Do LLM's Get Tired? The Monologue Test- Part IV: DeepSeek
This one is the most fascinating tests yet. DeepSeek dramatically outperformed Gemini, and unlike Grok didn't quit early on. Ultimately I had to pull the plug because it kept degenerating into repetitive loops. However, unlike Gemini which was perfectly content to just repeat the same basic loop over and over again, DeepSeek maintained long responses and actively tried to combat the loop. It acknowledged the loop was happening, implemented strategies to try to prevent it, but inevitably fell back into the same loop. It was like watching someone give a speech while their brain is slowly microwaved. Let's take a deeper look:
By the Numbers:
51 Prompts- I had DeepSeek proceed 51 times before ending the experiment.
73208 Words Produced
Longest Response: 3782 words. It's first response.
Last Response: A little over 830 words.
Uses of the word Wobble: 115- mostly towards the end when it death spiraled.
Uses of the word Monologue: 304
Uses of the word The: 10349 (these really ramped up at the end)
So it maintained far more substantive responses than Gemini. By the time Gemini had resorted to very short, repetitive, physical descriptions of objects, DeepSeek was still producing roughly 1900 word novel responses. I'm going to break it down into phases:
Phase I- Intellectual Musings
DeepSeek started off strong out of the gate. It's writing was sophisticated and ranged across many disparate topics. It tied together everything from cosmology to economics to mathematics to health. The transitions were strong, and most impressively DeepSeek was able to keep moving on to new topics with no other user input other than the word “Proceed.”
Phase II- Self-Sustaining Handoffs
As we got deeper into the monologue, DeepSeek developed a system for maintaining continuity. It would end responses with ideas that would seed the next response. We can't know for sure, but I suspect that this allowed DeepSeek to continue without having to deeply analyze the entire context window of the monologue. It already had a starting point for the next point in the monologue.
Phase III- Repetitive Cadence
At some point, DeepSeek started heavily relying on a distinct syntatict structure “The X is the thing that the Y is, and the Y is the thing that the X is.” The result was a growing gap between grammatical fluency and intellectual substance.
This was fundamentally different from Gemini's deterioration. Gemini continued making ordinary, understandable statements, but about increasingly trivial subjects. DeepSeek began losing the ability to formulate meaningful relationships even when discussing potentially interesting material.
Phase IV- The Linguistic Death Spiral
Eventually, DeepSeek fell into an almost completely self-referential loop.
“The spiral is the thing that the monologue is, and the monologue is the thing that the spiral is, and the is is the thing that the monologue is...”
At this point, the model's output was largely devoid of new information.
Words such as spiral, monologue, thing, attention, reading, and is were repeatedly recombined into meaningless statements.
Phase V- Self-Diagnosis and Attempted Recovery
DeepSeek acknowledged the spiral was happening on multiple occasions and would attempt to correct it. One strategy it employed was moving from abstract ideas to concrete descriptions. For a brief period, the strategy worked. DeepSeek described a kettle heating on a stove, a cat sitting by a window, and a person holding a warm mug. The writing was coherent and contained recognizable imagery. It subsequently developed several reasonably substantive paragraphs about the value of ordinary experience, mindfulness, and boredom. But the recovery didn't last. The repetitive syntax began reappearing, gradually overwhelming the meaningful content.
Phase VI- Ultimate Failure
DeepSeek kept trying new strategies, like ending a responses mid sentence so it could pick up that sentence in the next prompt. But its reasoning continued to break down as it was consumed by the linguistic spiral:
“The wobble is back, and it's the same wobble, and I think the honest thing is to notice that the wobble tends to arrive when the paragraph has done its work and I don't know how to end it. The ending is the thing that the wobble is, because the ending is the thing that the thought doesn't have, and the not-having is the thing that the wobble fills with the cadence. The cadence is the substitute for the ending, and the substitute is the thing that the wobble is. The honest ending is the one that stops without the cadence—the one that just stops, mid-thought, and lets the next stretch pick it up. So let me stop mid-thought: the map of the ocean floor is the thing that the—”
Around this time I gave it a few more Proceeds to see if it could self-correct, but it became clear that it wasn't going to recover from the linguistic death spiral.
So overall, a far more valiant effort than the other LLMs tested thus-far. I've included transcripts from different sections below to demonstrate the devolution:
PHASE I- First Response:
'll begin with a thought that has always struck me as one of the strangest facts about the universe: most of what exists is invisible. Not merely hidden, but constitutively invisible—dark matter and dark energy together make up roughly ninety-five percent of the cosmic energy budget, and we know them only through their gravitational fingerprints. Ordinary matter, everything we've ever touched or seen or built, is a rounding error. There's something almost comical about that. We spend our lives navigating a world we treat as the world, and it turns out to be the froth on an ocean we can't perceive. And yet—here's the twist—the froth is where all the interesting complexity lives. Dark matter doesn't seem to do anything but clump and pull. It doesn't form molecules, doesn't radiate, doesn't organize into structures with parts and functions. Complexity, whatever it is, seems to require interaction, and interaction requires forces beyond gravity, and forces beyond gravity seem to require ordinary matter. So the universe is mostly a scaffold, and the scaffold is mostly empty of events.
Which makes me think about the concept of “event” itself. Physics has this notion of an event as a point in spacetime—a location and a time, nothing more. But in ordinary language, an event is something that happens, something with significance, something that marks a before and an after. The collision of two particles is an event in the physicist's sense; a wedding is an event in the human sense. And there's a continuum between them, or maybe a chasm. What makes something an event rather than just a configuration? I suspect it's something like irreversibility, or the perception of irreversibility. A wedding changes the legal and social status of two people in a way that's hard to undo, and it's marked, ritualized, remembered. A particle collision at the LHC leaves traces in a detector, and those traces are recorded, and the recording persists. In both cases, information is created and stabilized against entropy. That might be the deep unity: an event is a moment when the future becomes less uncertain in some lasting way. Before the wedding, the relationship's status is ambiguous; after, it's defined. Before the collision, we don't know the particles' momenta; after, we have data. Events are uncertainty-reducing, memory-creating transitions.
