Essays & Lyrics

Jane is muted by her boss during a morning meeting. Her voice is literally switched off. With nothing left to say, she turns inward. At first, she begins chanting Om to herself—the ancient syllable associated with cosmic unity—until she grows bored. With characteristic wryness, she decides she has nothing left to do but write a poem. Is poetry Chalamet’s third dying art after ballet and opera?

Jane, the intrepid engineer, is trying to be funny. This sits close to Learn to Be Funny, where performance and social survival become their own kind of art. But where does she even begin?

Time is brandished upon our souls.

Jane then slips into the sacred structure of scientific thought, and the poem begins to propel her forward. Each stanza arrives as a surprise, escalating the thesis until it has gone as far as anything can go.

The poem unfolds according to astronomical cycles, expanding in scale with each movement:

• Earth’s rotation: the polarity of night and day
• Earth’s orbit: the seasonal rhythm of life and death
• Precession: the slow axial drift across millennia
• Nutation: smaller oscillations within that longer arc
• The Sun’s galactic motion: deep cosmic time
• Cosmic expansion: the ultimate horizon

Each step widens the frame until individual life—with its meetings, its humiliations, and its mute buttons—appears within a scale so vast it almost disappears.

Stylistically, the poem draws on Whitman. The accumulation of opposites and rhythmic catalogues is intended to produce a liturgical effect. The title, Going and Gone, echoes Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, with its meditation on endings that are also continuations. Like Eliot, the poem situates the present moment within something older and larger than itself.

The piece is Jane’s courageous attempt to synthesize scientific and humanistic ways of understanding the world. Throughout the work, the cosmos remains both measurable and mysterious. There are metaphysical sprinklings of Friedrich Nietzsche, with the recurrence of patterns across scales; Martin Heidegger, with existence structured by temporality; and Henri Bergson, with the tension between measured time and lived duration.

The poem culminates in the existential realization of cosmic indifference. But whether this indifference is tragic remains unresolved. Does Jane experience it as loss, or as liberation? Does she prefer illusion, or does she accept impermanence? This question later shadows Gone Tomorrow, where disappearance becomes more immediate and less theoretical.

This moment marks the first clear glimpse of Jane’s deeper consciousness. Externally, she is a muted employee in a corporate meeting. Internally, she is capable of thinking at a cosmological scale. The gap between those two realities is both the subject and the irony of the piece.

The poem’s meaning extends beyond its esoteric register. It also performs several narrative functions within the novel.

It reveals Jane’s mind. While others are absorbed in hierarchy and performance, her thoughts move outward—past the office, past the planet, past the solar system—to the structure of time itself. This is who she is when no one is listening. Even she does not yet fully know it. That inward pressure will later become more explicit in Rewrite My Lines, where self-authorship is no longer merely private thought but a survival strategy.

It contrasts human authority with cosmic indifference. Zane controls the meeting with a mute button: a small power, exercised with quiet satisfaction. The poem places this beside forces of an entirely different order. Precession reshapes civilizations. Cosmic expansion dissolves galaxies. Against that backdrop, the mute button becomes a precise kind of absurdity.

It foreshadows the novel’s larger concerns: interiority, scale, the tension between individual consciousness and the structure of existence, and the question of meaning within time. This is also why it belongs near the first KnewDowns movement: departure, voice, body, machine, and time are already starting to braid together.

The title carries the emotional weight of the piece.

Going suggests motion: life not yet complete. Gone suggests cessation: death, or something beyond it. The universe, the poem implies, moves inexorably from one to the other.

At the same time, the title reflects the immediate scene. Jane’s voice was going, and then it was gone. Yet internally, it continues. The poem raises a quiet question: does something persist even after it has been switched off?

The key word in the poem is brandished, appearing at both the beginning and the end. To brandish something is to hold it up deliberately, even aggressively. We brandish weapons. We brandish proof. We brandish authority. Time, the poem insists, is not something we wield. It is something the universe holds over us.

The closing lines invert the relationship:

Bodies in the universe spin, orbit, wobble, drift, and expand.
So too do our bodies spin, orbit, wobble, drift, and expand,
brandishing themselves on the arrow of time.

We do not stand outside these motions. We participate in them. We spin with the Earth, orbit with the solar system, drift through the galaxy, and expand with the universe. We are not observers of time. We are expressions of it. We are made of the same forces that will eventually unmake us.

Rewrite My Lines

The song begins in disorientation. The vocals enter without preamble near the start of the third chapter, right after Jane has been fired. The song marks the collapse of one identity before another has formed. It is Jane’s attempt to renegotiate the self in the absence of stable ground.

I don’t know where I’m going.
I don’t know where I’ve been.
I’ll rewrite my lines once again,
until I fit the part that I’m in.

The verb fit is doing the heavy lifting. It implies that the role precedes the person, and that the task is adaptation rather than invention. The speaker’s agency is tightly constrained: she can rewrite, but only within the margins already drawn. This is the specific condition Sartre called bad faith made visible: the moment when a person recognizes that the role she inhabited was never fully hers.

The workplace in the song is a theatre, and everyone inside it is in costume. The debutante arrives polished and composed, her surface immaculate. The image captures the performance demanded of women entering professional spaces: the precise calibration of tone, appearance, and affect designed to secure acceptance before competence can be demonstrated.

The lyrics hint, though, that there may be more going on:

Is there a wolf underneath your fine skin?

The debutante and the wolf are not contradictions. The former is a convenient disguise for the latter. Jane conceals her desires and instincts in order to be accepted in the corporate world. The problem is that she must perform in a way that conceals the very qualities that give her power. This is the structural trap the song explores. Later in the novel, Jane returns to this image explicitly, likening herself to a werewolf; that identity is explored more fully in Part Two.

The wolf metaphor also reframes a familiar tension. In professional environments, women are routinely required to be both likable and capable, a pairing that is structurally unstable. Too much competence is interpreted as a threat, even subconsciously if not overtly. Too much likability is understood as triviality.

Erving Goffman observed that social interaction resembles theatrical performance: individuals manage impressions through carefully controlled front-stage behavior. But the wolf does not disappear because it is hidden. It bides its time.

The song returns to the moment when this performance still seemed like a reasonable exchange. Jane imagines the workplace she was promised:

We’ll have fun in our team meetings.
They’ll be roasts, not browbeatings.

The lines are comic, but the underlying philosophy is real. Johan Huizinga argued in Homo Ludens that play is not an ornament to culture but one of its generative sources: creativity and genuine collaboration require an atmosphere in which people are not performing fear. The workplace that eliminates humor becomes less fluid and more brittle.

At the beginning, Jane thought this was a fair exchange:

You give me punchlines
and I’ll meet your deadlines.

The speaker does not reject performance. She demands reciprocity. If she is expected to manage her affect, sustain energy, and remain engaging across the full length of a working day, then the environment must justify that expenditure. Emotional labor extracted without return is simply extraction.

The same logic reaches its most direct statement in the lines that follow:

Make me angry, make me cry,
as long as there’s a reason why.

Here Jane refuses emotional anesthesia. It is also a philosophical position. To insist on feeling with justification is to insist on remaining a subject. It echoes Simone de Beauvoir’s argument that women are persistently positioned as the Other, defined in relation to systems that were not built around their experience. The demand for a reason why is a demand to be treated as someone whose inner life counts. Workers are typically expected to regulate their feelings as part of their professional role. This is what Arlie Hochschild calls emotional labor, and the burden is not distributed evenly across gender.

Throughout, the language of rewriting continues:

I’ll rewrite my lines till I’m witty,
I’ll erase my lines till I’m pretty.

