Featured Essays
Key Themes
History of Intelligence
AI sets in motion a new chapter in the history of intelligence’s confrontation with fate and necessity. Telling the stories of its twists and turns will broaden our upstanding of what intelligence has been and can be.
Computational Power
These essays examine how digital systems reshape experience, agency, and the unfolding of time. This is not a moral complaint; it is an examination of possibilities.
Rejuvenation
Modernity is not defined by the loss of meaning, but by the expansion of human self-assertion—the long effort of our genus to shape contingency, redirect fate, and assume responsibility for outcomes once attributed to nature or the gods.
Revaluation of Values
What looks like a loss of meaning may instead be a revaluation of values—one forced by technologies that move faster than our ability to localize responsibility or foresee consequences.
Exo-Darwinism and the Compression of Time in Michel Serres’ The Incandescent
Modern technology does more than accelerate life—it reshapes how time itself is experienced. Drawing on Michel Serres’ reflections in The Incandescent, this essay explores how intention, speed, and exo-Darwinism compress the past into background, turning history into a resource rather than a place we still inhabit.
Fate, Computation, Purpose
What if our moment is not a crisis of meaning, but a crisis of purpose—one born from the ability to compute the future faster than the values meant to guide it?
Out-Computing the Gods
This essay examines how the discovery of computation transformed humanity’s relationship to fate. Beginning with Babylonian astronomy, it shows how early techniques of prediction turned omens into foresight, allowing humans to anticipate and intervene in processes once attributed to the gods.
Inventing Behavior After the Neolithic: Michel Serres and the Moral Problem of Auto-Evolution
This essay introduces Michel Serres’ late philosophy by emphasizing its moral core rather than its metaphysics. Drawing on The Incandescent and le Grand Récit, it explores auto-evolution, violence, and the challenge of inventing moral orientation after the Neolithic age.
Fate, Computation and the End of Christian Time
This brief essay traces how Enlightenment calculation reshaped humanity’s experience of time, fate, and foresight—from biblical chronology to geological deep time and modern predictive control. Rather than condemning the Enlightenment, it argues for renewing its legacy by learning how to live responsibly within the futures we now help to compute.
Saving the Phenomenon: Panchrone, Assembly Theory and Thinking in Time
A brief exploration of how theoretical physicists such as Lee Smolin and Sara Imari Walker are not only rethinking time but changing our capacity for experience.
Living with Our Intelligence
Reflections on how ill-prepared our traditional moralities are for the world in which we live. The speed and spread of computational power is forcing a revaluation of values that we are not equipped to handle.
Life at the Speed of Computation
A meditation on what happens to judgment and responsibility when action outpaces reflection.
The Natural Contract - Michel Serres
Michel Serres at his most political. This 1990 book is a defining work in the modern understanding of the climate crisis. I've written a long essay inspired by the depth and breadth of Serres vision.
Time Reborn - Lee Smolin
Lee Smolin argues that physics should no longer treats time as an experiential illusion. It is fundamental to the universe because everything is relational and evolving.
L’Incandescent – Serres on Emergence, Light, and Moral Attention
An essay exploring Michel Serres’s concept of the incandescent — where light, unpredictability, and moral attention emerge at thresholds beyond calculation and control.
Kairos and Continuity
This essay takes up the ancient distinction between chronos and kairos to explore how time can be lived as more than succession. Kairos names the charged moment—the opening in which action matters disproportionately to duration. Read alongside continuity, kairos becomes not a rupture from time, but a way of inhabiting it attentively, without surrendering to either stasis or acceleration.
Birth of Physics - Michel Serres
Michel Serres makes Lucretius our contemporary. Published just before Le Parasite, Le Naissance de la physique was a key moment in the history of chaos theory and the ability to see order emerging from disorder -- a reversal of the Enlightenment's formula. Serres finds in Lucretius' De rerum natura a pre-Modern text that offers a more relevant way of thinking about order and disorder free of eternal natural laws.