You may know ‘severance’ as a word or the name of the series on Apple TV, but have you thought about severance as a metaphor for the Original Sin of the Technological Society? It's the Original Sin expressed through the invention of the phonetic alphabet, which severed sound from meaning.
Millennia after this Big Bang, severance remains a theme in our environment. Ours is an age of severances, fragmentations, divisions, polarizations, alienations and excommunications held in a fearsome harmony by mutual animosity and incomprehension. But, before I tell you more about these fruits of our Original Sin, I need to know if I'm speaking with your Innie or your Outie. Next time we speak, I will know the answer based on your response or non-response to this post.
If you don't know what any of this means, it's probably because you haven't watched Severance. If that's the case, watch Severance. If you do know what I'm talking about, read on; but keep in mind that there's only so much I can tell you through the medium of the phonetic alphabet. It won't be nearly enough; you'll need to read between the lines and parse my metaphors.
The purpose of writing this post is to find a way for us to speak, preferably in person. In the meantime, make the most of the abstract symbols below.
The Story In Brief: Five Horizons
I've had multiple interactions with your Innie, often in very noisy and chaotic environments that made communication difficult. Needless to say, I've often wondered why my message hasn’t been getting through. I blamed the noise and chaos. I only realized recently that I haven't been speaking with you. This whole time, I've been speaking with your Innie.
Soon after this stunning realization, I started preparing written materials for our next conversation. The materials are unfinished, of course, but like the Israelites fleeing Pharaoh's Egypt, I can't wait for this bread to leaven. Hastening slowly, I'm all packed up for the journey to the land flowing with milk and honey.
Before I go, I leave you five links to the materials I prepared for you. Since the start of 2023, I developed five blogs organized around five horizons of possibility. Now that these horizons appear in the rear-view mirror, I'll give you a summary of what I've published so far.
First, through M2 Dialogue (M2D), I explored the possibility of maintaining balance in the liminal space between matter and metaphor. If you are even half as stunned as I was when I realized what I'm sharing with you here, you probably realize how easily we can lose balance. It probably doesn't surprise you that the overwhelming majority of people continue to trip and fall at the intersection of story and reality. Writing M2D helped me maintain my balance, and I hope that reading it helps you in the same way. In addition to mixing metaphors and processing the shock of the revelation, M2D helped me lay a foundation for our future discussions of the art of translating metaphoric truths into political and economic reality.
Building on this foundation, I introduced Dialogue as a Service (DaaS) to explore the possibility of becoming fully human and regarding each other as human beings. This exploration led me to the study of stumbling blocks on this path.
The study of obstructions to dialogue led me to start BS"D to explore the possibility of fruitful responses to “fractal falsehood”. I provisionally defined this hyperobject as “a ceaseless recurrence of self-similar patterns of distortion and distraction across scales, domains and dimensions.”
The likelihood of fruitful responses to this pandemic increases with our willingness to contemplate what is happening. That’s why, I created MISM to explore the possibility of understanding media as our extensions. For a while, “The medium is the message” served as the motto for my work.
Finally, for my post-LinkedIn professional network, assembled at LJ-Pro, I started exploring alternatives to the perverse incentives of the attention economy. I also introduced my current motto: Seize the means of perception!
What To Do? New Horizons
Over the past two years, I’ve published hundreds of posts, some with daunting word counts over 2,000. Even after I realized that I was only reaching your Innie, I kept publishing because I heard from the One True God (OTG) that he intends to destroy the world. See Genesis 6:13. Honestly, I could've used a break from stunning revelations, but here was OTG telling me:
“I have decided to put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them: I am about to destroy them with the earth.”
Apparently, this information has been out there for ages, but somehow, I only got the memo last year. OTG must have noticed my thinly veiled reaction because he immediately answered arguably the most important question: What to do? In Genesis 6:14, I found the answer:
“Make yourself an Ark of gopher wood.”
Due to everything lost in translation, it took me a long time to establish a sustainable supply of gopher wood. That ordeal is now behind me. You won't believe the kinds of demons I had to confront when I discovered the corruption of the supply chain. The bottom line is that I'm now ready to talk to you. In fact, I already started following the instructions at the end of Genesis 6:14:
“Make it an ark with compartments, and cover it inside and out with pitch.”
A couple of months ago, I opened the First Compartment on my Ark, and it already accommodates more than a dozen inhabitants, with room for more. As I started the construction of the Second Compartment, I anticipated the disruption of the pitch supply chain by echoes of the Original Sin in our economic policies. Thankfully, I completed the construction before pitch prices spiked.
With this post, I invite you to join me in the Second Compartment, a space for people who dare to contemplate the Original Sin of the Technological Society; people who think of ‘the flood’ not as mere metaphor, but as a description of lived reality; people who see the five horizons in the rear-view mirror. Most importantly, the Second Compartment is for people prepared to use the Ark to examine new horizons.
Call to Action
I know I dropped a big load of revelations on you. I'm happy to answer any questions, but not through this medium. If you need to read anything else before you confirm your identity, start with my interpretation of the story of Noah's Ark. In particular, note the meaning of gopher wood and the five principles I sketched out in the conclusion about “The Way Forward”. Then read: "Survival Strategies: Prophecy, Anti-Prophecy, Realism", and “Trump 2028: An Introduction to Cute Monsters in the Vortex” and “Seize the Means of Perception: Alternatives to Survival through Ignorance”. Please be careful not to add too much weight to the already-onerous burden of infobesity.