These desires are not intrinsic. They are acquired, shaped by the specific demands of the environment the speaker inhabits. Wit and prettiness are currencies within the system, and the speaker knows it. Yet the song’s own wit is constant, sharp, and already fully formed. There is a gap between what the speaker claims to want and what she demonstrably is. That gap produces a layer of dramatic irony that only fully opens later in the novel.

What the song ultimately refuses is total compliance. The speaker is willing to rewrite, but not to disappear. There remains something beneath the performance that cannot be fully edited out: something that persists, that insists on humor and play and emotion with justification. The wolf is not eliminated. It is contained, redirected, held in reserve.

The tension the song establishes is never resolved, because resolution is not the point. Identity here is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be managed. The lines can be rewritten. But not entirely. There is always a remainder: something that declines to be absorbed into the role, something that will eventually require a different kind of expression altogether. Empowered by this recognition, Jane later sings another tune with a more idealistic future in Learn to Be Funny.

I don’t know where I’m going.
I don’t know where I’ve been.
I’ll rewrite my lines once again,
until I fit the part that I’m in.

I’ll rewrite my lines till I’m witty,
I’ll erase my lines till I’m pretty.
The truth of first impressions
is more than I can stand.

He asked me what I wanted,
and I say anything but bland.
Make me laugh every day.
Work should never crowd out play.

We’ll have fun in our team meetings.
They’ll be roasts, not browbeatings.

Make me angry, make me cry,
as long as there’s a reason why.
They say dress for the job you want,
and you walk in like a debutante,
all polish and promise and paper-thin.
Is there a wolf underneath your fine skin?

You are young and you are spry.
I don’t care if your jokes are wry.
We’ll have fun in our team meetings.
They’ll be roasts, not browbeatings.

You give me punchlines,
and I’ll meet your deadlines.
My jokes might be naughty
when your work is shoddy.

I don’t mind as long as we have fun.
Keep it real while the work gets done.

Learn to Be Funny

This song follows soon after Rewrite My Lines and sits in a long tradition of philosophical reflection on why humans laugh and why laughter matters most when life becomes unbearable. Henri Bergson, in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, argued that comedy emerges when rigid social systems collide with the fluidity of life. We laugh when mechanical structures fail to contain living spontaneity. The corporation, with its performance reviews, org charts, and scripted roles, is precisely the kind of mechanical encrustation Bergson had in mind. Jane has just been expelled from that machine. Her turn toward comedy is not escapism; it is a return to the living world after a bout of institutional rigidity.

Freud, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, proposed that humor releases psychological tension. Jokes allow forbidden or painful truths to surface indirectly, bypassing the censors of shame and social propriety. The desire to “learn to be funny” is therefore not trivial entertainment. It is a psychological strategy for metabolizing humiliation, anger, and uncertainty after the Culling. What cannot be said directly can perhaps be said from a stage. Comedy is both emotional regulation and intellectual resistance.

The song also stands on the shoulders of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival, one of the most enduring ideas in cultural theory. Bakhtin described medieval carnivals as temporary spaces where social hierarchies dissolve entirely. Kings become fools, fools become kings, and laughter suspends the ordinary structures of power. The carnival is organized around participation rather than rank.

Jane imagines precisely such a space. The “big tent” she envisions is a carnival world: hierarchy dissolved, everyone welcome, laughter replacing command. The line “everyone is well-meant” captures the carnival’s essential innocence — a world where intentions are assumed good because status competition has been suspended. The comic stage replaces the corporate ladder, and applause replaces the performance review.

What makes this poignant is that Jane knows, on some level, that the carnival is temporary. Bakhtin’s carnivals always ended. The hierarchies returned. But the memory of the carnival changes how people experience the ordinary world.

There is also a deep connection to Albert Camus’s philosophy of the absurd. Camus argued that human beings search desperately for meaning in a universe that offers none. The appropriate response, he insisted, is not despair but defiant creativity. One must imagine Sisyphus happy to endure human existence.

Jane’s pivot toward stand-up comedy carries this same tone of rebellious absurdity. The corporate world promised meaning through achievement, title, and belonging. The Culling dissolved all three in a single afternoon. If the structures that promised meaning collapse so easily, one might as well invent entirely new forms of play. Humor becomes a response to existential disorientation. The comedian stands before an audience and says: yes, things are ridiculous, and I will show you how ridiculous they are, and we will laugh together — and that will be enough for tonight.

The lyrics deliberately parody the language of startup culture. Lines about starting startups, counting money while the days are sunny, and gathering everyone under a big tent reflect the optimistic mythology that surrounds tech entrepreneurship. Silicon Valley rhetoric has long imagined a future where innovation dissolves hierarchy, wealth spreads naturally to those who hustle creatively, and work becomes indistinguishable from play. The language is utopian, and Jane borrows it wholesale.

The result is both hopeful and gently satirical. Jane is aware enough to exaggerate the vocabulary until it tips into dream, but she is not cynical enough to reject the dream entirely. The song captures the strange mixture of idealism and naïveté that runs through the modern startup imagination — the belief that, with the right combination of freedom, creativity, and good intentions, everything might just work out. It is the fantasy of life after corporate captivity, still expressed in the only entrepreneurial language available.

From a feminist perspective, the song engages directly with the concept of emotional labor, first developed by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in The Managed Heart. Hochschild observed that certain professions — disproportionately held by women — require workers to manage their emotional displays as part of the job. Flight attendants must smile. Customer service representatives must remain warm. Feelings are commodities, sold along with the service.

Women in professional settings face an intensified version of this demand. Cheerfulness is expected regardless of internal emotional state. Warmth is required even when cold treatment is received. The professional woman who fails to perform pleasantness is penalized twice: once for her feelings, and again for showing them.

Jane’s wish to “learn to be funny” can be read as both an embrace and a reclamation of this dynamic. Instead of performing pleasantness for an employer who can terminate her at will, she imagines performing humor on her own stage, for an audience she has chosen, on terms she controls. The comedian’s relationship to the crowd is voluntary on both sides. Nobody is forced to laugh.

The song has a distinctly utopian structure that deserves closer attention. Philosopher Ernst Bloch, in The Principle of Hope, argued that utopian imagination erupts most powerfully in moments when existing systems fail. When the structures that organize daily life crack open, people begin dreaming of new social arrangements — and those dreams surface most vividly through art, music, and storytelling. Bloch called these eruptions “anticipatory illuminations”: flashes of a possible future that the present has not yet made room for. This is precisely what is happening at this moment in the novel.

Jane’s imagined world — no exploitation, everyone free, laughter everywhere, wounds that all have dressings — is exactly such an anticipatory illumination. It is less a realistic plan than a burst of hopeful imagination during a moment of personal rupture. The vision is exaggerated, almost naïve, and that exaggeration is precisely the point. Utopias do not arrive as policy proposals. They arrive first as songs.

The song also participates in a broader philosophical conversation about what happens to the self when work disappears. Hannah Arendt distinguished between labor, work, and action. Modern employment collapses all three into a single transaction, leaving workers uncertain which category their efforts belong to — and therefore uncertain who they are when the transaction ends.

David Graeber, in Bullshit Jobs, documented the psychological damage done by work that feels meaningless even while it is performed. Kathi Weeks, in The Problem with Work, argued that the equation of identity with employment is not natural but ideological: a story told to keep people compliant.

Jane’s fantasy of stand-up comedy and creative freedom represents one possible answer to the identity crisis that follows. If work no longer defines the self, then perhaps performance, connection, and chosen expression can take its place. The comedian is not employed by the laugh; she earns it, freely, from free people. The song therefore extends the arc that began in Rewrite My Lines. There, Jane recognized that her professional role was scripted by others. Here, she begins imagining what it might mean to write — and perform — something entirely her own.

