Category Archives: Works

Jacob’s Lattice

July 7, 2026Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalahanomalogue

In the Jacob’s Ladder figure (which a designer might be tempted to call Jacob’s Lattice), four Sefirot appear in vertical arrangement, each a world, overlapping at Malchut-Keter.

The terminal consummation at the foot of the world above (its fully realized Malchut) initiates the world below (that world’s Keter). Each world is suspended between an inheritance and a bequeathal, a coronation (Keter) and a kingdom (Malchut). The King is dead; long live the King.

Each world is the emergence of a category of transpiration. A mode of transpiring transpires.

In Beriah, creation transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate emanated world, Malchut of Atzilut, culminating in a consummate creational world (Malchut of Beriah) where formation can commence (Keter of Yetzirah). Here transpires creatio ex nihilo: something from nothing.

In Yetzirah, formation transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate created world, Malchut of Beriah, culminating in a consummate formational world (Malchut of Yetzirah) where actualization can commence (Keter of Assiyah). Here transpires formatio ex spiritu: something from something.

In Assiyah, actuality transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate formal world, Malchut of Yetzirah, culminating in a consummate actual world (Malchut of Assiyah). Here transpires ars ex formatione: thing from something — first, inception of an idea, then its unfolding as multiple possibilities, then development as one specific possibility, then finally to full actualization as a voiced word or physical act or artifact — a material actuality.

If material is invited to reciprocate — as it should, for this is the material dialogue of craft — the influence ripples back upwards. Material responds to actions, actions respond to form, form responds to creation, and presses into inconceivability, impossibility — nihilo —

…And sometimes a response issues from the emanative beyond — a divine echo of creation, revelation from nowhere, revelatio ex nihilo, also known as inspiration. Some shocking, inconceivable impossibility is conceived as a given possibility.

And when this happens, two things happen. The qualitative meaning of infinity is experienced directly as radical surprise. And the person who receives the surprise is transformed, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, occasionally completely, and neither they nor the world they now inhabit is ever the same again.

Conversion is reenworldment ex nihilo. With a sufficient number of reenworldments, a person might become metaconverted to a world of enworldment, where reenworldment ex nihilo is permanently possible and forever expected. Such a person can never take nothingness, inconceivability or impossibility at face value ever again, for nothingness is the tender mask of infinity, worn for our own fragile finitude.

Let us call this metaconversion exnihilism.

Each one in One

July 6, 2026Enworldment, Exnihilism, Love, Philosophy, Religionanomalogue

Each one of us is the image and likeness of the One.

But each one is merely image and likeness, a self-similar part of the One.

The essence of the One is absolutely unique all-inclusive infinitude. Only the One is absolutely unique, all-inclusive and infinite.

Each one is finite, unique solely by other-exclusion, and has a given finite appearance of centrality within an all-containing everything given through the negative element of infinitude, nihilitude.

Nihilitude defines finitude against absorption in the exnihilating infinitude of the One. The layered protecting garments that bless finite beings with the possibility of enworldment are woven from the divine negative substance, nihilitude.

It is easy to confuse Nothingness with the Infinite, because the infinite One against whom our finite one is defined is concealed in nihilitude. But nihilitude is only the skin of the Infinite One, relative only to some particular finite one. The nothingness comprehends only some particular one, not the One.

Some of us despise our own finitude. We want to transcend it in order to escape it. We want to lose our finitude and be re-absorbed back into the infinite. Others hate whatever reminds us that we are merely one, not One. We try to annihilate whatever and whoever punctures the thin skin of our universal everything-that-is. Whether that everything-that-is happens to be objective scientific fact, or an absolutist religious doctrine, or a socio-psycho-physio-historic theory does not matter — whatever or whoever defies our universal gnosis cannot be. Some of us are just lonely and do not want to be alone inside our own finite one. We long for another to be one with us. Or we subscribe to something universally good. We try to become one with a collective one so vast and grand that it seems, in comparison with our own one, to approximate One.

We must learn to want our finitude. We must learn to savor inexhaustible moreness, and its practical manifestation, inexhaustible surprise. This requires us to intuit and love the nihilitude that protects our finitude and the finitude of others. It is from this nihilitude that creation and revelation come to us from the Infinite One, in small enough quality and magnificence that we may grow toward the infinite without exnihilating into it, altogether.

Years ago, a strange friend shared a quote with me in a characteristically strange way, which, it turned out, was a poetically simple expression of this truth.

Shit index

July 1, 2026Shit theoryanomalogue

So here we are. Shit theory’s growing taxonomy is up to seven shits:

Chickenshit — “tedious nonsense — all the formalities, procedures, reports, busywork and minutiae that ruins everyday existence — that seem like it ought to add up to something important but never does..”
Bullshit — “meaning-mongering nonsense — notions that seem overflowing with promise, benevolence and idealistic intention — but which can never be achieved, or even put into practice.”
Horseshit — “malevolent nonsense — artifacts of ignorant, paranoid resentment meant to answer the eternal question ‘who can we blame for this shitshow?’”
Birdshit — “meta nonsense — the little condescending golden turds of pseudowisdom dropped from above by high-flying assholes, soaring on the conceit that abstract theorizing somehow raises us above the stubborn concreteness of the human condition..”
Dogshit — “incompetent nonsense — the result of nondesigners who think they are designers trying to design and bungling it, and then repeating the bungling as rapidly and randomly as possible.”
Apeshit — “weaponized nonsense — any lump of ideas picked up and hurled as a projectile.”
Batshit — “crazy nonsense — the byproduct of an urgent and failed need to make sense of things that are not even real — at least according to all you “sane” people.”

What else is there, even? Catshit? Ratshit? I don’t even know if they’re needed. I think this might be a complete list. If so shit studies reached its apex within 72 hours of its founding. That’s a pretty squat shitheap, given the overwhelming quantity of shit out there.

Batshit

July 1, 2026Philosophy, Shit theoryanomalogue

Another extremely important shit species that deserves analysis is batshit.

When someone believes things beyond belief, and believes them elaborately, intricately, extravagantly and urgently, we call that person batshit crazy.

Often, these beyond-belief beliefs are literally about the beyond. They are speculative. But the speculation has taken on a life of its own, and is no longer obviously speculation about reality. The speculations have detached and become a standalone batshit world, which feels way more real and interesting than whatever that other world was.

Batshit is sometimes confused with bullshit, because batshit is nonsense that never touches ground and has no practical effectiveness. But unlike bullshit, batshit is believed, intensely and sincerely. And while both bullshit and batshit fail to translate ideas into effective practices, bullshit never tries, whereas batshit ideas lead directly to batshit practices.

And it is also easy to confuse batshit with birdshit, in that it flies around in the sky. But where birdshit flies into the sky to get a better, loftier, critical look at the ground in order to shit all over it, batshit is trying to fly further than the sky, and the batshit produced in the effort is innocent byproduct, forgotten as soon as it falls into that nowhere known as solid ground.

“Batshit” is crazy nonsense — the byproduct of an urgent and failed need to make sense of things that are not even real — at least according to all you “sane” people.

Apeshit

July 1, 2026Shit theoryanomalogue

I mentioned apeshit in passing in an earlier shit theory installment. But it deserves its own definition.

When we human primates get really super-fucking angry, something horrible and funny happens to us. We lose access to the newfangled lobes of our hypertrophied brains, we begin to resemble our animal kingdom relatives.

We do what they do. We grab whatever is closest at hand and fling at whoever has infuriated us. We go apeshit.

Shit studies scholars call whatever is flung in this state apeshit. Whatever kind of shit it started out as, once it is picked up and hurled, it is now classified as apeshit.

“Apeshit” is weaponized nonsense — any lump of ideas picked up and hurled as a projectile. The point of it is not truth, or ideas, or anything resembling communication. It is pure animal speech act.

Apeshit is not about content. Blunt force impact is the message. It is about impact, and a disgusting, degrading mess to clean up.

Dogshit

June 30, 2026Shit theoryanomalogue

I was shooting the shit with my brother Scott, and he raised a crucial question. When would I address the issue of dogshit?

How about now?

I am a designer by profession, which is why I am angry nearly all the time.

One of the worst things about this being a designer, besides the usual chickenshit, is one particularly noxious bit of bullshit, that I’m pretty sure nobody else has to deal with.

That bullshit is the deeply untrue insistence that “everyone is a designer.”

I don’t see other professionals running around assuring everyone that they can do their job.

And this bullshit invites people to do our jobs instead of us. Tragically, thanks to the maleficent magic of metacognitive incompetence, aka Dunning-Kruger, aka double-ignorance, they are unable to notice how much worse at design they are than designers.