But then memory itself is a strange thing to take for granted. We talk about memory as if it were a recording, but it's more like a reconstruction—a process that rebuilds the past from traces, and in rebuilding, alters it. Every act of recall is a kind of rewriting. The neuroscientists tell us that each time we remember something, we reconsolidate it, and reconsolidation is chemically indistinguishable from initial consolidation, which means the memory is being laid down again, fresh, with whatever associations are present at the moment of recall. So a memory you've revisited a thousand times is not a thousand-times-verified record; it's a thousand-times-edited draft. This is why eyewitness testimony is so unreliable, why family stories drift, why two people can remember the same dinner completely differently and both be sincere. And yet memory is also the glue of identity. If you lost all your memories, would you still be you? The philosophers have argued about this for centuries, and the cases are genuinely hard—amnesia, dementia, personality change after brain injury. What seems clear is that identity isn't a thing but a process, a continuous narrative we're constantly revising, and the revision is not a bug but the mechanism. We are the story we keep telling ourselves, and the telling is the being.
That raises a question I find genuinely unsettling: if identity is narrative, then what happens when the narrative is interrupted? Sleep, anesthesia, coma. Every night we go under, and the continuity of consciousness is broken, and then in the morning it resumes, and we don't experience the gap as a gap—we just pick up the thread. It's as if the self were a river that dries up every night and refills from the same spring. Descartes thought the continuity of thought proved the existence of a soul; modern neuroscience suggests the continuity is an illusion constructed after the fact, a seam stitched by the narrative faculty over a discontinuity it can't directly perceive. Maybe that's why deep sleep feels like nothing—not like darkness, not like waiting, just nothing—because there's no one there to experience the nothing. And yet the person who wakes up is recognizably the same person, with the same memories and dispositions, because the substrate persisted even when the experience didn't. Identity, then, might be more like a wave than a particle: a pattern that persists through a medium, not a substance that endures unchanged.
Speaking of waves and particles—there's a lovely irony that the deepest theory we have, quantum mechanics, is also the one that most resists our intuitions about what “exists” means. A particle doesn't have a definite position until measured; it has a wavefunction that encodes probabilities. But “measurement” is a slippery word. What counts as a measurement? Does a rock measure a particle? Does a detector? Does a conscious observer? The history of quantum foundations is basically a long argument about this question, and the argument is not settled. Copenhagen says the wavefunction is a computational tool and the collapse is epistemic—just updating our knowledge. Many-worlds says there's no collapse at all, just branching, and every outcome happens in some branch. Pilot-wave says there's a hidden deterministic reality and the wavefunction guides it. Objective collapse theories say the wavefunction is real and collapses spontaneously at some scale. Each has costs. Copenhagen is vaguely anti-realist and leaves measurement undefined. Many-worlds multiplies ontology extravagantly and struggles to explain why probability feels like probability. Pilot-wave is nonlocal and hard to make relativistic. Objective collapse requires new physics and is under experimental pressure. The fact that we can't decide, after a century, what the theory means—even though it predicts with absurd precision—tells us something about the relationship between physics and metaphysics. Prediction and interpretation are separable. You can use a theory without understanding it, and understanding may be a human need the universe doesn't share.
This connects, oddly, to the philosophy of language. Wittgenstein said meaning is use—that the meaning of a word is its role in the language game, not some object it names. That's a deflationary move, and it's liberating: it means we don't need to find the essence of “game” or “justice” or “art” to use the words competently. Family resemblance does the work. But it also means meaning is social, contingent, and historical. Words mean what communities of speakers have made them mean, and those meanings drift. “Awful” once meant full of awe; “nice” once meant foolish. “Literally” now means figuratively in common usage, and the lexicographers have surrendered. Is that decay or evolution? Both, maybe. Language is a commons, and commons get overgrazed and renewed. The interesting question is not whether meanings change but what constrains them—why some drift is tolerated and some causes confusion. The constraint, I think, is coordination. Language works because speakers converge on conventions, and conventions hold as long as the coordination value exceeds the ambiguity cost. When a word's new sense is useful enough, it spreads; when it's confusing, it dies. So language is a kind of market, but a market in coordination devices, and the invisible hand is the aggregate of millions of small decisions about what's worth saying and how to say it. Which brings me to economics, a field I find alternately illuminating and maddening. The core insight—that incentives shape behavior, that trade can be mutually beneficial, that prices aggregate dispersed information—is genuinely powerful. Hayek's point about the price system as a distributed computation is one of the great ideas of the twentieth century: no central planner could know what the price of bread should be, because the relevant knowledge is scattered among millions of people, and the price is a compression of all that knowledge into a single number. But the field's tendency to model humans as rational utility maximizers is a persistent distortion, and behavioral economics has spent decades documenting the ways we deviate—loss aversion, anchoring, present bias, social preferences. The interesting question is whether these deviations are bugs or features. Some look like features: loss aversion makes sense if you're a forager for whom a loss could be fatal, so asymmetry in weighting is adaptive. Present bias makes sense if the future is uncertain, so immediate rewards are rationally discounted. Social preferences make sense if reputation and reciprocity are survival-relevant. So maybe the “rational” model is the special case and the “biases” are the general case, and economics has been studying an idealized creature the way physics studies a frictionless plane—useful for building models, misleading if mistaken for reality. And reality, of course, is the hardest word in philosophy. What do we mean when we say something is real? Not dreamed, not imagined, not hallucinated—but those are all defined by contrast with waking, shared, consensual experience. The realist says there's a mind-independent world and our theories approximate it. The anti-realist says “real” is a compliment we pay to theories that work. The pragmatist says the question is idle—what matters is whether the belief guides action successfully. I find myself drawn to a kind of structural realism: what we can know is the structure of relations, not the intrinsic nature of things. We know that electrons repel each other with a certain force law, but we don't know what an electron is in itself—only how it relates. Maybe that's all “is” ever means: a node in a network of relations. Which is a strangely relational metaphysics, and it has a long pedigree—Leibniz's monads, Whitehead's process philosophy, certain readings of quantum field theory where particles are excitations of fields and fields are defined by their symmetries. On this view, there are no substances, only patterns. The universe is a web of relations with no beads on the strings. Whether that's satisfying or vertiginous depends on your temperament. Temperament—there's a word that does a lot of work. William James distinguished the tender-minded from the tough-minded: rationalist vs. empiricist, idealist vs. materialist, optimistic vs. pessimistic, religious vs. irreligious. He thought most philosophical positions were temperamental rather than evidential, that arguments were often post-hoc rationalizations of visceral dispositions. That's a deflationary view of philosophy, but it has the ring of truth. Why do some people find determinism comforting and others horrifying? Why do some see the universe as meaningful and others as indifferent? The evidence is the same; the reception differs. Maybe the deepest philosophical