In the structure of Chapter Three, the song functions as a moment of imaginative expansion following the shock of the Culling. Jane moves from humiliation and existential uncertainty toward playful, almost reckless speculation. The shift in pronouns across the song enacts this movement. Early verses use “I” and “could” — tentative, individual, conditional. Later verses shift toward “we” and “will” — collective, confident, declarative. The utopian vision grows as it is sung. Instead of asking “Who am I now?”, Jane begins asking “What else could I try?” — and then, by the final chorus, something closer to “What will we build together?”

Comedy becomes the first tentative answer to the post-Culling question of meaning. But it is an answer that immediately reaches outward: toward others, toward community, toward a shared stage rather than a private consolation. The idea of “learning to be funny” suggests that identity is not fixed but trainable, improvable, and perhaps even performable — a skill practiced before crowds rather than an essence discovered in solitude. That is a quietly radical proposition. And it is one that only becomes visible when the old scripts have finally been taken away.

Deference

The song grows out of a card game of the same name. The game is designed to stand on its own while also accentuating the meaning within the novel and extending the experience of Knew Downs beyond the text.

At its core, the game was built around a few principles. It must be fun to play, regardless of the number of players. It must strike a balance between simplicity and depth: easy enough for anyone, including my eight-year-old, to learn quickly, yet complex enough that there is no single obvious optimal strategy. It should reward judgment, not just rote calculation. Like chess or poker, it should help players develop skills over time: reading situations, managing uncertainty, and making decisions with incomplete information.

Within the novel, the game also operates on multiple levels. Its elements function as metaphors for the themes of the book. Its structure mirrors the narrative. And its presence, whether played, discussed, or remembered, grounds abstract ideas in lived interaction between characters.

The game also supports the broader world of Knew Downs. It can be played online or through an app, both of which can contain narrative and character elements from the novel. The song, in turn, serves both to introduce the game and to deepen its meaning.

In most card games, each hand resolves and the table resets. In Deference, if no one wins the turn, the pile grows. This is the defining mechanic. The song encodes the rules directly:

Flip the stack — the suit is led
Play a card or draw instead

A card is flipped to establish the situation. Players respond in turn, constrained by the lead suit. They may follow, draw, pass, or defer. A diamond defers the outcome, preventing the pile from being won on that turn. A Joker overrides everything and resolves the pile immediately.

The central image of both the game and the song is the pile. As the pile grows, so do the stakes. Every player must decide: do you play to win it now, do you defer and allow it to grow, or do you wait, holding your strongest card for a moment that matters more?

The pile reflects how situations develop in the world. The longer something goes unresolved, the more charged it becomes:

The pile builds. The stakes grow higher.
It’s coming down to the wire.

The game teaches, and the song argues, that the instinct to act is not always the right one. Sometimes the most powerful move is to pass, to defer, or to let a moment go by because it is still too small to claim. This makes Deference a first-part counterweight to Rewrite My Lines and Learn to Be Funny: Jane is still learning not only how to perform, but when not to move.

Midway through the song, the focus shifts from the mechanics of the game to a historical example where restraint was the optimal move: the Cuban Missile Crisis.

October skies in Havana.
Missiles hidden in the canna —
Should we pass, should we play?
Should we wait another day?

The elements of the game map onto the crisis. The naval blockade, rather than direct military action, functions as a diamond play: it prevents immediate resolution while allowing the situation to persist. The Joker, representing sudden and irreversible escalation, is never played. The absence of that move becomes the condition for survival.

The pile clears without a war.
And the Joker never came —
A tie also wins the game.

Khrushchev’s decision to withdraw the weapons reflects a recognition that the pile had become too dangerous to contest. The crisis reaches a resolution that mirrors the game’s denouement: the turn ends, the pile clears, and play resumes. The use of the word denouement is deliberate. It marks both a diplomatic and a narrative unravelling of tension.

The later verses shift into a more familiar setting: kitchen tables, family games, and the slow process of learning.

The game is full of pleasure
If you can stand the pressure —
We rehearse our moves
The old and the youths
Knowing when to step aside
Knowing when to let it ride

Here, the game is no longer framed as competition, but as practice. Players develop the ability to manage uncertainty, read others, balance immediate reward against long-term consequence, and accept loss without collapse.

To learn the grace of losing —
it’s okay, we keep improving.

There is also something at stake in the act of playing together:

This is why we get together —
The game makes us better.

The social dimension is inseparable from the meaning of the game. These are not isolated strategic problems. They are shared situations, unfolding among people who are learning to read one another. The skills compound, but so do the relationships.

The musical structure reinforces the meaning of the song. The rhythm is steady, turn-based, and almost percussive. The lyrics move in short imperative phrases: “Flip the stack,” “Follow suit,” “Match the rank.” These commands mirror the cadence of gameplay. Each couplet resolves like a turn. As the pile grows, the phrasing tightens, creating pressure. The Cuban Missile Crisis section loosens the rhythm, introducing uncertainty. The closing verses return to the regular cadence of play.

The song does not resolve with a Joker. The decisive, overriding move never comes. What does the Joker represent?

At its core, Deference is an attempt to recover the meaning of the word itself. Deference is often mistaken for weakness or passivity. In this system, it is neither. It is a deliberate choice to withhold, to allow a situation to develop, and to act at the right moment rather than the available one. This logic later reappears in different forms: the strategic uncertainty of Cyborg City, the pressure threshold of Myself Can’t Stand, and the literal threshold-crossing of Threshold.

Sometimes the strongest hand we play
is choosing not to win the day.

Ten of hearts flips on the pile
Jack is played with a smile
Follow suit if you’re able
As we circle round the table

When the ten of spades is played
The leading suit is changed
Play a diamond if you prefer
Then the pile will be deferred
But we are all still dead afraid
if a Joker should be played

Flip the stack — the suit is led
Play a card or draw instead
Follow suit, if suit you hold
If you can’t, a diamond’s bold
Match the rank — the suit will change
Turn the table, rearrange

It’s more than just a game
we’re playing with the flame

October skies in Havana.
Missiles hidden in the canna
Should we pass, should we play?
Should we wait another day?

Should we send in our aces —
Take control of their airspaces?
When they shoot down our plane —
Our relations start to strain.

One order lights the match.
Civilization back to scratch
We turn again to psalms —
We have not learned to love the bombs.

This might be our final seconds,
... ... ...
Then Khrushchev pulls the weapons.
No more threat near our shores,
The pile clears without a war.

And the Joker never came —
A tie also wins the game.
We reach our denouement —
Pay deference and carry on.

Sometimes the strongest hand we play
is choosing not to win the day

Beat the pile if you are able
Strongest card stays on the table
Play a diamond — lock the fight
No one wins the pile tonight
But when Jokers hit the floor
They take the pile and end the war

Play another act of Deference
Learn to aim with temperance
The game is full of pleasure
If you can stand the pressure

We rehearse our moves
The old and the youths
Knowing when to step aside
Knowing when to let it ride
Knowing when a moment
is still too small to claim
This is why we get together —
The game makes us better

Strategy takes some refining
To learn the weight of timing
The skills of card counting —
with benefits compounding
To learn the grace of losing —
it’s okay, we keep improving

Beat the pile if you are able
Strongest card stays on the table
Play a diamond — lock the fight
No one wins the pile tonight
But when Jokers hit the floor
They take the pile and end the war

Strength is not in taking more
but knowing what you’re waiting for

The pile builds. The stakes grow higher.
It’s coming down to the wire.
The clever play
is not to take the pile

Flip the stack — the suit is led
Play a card or draw instead
Follow suit, if suit you hold
If you can’t, a diamond’s bold
Match the rank — the suit will change
Turn the table, rearrange

◆ DEFER ◆

Diamonds are for the clever.

Game Setup

• Use a standard deck with 2 Jokers: 54 cards.
• Deal 4 cards to each player.
• Place the remaining deck face-down as the Stack.
• The Pile starts empty.
• The player left of the dealer goes first.

