“The entire book that you are going to read was written under the pressure of a sort of religious terror in the author’s soul, produced by the sight of this irresistible revolution.” These words were written by Alexis de Tocqueville in the introduction to Democracy in America. Reading Antón Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation, one experiences something like Tocqueville’s religious terror at the sight of the digital revolution. What Tocqueville did for the democratic revolution Barba-Kay aims to do for the digital: to record the ongoing digitalization of the modern world as our fundamental, generative fact. In Barba-Kay’s own words: “digital technology is no longer just a product, but our turn of mind—the configuration of our needs, our novel attention to the world’s uses.” In the spirit of Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt, Barba-Kay tries, in the words of the latter, “to think what we are doing.”
Yet while everyone noticed the advent of modern democracy, for too long, the digital revolution has been contemplated as if it were merely virtual, changing little “in reality.” This is what Barba-Kay calls “the digital’s trick”: “to show us everything we wish while erasing its own tangible presence and effects.” For Barba-Kay, the digital is a (high-tech) mirror; this metaphor runs through the book from beginning to end. Your phone mirrors the world back to you. But what you see is the world you want to see—a “frictionless,” “responsive,” “immediate,” “obedient,” “commercialized,” “optimized” simulacrum of your own will accomplished. The digital is a master tool that performs almost any task, from conducting business to procuring sex to translating foreign languages. The digital is also the medium in which we disclose our humanity in its unique contemporary form—our politics, culture and self-understanding. Because the digital so effortlessly mediates our words and deeds, we collaborate in its ascendancy. We have our phones. Our phones have us.
Do you remember what it was like to wake up before you had a smartphone? For me, it happened either slowly or all at once: perhaps I would smile at my wife, say something sweet or ridiculous to her, judge the light through the window; alternatively, if I had to get up quick, I’d jump up and take the dog outside, shoulders squared against the weather. Now I wake up in exactly one way every day: I reach for my phone. There may be texts from family and friends who stay up later than I do or who live on the West Coast. There may be activity on Twitter (absurdly, X): since I am “on there,” I should see what I’m up to. It would be irresponsible, unfriendly, not to check; perhaps a friend has done something impressive; I should retweet the announcement. And who am I kidding: I want to see whether my own tweets have received attention, maybe even gone viral, since a viral tweet requires its own kind of upkeep. I want to see what has happened while I slept. And my phone shows me exactly the sort of happening about which I care (a contested election, or an NBA playoff game). From my bed, or as I stumble to the bathroom, I talk to my friends, view the world and begin to check items off my list of tasks. What’s not to like?
To wake up in this way is also strange—at once pious and numbing, urgent and alienating. Let me look again at what I’m doing. I attend to my phone first thing, like Queequeg to his idol. Almost automatically, I’m quipping bleary-eyed text replies, toothbrush in mouth, expressionless (though I’ve added lols). Turning to Twitter, I channel surf other brains before consulting my own. The news articles that strike me as crucial upon waking will later seem contrived, forgettable. And why should I allow emails about meetings to crowd out early-morning conversation with my family? When I begin to talk to my kid over breakfast, or when I pick up the book that I will teach later that day, I sometimes have the sense of regaining consciousness. Barba-Kay suggests that even this distinction between the virtual and the real is symptomatic of the digital age. “Offline friction now shows up in a new light, something that must be actively preferred (and perhaps quantified) for its own sake—a salutary attentional spinach. … The desire to be analogue is itself extruded from the digital.” One of the ways that I “get offline” in the morning is by running—after which I upload my run to Strava.
Barba-Kay’s book elicited these reflections; his book, too, is a mirror, albeit of a harsher kind. The average American checks their phone every six minutes. A question that motivates our checking: “Who is the most beautiful of them all?” When Barba-Kay writes about the role of shame in our online experience, he is both examining the digital soul and exposing it:
The internet is—as a faceless medium, as a medium of seeing without being seen—an essentially shameless medium. Shame is an experience of seeing others seeing us; it is also a corporeal affect (we blush, cover our face, or hang our head). Both these conditions are absent online where we are removed from presence and on permanent display: We offer up instead a face that cannot blush.
