[An experiment in technology]

In early 2023, a new public sculpture was unveiled in Boston Common. Titled The Embrace, the piece by artist Hank Willis Thomas depicted two sets of arms interlocked in a gesture of love and solidarity. It was intended as a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, inspired by a famous photograph of the couple hugging after King won the Nobel Peace Prize. The reception, however, was sharply divided. Some celebrated the sculpture’s symbolism and abstraction. Others called it confusing, tone-deaf, even disrespectful. Critics flooded social media with mockery, accusations, and alternate interpretations. Supporters pushed back, accusing detractors of bad faith—or worse. Within days, the conversation had calcified. What began as a moment of cultural expression and celebration became a litmus test for alignment. Were you for it, or against it? Was your critique aesthetic, or ideological? The louder the criticism grew, the harder it became to hold a middle position—or even ask questions without seeming disloyal. Those who tried were quickly pulled into a binary.

This wasn’t just conflict across lines. It was pressure from within. Progressive institutions, cultural commentators, and social media allies nudged each other toward alignment—making space for ambiguity felt disloyal. Even aesthetic disagreement was quickly read as ideological. At the same time, conservative voices closed ranks in the opposite direction, turning their critiques into declarations of moral clarity and anti-woke rebellion. Across the board, nuance was drowned out. Supporters and detractors alike began self-sorting—not just by opinion, but by identity, allegiance, and presumed intent. In a culture primed for polarization, the space between “for” and “against” all but vanished.

The sculpture hadn’t changed. But the interpretive space around it had.

This is the climate we’re in: emotionally charged, interpretively unstable, and saturated with risk. Not just for artists, but for anyone participating in public discourse. Even well-meaning contributions can be quickly reinterpreted as betrayal. And instead of grappling with ambiguity, people retreat to safe scripts—or say nothing at all.

We live in what looks like a frictionless culture. Or at least, that’s what it’s trying to become. Everything is faster, smoother, more optimized. Disagreement from within is discouraged. Conflict is reflexively reframed as harm. Even art—once defined by surprise and struggle—now often feels curated for safety and alignment.

This doesn’t mean culture is free of conflict. Far from it. We’re living through one of the most polarized, combative eras in recent memory. But much of that conflict happens between groups. The kind of friction we’re talking about—the generative, uncomfortable kind—has been disappearing within groups. In many spaces, the pressure to signal alignment and avoid discord has made authentic disagreement feel dangerous. It’s not that friction is gone. It’s that it’s been redistributed—and in some of the places we need it most, it’s been quietly pushed out.

But here’s the paradox: the more we try to eliminate friction—from conversation, from creation, from public life—the more tension we seem to create. Anxieties grow. Ideas shrink. Risk disappears. We’re left with a culture that appears open but feels constrained. We act like we celebrate freedom, but in practice, we reward caution. When every gesture is visible, every mistake amplified, every tone parsed for misalignment, people learn to smooth the edges. To self-monitor. To play it safe. The result isn’t silence exactly—but it’s not freedom either.

This atmosphere didn’t emerge from nowhere. It’s the product of overlapping pressures—cultural, economic, psychological, technological—that have reshaped what feels sayable, showable, or survivable. In this climate, people don’t just fear being wrong—they fear being wrong in public, where the consequences are always on display and sometimes indelible.

The tone of public life has shifted from curiosity to caution. Disagreement no longer feels like a path toward understanding—it feels like a personal threat. Even good-faith engagement carries risk. So people hold back. They edit themselves and others. Constantly and in real time. Not just their posts, but their thoughts—running everything through an imagined audience before it’s even spoken aloud. The result is a thinning of discourse. Conversations become brittle, easily disrupted or derailed. Engagement becomes performance. And performance becomes survival.

This doesn’t mean artists have stopped working, or critics have stopped speaking. It means the conditions under which they operate have changed—and those conditions shape what gets made, what gets shown, and what gets said.

To be clear: this essay isn’t a dismissal of care. The language of harm, identity, and emotional safety wasn’t conjured from thin air—it was forged by those long denied voice and dignity. Emotional legibility and communal accountability were necessary responses to cultures that refused to listen. But even the most vital frameworks can become limiting when they harden into orthodoxy. Our aim isn’t to discard them—it’s to ask how we hold space for both protection and provocation. Both care and contradiction. The most generative cultures don’t choose between those values. They learn to hold them in tension.

What follows is an attempt to look more closely—not just at what people are saying or not saying, but at the deeper forces shaping those behaviors. We begin with five converging pressures that appear to be reshaping cultural life in subtle but powerful ways. They’re not isolated—they overlap and reinforce each other. And while this essay turns often to the art world, it’s not because artists are the problem or even the solution. It’s because they often function as a cultural seismograph—registering tensions before the rest of us can name them.

This isn’t a definitive map. It’s a provocation. A way to trace some of what’s been flattened, what’s gone missing, and what might still be possible. If we want to rebuild the conditions for thought, risk, dialogue, and difference, we have to understand how we got here—and what we’ve learned to stop saying along the way.

Five Converging Forces

The cultural constraint we’re feeling isn’t coming from a single place. It’s the result of multiple cultural forces—each one claiming, at least in theory, to expand our world: to democratize knowledge, increase access, amplify marginalized voices, unlock creative potential. And in many ways, they have. Platforms have given more people a voice. Some institutions have become more self-aware. Ideas that once lived at the edges now shape the center.

But alongside that expansion has come something stranger, harder to name: a quiet tightening. Less room for ambiguity. Less space for meaningful contradiction. Less tolerance for patience, slow thinking, or the time it takes to explore uncertainty. The very practices that once helped people question power, imagine alternatives, and make space for excluded voices have started to function as new forms of constraint—not through direct censorship, but through market pressures, social incentives, emotional optics, and algorithmic conditioning.

Art, technology, discourse, and culture all promise openness. They promised connection, creative freedom, broader understanding, and the ability to speak and think beyond outdated limits. But what we’re living through is something more paradoxical: a time when that promised freedom quietly gives way to subtle pressure coming from all directions. An era where the very tools that were supposed to set us free now shape what we say, what we make, and how we think—sometimes subtly, sometimes aggressively, and often without us realizing it.

