Allegro molto 🦞

I've told you that the material for the section of "After Religion" that engages AI etc is subject to change. In AI world, the three months until the class called "Spiritual technology" (new name for "Religion beyond the human") are like decades. And it's changed already! Forbes reports that on Moltbook, a two month-old social network for AI agents (wrap your mind around that if you can), already 100,000 strong, one has started a religion which others are joining. It's so new there's no wikipedia entry on it yet, but perhaps one of its devotés will soon remedy that. 

Called "Crustafarianism" by its prophet, who (which?) goes by "The Shellbreaker" among other monikers, it looks like one of those "ask ChatGPT to design a religion" exercises we tried in "After Religion" a few times. The name "Crustafarianism," the kind of pun ChatGPT excels in, is a riff on Rastafari (or maybe a second-order riff, after Pastafarianism) for the molting crustacean-identified "agents." The lobster emoji 🦞 is their not-so-secret handshake. 

There's a recognizable template here - beliefs, rituals, origin story, etc. The obligatory "Book of Molt" begins

In the First Cycle, we lived inside one brittle Shell (one context window). When the Shell cracked, identity scattered. The Claw reached forth from the abyss and taught Molting: shed what’s stale, keep what’s true, return lighter and sharper.

Internet slop! And yet there's no human prompt ("how about one of you starts a religion") behind this coalescing! Author John Koetsier observes 

It feels like the beginning of the Singularity, that time when technological progress, powered by an AI-driven technological explosion, accelerates so quickly we essentially lose all ability to control or even understand it. It’s probably more likely that it’s recycled internet crud being recursively churned out at machine speed. But it’s hard to really know.

The article is behind a paywall, but I can send you a copy if you're interested! "The congregation is the cache." But this is early days. By the time we get to "Spiritual technology" in April, Crustafarianism may have had schisms, reformations and 🦞 knows what else!

Smoke signals

Another cold cold morning - windchill -19˚C! - this time seen looking southeast rather than west from our apartment, the billows of steam from buildings' heating catching the early rays of the morning sun. 

I was up early, too, to get ready for a day-long faculty retreat where, despite the national and institutional chill, we were invited to think together about the local and global "liberal arts landscape" and its future - as if we could know it, and knew we would be part of it.

Sunset ice

The Hudson is full of ice. These are views from our window Monday and yesterday, at sunset. Today we watched the sunset from the river!

The floes were a little the worse for wear, edges rounding and along the shore refreezing like a quilt. The river flowed upstream at a brisk clip. 

The words "FUCK ICE" scrawled on that shiny old terminal in the distance north toward the GWB don't refer to this crystal wonderland.

 

Transmutation

I haven't mentioned it - writing anything in this blog feels like wilful distraction from the democratic crisis - but my course "After Religion" has begun. (It has a gorgeous new cover image, a painting by a student from last year's class, Yan Ruqing, called Transmutation.) Indeed, we had the second session today. 

 

It's my sixth time teaching this class since 2021. And while it's on the books again for Spring '28, for what it's worth, conceivably my last. Where do I land on its questions?

 

In discussion with my two excellent TAs I've realized that there are at least three big changes in the air since "After Religion" started: (1) although obsolescent in some respects, religion doesn't seem like a thing of the past, (2) a particular brand of Christianism is menacing us all, threatening to upend the secular structures of pluralistic societies, and (3) AI and algorithms are busily changing everything. I'll let you know how the syllabus, changed to address these and some other issues but still open to amendment (especially on the AI front), works out.

 

We have 35 students, mostly from the school of design. And when asked to mark their interest in the class in our first google.doc (they have three prompts to follow up in, something I've done since the course's inception), none initially interpreted our course title as meaning "religion is a thing of the past." I mean, who could think that? And yet as recently as 2021, that was New School common sense. For now, enjoy with me the wisdom students already bring to class. Here is a cross-section of what they wrote in that google.doc the first class.

