Who can stop themselves now from being lured into the wilderness of black mirrors?

We’re told our entanglement prevents some sort of separation. But it’s the cyborg regime we’re too entangled in, not each other.

A scant two years ago Don’t Look Up presented viewers with a jaundiced look at a present-day America where every commercial and cultural current pushed online and TV audiences deep into denial about the huge asteroid coming to wipe out all life on Earth. 2023’s live-action spectacular features a synced-up information-management complex insisting we do look up. What don’t they want us to see down below?

In English the word chore comes out of an older term encompassing in the broadest senses the small events that add up on Earth to the vast anonymizing sands in our mortal hourglass: turn, change, time, occasion, affair.

I’ve had my share of brushes with spycraft, which does visibly wind its way through L.A. on occasion. Cars explode, coroner’s reports are sealed — a British girl, sad on her birthday, unspools between cigarette drags a story about a father who turned down a contract to assassinate Nelson Mandela. He miraculously survived the skydiving “accident” that transpired shortly thereafter, but could only croak out nonwords from his hospital bed about who called the hit and why…

Even as the phantom it now is of the California that once was, Los Angeles, still whispering its secret language, lures and claims innumerable lives, their minor details accumulating into a trajectory of acquiescence that, in hindsight, too late, may well have been there all along, subtly, insistently, in hiding, crying out.

It’s not hard to understand the mania for building that took us through the collapse-a-thon of 2022 on into ’23. It makes sense that so many who warn and insist that it’s time to build hope to accelerate us through a sequence of their constructions into a new regime, one that can rescue us from the final breakdown of the decaying regime we’re in. The signs of this breakdown are everywhere, saturating every facet of life — an omnipresence rivaled only by that of technology itself.

Welcome to The Build, an open journal in newsletter form about rising up from America’s ruins. For over a decade—since, intriguingly, the dawn of the smartphone—we’ve heard a lot about our need to build back from what once was. That rhetoric reached a fever pitch amid the pandemic. Even many powerful and intelligent people who rejected the “Build Back Better” agenda insist that “it’s time to build.” And so it is. But time to build what?