Sachin’s foundational archival vs carnival time framework is really starting to pay off now. This is a powerful insight and a better explanation of responses to AI than the hypothesis that it is a straightforward extension of shallow pro/anti tech attitudes or economic anxieties vs excitement.

The x-axis of 2×2 in the post, contemplative vs embodied, is a genuine level up to the classic vita contemplativa vs vita activa distinction which obscures that both are actually equally active. Just on different modes of memory.

Along the way, the post also satisfactorily explains a 2018 tweet of mine with a vague intuition about asynchronous vs synchronous people that I couldn’t quite work out at the time.

A key advance of this essay is the idea of attunement to planetary hyperobjects. Unlike attunement to things like religion (through ceremonial life, as in the example he cites of late Roman Christian and pagan life), the things we have to be attuned to now, like the internet, changing climate, or AI, aren’t theological fictions. These hyperobjects break responses that are either purely contemplative or purely embodied. One is too slow, the other is too dumb. You need both.