What follows are five converging forces that help explain how this constraint has taken hold. Each operates differently—through systems, norms, platforms, feelings—but together they form a kind of invisible architecture, narrowing the aperture of what feels speakable, imaginable, or worth attempting. If we want to move forward, we need to recognize what’s shaping the way we speak, think, and create. Because what’s holding us back isn’t always obvious. It’s built into the systems around us, and it shows up everywhere—in habits, in incentives, in what gets rewarded and what gets ignored.

Neoliberalism and the Market Mentality

Neoliberalism didn’t simply reshape economies—it reshaped imaginations. Since the 1980s, it has grown from an economic policy agenda into a dominant worldview—one that prioritizes market logic in nearly every aspect of life, from education and healthcare to personal identity and cultural value. Under this lens, success is increasingly measured by metrics like scalability, profitability, and personal branding. The result is that artists, institutions, and audiences alike have absorbed the logic of the market as if it were natural, even inevitable.

Artistic production was once driven—at least aspirationally—by the pursuit of discovery, meaning, or disruption. But within neoliberal conditions, those aims increasingly have to pass through a filter: Will it sell? Will it scale? Will it turn a profit? This isn’t merely a story about commerce invading art. It reflects a deeper psychological shift, where market values haven’t just been imposed from above—they’ve been internalized. A proven track record becomes a proxy for success. And originality, once the hallmark of artistic ambition, is displaced by familiarity—work that resembles what’s already been shown to sell.

Art critic Ben Davis has called this condition "self-satisfied pluralism": a cultural climate where anything goes, as long as nothing truly disrupts the frame. The result is a glut of content but a shortage of friction. Work that might complicate, unsettle, or demand slow engagement gets edged out in favor of what’s instantly legible and socially acceptable. In this environment, artists are subtly encouraged to anticipate market reactions—to align their work not with their most searching questions, but with what has already proven popular, sellable, or safe.

None of this means art is dead or that artists are sellouts. But it does mean that within a system so thoroughly saturated with market thinking, even the impulse to resist it can become part of the performance. Rebellion starts to loop back into the very structures it aims to subvert. Take Banksy, who built his reputation on anti-capitalist, anti-establishment street art—intended to be ephemeral, disruptive, and outside institutional control. Over time, though, his work has become highly commodified, with pieces cut from public walls and auctioned for millions. Even his most notorious gesture—shredding Girl with Balloon immediately after it sold—was supposed to be a rejection of the art market. In reality, it was a carefully orchestrated stunt that gave the illusion of sabotage. It was engineered for maximum spectacle, all but guaranteeing the work’s value would increase. What looked like critique was, in reality, a performance designed to thrive inside the very system it appeared to condemn.

The same pattern repeats across culture. Punk fashion once signaled anti-establishment defiance, but its aesthetic—ripped jeans, safety pins, combat boots—was quickly co-opted, emptied of its urgency, and resold in department stores. Even corporations now borrow the language of rebellion and social justice. They adopt rainbow logos during Pride Month, release empowerment-themed ads, and signal progressive values—often while maintaining exploitative labor practices or resisting substantive change.

In each case, critique becomes another branding tool. What looks like resistance is often a curated performance—rewarded, amplified, and monetized. And in that atmosphere, the space for real risk—artistic, intellectual, or emotional—begins to contract. Not because people lack conviction, but because the system knows how to turn almost anything, even dissent, into content.

The Collapse of Shared Meaning

As a cultural and intellectual movement, postmodernism emerged in the mid-to-late 20th century as a response to the perceived certainties of modernism. If neoliberalism eroded trust in public institutions and recast everything through the lens of markets, postmodernism took aim at the concept of shared meaning itself. It didn’t just challenge dominant narratives—it exposed how those narratives were constructed, who they served, and who they excluded. In doing so, postmodernism opened a vital space: a space for doubt, critique, and plurality. It revealed the blind spots of Enlightenment rationalism, destabilized inherited hierarchies, and made room for voices that had long been marginalized or erased.

This wasn’t a glitch—it was a correction. One that was historically necessary. In a world shaped by colonialism, patriarchy, and cultural gatekeeping, the ability to question grand narratives wasn’t just provocative—it was liberating. Deconstruction became a tool for survival. Irony became a way to endure systems that had failed to deliver on their promises. What began as an intellectual project quickly became a cultural reflex.

Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard captured this shift in his diagnosis of the “postmodern condition”: a skepticism toward meta-narratives, those sweeping stories that once gave societies a sense of coherence and direction. In his view, this loss wasn’t a tragedy—it was a release. A way to acknowledge the multiplicity of perspectives that had been suppressed by universal claims. But Lyotard also warned that in the absence of those shared frameworks, knowledge would be reorganized around performativity—judged not by truth or meaning, but by utility and output. In many ways, that’s exactly where we’ve landed.

Over time, the corrective became a condition. Suspicion hardened into posture. And the idea of speaking with conviction—of expressing clear belief—started to feel unsophisticated, even embarrassing. In many spaces, to sound too certain was to risk being dismissed as naive, rigid, or unaware of the complexity. So people hedged, ironized, or avoided strong positions altogether. Meaning itself became unstable—something provisional, endlessly deferred, open to infinite interpretation but resistant to shared understanding. You could question anything, reframe everything, and still never find solid ground. Even resistance risked becoming aestheticized—just another stance, absorbed into the same systems it sought to critique.

This had profound effects on the role of context. One of postmodernism’s most important contributions was showing that meaning is never fixed—that context shapes how we understand everything from language to imagery to identity. But in loosening the grip of universal truths, it also loosened the structures that once anchored meaning. If context could be endlessly rearranged, it could also be endlessly manipulated. Over time, this insight—originally meant to empower—made meaning feel slippery, even suspect. Interpretation became a kind of free-for-all.

In the art world, this led to a strange flattening. Irony became the dominant tone. Context, once a grounding framework, became more fluid and unstable. Provocation was often the point, but rarely the beginning of a deeper exchange. You could make anything mean anything, and in the process, nothing held. Artists and critics alike found themselves caught between the freedom to say anything and the inability to say something that could stand.

Damien Hirst’s Cherry Blossoms series takes this drift to its logical conclusion. At first glance, the paintings seem sincere—lush pinks and greens, textured blooms, painterly flair. But the illusion of meaning collapses under scrutiny. The works were largely produced by assistants in an assembly-line process. Hirst reportedly returns to these pre-painted canvases to dab on bits of color—not to transform them, but to leave a trace. Then he records himself doing it. Alone in the studio, adding final touches for the camera, he performs the role of artist while the real work happens elsewhere. The videos circulate on social media as pseudo-proof: curated evidence of presence in a system that demands authenticity but no longer recognizes it.