Does Barba-Kay imagine that the book will shame susceptible readers (like me)? Near the conclusion, he throws down the gauntlet: “digital technology is spiritual opium”; we threaten to “erase the difference between ourselves and our devices, to be leading protagonists in our own dehumanization.” In these moments, the book hits the rhetorical register of a jeremiad. Even so, Barba-Kay offers no solution except that of Bartleby: refusal. “The only advice I will give in these pages is therefore so simple as to be the wisdom of fools,” he writes in the introduction. “If you’ve started, stop; if you haven’t, don’t; and if you can’t, then keep trying to think what you are doing.”
He knows this advice will be mostly ineffective. The last chapter is a tongue-in-cheek response to the book written via email by an (imagined) Silicon Valley executive, who condescends to offer Barba-Kay employment while berating him for his backwardness and self-importance:
You exhibitionist intellectuals, you armchair critics—you go on with your digital mewling in your boo-hoo books and grumpy blogposts, you conspicuously complain about social media in the New Yorker or The Atlantic, you type up your screeds on your new iMac, and then squeak with joy when your article works up a nano-trickle of retweets and gets picked up by one of our aggregators. It’s incredibly lame. As if blowhard complaint were not itself a form of modern performance art. As if criticism were not just another commodity. As if anyone really cared to see you go through these whingeing motions. As if you were not pretending to fight against something you don’t really want to destroy.
The exec knows that an anti-digital screed will either fall on deaf ears or inspire a few “think pieces”—think pieces, like this one, circulated and read on the internet. Since Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and the Sciences, we moderns have loved denunciations of our own modernity, especially if these allow us to embrace our progress (in corruption) with smug self-awareness and a freer conscience. So Barba-Kay’s nemesis gets the last word, unless we can imagine Barba-Kay replying to him: “No.”
●
Modernity refers, for Barba-Kay, chiefly if not exclusively to the unfolding of technological progress culminating in the digital. Whereas in the ancient world technē was seen to imitate and aid nature in the realization of its ends, as the physician uses his art to nurse the body to health, early modern thinkers wondered whether art could overcome natural limitations altogether. Medicine might vastly extend human life; the modern state, properly designed, might never die; the bomb, through the threat of mutually assured destruction, might obviate war. Digital technology is not just one more attempt to resist, artificially, the indifference of nature to human happiness. Instead, “the digital is a ‘natural’ technology, that is, a technology so useful as to serve as a paradigm for usefulness itself, a technology that achieves the goal implicit in technology as such.” For all that everything solid has melted into air for two centuries, for all that we have been shaped by cars and TVs, only recently did “human beings themselves become the objects of deliberate design, in which the bounds between what is given and what is made are altogether blurred.” What makes this audacious technological project work is that we choose it—only for a moment, but in almost every moment. And in these moments we aspire to merge with our phones, to efface the gap between the human and the digital in our own lives.
This is a powerful account of the so-called “question concerning technology”—and an accessible one, which is a serious advantage over Heidegger’s famous essay by that title. Like Heidegger, however, Barba-Kay may underestimate nature’s staying power, just as he may overestimate the quasi-poetic power of our Apple overlords to create new gods. (Take the events of last week, where a new commercial for the iPad Pro was met with such universal horror that Apple ended up apologizing for it.) The poet Horace wrote that “one can expel nature with a pitchfork, but it always returns.” Even with a pitchfork as powerful as the iPhone, I wonder whether it makes sense to call digital technology a “natural technology”—both because I worry about ceding the philosophical ground of nature to the tech bro who appears in Barba-Kay’s last chapter (whoever he is), and because I doubt that nature can be cast out altogether. I’d suggest that digital technology is neither natural nor unnatural. We are strange in-between creatures, susceptible to animalization or apotheosis—or animalization through misguided attempts at apotheosis. As Barba-Kay himself shows, so much depends on us—on the hopes we stake on digital technology, on our conformity to its laws.