This happened with “design thinking” when business executives actually believed designers and decided that learning a bunch of chickenshit techniques would help them solve a bunch of bullshit problems. “HMW we waste our time leveraging methods we have no business messing with, on problems nobody really cares about?” Design Thinking, that’s how!

And it happened again with product management. A bunch of clever, incompetent jacks-of-all-trades with MBAs who learned to talk like engineers decided to reinvent strategic design from scratch as if design never existed because this was a job far too important to let designers do.

The result of these efforts is pure dogshit.

“Dogshit” is incompetent nonsense — the result of nondesigners who think they are designers trying to design and bungling it, and then repeating the bungling as rapidly and randomly as possible. They call the repetition “iteration” and their bungling “failing fast” or “moving fast and breaking things” or “discovery”, missing the point that things are supposed to move steadily toward improvement, not just spasm every which way in perpetual brokenness.

I suppose we could expand the definition of dogshit to cover more takeovers of professions by hordes of incompetents. We could discuss how ideologues have invaded the humanities, or activists have taken over journalism, education and entertainment media, professional marketers have displaced artists, ?and just about everybody and their cousin cranking out vibecoded dogshit apps… ?and so on.

But I am the author of Shit Theory, and as far as I’m concerned, I’m nailing the shit out of it.

Birdshit

June 30, 2026Shit theoryanomalogue

My friend Jim graciously read my post on Shit Theory.

But it left him with a question: “Do you really believe Shit Theory can carry us over this rising flood of shit?”

I answered, “Of course not. That claim is total bullshit.”

“Nothing will save us,” I added. “We are all going to die.”

But then it hit me: My claim was not bullshit. It was something else entirely.

Jim had identified an entire new species of shit: birdshit.

My claim that understanding Shit Theory will somehow save us from drowning in shit is not only untrue, it dumps an entirely new ocean of shit into the already unfathomably shitty depths of bullshit, chickenshit and horseshit.

Here is the truth: No theoretical understanding of a shitty practical situation does shit to help us fix it. And believing that it does only makes things worse.

We are in deep shit, and Shit Theory’s birdshit claim of making it all better through the power of understanding only deepens the deep shit we are in.

The only way Shit Theory makes anything better is the feeble, overrated medicine of laughter. Any claims to value beyond cheap laffs is birdshit.

Let’s get scientific and define birdshit.

“Birdshit” is meta nonsense — the little condescending golden turds of pseudowisdom dropped from above by high-flying assholes, soaring on the conceit that abstract theorizing somehow raises us above the stubborn concreteness of the human condition.

On the contrary, assholes: nothing could be more essential to the human condition than the notion that our own high-flying notions have enlightened us and elevated us to transcendent heights above the shitshow below.

That shitshow is largely a shitheap of precisely this kind of birdshit, yours and everyone else’s.

You are the furthest thing from above it — you and your critiques, insights and true truth are just more birdshit on the shitheap you survey from your aerial view. And then your wings get weary and you have to return to your shitshow roost to be observed and birdshit on by other high-flying know-it-alls.

And notice how useless your birdshit is on the concrete, practical ground, even to yourself.

Birdshitting is self-indulgent condescension, the pleasure of unclenching your sphincter, releasing the pressure and watching your lofty wisdom rain down and splatter upon the stooped heads of those stuck on the ground below. When you return to the ground, though, you go right back to participating in the whole shitshow. You belong to it, seek your fortune in it, endure swoop-n-poops from your superiors and mutter petty complaints about the unfairness of it all, just like every other asshole. And your golden birdshit insights serve only as souvenirs of superiority. But it isn’t even a consolation prize. Everyone’s got their little pile.

When we are full of birdshit, we think our high-flying insights resolve our problems, which disarms our critical vigilance and liberates us to make things exponentially stupider and worse.

Birdshit belongs to a grand old tradition of salvific magical beliefs, according to which believing some set of extra-true facts automatically purifies a believer’s heart, and qualifies them for perks and benefits of pureness-of-heart, including admission to paradise and subscription to prayer-answering services. Present your handful of priceless birdshit at the Heavenly Gates and St. Peter will let you in.

The birdshit belief-in-belief tradition lives on — thrives, even — in the allegedly secular world of psychotherapy, which is really just a belief in salvific scientististic beliefs. If you figure out why you are neurotic, that cures your neurosis, despite the manifest fact that you are even more neurotic, now, because, in addition to your original neurosis, which continues unabated, now you cannot stop compulsively talking about your neurosis and what caused it. Your autobiographical logorrhea is birdshit.

And since psychotherapy entered politics as social justice, we’re seeing an explosion of political social-scientistic birdshit.

A depressingly excellent example of birdshit is “the work” silly racist white ladies have loved doing for the last ten years. They sit around meditating, theorizing about how racist they are. They fixate on it, talk about it, lament it and resolve to micromanage all their behaviors — to take each and every racist obsessive-compulsion and correct it, usually by reversing it from what they really think and feel.

This, they believe, is an effective corrective to racism.

All this, so far, is birdshit.

But the inner work of birdshit never stays inner for long.

Industrial volumes of birdshit, in fact, are produced by all this inner work — valuable expert knowledge everyone needs to know, and agree with!

Because if birdshit is as extra-true as it needs to be to have its magical salvific effects, it must be so overwhelmingly true that it is self-evidently undeniable to all. Otherwise, it’s just an extra-strong opinion.

Unanimous belief is required. To accomplish this unanimity, cognitive-behavioral micromanagement is expanded beyond the sphere in inwardness to the inwardness of everyone else. And this cognitive-behavioral micromanagement is accomplished, of course through human resource chickenshit.

The justification for the chickenshit is bullshit. Everyone must ostentatiously recite the same bullshit, perform bullshit ritual acts, pretend to agree with bullshit. To prove all this bullshit was actually said and done — and not just bullshit — everyone is required to keep chickenshit records, file chickenshit reports and make chickenshit measurements proving it all worked, which it won’t because bullshit cannot be accomplished and chickenshit never accomplishes anything. Which means more chickenshit controls and measurements are needed to make the bullshit a reality.

And everyone hates this. They cannot understand how things could become this thoroughly, intricately, elaborately shitty purely by accident. Surely it must have been ingeniously engineered for maximum shittiness. And they resent the hell out of being controlled, hectored, bullied, henpecked, lied to and forced to lie. They want to defy it, fight it, destroy this bullshitty, chickenshitty system, and whatever shithead was responsible for engineering it. And now we have horseshit. And the horseshit confirms the birdshit which claimed it was there all along. And this justifies yet more chickenshit and bullshit, and counter-horseshit, and produces a real shitstorm.

This is what could be called the birdshit-to-bullshit-to-chickenshit-to-horseshit-to-more-chickenshit-and-bullshit-to-counter-horseshit-to-counter-horseshit-to-shitstorm pipeline.

Birdshit that claims to be above it all is what feeds the pipeline. It is the rainfall that quenches the earth, refreshes the springs and flows forth in a great river of utter shit. This is why we are in a world of shit, and why knowing where it all comes from is the first step in a long journey leading directly up our own assholes.

Shittheory.com

June 29, 2026Autobiography, Philosophy, Shit theoryanomalogue

There was absolutely no chance that shittheory.com could be available, but I decided to check, anyway.

I am now the owner of shittheory.com.

Clearly, this is a sign from heaven.

Update: shitstudies.com is also available.

Destiny speaks.

Another update: blowjobstobedone.com is available, too?

My cup runneth over.

Precisely what it runneth over with is questionable, but it is certainly overflowing with something.

Polycentered declarations

June 28, 2026Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism, Staranomalogue

The main difficulty I have with esoteric thought is this: I know from direct experience how effective esoteric thought structures are in the dissolution, coagulation, crystallization and stabilization our own souls (psyches) and, consequently, the givenness of the world. Comprehensive conversion — transformation of soul — is a perpetual possibility. This is not even open to doubt, because I’ve experienced conversion phenomena for decades. And people who dismiss this only demonstrate spiritual naivety paired with hubris.

I also know firsthand the role that symbols play in these soul transformations. Radically new truths following from such transformations often emerge first in visual images and diagrams that precede the ability to verbalize the new truth. And when words come, they first come as poetry. Only much later can explicit language be found, but this language still collects around the original structural, visual and poetic core. This genre of revelatory drawing, poetry and writing is hermetic. Again, people who dismiss these things as nonsense only reveal their own limitations.

And I believe that esoteric and normal religious practices can do the same things that thought can. Periodic services and ceremonies, rituals, prayers, forms of mediation as well as religious observances (mitzvot) integrated into everyday life can change or stabilize the givens of reality. And as Susanne Langer taught, our best art is continuous with these religious productions.

To be fully transparent, for me these are less core to my own religious life than thought and symbol work. But they are profoundly important to people in my life that I love most, and by participating in them and bringing my own symbology to my participation, I contribute denser, richer meaning to these practices and receive spiritual communion with others.

