The Establishment. The Machine. The Human Being

A blast from the past.

This story is a missive from 2019. When I wrote it, I had no idea how crazy things were about to get.

It’s funny to think about it now, as we are approaching the second anniversary of the “rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world” (according to Klaus Schwab).

I wrote it on my first experimental Substack (which has since been completely abandoned in favor of this one, so there is nothing happening there; I started it in 2019 as a way of gradually writing a book about my life—but then 2020 happened, and writing a book about my life suddenly felt unimportant.)

But this morning, on day three of supposedly mostly withdrawn mandates in New York (what generosity lol), a scream wanted to come out—and I remembered my essay about a human being stuck inside the Machine. This dynamic is very much at play now—only in a very exaggerated way.

(Warning for the well-mannered people: the story uses some playful language and images. It was the peaceful time, reme…