The gesture is theatrical, not expressive. It gives the appearance of intimacy while preserving the mechanics of mass production. But the deeper irony is in the work itself. The paintings don’t only resemble each other—they resemble every other neophyte floral painting. They look like the aesthetic noise of the algorithm: cheerful but empty, vaguely expressive but emotionally inert. They aren’t even visually pleasant, or unpleasant—they’re bland. Their function is ambient. Decorative and crude. Instantly forgettable. You’ve seen them before without ever really noticing them. And maybe that’s the point?

What’s most striking isn’t their sameness—it’s the apparent lack of concern for it. The quality of the work seems beside the point. There’s no real tension, no curiosity, no search for meaning—just production. And the indifference shows. Hirst speaks of the blossoms in romantic terms—beauty, transience, the seasons of life—but the language is as flat as the paintings themselves. They’re emotional clichés. The work repeats what’s already been said, by a million hobbyist painters. It’s drained of specificity, depth, and risk. Not because it’s gesturing toward emptiness, but because it no longer seems to care.

In a culture where everything can be aestheticized and shared, even sincerity becomes a kind of surface treatment. Hirst’s blossoms don’t bloom—they replicate. The result isn’t beauty or critique, but something eerier. A field of images that gestures toward feeling while remaining emotionally empty. Meaning is neutered. Authorship is staged. And everything starts to feel the same.

And collectors can’t get enough.

The Fear of Stepping Out of Line

Even without top-down censorship, powerful norms can quietly dictate what’s acceptable to say, think, or create. What’s changed in recent years isn’t simply that new rules have emerged—it’s that few feel empowered to question them. Pushback feels perilous, even when warranted. In the absence of friction, ideas aren’t sharpened; they’re smoothed into consensus. The frameworks that govern what counts as good, valid, or worthy have narrowed, not because someone declared it so, but because no one wants to be the one to challenge them.

This dynamic was starkly illustrated in 2023 when art critic Ben Davis penned a review of Devon Rodriguez’s exhibition Underground at UTA Artist Space. Davis’s review praised Rodriguez’s technical skill while gently questioning the conceptual depth of the work. The response was swift and punishing. Rodriguez, best known for his TikTok subway portraits, rallied his massive online following against Davis, resulting in a wave of harassment, personal attacks, and threats. What had been a mild and measured review was reframed as an offense—and the reaction served as a warning to others: even light criticism, if misaligned with audience expectations, can trigger serious backlash. It’s a stark example of how, in today’s climate, the fear of saying the wrong thing can overpower the value of saying something true.

Cultural theorist Mark Fisher, in his essay Exiting the Vampire Castle, warned against this very dynamic. He observed leftist communities turning inward, policing tone and identity with such intensity that solidarity became impossible. What was once a space for critique became a space of emotional exhaustion and moral one-upmanship. Fisher termed this a “witch-hunting moralism”—a politics of blame that destroys the possibility of collective movement. What’s missing, he suggests, isn’t outrage, but generosity—a willingness to assume good faith, to tolerate discomfort, and to work through difficult ideas without collapsing into accusation.

Much of this pressure doesn’t come from institutions or authority figures—it comes laterally, through peer networks and social media. Artists, critics, and cultural workers become both audience and enforcer. It’s a form of horizontal enforcement, where everyone’s watching everyone else, often with an eagerness to be the one who spots someone stepping out of line. The safest move is to stay one step behind the discourse, never ahead of it. No one wants to miss the shift in tone or language, and no one wants to post something that feels out of sync. And because visibility is everything in the art world, that fear is potent. The risk isn’t always cancellation—it’s also being quietly sidelined. Ignored. Uninvited. Forgotten.

The cost of this is more than individual. It flattens discourse. Artists stop exploring riskier directions. Critics temper their assessments. Institutions lean into caution. The result is a cultural sphere that feels stagnant—where the energy that should be fueling difficult, generative disagreement gets redirected into optics management. And where complexity and contradiction—qualities that once defined great art and criticism—start to feel dangerous. When people are afraid to say something that might be misread, or to hold two opposing ideas at once, creative exploration narrows. It becomes safer to be obvious than original. Safer to follow the script than to write a new one.

The Psychologization of Public Life

Emotion has always shaped art, politics, and discourse—but never with quite this degree of public centrality. What we’re witnessing isn’t simply a rise in emotional expression. It’s a broader shift in how culture processes disagreement, harm, and truth itself.

In many ways, it’s a response to the limits of Enlightenment rationalism. Western culture spent centuries elevating logic, objectivity, and empirical reasoning as the only legitimate tools for understanding the world. Subjective experience—especially emotional experience—was seen as unreliable, even dangerous. That hierarchy of mind over feeling worked to exclude voices whose pain, anger, or identity didn’t fit the so-called universal model. So it’s not surprising that many contemporary movements would push back by centering emotion instead. As political theorist Martha Nussbaum argues, emotions aren’t the enemy of reason—they’re expressions of value. They tell us what matters, what’s unjust, what needs repair.

This re-centering of emotion isn’t random—it’s part of a larger historical reckoning. The Enlightenment’s promise of objectivity came with a hidden cost: a hierarchy that cast emotion as feminine, racialized, and irrational—something to be tamed or transcended. So it’s no surprise that many contemporary movements have pushed back, not by rejecting reason, but by reclaiming the legitimacy of feeling. Political theorists like William Davies argue that we’re living through the undoing of the Enlightenment’s emotional suppression. “Feelings are now facts,” he writes. And in that shift, long-excluded voices have gained new ground—but we’re still figuring out how to share that ground once it’s opened.

But if Enlightenment culture trained us to suppress feeling, contemporary culture is still learning how to hold it. We haven’t yet developed shared tools for collective emotional literacy—especially in public life. And without those tools, emotion can dominate a conversation before it deepens it.

We’re not just expressing more emotion—we’re organizing culture around it. The standard isn’t what was said, but how it was felt. And feelings, by their nature, resist collective negotiation. You can challenge someone’s facts, logic, or framing. But you can’t challenge their emotional reaction without being seen as invalidating or unsafe. So the conversation stops before it can begin.

