Missing the ground, as Douglas Adams notes, is the difficult part of flying.
It’s that much harder when you’re in freefall.
While falling, flying involves a frantic scramble to assemble the minimum viable version of a machine capable of using air to fight against the same forces that threaten to turn you into a bug splat on the windshield of Desert Bus, or a pancake-shaped coyote pasted against a matte painting of a tunnel.
The feeling is distinctly different from that of “building the plane while flying”; a metaphor I’ve come back to a lot in recent years. The idea that I’m simultaneously creating something that didn’t exist before, while creating the process for creating it, frantically laying down rails in front of the train that’s moving forward at the speed of time.
Building while falling is different. It’s not laying down rails to prepare for liftoff; it’s building the skeletal structure of wings to compete with the wind shear and drag on the components so they don’t fly apart, tacking on some primitive sheeting, and hoping it catches the air at *just the right angle* to gain altitude, skirt the ground, and well, miss.
The original idea for this rebirth of HD was to bring some critical distance to the visual culture that animated first version of the site, to create a dialogue that could hopefully shed some light on the current moment.
Then 2026 started, and the time, brain power, and feeling of distance that birthed that inspiration turned out to be in short supply.
Today I’m thinking about the fragility of that equilibrium that I found at the end of 2025, and what it means to be writing in a period of ever-accelerating crisis, where ease and reflection feel at odds with the urgency of the moment. Where having a normal one feels both crucial to building a durable foundation for a project like this, and simultaneously impossible, given current events.
I want to post about media, philosophy, semiotics, culture, and community. I need to post about the end of the world: AI, fascism, consensus reality, and organizing for our collective survival.
We exist within delicate, permeable membranes: studiously ignoring — or unable to ignore — the fragility our position in the hierarchy of race, or gender, or class, or ability. Always ever precarious; in or out, productive worker or “useless eater”, healthy or diseased, collaborator or conspirator.
Alive or dead.
I sit with the discomfort of that awareness and an understanding of its implications: that the only way out is to create strong structures of mutual support and collective care to replace those we’ve lost. To hold each other close, so when we fall, we build together, I write to myself.
I’m comforted, and terrified, to think that history is always as ever on a knife’s edge. What each of us does now, and what we do together, is what decides the future.
We — I — don’t have time to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
So I fall, and I build. And I hope that it’s enough.
featured image from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
