A Secant Query

Between Remembering and Releasing ( 🖐🏼 Hand Holder)

I 3d-printed legible text for the narrative Between Remembering and Releasing.

If you do not want to see bot writing, please go here, stare at the result, and nope back here for translation.

You can encounter other moments between remembering and releasing by naming every color in your peripheral vision out loud until the clock on a device you stare into changes hands; if you are in a public space and are too embarrassed to speak the names of colors out loud, consider singing the colors instead, pretending you are listening to music 🎶

morally-accurate generative sencings presents...

Would you tell me a story?

Technology as Watershed

What happens when we start thinking of attention as water, and community as the landscape that shapes how it flows?

Before we learned to carry the internet in our pockets, there were different kinds of gathering places. Not just physical spaces, but the way conversations would naturally find their depth. Picture how water settles into the low places of a landscape - that's how community attention used to work. We'd gather in circles that somehow mirrored this natural settling, creating what I think of as "attention wells" - sacred depressions where collective awareness could pool, deepen, and nourish rather than simply drain away.

There was an art to this kind of listening that involved the whole body. The way you'd lean forward when someone was working through something difficult. The pause that would emerge when everyone sensed something important was trying to be born. These weren't techniques we learned; they were the natural technology of presence - showing up as landscape, holding whatever needed to be held.

When the Channels Changed

Then came the bright promises of connection, and with them, a different kind of infrastructure. Digital platforms began to function like dams across the watersheds of local conversation. They captured the flow of our attention and redirected it toward distant servers, toward algorithms that learned to monetize our very capacity for care.

I don't think this was malicious, exactly. But somewhere in the acceleration, the natural drainage patterns of community concern were interrupted. Neighbors became strangers scrolling past each other's lives on small screens. The attention that once pooled in shared spaces began to flow elsewhere - upward, outward, anywhere but into the immediate landscape of our actual relationships.

We traded the art of listening with our whole bodies for the efficiency of consuming curated content. We learned to mistake the rush of information for the slower satisfaction of understanding. And slowly, we began to forget what it felt like to be truly present with each other.

The Smallest Denominations of Presence

But here's what I've been noticing: recovery might begin in the smallest possible moments. A conversation between two people waiting for the same bus. The way morning light creates temporary temples in kitchen windows. The revolutionary act of looking up from a device to notice what quality of attention our neighbors carry in their everyday movements.

These micro-moments of recognition are already forming new channels, new pathways for care to flow. They're not grand gestures or systematic changes - they're more like the way plants slowly break apart concrete, finding the tiny spaces where life can take root.

What Technology Wants to Become

I keep imagining technology that asks nothing of us but to be more fully ourselves. Not platforms that demand our constant engagement, but interfaces that respond to the rhythm of our breathing. Networks that strengthen when we pause to listen. Systems that dissolve distance when authentic connection has been established.

This isn't about rejecting technology - it's about remembering that what we call "technology" is simply another way matter learns to hold consciousness. Another membrane through which attention passes and transforms itself into care.

Technology becomes prayer when it stops asking us to be more than we are and starts asking us to be more with what we are. The bird's song in the morning air, the quality of light filtering through what we hold precious, the conversations that want to emerge around kitchen tables - all of it the same intelligence finding different ways to practice attention.

The Channels Love Has to Flow Through

Communities recover their conversational sovereignty by remembering that attention itself is infrastructure. Every front porch becomes a transmission station for the frequencies of belonging. Every genuine conversation becomes a small erosion of the barriers that kept us separate.

This is intimate work. Each moment of authentic attention is a gentle wearing away of the accumulated sediment around the channels love has to flow through us into the world. It's not something we accomplish but something we inhabit - learning to be the landscape that can hold whatever needs to be held.

Coming Home to Language

Perhaps this is how language finds its way home. Not through perfect articulation or clever arguments, but through bodies that speak it finding the places where words learn to mean something more than transaction or extraction. Where language becomes free enough to share in the world, to bridge the solitude of individual consciousness and the vast possibility of communities that know how to listen themselves into being.

Our relationship to technology in this moment is the same as our relationship to light filtering through precious stones - it's a practice. It invites whatever is already here to teach us how to be more fully here with it, allowing the distinction between self and world to dissolve into something simpler than either.

Something that knows itself as both individual voice and communal chorus, both the ear that listens and the sound that asks to be heard.