published: 2025-07-23
Buddha meditated beneath a tree. Jesus broke bread on mounts. Plato etched ideas into the very lands, airs, and seas that held his presence. In time. Occupying physical space.
They were not content creators. They were not chasing clout. They were present—so radically present that their presence became transmissible. What contemporary society refers to as memes were once remembered moments: shared memories. Written, not to cache, but committed to the solid state, precisely because the contributor once deemed it appropriate enough to commit.
Their pedagogies appealed to lords and commoners alike. But the creators’ intent was not reach—it was recognition. It was less about maximising clicks and more about the proximal encounters, the ones geographically close enough to administer or minister to.
Today, the feed moves faster than thought. Each post, a product. Every profile, a shop front. The platforms implicitly signal the “user”, to scale oneself like a startup. Yet, a hunger—for signal but not noise, for voice but not volume—persists.
Virality indicates that the platform functions. Proximity determines if any form persists.
Virality, as circulation, indicates that the algorithm functions as architected. But proximity, via a shared semantic, is what remains as form—the prompt’s precision determines its impact.
Ideas (and therefore, ideals) persist, not because of mass exposure, but because someone inherited the message: a direct transmission. They were translated, etched, manuscript, blocked, stamped, and finally mass-published, across generations. Not by solicitors, but by intentional readers who allowed themselves to be impressed.
This is the trade secret: a writer must first become the reader. If and only then, does one’s writings persist. To write without reading then, is sacrilege. If it’s not scripture, the manuscript won’t script.
This dispatch is rushed, because these writings must patch through. The proximity is not just spatial, it’s temporally encoded as well. A dispatch does not wait to be discovered; it is received long before it was ever sent. No call-to-action because it already moves.