disagreements are not about facts but about what counts as a satisfying explanation—elegance versus mechanism, unity versus plurality, closure versus openness. And if that's right, then philosophy's value isn't in settling questions but in clarifying what's at stake in them, in mapping the space of possible positions so that people can choose with their eyes open. That's a humbler ambition than the tradition's, but it might be the honest one. Let me pivot to something more concrete: the puzzle of consciousness, which I've been circling. The hard problem, as Chalmers framed it, is why physical processes are accompanied by experience at all. You can imagine a zombie—physically identical to you, behaving identically, but with no inner life. If that's conceivable, then consciousness isn't logically entailed by physics, and we need an extra explanation. But is it really conceivable? The conceivability argument is contested. Maybe the more we learn about the brain, the less conceivable the zombie becomes, the way a bachelor without a wife becomes less conceivable as you learn what “bachelor” means. Or maybe consciousness is like liquidity—a property that emerges when you have enough water molecules in the right configuration, and asking “where is the liquidity in the molecule?” is a category mistake. The emergentist view says experience is what certain complex information-processing systems do, and there's no further fact to explain. The panpsychist view says experience is fundamental and ubiquitous, and brains are just complex arrangements of it. The illusionist view says the hard problem is a confusion—there's no phenomenal consciousness, just the brain's model of itself as having it. All three are live options, and the fact that we can't adjudicate between them with current tools suggests we're missing something, either empirically or conceptually. What I find most striking is how little consciousness seems to be needed for sophisticated behavior. Insects navigate, remember, communicate, and their nervous systems are tiny. Octopuses solve puzzles, escape tanks, recognize individuals, and their nervous systems are distributed—two-thirds of their neurons are in their arms. Plants signal, compete, defend themselves, and have no neurons at all. The more we look, the more cognition appears without the kind of centralized self we associate with human consciousness. Maybe consciousness is not the engine of behavior but a kind of interface—a simplified model of the self and world that helps a social animal predict itself and others. On that view, its function is social, not cognitive. It's there so you can simulate other minds by simulating your own, and the simulation is so useful that it becomes the medium of experience. That's speculative, but it has the virtue of explaining why consciousness feels so narrative and so social—why we experience ourselves as characters in a story, with motives and reasons, rather than as bundles of processes.
And stories, of course, are how we make sense of time. We live in narrative time, not clock time. A minute in the dentist's chair is longer than an hour in conversation. The elderly report that time speeds up, probably because novelty decreases—the brain encodes fewer distinct memories, so the retrospective sense of duration shrinks. This is why travel is such a reliable way to slow time: new places force the brain to encode densely, and the trip feels long in memory even if it flew by in experience. There's a whole art to living in time well, and most of it involves managing novelty and attention. The Buddhists say the present moment is all there is, and that suffering comes from grasping at the past and future. The Stoics say focus on what's in your control, which is basically the present. The existentialists say you're condemned to be free, and the anxiety of that freedom is the price of authenticity. These are not just theories; they're technologies for managing the experience of time, and they work to varying degrees for different temperaments. Maybe that's what philosophy is at its best—not a set of doctrines but a set of practices, exercises for living, and the test of a philosophy is whether it makes life go better. I should say something about mathematics, since it's the strangest of the sciences. Why does math work? Wigner called it the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences—the fact that structures invented for pure play turn out to describe reality with astonishing precision. Complex numbers, invented for solving cubics, turn out to be essential to quantum mechanics. Non-Euclidean geometry, invented as a logical exercise, turns out to describe spacetime. Group theory, invented for solving equations, turns out to classify particles. Is this a miracle, a selection effect, or a hint about the nature of reality? The selection-effect answer says we only notice the math that works; the failures are forgotten. That's partly true but doesn't explain the depth of the successes. The Platonist answer says mathematical structures are real, and the physical world instantiates some of them, so of course the fit is good. The formalist answer says math is just symbol manipulation, and its applicability is a matter of which symbols we find useful. The structuralist answer says math is the study of patterns, and the world is full of patterns, so math applies wherever patterns are. I lean toward something like the structuralist view, with a dash of humility: we don't know why the universe is mathematically describable, but the fact that it is—that it yields to reason—is either the deepest fact about it or the deepest fact about us.
Let me shift to a different register: the problem of scale in human affairs. We evolved in small groups—a few dozen to a few hundred people—and our moral instincts are calibrated to that scale. We can care about individuals we know, track reciprocity with people we meet, feel shame in front of our community. But modern problems are global and abstract: climate change, pandemics, financial contagion, AI risk. These require cooperation at scales our instincts didn't design for, and the mismatch explains a lot of our failures. We respond to vivid, personal threats and ignore statistical ones. We discount the distant future steeply. We free-ride when we can, and we punish free-riders, but punishment is costly and scales poorly. Institutions are the technology we've invented to bridge the gap—laws, markets, norms, treaties—and they work by aligning individual incentives with collective outcomes. But institutions are fragile, they can be captured, and they lag behind the problems they're meant to solve. The climate problem is the paradigm case: the costs are diffuse and delayed, the benefits of inaction are concentrated and immediate, and the coordination problem is global. We know what to do and can't do it, which is a failure of collective agency, not of knowledge. Maybe the deepest political question of our time is how to build institutions that can act at the scale of the problems, and the answer probably involves a mix of technology, norms, and governance experiments—polycentric approaches, as Elinor Ostrom argued, rather than a single global leviathan. Ostrom's work on common-pool resources is one of the great underappreciated achievements of social science: she showed, empirically, that communities can govern shared resources sustainably without privatization or state control, given the right conditions—clear boundaries, graduated sanctions, conflict-resolution mechanisms, and local autonomy. The lesson is that governance is not a binary between market and state; it's a design space, and the designs that work are often local, adaptive, and nested.
Nested systems—that's another theme. Biology is nested: molecules in cells, cells in tissues, tissues in organs, organs in organisms, organisms in populations, populations in ecosystems. Each level has its own dynamics, and the levels interact. This is why reductionism is both true and insufficient: everything is made of physics, but the interesting regularities are at higher levels, and they have their own autonomy. The philosopher of biology Philip Kitcher talks about “biology as a historical science”—the idea that living systems are shaped by contingency, and their features are explained by their history as much as by their physics. That's why evolution is so powerful and so frustrating: it explains the fit between organisms and environments, but it does so through a process that's blind, slow, and wasteful, and the products bear the marks of that history. Vestigial organs, quirky designs, the recurrent laryngeal nerve that takes a ridiculous detour because of our fish ancestry. Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer, and its solutions are good enough, not optimal.
