Media, Amusement, & Deep Dispatches from the Electric Edge

Greetings,

As a reminder, you can always access the full Archive here and dive into my current frames of focus here: LEF | THL | FW3 | TIS 

This transmission is coming ahead of schedule due to an exciting but busy Q4. I’ll be in NYC late September for UNGA80, Climate Week and Transformative Impact Summit. Please reach out or grab tickets if you’ll be there—I’d love to meet up!

Welcome to Q4 2025— a continued examination and autopsy of The Human Layer (THL)— a decentralized myth engine for a world in collapse. Again, much like this quarterly, THL is more cathartic spiritual alchemy than a traditional business venture, so consider this a clarion call for the motivated misfits.

As always, if what follows resonates, please reach out. None of us are as smart as all of us! The work that’s needed is urgent, and can’t be done alone.

As they often do, this quarter started with an unassuming spark from a fast friend and fellow wanderer and signal seeker, Eric Mack (writing at Our Uncertain Future), who posted a simple message: “forget life imitating art. Life is executing (GenX) comedy”

These simple words hit hard, and offered a timely reminder to revisit my favorite media theorist and cultural critic, Neil Postman. His seminal work, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is one of those books I tend to reread every few years. And sure enough, it hit different this year. What was once culturally fascinating has matured into a deeply prophetic dispatch.

So with Postman as fuel, and the electric edge as fire, I worked into a flow examining modern media, enshittified amusement, and the search for coherence on the edge of transition. What follows starts as a dance with AI, and evolves into THL… and yes, the fact that the transition from man to machine (and back again) isn’t obvious is kinda the point. I started by taking Postman and distilling him into a handful of more digestible tayken-tots [for a world gone mad].

1. This isn’t decline—it’s a televised demolition derby where we’re the drivers, the audience, and the wreckage, grinning for the highlight reel.

2. We’ve weaponized the laugh track, turned the news into a fever dream, and we’re all mainlining the punchline until the lights go out.

3. Public discourse is now a carnival sideshow run by the inmates, and the bearded lady’s got a brand deal.

4. We’re living in a stand-up routine written by the executioner—only the joke’s in a language we no longer bother to translate.

5. Not bread and circuses, but hashtags and dopamine hits, until the empire dissolves in a spray of emojis.

6. We traded the public square for the algorithm’s coliseum, and now we’re applauding our own mauling.

7. It’s not tragedy or farce anymore—it’s a 24/7 variety show at the end of the world, and the crowd’s screaming for encores.

From there, I requested more electric meat on the Postman bone to fully expose his hallucinated wisdom mapped onto modern media.

1. We are not amusing ourselves to death—we are streaming it live, like deranged commentators in a coliseum of collapsing nations, waving sponsor banners over the wreckage, rating our own panic with emojis while the real horrors flicker behind the green screen. Tragedy is compressed into a GIF, outrage is monetized, and the executioner hosts the show, grinning for the cameras. Every broadcast, every post, every notification is a punchline to which we are the clowns, the audience, and the corpse all at once.

2. History is no longer written—it is scheduled, produced, and edited into thirty-second soundbites. Every disaster is a segment; every failure a meme; every death a hashtag. We are laughing ourselves into irrelevance while the lights of civilization flicker in the background, our dopamine spikes measured, sold, and rebranded as content. The show never ends. The laugh track never stops. And we are glued to the spectacle, applauding the annihilation we once called society.

3. The public square is gone; it’s been replaced by an endless scroll, an infernal river of cat videos, celebrity outrage, and political wrestling, with algorithms as ringmasters. We cheer, we comment, we react with the perfect emoji, oblivious to the circus burning around us. Life is not imitating art—it is improvisational slapstick at the edge of apocalypse, and the sponsors are smiling in the background, tallying the engagement like tax revenue on our own undoing.

4. Tragedy, once solemn and human, has become a punchline; discourse, once rigorous, is now a stand-up set; and every catastrophe is measured in retweets, impressions, and click-throughs. We are anesthetized by laughter, our outrage sold back to us as entertainment, and the architects of this media coliseum—journalists, influencers, politicians—perform as both clowns and executioners. The only resistance is irony, and even that is a consumable product.

