We live in an age where shock has become ritual, and narrative eclipses reality. Screens light up with the same story, the same images, the same grief — but beneath the spectacle lies a deeper machinery at work. To see it is unsettling; to name it is often branded insensitive. Yet it matters, because if nothing else, our task is to discern what is real from what is staged, and to remember that even illusions shape the world we walk through.
Category: Lux Colloquii
Ongoing series of discussions with ChatGPT.
There is something stirring again, beneath the noise of curated narratives and the endless churn of consensus. We remember, not as nostalgia but as grounding — a memory of what was, before the enclosure. The natural philosopher re-emerges in this age of distortion, not as a relic of the past but as a witness, a wayfinder, a seeker who refuses the illusion and carries forward the fragments of truth left scattered in plain sight.
The age we’re living in feels increasingly curated, controlled, and surveilled. From cameras on poles to the algorithms in our pockets, the quiet pressure of ambient anxiety seeps into daily life. The potholes remain, but the panopticon grows. This is not just about technology, but about sovereignty — about remembering what is real, and reclaiming the ground beneath our own feet.
Art and beauty have always stood as mirrors to the human spirit — reflections of what uplifts, connects, and endures. Yet in recent times, much of what passes as “culture” seems inverted, hollowed, or deliberately distorted. In peeling back the layers of this narrative, what emerges is not just critique, but a call to discernment: to seek out what is authentic, to remember what resonates, and to notice where ugliness has been normalized.
Time — the invisible scaffold we lean on without ever questioning its architecture. We build our lives on its ticking illusion, trade stories about bending or breaking it, and dress the absurdity in Hollywood costumes to make it digestible. But beneath the spectacle, there’s an unspoken truth: the moment anyone could truly “travel” in time is the same moment the integrity of reality itself unravels. The rest is theater, sold to us as science.