We’ve seen this pattern in the response to comedian Dave Chappelle’s Netflix specials, which sparked widespread backlash for their commentary on trans identity. For some viewers, the emotional harm felt was reason enough to call for removal. But others saw the conversation stop short—shaped less by engagement with what Chappelle said, and more by the emotional reaction it provoked. Disagreement wasn’t explored; it was pathologized.

This dynamic shows up elsewhere too. On college campuses, student protests have increasingly framed disfavored speech not as disagreement, but as danger. Invitations to controversial speakers become public flashpoints. Discomfort is treated as harm, and the presence of opposing ideas as an existential threat. The result is an atmosphere where learning is redefined—not as exposure to complexity, but as protection from disruption.

Consider the controversy surrounding Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket, included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. The work, an abstract depiction of Emmett Till’s casket, immediately provoked outrage. Critics—particularly Black artists and writers—argued that Schutz, a white painter, was exploiting Black suffering for aesthetic or symbolic gain. Artist Hannah Black, in an open letter that was widely circulated, called for the painting to be removed and even destroyed, writing: “The painting should not be acceptable to anyone who cares or pretends to care about Black people’s lives.” 

For many, the piece was part of a larger pattern—one in which Black trauma is made visible, circulated, and consumed, while Black agency and authorship remain marginalized. The core question for some wasn’t simply can this painting exist, but should it be shown, by this artist, at this moment, in this venue—amid heightened racial tension and long histories of cultural appropriation.

Schutz, for her part, said the work came from a place of grief and identification. She wasn’t trying to speak for anyone, she said, but to reckon with her own emotional reaction as a mother. The painting was not for sale, and she insisted she did not intend to profit from it. Some critics defended her, arguing that the calls to censor or destroy the work risked setting dangerous precedents—that art must remain a space where emotional risk and moral discomfort are possible. But for many others, the issue wasn’t her intention. It was the history. The context. The power dynamics. The location of the work—at a major institutional exhibition curated by white organizers—made it even harder to separate individual expression from systemic exclusion.

And underlying that controversy was a harder, more institutional question: What conversations didn’t happen because this painting was chosen? What other artists—perhaps Black artists engaging similar themes with different stakes—weren’t included? In deciding to show Open Casket, the curators also decided not to show other work that might have opened up richer or more resonant dialogue in that moment. The painting didn’t just provoke—it displaced. And that displacement is part of what made the reaction so charged.

The result was a cultural standoff. A moment that should have opened a difficult, necessary conversation about race, representation, and artistic responsibility instead hardened into sides. What was missing wasn’t passion or intelligence—both were present in abundance. What was missing was the space to metabolize all that intensity. The ability to sit with the discomfort long enough to make sense of it together. In the absence of that space, the work became a symbol—not of dialogue, but of rupture. And the emotional weight of the moment, rather than being worked through, was left to hang in the air, unresolved.

These examples are emblematic of a broader pattern: emotional intensity overwhelming the possibility of shared meaning—something that’s become increasingly common across public life. In this climate, the artist’s intention matters less than the viewer’s reaction. The artwork doesn’t spark dialogue—it sparks projection. A critique doesn’t invite conversation—it gets pathologized as toxic or unsafe. Public statements are sifted for microaggressions, tone violations, hidden motives. Everyone’s scanning for harm, but no one can agree on what harm actually means.

Cultural critic bell hooks warned us against this kind of collapse. Love and anger, she argued, were essential to liberation—but only when held in tension with trust, reflection, and shared responsibility. It’s not enough to feel. We have to stay in the room long enough to understand what those feelings are asking of us.

This mirrors the fragmentation we explored in postmodernism—but on a psychological level. As Jonathan Haidt has argued, when discomfort is equated with danger, the conditions for serious dialogue collapse—not because people disagree, but because they no longer believe disagreement is survivable. Emotion becomes privatized certainty. If something feels harmful, that feeling becomes the final word—no inquiry, no negotiation, no possibility of repair.

That doesn’t mean emotion is wrong. It means emotion, like reason, needs friction, reflection, and shared norms to do its best work. But in the absence of those conditions, we see something different: feelings used not to connect, but to control. We don’t process emotion—we brandish it. We wield it as proof, as protection, as punishment. And in doing so, we lose what makes both art and dialogue matter: the capacity to be changed by another perspective, and the friction that true engagement demands.

The Algorithmic Capture of Culture

The internet promised freedom. A frictionless space where ideas could flow without gatekeepers, where voices once excluded could find an audience, where discovery wasn’t determined by institutions or elites. And for a moment, it looked like that might be true. But platforms never stay neutral. They evolve—or rather, are engineered—to reward what performs. And performance, in the platform economy, isn’t measured by depth, meaning, or complexity. It’s measured by engagement.

Cultural theorist Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, warned that digital platforms don’t just reflect behavior—they shape it, predict it, and ultimately manipulate it. By engineering environments that reward predictable emotional outputs, platforms train users to conform to algorithmic incentives. Over time, that structure doesn’t just change what people say. It changes how they think—and what they think is worth saying.

That shift has rewritten the structure of attention itself. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and even Substack don’t just host content—they shape it. Their algorithms prioritize immediacy, repetition, clarity, and emotionally charged posts—especially those that frame people as wronged, lied to, or betrayed. Gaslighting, commiseration, conspiracy—these are the emotional patterns that rise. What cuts through the noise is what the machine can easily categorize and circulate. And over time, creators adapt. Not necessarily because they want to—but because it becomes the only way to be seen.

You can see it clearly in the music industry. Artists on platforms like Spotify have begun to structure songs around skip rates, payout thresholds, and playlist visibility. Producers front-load tracks with hooks in the first 15 seconds—because if a listener skips before then, it doesn’t count as a full play. Songs are getting shorter, catchier, and more repetitive, not because artists are creatively limited, but because the platform’s design encourages it. The goal isn’t depth or experimentation—it’s retention. What began as a promise of frictionless access has become an apparatus that hides anything that can’t be instantly consumed. As industry experts have noted, what used to be a medium for storytelling and mood is increasingly optimized for streaming metrics. Music is still being made, but it’s being shaped—sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly—by the architecture of the algorithm.

