The Shape of Things Unravelling
culture, ideas, and fragments from a beautifully unstable internet
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Last weekend, by some small accident of time and mood, we found ourselves inside The Devil’s Advocate, a rather bizarre film from 1997. Do you know it? Neither of us had heard of it before, which feels strange given that it stars Keanu Reeves, Al Pacino, and an early Charlize Theron. It’s also two and a half hours long, excessive, absurd, faintly unhinged. Also entertaining, I suppose, since we watched it all the way through, but we were together and we had wine.
The internet was out for part of the weekend, and while some people in that situation might tell you they baked a loaf of bread, took a bath (and it was bliss), finally finished that novel they’ve been reading for a month – I’ll tell you the truth: I kind of flipped out. I don’t need to be online all the time, of course, but I do like knowing it’s there, in the background, if I need it. Everything is fixed now, but I’m doing a little soul-searching.
This week is about attention when it slips out of reach, and what happens when the systems we rely on quietly fail, and the background hum of constant access disappears. It moves between film, fragmentation, digital dependency, and the strange comfort of disconnection, tracing how much of modern life is held together by things we barely notice until they’re gone.
LAST TIME /at hyperreality
Half a Life on Screens
Monthly Salon: culture, ideas, and obsessions to elevate your week /041
Welcome back to the intellectual salon. This month's Recent Intelligence moves through several preoccupations at once: how AI is reshaping human relationships; what it looks like when a designer stops buying from supermarkets, switches to natural wine, and replaces refined sugar with honey; and a broader cultural drift away from perfection toward something softer, stranger, and more undone. As always, a selection of links to carry you through the weekend. What follows is a collection of the meaningful and the fleeting – small moments of thought, art, and life.
Below, for Paid Subscribers, spring’s shifting vocabulary of objects and desire, what I’m currently reading, and a sequence of fragments from an increasingly unstable internet. Notes on attention, surfaces, and the deep importance of what we choose to notice.