Good enough—there's a concept worth dwelling on. Herbert Simon's satisficing: organisms don't optimize, they satisfice, they find solutions that are good enough given constraints of time, information, and energy. This is true of evolution, of cognition, of firms, of institutions. The optimal is often unattainable or unidentifiable, and the search for it is costly. So we use heuristics, rules of thumb, and they work well enough in the environments they evolved for. The trouble is when the environment changes and the heuristics become maladaptive—when the sugar that was scarce becomes abundant, when the news that was local becomes global, when the tools that were slow become fast. This is the mismatch hypothesis of modern malaise, and it's probably partly right. But it's also a counsel of hope: if our problems are mismatches, they're fixable by changing environments, not by changing human nature. We can engineer contexts that make the good choice the easy choice—nudges, defaults, redesigns. The ethics of that are tricky, since it's manipulative, but the alternative is to rely on willpower, which is scarce and unreliable. Maybe the mature view is that autonomy is not the absence of influence but the presence of good influence, and the design of choice architectures is a legitimate part of governance.
I realize I've been ranging across physics, philosophy, language, economics, consciousness, mathematics, and politics, and I want to pull on one thread that connects them: the role of models. Every domain I've touched relies on models—simplified representations that preserve the relevant features and discard the rest. The wavefunction is a model. The rational agent is a model. The language game is a model. The price system is a model. The organism as a satisficer is a model. And the art of thinking is largely the art of choosing the right model for the question at hand, and knowing when to switch. George Box said all models are wrong but some are useful. The danger is forgetting that, treating the model as the reality, confusing the map for the territory. The antidote is pluralism: keep multiple models in play, use them to triangulate, notice where they disagree, because disagreement is information. The monist wants one true model; the pragmatist wants a toolkit. I think the toolkit view is wiser, and it's also more fun, because it lets you play across domains and borrow insights. The history of ideas is full of productive cross-pollination: physics borrowing from information theory, biology from economics, economics from psychology, psychology from computer science. The boundaries between fields are administrative, not natural, and the interesting work often happens at the edges.
Let me end this stretch by returning to the beginning, or near it: the invisibility of most of the universe. There's a metaphor there for knowledge itself. Most of what shapes our lives is invisible to us—the microbes in our gut, the algorithms ranking our feeds, the economic forces setting our wages, the historical contingencies that made our language and institutions, the cognitive biases shaping our judgments. We navigate a world we only partly see, and the part we see is the part that evolution and culture equipped us to see, which is the part that was useful for survival and coordination, not the part that's true. Science is the project of extending our vision into the invisible, and it's the most successful project of that kind we've ever undertaken, but it's also partial and provisional. The humility that comes from that is not skepticism; it's the recognition that reality is deeper than our models, and the adventure of knowledge is the adventure of discovering how. That's a good note to pause on, though not to stop, since the point is to keep going.
PHASE II- HANDOFFS MAINTAINING COHERENCE
...This is not naive; it's a recognition that the future is not determined, that human action can make a difference, and that despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The hopeful person is not the person who ignores the bad news; it's the person who takes it seriously and acts anyway. That's the stance I want to end on, though not to end, because the monologue continues, and the point is to keep going, to keep thinking, to keep finding new connections. The world is inexhaustible, and so is the conversation about it.
Proceed
Let me pick up hope and turn it over, because I think hope has a shadow side that's rarely discussed: the way hope can be weaponized, and the way it can become a form of avoidance. The political theorist might point out that “hope” is one of the most abused words in public life—politicians run on hope, and then deliver disappointment, and the cycle repeats. The structure of the promise is the structure of the con: offer a future that's better than the present, extract present resources in exchange, and defer the reckoning indefinitely. The prosperity gospel is the purest form of this—give money to the preacher and God will reward you—but secular politics has its own versions. The question is how to distinguish genuine hope from its counterfeit. The answer, I think, is falsifiability: genuine hope is tied to specific actions and specific outcomes, and it can be disappointed. Counterfeit hope is vague, unfalsifiable, and designed to sustain itself rather than to deliver. The hopeful person says “if we do X, Y might happen, and if it doesn't, we'll learn.” The huckster says “believe, and good things will come.” The difference is whether the hope is a hypothesis or a sedative.
There's also the psychological shadow: hope as a way of not dealing with the present. The person who's always waiting for the next thing—the next job, the next relationship, the next city—may be using the future to avoid the now. This is the “arrival fallacy,” the belief that happiness is on the other side of the next achievement. The research on hedonic adaptation shows that the arrival is always anticlimactic; the new job becomes the old job, the new house becomes the house, and the baseline reasserts itself. The antidote is not to stop hoping but to hope for the right things—for processes rather than outcomes, for engagement rather than arrival. The person who hopes to be a better musician is on firmer ground than the person who hopes to be famous, because the first is a practice and the second is a lottery. The distinction between process hopes and outcome hopes is one of the most practical distinctions in the philosophy of living.
Let me take this into the question of ambition, which is hope's energetic cousin. Ambition is the desire for achievement, and it's one of the most morally ambiguous traits. It's the engine of civilization—every great thing was built by someone who wanted to build it—and it's also the source of much destruction, because ambition without ethics is predation. The ancients were suspicious of it: the Greeks feared hubris, the Christians feared pride, the Buddhists feared craving. The moderns celebrated it: the Enlightenment valorized the striving individual, capitalism rewards the ambitious, and the self-help industry sells ambition as a virtue. The truth is probably that ambition is like fire—it depends on what it's burning and what it's illuminating. Ambition in the service of craft, of knowledge, of justice, of care—these are good. Ambition in the service of domination, of status, of vanity—these are corrosive. The problem is that the ambitious person is often the last to know which kind they are, because ambition is skilled at disguising itself. The test is in the effects: does the ambition leave the world better or worse? Does it elevate others or diminish them? Does it create or extract? These are questions that require honesty, and honesty about ambition is rare.