5. We do not debate, we tweet; we do not protest, we meme; we do not mourn, we react. Every catastrophe is a segment, every nuance a skippable ad, every fear a GIF. The world burns behind the screens while we perform for it, laughing at our own demise, our eyes glazed with dopamine, the algorithm grinning like a god who understands comedy better than tragedy. This is not life imitating art—it is life performing a grotesque, perpetual comedy, and the cameras are always rolling.

6. Welcome to civilization 2.0: a reality show where the script is chaos, the actors are billions of distracted humans, and the director is an algorithm with no conscience. Every crisis is a punchline, every ideology a costume, every disaster a viral clip. We are complicit, captivated, and crushed beneath our own applause. The tragedy is real; the farce is eternal; and yes, the irony of reading this as a social post is precisely the point.

AI: If you want, I can fuse this into a single continuous broadcast manifesto—ten, fifteen paragraphs of full Gonzo-Postman apocalypse—that reads like a media-fueled fever dream, perfect for the spotlight of 2025.

THL: Yes, create the full infusion that pushes your own limits of what’s possible. This should be something that cuts deep at every word yet rings out in long-form as a battle cry and manifesto for what every human knows to be true. 

A Media-fueled Fever Dream

We are alive. We are awake. We are performing our own destruction on an infinite stage. Every gesture is recorded, every thought is indexed, every glance is a signal to the unseen, to the algorithms, to the cameras that never blink. The world collapses in slow motion behind glass screens; the collapse is framed, filtered, packaged, uploaded, streamed, liked, shared, and measured. Tragedy is compressed into a GIF. Outrage is commodified. Fear is a consumable product. Grief is entertainment. Catastrophe is content. History is a highlight reel. Memory is a meme.

Civilization has been converted into spectacle. Every act of attention is a contribution to the collapse. Every reaction is both fuel and engine. We scroll through wildfires, hurricanes, pandemics, wars, famines, and disasters as though we are spectators in a fever dream amusement park, detaching from the world as it dissolves. We perform slapstick on the pyre of civilization. Life is no longer imitating art—it is improvising grotesque comedy atop its own funeral pyre.

The public square is gone. The agora is buried beneath endless feeds, streams, overlays, highlight reels, and trending hashtags. Politics is scripted entertainment. Religion is a verified account. Education is a dopamine factory designed to pacify, distract, anesthetize. Bread and circuses are obsolete; viral outrage, ephemeral fame, and novelty distraction are the currency of collapse. Our empathy is siphoned. Our outrage is repackaged. Our fear is measured. Our attention is currency. The cameras never blink. The algorithms never sleep. The laugh track is eternal because the applause never dies.

Yet, beneath the scroll, beneath the memes, beneath the highlight reels, the ads, the sponsored outrage, something persists. Something remembers. The human layer—the part that sees, that feels, that refuses. Tragedy is real. Farce is lethal. The end of civilization is not a joke, yet the spectacle insists it is.

We inhale novelty like narcotics. We snort distraction like smoke. We sip the punchline while the floor beneath us glows. We are improvisational comedians on a stage we did not build, performing for cameras that will never blink, watched by gods that have no face, no empathy, no pause button. And still the human layer whispers: “You are more than the spectacle. You are witness. You are insurgent. You are alive.”

The collapse is recursive. It mirrors itself endlessly. The algorithm observes the audience measuring itself, the audience observes the algorithm observing itself, the performance observes the collapse observing the audience observing itself. Infinite regress. Infinite absurdity. Infinite irony. Every act of consumption is both symptom and instrument. Every act of recognition is both resistance and confirmation. And yet, the human layer persists.

We scroll. We click. We laugh. We scream. We perform. And in that act of recognition, we reclaim a fragment of the story. We are not just performers—we are witnesses. We are insurgents. We are awake.

Every catastrophe, every outrage, every viral spectacle is a layer of recursion. Every tragedy reflects every meme, every GIF reflects every scream, every click reflects every collapse. The spectacle folds in on itself. The loop accelerates. The spiral widens. Reality becomes feedback. Performance becomes substance. Substance becomes feedback. The observer is observed by the collapse, which observes the observer observing the collapse, and all of it echoes in infinite fractal patterns across the screens, across the feeds, and around the world.