Whereas others warn of a digital apocalypse in which humanity is enslaved or destroyed by AI, Barba-Kay reveals how much we have lost already. In the book’s climactic chapters, Barba-Kay argues that the digital corrodes political action itself. As most of us have been made aware by now, the digital can be used for authoritarian ends—and Barba-Kay describes China as “the first fully developed digitocracy, a totalitarian regime based on technical control and panoptical transparency.” Yet, for Barba-Kay, “the internet’s most powerful political desire—the political attitude that most visibly emerges from our collective uses of it—is the desire to escape from politics altogether.” Even when we log on to express our political preferences, we do so from nowhere, addressing no one in particular. Our venues of online speech are run by corporations that have exploded trust, abdicated political responsibility (in pursuit of neutrality, that is, profit) and encouraged partisans and ideologues to dominate the conversation. To ask whether the internet is good for liberal democracy (or any other regime) therefore misses the point. “The internet is entropic to the realization of political form; it is a force of political incoherence and discoherence.” At the same time, our politics is illegible without the internet; Trump’s “Twitter presidency” is a case in point. The digital both informs and endangers our politics.
Likewise, the digital now inflects how we think—and how we think about thinking. While the “most urgent and proximate concern about AI is not the death of theory … [but] the possibility that AI will be deployed for military purposes so as to slip from our control,” Barba-Kay’s long-range concern is the redefinition of intelligence itself, with the artificial version ascendant. “By perfecting digital technology, we are in fact constructing a model of human intelligence, our perfect self. And the more we see ourselves in it (because we are able to), the more it becomes us, the more we become it.”
Algorithmic, utilitarian and putatively neutral, AI represents “the ultimate expression of modern science’s founding gambit, which is to make practical effectiveness primary over metaphysical or philosophical meaning.” What AI cannot do is judge, deliberate or contemplate: AI cannot tell you whether to go to war or whom to marry; nor can it answer the question, quid sit deus? Will we learn not to ask these questions? This is the real threat posed by AI according to Barba-Kay—the withering away of intellectual virtue, practical and theoretical. Should we cease to think and judge, it will not be because the robots do all our intellectual work for us; rather, the cause will be our own embrace of robotic thinking. After all, the devices work best when we think like them.
●
Other worlds are possible. In the book’s chapter on the fate of the political in digital modernity, Barba-Kay writes: “I myself have been living in an isolated, rural community of about forty inhabitants. It is wonderful to belong, but it is terrible to feel at every moment under the scrutiny of knowing eyes.” This is the lone, oblique reference to Deep Springs College, where Barba-Kay holds the humanities chair. I too have taught at Deep Springs as a visiting professor. (And so, full disclosure, I know Barba-Kay, though nothing he said to me in our short time as colleagues could have prepared me for this book.) The (fewer than) thirty students of Deep Springs form a tiny polis: they govern themselves and run the college, which is also a cattle ranch requiring their labor and administration, even as they undertake a rigorous liberal arts curriculum, selecting their professors and courses. Deep Springs is free; for their education students incur only an obligation of “service to humanity.” My family and I lived at Deep Springs during May and June of 2021 and 2023; during both stints, the student body banned the internet. While faculty are not subject to student legislation, Deep Springs Valley—located in the remote high desert of the Eastern Sierra—imposes a de facto internet ban: there is no cell service. When I’m at Deep Springs, or when I’m backpacking after I finish teaching there, my phone is disenchanted, nature reenchanted. Sometimes I reach into my pocket, and I do not know what for.
Nature returns with a pitchfork at Deep Springs. But the digital also lurks. On the college’s campus, I’m aware, in spite of myself, when I’m close enough to a building to pick up Wi-Fi. Have I checked my email while my kid feeds alfalfa to a Deep Springs horse? Yes. And hiking in the surrounding desert and mountains, I carry my phone. Although I don’t use it frequently, I tell myself that I need it—to take pictures, to identify plants and animals and to chart my route. Weaving through desolate canyons, how useful it is to have an app that marks my exact location on a USGS topographic map! I also bring a satellite device, which would allow me to call for help; when I get my next iPhone, it will have built-in SAT capacity, two devices in one. With that phone, at the top of a mountain, I will have to choose not to send a text, or even a pic. On the darkest nights at Deep Springs, even though the nearest small town is fifty miles and a huge mountain range away, one can see a slight glow on the horizon: Vegas.
However much I’m tempted to question the theoretical core of Barba-Kay’s argument, his account of the digital as a “natural technology,” I’m unable to deny its practical force. Today it may be the digital that returns, even as we try to drive it out. After all, what does my insistence on the possibility of a permanent human nature avail me when it is practically compatible with my imprisonment and stultification by the digital? For those whose phones have become their way of life, the consolations of theory—the knowledge that we can and should do otherwise—may be worth little, or nothing at all.