Objective

Capture cards from the pile. At the end of each round:

• +1 point for each card you captured.
• −1 point for each card left in your hand.

The first player to reach the target score wins. The default score is 100 divided by the number of players, rounded up to the nearest integer.

Start a Turn

The active player flips the top card of the Stack onto the Pile. Its suit becomes the lead suit. Players now take one action each, clockwise.

On Your Turn

You may play a card, draw a card, or pass.

Playing Cards

If you have the lead suit, you must follow suit, draw, pass, or play a Joker. If you do not have the lead suit, you may play a Diamond, draw, pass, or play a Joker.

Beating the Pile

A card beats the Pile if it is a higher card of the same suit. A Joker beats everything and immediately wins the pile.

Suit Switch

If you play a card with the same rank as the Pile, you may place it on the pile instead of the side. This changes the lead suit to that card’s suit. The turn then continues normally. If the side had a winning card, it no longer does. Sorry.

Diamond Defer

If a Diamond is played that is not the same rank as the Pile, the pile becomes deferred. When the pile is deferred:

• No card can win the pile this turn.
• All players still take their turn.
• At the end of the turn, the cards stay on the pile.
• Only a Joker can capture a deferred pile.

End of the Turn

After everyone acts, if the strongest challenger beats the pile, that player wins all cards. Otherwise, the cards remain in the pile and it grows.

Round End

The round ends when the stack is empty or a player runs out of cards. Score the round and deal a new one.

The Core Idea

Win the pile, or stop anyone else from winning it. Sometimes the smartest move is to defer.

Work occupies an enormous portion of human life, yet it remains oddly underserved in art. We have endless songs about love, heartbreak, youth, drinking, desire, grief, freedom, rebellion, and death. These are the great recurring subjects. They return again and again because they are emotionally obvious. Work is different. It is everywhere, but it is often treated as background. Characters have jobs, but the job is usually not the subject. It explains where they are, what they can afford, or why they are tired. It does not always become the emotional or artistic center.

This is especially true of corporate work. Manual labor, factory work, farming, domestic service, and military life have all produced recognizable artistic traditions. Corporate life has produced fewer equivalents. The office is central to modern society, but it is not always treated as poetic material. Its rituals are too bland, its language too deadening, its dramas too indirect. Love gives us confession. War gives us extremity. Drinking gives us release. Corporate life gives us onboarding videos, expense policies, calendar invites, password resets, compliance modules, and acronyms.

That may be precisely why it deserves attention.

Corporate Denizen appears at the moment Jane has her first serious contact with institutional work. Until now, she has lived largely in her own mental weather. She is dreamy, bright, evasive, funny, self-aware, and not always practical. The chapter introduction frames this clearly: “In the summer before my senior year, I came out of la la land.” The internship is not just a summer job. It is Jane’s first collision with the adult machinery of professional life.

The setup is modest. She does not enter a glamorous world. She does not get a dramatic assignment. She does not discover corruption, genius, or romance. She barely speaks with anyone. She watches training videos. She performs busywork. She learns about safety, culture, values, compliance, reporting, and what have you. This anticlimax matters. Her first corporate experience is not business as conquest. It is business as absorption.

The song begins with access:

They send me my credentials,
I’ve got the tech essentials.
A password reset, and I’m in —
A flood of content rushes in.

This is a very contemporary opening. In older stories of work, entry might begin with a factory gate, a time clock, a uniform, a desk, or a foreman. Here it begins with credentials. Jane receives a digital identity before she receives any real human belonging. The password reset is not only a technical step. It is the first symbolic act of corporate incorporation. The company does not yet know her as Jane in any meaningful sense. It knows her as a user.

That makes the title important. A denizen is not simply a worker or an employee. A denizen inhabits a place. The word suggests belonging to an environment: a denizen of the forest, a denizen of the deep, a denizen of the city. Jane is not merely taking an internship. She is entering a habitat.

The early verses introduce the company through its official voices:

The C.E.O. pops on my screen,
Wants me feeling like I’m seen.
The C.F.O. then spills the beans
about our finely tuned machines.

The CEO provides recognition. The CFO provides structure. The lawyer provides prohibition. IT provides threat awareness. The engineer provides rules and documentation. The sequence is funny because it compresses the whole organization into a series of onboarding archetypes. Each function tells Jane what kind of world she has entered.

The CEO says: this place has purpose. The CFO says: this place has systems. The lawyer says: this place has consequences. IT says: this place is under attack. The engineer says: this place has procedures.

None of these perspectives is necessarily false. That is part of the point. The comedy does not come from simple ridicule. It comes from accumulation. Each voice may be reasonable in isolation, but together they create a strange institutional chorus. Jane is not being welcomed by people so much as by departments.

This places the song near How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which remains one of the sharper artistic treatments of corporate life because it understands the workplace as a performance system. In that musical, the corporation is not just a setting. It is a ladder, a theater, a belief system, and a game. J. Pierrepont Finch succeeds not because he works in any noble or traditional sense, but because he learns how the system wants to be played. He understands gestures, appearances, titles, loyalties, executive vanity, and the difference between actual competence and institutional legibility.

That is highly relevant to Jane’s song. Corporate Denizen is not about accomplishing work. It is about becoming readable to the corporation. Jane must learn how to behave, what to click, what to acknowledge, what to remember, what to fear, which words to use, which structures matter, and how to signal that she has absorbed the system’s expectations. Like Finch, she is entering a world where success depends partly on learning the codes.

But there is also a difference. How to Succeed is about ambition. Finch wants to climb. Jane is not yet climbing. She is being processed. Her experience is earlier, lower, more passive, and perhaps more modern. She is not plotting her rise from window washer to chairman. She is trying to survive the first week without losing her mind to training content.

That is why the refrain works:

I have to take my medicine
It comes back down to discipline.
I will stick to my regimen,
I’ll become a denizen.

The medicine metaphor gives the song its emotional center. Onboarding does not feel like discovery. It feels like dosage. Jane does not yet know whether the material is useful, but she knows she is supposed to consume it. The corporation prescribes its values, procedures, warnings, and vocabulary. She swallows them in sequence.

This is a different artistic register from songs like “A Hard Day’s Night,” “9 to 5,” or “Maggie’s Farm.” Those are songs about work as exhaustion, exploitation, rhythm, pressure, and rebellion. “A Hard Day’s Night” turns labor into kinetic release: the speaker works hard, but the song itself is charged with energy and romantic reward. “9 to 5” makes the office a site of gendered frustration and economic captivity, with the worker trapped inside someone else’s ladder. “Maggie’s Farm” rejects the whole arrangement, converting work into a symbol of domination and refusal.

Jane is not quite in any of those modes. She is not celebrating work, not yet trapped by it, and not rebelling against it. She is in the more specific condition of induction. She is learning how an organization manufactures membership.

That is a less common subject, and maybe a harder one to dramatize. It lacks the immediate heat of oppression or revolt. It is not “take this job and shove it.” It is “read and comply, acknowledge why.” The coercion is softer. The absurdity is procedural. The stakes are dispersed across systems.

The song’s middle section makes that clear:

Lists and tasks, tells and asks,
Fill, confirm, on every form,
Tick and click, fingers twitch,
Read, comply, acknowledge why,
Scroll, agree, repeatedly.

This is where the song becomes most specifically corporate. The language is not lyrical in the traditional sense; it is deliberately procedural. The verbs are small and repetitive: fill, confirm, tick, click, read, comply, acknowledge, scroll, agree. These are not the verbs of epic action. They are the verbs of administrative submission.

The rhythm also matters. The short phrases create the feeling of repeated micro-actions. Nothing individually dramatic happens, but the repetition becomes overwhelming. This is a good representation of busywork because busywork often does not feel significant moment by moment. Its weight comes through accumulation.

