What We Built Instead

Technologies of Fragmentation

We are fragmented. We feel it. The dismembering described in the last chapter is not an abstraction — it is the texture of daily life. Attention scattered across twelve tabs. Relationships mediated through feeds. Bodies parked in chairs while minds race through information. The feeling, pervasive and low-grade, that things should cohere more than they do.

So we build things to fix it.

Social media tries to remember connection. It addresses a real need — the need to stay in contact with people you care about, to feel part of a community, to witness and be witnessed. Productivity tools try to remember coherence. They address a real need — the need to organize a life fractured across dozens of contexts, calendars, inboxes, and obligations. AI tries to remember cognitive capacity. It addresses a real need — the need for a mind overwhelmed by information to have something that can process, summarize, generate, and keep up.

These are not trivial products. They address real pain. Billions of people use them because the pain is real and the relief, however partial, is 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 email app manages your messages. Your calendar manages your time. Your fitness app manages your body. Your meditation app manages your attention. Your social media app manages your relationships — by which it means: your feed, your posts, your notifications.

One user. One account. One interface. The world is something to be managed, optimized, predicted — and you are the bounded unit doing the managing.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a worldview. It’s so pervasive it feels like common sense. But it determines what gets built — and what never occurs to anyone to build.

The Model of Self Behind AI

Generative AI is the clearest expression of this worldview. Not its worst product — its most honest one.

AI takes the outputs of individual cognition — text, code, images, analysis, conversation — and produces them faster, cheaper, at scale. It processes symbols. It does not need a body. It does not need a room. It does not need another person. It is the logical outcome of a very reductive idea about human orientation — that one’s life is about one’s self, and that the valuable part of being a self is the capacity to produce a certain kind of cognitive labor.

AI is revealing which human activities were always computational — always, in a technical sense, the kind of sequential symbol-manipulation that 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 always were: computation.

This is clarifying, not threatening. Or rather — it is threatening only if you believe that computation is what makes humans valuable. If the valuable part of being a person is the part that processes information and produces outputs, then a machine that does it better and faster is an existential problem. If the valuable part of being a person includes capacities that are not computational — presence, embodiment, the capacity to be transformed through relationship — then AI is simply clearing the field. Showing us, by doing the computation, what remains.

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 a limited answer to this question. It points inward — to awareness, to subjective experience, to consciousness. These are real and important. But there is another answer that the bounded-self worldview cannot see, because it starts from a premise that makes it invisible.

What’s left is the between.

The Contemplative Renaissance

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

Contemplative practices — meditation, mindfulness, prayer, yoga, breathwork, 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. Not a fad. A genuine cultural reclamation. People are taking them seriously — not as self-help accessories, but as essential practices 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 is paramount. I mean that word precisely. The rediscovery of the inward orientation — the recognition that awareness, presence, and interior wholeness are capacities to be cultivated, not just states to be enjoyed — is one of the most important cultural developments of our time. I have deep respect for it. I practice it. I am not setting it up to be dismissed.

And the contemplative renaissance is producing real pushback against the bounded-self model. Many contemplative traditions explicitly 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. 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’s a moment — I’ve felt it more times than I can count, though I can’t predict when it will come. I’m in the roda, and the distinction between my movement and the other player’s movement dissolves. I’m moving, but my movement is partly mine and partly a response to what they’re generating. They’re moving, but their movement is partly theirs and partly a space I’ve opened. Where does one of us stop and the other begin? I’m not inside my body looking out. I’m in the space between us. My awareness is distributed across that shared time.

This is the capacity I’m interested in. This is what a cultivation of the between might address.

I want to add something to that conversation.

There are practices — real, living, sophisticated practices — for exploring and cultivating how we, in the physical world, can lose the self and coordinate and become and transcend the self by joining in with other selves. These practices are not about individual cognition, though they involve cognition. They are not about individual awareness, though they produce extraordinary states of awareness. They are about what happens when bodies enter shared time together and, through structured musical and choreographic interaction, produce something that none of them could produce alone.

They highlight, they display, they challenge, they cultivate, and they exercise our abilities both as embodied beings and as collaborators in a shared cognitive landscape.

That is a huge challenge to the model of self that often informs — and is implied by — the way we do AI.

Because 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. It is an active obstruction. It cannot see what these practices produce, because what they produce doesn’t fit inside any one self.

The outward orientation is massively developed. The inward orientation is being rediscovered. The between — the gap identified in the last chapter — still has almost no language, no design frameworks, no institutional home.

And yet the practices exist. They 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.

Agonistic Reappropriation

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

The berimbau is the clearest example. A bow, a gourd, a coin, a stick — instruments people didn’t have, so they made them from what was available. And from that assembled tool, they created one of the most sophisticated governance instruments ever devised. Something that could do what they needed: shape a game, coordinate bodies, govern through sound. Not rejecting the tool’s basic shape. Understanding it well enough to redirect it.

The turntable is the contemporary version of the same principle. Designed for playback. DJs turned it into an instrument for reading and responding to bodies in real time.

This is what I’d call agonistic reappropriation: taking tools built for the bounded self and redirecting them toward relational ends.

That’s the tradition I’m working in. Motion capture, machine learning, real-time audio synthesis, pose detection — these are technologies built squarely within the bounded-self paradigm, designed for individual users managing external systems. But they can be bent. They can be made to listen to bodies. They can be made to respond to relationship. They can be made to create shared time instead of fragmenting it.

The question is: bent toward what? Built on what principles? Informed by what knowledge?

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.