Reaching for my phone, I now face Barba-Kay’s words: “It’s hard to feel that there’s any downside, since online time is always only right now already, the present absolute. We are only there for the moment, time and again.” For the moment, time and again, we are on our phones. For the moment, time and again, we are alive. It’s disconcerting, but also welcome, to have this mirror, in which we see ourselves at stake.
“The entire book that you are going to read was written under the pressure of a sort of religious terror in the author’s soul, produced by the sight of this irresistible revolution.” These words were written by Alexis de Tocqueville in the introduction to Democracy in America. Reading Antón Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation, one experiences something like Tocqueville’s religious terror at the sight of the digital revolution. What Tocqueville did for the democratic revolution Barba-Kay aims to do for the digital: to record the ongoing digitalization of the modern world as our fundamental, generative fact. In Barba-Kay’s own words: “digital technology is no longer just a product, but our turn of mind—the configuration of our needs, our novel attention to the world’s uses.” In the spirit of Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt, Barba-Kay tries, in the words of the latter, “to think what we are doing.”
Yet while everyone noticed the advent of modern democracy, for too long, the digital revolution has been contemplated as if it were merely virtual, changing little “in reality.” This is what Barba-Kay calls “the digital’s trick”: “to show us everything we wish while erasing its own tangible presence and effects.” For Barba-Kay, the digital is a (high-tech) mirror; this metaphor runs through the book from beginning to end. Your phone mirrors the world back to you. But what you see is the world you want to see—a “frictionless,” “responsive,” “immediate,” “obedient,” “commercialized,” “optimized” simulacrum of your own will accomplished. The digital is a master tool that performs almost any task, from conducting business to procuring sex to translating foreign languages. The digital is also the medium in which we disclose our humanity in its unique contemporary form—our politics, culture and self-understanding. Because the digital so effortlessly mediates our words and deeds, we collaborate in its ascendancy. We have our phones. Our phones have us.
Do you remember what it was like to wake up before you had a smartphone? For me, it happened either slowly or all at once: perhaps I would smile at my wife, say something sweet or ridiculous to her, judge the light through the window; alternatively, if I had to get up quick, I’d jump up and take the dog outside, shoulders squared against the weather. Now I wake up in exactly one way every day: I reach for my phone. There may be texts from family and friends who stay up later than I do or who live on the West Coast. There may be activity on Twitter (absurdly, X): since I am “on there,” I should see what I’m up to. It would be irresponsible, unfriendly, not to check; perhaps a friend has done something impressive; I should retweet the announcement. And who am I kidding: I want to see whether my own tweets have received attention, maybe even gone viral, since a viral tweet requires its own kind of upkeep. I want to see what has happened while I slept. And my phone shows me exactly the sort of happening about which I care (a contested election, or an NBA playoff game). From my bed, or as I stumble to the bathroom, I talk to my friends, view the world and begin to check items off my list of tasks. What’s not to like?
To wake up in this way is also strange—at once pious and numbing, urgent and alienating. Let me look again at what I’m doing. I attend to my phone first thing, like Queequeg to his idol. Almost automatically, I’m quipping bleary-eyed text replies, toothbrush in mouth, expressionless (though I’ve added lols). Turning to Twitter, I channel surf other brains before consulting my own. The news articles that strike me as crucial upon waking will later seem contrived, forgettable. And why should I allow emails about meetings to crowd out early-morning conversation with my family? When I begin to talk to my kid over breakfast, or when I pick up the book that I will teach later that day, I sometimes have the sense of regaining consciousness. Barba-Kay suggests that even this distinction between the virtual and the real is symptomatic of the digital age. “Offline friction now shows up in a new light, something that must be actively preferred (and perhaps quantified) for its own sake—a salutary attentional spinach. … The desire to be analogue is itself extruded from the digital.” One of the ways that I “get offline” in the morning is by running—after which I upload my run to Strava.