Until we confirm your identity, this is all I can tell you about the Second Compartment. I'll tell you everything else next time we speak. To confirm your identity, simply fill out the registration form for the Ark. It only asks you to enter your name, email address and a response to the question: What’s your story? What brings you here? Hasten slowly.
May the will of the Almighty Algorithm bring this message to everyone ready to receive it as it is intended.
An Unorthodox Passover Message
Soon, Jews around the world will start retelling the biblical story of Exodus. My favorite part of this story isn’t in the story, but in the tradition of retelling it every year. This tradition must have grown out of the realization that stories change minds and hearts through repetition.
Despite this age-old tradition, Jews and non-Jews alike continue to trip and fall at the intersection of matter and metaphor. They translate this story of liberation into living patterns of enslavement and oppression. In my view, these recurring mistranslations represent a consequence of our unwillingness to examine the Original Sin of the Technological Society.
This unwillingness is a widely observed characteristic of Innies. A few days ago, I spoke with an Innie who gave me his interpretation of the Exodus story. He said we're not looking for the Promised Land because we already found it — in 1948! The state of Israel is our Promised Land, he said, and it is only the beginning of the fulfillment of God’s promise to his chosen people.
I grew up among Innies who share this belief. I was born into this belief. Once I recognized it as the result of a translational error, I started to deprogram, mainly by studying the Original Sin of the Technological Society. That was in 2014, more than a decade ago. Since then, I’ve often been reminded that the best way to keep people enslaved is to convince them that they’re already free.
I’ve also paid more attention to criticisms of the Innie interpretation of the Exodus story. Critics regard the Innie reading of the story as deranged and destructive. I’ve learned a lot from the critics, but I prefer to describe the Innie interpretation of Exodus as sacrilegious. The political and psychological threats are downstream effects of sacrilege.
In turn, the sacrilege is a downstream effect of what the neo-Jungian psychologist James Hillman called myth deficiency. This epistemic ailment can affect theists and atheists alike. The deficiency can be caused either by insufficient exposure to myth or an inability to read myth as myth. Either way, myth deficiency is a path to fundamentalism.
Over the past two years, as I explored the five horizons of possibility, part of what fueled my work was a desire to build a bridge, perhaps a very narrow bridge, over the ever-widening gulf that separates me from Innies. Through Dialogue as a Service, I thought I could get through to Innies who are convinced that they found the Promised Land with the founding of the State of Israel.
I built the bridge I had envisioned, but no one dared to cross the gulf. It’s understandable. The winds of toxic ideology were so strong that the bridge shook. It was unsafe. I still think it was worth a try. Not that I needed the confirmation, but I’ve now confirmed for myself that the immunity to language among Innies is impenetrable. Given the limits of our current technologies, the severance procedure is irreversible.
I realized that what separates me from Innies isn't a mishandled disagreement or a specific difference in perspective or personality. The problem is that we don’t speak the same language. We may all speak English, but we don’t speak the same Language. Our difference is rooted in the biology of language and affinity, and we are separated by a gulf of mutual unintelligibility. We suffer because we refuse to honor the difference. This refusal is an echo of our Original Sin.
Jacques Ellul and Martin Buber would probably agree that we can make two observations about the relationship between dialogue and propaganda: 1) Dialogue ceases where propaganda begins, and 2) Propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins. As long as we refuse to honor the difference, all we will ever know is propaganda. The Innie interpretation of Exodus is a form of sacrilege, propaganda and, often, trolling. It’s also theocratic in spirit and destructive in its effects. It makes dialogue impossible.
Back to the Ark: The First Compartment
This impossibility brings us back to the Noah’s Ark metaphor. Starting after Passover, I’m joining a compartment on someone else’s Ark. In non-metaphorical terms, that means I'll be contributing to another publication.
This is part of my work in the First Compartment that I mentioned earlier. Here, I intend to continue the study of the epidemiology of fractal falsehood, but mainly in its concrete forms. Specifically, my focus in this work is on the epidemiology of fundamentalist religion, cultic thinking, and the pollution of “the people’s opium” supply. To join me in the First Compartment, email me at mtf102@proton.me. Write “First Compartment in the subject line.
Conclusion
Against the backdrop of a world flooded with military-grade bullshit, the Ark is sailing toward a clear horizon of possibility: dialogue during war. Gazing at this horizon, I recall Ellul’s and Buber’s observations about the relationship between dialogue and propaganda, and I acknowledge that the possibility of dialogue arises from the total effect of the environment. It recoils from noise of any kind, including propaganda, but also the most mundane distractions like phone notifications and people assuring you that they can listen to you and reply to an SMS at the same time.
However, the space for dialogue during war also expands in hospitable environments. In non-metaphorical terms, that’s what the Ark is: an environment hospitable to dialogue, shielded from the ambient noise and chaos. Once you join me in one of my compartments I can tell you the rest of the story about this space.
In the meantime, enjoy mixing your metaphors. Feel free to share your cocktail in the comments below.
Next year in Jerusalem!