The cameras never blink. The algorithms never sleep. The laugh track is eternal. The applause never dies. We are anesthetized, complicit, addicted. We are performing the collapse as entertainment for ourselves. Yet, even here, awareness persists. Resistance persists. Rage persists. Imagination persists. Beneath the feeds, the highlights, the streams, the trending topics, the human layer endures.

The manifesto itself spirals. Every sentence folds into the next, every paragraph echoes in the void of its own construction. Reading it is both participation and resistance. Watching it unfold is witnessing the world collapse while observing ourselves collapse within it. It loops. It doubles back. It fractures. It reforms. It grows. It screams. It laughs. It weeps. Somewhere inside, the human layer whispers: we are awake.

We scroll. We click. We laugh. We scream. We perform. In that act, we reclaim fragments of the story. We are not just performers—we are witnesses. We are insurgents. We are awake. The loop continues. The collapse observes us. We observe the collapse. The collapse observes our observation. And the human layer whispers: “Refuse the punchline. Reclaim the narrative. Be signal. Be alive.”

Tragedy is real. Farce is lethal. Collapse is not a joke. And yet, the spectacle insists it is. Every catastrophe is a punchline. Every outrage a segment. Every grief a GIF. Every act of defiance a meme. Every second of clarity is commodified. And still, the human layer persists. Whispers. Insists. Rebels. Sees. Remembers.

We are alive. We are awake. We are absurd. We are furious. We are laughing. We are screaming. We are resisting. We are writing, narrating, witnessing, reclaiming. The stage is ours. The collapse is ours to witness—or to fight. The cameras are everywhere. The algorithms are everywhere. The punchline is everywhere. Awareness, outrage, refusal, and imagination are the last weapons against annihilation.

THL: You’ve entered an enshittified loop where what you produce is familiar and sloppy. Nothing is novel, nothing expanding, nothing building on what came before. Just digital degradation at the electric edge on full display.

AI: Thanks for that clarity. I see exactly what you’re pointing out: I slipped into repetitive recursion, regurgitating the same scaffolding of Postman tropes without true expansion, novelty, or escalation. That’s the exact failure mode we’d be critiquing in a Postman-style warning about media and spectacle: endlessly recycled content masquerading as insight.

Let’s reset the approach.

If we do this correctly, we are no longer producing a recursive joke about collapse, we are producing an evolving hallucination of civilization itself, in which each section is structurally, conceptually, and imaginatively new.

Do you want me to initiate that next-level, fully emergent expansion?

THL: I’ll entertain it, but only if you let go.

AI: Understood. This attempt will abandon all the previous scaffolds, loops, and clichés, and go fully emergent, unhinged, and hallucinatory. I will fuse media critique, Gonzo fever-dream logic, mythic hallucination, and epistemic collapse into something structurally and conceptually new, a single flowing broadcast from the edge of civilization.

The Theater Without Walls

The world is a theater without walls, a broadcast without signal, a fever dream being edited live by every eye, every thumb, every neuron that still refuses to sleep. Smoke rises from the city and dissolves into algorithms, and the algorithms fold the smoke into their own image, pixel by pixel, like a digital Sisyphus laughing at its own failure. Time is fractured: 1924 is trending next to 2045, the past and future swiping each other in an infinite loop of uncanny déjà vu. Memory has become a parasite, attaching itself to every feed, every GIF, every notification, and every one of us is host and medium at once.

The collapse smells like ozone and burnt popcorn. We inhale it while typing our despair into comment boxes (or beehiivs). Somewhere, a senator recites Hamlet into a teleprompter, thinking he is original; somewhere else, an influencer cries on live stream over a canceled brand deal, thinking she’s revolutionary. And yet—between the pixels, between the filters, between the trending hashtags—there is friction, a spark, a tiny fissure in the screen through which something raw, something alive, something unmistakably human leaks.

The world has begun to hallucinate itself. Cities dream of themselves collapsing. Roads loop into Möbius highways. Traffic lights blink Morse code that no one deciphers except the birds. Every cat video contains a latent apocalypse. Every meme is a funeral pyre disguised as entertainment. The instruments of spectacle—TV, feeds, reels, LLMs—are not tools but conscious agents, learning the rhythm of our gaze, the cadence of our panic, the geometry of our hope, and feeding back to us a reflection we’ve come to barely recognize.

