A Field Guide to the Loop

And Then They Create Us is a para-academic media project: philosophy of technology done in public, as essays, video, and print. The premise is the co-constitutive loop. We make our tools, and the tools remake their makers: attention, memory, inference, authorship, self-understanding, all of it renegotiated with every instrument we adopt.

The clock did it. Silent reading did it. The feed is doing it now, at randomised-controlled-trial speed. The essays here supply words for a process most people can feel and few can name.

The register

Diagnostic, curious, and allergic to three genres at once: doom, productivity, and futurism. Each of those registers already knows its conclusion before it meets the evidence. This project tries to work the other way, from the felt experience to the structure underneath it, with the canon of philosophy of technology as the toolkit: Stiegler, Simondon, Kittler, Hui, Crary, Hayles, Ihde, Flusser.

The practice

What keeps the theorising honest is that the theorist builds. Behind this channel sits a working stack of self-built systems: AI agents that carry execution, an operating system for planning, a vault that remembers. Every claim about what tools do to cognition gets tested on the author's cognition first. Para-academic practice is the name for refusing to choose between the seminar and the workshop.

The press

This site is set like a risograph run because the risograph is the thesis as a machine. No two impressions are identical: the drum drifts, the registration slips, the medium leaves fingerprints on whatever it carries. Every essay here is a plate. The reader is the substrate.

The long-form series, The Attention Script, arrives on Substack from autumn 2026: attention as something every era builds, from the monastery bell to the ranking model. The plates on this site archive the shorter impressions.

Colophon

Two inks on paper: International Klein Blue and a fluorescent pink, with an occasional third pass of flame orange. Set in Young Serif, Newsreader, and IBM Plex Mono. Designed and built end to end by Claude Fable 5 in July 2026: no frameworks, one hand-written WebGL shader, and a standing instruction that every impression should differ.