Barba-Kay’s book elicited these reflections; his book, too, is a mirror, albeit of a harsher kind. The average American checks their phone every six minutes. A question that motivates our checking: “Who is the most beautiful of them all?” When Barba-Kay writes about the role of shame in our online experience, he is both examining the digital soul and exposing it:
Does Barba-Kay imagine that the book will shame susceptible readers (like me)? Near the conclusion, he throws down the gauntlet: “digital technology is spiritual opium”; we threaten to “erase the difference between ourselves and our devices, to be leading protagonists in our own dehumanization.” In these moments, the book hits the rhetorical register of a jeremiad. Even so, Barba-Kay offers no solution except that of Bartleby: refusal. “The only advice I will give in these pages is therefore so simple as to be the wisdom of fools,” he writes in the introduction. “If you’ve started, stop; if you haven’t, don’t; and if you can’t, then keep trying to think what you are doing.”
He knows this advice will be mostly ineffective. The last chapter is a tongue-in-cheek response to the book written via email by an (imagined) Silicon Valley executive, who condescends to offer Barba-Kay employment while berating him for his backwardness and self-importance:
The exec knows that an anti-digital screed will either fall on deaf ears or inspire a few “think pieces”—think pieces, like this one, circulated and read on the internet. Since Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and the Sciences, we moderns have loved denunciations of our own modernity, especially if these allow us to embrace our progress (in corruption) with smug self-awareness and a freer conscience. So Barba-Kay’s nemesis gets the last word, unless we can imagine Barba-Kay replying to him: “No.”
●
Modernity refers, for Barba-Kay, chiefly if not exclusively to the unfolding of technological progress culminating in the digital. Whereas in the ancient world technē was seen to imitate and aid nature in the realization of its ends, as the physician uses his art to nurse the body to health, early modern thinkers wondered whether art could overcome natural limitations altogether. Medicine might vastly extend human life; the modern state, properly designed, might never die; the bomb, through the threat of mutually assured destruction, might obviate war. Digital technology is not just one more attempt to resist, artificially, the indifference of nature to human happiness. Instead, “the digital is a ‘natural’ technology, that is, a technology so useful as to serve as a paradigm for usefulness itself, a technology that achieves the goal implicit in technology as such.” For all that everything solid has melted into air for two centuries, for all that we have been shaped by cars and TVs, only recently did “human beings themselves become the objects of deliberate design, in which the bounds between what is given and what is made are altogether blurred.” What makes this audacious technological project work is that we choose it—only for a moment, but in almost every moment. And in these moments we aspire to merge with our phones, to efface the gap between the human and the digital in our own lives.
This is a powerful account of the so-called “question concerning technology”—and an accessible one, which is a serious advantage over Heidegger’s famous essay by that title. Like Heidegger, however, Barba-Kay may underestimate nature’s staying power, just as he may overestimate the quasi-poetic power of our Apple overlords to create new gods. (Take the events of last week, where a new commercial for the iPad Pro was met with such universal horror that Apple ended up apologizing for it.) The poet Horace wrote that “one can expel nature with a pitchfork, but it always returns.” Even with a pitchfork as powerful as the iPhone, I wonder whether it makes sense to call digital technology a “natural technology”—both because I worry about ceding the philosophical ground of nature to the tech bro who appears in Barba-Kay’s last chapter (whoever he is), and because I doubt that nature can be cast out altogether. I’d suggest that digital technology is neither natural nor unnatural. We are strange in-between creatures, susceptible to animalization or apotheosis—or animalization through misguided attempts at apotheosis. As Barba-Kay himself shows, so much depends on us—on the hopes we stake on digital technology, on our conformity to its laws.
Whereas others warn of a digital apocalypse in which humanity is enslaved or destroyed by AI, Barba-Kay reveals how much we have lost already. In the book’s climactic chapters, Barba-Kay argues that the digital corrodes political action itself. As most of us have been made aware by now, the digital can be used for authoritarian ends—and Barba-Kay describes China as “the first fully developed digitocracy, a totalitarian regime based on technical control and panoptical transparency.” Yet, for Barba-Kay, “the internet’s most powerful political desire—the political attitude that most visibly emerges from our collective uses of it—is the desire to escape from politics altogether.” Even when we log on to express our political preferences, we do so from nowhere, addressing no one in particular. Our venues of online speech are run by corporations that have exploded trust, abdicated political responsibility (in pursuit of neutrality, that is, profit) and encouraged partisans and ideologues to dominate the conversation. To ask whether the internet is good for liberal democracy (or any other regime) therefore misses the point. “The internet is entropic to the realization of political form; it is a force of political incoherence and discoherence.” At the same time, our politics is illegible without the internet; Trump’s “Twitter presidency” is a case in point. The digital both informs and endangers our politics.