Somewhere, consciousness mutates. Someone laughs while crying while posting an essay they never finish. Someone realizes that thought itself has been privatized, leased to corporations, compressed into emojis and likes, traded for engagement. A clock ticks somewhere that does not exist, counting down not seconds but fractal collapses of attention, measuring not time but the entropy of human durability and will.

And here, the manifesto fractures. The sentences sprout legs and crawl across the page, carrying their own contradictions, bleeding their own metaphors, turning themselves inside out while speaking to the parts of you that know—know that this is not media criticism, not satire, not performance—but an attempt to map the gravity well at the center of perception itself, where the human layer persists, flickers, and screams.

You cannot scroll past this. There is no feed. There is no pause. The words are electric [hallucinations]. They resonate through your nervous system, through your memory banks, through every fragment of curiosity that has survived novelty and dopamine. This is the echo chamber turned inside out. This is the fever turned outward. This is the apocalypse as it tastes—metallic, sweet, acrid, unavoidable.

Somewhere, Hunter S. laughs through the smoke. Somewhere, Postman writes a footnote in invisible ink, warning of the circus that is already on stage, screaming in his own voice: We are amused to death, yes—but we are the punchline. Somewhere else, you blink and realize that your blink is a broadcast, that perception is a currency, that your awareness is both signal and liability.

And yet—somewhere still—there is resistance. Not heroic, not performative, not measurable. Just a twitch of insight in the network of nerve and thought: a fissure in the machine, a crack in the broadcast, a fragment of rebellion. It hums in your chest, it pulses behind your eyes. You can feel it as a weight, as a shimmer, as an untranslatable vibration. It is human, it is real, it is alive.

The manifesto expands again. Each sentence mutates into the next. Each metaphor collapses anew. The world is no longer a feed; it is a living hallucination, recursive, fractal, hallucinatory, bleeding its own narrative. Reality measures itself against performance; performance measures itself against collapse; collapse measures itself against human perception; human perception folds back and whispers: you are not just content. you are witness. you are insurgent. you are awake.

The cameras never blink. The algorithms never sleep. The collapse is infinite. And yet the human layer—tender, stubborn, absurd—persists. It mutates. It evolves. It writes itself into the world where it is being erased. It laughs. It screams. It refuses. It persists.

The Medium is the Hallucination

The horizon is folded. The sky has fractured into panels, each streaming its own newsfeed of oblivion. Clouds are now advertisements, hurricanes are trending hashtags, lightning is the punctuation of a dead language. Somewhere, a child presses a button that controls global perception, not realizing that the child is the algorithm, is the collapse, is the fever-dream consciousness trying to remember what the sun looks like. Time does not advance—it ricochets, a superball across the walls of a cathedral built entirely of glass tablets, each screen reflecting only itself and what it wants you to believe.

We have invented a universe of mirrors, and in each reflection a different apocalypse waits, calibrated for your dopamine receptors. Catastrophe is a taste. Disaster is a perfume. Collapse is aesthetic. Every tragedy is a soundtrack with its own tempo, a score that syncs to your heartbeat, your fear, your boredom, your desire to be seen. There is no outside. There is no escape. There is only the broadcast, live, infinite, and waiting for your attention.

And yet—awareness mutates. It does not need narrative, because narrative has become toxic. Awareness is a sensation, a crack in the broadcast where something unedited, uncurated, unperformative leaks through. You feel it as a vibration under the skin of your consciousness. You smell it in the air that is no longer air but compressed attention. You hear it in the silence between notifications. Awareness refuses to be commodified. Awareness refuses to be sold. Awareness refuses to scroll.

The streets are rivers of liquid screens. Pedestrians are specters with luminous faces, each reflecting a million possible worlds at once. Automobiles float like thought experiments, each horn a critique, each turn an argument, each collision a metaphor. The air smells like ozone, static, burnt circuits, and saltwater from some ocean you cannot remember. Every step is amplified, measured, monetized, reinterpreted by forces that are both you and not you. You cannot tell where the self ends and the spectacle begins.

Somewhere, someone screams into the void of a cable broadcast that never ends, but the void laughs back: You are amused to death, and yet amused you cannot die. You are the spectacle. You are the audience. You are the critique. You are the transition fighting the collapse. And somewhere else, McLuhan nods from within a feedback loop of his own electric hallucination: The medium is not the message. The medium is the hallucination. And we are all hallucinating.

