Philosophy

How modern video games and speculative fiction help a post-religious generation trade the fear of an angry creator for the terror of an indifferent cosmos.

There is a moment near the start of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, published in 1984, when the reader learns exactly what kind of story this is going to be. Case, a washed-up console cowboy, has been…

Begin with something small. A room at night, the lights off, the house quiet. Nothing is happening. You are aware of the hum of the refrigerator two rooms away, the particular grain of darkness…

Phanes, the Rebel Archons, and the Fable Genshin Impact Is Quietly Handing to the West

On Vector Ethics, four thinkers who never saw a computer, and how to calibrate an instrument that keeps failing in two opposite directions

I performed an interesting thought experiment today and gave Anthropic Claude’s new Fable 5 model something to chew on. I have a Pro subscription and Fable was recently made available again under my…

There is a scene in a video game that has no business being as profound as it is. A clockwork woman — a machine built by human hands, granted senses, memory, and a formidable capacity for reason …

What a “casual” gacha game played by millions is really whispering about fate, creation, grief, and the freedom to become someone new.

An investigation into the company behind Genshin Impact — a billion-dollar Shanghai studio funding fusion reactors, rockets, and artificial intelligence while telling a story about breaking out of a…

There is a Buddhist temple in Isumi, in Japan’s Chiba Prefecture, that is roughly four and a half centuries old. It has weathered shoguns and famines, the opening of the country to the West, the…