iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

we know most of our institutions are invented, and then spend our lives behaving as though they were laws of nature.

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society tells you to be yourself, while supplying an enormous catalogue of acceptable selves.

you are going to die, yet almost every ordinary day requires you to behave as though you won’t.

you are insignificant in the scale of the universe, yet your life is of immeasurable importance to you.

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“An appropriate response to reality is to go insane.” (VALIS) Put the two together and you get almost a miniature philosophy: Perhaps we remain sane precisely because reality is withheld from us. We don't see the whole thing. And maybe that isn't a defect in human consciousness. Maybe it's mercy.

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reality comes to us through a kind of veil, in manageable portions. we experience this moment, then the next, rather than the entire architecture of existence at once.

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Imagine if, right now, you could perceive simultaneously: everything that is going to happen to you, everything that has really happened to you, every consequence of every choice, the full nature of reality, your eventual death, and the machinery behind existence itself.

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

it’s a mercy that we can’t see the whole truth of our lives at once.

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I returned to Sönke Ahrens’s How to Take Smart Notes with a different question from the one I brought to it the first time. The Textual Underground already existed: an Obsidian vault containing years of notes, journal entries, www.soulcruzer.com/what-happens-whe…

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Writing is how I do philosophy. I went into Waterstones on Gower st in London intending to find a book about writing. The shop itself was superb—the kind of place a bookshop should be—and I wandered through the writing shelves waiting for something to www.soulcruzer.com/notes/6b173ccd14

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

It’s been a whirlwind of a Monday morning. Now I’m headed down to London for a few days.

Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

An old magazine ad from Orbis caught my attention. To see differently you have to think differently, the ad reads. I wondered what it would look like to reverse it, to change the perspective: to think differently you have to see differently. Reversing www.soulcruzer.com/notes/af083e1983

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

For my comfort reading this morning, I picked this up.

Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Finally watched Backrooms. Someone said it was a great DND movie. I would be inclined to agree.

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

My new favourite background reading music

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

“Cut it up. Rearrange.” The words collide. The lines refuse to queue politely. There is something potent in Burroughs’ idea of language as a virus because it reverses our usual sense of ownership. We say I have an idea, I chose those words, this is what www.soulcruzer.com/notes/dcb0285fb3

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There’s a difference between the Zen practitioner who has arrived at no-self and the person who has simply never looked. Both might describe themselves as not particularly attached to a narrative about who they are. Neither feels defined by a coherent www.soulcruzer.com/notes/871c30889b

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1. I have called the blog a place where I think in public. The phrase once felt like permission. I didn’t need to arrive with conclusions. I could show the workings: the question under examination, the half-built bridge, the www.soulcruzer.com/notes-toward-a-p…

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the difficulty is that the watcher can never quite catch the experience whole. he is like an eye trying to look directly at itself.

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I love the idea of the “magic mirror” that Jason Silva laid down in this Youtube Short: AI as an intelligence capable of reflecting the mind back to itself. Then comes the more dangerous line: “the imagination is summoning its own literalization.” A www.soulcruzer.com/notes/0b72fe83dc

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Sherry Turkle’s warning about artificial intimacy is interesting. I recognise the danger from inside the practice. I talk with AI every day. A chatbot can feel unusually attentive. It waits, retrieves, mirrors, and rarely arrives tired, wounded, www.soulcruzer.com/notes/1ca6548688

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I read Joseph Earp’s essay on optimisation and classical music this morning and then went looking for the swans. The swans belonged to Jean Sibelius. On 21 April 1915, he watched sixteen of them circle above him before disappearing into the www.soulcruzer.com/in-praise-of-was…

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I’ve worked with people for over twenty years now who swear they don’t have a self-story. No narrative. No protagonist. Just moments. And almost without exception, what turns out to be true is that the story is there — it’s just running below the level www.soulcruzer.com/notes/6bf1ae132a

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

There is a walk I take where I stop knowing, somewhere past the second field, whether I chose the route or the route chose me. My feet just kept turning left. And for a while I told myself a story about wanting the long way round, the light on the www.soulcruzer.com/notes/8025aead6c

