What We Built Instead

Technologies of Fragmentation

An ordinary day has a particular texture now. Attention gets scattered across a dozen browser tabs while relationships arrive through feeds. The body sits parked in a chair for hours while the mind races through information, and underneath it all runs a pervasive, low-grade feeling that things should cohere more than they do. The dismembering of the last chapter is not an abstraction; we live inside it.

So we build things to fix it: social media to remember connection, productivity tools to remember coherence, AI to remember cognitive capacity. These products address real pain. Billions of people use them because the pain is real, and the relief, however partial, is also real.

But look at what they assume about you. Every one of these tools starts from the same premise. You are a single person, sitting alone, looking at a screen, managing your world. Your apps manage your relationships, your time, your attention, your body. Each of them imagines one user, one account, one interface. The world becomes something to be managed, optimized, predicted, and you become the bounded unit doing the managing.

Nobody planned this. It is a worldview, so pervasive that it feels like common sense, and it quietly determines not only what gets built but what never occurs to anyone to build.

The Model of Self Behind AI

Generative AI shows this worldview in its clearest form, probably its most honest.

AI takes the outputs of individual cognition (text, code, images, analysis, conversation) and produces them faster, cheaper, and at scale. It processes symbols, and it needs no body to do it, no room, no other person. This is the logical outcome of a reductive idea about what a person is: that a life is mainly the cognitive labor of a self acting on its environment, and that the valuable part of being a self is the capacity to produce that labor at higher rates.

What is quietly happening, as AI gets better, is a slow revelation about which human activities were always computational: always, in a technical sense, the kind of sequential symbol-manipulation a machine can replicate. Writing certain kinds of prose. Generating certain kinds of analysis. Producing certain kinds of code. Summarizing, translating, pattern-matching. These activities felt deeply human when humans were the only ones doing them. Now that machines do them too, we can see them more clearly for what they were.

This is clarifying. It is only threatening if you have staked your sense of human value on those particular outputs. If the valuable thing about being a person is the part that processes information and produces results, then a machine that does it better is an existential problem. If the valuable thing about being a person includes capacities that aren’t computational, then AI is clearing the field, showing us, by doing the computation, what was always something else.

The question AI forces is: what’s left? What can’t be offloaded? What about human experience is irreducibly non-computational?

The bounded-self worldview has an answer to that question, but a limited one. It points inward, to awareness, subjective experience, consciousness. Those are real. There is another answer the bounded-self worldview cannot see, because it starts from a premise that makes the answer invisible.

What is left is the between.

The Contemplative Renaissance

Before going further, I want to be honest about something.

Contemplative practices such as meditation, mindfulness, prayer, yoga, breathwork, and psychedelic-assisted therapy are technologies of remembering too. They reconnect us with interior wholeness, with presence, with the one awareness from which experience arises. They restore a relationship between the self and its own attention. They quiet the noise of compulsive processing and open a space for something deeper to be noticed.

And they are experiencing a real renaissance, a genuine cultural reclamation. People are taking these practices seriously as essential disciplines for living a coherent life in a fragmenting world. Meditation has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Psychedelic research is being taken seriously by major medical institutions. Contemplative traditions from Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Christian mysticism, and indigenous practice are being engaged with increasing depth and respect.

This rediscovery of the inward orientation, the recognition that awareness and presence are capacities to develop rather than states to enjoy, is one of the most important cultural developments of our time. I say this with deep respect, as someone who practices these disciplines myself, and I am not setting them up to be dismissed.

And the contemplative renaissance is producing real pushback against the bounded-self model. Many contemplative traditions teach that the self is not what it appears to be, that the boundary between self and world is more permeable, more constructed, more fluid than the default materialist account suggests. In that sense, the contemplative traditions are already challenging the worldview I described above. They are already pointing beyond the bounded unit managing its environment.

What’s Missing

So we have two responses to the fragmentation: build better tools outward, cultivate presence inward. Both are real and both are needed. And both, in their different ways, still center the individual, as a processor of information or as a locus of awareness. Neither one asks: what happens in the space between individuals? What capacities live there?

There is a moment in the roda I have felt more times than I can count, and I still cannot predict when it will arrive. The distinction between my movement and the other player’s movement dissolves. I am moving, but my movement is partly mine and partly a response to what they are generating. They are moving, but their movement is partly theirs and partly a space I have opened. Where does one of us stop and the other begin? I am not inside my body looking out. I am in the space between us. My awareness is distributed across that shared time.

This is the capacity I am interested in, and it is what a cultivation of the between might address.

I want to add something to the conversation between the toolbuilders and the contemplatives. Real, living, sophisticated practices exist for cultivating what happens between bodies in shared time: how a self can loosen its edges, join with other selves, and coordinate into something larger without disappearing. These practices involve cognition, and they produce extraordinary states of awareness, but neither is the point. The point is what happens when bodies enter shared time together and, through structured musical and choreographic interaction, produce something none of them could produce alone.

That is a challenge to the model of self that informs the way we do AI. If the most sophisticated human capacities include capacities that are irreducibly relational, capacities that cannot be located in any one body, that require shared time, that depend on the loop of mutual transformation between people, then the bounded self is not just an incomplete model but an active obstruction. It cannot see what these practices produce, because what they produce does not fit inside any one self.

The outward orientation is massively developed, and the inward orientation is in the middle of its rediscovery. The between, meanwhile, has almost no language, no design frameworks, no institutional home.

And yet the practices exist, and have existed for centuries. They are working right now, in rodas and dance floors and jazz sessions and bomba bateys and rumba yards around the world. They have been refined by communities who understood, because survival demanded it, that the between is not a luxury.

Bending the Tool

There is a tradition running through Afro-diasporic culture of taking tools designed for one purpose and bending them toward something else entirely.

The berimbau is the clearest example. People stripped of their instruments built one from what was at hand: a bow, a gourd, a coin, a stick. And from that assembled tool, communities created one of the most sophisticated governance instruments ever devised, something that could shape a game, coordinate bodies, govern through sound. The basic shape of the tool was kept; its purpose was redirected.

The turntable is the contemporary version of the same move. It was designed for playback, for one listener and a recording. DJs turned it into an instrument for reading and responding to bodies in real time.

The move deserves a name. Call it agonistic reappropriation: reappropriation because a tool is taken up and repurposed, agonistic because the repurposing works against the grain of what the tool was built for. Taking tools designed for the bounded self and redirecting them toward relational ends.

That is the tradition I am working in. Motion capture, machine learning, real-time audio synthesis, pose detection. These technologies were built squarely within the bounded-self paradigm, designed for individual users managing external systems. They can be bent: made to listen to bodies, to respond to relationship, to create shared time instead of fragmenting it.

The question is what they get bent toward, what principles they are built on, what knowledge informs the design.

For that we need models: working systems that already coordinate bodies, distribute intelligence, bridge inner and outer, and produce collective states that no individual controls.

We need the forms.