Prior to participation in a religious tradition, my spiritual isolation bordered on intolerable. This could be called religious alienation. (Despite what the spiritual-but-not-religious folks believe, serious spirituality craves community of faith. My strong hypothesis is that if this seems otherwise, a person’s spirituality already subsists in an unacknowledged community of faith, perhaps a political one.)

The challenge for me was finding a religious community whose general faith, symbology, practices and metaphysics could accommodate my own faith and its peculiar ways. I absolutely could not belong to any community with anti-intellectual tendencies. I could not belong where devotion or punctiliousness or inchoate mystical feelings of knowingness prevail, and condescendingly assume all religious thinking must be mere theology — a handmaiden of “real” religiosity, or an idle distraction from it.

I found my home in Judaism, where deep study is not thinking about religion, but is itself a core religious praxis on par with prayer. Since the destruction of the Temple and the loss of its material sacrifices, Judaism has sublimated sacrifice and become a radically hermeneutic religion, where lesser understandings are ritually sacrificed and burned on the altar of Machloket l’Shem Shamayim and freed to climb like smoke into the aether, so that insights can descend through the dissipated vapor, back into our souls for recirculation.

This is the religious life as I know it firsthand and very close secondhand.

If you want to know why in Heaven’s name I live a Jewish life, this is my best answer. I am grateful for the miraculous Jewish tradition, and what it has given me (and to all of us, if we are willing to feel the depth and magnitude of gratitude we owe it, instead of stealing these gifts like today’s fashionable anti-Jew “antizionist” prophets of horseshit). And having been adopted into this dysfunctional holy family, I love it in that same stormy, spastic way tight, loving, fucked-up families love — with warmth, fury, irritation, dismay, toughness and hope. And now whatever happens to Am Yisrael — pride, shame, pain, glory, awe, and everything between — directly in my own heart, soul and body, like it happened to me directly, like it happened to my child.

This is identity. It is being a living organ of a living supra-personal body. Anyone who thinks it is a social category imposed on us from without only knows half of the truth, and most very obviously know far less than half of this half.

This section is about what identity is — belonging as an organ of supra-personal being — and what identity is not, a social category that is assigned by oneself or another. It can be skipped, if it bores or offends.

Progressivism is an identity. What progressivists “identify as” is not. This identifying-as is only an expression of one’s Progressivist identity.

The same is true on the right. A great number of Tradcaths and Orthobros express their political identity through some requisite traditional religious devotion.

Progressivists who “identify as a Jew” mainly experience Jewish “identity” as a category assignment within their political identity. Like all members of their faith they are jealous of their category. But they feel directly and spontaneously only the triumphs and humiliations of Progressivism. The daily vicissitudes of the Democratic Party are more viscerally real to them than the existential struggles of Israel. To put it in the starkest terms, November 2024 was personally devastating, where October 2023 was a news story about something that happened far away to someone else.

With respect to the Jewish people — Am Yisrael — Progressivist “as a Jews” are like an estranged spouse with a new lover. Technically they remain married, but their heart belongs to someone new. They are, in fact, Jewish, and nobody can take that away, but they are faithlessly and soullessly Jewish.

They might have a lingering fondness for ethnic Jewishness, and they may feel occasional spasms of ownership, especially if they spot their spouse out in public with someone new (like me, for instance!). “That’s mine, not yours, you lame imposter!” But they have no commitment or loyalty. All that goes to Progressivism. And deep down they know their “as a Jew” identity, is conditional. They must regularly, vocally and explicitly betray their people. Their function is to be human proof-points that Jews, too, can be indifferent or hostile to Israel, and therefore that Anti-Zionism is not anti-Jewish. As long as they keep serving that function, they can be Progressivists in good standing. For now. If the need to renounce antisemitism disappears — and that seems likely — the “as a Jew” Jewish Progressivists will find themselves in the same boat as their disloyal ancestors — abruptly expelled and attacked as outsiders. This pattern has recurred in every European and Arab nation, which of fucking course was precisely why Zionism became necessary. That and two thousand plus years of oppression, persecution and deadly pogroms. To be clear, in this age of exaggeratedly reified metaphor, by “deadly” I mean intentional, non-figurative, non-rhetorical, literal, physical, biological life-ending deaths in large numbers. Folks like Scott Weiner who accuse Israel of genocide, but not enough to satisfy the insatiable hatred of Israel-haters should remember that kapos — even the most willing ones — only delayed their gassing and incineration.

This is how I understand and experience Jewish identity, and how I see it in relation to technically Jewish “as a Jew” Progressivists of Jewish ancestry.

Now I want to speak frankly about important doubts about esoterism, hermeticism and the like. These center on magical claims beyond effects on souls.

Here I have only secondhand knowledge.

To make matters worse, these claims conflict with my metaphysics. These ideas remain outside my faith, perhaps beyond my faith, cloaked in oblivion, as these things are before they reveal themselves ex nihilo.

All this might very well be beyond my reach in the same way my firsthand knowledge of spiritual transformation is beyond the experiential range of the as-yet unconverted or authentic Jewish identity is outside the experience of ethnically Jewish Progressivists.

And I do not mind showing my limits. I am who I am, and I have only come as far as I am today.

I will try to stay faithful to what I know while maintaining as much exnihilist humility as I can toward what may someday come to light. And I will try and re-try never to alienate anyone whose spiritual center is remote from mine.

I will, in other words, respectfully polycenter myself where I am: I, here, now.

And I, here, now believe — humbly and tentatively — that design does, in actuality, and even more in potentia, what magic (also) claims to do.

That is, design forms, reforms, maintains and repairs materials and souls together to instaurate enworldments capable of mediating infinite, finite and definite being. Design circulates the divine light through exchange of gifts.

I have written about design this way before, in a variety of ways, so I will leave things here, compact and opaque and pregnant with hope.

Intuition, commonality and scalar being

June 24, 2026Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophyanomalogue

In all three facets of my work — as a philosopher, esoterist and designer — intuition is central to what I do, not only in the content and goals of my work, but in how I approach the work and do the work.

By intuition, I mean something quite simple. To dumb it down to the simple essence, intuition means “without linguistic mediation”. Whenever we experience or know or do something without using words to explain it to ourselves or to direct ours actions, that is intuition.

We can have intuitive perceptions, intuitive responses, both with people (with others and ourselves), with things around us, intuitive understandings and with reality in general.

Intuitive perceptions and responses is the stuff of what Husserl called the lifeworld. We spontaneously effortlessly see-as and wordlessly deal with the things around us. We only reach for language if something resists our intuition, and we need to figure out what it is or how it works or what we ought to do.

It is almost the same with our social environment. Through what Garfinkel called ethnomethods, in social settings where we “belong”, we know how to spontaneously and wordlessly “read” other people’s symbolic actions, and to produce legible symbolic actions so we are understood. Here, too, we only resort to explicit language if things get awkward and an explanation is needed, or, in more extreme cases, demanded.

Finally, at the heart of it all, radiating to the furthest reaches, is our intuitive understanding of how particulars hang together within the universal. Prior to any explicit thought, we carry an intuited ontology within an intuited metaphysics. Or, if you prefer, we can say we have an intuited sense of everything, within which every thing is intuited, in intuited relation to everything and to every other thing. Some call this “worldview”, but the spectatorial overtones can mislead. I (perhaps confusingly) call this intuited ontology and metaphysics a faith. A faith is not what we believe, but that by which — by whom — we believe.

And all our activities, solitary and social, materially and symbolically shape the world we share. In our immediate environments, where we have ownership, we are able to shape it according to our own preferences. We have less and less influence at as scale increases. At smaller scales, we actively shape the material environment, often to make it more accessible to intuition. At larger scales we influence it only indirectly, if at all, and often what is outside of our control is also unintuitive, and, therefore in need of explanation. Here we use language to make as much sense of things as we can, to get it somehow to fit our faith — our intuitive sense of everything and things in general. This material shaping of our environment and of our general understanding of things we influence and cannot influence is what I call an enworldment.

As a designer, I am concerned with the shaping of environments. My goal is to shape them in such a way that they are readily intuited (with minimum need to figure them out), can be interacted with intuitively (with minimal need to verbally direct one’s actions) and most of all, intuited as valuable — as stabilizing and enriching one’s own enworldment.

As a philosopher, I am concerned with the shaping of symbols, primarily linguistic ones. But some of my most important symbols are visual or diagrammatic, and these help me extend the reach of my philosophical work. I have come to recognize that my philosophical work overlaps with the genre of hermeticism, in that it deploys words and diagrams and dense visual symbologies to say true things about reality beyond the scope of words. I’ve been talking a lot about objects held and valued in common, but one of our most important common objects are symbolic, linguistic and literary.

