As time passes, insight expands, and even more context comes into view." Understanding that deepens rather than uses up. The opposite of consume.