Day 1324
Walking past a placard reading “WRATH: OUR TRUTH” in downtown Kyiv this morning, I had two thoughts in quick succession:
First: interactive education should abandon kindergarten’s “everybody’s happy nowadays1” approach and focus entirely on maps. Drop students into utterly alien environments—Chicago, Portland—armed only with digitized maps. Time how long it takes them to orient themselves in these baffling wayfinding systems, each more chaotic than the next. Then have them create accurate interactive experiences of these places and share them with the world.
Second: we should revive pulp fiction’s tradition of rescuing failing plots by adding labyrinths—except now they’re AI-generated mazes embedded in websites.
Both thoughts dissolved when I scrolled to photographs of the not-very-portable cement bomb shelters being erected in the capital looking like brutalist sculptures on their way to an exhibition that no one wants to attend.