Finally, as an esoterist I am interested in what can be done with faiths. They are far from immutable. They can change in ways that can make life immeasurably and ineffable better… or worse. Think of this as soul hacking. There are many possible means for hacking souls, but my favorite means, and the one I am best at is hermetic philosophy. But design is also a powerful tool, because design shapes materials into media, and media convey and support (or block and undermine) faiths.

These three intuitive activities, initially separate concerns of compartmentalized parts of my self, over three decades have gradually converged and grown together into one complex multifaceted being. Three trees have intertwined into a lattice, and in their interilluminating density this shared set of ideas have gained reality and a palpable halo of significance. And I, as a person, have gained a sense of integrity, wholeness and reality. I am no longer spiritually fragmented, conflicted or of two or more minds on important matters.

I think, feel and act more wholeheartedly, because of my inward richness of common concerns.

I have enworded myself with enworldment.

It has been obvious to me for decades now that being is scalar, and that the individual person is only one of these beings.

Unfortunately, in this time, many of us have developed a great number of conceptual and linguistic habits, reinforced by scientistic metaphysics, to obscure and explain away the smaller and larger scales.

People who rely entirely on language for their thinking, and people whose thinking is purely instrumental (used to direct practical and social activity) will be entirely oblivious to this reality. People who depend upon ready-made words with ready-made definitions as their thought construction materials cannot think with the originality of those who articulate intuitions to develop new generative language. It is the difference between a person who enjoys constructing elaborate new things with LEGO blocks and the inventor of LEGO blocks. It is the difference between ingenuity and genius.

But if we take our intuition seriously, sub-individual and super-individual being is manifestly real. It is given even when we lack language-equipped concepts to receive it.

My first observation was of being at the smaller scale. I noticed that people became different in the company of different people. They used different words, behaved differently, exuded different energy. I intuited as different. I also notice some aspects of them were suppressed or marginalized. We see this when people fall in love. They can almost become strangers to us in their new intimacy with another.

I associated this with politics. For example, when the Germans invaded France in 1940, they met less resistance from the French Army than might have been expected. But this was not just weakness. Much of the French right felt more loyalty to the right wing spirit of the Nazis than they felt for their own republic. And when the Nazi successfully conquered Paris, they established the infamous right-wing Vichy government to govern southern France. For the Vichy French there was more solidarity across the right-wing parties than for the left and centrist French.

Similarly, across two people newly in love, spiritual factions within each can come together with such powerful affinity that it breaks the each person’s pre-love integrity, to create a new integrity between them. They become disordered and reordered, and both can estrange them from the people who had been important to them before they fell in love. This threat of estrangement and its reality is the substance of jealousy. Jealousy is the intuition of relationship-threatening psychic reorderings.

I already hinted at the larger scale beings with my Vichy France analogy. Nations are always uneasy alliances of ideological factions. Some nations have inward integrity. The factions might disagree on certain matters, but they hold other things about their nation in common, valuing them in different ways. People agreeing that they are valuable, even if what is valued differs. But if ideologies begin to value their own ideological ideas more than their nation, they may even become hostile to their nation for refusing to share their ideological loyalties. They might break faith with their own national tradition and betray it with dalliances with more like-minded foreign actors.

I first intuited this kind of ideological being as being (as opposed to simply agreeing on the same facts, preferable policies) — that is, as a shared living faith — during the charged time between 2001 and 2005 when a great many Americans discovered the intoxication of mass Standing United. Suddenly I head people adopting common language, concepts, lines of reasoning and attitudes that I’d never noticed before. I started feeling like something was speaking and acting through them, and I found it intensely and profoundly repellent. The same thing happened in 2020. People began to adopt new language, beliefs, concepts and behaviors en masse, which were not only different from before, but in direct conflict with the liberal values they used to espouse, seemingly sincerely. Now they were hardcore identitarians, who believed different categories of person should have different standing before the law, different social status, be awarded different privileges? and held to different norms. I had the same intuitive revulsion, but this time it was compounded with a sense of betrayal, because it was my liberal values they’d turned against. Their liberalism, it turns out, had been mere social conformism, not a principle of personal integrity. It seems that most people are like this. Most of us conform to a belief that integrity is important, but very few people have the integrity to resist if our tribe drifts into illiberalism, tolerance of evil or actual evil. This is normal, and this is why maintaining social order is so crucial. The majority of people, it seems, are potential extremists or supporters of extremism, because their primary mechanism of integrity is their social context, not a cultivated inner integrity. Many of the most spiritual-but-not-religious people who see religion as empty formalism (to put it in bigoted anti-Jewish language “pharisaism”) need religion far more than they can understand from within the debased faith they’ve accidentally drifted into on the currents of ideological conformity. Judaism, by the way, more than any other religion, precisely because of its formality, has emptied, fulfilled and refulfilled itself innumerable times, and has developed the richest set of symbolic forms diversely valued in common of any religion, very much including its brittle squabbling, splitting, warring offspring who believe they are the heirs of the covenant while dramatically demonstrating the opposite.

Of course, there are many scales of being between psychic factions within a person or across couples in love and ideological factions and nations. These are what interest me most, especially as a designer.

Organizations can have differing strengths of integrity. They can be integrated around common purpose, or they can be managed in siloes, or they can descend into departmental and factional wars. Organizations are beings composed of beings, belonging to larger scale beings.

To put it in the flakiest possible way, service design is in the egregore business. And design is their heir of alchemy.

I’ll just leave it there, to be rejected, neglected, forgotten or pondered.

+0(

Shit Theory Handbook notes

June 22, 2026Design, Judaism, NOTA, Politics, Shit theoryanomalogue

Announcing a new shit: Horseshit.

Horseshit is whatever horrible shit the far left and the far right can find to agree on. It is called horseshit because it collects between the converging extremes described in horseshoe theory.

With horseshit, we are now up to three kinds of shit, because there is also bullshit and chickenshit.

We are no longer limited to giving two shits about anything.

This post, which began as a rant appears to be developing into a textbook.

To catch everyone up, here’s some foundational Shit Theory, to help everyone keep their shit straight:

According to Shit Theory, “chickenshit” is tedious nonsense — all the formalities, procedures, reports, busywork and minutiae that ruins everyday existence — that seem like it ought to add up to something important but never does.

In contrast, “bullshit” is meaning-mongering nonsense — notions that seem overflowing with promise, benevolence and idealistic intention — but which can never be achieved, or even put into practice.

And now “horseshit”. Let us formulate a provisional technical definition.

“Horseshit” is malevolent nonsense — artifacts of ignorant, paranoid resentment meant to answer the eternal question “who can we blame for this shitshow?” This question drives ignorant but urgently inquiring minds to extremes of left- and right-wing politics. But by some diabolical antimiracle these theories all converge in a negative common ground of suspicion and hate. And, 100% of the time, as if by cosmic law, smack in the middle of this common ground is always and inevitably The Jews.

Now, let us explore practical applications of Shit Theory.

The origins of the discipline were practical, which is why Shit Theory is not, like most theory, pure bullshit.

It was developed to diagnose and treat a common and deadly strain of shittiness found in most organizations. This shittiness is known as “corporate”.

Corporations are terrible at integrating meaning and practice. Integrating meaning and practice means committing to a difficult, qualitative, nonlinear and not-entirely-predictable process called “design”.

Design does not suit the kind of technocratic ndbf administrator who thrives in the upper half of glass towers. This type generally leans soulless, and is reliably numb and deaf to genuine meaning. They are more into efficiency, productivity, measuring things and evading blame. But their whole job is to make human resources produce maximum productivity. But for temperamental reasons, inspiring people to work together to achieve a common goal is out of the question. Their workaround is to coercively micromanage each isolated resource to construct some isolated bit of a complicated and entirely uninspiring system.

These bits, once built, can be bolted and hacked together to more or less function, or at least to check a box and evade blame for any larger scale systemic malfunction or dysfunction. The hacked-together lump is then sent off to creative, who try to repair, patch and sand the lump to inoffensiveness, before applying several coats of artificial charm to its surface. Then marketing pumps phony meaning onto it. Then the inoffensive, artificially charming, phony lumps are boxed up, loaded onto trucks and off it all goes for consumption.

Corporations fabricate bullshit-coated chickenshit.

And, unfortunately, so do most governmental agencies.

And so do non-governmental organizations (NGO), who are normally founded by ndbf technocratic administrators who are so amazing at corporateness they’ve become zillionaires whose egos have grown in inverse proportion to their infinitesimally shriveled souls.

They have big empty ideas about how their deep expertise in chickenshit, combined with the unlimited coercive power and scale of government could help produce bullshit of epic proportions and beneficence.