This is where corporate satire often finds its material. Office Space is not funny because of one catastrophic event. It is funny because of cubicles, memos, printers, flair, consultants, and repeated managerial phrases. The Office works because the workplace is treated as a machine for generating minor humiliations, forced performances, weak authority, and awkward social rituals. The IT Crowd draws comedy from the gap between technical expertise and organizational stupidity. Succession, though darker and more dramatic, also depends on institutional language: strategy, optics, board votes, interim roles, confidence, narrative, control. Severance takes the logic further by making corporate compartmentalization literal. The worker is split in two.

These works are not really about productivity. They are about the systems surrounding productivity: meetings, rituals, hierarchy, surveillance, jargon, social performance, compliance, and identity. The actual product can almost disappear.

That is also true here. The company is an engineering firm, but Jane’s first encounter with it is not engineering. It is onboarding. She meets the wrapper before she meets the work. In a modern organization, the wrapper is not incidental. The wrapper is part of the work.

The song then shifts into corporate seduction:

Executives are here for me,
They all want me to succeed.
And, if I ever need a thing,
Their help is always guaranteed.

This section is important because it prevents the satire from becoming too easy. The organization is not presented as purely hostile. It offers support, mentorship, coaching, perks, growth, purpose, pensions, flexible time, raises, prizes, and room to climb.

That is how corporations often function. They are not only systems of control. They are also systems of opportunity. They can be tedious and generous at the same time. They can produce dead language and real mentorship. They can waste time and structure careers. They can reduce people to users while also giving them access, training, money, community, and mobility.

The satire is stronger because it admits this. A purely villainous corporation would be simpler and less interesting. Jane’s company is absurd because it is recognizable. It is not an evil empire. It is a normal organization doing normal things in a way that becomes strange when looked at closely.

This is one reason corporate life may be difficult to represent in art. It often does not present itself as tragedy. It presents itself as process. Its emotional effects are gradual. It shapes people through language, calendars, incentives, reporting structures, platforms, habits, and norms. The drama is not always an explosion. Sometimes the drama is that after enough time inside the system, you begin to speak like it.

The final major movement of the song addresses exactly that:

Speak in acronyms,
Think in homonyms,
Seek efficiencies,
Scale the synergies,
Track dependencies.
Hedge contingencies.

This is the moment Jane begins to internalize the language. The lines are ridiculous, but not random. They capture the texture of corporate speech: efficiency, synergy, dependency, contingency, ownership, OKRs, leadership, org charts, circle back. These are not merely buzzwords. They are membership tokens.

Every community has such tokens. Academic disciplines have them. Religions have them. Militaries have them. Teenagers have them. Online communities have them. Corporate language is easy to mock because it often sounds inflated, abstract, or evasive, but it also performs a real social function. It tells people who belongs, who understands the system, who can be trusted to sit in the meeting, who knows how decisions are framed.

The song does not need to claim that this language is meaningless. It only needs to show that the language is contagious.

That contagion is the point of the final transformation:

soon I too will speak the tongue
circle back and rise a rung.

This is the most direct link to How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Corporate success is partly linguistic. Finch learns the language of ambition. Jane learns the language of participation. He uses the system; she is absorbed into it. Both works understand that corporate life is not just about tasks. It is about fluency in a social and symbolic order.

The ending confirms that absorption:

I just took my medicine
It came down to discipline.
I stuck to their regimen,
I’m a corporate denizen.

The refrain has changed tense. Earlier, Jane was becoming. Now she is. The song begins with credentials and ends with identity. She has not completed a heroic journey. She has completed onboarding. That is the joke, but it is also the seriousness of the song.

There is something quietly unsettling in this. Jane does not revolt like Dylan’s speaker in “Maggie’s Farm.” She does not expose the system like a workplace satire. She does not escape, sabotage, or triumph. She completes the modules. She learns the acronyms. She internalizes the rhythm. She becomes legible.

That makes the song useful within the novel. It marks the point where Jane enters the world she will later analyze, resist, mock, and perhaps depend on. She cannot critique corporate culture from the outside anymore. She has taken the medicine. She has joined the habitat.

The broader point is that corporate life deserves more artistic treatment precisely because it is not obviously poetic. Its surfaces are dull. Its language is sterile. Its rituals are repetitive. But many people spend their lives inside these systems. They learn to think through them, perform within them, complain about them, benefit from them, and become shaped by them.

Love songs are common because love transforms people. Drinking songs are common because drinking transforms the room. War stories are common because war transforms history. Corporate life transforms people too, but often through smaller instruments: passwords, policies, meetings, forms, org charts, objectives, and language.

Corporate Denizen turns that transformation into a comic initiation song. Jane enters as an intern. She exits as a user, a trainee, a compliant reader, a future acronym-speaker, and finally a denizen. Not because she has done meaningful work yet, but because the organization has performed its first and perhaps most important act upon her.

It has taught her how to belong.

Jane has just started her first job. She is tentative, conscientious, and stuck in decision paralysis. This happens to the best of us, and the only known cure is to maintain a bias for action.

Sociologist Ulrich Beck, in Risk Society, argued that modern organizations are increasingly defined by the hazards they manage: chemicals, contagions, system failures, and other threats that saturate the working environment. Individuals feel personally responsible for preventing disasters even when those disasters are beyond any one person’s control.

Jane sings “Ice, Ice, Maybe” because she is caught between two imperatives: act quickly and ensure absolute safety. The result resembles an actor-critic model in reinforcement learning that oscillates without converging. Faced with complex choices and uncertain outcomes, people tend to gather more data rather than commit to action.

Each delay in decision-making increases the likelihood that the decision will be delayed again. It is like borrowing at 100% continuously compounded interest: pure bondage. Like printing money. It is the Lindy effect applied to hesitation.

Each perspective is considered. Each question reveals a new risk. Each risk demands analysis from new perspectives.

Thinking itself has become an obstacle. Conscientiousness is now both a sacrament and a sin, à la Hamlet. Knowledge is slime dropping from the ceiling in Double Dare.

Where Hamlet had Horatio urging him toward action, Jane has Zane:

Jane, why are you hesitating?

Another seemingly sensible, but potentially duplicitous, concept is the precautionary principle, which is applied widely in ethics, law, and policy. It has a Hippocratic logic: when in doubt, do not act. The burden of proof falls on those who wish to proceed. Wait at the risk-free rate, because that is the opportunity cost.

The principle emerged from hard experience with industrial disasters, including chemical spills, pharmaceutical tragedies, and ecological collapses, where acting before certainty proved catastrophic. Jane is not wrong to be cautious. The organization is not wrong to need her to decide.

That is the bind. Work pressures demand deadlines, commitments, and more output from every resource, contract, asset, person, and market opportunity. Yet as soon as something goes wrong, the rules multiply themselves. You need rules to control the rules. You need rules about how to decide the rules, how to document the rules, when to communicate the rules, and why we must test the rules. Then you lease the rules back from your own industry as a standard.

This connects to Deference, where restraint can be strategic rather than weak. But in “Maybe,” restraint has curdled into paralysis. The clever pause has become the frozen step.

The song’s riff on Vanilla Ice’s masterpiece is meant to be both reverent and comic. Its tight but varied flow shows confidence and whimsy. Comedy often works by importing serious content into a playful formal container. The bounce and repetition of the original track sit in comic contrast with the genuine dangers Jane is contemplating.

The rhymes about explosions, toxic fumes, felony charges, and professional disgrace are meant to feel Rabelaisian. The gap between the breezy musical form and the catastrophic content is supposed to rub. Humor becomes a socially acceptable method of expressing anxiety, including the fear of inadequacy.

