Time Out of Joint

Time Out of Joint is my Substack newsletter. It begins from a simple recognition: culture works on us before we ever consent to it. Its expectations arrive through language, habit, ritual, and silence. Before we choose, we inherit stories. Before we speak, we are already being spoken—for, about, and through.

One of the lasting achievements of the Enlightenment was to bring more of fate under human control. Roads, print networks, postal systems, markets, and clocks reorganized experience long before they reorganized ideas. Enlightenment thought mattered because it was carried by infrastructure that coordinated motion, synchronized time, and rendered the world newly tractable to calculation.

We are living through a transformation of similar scope. Computational systems now shape the tempo of perception, decision, and consequence. They do not sit outside culture; they are culture’s contemporary machinery. When these systems accelerate faster than inherited norms can keep pace, convention reveals itself as convention. Time comes loose from its joints.

The question that animates this work is not how to escape these conditions, but how to respond without merely repeating them. How do we orient ourselves when Enlightenment compasses—progress, autonomy, rational control—no longer point reliably? How do we build moral bearings adequate to a world of global systems, fragmented politics, and engineered futures?

You won’t find prescriptions here, nor a finished way of life. What you’ll find are essays that treat experience as the testing ground of orientation—historical, philosophical, and experimental—seeking forms of moral navigation that move with the speed and scale of the world we have made, rather than importing moralities designed for slower times.