So the corporations and the government and the NGO zillionaires with great billowing bullshit ostentation, gather to have top-secret chickenshit meetings about the future of the entire world.

Of course, it is all bullshit that will result in nothing more than yet more chickenshit. But to those poor paranoids who don’t know jackshit about the realities of corporateness, it looks like some seriously sinister shit is probably going down.

Thus horseshit, in copious quantities.

I’ve been writing about bullshit and chickenshit for many years now, but I have never recorded the august ancestry of these two concepts.

My use of bullshit was inspired by Frankfurt’s famous essay:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

I got the term chickenshit from Paul Fussell.

What does that rude term signify? It does not imply complaint about the inevitable inconveniences of military life: overcrowding and lack of privacy, tedious institutional cookery, deprivation of personality, general boredom. Nothing much can be done about those things. Chickenshit refers rather to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant “paying off of old scores”; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called—instead of horse-or bull- or elephant shit—because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.

So there we have it. Bullshit. Chickenshit. Horseshit.

Isn’t it funny, too, that the latest deluge of horseshit is a reaction to institutional bullshit and chickenshit?

If you can fight fire with fire, why not fight shit with even shittier shit? All this shit flinging, by the way, proves conclusively that we are descended from apes.

And this is probably our best theory why everyone has suddenly gone apeshit.

Apeshit is the frantic nonsense we start flinging when the world has gone to shit, and the material we have available around us is shit and more shit. So that is what we throw at each other.

And so here we are.

We are up bullshit, chickenshit, horseshit and apeshit creek without a paddle. No, it is worse. These creeks have risen into rivers, and the rivers have swelled into an ocean.

A shitflood is drowning the whole world.

And Shit Theory is the Ark to help us stay afloat of it.

Protected: Enworlding One

June 22, 2026Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Staranomalogue

Belimah again

June 21, 2026Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalahanomalogue

Reading further in Scholem, I just came upon that miraculous word belimah. Here is what Scholem says about it.

Various peculiarities of the terminology employed in [Sefer Yetzirah], including some curious neologisms which find no natural explanation in Hebrew phraseology, suggest a paraphrase of Greek terms, but most of the details still await a full clarification. The precise meaning of the phrase Sefirot belimah which the author constantly uses and which may be the key to the understanding of what he actually had in mind when speaking of the Sefirot, is a matter of speculation. The second word belimah which may be taken to denote or to qualify the specific nature of these “numbers” has been explained or translated in accordance with the theories of the several writers or translators: infinite Sefirot, or closed, abstract, ineffable, absolute Sefirot, or even Sefirot out-of-nothing. If the author of the book wanted to be obscure, he certainly succeeded beyond his wishes.

What is richness?

June 19, 2026Design, Esoterism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism, Shit theoryanomalogue

I cannot stop thinking about Christopher Alexander’s essay “A City is Not a Tree”.

The specific theme that is emerging as most important to me is this idea of a designed thing’s capacity to accommodate multiple perspectives, as intrinsically valuable.

A functionalist might see such accommodation in terms of versatility. A functionalist would say that each accommodation signifies benefit to another segment of person.

But I think what Alexander is saying is very different from that. The accommodation of other subjects is part of each person’s experience of common things.

When many different kinds of people love the same thing in different ways, this thing is experienced as richly valuable. It is charged with possibility and the presence of others. It gathers an aura of transcendence about it, which signals to us that we are neither alone as individuals nor as like-minded parts of a collectives. We feel the truth that ours is only one finite enworldment among many others who regard the same things as valuable, but in many different ways. These enworldments overlap, and this feels like life — vibrant, full of possibility, adventure, potential sources of inspiration. The palpable density of overlaid heterogeneous valuing is what we mean when we say something feels rich or vibrant. It has a halo of inexhaustible moreness around it.

This is why organizations which belong to many people in many ways feels vibrant. With each new perspective and practice that finds its own opportunity to serve in this organization, the organization gains a new kind of value.

Conversely, an organization dominated by one logic will feel flat and standardized and harder to value, if not oppressive to some degree. Homogeneity is imposed — one expertise and one standard methodology is applied to every problem. It is hooded with a sense of constriction. Worse, as members of the organization try to bring their own uniqueness to the work — try to make the organization their own their own by contributing their own sensibilities — and find that whatever does not conform to the monologic of the organization is unvalued, or even discouraged or prohibited a sense of futility and alienation sets in. One cannot own the organization in a new way. Each employee must resign themselves to renting a defined role — they will never own any place in such an organization.

Consequently, the organization has the same artificial, stilted corporate feel as Alexander’s artificial city. It doesn’t matter the size or legal status of the organization. It could be privately owned and have only twenty or so members. It will feel corporate. And all attempts to add style or whimsy will come off like all phony corporateness: a bullshit coating for a bunch of mechanical meaningless chickenshit.

A lattice-form organization, valued — even loved — in common, in myriad divergent ways, from within and from without, will be haloed with a vibrant, living, compelling brand.

An organization is not a tree. It is especially not an org chart.

Years ago, a friend of mine showed me a screenplay he was writing. It felt morally flat to me. Every character did they only thing they could morally do to. There was only one moral interpretation of the story. My advice at the time was to build more ambiguity into each character, so we are unsure of whether their actions were moral or not.

I am realizing now that I was looking for moral and narrative richness in that story. It needed to accommodate multiple readings. ?

And what made the famous short story “Cat Person” was so fascinating was its moral multistability. I found out after reading it, that the author’s ethical assessment differed from mine, which only made it more impressive.

A story is not a tree.

A reader should feel their own freedom to bring themselves to the reading, and to read themselves into what they read.

Politically, I have described myself as a militant pluralist. That is because I want public life to have richness. That means we cannot impose one moral logic upon public life. There must be room for disagreement, debate even conflict. The only thing that is not debatable is imposition of one’s political will while refusing to debate. This is especially true if in the name of harmony, or safety, or comfort, or even “diversity”, that everyone be forced to conform to the same ethical stance on what one group believes to be an undebatable, nonnegotiable matter.

Neither society nor culture nor polis is a tree.

Whoever seeks to impose a tree upon society is totalitarian, however, benevolent their intent.

When a text or tradition is so densely accommodating that innumerable people over millennia can read that text in myriad intensely meaningful ways, that text gains value with each new insight. The sheer density of insight makes that text glow with a blindingly bright halo of holiness, especially when readings diverge but the text becomes more beloved in collision of interpretation — sacred argument.

The attempts of theologians to find the one correct meaning desecrates the text and the infinite being who is the subject(s) of the text. The infinite being is reduced to finite idol.

It is my belief (an insuffiently supported one) that service design should intentionally design lattice-form services. Current service design practice creates inflexible lifeless pre-structures. It tries to construct ??a?rtificial organizations, and whatever life in an organization survives, is due only to shortcomings of service design method. It is a little bit like Bauhaus designs. Their charm and warmth come from limitations of fabrication to achieve the precision they sought. Likewise, all most technocratic business management. Businesses succeed despite their management. If managers had the transparency and control they really wanted, the organization would be drained of all richness, and people would hate their surveilled, controlled lives. And indeed, management is getting better at doing what it thinks it’s supposed to do, and we are all suffering as a consequence.?

That is my perspective on my field. But can my field accommodate it? Are they “ready to hear it?” Probably not…

The gift-rooted organization

June 17, 2026Design, Enworldment, Ethics, Exnihilismanomalogue

The problem with technicity is not that it interprets purposeful action in terms of instrumental chains of in-order-to.

In even the best circumstances, most action is instrumental — performed in order to make it possible to do some other thing.

The problem with technicity is that the in-order-to never terminates in positive intrinsic value. It either continues on and on and eventually peters out in futility, or it forms a closed logical loop, or it reveals only negative goals.

Technicity asks leading Why questions. It asks Why with an expected instrumental answer: Because. “Because” means “in order to.”

But ultimately, Why is not a question answered with because. The reverse is true. Because is answered with Why.

Unless the instrumental in-order-to terminates in a Why with no because other than itself, a person is morally ungrounded. Why is only “Because I love it.” Why is only “Because I am here for this.” Why is “When this Why is present to me, I am who I am.”

Why is spontaneously felt value. Why is intrinsic. Why is experienced as answer, not question. When Why is present, we have no reason to ask why. If we are moved to ask why, this indicates that whatever we are doing is ungrounded from Why. When Why is present we say “This is why…”

Much of our Why is rooted in some kind of giving that we are born to do. Why do I exist? I exist to give specific kinds of gift to people who value it. The Why is only actualized when someone values what we give, and receives it as a gift.

The rest of our Why comes from receiving gifts from others, which in turn activates their Why.

Why is actualized in such exchanges of value.