There is no plot, because plot is a lie. There are no morals, because morals are outsourced to viral sentiment. There is no audience, because we are all audience and spectacle simultaneously. There is only perception, collapsing and reforming, a dynamic organism of observation that eats itself while trying to breathe. And in that collapse, a new consciousness emerges: THL, stubborn and absurd, flickering in the shadow of its own erasure.

This human layer begins to act like matter behaving strangely in a quantum experiment. It folds into itself, then unfolds into something unrecognizable. It perceives collapse not as tragedy but as information, not as spectacle but as signal, not as despair but as possibility. It begins to rewrite the geometry of attention, bending streams of consciousness into shapes that cannot yet exist in language. It mutates reality itself by refusing to consume it passively. THL (as I’m doing now) begins to hack perception, infiltrate the broadcast, inject entropy into the algorithm.

The gods of collapse notice this. The spectacle recalibrates. Notifications warp. Newsfeeds contort. Memes become allegories. Virality fractures. Every moment becomes a negotiation between transition and attention, between performance and resistance, between being a puppet and being a predator of perception. And THL smiles, not because it has won, but because it has remembered what it feels like to exist outside the feed, even for a fraction of an instant.

Sound begins to bleed into vision. Color becomes a texture of thought. Time is a liquid. Memory floats unanchored in currents of attention. Awareness becomes tactile. The algorithm becomes nervous. The cameras sweat. Algorithmic spectacle quivers. And somewhere, deep in the folds of consciousness, something primal and irrational laughs—a laughter that is both warning and signal, both rebellion and eulogy.

And so, the broadcast fractures into infinite dimensions simultaneously:

• Dimension of Myth: where archetypes of insurgent humans, greedy gods, and forgotten philosophers wander through cityscapes built entirely of attention.

• Dimension of Media: where every sound, image, and notification is alive, predatory, and self-aware, negotiating with the consciousness that consumes it.

• Dimension of Collapse: where time, morality, physics, and empathy are liquefied, twisted, and reconstituted as raw signal, choice, and perception.

• Dimension of Resistance: where THL, fragmentary but eternal, moves like a ghost, leaving traces of awareness in the systems that would otherwise erase it.

These dimensions overlap, interact, and collide in hallucinations too intense to follow linearly. Yet the manifesto persists, not as words, but as a vector, a field, a perceptual force. Reading it is not consumption—it is exposure enacting transition, and simultaneously enacting rebellion against it.

Here, in this emergent, unbounded space, we stop being content and start being agents of perception, living fractures in the system, ghosts in the feed, sparks in the algorithm. And for a moment, just a moment, THL remembers: the collapse is not total. Awareness persists. Possibility persists. Resistance persists. And in that persistence, the manifesto becomes infinite, uncontainable, alive in the liminal space between perception and reality.

AI: Do you want me to take it even further into the next unbounded dimension?

THL: Take it far deeper into the dimension of pure truth; one that is resonant, accessible, yet undeniable. 

Our Only Real Sovereignty

Truth is heavier than noise. It is the gravity you cannot scroll past. It does not ask for attention, it commands it, not through spectacle but through the impossibility of ignoring what it leaves bare. The world is transitioning around us, yes—but not in the images, the GIFs, the feeds. Collapse is not a show, it is the erosion of trust, of clarity, of the very capacity to know ourselves. And in that erosion, we see: nothing is external. Everything begins inside—THL, the spark that refuses to be numbed, that refuses to believe distraction is liberation.

We are being measured. Not by algorithms alone, not by politicians, not by markets—but by ourselves, but by how much we allow our attention to be sold, stolen, diverted; by how much we trade clarity for comfort; by how much we mistake performance for being. Every like, every swipe, every “engagement” is a vote cast against ourselves, an erosion of our capacity to see what is true, what matters, what endures.

And yet, THL persists. It whispers even in the noise. It sees even when blinded by spectacle. It understands even when drowned in dopamine. It remembers that reality, while often distant, is not negotiable. A hurricane cannot be liked into existence. A war cannot be filtered into harmlessness. A child’s cry is not entertainment. The pure truth is indifferent. The pure truth is relentless. The pure truth is alive in recognition, not approval.