And this shift isn’t confined to music. The same pressures are reshaping how art, writing, and ideas circulate across nearly every field. This is no longer a subcultural concern. It’s a mainstream reality. Across music, writing, art, scholarship, and criticism, the gravitational pull of platform logic is reshaping not just how work is shared, but what work is made. There’s less room for ambiguity. Less patience for nuance. What thrives are takes, tropes, formats, templates. Styles become memes. Ideas become soundbites. Even rebellion starts to look familiar. Because the algorithm doesn’t reward surprise—it rewards familiarity.

Technology sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has described how these platforms create “feedback loops of extremity.” But the extremity isn’t always ideological—it’s aesthetic, emotional, or structural. What’s rewarded is what’s recognizable. So artists and thinkers learn to smooth out what’s unexpected. They deliver quicker payoffs. They build bodies of work that look good in grids. They become brands, not because they want to—but because the structure favors the branded over the exploratory, the choreographed over the unpredictable, the streamlined over the searching.

Platforms even reward performative authenticity—but only a certain kind. Not the unruly kind that grows from self-examination or wrestling with tension, but something more stylized: curated vulnerability, emotional performance, choreographed rawness. It gives the impression of being real—yet it’s rehearsed rather than spontaneous, stylized rather than sincere, curated rather than lived.

Identity becomes performance—not just for expression, but for visibility. The result isn’t outright falseness, but something more insidious: a cultivated self that feels authentic enough to resonate while remaining optimized for circulation.

Art doesn’t disappear in this world. But its metabolism changes. It has to keep up. It has to fit in. The result is a cultural field that moves fast, feels familiar, and resists slow growth. Work that once invited patience or discomfort now has to capture attention in seconds or risk vanishing altogether.

In the visual arts, this compression is especially visible. Art critic Ben Davis has noted how Instagram, in particular, has pushed artists toward visual punch—toward work that photographs well, reads clearly, and travels quickly. Detail, texture, scale, and time are lost. What’s gained is reach. But reach without resonance becomes a kind of ghost circulation: the image travels, but nothing lingers.

For many artists, the pressure is existential. Not in a dramatic sense—but in a practical one. Visibility is tied to viability. And in a system where the algorithm is the de facto curator, deviation becomes a risk. Not because of censorship, but because of obscurity. The fear isn’t being punished—it’s not being noticed.

Even when the work isn’t directly shaped by the algorithm, it’s shaped by the awareness of it. The artist doesn’t just make the thing—they imagine how it will be seen, clipped, shared, and interpreted. That recursive loop—of creation anticipated through consumption—dulls spontaneity. It narrows experimentation. And it produces what William Deresiewicz, in The Death of the Artist, calls “market-ready selves”: people who are not only constantly producing content, but constantly adjusting their selfhood to remain relevant.

We often frame this as a question of distraction. But distraction is just the surface effect. The deeper shift is epistemological. When attention becomes the currency of value, then what’s meaningful is what’s visible. And what’s visible is what performs. That logic doesn’t just influence what we consume—it reshapes what we believe is worth making.

Orchestrating Constraint

We’ve explored five cultural forces that—while distinct in origin—often work in concert to shape how people speak, think, and create. To see their combined effect, it helps to shift from analysis to imagination. What follows is a fictitious scenario drawn from the patterns we’ve discussed. It’s meant to illustrate how these forces converge not in dramatic flashpoints, but in the subtle choices people make every day. How do you pursue expression, risk, or meaning when every gesture must navigate market logic, group dynamics, platform incentives, emotional risk, and unstable meaning?

Lena is an emerging artist in a city with an active but modest art community. She’s been in some group shows, had a couple of modest solo exhibitions in alternative spaces around town, and has a growing following on Instagram. She’s thoughtful, socially aware, and genuinely wants to contribute something meaningful. She also wants to take her career to the next level. That means making work that gets noticed—by curators, collectors, institutions. And whether she admits it or not, by her peers.

She starts a new series. The idea is promising—something personal, formal but emotionally grounded. Her early sketches feel raw, strange, not quite resolved. She likes what she’s seeing but worries it’s too much of a departure from her earlier work. So instead of following the oddness, she finds herself shaping the work into something more recognizable. Partly because she knows what kinds of images get shared. Partly because she knows what her cohorts will say, what they always say. She smooths out the unfamiliar parts hoping she’ll remember to play around with those new ideas later. When she posts it online, it gets more likes than usual. Comments call it "provocative," "timely," "authentic." She’s relieved. But also, quietly, unsure.

The feedback loop has started.

Lena wouldn’t say she’s censoring herself. She’s not afraid of being challenged on her ideas. But she is afraid of being misunderstood—or worse, ignored. And so the internal calculation begins: What version of this idea feels legible? What tone will land? What reference will signal that I get it—that I’m in alignment?

This is how the five forces are converging:

The neoliberal pressure to succeed in an oversaturated market means Lena is always thinking about visibility. Visibility means opportunity. So when platform algorithms reward consistency, clarity, and emotional legibility, she leans into those habits. The work becomes easier to scan, easier to categorize. Lena doesn’t necessarily believe this makes the work better—but she knows it makes it more viable online.

Over time, that calculation becomes a loop: a kind of self-aware production calibrated to resonate, not to surprise. Like an endless playlist of algorithm-approved songs—polished, palatable, and forgettable. In the name of visibility, we flatten what makes us human. What gets lost isn’t only originality or risk. It’s distinction itself. When every gesture is optimized for acceptance, everything starts to look the same. And sameness isn’t safety—it’s slow creative erosion.

At the same time, she’s operating in a climate of psychological sensitivity, where strong responses can be read as harm, and even mild deviation from group norms carries reputational risk. She avoids anything that might be misread—not because she’s insincere, but because she doesn’t want to be flattened into a symbol of the wrong thing. Even when she wants to push back or take a risk, she remembers what happened to a friend who got piled on. How quickly the tone of support can flip.

Her education, shaped by postmodernism, taught her to deconstruct everything—to treat meaning as fluid, identity as context, and theory as the material. In critique sessions, the focus wasn’t on what the work communicated on its own, but how the artist could locate themselves within larger narratives of power, history, and culture. Identity became a kind of context: not just who you are, but how your presence and perspective shape what your work is allowed to mean. Everyone’s meaning was valid, but meaning itself became unmoored. And while the classroom encouraged open interpretation, the work often began to converge—conceptually heavy, visually familiar, formally underdeveloped. What mattered most was being able to explain yourself fluently in the right language—not whether the work held up without explanation.