Now some of these exchanges are purely instrumental. This is unavoidable, and not even a bad thing — as long as the instrumental chains are grounded in Why.

This grounding can be analyzed. This is what we are trying do when we ask ourselves “Why am I doing this activity?” or “Why am I doing this job?” or “Why am I working for this organization?” And sometimes this analysis succeeds and reconnects us with our Why. We close the circuit, and feel the flow of Why moving through us again. All the instrumental in-order-tos receive a charge of “worth it”. But we must do this analysis this outside the enframing of technicity, or we must at least allow it to lead us beyond technicity, to a meaningful terminus where Why is an answer, not a question.

Value exchange is the medium of service. But at the very root of value is essential gift: the terminal Why of each person, which is the true taproot of everything good in this world.

Organizations which tap into people’s essential service — which provide opportunities to people to give their gifts and find people who will value and receive them — who will provide their people with services they need to support the giving of their gifts — where they receive other people’s gifts and in valuing and receiving them actualize them as who they are as people — such organizations become infused with value. They are beloved, charismatic, charged with meaning.

But this is unusual. Such organizations are rare, and they must cultivate, maintain and grow their networks of value exchange, and take seriously their moral grounding — their rootedness in gift. When designers discuss design ethics, this should be front and center. This is the very core of design ethics.

But most designers are as technicity-dominated as their masters. Most “design ethics” is concerned with using design methods to achieve the standardized set of technocratic objectives, unusually avoiding unfairness, injustice, oppression or ecological disaster.

Designers have a deeper positive goal. To arrange and shape our shared world so that we naturally, spontaneously want to serve, protect, repair, enhance, honor, ornament, love this world like our own child.

To fix the myriad technical problems of the world we must first love our world enough that we want to fix them, and cannot abide leaving the world broken.

Designers are responsible for treating our general societal nihilism problem.

Because nihilism is the inevitable result of ungrounded technicity.

This is why designers are morally obligated to transcend technicity, even while working within it.

If designers “go native” and adopt technicity in order to function better in technicity-dominated environments, we have not only lost our meaning as a profession, but we are betraying our collective and individual Why. Our lives will become utterly meaningless and the world will become worthless.

We’ll become mechanics who fix and tune behavior extraction machines, and we will generate nihilism, instead of meaning.

Indeed, we currently suffer a nihilism pandemic. This mass nihilism is caused by ubiquity of technicity, and mass service to behavior extraction systems.

Let us now look at Business as Usual organizations, not only as the root cause of nihilism, but also as commercially unwise, from a business perspective.

The less people are given opportunities to give their own essential gift to others who need it, want it, value it, love it, the less they are themselves in a world in which they belong. They become alienated from the people and organizations who reject their essential service while extracting from them behaviors that have nothing to do with who they are.

That kind of behavior extraction is expensive. It requires constant monitoring. The behaviors are ones the person does not want to perform, so they are likely to stop doing the specified behaviors if they can get away with it. They require surveillance to ensure the behaviors are produced in the right quantities and within specified tolerances.

This kind of monitoring is expensive. Doing work in a way conducive to monitoring introduces overhead. At minimum the work must be “instrumented” for generating behavioral measurements. But generally, a monitored human resource is also required to spend much of their day providing “visibility” to those to whom they report. They produce activity reports of various kinds. They must demonstrate value in progress reports, self-assessments, periodic performance reviews and other meetings. and create appearances that suggest productivity to anyone watching them.

But then behaviors must be controlled. First and foremost, they must be motivated externally, through various positive and negative factors. — “carrots and sticks”, as they say, referring to donkey driver methodologies. This is a euphemism for bribes and blackmail, which motivate by fear and greed. Many companies (most?) rely on money to motivate desired behaviors. This is an expensive way to fuel an organization. So socially-acceptable intimidation and bullying supplement the positive motivation. Market forces establish not only fairly consistent pay across employers, but also consistent levels of intimidation and bullying. Teachers, for instance, as a profession, expect a higher level of systematic abuse than designers. But most people expect some reasonable amount of surveillance and coercion from their management. It seems normal.

(If all this sounds totalitarian, that is because BAU orgs are miniature totalitarian states. At heart, totalitarianism is technicity taken to extremes of purity and magnitude.)

But again, why shouldn’t an organization selfishly choose to be totalitarian?

Because such organizations are repellent. They are manifestly meaningless. Nobody chooses them unless they are deprived of alternatives, or are trapped (“locked in”) or are forced to.

Organizations rooted in value — let’s call them “gift-rooted organizations” are inspiring within and without, attractive, radiant. They have genuine brand value that goes far beyond mere brand recognition or just trust.

Dang. Out of time.

To be continued.

A career in four-and-a-half presentations

June 11, 2026Autobiography, Design, Shit theoryanomalogue

I’ve done four pivotal presentations in my career, and I’m getting the itch to update them all together to reflect my latest thinking.

The first presentation “Dialogue”, was from 2008. It was a dense summary my thinking up to that point on the importance of gestalts in design, and the power of dialogue to generate sharable gestalts, which I associated with brand.

Since this point, I’ve developed a theory of psychic multistability that understands gestalt shifts from one perceptual stability to another, and hermeneutic shifts from one conceptual stability to another to be the result of what I’m calling a gestell shift — a shift from one subjective state to another, which changes the spontaneous sense we make of things. And brands are stable gestells.

I did the second presentation “Spiral Process” in 2010, and it was also about the importance of gestalts in design, but this time taking a practical approach.

I started by laying out a theory-space based on two contrasting ways of approaching composite things: 1) a parts-first systems approach, and 2) a wholes-first gestalt approach.

Like the good consultant I am, I laid these approaches on a 2×2 matrix. Like the bad esoterist I am, of course I had to assign gestalts to the vertical axis and systems to the horizontal one.

I defined domains in each quarter. The quarter where there is no gestalt and only system was assigned to Engineering. The quarter where there is only gestalt and no system was assigned to Art. The quarter where there is neither system and nor gestalt was labeled “perplexity”; had I assigned it to a domain, that domain would have been Philosophy, for here we truly “do not know how to move around.” Finally, the quarter where there is both gestalt and system was assigned to Design. Design seeks systems that are taken together as gestalts.

Then I outlined a process for getting to both, which I contrasted to engineering processes and creative processes. The engineering process more or less curves straight into systematizing. After the system is finished, the team claps some style, value claims and “story” onto it in order to make people care about it. Art (creative) goes the other way. It starts with a nice bright blobby nebula of meaning, and then tries to build a system that more or less approximates and embodies it. The creative concept is fleshed out in features so it at least appears to deliver on its conceptual promise, and organized to provide some logical bone structure.

Design takes a much less direct route. It dives into perplexity and experiments there to find a gestalt that can be built out into a system that corresponds with the natural facets and articulations of that gestalt. This permits a team to systematize by the logic of a gestalt and produce design magic that is both meaningful and logically clear.

Since I made the “Spiral Process” presentation, I’ve improved the vocabulary. I continue to use the word conception for the process of instaurating and understanding a gestalt. But I now use the word “constructing” for the activity of building out a system, and “construing” for making sense of it.

I have also developed a more nuanced understanding of the experimental tacking process designers use to tentatively construct systems that might suggest a gestalt (or not) and to conceive possible gestalts and test them for feasibility. In design, construction and conception processes rapidly, informally alternate and are brought into dialogue together in iterative trials of multiple kinds.

The last two presentations are from my latest life in service design. The first, from 2019, wasn’t but should have been called “Service Design for UX researchers”. the second, from 2024, was called “Six Sensibilities of Service”.

“Service Design for UX researchers” was meant to clarify the relationship between service design research and UX research, but approached it by way of clarifying the precise relationship between the disciplines of service design and UX. In this presentation I described service design dimensionally.

One-dimensional design is design within one single service delivery channel. UX is a common example. Or industrial design. Or print design. Most design has been one-dimensional, single service channel touchpoint design (for example digital, in-person, voice, etc.. I pointed out, though, that a good single channel designer always makes a point of understanding other channel paths their user might take or need. This is part of the design context.

But in two-dimensional design the context becomes part of the design problem. Here is where omnichannel design, CX design and experience design proper occurs. Here the designer takes full responsibility for all service delivery channels and shapes an end-to-end omnichannel experience for a user, customer, patient , employee, etc — whoever’s experience the team is focusing on improving. But in order to do a good job at this, the design team will need to understand the organization’s capabilities to deliver this experience, to ensure it is feasible.

In three-dimensional design, we have service design. In service design, an organization’s capabilities are no longer just constraining and enabling context but part of the design problem. Designers are now responsible for shaping the organization’s delivery of a customer’s experience (or the experience of whoever is receiving the service) in the “front stage” where they experience what is happening, and backstage where the service is supported but not directly experienced.

