networked.art: On the Tyranny of Alphabetic Linearity

We are told the machines are coming for our thinking. They arrived three thousand years ago. Well before large language models, the alphabet was the first capture technology.

A figure stands behind columns of letters. The letters sit in the order a typewriter gave us, an engineering compromise from the 1870s still under nearly every hand that writes. The circles are ideas: they rise through the body, gather, and press against the columns.

The bars are not a figure of speech. But they are not absolute either. Letters flicker. Forms begin to push past the edge and stop short of it. Nothing has left. Not yet.

Seamless ten-second loop. 1/1. https://tyranny.averylakeofficial.com/