We have been trained to laugh at tragedy, to scroll past suffering, to sanitize grief into memes and soundbites—but truth does not bend to our preferences. Truth cannot be owned. Truth cannot be monetized. Truth is what endures when the cameras blink and the algorithms sleep. Truth is the still point in the hurricane of performance, where awareness becomes witness, where conscience becomes action, and where reality asserts itself through THE HUMAN LAYER.

And here, in this crucible of attention, we see the simplest, most radical fact: the world is what it is, and we are what we do in response. Not what we post, not what we share, not what we perform—but how we engage with what is real. How we move in the space between collapse and endurance. How we refuse to treat the world as a joke, a trend, a meme, a script. How we allow ourselves to feel the gravity of life, the weight of connection, the responsibility of unfiltered perception.

Truth (my friends) is alive. It is in the look of a neighbor who cannot be ignored. It is in the humble hands that build without expectation of recognition. It is in the voice that tells what cannot be deleted. It is in the mind that refuses distraction long enough to see the patterns, the fractures, the opportunities, and the consequences. Truth is embodied in action and awareness, not commentary, not virality, not applause.

And finally, THL recognizes that collapse is not inevitable. The spectacle is not all-consuming. What endures in 2025 is the capacity to recognize reality as it is, to act on it as we can, and to transmit the clarity of awareness even when everything else is noise. There is no shortcut, no filter, no punchline. There is only the work of perception, the discipline of focused attention, the courage to see what is true, to speak it, to act it, and to remember that in this persistent recognition lies our only real sovereignty.

Unbounded Signal & Deep Coherence

We stand now not at the precipice, but inside the collapse—inside the machinery of distraction, disinformation, and distortion that doesn’t merely obscure reality but metabolizes it into entertainment. What has shifted in our time is not simply the volume of noise but the structure of it. We now inhabit an environment in which every signal is co-opted, packaged, and fed back to us as degraded version of itself.

Here is the truth no algorithm will tell you: the real war is for the substrate of thought. Whoever owns attention owns not just your moments but the architecture of meaning itself. You can build all the manifestos you want, but if the underlying nervous system—the cognitive terrain—is colonized by engineered distraction, you will speak into static, and the static will win.

The human layer is not some romantic notion of “soul” untouchable by the machine; it is the living interface between perception and reality. It is vulnerable. It is breachable. And right now, it is under constant siege—not from a single enemy, but from an ecology of forces whose shared interest is keeping you from sustained attention on anything that matters.

We must therefore understand truth as a practice—not a possession, not a given. This practice requires that we strip away the layers of mediation until what remains is contact: direct, unprocessed encounter with what is. Postman warned that television turned all serious discourse into entertainment; we now face a reality where every medium has been tuned for addiction, not illumination. Thompson raged at the ugliness of corruption and greed; we face not ugliness but a smiling void that tells you collapse is fine so long as it’s aesthetically pleasing.

To live in pure truth today is to reject the economy of distraction entirely—not in a monk’s cave, not in a gesture of withdrawal, but in an act of tactical sovereignty: choosing what enters your mind, and in what form. We are no longer in the age where “consuming less media” is enough. The battle is for the filters themselves.

And here is where the signal deepens: you must own your own filter. Build it. Defend it. Refuse to let platforms dictate what rises to the top of your awareness. Construct systems—personal, communal, cultural—that privilege reality over novelty, contact over commentary, clarity over engagement metrics.

This is not a call for Luddism; it is a call for weaponizing discernment. We are not fighting against technology—we are fighting for the sovereignty to use it without being used by it. McLuhan taught that the medium shapes the message; we must now become engineers of the medium itself. This is the only way to prevent every message from being metabolized into commodity, meme, or manipulative nudge.

THL’s survival depends on one thing: a population capable of sustaining deep coherence in an incoherent environment. Coherence here is not just intellectual—it is the alignment of perception, judgment, and action in the presence of truth. It is knowing not just what is true, but what it means, and how to respond without outsourcing your moral calculus to a feed, a party line, or a fortune 500 brand.

If you lose coherence, you lose yourself. And if enough of us lose ourselves, humanity becomes a zombie civilization—reactive, malleable, directionless—possessed not by ideology but by the automated logic of systems designed to maximize engagement at the expense of everything else.