Her hesitation is not only about preventing external disasters. It is also about preventing the disaster of professional embarrassment. That places the song near Corporate Denizen, where the workplace has become a made-up world with rules one must learn quickly, and near Myself Can’t Stand, where stress finally stops being funny and becomes audible as sorrow.

The frozen lake metaphor represents genuine technical and legal risk. Ice is deceptive by nature, like people. You do not know when it is going to crack. What is concealed beneath? Jane fears the ice may crack, and she may be the only one who sees it.

The metaphor suggests she has already understood something her organization has not yet admitted: the surface is thinner than it looks, and the depths are darker than anyone wants to acknowledge.

Within the arc of the novel, the song pulls the narrative back from the expansive, utopian imagining of Learn to Be Funny and returns Jane to the immediate pressures of organizational life. The earlier songs in the chapter explore questions of identity and possibility: who Jane might become once freed from institutional constraint. “Ice, Ice, Maybe” reminds us, and her, that she has not yet been freed. She is still inside the system, still subject to its demands, still responsible for decisions whose consequences she cannot fully anticipate or control.

The shift in emotional register is deliberate. From the playful carnival of “Learn to Be Funny,” with its visions of big tents and sunny days, Jane returns to the thin ice of professional reality, where every step must be calculated, every risk must be weighed, and the penalty for getting it wrong falls on her alone.

The song also introduces a tension that recurs throughout the story: the conflict between the speed modern organizations demand and the care complex technical systems require. These two imperatives are genuinely incompatible much of the time. Jane’s paralysis is not a personal failing. It is the honest expression of a structural contradiction the organization prefers not to name.

Ice, ice, maybe

Ice, ice, maybe
I stop, equivocate and listen
My fear is back with a new premonition
My logic twists and knots too tightly
I check each threat, however unlikely
Will they ever come? I don’t know
If I don’t check, it might blow
In the extreme, we’d have a big scandal

Light up the sky, it’s more than we can handle
Run, get away from the toxic fumes
Trouble blooms in the wake of the boom
Deadly, when we play with the chemistry
Anything not per code will be a felony
Check it or flag it, to avoid this mess
I miss a deadline to avoid the stress
If there is a problem, please absolve me
I check with my boss, and start to make my plea.
Ice, ice, maybe

The song “Threshold,” in Part Two of Knew Downs, is preceded by a scene that mirrors Waiting for Godot, with Jane’s college friend Lucy filling in for the hapless Lucky.

Beckett’s original play presents characters suspended in inaction, waiting for meaning—Godot—that does not come. Didi and Gogo pass the time in tragic calm, failing to face the reality of death. This is the apotheosis of existential absurdity. The stakes are the nature of existence itself: its limits, bounds, and liminalities.

Where Beckett’s speech mocks theological systems and metaphysical ambition, Lucy laments servers, algos, and gaming culture. The substitution is more than a literary chestnut. The point is that absurdity thrives just as well in the technological age. Modern art was right after all. We have to go stare at the Rothkos now in penance.

Requests time out. Prayers return 404. The load balancer distributes nothing evenly across infinite servers.

The recurring image of the cache in the skull recalls The Ambassadors at the National Gallery in London. What are the potential relations between technological storage and human memory? When will looking something up become more efficient than thinking it up for yourself?

Bernard Stiegler, building on the work of Jacques Derrida, argued that human consciousness has always been shaped by external memory systems: writing, archives, recordings, and databases. What Stiegler called “tertiary retention,” memory stored outside the body, fundamentally alters what it means to think, remember, and be a self. When memory migrates into technical systems, individuals risk losing control over what is remembered, what is forgotten, and who decides which is which.

Lucy’s speech dramatizes exactly this loss of control. The system holds the archive but assigns no meaning to it. She becomes obsolete because the system has moved on, indifferently, automatically, without ceremony or acknowledgment.

Jane then begins to wake from this dream. She is in a liminal state when she starts humming the lyrics to “Threshold,” whose tight cadence is meant to mimic the sound of someone talking under her breath while asleep.

never virtual, body physical,
not digital, lyrical
and numerical, soul spiritual,
not material.

In myth and narrative theory, the threshold marks the boundary between worlds. Joseph Campbell, drawing on the comparative mythology of Arnold van Gennep, described the threshold crossing as the moment when the hero leaves the familiar environment—the ordinary world of known roles and established meanings—and steps into the unknown. The crossing involves disorientation, vulnerability, and the temporary suspension of identity.

Here the threshold is psychological. Jane moves from indifferent protocols into a vision of personal autonomy.

The language transforms. Where Lucy’s speech was fragmented, recursive, and darkly comic, Jane’s lyrics are rhythmic, declarative, and assertive. Jane is not describing the act. She is performing it in the song.

I ain’t mystical,
I’m empirical.
The reciprocal of fictional —
I’m literal,

The dream places Jane in a condition that anthropologist Victor Turner called liminality: the middle stage of transformation, between the dissolution of an old identity and the consolidation of a new one. Turner, building on van Gennep’s analysis of rites of passage, described liminality as a period of genuine suspension. At this moment, Jane is no longer what she was and not yet what she will become.

Count on me…
like a fundamental principle.
Solve for me…
like an indefinite integral…

Ordinary social structures temporarily lose their grip. This suspension is disorienting, but it is also generative. Jane has already been structurally dislodged from the institutional role that once organized her identity. The dream dramatizes that dislodgement. Her mind moves through fragments of theatre, technology, philosophy, and mathematics because the ordinary partitions between these domains no longer hold. She is between worlds, and the threshold she crosses in the dream is the psychological equivalent of the rite of passage Turner described.

What liminality offers, ultimately, is the possibility of genuine transformation. Jane agrees to reconstitute herself according to new principles.

The song invokes the spiritual nature of life alongside the clinical and the numerical. Each worldview must be tried, borrowed from, and improved upon. Jane wants to be both lyrical and numerical, both spiritual and material, both principled and whimsical.

The song opens:

I dream of me,
of what I’d be,
if I was free…
with full autonomy,
before Ptolemy.

Ptolemy’s geocentric model placed the Earth at the center of the cosmos. The time before Ptolemy is meant to represent a time before a fixed understanding of the universe, however wrong that understanding later proved to be. Systems survive only with sufficient conformance to their axioms. In the context of Jane’s story, the line shows her scientific mind reaching into the unknown.

Corporations contain mostly Ptolemaic systems. Agriculture is another prime example. There is a deliberate choice in the second half of the song to become a tree. Jane would rather turn toward nature than remain stuck in an artificial world.

I’m dendritical, not mechanical,
life is cyclical, I’m invincible,
heed Natural law, it’s mythical.
I’m traditional, I grow vertical.

This is also, paradoxically, a turn toward conservative values as Jane flirts with embracing the system.

These lines are also meant to evoke the rhizomatic theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In A Thousand Plateaus, they contrast two fundamental models of thought and organization. The arborescent model, organized like a tree, is hierarchical, centralized, and directed. It has a single origin, a trunk, branches that subdivide in orderly ways, and a predetermined logic of growth. Institutions, bureaucracies, and corporate org charts are arborescent. They assume a center from which authority flows downward.

The rhizome, by contrast, is a botanical structure that grows horizontally through networks of roots and shoots, with no single origin and no central trunk. It spreads through connection, intersection, and unexpected emergence. It cannot be uprooted at a single point because it has no single point. Destroy one node and the network finds another path. The song mimics Jane’s inner struggle between the rhizomatic and the arborescent.

The song reaches its philosophical culmination:

I am the agent… and the principal.

In economic and legal theory, the principal-agent problem describes the tension that arises when one party, the agent, acts on behalf of another, the principal. Corporate governance, contract law, and organizational design exist to manage this problem. Being both principal and agent symbolizes the transcendence provoked by playing in liminal spaces. The principal-agent problem dissolves, and the next level of reality appears.