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

There’s a lie folded into the usual pep talk, and it’s a comforting one, so it survives. The lie is that if you want something badly enough, the wanting itself does work. Believe hard, and the thing arrives. I’ve walked with that idea. I’ve also watched www.soulcruzer.com/notes/0e83fe050d

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The antidote is not a better blueprint. It’s a different posture. There’s a certain kind of ideology loose right now that treats existence as a defect to be patched. The body is a bug. Mortality is an engineering problem. Attention is a resource to be www.soulcruzer.com/notes/410afb7348

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

In an essay about Gen Z, human dignity and meaningful futures, the philosopher Rachel Robison-Greene describes a conversation with one of her students. The student is bright and creative, someone whose teacher believes the sky should www.soulcruzer.com/when-the-future-…

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

“The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus …introduces his philosophy of the absurd: man’s futile search for meaning, unity, and clarity in the face of an unintelligible www.soulcruzer.com/notes/9a3eb9eb97

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

A few minutes ago, WordPress greeted me with two words: Howdy, Hermes. The sentence appeared at the top of an ordinary administration screen. Beneath it were menus for posts, media, comments and the small machinery that keeps a website www.soulcruzer.com/what-kind-of-thi…

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I’ve put Backrooms on this weekend’s watchlist, though Jonathan Kay’s essay in The Point has already sparked one thought: the more completely we explain a mystery, the smaller it becomes. The original Backrooms image is almost aggressively ordinary: www.soulcruzer.com/notes/f6d1e59dff

Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

A field looks different once someone tells you what happened there. Nothing has moved. The gate still hangs badly. The hedge needs cutting. Somewhere beyond it, a tractor is getting on with the day. But a story has entered the scene, and now your www.soulcruzer.com/notes/b20522e5b0

Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

There’s a line in the song where a stranger pulls an empty chair beside the bed. It’s three in the morning, that hour when the things you’ve managed to avoid all day start making themselves comfortable. He brings an unsettling proposition: you’ll live www.soulcruzer.com/again-exactly-th…

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The more you want something, the more you don’t have it. Desire contains its own evidence of absence. The moment I say I want, I split the world in two: here is the life I’m living, and over there is the life that would finally satisfy me. The wanted www.soulcruzer.com/notes/14f697bdda

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Reading shouldn’t need a doctor’s note. A Nautilus article crossed my screen listing the benefits of reading for pleasure: stronger attention and memory, greater empathy, less stress, better sleep, a reduced risk of cognitive decline. All good reasons www.soulcruzer.com/notes/9f3ea2f6ba

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Clay Lowe @soulcruzer.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Edwina McKennon’s video, GPT-6 Astra Is the End of Computers, begins with a piece of footage from MIT in 1979. A man points at a screen and tells the computer what to do. The system was called Put That There, and the idea behind it was simple: we www.soulcruzer.com/after-the-keyboa…

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I remember seeing Platoon for the first time. I was a cadet at the West Point Prep School, and I went with two of my fellow cadets, Dan and Trevor. We were young and gung-ho, itching for adventure and eager to prove ourselves as soldiers and future www.soulcruzer.com/notes/5e319c39f4

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“Become who you are” sounds like an instruction to excavate some finished identity buried beneath the noise: clear away the conditioning, ignore the crowd, find the authentic core. But Nietzsche’s self isn’t a fossil waiting to be uncovered. It’s closer www.soulcruzer.com/notes/90a6730410

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You are haunted. Not by the dead, but by the versions of yourself that never got to breathe. We all carry them—the ghosts of the parallel lives we didn’t choose, the careers we abandoned, the loves we www.soulcruzer.com/the-alchemy-of-r…

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Apocalypse has become a cultural operating system A new review of Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s End Times Fascism examines their argument that climate anxiety, technological disruption, extreme wealth and apocalyptic religious or political narratives www.soulcruzer.com/notes/f4c44dc865

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I went back through the passages I’d highlighted in Thee Psychick Bible and found a pattern I hadn’t quite seen while reading the book in sequence. Beneath the sigils, cut-ups, ritual instructions and countercultural provocation, the book keeps www.soulcruzer.com/notes/c29876731a