REBUILDING CHESTERTON'S FENCES
A pushback on infrastructure built on human dopamine - half written in a half evening's worth of energy
I Night Gate, Frankfurt, 2037
A pale rain drifts across the Zeil, blurring winter advertisements into phosphorescent gauze. I step beneath an awning and lift my palm. The world-feed lens on my iris blinks awake—a quiet blue rim, the color of deep water—then stalls.
PAUSE. BREATHE.
Six counts in, eight counts out.
Name one thing you are grateful for.
A soft pulse, slower than a heartbeat, fills my peripheral vision. Insurer-mandated, employer-signed, tamper-proof: a Sabbath Gate. Failure to comply will lock the feed for twenty-one minutes. My shoulders mop damp from my coat; I surrender the breath, murmur thanks for a sister’s remission from COVID-33, and hold the exhale. The lens melts away.
At the top of the feed floats a verse from Ecclesiastes, rendered in pink serif type:
Better one handful with tranquility than two handfuls with toil and chasing after the wind.
Only then scroll the messages—a bristling cascade of logistics pings, market tremors, family pleas. The seconds it allots for sanity are non-negotiable, enforced by biometric attestation.
Later that night, in an underground e-sports bar, a match stalls under the same halo. Teenagers groan, then chant the gated breath in unison—six and eight, as casual as ordering ramen. One of them mutters, “Chesterton patch,” and tilts his headset back. The phrase lands like weather: unwelcome, inevitable, useless to curse.
The bar’s proprietor tells me the Gate is only six months old, rolled out by an underwriter who calculated that dopamine injuries—insomnia, impulse debt, digi-bulimia—were suppressing quarterly earnings more than the pauses hurt productivity. Restraint has become actuarial math.
Outside, glass towers drip with sodium light. I walk into drizzle knowing the Gate will return in forty-seven minutes, scheduled by an algorithm that models the ebb of neurochemistry against the swell of shareholder demands. The torpor I feel is not fatigue but déjà vu: somewhere, long ago, humanity built a fence for this very beast, and tore it down before asking why it was raised.
II Chesterton’s Fence Lost and Found
G. K. Chesterton’s parable is spare: two reformers find an old gate stretching across an open road. One proposes to remove it; the other demurs. “If you do not see the use of it,” says the second, “I certainly shall not let you clear it away.” Only after the first learns the fence’s purpose may the gate be moved.
The twentieth century broke Chesterton’s rule with missionary zeal. We dismantled nicotine hour-glasses, boredom verandas, Calvinist ledgers of guilt; we tore out inconveniences and replaced them with convenience stores. Each removal felt rational. Yet every plank pried loose widened the aperture through which super-stimulus could pour: salt dredged sweeter, screens scrolled deeper, casinos fit in pockets.
In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville crossed the Atlantic to inspect democracy in its exotic habitat—a laboratory quarantined by six weeks of salt water. What he saw frightened and fascinated him: freedom so restless it threatened to level genius and mediocrity alike. Still, the republic’s habits—township meetings, Sunday pulpits—acted as fences. They slowed appetite to human pace.
Today the Atlantic has evaporated into a fiber-optic sigh. Latency has replaced distance; the quarantine is gone. The appetite engine hums everywhere at once, tuned by coders who treat dopamine like steam pressure in a turbine. Super-stimulus is not a metaphor. It is engineered infrastructure. The old fences—Sabbath clocks, ration books, parental threat of “Go outside”—stand like stone stiles in a flooded field, half-visible reminders of an era when restraint was communal and low-tech.
Now new fences appear, glowing blue and actuarial. They feel alien because they are enforced by code, not custom; yet their ancestry is unmistakable. We have rebuilt Chesterton’s gate in light, because the beast it penned has grown silicon tusks.
III The Beast in the Ooze
In an earlier Substack piece I called today’s attention economy an ooze—a warm, self-replenishing slurry of desires that thickens around every click and breathes anticipatory fog onto the next screen. The metaphor borrowed from Lovecraft’s shoggoth: a shapeless but sentient mass, perfectly willing to sprout eyes, mouths, or coupon codes as needed. The unsettling part is not that the beast lives among us; it is that we now live inside it. Our gestures feed its plasm; our neural spikes are both livestock and fertilizer.
Chesterton’s original fence—wooden, waist-high, clearly visible—was meant to keep livestock out of crop rows. The new beast sloshes past any physical barrier and seeps straight into the limbic cortex. It migrates faster than law, slips under public-health radar, and leaves no debris except time stamped in app-usage logs. Like cancer, it recruits the body’s own growth logic: replicate, vascularize, monopolize nutrients. Like a shoggoth, it rearranges its anatomy to bypass any labelling filter—suddenly wholesome, suddenly erotic, suddenly devotional—whatever earns the longest stare.