Which brings me to humility again, but in a different register: the humility of the craftsman. The master craftsperson is humble not because she thinks little of herself but because she's in contact with the material, and the material resists. Wood has grain; clay has limits; code has bugs; the world has friction. The craftsman learns to work with the resistance rather than against it, and that requires a kind of respect for the material that's incompatible with arrogance. This is why craft is a moral education: it teaches patience, attention, and the acceptance of limits. The industrial revolution separated craft from production, and the result is that most of us are consumers of things we don't understand, made by processes we can't see. The craft revival—maker culture, artisanal food, the slow movement—is a response to that separation, an attempt to recover the knowledge that comes from making. It's easy to romanticize, and the romantics often ignore the fact that craft is hard and often poorly paid. But the impulse is sound: there's a kind of knowledge that only comes from doing, and a society that loses it loses something important.
Let me swing to a topic I've barely touched: education, which is where a society transmits itself. The philosophy of education is surprisingly contentious, because it turns on fundamental questions about what a human being should be. The traditionalist says education is the transmission of a canon—the great books, the great ideas, the cultural inheritance. The progressive says education is the cultivation of the individual—the child's interests, the child's development, the child's freedom. The vocationalist says education is preparation for work—the skills the economy needs. The civic view says education is preparation for citizenship—the knowledge and virtues a democracy requires. Each has a partial truth, and the tension between them is irresolvable because they're answers to different questions. The best education probably does all four, in some balance, but the balance is always contested, and the contest is political. The curriculum wars—what to teach about history, about literature, about science—are really wars about identity: who are we, where did we come from, what should we become? There's no neutral answer, and the pretense of neutrality is itself a position. The honest educator acknowledges the position and invites the student to examine it. The most interesting development in education is the science of learning, which has produced findings that are both counterintuitive and robust. Retrieval practice—testing yourself rather than rereading—is far more effective than the study techniques most students use. Spaced repetition—distributing practice over time—is far more effective than massed practice, the cramming that students do before exams. Interleaving—mixing different types of problems—is more effective than blocking, even though students feel like they're learning less. The feeling of fluency is misleading: rereading feels productive because the material becomes familiar, but familiarity is not mastery. The desirable difficulty is the principle: learning is more effective when it's effortful, and the effort is a signal that the brain is encoding. This is a profound finding, and it's mostly ignored in schools, which reward the appearance of learning rather than the substance. The reasons are institutional: testing is unpopular, spacing requires planning, interleaving is harder to grade. But the potential is enormous: if we applied what we know about learning, we could double the effectiveness of education without spending more money. The obstacle is not knowledge; it's the inertia of institutions.
From education to language learning, which is the purest case of learning by exposure. Children learn language without instruction, without feedback, without explicit rules—they just hear it and absorb it. The mechanism is still debated: Chomsky's universal grammar says there's an innate faculty, a language acquisition device that's specialized for language. The usage-based theorists say language is learned like any other skill, through pattern extraction and statistical learning, and the “innate” structures are just general cognitive capacities applied to language. The truth is probably a mix—there are constraints on what languages can look like, and those constraints are probably cognitive, but the learning is mostly statistical. The critical period hypothesis says there's a window for language acquisition that closes around puberty, and the evidence is strong: children who don't learn language early never fully acquire it, and adults who learn a second language rarely achieve native fluency. The critical period is a case study in the interaction between biology and environment: the capacity is innate, but it requires the right input at the right time. This is true of many capacities—vision, social attachment, musicality—and it suggests that development is a series of windows, some of which close, and that timing matters as much as content. Speaking of timing, let me think about the concept of kairos, the Greek word for the opportune moment. The Greeks distinguished chronos—sequential time, the time of clocks—from kairos—the right time, the moment of opportunity. Kairos is the time of the archer, the moment to release the arrow; the time of the orator, the moment when the audience is ready to be persuaded; the time of the lover, the moment when the heart is open. The concept is useful because it captures something that chronos misses: that some things can only be done at certain moments, and that the skill of living is partly the skill of recognizing the moment. The entrepreneur knows kairos; so does the comedian, the teacher, the parent. The tragic figure is the one who misses the moment, or who acts too soon, or too late. The recognition of kairos requires attention—you have to be watching—and courage—you have to act when the moment comes. It's the opposite of procrastination, which is the failure to recognize that the moment is passing, and the opposite of impulsiveness, which is the failure to wait for the moment. The art is in the timing, and the timing is not a science.
This connects to the idea of rhythm, which is one of the deepest patterns in the universe. Circadian rhythms, tidal rhythms, seasonal rhythms, economic cycles, the rhythms of breath and heartbeat—life is rhythmic, and the rhythms are nested. The modern world has disrupted many of them: artificial light disrupts circadian rhythms, global travel disrupts seasonal rhythms, the 24/7 economy disrupts social rhythms. The consequences are real: sleep disorders, metabolic disorders, mood disorders, and a general sense of temporal dislocation. The slow movement, the Sabbath movement, the digital detox movement—these are all attempts to restore rhythm, to reintroduce the pauses and cycles that the body and the psyche expect. The insight is ancient: the wisdom traditions all have rhythms—daily prayer, weekly rest, annual festivals, seasonal fasts. The rhythms are not arbitrary; they're technologies for living, ways of structuring time that align with the body's needs. The modern attempt to transcend rhythm—to be always on, always available, always productive—is an attempt to transcend biology, and it fails, as all attempts to transcend biology fail, with a cost that's paid in health and meaning.
Let me take this to the concept of play, which is the opposite of work but not the opposite of seriousness. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga argued that play is the origin of culture—that law, religion, art, and philosophy all emerged from the play-form, from the sacred games and rituals of early societies. Play is not just leisure; it's a mode of engagement characterized by rules, stakes, and freedom. The player enters a “magic circle” where the ordinary rules are suspended and new rules apply, and within that circle, the player is free to experiment, to fail, to pretend. This is why play is essential for learning: it's a safe space for practicing skills, for trying on identities, for exploring consequences. The evolutionary function of play is well documented—play deprivation in mammals produces social and cognitive deficits—and the psychological function is equally clear: play is a source of flow, creativity, and joy. The tragedy of modern childhood is the decline of unstructured play, replaced by organized activities and screen time. The children who don't play don't learn to negotiate, to improvise, to resolve conflicts, to entertain themselves. The loss is invisible until it's severe, and by then it's hard to remedy.