Likewise, the digital now inflects how we think—and how we think about thinking. While the “most urgent and proximate concern about AI is not the death of theory … [but] the possibility that AI will be deployed for military purposes so as to slip from our control,” Barba-Kay’s long-range concern is the redefinition of intelligence itself, with the artificial version ascendant. “By perfecting digital technology, we are in fact constructing a model of human intelligence, our perfect self. And the more we see ourselves in it (because we are able to), the more it becomes us, the more we become it.”
Algorithmic, utilitarian and putatively neutral, AI represents “the ultimate expression of modern science’s founding gambit, which is to make practical effectiveness primary over metaphysical or philosophical meaning.” What AI cannot do is judge, deliberate or contemplate: AI cannot tell you whether to go to war or whom to marry; nor can it answer the question, quid sit deus? Will we learn not to ask these questions? This is the real threat posed by AI according to Barba-Kay—the withering away of intellectual virtue, practical and theoretical. Should we cease to think and judge, it will not be because the robots do all our intellectual work for us; rather, the cause will be our own embrace of robotic thinking. After all, the devices work best when we think like them.
●
Other worlds are possible. In the book’s chapter on the fate of the political in digital modernity, Barba-Kay writes: “I myself have been living in an isolated, rural community of about forty inhabitants. It is wonderful to belong, but it is terrible to feel at every moment under the scrutiny of knowing eyes.” This is the lone, oblique reference to Deep Springs College, where Barba-Kay holds the humanities chair. I too have taught at Deep Springs as a visiting professor. (And so, full disclosure, I know Barba-Kay, though nothing he said to me in our short time as colleagues could have prepared me for this book.) The (fewer than) thirty students of Deep Springs form a tiny polis: they govern themselves and run the college, which is also a cattle ranch requiring their labor and administration, even as they undertake a rigorous liberal arts curriculum, selecting their professors and courses. Deep Springs is free; for their education students incur only an obligation of “service to humanity.” My family and I lived at Deep Springs during May and June of 2021 and 2023; during both stints, the student body banned the internet. While faculty are not subject to student legislation, Deep Springs Valley—located in the remote high desert of the Eastern Sierra—imposes a de facto internet ban: there is no cell service. When I’m at Deep Springs, or when I’m backpacking after I finish teaching there, my phone is disenchanted, nature reenchanted. Sometimes I reach into my pocket, and I do not know what for.
Nature returns with a pitchfork at Deep Springs. But the digital also lurks. On the college’s campus, I’m aware, in spite of myself, when I’m close enough to a building to pick up Wi-Fi. Have I checked my email while my kid feeds alfalfa to a Deep Springs horse? Yes. And hiking in the surrounding desert and mountains, I carry my phone. Although I don’t use it frequently, I tell myself that I need it—to take pictures, to identify plants and animals and to chart my route. Weaving through desolate canyons, how useful it is to have an app that marks my exact location on a USGS topographic map! I also bring a satellite device, which would allow me to call for help; when I get my next iPhone, it will have built-in SAT capacity, two devices in one. With that phone, at the top of a mountain, I will have to choose not to send a text, or even a pic. On the darkest nights at Deep Springs, even though the nearest small town is fifty miles and a huge mountain range away, one can see a slight glow on the horizon: Vegas.
However much I’m tempted to question the theoretical core of Barba-Kay’s argument, his account of the digital as a “natural technology,” I’m unable to deny its practical force. Today it may be the digital that returns, even as we try to drive it out. After all, what does my insistence on the possibility of a permanent human nature avail me when it is practically compatible with my imprisonment and stultification by the digital? For those whose phones have become their way of life, the consolations of theory—the knowledge that we can and should do otherwise—may be worth little, or nothing at all.
Reaching for my phone, I now face Barba-Kay’s words: “It’s hard to feel that there’s any downside, since online time is always only right now already, the present absolute. We are only there for the moment, time and again.” For the moment, time and again, we are on our phones. For the moment, time and again, we are alive. It’s disconcerting, but also welcome, to have this mirror, in which we see ourselves at stake.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.