I explained that ultimately service design frames a whole system of interconnected problems. And it is these interconnected problems that UXers and other touchpoint designers. Service designers help UXers understand the full experientical service context in which their touchpoint will be experienced and will play a part in the customer’s journey, or the journey of the one delivering or supporting the experience.

Not be a damn braggart, but this made clear sense of a very unclear situation that many others had bungled and continue to bungle because they keep trying to flatten the space into domains of responsibility or overlapping toolsets, and other dead-end approaches to dividing up the work.

But this presentation also needs some updates. First it underplays the polycentric aspects of service design. It still privileges the recipient of the service over the people who deliver and support it. These latter service actors end up fading into the organizational capabilities, when in fact, service design tries to afford them the same importance and focus as the service recipient.

I also think it doesn’t need all the research content. That turned the presentation into a cognitive overload atrocity that no person could absorb in a single sitting. How do I know? This brings me to the fourth presentation

“Six Sensibilities of Service” was my final project for a course design course I took in 2024. One of the things this course taught me was that I was guilty of trying to teach too damn many things all at once in most of my presentations. I needed to simplify everything drastically.

“Six Sensibilities of Service” took as its point of departure the very goal of service design: good services. Many services are pretty terrible. I hypothesized that this is because many people faced with service problems misdiagnose them as other kinds of problems, and proceed to treat the wrong condition with the wrong methods. But by sensitizing ourselves to issues specific to services, we can better recognize when something is specifically a service problem that is best treated as such with a service design methodology.

As a gimmick, I warned everyone that if they cooperated with this lesson and acquired any of these six sensibilities, they would never stop noticing service problems, and that this would turn them bitter and crazy. I made them sign a form releasing me from liability if they were to suffer mental problems as a result of what I was about to teach them.

This presentation is more recent, and I think it still hold up pretty well. I’ve begun to think about pluricentricity as a separate issue from polycentricity (the former is first-person and experiential, the latter is third-person and behavioral, but I am not not sure this hair-splitting is worth the additional cognitive load. Something to ponder as I do the revisions.

I think I might see if I can revise these presentation and then record myself presenting them.

Oh, I forgot another presentation I made in between 2009 and 2019. It was basically a rude version of the “Spiral Process” presentation that called construction without concept “chickenshit” and and concept without construction “bullshit” and claimed that successful design is the shit. I presented this pottymouth material to a team at Coca-Cola in 2019, and I won’t pretend I’m not proud.

If I ever make a site dedicated to my design work, I think I will enable multiple languages and make it trilingual. The visitor can select the language of their choice: English, Esoteric and Pottymouth.

Actually, I am blurring things a little on the “Bullshit/Chickenshit” presentation. It did not map as cleanly to the conception and construction as I suggested. Bullshit was actually meaning without practice. Chickenshit was practice without meaning.

But it still roughly maps, because chickenshit is almost always construction of practices, done with little consideration for anything beyond process mechanics. Chickenshit is the mass of codification — policies, procedures, standard practices — for how things are to be done that accrete within organizations, especially ones without any real mission (that is, with a bullshit mission). Chickenshit is “executable code” of social engineering, performed mechanically, directed by verbalized directions, in conformity with specifications, with no need whatsoever for such nebulous woo-woo notions as inspiration or spontaneity.

Yet, chickenshit work tends to hollow people out and make them feel unnatural, then alienated, then dehumanized, then inhuman, and then, eventually altogether unreal living in unreality. So then social engineers identify a functional need for supplemental meaning. This meaning is manufactured and distributed for the sake of morale or marketing or brand perception or what have you.

So bullshit is prescribed and administered like a vitamin pill — a dose of humanoidal values to supplement a diet deficient in humanity. It is very similar to how we take a dose of art or religion or spirituality on weekends, evenings or vacations to revive us after dry stretches of grinding cranial labor — and perhaps it isn’t only similar.

Technicity — the foundational faith of all industrial ideologies, even supposedly opposing ones like “capitalism” and “marxism” — is the reflex of answering questions of meaning by asking ” what is it for?”. This pragmatic presequence of presuming a functionalist implicitly leading question behind Why, treats morale, meaning, value, love as something that has a motivating function in life, and which can be added onto something otherwise meaningless to give it market appeal or motivational oomph or other powers to control, motivate or manipulate human behaviors.

They assign Why to design and call that “desirability” and then assign designers the task of fabricating desirability and putting it onto their chickenshit so people will adopt it, or accept it or at least comply with it for some span of time.

Pluricentric design is understanding the driving Why within all people involved in an organization and serving it from start to finish, because the What and How of the world is supposed to serve Why — and not the reverse, despite all conceits of technicity. Right now bullshit-coated-chickenshit — also known as that species of cynical artificiality derided as “corporate” — is so ubiquitous in both the private and public sphere that it rarely occurs to organizations to compete on being palpably human. Perhaps someday, organizations might, by the logic of technicity, for technicic purposes, invest real effort into transcending technicity.

The central insight of my designerly life is a simple one. Design cannot be what it is, and designers cannot play their role inside the narrow functionalist, behavioralist, In-Order-To logic and practices of technicity. Design does not fit inside engineering. Design is not an engineering function. Engineering development processes cannot accommodate design practice. Design cannot conform to the norms of engineering and technicity-minded practices. Designers who try to force design into the constraint-jacket of technicity in the name of empathy (meeting our masters halfway), or because they have succumbed to values of being realistic and go hard-nosed, do not serve design but betray it.

The reverse is, in fact, true. Engineering is a part of design’s bigger picture. But if engineering, management and other technicity-oriented practices take their place within a Why-directed design practice, their work will also become more meaningful, “impactful”, memorable and valued.

To overstate it with maximum obnoxiousness, every C-Suite should build a penthouse onto the roof of its headquarters. The penthouse should be staffed with designers responsible for advising executives in matters of meaning — so things don’t immediately devolve back into the brutal power machinations of technicity. You want to be the Apple of your industry? This is the secret of Apple: Crown your glass tower with a D-Suite.

Coaxing bolts from the blue

June 7, 2026Design, Shit theoryanomalogue

The main thing I’ve noticed working as a designer in project teams is the decisive difference between people who take nothingness at face value, and those who know better.

The people who take nothingness at face value are inferior collaborators because they kill possibility in the cradle. They “take absence of evidence as evidence of absence”. They mistake inconceivability as dead nonexistence. If such an inhospitable person points their eyeballs or minds at something, and nothing is perceived or conceived, to them it is pointless to engage. They cut it off, implicitly or explicitly, through a variety of tactics (* see note below), painfully familiar to anyone with a living designerly soul. They are invalidation tactics, meant to not only assert but demonstrate and enact impossibility, and to convince everyone involved that the incipient idea is not worth further consideration. In this way, they sap the enthusiasm, energy and hope required to invite the future into the present.

The best design collaborators, though, are vividly alive to the omnipresent possibility that something miraculous might irrupt into the world at any moment.

They adopt an attitude and receptive charge of imminent miracle. Kate Bush sung it well:

I just know that something good is gonna happen
I don’t know when…
But just saying it could even make it happen

Do not mistake this outburst for an optimistic prediction. These sung words are a speech act, that expresses, describes and invokes the conditions for coaxing the unconceived from nowhere into presence, ex nihilo. What is invoked is an acutely charged expectation that something shockingly new and good might shock us with its spontaneous appearance.

But the expectation is only a necessary condition. It is not in itself sufficient. The irruption ex nihilo emerges from efforts to summon it forth. Ideas are invited to consummation through participation in its development, emergence, strengthening and maturation.

But… If we deny this expectation, and refuse to cooperate and participate in its emergence, the idea’s worthlessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The idea goes nowhere because we refuse to come along.

This awareness and attitude toward nothingness is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Another insight into nothingness is crucial: the sober understanding that these miracles are cloaked with dread, and with this understanding a second attitude: courageous resolve to endure the dread, and press forward through the agony.

A delightful process will not yield delightful results. It will yield only frivolous and derivative drivel. It is the harrowing processes that produce brilliant breakthroughs of insight.

I once got into a surprisingly bitter fight over this matter. I had a philosophical friend who insisted that my tragic sense of creativity was passé. Maybe in his youth he had too much vulgar existentialism, with all its angsty melodrama and alienated brooding.

His claim — his doctrine, actually — was that we can generate novelty without any pain. We could frolic about in the world of ideas, and through pure play produce exciting new ideas with joyous profusion. His view was that it was much more blazingly and boldly original to reject the necessity of creative pain than to embrace it.

This pissed me off. Maybe it was because this vision of frivolous creativity reminds me of how nondesigners think design probably is or should be.