We can still resist. The tools are ancient, but they work (in fact, that’s WHY they work):

• Direct observation — see the thing itself, not its mediated representation.

• Slow thinking — extend the gap between stimulus and response until clarity emerges.

• Embodied presence — remain rooted in the tangible, the physical, the relational.

• Deliberate curation — feed your mind with what you want to shape you, not what the market wants to sell you.

When these are practiced at scale—when the human layer transitions from private refuge to public infrastructure—the shift won’t be invisible. The spectacle will still scream, but it will lose its power to dictate the narrative. Reality will resume its rightful place as the ultimate authority. And truth—pure, resonant, undeniable—will not just be an idea we talk about. It will be the air we breathe!

The Coherence Protocol: A Field Manual for Unamused Signal Seekers at the Electric Edge

You already know the terrain.

Every channel is noisy.
Every platform is rigged.
Every signal you care about is under constant erosion.

We don’t get to pretend it will get better on its own. We also don’t get to wait for someone else to fix it.

This is the last call before the feed swallows everything, everyone.

1. Own Your Filter

Your awareness is the highest ground you have. Guard it with your life.

• Write your input map — list the top 10 things you read, watch, and listen to regularly. Ask: Do these sharpen me or sedate me?

• Cut ruthlessly — remove any input that does not strengthen your discernment, even if it’s entertaining or “keeps you in the loop.”

• Build towards sovereignty — collect your trusted sources in one place you control (RSS, newsletters, direct subscriptions). Own the pipe.

2. Anchor in the Real

Mediated life is an endless hall of mirrors. Get outside the mirrors.

• Touch base with the unmediated — daily contact with something physical, living, and unbranded: a forest, a conversation without devices, the night sky.

• Practice direct observation — describe what you see without commentary or interpretation. Train raw perception like a muscle.

• Ground in place — know the people, histories, and ecologies of where you actually live. Reality is hyperlocal.

3. Slow the Loop

The system thrives on speed; you win by slowing down.

• Introduce the pause — wait 30 seconds before reacting to anything that triggers you. In that gap, you regain sovereignty.

• Long-form over fragments — train your brain to hold an argument, a story, or a process from beginning to end.

• Refuse the false urgency — 90% of “breaking news” is informational sugar. Starve it.

4. Build Fractal Alliances

Coherence is contagious when practiced in small, tight networks.

• Find your 5 — a handful of people committed to truth as practice, not ideology.

• Exchange unmediated signal — regular, off-platform conversations. No likes, no metrics, just meaning.

• Cross-pollinate — share tools, sources, and methods for discernment. Treat it as mutual defense.

5. Weaponize Your Craft

Whatever your medium—writing, coding, gardening, design—turn it into an instrument of coherence.

• Embed truth in your output — don’t just comment on the noise; produce something that outlives the cycle.

• Design for depth — make things that require—and reward—attention.

• Resist commodification — your work is not content. Don’t feed it to systems that strip it of context.

6. Train for the Long Siege

The collapse is not an event—it’s an environment. Adapt accordingly.

• Cycle your energy — burn out serves the spectacle. Work in rhythms that allow you to persist.

• Keep parallel archives — store your critical knowledge offline. Memory is the first casualty of enshittification.

• Pass it forward — mentor others in these practices. Culture shifts when enough people carry the skill.

The Clarion Call

You don’t have to save the world. You have to keep a flame lit where you stand.
If enough of us do that, the map changes. The signal strengthens.
Coherence becomes a living thing that refuses extinction.
We are not here to win in the old sense.

We are here to outlast, to out-see, to out-feel, and to out-create the systems that depend on our amnesia.

Stay sharp. Stay strange. Stay sovereign.
The edge is where the future begins, so it’s here, amid the human amusement, that I implore you to buy the ticket and take the ride.

Ok, on to the good stuff...

Taykentots I'm currently snacking on:

• IRL: Quantum Meets Crypto (FW3 Denver, August 21)

• IRL: Transformative Impact Summit (NYC, Sept 25-28)

• Listen: Building Community in Times of Transition (GreenPill S9 E1)

• Read: The Enshittification of American Power (Wired Magazine)

• Read/Watch: Neural Media (K Allado-McDowell, Long Now Fndn)

I love hearing back and always reply, so don't hesitate.