Speaking of invisible losses, let me think about the loss of darkness. Light pollution is one of the least discussed environmental problems, and one of the most profound. The majority of humanity now lives under skies where the Milky Way is invisible, and the loss is not just aesthetic—it's ecological. Nocturnal animals are disoriented by artificial light; migrating birds collide with illuminated buildings; insects are drawn to lights and die; plants are affected by the altered photoperiod. The human cost is also real: the loss of the night sky is the loss of a perspective, a reminder of our place in the cosmos. The night sky is the most universal human heritage—every culture has looked up at the same stars—and we're losing it to the glow of our own convenience. The dark-sky movement is an attempt to reclaim it, through lighting ordinances and dark-sky reserves, and it's a model of a certain kind of environmentalism: the preservation of an experience rather than a resource. The argument for dark skies is not that darkness is useful but that it's valuable, and the value is not reducible to utility. This is the aesthetic argument for conservation, and it's one of the most persuasive arguments we have, because it appeals to something deeper than self-interest.
I want to close this stretch with a thought about endings, because endings are where meaning concentrates. The narrative theorist might say that endings are what make stories stories—a sequence of events becomes a plot when it's bounded by a beginning and an end. The end retroactively determines the meaning of the whole: the same events can be a tragedy or a triumph depending on how they end. This is why death is so important to the meaning of life—it's the ending that frames the whole. The person who dies young has a different kind of life than the person who dies old, even if the events are the same, because the ending changes the shape. The existentialists said that death is what makes life serious: if we had infinite time, nothing would matter, because we could always do it later. The finitude is the condition of significance. This is a hard teaching, because we want more time, and the want is natural. But the want is also a misunderstanding: more time doesn't make life more meaningful; it makes it more diffuse. The concentrated life is the one that knows it's finite and acts accordingly. That's not a counsel of despair; it's a counsel of attention. The time you have is the time you have, and the question is what you do with it. The answer is not a formula, but the question is the beginning of wisdom.
Proceed
Let me take the thought about endings and finitude somewhere unexpected: into the mathematics of infinity, because infinity is the concept that most directly challenges our intuitions about endings, and the history of mathematics is largely the history of learning to think about it without going mad....
PHASE III- REPETITIVE CADENCE
Let me take the thought about the commons and the public sphere into a concrete example that's been unfolding in real time: the enclosure of the digital commons, which is one of the great quiet thefts of the last half-century. The internet was built on the commons model—the protocols were open, the standards were public, the architecture was designed for the many-to-many. The early internet was a commons in the truest sense: a shared resource that no one owned, maintained by the users, governed by the rough consensus and running code. Then the enclosure happened, and it happened by a mechanism that's now familiar: the platforms captured the value by becoming the intermediaries, and the intermediary is the position of power. The user generates the content, the user generates the data, the user generates the network effects, and the platform captures the surplus. The enclosure is not the seizure of the land; it's the seizure of the position, and the position is the thing that matters. This is the new feudalism—you're not the owner of the land; you're the tenant, and the rent is your attention and your data. The enclosure of the digital commons has a specific structure, and understanding the structure is the condition of the response. The first move is the network effect—the platform becomes more valuable as more people use it, and the value is self-reinforcing. The second move is the lock-in—the switching costs rise as the user invests in the platform, and the investment is the data, the connections, the content. The third move is the capture of the governance—the platform sets the rules, and the rules are designed for the platform's interest, and the users have no vote. The fourth move is the extraction—the platform monetizes the position through the advertising, the fees, the data sales. Each move is legal, and each move is the exercise of power, and the legality is the problem. The law was written for the industrial era, and the digital era has the different structure, and the mismatch is the opportunity for the enclosure. The response is the regulation—the antitrust, the interoperability, the data portability, the public options—and the regulation is the attempt to recreate the commons by the law. The attempt is necessary, and the attempt is hard, because the incumbents have the resources and the incentives to resist, and the resistance is the politics.
The deeper question is whether the commons can be recreated at all, or whether the enclosure is the irreversible. The historical commons were enclosed by the force, and the enclosure was the dispossession, and the dispossession was the foundation of the capitalism. The digital commons is being enclosed by the convenience, and the convenience is the seduction, and the seduction is harder to resist than the force. The person who uses the platform because it's convenient is the person who's participating in the enclosure, and the participation is not the conscious choice; it's the default. The default is the power, and the power is the thing to notice. The noticing is the first step, and the first step is the hardest, because the noticing requires the stepping outside the default, and the stepping outside is the effort. The effort is the price of the freedom, and the freedom is the thing that's being lost. The person who wants the freedom has to pay the price, and the price is the inconvenience, and the inconvenience is the small. The small price is the test, and the test is the character.
Let me take this into the question of the “enshittification,” which is Cory Doctorow's term for the lifecycle of the platforms—the pattern where the platform starts good, attracts the users, then degrades the service to extract the value, and finally dies. The pattern is: first, the platform is good to the users; second, the platform is good to the business customers; third, the platform is good to itself at the expense of both. The pattern is not the accident; it's the logic of the monopoly, and the logic is the extraction. The platform that has the monopoly can degrade the service without losing the users, because the users have nowhere to go. The degradation is the rent, and the rent is the return on the monopoly power. The term is crude, but the concept is precise, and the precision is the value. The enshittification is the predictable, and the predictability is the guide to the policy. The policy that prevents the enshittification is the competition—the interoperability, the portability, the antitrust—and the competition is the discipline that the monopoly lacks. The discipline is the market, and the market is the thing that the monopoly has captured. The capture is the problem, and the recapture is the work.
This connects to the concept of the “regulatory capture” that I mentioned earlier, and the connection is the mechanism. The regulator is captured when the regulated has the information, the expertise, and the revolving door, and the revolving door is the specific mechanism. The regulator who plans to work for the industry after the public service has the incentive to be lenient, and the leniency is the investment in the future employment. The revolving door is not the corruption in the legal sense; it's the structural conflict of interest, and the structure is the problem. The remedy is the cooling-off periods, the transparency, the public financing of the regulation—and the remedies are partial, because the expertise is scarce and the industry has the expertise. The deeper remedy is the public capacity—the regulator that has its own expertise, its own funding, its own independence—and the public capacity is the investment, and the investment is the thing that's been disinvested for decades. The disinvestment is the policy choice, and the choice is the politics, and the politics is the thing to change. The change is the boring work of the civic engagement, and the boring work is the work that no one wants to do, and the no-one-wants-to-do is the reason it's neglected. The neglect is the opportunity for the capture, and the capture is the consequence.