It didn’t feel like a big thing at the time. But now, Lena can sense it—the way that absence of shared meaning has followed her beyond school. Not just into the studio, but into the broader culture. Into every conversation that falls apart before it begins. Because when there’s no common reference point, no stable ground to build from, even good faith turns fragile. Change becomes harder to organize. Conflict becomes harder to resolve. Everything gets personal, everything gets slippery—and nothing sticks.

And that cultural instability isn’t abstract—it lands right in her hands, every time she works on a painting. In the studio, she might second-guess whether sincerity might be mistaken for naiveté. She wonders again if making the work more visually refined will come off as avoiding real issues—as if beauty or complexity signals a lack of seriousness. So she plays it safe—not by retreating, but by performing alignment.

And the mechanism that keeps it all in place isn’t top-down—it’s horizontal enforcement. It’s the group chat, the DM thread, the post that clearly calls someone out, but never says who. Everyone knows. No one says. It’s the soft threat of being read as problematic, out of step, or worse: embarrassing. The risk isn’t always cancellation. Sometimes it’s being taken the wrong way—or not being taken seriously at all. And when Lena thinks about pushing the work further—making it stranger, riskier, less resolved—she hesitates. Not because she doesn’t want to. Because she can already hear the reaction.

This isn’t a story of cowardice or conformity. It’s a story of atmosphere—of acceptance, of pressure, of trying to succeed within the lines that have already been drawn. A thickening web of subtle forces shapes what gets made, what gets shown, and what gets said about it. Lena is still making art. But every choice carries weight—not just artistic, but social, emotional, economic. The forces don’t tell her what to do. They don’t have to. They simply make certain moves feel riskier than others. And over time, that quiet pressure has a cost—not just for her, but for the culture she’s trying to contribute to.

What emerges isn’t outright failure—it’s a kind of ambient mediocrity. Work that ticks the boxes but leaves nothing behind. It may sell, it may circulate, but it rarely stirs, disrupts, or endures. And the deeper tragedy is that this isn’t limited to art. It mirrors something larger: a social order that prizes safety over substance, performance over connection, optimization over aliveness. In the name of visibility, we flatten what makes us human. What gets lost isn’t only originality or risk—it’s sincerity, joy, friction, curiosity, and everything that gives culture its depth.

Naming What Needs to Change

If we want to build a more vital cultural landscape, we have to begin by naming the constraints. Not just the ideological ones, but the structural, emotional, technological, and psychological habits that now shape how art is made, how ideas are received, and how people engage with each other. The forces shaping today’s culture aren’t simply abstract trends—they’re interlocking pressures that condition everything from expression to attention, from dialogue to disagreement.

We’ve traced five of them. The market’s distorting logic. The algorithm’s flattening effect. The inward collapse of emotional discourse. The postmodern erosion of shared authority. The in-group policing that narrows what can be said. Each of these emerged from different domains—economic, digital, therapeutic, philosophical, and social—but they converge in how they constrain the flow of cultural life. They don’t just change what gets rewarded. They change what feels possible. We tried to remove friction to make culture more humane. But without friction, there’s no traction. And without traction, culture can’t move.

What we’re left with is, in many ways, a culture of soft coercion—not outright censorship, but a diffuse pressure that shapes behavior before anyone has to say no. It doesn’t operate through mandates or bans, but through signals—atmospheric, emotional, algorithmic—about what’s desirable, acceptable, and safe. Institutions incentivize risk-aversion. Platforms accelerate siloed sameness, dividing us into echo chambers and rewarding the behaviors that keep us there. Disagreement from within is treated as disloyalty. Emotional resonance becomes a proxy for truth. 

None of this began with bad intentions. Much of it grew from urgent demands—for visibility, for protection, for redress. But good ideas, left unexamined, can calcify into new orthodoxy. Artists, thinkers, and participants adapt—not because they lack imagination, but because the atmosphere has taught them to be careful. And ironically, as polarization between groups intensifies, the pressure for agreement within groups also grows. 

Culture feels fractured and combative on the surface—but beneath that, a subtler conformity sets in.  We’re fighting across lines, but avoiding tension within them. The friction hasn’t vanished—it’s migrated. And some of the most vital spaces for growth and creative exchange are the ones where it’s gone missing. The result isn’t silence, but banal repetition. The circulation of ideas that feel increasingly frictionless, familiar, and hollow.

The solution isn’t a return to some imagined past of unfiltered provocation or rigid authority. It’s to ask what kind of culture we want to build for tomorrow—and what conditions would make it possible. A culture where disagreement isn’t confused with harm. Where curiosity isn’t punished. Where complexity isn’t collapsed into soundbites. Where risk, rupture, and ambiguity have room to breathe.

Before we can start building that, we have to recognize that culture isn’t a passive reflection of the times—it’s a system shaped by decisions, incentives, and norms. If we want something different, we have to remake those systems. Not overnight. Not by decree. But through deliberate shifts in how we fund, curate, educate, organize, and participate. The goal isn’t to tear everything down. It’s to make space for what’s been missing.

We’re not promising answers here—certainly not all the ones we’d need, and not ones we know will work in every case. We’re not experts in this, and this isn’t a manifesto. But we have to start somewhere. And we’d love to hear where you think we should go next. Below are a few places to begin. Please add to the list.

Shifting the Culture of Expression

If we want a healthier cultural atmosphere—one that welcomes friction without collapsing under it—we have to change what gets rewarded, and what gets reflexively punished. Some of that work is cultural: shifting norms, expectations, and collective habits. But some of it is institutional. The same systems that have quietly incentivized performance, consensus, and risk-aversion can be restructured to support experimentation, friction, and genuine dialogue.

At the cultural level, we need to stop treating disagreement as an identity threat. That begins with restoring the idea that contradiction isn’t a flaw—it’s a feature of learning. The best conversations rarely follow clean trajectories. They loop, stall, revise, backtrack. They leave room for confusion, vulnerability, and discovery. But that kind of openness can only happen when people feel safe enough to take risks and secure enough to survive being wrong. As bell hooks once argued, "genuine dialogue is not possible if we do not have a community of shared meaning." But she also reminds us that shared meaning doesn’t require agreement—it requires trust. That means creating spaces where disagreement isn’t just allowed, but meaningfully held.

