Human beings have the remarkable ability to transcend physical space and time with nothing more than imagination. This ability, combined with a deeply-rooted thirst for stories about ourselves—the unfolding narratives that allow us to make sense of our own actions and those of others—constitute the very essence of humanity. But now, enabled by our technologies, everything from high-speed communications to virtual reality, we have trapped ourselves in a vicious positive feedback loop that encourages us to make simple-minded interpretations.

Our technology transforms us into simple caricatures of ourselves and then we become those caricatures. We have traded a universe filled with marvels for the Marvel Universe. The cost of this trade has been a deep denigration of what it really means to be a complex, vital, and fully realized human being.

We swallow fatuously oversimplified “scientific” accounts of ourselves with nary a whimper. Not only do we allow ourselves to be counted, sorted, and categorized by artificially intelligent machines, but we embrace the insights provided by those machines as if they constitute deep and unassailable truths about our nature. We tolerate drab, homogeneous, placeless cities and neighborhoods as though the settings of our lives didn’t matter. Without a massive destabilizing event like a global pandemic, it might have been possible for civilization to continue to sleepwalk into this diminished, algorithmic, machinic version of ourselves without even noticing—indeed we are well on the way to this sorry state.

But we can wake up. There’s still time left to fix us. That’s what The Cartesian Rift is about.