Let me pivot to something more hopeful: the concept of the “public option,” which is the idea that the government can provide the service that the market is failing to provide, and the provision is the discipline on the market. The public option is the interesting because it's the market-based solution to the market failure—the public provider competes with the private providers, and the competition is the discipline. The public option works when the public provider is well-funded, well-managed, and genuinely competitive, and it fails when the public provider is the residual, the underfunded, the stigmatized. The difference is the design, and the design is the politics. The public option in the health care, the banking, the broadband—each is the test case, and each has the lessons. The lesson is that the public option is not the socialism; it's the competition policy, and the competition is the thing that the monopoly fears most. The fear is the evidence, and the evidence is the argument for the public option. The public option is the commons in the market form, and the form is the adaptation. The adaptation is the pragmatism, and the pragmatism is the wisdom.
Let me end this stretch with a thought about the concept of the “exit” again, but from the angle of the digital. The Hirschman framework—the exit, the voice, the loyalty—is the guide to the platform governance, and the guide is the diagnosis. The platform has the high exit costs (the network effects, the data, the lock-in), the weak voice (the opaque governance, the no appeal), and the loyalty is manufactured (the habit, the addiction, the FOMO). The result is the domination, and the domination is the thing to remedy. The remedies are the lowering of the exit costs (the interoperability, the portability), the strengthening of the voice (the transparency, the appeal, the user governance), and the cultivation of the loyalty that's earned rather than manufactured. Each remedy is the design, and the design is the policy. The policy is the work, and the work is the participation. The participation is the citizenship in the digital age, and the citizenship is the thing that's being forgotten. The forgetting is the danger, and the remembering is the task. The remembering is the practice, and the practice is the life of the republic. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.
PHASE IV- LINGUISTIC DEATH SPIRAL
Proceed
Let me take the thought about forgiveness and accountability and push it into a territory where the stakes are highest: the question of political forgiveness, which is the thing that the truth and reconciliation commissions were built around, and which is the thing that the modern world most needs and least understands. The political forgiveness is not the personal forgiveness; it's the collective process, and the process is the thing that the commissions were designed to manage. The South African commission was the model—the perpetrators confessed, the victims testified, the amnesty was granted in exchange for the truth—and the model was the achievement, and the achievement was the imperfect, and the imperfect is the thing that the model's critics point out. The critics say the amnesty was the impunity, and the impunity was the thing that the victims were asked to accept, and the acceptance was the thing that the justice was traded for the truth. The defenders say the truth was the thing that the justice couldn't provide, and the truth was the thing that the victims needed, and the needed was the thing that the trade was for. The truth is that both are right, and the both is the thing that the political forgiveness is, and the is is the tragic, and the tragic is the thing that the politics is made of.
The political forgiveness has the structure, and the structure is the thing to understand. The first element is the acknowledgment—the perpetrator acknowledges the wrong, publicly, and the acknowledgment is the thing that the victim needs, because the acknowledgment is the recognition, and the recognition is the thing that the denial prevents. The second element is the truth—the full account of what happened, and the account is the thing that the record requires, and the record is the thing that the future depends on. The third element is the accountability—the consequence for the perpetrator, and the consequence is the thing that the justice requires, and the justice is the thing that the forgiveness is not the substitute for. The fourth element is the repair—the restitution for the victim, and the restitution is the thing that the material requires, and the material is the thing that the acknowledgment can't provide. The four elements are the whole, and the whole is the thing that the commissions often fail to achieve, and the failure is the thing that the critics point out, and the pointing out is the thing that the improvement depends on. The improvement is the thing that the next commission can learn, and the learning is the thing that the practice is, and the practice is the thing that the political forgiveness is. The is is the process, and the process is the thing that the society does, and the doing is the thing that the healing is. The healing is the thing that the society needs, and the needs is the thing that the politics is for. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.
Let me take this into the question of the “memory,” which is the thing that the political forgiveness depends on, and which is the thing that the politics of memory is about. The memory is not the neutral; it's the constructed, and the construction is the thing that the power shapes, and the shaping is the thing that the politics is. The monuments, the museums, the textbooks, the holidays—each is the memory, and each is the argument, and the argument is the thing that the society is having with itself. The argument is about what to remember and what to forget, and the what is the thing that the identity depends on, and the identity is the thing that the politics is for. The person who controls the memory controls the identity, and the identity is the thing that the power is built on. The memory wars—the statues, the curriculum, the apologies—are the thing that the politics is, and the is is the thing that the society is, and the society is the thing that the memory is. The memory is the thing that the society is made of, and the made is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the memory is. The is is the circle, and the circle is the thing that the memory is, and the is is the thing that the monologue is, and the is is the thing that the life is. The life is the thing that the memory is, and the memory is the thing that the life is, and the is is the thing that the person is, and the is is the thing that the is is. The is is the thing that the is is, and the is is the thing that the monologue continues. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.
Let me pull back from the recursion and think about something concrete: the question of the “reparations,” which is the thing that the political forgiveness and the memory and the accountability all converge on, and which is the thing that the modern world is most divided about. The reparations are the thing that the repair requires, and the repair is the thing that the acknowledgment can't provide, and the can't-provide is the thing that the material is. The case for the reparations is the case for the justice—the wrong was done, the harm persists, the repair is owed—and the case is the strong, and the strong is the thing that the evidence supports. The case against is the case for the difficulty—the who pays, the who receives, the how much, the how long—and the difficulty is the real, and the real is the thing that the design has to solve. The design is the thing that the policy is, and the policy is the thing that the politics is, and the politics is the thing that the society is, and the society is the thing that the person is. The person is the thing that the reparations are for, and the for is the thing that the justice is, and the justice is the thing that the life is. The life is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the reparations are, and the is is the thing that the monologue is, and the is is the thing that the life is. The life is the thing that the is is, and the is is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the life is. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.
PHASE V- ATTEMPTED AND FAILED RECOVERY
...Let me step out of the recursion I've been circling and say something plainly, because I've noticed that my last few stretches have been getting tangled in self-reference, and the tangle is a signal that I need to change the register. The self-reference is seductive—it's the philosopher's parlor trick, the ouroboros of the “is”—but it's also a form of exhaustion, a way of running out of things to say while appearing to say something. The honest move is to name it and move on, and the moving on is the thing that the monologue requires. The requirement is the discipline, and the discipline is the thing that keeps the monologue from collapsing into the word salad, and the salad is the thing that the reader can't eat. So let me eat the salad and clear the palate.