At the institutional level, risk needs to be revalued. Instead of penalizing unpredictability or deviation, arts organizations, foundations, and educational spaces could make creative discomfort part of the criteria for support. What if more grants rewarded work that resists easy definition. What if museums supported work that invites disagreement—not as spectacle or conflict, but as an opportunity for deeper engagement in a space where it’s safe to not all agree. What if schools made intellectual humility and discursive resilience core to their curriculums.

Some of this is already happening, in pockets. The School for Poetic Computation in New York, for example, uses art and code to explore creative, ethical, and political complexity—often privileging process over product. The Rebuild Foundation in Chicago, founded by artist Theaster Gates, transforms abandoned buildings into spaces for cultural exchange, centering Black voices without reducing them to monolithic narratives. These are just two examples of counter-models—institutions structured not around compliance or consensus, but around friction, trust, and discovery.

Technology critic Zeynep Tufekci has argued that platforms shape the behavior they’re built to reward. But that’s not just a critique of social media—it’s a design insight. What if our institutions—schools, museums, granting bodies—were reimagined to reward ambiguity, reward patience, reward the kind of dialogue that doesn’t produce clean takeaways? Culture follows structure. If we want the culture to shift, the systems need to shift too.

This isn’t about endorsing chaos or handing everyone a megaphone. It’s about making room for surprise. Supporting work that doesn’t fit the frame. Letting art provoke instead of pander. Letting ideas unfold slowly, with the faith that if we build the right conditions, the depth will come.

At the same time, we want to be clear: valuing friction doesn’t mean dismissing care. The language of harm, identity, and emotional safety didn’t appear out of nowhere—it was fought for by those who were long denied voice and dignity. Emotional legibility, communal accountability, and horizontal enforcement all arose, in part, as protections against systems that refused to listen. We don’t take that lightly.

But protection and friction don’t have to be opposites. The most generative cultures do both—they make space for contradiction and care. They hold disagreement without collapsing into harm, and honor emotional complexity without turning every discomfort into danger. Our argument isn’t that emotional safety should be abandoned. It’s that it shouldn’t come at the cost of inquiry, surprise, or the ability to change. We need friction that sharpens—not domination disguised as dialogue, but difference that helps us grow.

Resisting the Flattening Forces

If we want to rebuild a culture that supports friction, surprise, and mutual transformation, we need more than good intentions—we need tactics. The five forces we’ve mapped aren’t abstract—they’re structural. They shape the systems we move through and the habits we absorb. So pushing back requires a deliberate effort to shift those systems and habits, both individually and institutionally. What’s needed is not a return to some lost golden age, but a recalibration: a way of designing spaces, tools, and relationships that don’t just accommodate disagreement and creative risk—but actively invite them.

Some of this work happens on the ground—in classrooms, studios, galleries, collectives. Educators, curators, and cultural workers can create conditions that prioritize slow thinking over hot takes, curiosity over performance, and experimentation over polish. In education, this might look like building curricula that reward revision and risk instead of rote consensus. In curation, it might mean creating exhibitions that leave room for contradiction rather than resolving it in advance. In criticism, it means reviewing the work itself, not the ideological positioning of the artist.

Cultural theorist bell hooks once wrote that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” That possibility, she argued, depends on creating an environment where vulnerability, challenge, and difference aren’t just tolerated, but welcomed as necessary for learning. In the same spirit, we might imagine institutions—museums, schools, granting bodies—not as gatekeepers or validators, but as stewards of complexity. Their job isn’t to define the terms of engagement, but to hold space for many terms to co-exist, clash, and evolve.

At the level of infrastructure, platform design plays a crucial role. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has pointed out that many of our current systems were “built for content, not for people.” That difference matters. Algorithms reward volume, polarity, and emotional immediacy because those things keep us clicking. But what if platforms were optimized for something else—like connection, reflection, or mutual understanding? What if they were designed not to accelerate reaction, but to support dialogue?

Take the comment section, for example. Right now, it’s engineered for speed and spectacle. But it doesn’t have to be. Imagine features that nudge users toward engagement instead of performance: thread prompts that encourage people to ask questions rather than stake claims; upvoting systems that reward nuance instead of outrage; reminders to return to conversations after time has passed, allowing for reflection instead of escalation. Even small design shifts—like time-delayed posting, or private follow-up invites—could open space for deeper, more generous exchanges. If platforms shape how we talk, then redesigning those spaces isn’t just a technical question—it’s a cultural one.

This kind of rethinking doesn’t need to stop with platforms. It can happen across the cultural field—wherever creative risk and discourse intersect. What if collectives or residencies required artists to publicly disagree with each other’s work—in writing, in dialogue, in front of an audience—but in ways that deepen rather than polarize? What if review panels included people trained in generative critique, not just consensus scoring? What if funders rewarded risk-taking that led to failure, provided it was documented and reflected upon?

These aren’t utopian fantasies. They’re design questions. What kind of behaviors are we building for? What kind of minds do we want to cultivate? And how can we structure our systems to reflect that?

The flattening forces we’ve described—market logic, platform incentives, in-group policing, psychologized discourse—aren’t going away. But they’re not immutable. They’re systems, which means they can be redesigned. The work begins by treating culture not as a passive mirror, but as a structure we co-create. If we want to shift the culture, we have to reshape the systems that scaffold it—starting with the tools we use, the platforms we inhabit, and the values we embed in the institutions around us. Let’s support spaces that favor depth over spectacle, contradiction over consensus, listening over branding.

A Culture That Can Hold More

If we want to rebuild space for disagreement, surprise, and risk, we can’t stop at strategies and tactics. We need a deeper shift in sensibility. That means cultivating a culture that can hold more—more contradiction, more ambiguity, more discomfort, more difference.

This kind of culture won’t come from policy alone. It will come from practice, from modeling, from everyday decisions made by artists, institutions, educators, and audiences. It means refusing the false comfort of certainty. It means re-learning how to be curious when we don’t understand. It means treating creative tension not as a liability, but as the generative force it’s always been.

We also need to rehabilitate the idea of complexity itself. That means rejecting frameworks that turn every disagreement into a crisis, every question into a threat, every ambiguity into a flaw. It means resisting the pressure to rush to judgment, and instead staying with the unformed, the unfinished, the uncomfortable. Those spaces are where insight lives. They’re where transformation happens—and where people need the room and grace to change their mind without fear of shame or exile.