But annoyance became hostility, when I began to notice that whenever I tried to share with him one of my painfully won insights, he didn’t understand them. And he would sit and smirk, as my attempts to convey my insights failed to penetrate his skull. His own incomprehension and my frustration were amusing evidence that there was no point to my babble.

But then — eureka! My confusion had given him a new novel idea! Perhaps he would write it into the book he was writing.

And see? No angst. No suffering. Just floating playfully above, amused, detached, waiting for inspiration to alight.

And he would then proceed to paraphrase my own idea to me as his own, as if he himself conceived what he refused to be taught.

No wonder he believed that frolicking about in the playground of other people’s ideas was sufficient to stimulate original thought.

He couldn’t conceive the difference between kidnapping someone else’s insight and birthing his own.

Rejection of the radically unfamiliar, passive consumption of novelty won through distant ugly work — two facets of the same attitude toward approaching nothingness. Two strategies for avoiding the labor pain, strain, uncertainty and terror of giving birth to new being ex nihilo.

Note * — One common way to destroy possibility of radical newness is to interrupt. This kills the line of intuitive thought before it can gains flow, momentum, musicality. Chop the song into isolated notes, and interject each with soul-killing frustration, and the melody will stay dismembered and never come to life.

Or digress. Change the subject (“subject” in the most literal, egregoric sense). Or impose and reimpose an alien field of relevance upon the conversation. “What you are trying to say is irrelevant, and should therefore be snuffed out before it wastes more time.”

Or confront the fragile embryonic subject with some overpowering objection, and turn the nursery into an arena, where the infant must prove its right to eventual maturity by defeating gladiators and lions. Even if the infant survives the arena, the very deprivation of nurture and protection will turn the idea monstrous and ugly.

Pessimistically pick at the idea, and find innumerable reasons why it the idea can never come to anything. Destroy the ideas faith in itself until it is dispirited and ready to give up the geist.

In fearful organizations, another routine tactic is lethally effective. For the sake of efficiency or rigor, clap procedures, formalities and norms onto the collaboration. These misnorms afford credibility only to well-established, pre-comprehended ideas, Only sturdy, old, established, workaday idea-blocks are admitted, and the only innovation permitted is in permutations of stacking. One can build whatever out of the provided LEGO block set, but nothing on the order of inventing LEGO blocks could ever happen. However novel the stacking, the notion stacks never feel promising, only stalely sufficient. But it serves its true purpose, which is to check boxes that require checking, and make one’s colleagues more likely layoff targets than oneself. The output lacks all excitement, but never mind that. A marketing department will coat the quotidian with noncredible hype calculated to be adequate for making a fraction of a percent of a segment choose this option of that one. The experience of this bullshit coated chickenshit, is commonly known as “corporate”. It is the natural consequence of trying to add “desirability” at the end of an engineering process (often social engineering that mistakes itself for design because it considers “people”) that should have been designed starting from desirability.

It is commonplace — and by commonplace logic, it is the precisely the commonplace that determines all meaning — to call all vision-oriented planning design.

To design is to imagine a possibility with such specificity that specifications are produced that can serve as a plan. (“Design is the rendering of intent”, to use the poetically spare jargon of one typical design “thought leader”.) According to this definition of design, one designs a book or a service in the same sense as one designs a microchip or jet engine.

But we know, even when we can’t or won’t admit it, that design has a second, deeper meaning. And it is this meaning that gives design its mystique, and that is because design (in this second sense) it is rooted in the same soil as mysticism. Design in this sense taps into depths of human meaning, draws it to the surface and nourishes the world with strange new vivacity. There is something vividly alive, important and ineffable in a great design artifact — unprecedented, artificial (in the strict sense) but as natural as nature itself — enhanced, renewed, human.

If Herbert Simon’s “Sciences of the Artificial” explored “rendering of intent” design, someone should write a followup: “Arts of the Second-Natural” to explore design that materially manifests meaning. The blurring of these two conceptions of design has made it far too effortless to lose the second, far more vulnerable design that serves an technocratic order that numbs and is numb to love, even of the minutest magnitude.

Designerly nothingness

June 6, 2026Design, Exnihilismanomalogue

Complaint litany of an alienated designer:

This work harnesses none of my essential energies, but saps my will by extracting and utilizing resources I lack.

This work refuses my essential services while demanding from me what I do not have to give and, in fact, need to receive from others.

This work does not move me forward in my personal project. Indeed, it does the reverse: In pulls me backwards, by enslaving me to the very forces I feel called to challenge and overcome.

Regarding these forces I believe should be overcome — these forces we are forced to serve when our work feels most forced — they belong to an enworldment which Heidegger called “technicity”.

Technicity is essentially the utilitarian instinct driven to extremes.

Technicity creates an interminable chain of “in order to”.

In technicity we are all chained to “in order to”, and become links in that chain, with no purpose except to serve someone else’s “in order to”, who, in turn serves another’s “in order to.”

At the heart of technicity is one monomaniacal question “What is it for?”

This is true not only of “What?” and “How?” questions — even, and especially, questions of love and value. So when technicity asks “Why?” it only knows how to mean “What is it for?” And when technicity asks “Who?” it only knows how to mean “What is it for?” This is where the nihilistic damage happens

Design is a different way to work. It approaches questions of value and relationship as outside the realm of use. It provides a terminus for the chain of “What is it for?” It is for the sake of itself. It is useless and I love it for no reason other than love. Je ne sais quoi. Even tiny mustard seed sized specks of irrational love bring desirability to life.

But under the iron reign of technicity, design is reduced to an alternate toolset for problem-solving. And that problem is, of course, “how do I do x, in order to do y, in order to do z, in order to…” with no “because I just love it” anywhere to be seen.

Design is far too expansive to fit inside the narrowness of technicity, in any of its contemporary forms.

Of course — obviously — it does not fit inside corporate capitalism.

But neither does design fit inside managerial Marxism, which is the only viable mutation of Marxism in a mature industrial or senile postindustrial world! Your revolution, once inspired by material dialectic, has expired by it. It has been exnihilated by the fundamental fact that we are situated inside a dialectic with no exterior. We are always at the conclusion of an endless journey we are only now beginning.*

And, most relevantly to you, neither does it fit inside a technocratic administrative state, or a mini-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged organization, or a macro-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged global economy), or — most importantly of all, a nano-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged individual soul).

Design, properly practiced, attaches uses (“usefulness”), qualities of use (“usability”), use for businesses (“viability”), uses of technology (“feasibility”) in service of something higher, which is beyond the grasp and even reach of techniques and technologies — something that bears no fruit except a totally useless “I love this.”

The technicity world shovels this quality into the inadequate lust-adjacent category “desirable.” Lust is erosless urge to possess, as opposed to love which is transcendent, erosful pursuit of belonging. “Lovable” is a better word than “desirable”.

Note: * Hegel, Marx, and all other pseudo-prophetic avatars of Prometheus — all those who foresee inevitable futures as if they preexist behind some temporal curtain — seem oblivious to the fact that there is only nothing there to see. There is only the boiling chrome of nothingness.

They miss the insidious subtlety of nothingness. As if nothingness would be so hamfisted as to hide itself beneath something we can see. They think nothingness would marked itself with something so blatant as a shadows?

No, no, no — the surface of nothingness is reflective. If we stare into it, all we see is our own self. And to an omniscient soul, everything and everyone beyond omniscience is nothingness… So they look out at the nothingness of another and see only who they are. Thus “accusation in a mirror”. If in that mercury pool, we see racism, hate, intent to annihilate, genocide! — something to fight to the death. The designated nobody, the persona non grata, bears the sins of the judge and jury. Rememver this whenever a radical bays for blood. Technicity sees its own sins everywhere it looks.

In Soviet Russia, abyss stare out from you.

It is all in our choice of nothingness. Whether we think it explicitly, or simply live it out intuitively, designers must choose, now and perpetually, the pregnant nothingness of exnihilism. The designer who looks out into the world and sees no option but to sell himself into indentured servitude in the factories and towers and nowheres of technicity, will remain a designer only in title.

Protected: Triad trouble

June 5, 2026Autobiography, Design, Philosophy, Trefoilanomalogue

Fertile overlap

June 4, 2026Design, Enworldment, Philosophy, Religionanomalogue

I work in the overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them.

Design is the intentional formation of hybrid systems — systems of interacting objective parts and subjective participants. While an engineered system of objects is complete prior to human participation, a hybrid system of subjects and objects is incomplete until the subjective participants actively take part in the system.

Philosophy is one species of design intended to transform a person’s capacities for various forms of givenness. It enables a person to perceive, conceive or receive as given, what otherwise is imperceptible, inconceivable or otherwise submerged in oblivion.

Religion is the attempt of a finite being to fully participate as a finite being within infinite being.

The overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them can be called enworldment.

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