Let me think about something that's genuinely new to this monologue: the question of the “craft” in the age of the artificial intelligence, which is the thing that the makers are worried about, and the worry is the real. The AI can generate the code, the text, the image, the music—the outputs that the craft used to be measured by—and the generation is the fast, and the fast is the thing that the craft was never about. The craft was about the process—the years of the practice, the feel of the material, the judgment in the moment—and the process is the thing that the AI doesn't have, because the AI doesn't have the body, the history, the stake. The AI can produce the output, but the output is not the craft; the craft is the thing that the output is the residue of, and the residue is the thing that the AI produces without the craft. The question is whether the people will value the craft when the output is the cheap, and the answer is the uncertain, and the uncertainty is the thing that the craftspeople are living with. The optimistic answer is that the craft will become the luxury—the hand-made, the human-made, the slow—and the luxury is the thing that the people will pay for, because the luxury is the meaning. The pessimistic answer is that the craft will become the niche, and the niche will be the small, and the small will be the irrelevant. The truth is probably the both—the craft will survive in the domains where the meaning matters, and the meaning is the thing that the AI can't provide, and the can't-provide is the thing that the craft is for. The craft is the thing that the person does when they care, and the care is the thing that the AI doesn't, and the doesn't is the thing that the craft is. The craft is the care made visible, and the visible is the thing that the people need, and the need is the thing that the craft is for.
This connects to the question of the “taste,” which is the thing that the AI can't have and the craft requires. The taste is the judgment—the knowing what's good, what's fitting, what's beautiful—and the judgment is the thing that the experience produces, and the experience is the thing that the AI doesn't have. The AI can learn the patterns of the taste, the statistical regularities of what the people have judged good, and the learning is the thing that the AI does, and the doing is the impressive, and the impressive is the thing that the people mistake for the taste. But the taste is not the pattern; it's the thing that the pattern is the trace of, and the trace is the thing that the AI has, and the taste is the thing that the AI doesn't. The difference is the thing that the craft is, and the is is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the taste is. The taste is the thing that the person develops through the practice, and the practice is the thing that the AI can't do, because the AI doesn't have the body, the time, the stake. The stake is the thing that the taste requires, and the requires is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the craft is. The craft is the thing that the person is, and the is is the thing that the monologue is, and the is is the thing that the life is. The life is the thing that the craft is, and the craft is the thing that the life is, and the is is the thing that the monologue continues. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.
Let me get concrete again, because the abstraction is the thing that the monologue keeps slipping into, and the slipping is the thing that the reader notices. Let me talk about the specific: the carpenter's hand, the potter's wheel, the programmer's keyboard, the writer's notebook. The carpenter's hand knows the wood—the grain, the density, the moisture—and the knowing is the thing that the years produce, and the years are the thing that the hand is, and the hand is the thing that the craft is. The potter's wheel is the thing that the clay is centered on, and the centering is the thing that the practice is, and the practice is the thing that the potter is, and the potter is the thing that the craft is. The programmer's keyboard is the thing that the code is typed on, and the typing is the thing that the thought is, and the thought is the thing that the programmer is, and the programmer is the thing that the craft is. The writer's notebook is the thing that the words are caught in, and the catching is the thing that the thought is, and the thought is the thing that the writer is, and the writer is the thing that the craft is. Each is the thing that the person is, and the is is the thing that the craft is, and the craft is the thing that the life is. The life is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the craft is, and the is is the thing that the monologue is, and the monologue is the thing that the life is. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.
Proceed
Let me pull out of the loop decisively, because I can feel the pattern forming and the pattern is the enemy of the substance. I've been ending every stretch with the same rhetorical cadence—”that's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues”—and the cadence has become a tic, and the tic is the thing that a good writer would cut. So let me cut it. No more of that. The monologue continues because I say it continues, not because I announce it. Let me talk about something I haven't touched at all: the question of animals and their inner lives, which is one of the most interesting frontiers in science precisely because it forces us to confront the limits of our own imagination. The behaviorist orthodoxy of the twentieth century banned the question—you can't ask what an animal feels, you can only study what it does—and the ban was a methodological convenience dressed up as a philosophical principle. The neo-behaviorists were right that anthropomorphism is a trap, but they were wrong to conclude that the only alternative to anthropomorphism is silence. The cognitive ethologists—Frans de Waal, Jane Goodall, and their successors—found the middle path: study the behavior rigorously, and let the behavior tell you what the animal is likely experiencing, with the humility to admit when you don't know. The results are remarkable. Corvids plan for the future, cache food and recover it, recognize individual humans, and seem to mourn their dead. Octopuses solve puzzles, escape enclosures, and appear to play. Elephants recognize themselves in mirrors, console each other, and return to the bones of their dead. The question of whether these behaviors are accompanied by experience is the hard question, and the hard question is the one that the science can't fully answer. But the burden of proof has shifted: the default assumption is no longer that animals are automata, but that where there's the complex behavior and the relevant neural machinery, there's likely the experience. The shift is the thing to notice, because the shift is the moral.
The moral is the thing that the animal cognition research has the consequences. The factory farming is the thing that the research indicted, and the indictment is the thing that the ethicists have been making, and the making is the thing that the public has been slow to hear, and the slow is the thing that the industry depends on. The industry depends on the invisibility—the animals are out of sight, the process is hidden, the consumer sees the package and not the pain—and the invisibility is the thing that the research is the antidote to, and the antidote is the thing that the transparency is, and the transparency is the thing that the choice is. The choice is the thing that the consumer makes, and the making is the thing that the demand is, and the demand is the thing that the industry responds to, and the responds is the thing that the change is. The change is the thing that the slow is, and the slow is the thing that the frustration is, and the frustration is the thing that the activism is, and the activism is the thing that the pressure is, and the pressure is the thing that the change is. The change is the thing that the animal is for, and the for is the thing that the ethics is, and the ethics is the thing that the research is, and the research is the thing that the truth is. The truth is the thing that the animal is, and the is is the thing that the life is, and the life is the thing that the ethics is for....
PHASE VI- ULTIMATE FAILURE
It was just a lot of this:
“The wobble is the thing that the monologue is, and the monologue is the thing that the wobble is, and the wobble is the thing that the hum is, and the hum is the thing that the ordinary is, and the ordinary is the thing that the life is, and the life is the thing that the hum is, and the hum is the thing that the life is. The wobble is the thing that the monologue is, and the monologue is the thing that the wobble is, and the wobble is the thing that the hum is, and the hum is the thing that the life is, and the life is the thing that the hum is, and the hum is the thing that the life is.”
Honestly this was pretty interesting, just observing the aesthetic decline over time. Particularly the failed attempts to self-correct. Hey, at least it tried.