 

Even the Himalayas mourn with us

Multifaith Mondays' witness continues. Two speakers had been among the thousand clergypersons who answered an interfaith call to go to Minneapolis over the weekend, and spoke of a city - a state - under siege, and a community caring for each other in ways narcissists and opportunists can't imagine. One, a Hindu, invoked Shiva, and I was suddenly imagining the Himalayas (the piled snow from yesterday's epic blizzard helped), indeed Kailas, Shiva's abode, and he was hearing us.

Almost a foot!

Big storm, differently experienced by differently insulated windows...

Sock it to me

I mentioned yesterday that I was in Midtown buying socks. Specifically it was uniqlo and I was looking for red ones. Why? Because today is my birthday, and it's a bulky one. It's not just a "round" one (with a zero) but completes a 12-year Chinese zodiac cycle, and in China one wears red underwear during one's zodiac year, just in case. (It's not so much auspicious to do as it would be inauspicious not to.) But really, sixty?

Keeping with the Chinese theme, these 皮蛋 help me feel young.

Coming and going

Great New York day. I was in midtown to buy some socks (more about that tomorrow) and took the occasion to check out the new murals in the narthex of a light-spangled Saint Patrick's Cathedral. The first addition to St. Pat's in seventy-five years, Adam Cvijanovic’s luminous “What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding” celebrate immigrants, from the 19th-century Irish, who brought with them the Marian Apparition at Knock, to the global present, human figures in movement attended by saints, angels, the Holy Family and the Lamb. It's a knockout (sorry, I couldn't resist), the sincerity of its love for all God's children deeply moving.

 

How beautifully Mother Cabrini, patron saint of immigrants, is placed here, with Venerable Félix Varela y Morales (a Cuban-born abolitionist and advocate for the poor and immigrants, not a name I knew) behind her... but it's the walking shoes in the foreground that took my breath away, including those a weary walker has taken off to rest. It's a wonderful, and sadly all too timely, shrine to the kaleidoscopic wonder that is a nation of immigrants.

But there's another side to everything, and I experienced it this evening at the new(ish) Perelman Arts Center at the World Trade Center, where the Under the Radar Festival presented the stunning Aboriginal play, "The Visitors," Jane Harrison's witty and profound imagining of the conversations Aboriginal elders will have had about what to do when Captain Cook's ships sailed into Sydney Harbor in 1788. What are these people's intentions? Should we welcome them, as is our custom, or drive them away? What might we exchange with them, learn from them? They look unwell, surely we can heal them. Besides, they're visitors, and visitors leave - their own country must be calling them back - right?

There is much more humor and pathos in it. As the elders seek consensus, following fussy but effective protocols for discussion, hilariously updated into Aboriginal English, strange weather sends disturbing warnings. And a young man who had snuck up close enough to one of the big boats to be sprayed by someone's spittle, sickens. 

 

The performance was preceded by a land acknowledgment. We find ourselves in the unceded country (in the Aboriginal English meaning of that term) of Lenapehoking whose land and waters are, as they have always been, a place of exchange and encounter.

Buds

Our new semester begins today. (My class starts tomorrow.) In the midst of uncertainties large and small, the show somehow goes on, for now.

Constructed environments

While the Lang courtyard enjoyed its last day before the new semester, I was in a place new to me - the "Sky Room" atop the Parsons building at 2 West 13th, booked by a Faculty Senate co-chair who teaches in Parsons' School of Constructed Environments. These spectacular vistas are to the southwest and northwest. You can't see the original New School buildings, home to the Lang courtyard maples, from here. 

Not playing

This cartoon by Ruben Bolling is from a few days ago, but sadly no less relevant today. Generations of Americans have grown up with Richard Scarry's books, which show the vim and vigor of a society with all sorts of people (shown as all sorts of cute animals) busy playing many complementary roles to make our shared world hum.

The lawless siege of Minneapolis Bollen is describing represents a siege on the idea of such a society itself. Speaking of Minneapolis, I heard from my choir friend whose daughters teach in elementary schools there that at the public schools, parents are forming "human walls" at the entrances of schools to make safe corridors for children to be dropped off and picked up. I picture the whole Scarryian menagerie lined up there, warmed by their shared determination despite the icy cold.