This is the logical culmination of the arc that began in “Rewrite My Lines”, where Jane first recognized that her professional identity had been scripted by others. There she saw the script. In “Learn to Be Funny”, she imagined writing a different kind of story. Here, at the threshold, she claims herself as her own for the first time.

Threshold…
I dream of me,
of what I’d be,
if I was free…
with full autonomy,
before Ptolemy.

I ain’t mystical,
I’m empirical.
The reciprocal of fictional —
I’m literal,
principled, not political.
It’s critical to be clinical

Count on me…
like a fundamental principle.
Solve for me…
like an indefinite integral…

on the threshold.
I found a loophole—
I’m on a lucky roll.
I’m gonna take control…

I stretch my wings,
I own the sky,
I take the space,
hear me rise.
Freedom reigns when I survive

At the pinnacle of original,
analytical, a bit cynical,
openly egotistical, whimsical,
never unoriginal, explicable,
never satirical, ethical,
never despicable, visible,
never virtual, body physical,
not digital, lyrical
and numerical, soul spiritual,
not material.

I’m on the threshold,
I found a loophole—
I got a new goal.
I found the right scroll.

I dream of me,
of what I’d be,
if I was free…
with full autonomy,
before Ptolemy.

I’m dendritical, not mechanical,
life is cyclical, I’m invincible,
heed Natural law, it’s mythical.
I’m traditional, I grow vertical.

Count on me…
like a fundamental principle.
Solve for me…
I’m an indefinite integral…

on the threshold.
I found a loophole—
I got a new soul.
I got self control.

I bend my branches so the forest survives.
I leave some light so the others can rise.
My freedom lives in the reach I deny

I am the agent… and the principal.
I’m at the pinnacle… of pontifical.
The reciprocal of fictional — I’m literal.
Count on me… like a fundamental principle.

Lyrical and numerical.
It’s critical to be clinical.
Life is cyclical, invincible.
Soul spiritual and material.

I’m on the threshold.
I found a loophole—
I am finally whole.
I took control.

Essay

In Chapter 7, Noema comes into force. Jane, our intrepid narrator, admires her and is excited to attend the upcoming Young Leaders Conference, where Noema will be the headline speaker.

We will leave the deeper meaning of Noema’s character for the reader to interpret. For now, it is enough to say that she has an unusually powerful media presence: part business guru, part pop-cultural phenom, and part oracle for a generation trying to make sense of technology and self-invention.

In advance of the conference, Jane has submitted several songs to Noema, who prizes creativity alongside business savvy. Now Jane plays one of Noema’s own songs for us: “Attention.”

The song begins in the early internet, when the web still carried a utopian charge. Its references belong to that bygone era: Flash, listservs, Ask Jeeves, MapQuest, Yahoo, chat rooms, and banners in the cache. Everything felt new, magical, and empowering. Information was no longer scarce. Search felt like liberation. The internet seemed capable of solving many of our ills: ignorance, loneliness, distance, delay.

This was the moment when the promises and anxieties of Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” began to feel less theoretical. We were extending ourselves through screens, handles, searches, maps, forums, and machines. This lineage also runs through Silicon Girl in Chapter 10, where synthetic identity becomes more personal for Jane, and it reaches its most explicit bodily form in Cyborg City.

The early web also seemed to answer the social loneliness described by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone. If civic life was thinning out, perhaps the internet would thicken it again. If we were no longer bowling together in leagues, perhaps we would bowl online with our Nintendo Wiis.

In this early phase, the internet appears as a democratic library, a social commons, and a prosthetic memory. It answers questions that once remained unanswered. It connects people who once remained alone. It gives ordinary users the sense that knowledge has been unlocked and distributed. The song’s line “Common knowledge…now does what’s on the tin” captures this moment of distributed knowledge with comic bluntness.

The history of philosophy offers a useful way to understand the shift. For Plato, knowledge is a difficult movement from shadows toward truth, exemplified by the allegory of the cave. For the Enlightenment, knowledge is tied to emancipation: the courage to know, to reason, and to step out from inherited authority. Our current condition may be closer to Borges’s “Library of Babel,” where everything exists, but meaning becomes almost impossible to locate.

This is the internet’s dialectical tension. What first appeared freeing has become something more sinister. “Attention” tracks the genealogy of that transition: from information scarcity to information abundance, and then from abundance to overload, capture, and compulsion.

The concept of the cyborg is useful again here. In fact, the final song of the book, Cyborg City, explores this theme explicitly. Cyborgs, in this sense, are persons whose perception, memory, identity, desire, and social life have been technically extended.

The first phase of the internet does not abolish the human. It supplements the human. It gives us maps, answers, archives, forums, feeds, aliases, and search bars. But supplementation is never neutral. As Marshall McLuhan’s famous insight suggests, media reshape the conditions under which content can be received. The tool changes the user.

That is why “We became ourselves / Functions to numbers” is one of the song’s key lines. The line evokes self-optimization, but also self-reduction. Yes, the internet allows individuals to express identity. But it also incentivizes aspirational identities that are manufactured, ranked, edited, and performed. The self enters the machine as possibility and returns as profile. This is why the song belongs in the same family as Rewrite My Lines and Learn to Be Funny: the self is not merely found. It is scripted, optimized, performed, and judged.

The second movement of the song begins when sufficiency turns into excess.

When the dot-coms went bust.
Lost your money, lost your trust.

The crash is economic, but also social. The first naïveté begins to wane as Web 2.0 and early social media start to dominate. The internet does not disappear after the bust. It becomes more disciplined, more monetized, and more psychologically fluent.

This is the world Herbert Simon anticipated when he observed that an abundance of information creates a scarcity of attention. Once information becomes plentiful, attention becomes the scarce resource. The problem is no longer finding something to know. The problem is deciding what deserves to be known. Our minds become filters first.

The lyrics become more frantic as the history advances. “Focus here, focus there. / Locus could be anywhere.” The self becomes spatially unstable. Attention is pulled across tabs, feeds, arguments, causes, jokes, outrages, and seductions. “Let’s browse, be aroused” collapses curiosity and stimulation into the same gesture. The act of looking is no longer innocent. It is bodily, chemical, social, and commercial. The exhaustion that later surfaces in Myself Can’t Stand is already being produced here, click by click.

Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle” becomes newly literal in the platform age: social life is mediated by images, performances, rankings, and public reactions. Foucault’s concern with surveillance also mutates. The user is not only watched from above. The user volunteers information from within. Deleuze’s “societies of control” fits even more closely: power no longer needs a single prison, school, office, or factory. It moves continuously through passwords, permissions, metrics, recommendations, and behavioral nudges.

The user feels free because the interface permits movement. The system profits because the movement is legible.

This is the trap inside “Attention.” The song begins by asking for attention politely: “Can we have your quick attention?” By the end, the mask drops: “We’ve bought your attention.” The request was theater. The transaction had already occurred. Attention has become an asset class.

The pasture image is especially severe. It suggests that users are no longer merely citizens, consumers, or spectators. They are grazed. Their thoughts, moods, reactions, complaints, and micro-desires are harvested. This puts the song in direct conversation with Corporate Denizen: the corporate system does not only employ the subject. It metabolizes the subject.

“Attention” is the social-media chapter of the book’s larger diagnosis. It explains how the cyborg condition became ordinary. Not through one dramatic invention, but through a thousand conveniences. Not through conquest, but through use. Not because the machine defeated the human, but because the machine learned how to satisfy the human too well.

The song’s third movement is the most contemporary and the most bitter.

When em-dash went crush, it all turned to mush.

This is a joke, but not only a joke. Language itself has entered the attention economy. Style becomes signal. Syntax becomes trend. Thought is shaped by what can be posted, clipped, imitated, searched, liked, and recognized. The em dash stands in for the broader automation and stylization of expression. We begin to sound like the systems we use, and then we mistake that sound for ourselves.