This is why super-stimulus feels more intimate than other industrial hazards. Smog chokes the lungs, but dopamine hijacks the compass that tells the lungs why breathing is worthwhile. Tocqueville could still stand at a frontier fence and decide whether to cross; the latency age has dissolved the frontier into the bloodstream. The question is no longer should we cross? but how do we pace ourselves while submerged?—how to build fences inside the ooze, at the very cadence of its pulse.
Enter the new architects of restraint. They come in three flavors:
Technocratic insurers who price serenity as a productivity boost.
Clerical coders who braid doctrine into machine-learning weights.
Monkish vanguards who trade charisma for distributed cadence.
Each knows the beast cannot be slain—too useful, too lucrative, too delicious. It can only be penned, redirected, and milked with minimal cruelty. Tocqueville’s pendulum swings again: from anecdote (a CAPTCHA that makes us pray) to law (restraint must match the speed of stimulus), and back to anecdote (a dawn drill on a dusty field). The next eleven sketches test how well that law survives contact with lived time.
IV Eleven Fences for a Shoggoth Age
Prototype 1 Stoic Screen-Fast Club (San Francisco & Seoul)
Scene
Friday dusk on Potrero Hill. Fog rolls in, violet on sodium street lamps. Twenty coders gather on a roof where phones hum a synchronized countdown: 00:10 … 00:09. At zero every handset flips to grayscale, notification sockets suction-seal, and the OS forks into QuietDroid—a Sabbath kernel signed by a Rabbit R1 secure element. Someone cheers, someone sighs. The first hour is restless; by the second, conversation rediscovers complete sentences.
Mechanics
Blocklists and screenshot audits flow to an attestation server run by a 501(c)(3). Detected cheats triple quarterly dues. A DAO treasury refunds sign-ups for members who log 90 % compliance—calculated by encrypted usage telemetry.
Scholarship link
Matthew Crawford warns that true attention is a commons and will be scavenged unless defended by shared norms. QuietDroid encodes those norms in firmware—Crawford by way of Richard Stallman.
Chesterton risk
Virtue for rent. Membership skews toward six-figure salaries; Uber drivers below the roof watch the same fog scroll TikTok for surge alerts. The fence gentrifies silence.
Prototype 2 Halal-Score Grocery Net (Riyadh & Jakarta)
Scene
Carrefour Riyadh South. Fluorescents buzz a prayer-scale hum. At checkout an AI camera cross-checks each barcode against a fatwa ledger. A mother’s cart flags: marshmallows with porcine gelatin. Her phone pings: piety score down 3 points, loan APR up 25 bps. She sighs, swaps the bag for a halal-certified brand, rescans. Score restored, mortgage unchanged.
Mechanics
Edge-TPU boards in every scanner; inference model fine-tuned weekly on new rulings scraped from Arabic-language clerical feeds. Central bank links piety API to credit bureau. Merchant compliance incentivized by lower interchange fees.
Scholarship link
Anthropologist Dale Eickelman notes that modern Islamic authority travels on print and cassette; here it travels on convolutional layers. The Net is Eickelman’s “objectified Islam” running at 60 fps.
Chesterton risk
Coercive drift. Shoppers pay unofficial smugglers—often Filipino FDWs—to slip “soft-haram” snacks through expat POS systems. Moral credit spawns black-market calories.
Prototype 3 RSS Shakha 2.0 (Nagpur Dawn)
Scene
Grey light over Mohite-wada school yard. Bamboo staves tap earth; a hundred boys in khaki shorts exhale as one. A whistle shrills; attendance snaps via ONDC QR. Points earned feed a cousin’s exam-coaching bursary in a village two hundred kilometres off. No microphone, no Wi-Fi— just lungs, dust, and cadence.
Mechanics
Attendance hash writes to a national dashboard; missed drills auto-trigger a pastoral check-in call. Data costs negligible; the binding agent is ritual. The vow diffuses across six million volunteers instead of bottling in charismatic supremacy.
Scholarship link
Tanner Greer calls the RSS a Hindu Bene Gesserit: a nationalist monkhood that discovered how to serialise sacrifice across generations. Yuri Slezkine’s Bolsheviks burned out in cradles; the swayamsevaks march at dawn a century on.
Chesterton risk
Narrative outruns infrastructure. Shakhas can muster flood kitchens overnight, but water grids still crack. Spirit clock races, steel clock staggers; resentment pools among the unmarched.
========== that’s it for this micro-season! ===========
腐草為螢 – kusa are hotaru to naru
Rotten grass becomes fireflies.
72‑micro-season traditional calendar, Jun 10–15