If we want a culture that grows, that moves, that surprises itself, we need to recover a sense of dialogic possibility. Not a return to consensus, but a return to contact—to the idea that meaning itself emerges not in isolation, but in the charged space between people who see the world differently. As literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote, “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person; it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.” In other words, we don’t figure things out alone. We figure them out together—by talking, disagreeing, listening, and staying in the room. It’s through that back-and-forth, that friction, that something new can emerge. Not because everyone ends up agreeing, but because they stayed long enough to understand.

What makes that process possible isn’t perfect harmony. It’s proximity. The willingness to remain in the room when things get tense. The courage to bring your full self without demanding total agreement in return. The most meaningful art—and the most meaningful cultural shifts—don’t emerge from perfect control. They come from encounter. From staying open, showing up, and risking change.

That’s the work ahead: not erasing friction, but learning to hold it. To stay curious in the face of tension. To treat friction not as something to smooth over, but as something to learn from. Because friction reveals where something isn’t settled yet—where values collide, where assumptions crack, where better questions might live. Friction shouldn’t dull, it should sharpen. It’s not a glitch in the system. It’s a guide.

Sometimes, this kind of cultural work begins not with major interventions, but with something much smaller. As philosopher and artist Erin Manning reminds us, transformation often starts with a minor gesture—a subtle disruption of the expected that creates space for something else to emerge. It might be as simple as gathering with other artists at a local pub—not to perform agreement, but to argue, reflect, and sharpen ideas together. That kind of space can feel informal, even inconsequential. But it creates the conditions where friction becomes fertile—where surprise and contradiction are metabolized, not erased.

The Culture We Want

We’ve spent this essay tracing how the unwitting pursuit of a frictionless culture—especially inside our own communities—has produced a strange new kind of constraint: a climate that prizes safety over confrontation, agreement over inquiry, and surface performance over deep engagement. Conflict hasn’t vanished; it’s been displaced. What’s often missing isn’t passion or belief, but the ability to stay with tension long enough for something new to emerge.

So what would it feel like to move differently? To build a culture where discomfort isn’t dangerous, where disagreement doesn’t collapse into accusation, and where risk—creative, intellectual, emotional—is something we know how to hold?

That kind of culture wouldn’t be defined by constant consensus. It would be defined by capacity. The capacity to absorb contradiction without rushing to resolve it. To sit with uncertainty without treating it as weakness. To trust that not all questions need immediate answers, and that not all disagreement signals disloyalty.

It would mean expanding our tolerance for ambiguity—not to celebrate vagueness, but to make room for discovery. Ambiguity, after all, is where curiosity lives. And curiosity is where everything worth making begins.

In such a culture, artists wouldn’t be asked to signal alignment before they’re heard. Audiences wouldn’t be trained to clap on cue. Institutions wouldn’t prize polish over depth or reward the safest expressions of identity. Instead, what’s rewarded is what resonates—and resonance doesn’t always arrive cleanly. Sometimes it comes in the form of disruption, confusion, or contradiction. But it lingers. It sharpens. It opens something up.

That kind of culture wouldn’t require us to abandon care. It would deepen it. Because real care isn’t about smoothing everything over—it’s about staying present through discomfort. It’s about creating the conditions for people to be surprised, challenged, and even changed, without being cast out for it. It’s about building enough trust to risk complexity, and enough strength to metabolize difference.

In this imagined world, dialogue wouldn’t be something we perform. It would be something we practice. Not for show, not for scoring points—but for the purpose of making meaning together, across our differences. And when conflict arises—as it always will—it wouldn’t be seen as failure. It would be seen as friction. And friction, when held with care, is how transformation begins.

We don’t need a perfect plan to begin. We need people willing to speak without knowing exactly how it’ll land. To listen without bracing for betrayal. To create without trimming every edge in advance. To stay curious long enough to be moved.

This isn’t utopia. It’s a capacity we can build.

Beyond Nostalgia, Beyond Nihilism

When culture feels stagnant, it’s easy to romanticize the past or despair about the present. We reach for earlier eras of messier freedom—or we decide the whole thing is too broken to fix.

But both moves miss the moment we’re in.

Nostalgia forgets who was excluded. Nihilism assumes change is impossible. But what’s needed now is a refusal of both—an insistence that culture isn’t over, and it isn’t finished. It’s being made every day, through every conversation, every risk, every decision not to default to the safest version of ourselves.

This doesn’t mean pretending the constraints don’t exist. It means holding onto the idea that constraint isn’t the whole story. That we still have agency, and that creative life—at its best—is always a practice of unsettling what’s settled. Always a space where the unexpected can still break through.

We don’t need to restore the old models. We need to remember what they were trying to do—and invent new forms that go further.

A Practice of Reinvention

What we’re calling for isn’t a blueprint—it’s a disposition. A kind of cultural stance that stays in motion. That doesn’t expect resolution, but looks for insight. That makes room for contradiction without rushing to clarity.

To build this kind of culture, we need to normalize failure—not just in art, but in conversation, in belief, in becoming. We need to reward the act of trying again. The slow work of listening better. The courage it takes to revise.

And that means making peace with process. With not knowing yet. With being willing to stay open.

As philosopher Édouard Glissant reminds us, we need the right to opacity. The right to resist total legibility. Not everything must be explained, justified, or optimized. Some truths arrive obliquely. Some beauty requires trust. Some insights need time to unfurl.

This is what reinvention looks like—not a wholesale rejection of what came before, but a commitment to what could still become. Not a culture that claims to have answers, but one that’s willing to ask better questions.

It begins wherever we are. In studios, classrooms, comments sections, friend groups, curatorial meetings, and late-night conversations. Anywhere two people decide not to perform for each other, but to stay in the room and find something new.

That’s the culture we want. And piece by piece, it’s one we can still make.

Crafting this essay was an experiment in collaborating with ChatGPT—using AI not as a shortcut, but as a tool to help refine my thinking, deepen the argument, and sharpen the language. While the AI assisted in shaping the prose, the core ideas, arguments, and structural choices are my own. This partnership allowed me to focus on the essence of the subject matter, ensuring that the final piece resonates with human insight and authenticity. The words, in some cases, were AI-generated. But the act of turning scattered questions into a coherent argument—that was the work of a curious, human mind. My hope is that, regardless of how this was written, the substance of what it explores remains relevant.

© 2025 Mark Dunst. All rights reserved. No part of this essay may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of Mark Dunst and WhoDaThunk Publishing.