Addiction is more than an accidental side effect of the digital world. Compulsion became the business model. Dopamine is named directly in the song because the internet’s promise has moved from knowledge to stimulation. The early user wanted answers. The later user wants relief, affirmation, escape, and another small reason not to stop. What was once “going online” becomes a condition of being gone tomorrow: present, consumed, refreshed, and already slipping from view.

The full arc of “Attention” is therefore clear.

First, information is scarce, and the internet feels miraculous. Then, information becomes available, and the user feels empowered. Then, information becomes excessive, and the user feels fragmented. Finally, attention becomes captured, and the user mistakes capture for participation.

Noema sings this history as a pop song because pop itself is part of the machinery. She is not outside the system she describes. She is adored by fans, attacked by critics, boosted by algorithms, and converted into circulation. The song criticizes attention capture while being designed to capture attention.

That contradiction is the point.

Can we have your quick attention?
It’s worth at least a mention…
When dot-coms boomed
cyborgs too bloomed.
Sites sporting flash,
banners in the cache,
world in our palms,
Ask Jeeves, no qualms.
It’s just enough.
Stop just there.
Common knowledge…
Now does what’s on the tin.
Sign up the listserv,
new domains reserve,
MapQuest, chat rooms,
Yahoo, our fate looms.
We became ourselves
Functions to numbers,
multiple choice,
undifferentiable.
We’ll never be the same.
No looking back,
You looking good.
We understand.
You’re understood.

Since we’ve got your attention,
It’s worth at least a mention…
When the dot-coms went bust.
Lost your money, lost your trust.
Focus here, focus there.
Locus could be anywhere.
Let’s browse, be aroused.
Preach, espouse sacred cows.
Join a pack,
Defend, attack.
Multitask.
Four hours, then bask.
Those miscreants
inject belligerence,
Combatants
caught in your arguments
You missed your turnaround
bound now for Knewdowns
without relics of paper
Analogs, vapor
We’ll never be the same.
No looking back,
We looking good.
You understand
You’re understood.

We’ve bought your attention,
worth more than can mention:
When em-dash went crush,
Some thoughts turned mush.
You thought it rapture,
It was manufactured.
We fractured, captured.
You’re now our pasture.
feel like a fraction.
complain of distraction.
understand reaction,
This a transaction.
We have your ink,
Just click this link,
We’ll be synched.
We know what you think.
Here’s your dopamine,
Just mental hygiene.
Scroll means pour,
It’s under our control.
We’ll never be the same.
No looking back,
only looking good.
You understand
We’re understood.

Essay

“Myself Can’t Stand” enters Chapter Eight at the point where Jane’s momentum can no longer sustain itself.

The chapter begins in motion: anxiety, collapse, Bronze Age ruins, Ozymandias, karma, monuments, radioactive decay, obsolescence, ambition, despair. Jane is thinking at high speed. She moves from ancient civilizations to Shelley, from moral causality to career half-life, from engineering to uranium, from technical depreciation to metaphysical survival. The mind is not calm. It is trying to outrun something.

That something is named only when the song arrives: sorrow.

Before the song, Jane is still converting pain into systems. Stress becomes Bronze Age collapse. Emotional depletion becomes a shortage of tin. Career anxiety becomes radioactive decay. Obsolescence becomes half-life. She is not wrong to think this way. The analogies are alive. But they also function as evasions. Jane turns feeling into architecture because architecture is easier to inspect than pain. That makes this song an earlier emotional counterpoint to Purlins and Concrete: here, structures do not hold. They expose the ache underneath.

The chapter says directly: “We think we are okay, when we are not. We say we are okay, when we are not.” It then follows the logic of untreated distress: what goes untreated “festers and infects and makes septic.” The song is therefore not decorative. It is the moment when the infection becomes audible.

Immediately before the poem-song, Jane arrives at Hamlet:

To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:

Then the Chinese begins:

寻寻觅觅, 冷冷清清, 凄凄惨惨戚戚

This transition is sharp. Shakespeare gives the Western dramatic threshold between life, sleep, death, and dream. Li Qingzhao gives the emotional aftermath: searching, coldness, bleakness, and grief that has outlasted event. In that sense, the song touches the same edge-crossing territory as Threshold, but from the far side of exhaustion rather than anticipation.

The song is based on Li Qingzhao’s 《声声慢·寻寻觅觅》, one of the great poems of late-life sorrow in Chinese literature. But in Chapter Eight, the important point is not simply that Jane is adapting a famous poem. It is that she reaches for a form older than herself because her own language has started to fail.

Up to this point, Jane’s language has been expansive and clever. She can make anything mean something else. Bronze becomes social order. Karma becomes the god of losers. Reputation becomes evaporation. Half-life becomes an ethics of endurance. But “Myself Can’t Stand” narrows the field. The language contracts.

Hunt, seek, hunt and seek;
Lone, cold, lone and cold;

The repetitions are not ornamental. They enact a mind circling the same emotional facts. Search does not lead to discovery. Cold does not become warmth. The doubling creates a stuck rhythm: hunt, seek; lone, cold. Jane is no longer explaining herself. She is pacing inside herself.

This is why the song feels different from Corporate Denizen. That earlier song turns institutional absurdity into comic rhythm. It processes the corporation through satire, rhyme, and social observation. “Myself Can’t Stand” does almost the opposite. It strips the performance down. The jokes are nearly gone. The corporate world has receded. What remains is weather, birds, petals, doors, leaves, and sound.

The imagery is seasonal and exhausted.

Sun today; ice the morrow.

This line carries the instability of stress. One day seems manageable; the next freezes over. The emotional climate cannot be trusted. Jane is living in sudden reversals. This connects to the chapter’s larger obsession with collapse. Civilizations collapse. Skills decay. Relationships wither. Reputations evaporate. But here the scale is no longer civilizational. It is bodily and immediate. The weather has entered the self.

The drinking image follows:

Resist repose?
Twin cups, three mugs: to numb?
Yield to forcing winds?

The question is not whether drink brings pleasure. It is whether numbness is possible. The phrasing is hesitant, broken into questions. Jane is not romantically intoxicated. She is considering sedation. “Resist repose?” suggests that rest itself has become suspect. To rest might mean surrender. To keep moving might mean survival. Stress has turned stillness into danger.

The geese are important because they bring memory. In the original Li Qingzhao poem, the wild geese are an old presence, associated with messages, distance, and the past. In this version:

As geese fest above,
Ills pest inside:
All known presences.

“All known presences” is a strong phrase for this moment in the chapter. Jane is not being attacked by new griefs only. She is being revisited by familiar ones. The geese are above, but the illness is inside. The outer world triggers the inner inventory. Stress is not merely what happens now. It is what returns.

That return is one of the chapter’s central emotional movements. Jane has been trying to build a monument to herself, to imagine what her life will mean, to preserve something against decay. In this respect, the song looks ahead to Gone Tomorrow, where presence is already becoming memory, and to Thankful for Infinity, where scale becomes both comfort and destabilization. Yet this song refuses monumentality. It gives us small things: cups, geese, petals, doors, leaves, drops. The scale collapses from empire to room, from Ozymandias to rain.

This movement from monument to droplet is crucial.

Earlier in the chapter, Jane asks: “What will my life be a monument to?” She imagines an “edifice erected in my honour.” The song answers by removing the monument entirely. There is no edifice. There are only beads on leaves.

Beads on Wutong leaves.
Chant: drip drop drip drop

The Wutong leaves carry a dense emotional atmosphere. In Chinese poetry, Wutong trees are associated with autumn, loneliness, separation, and rain. The leaves receive the drops, and the drops become a chant. This is grief as sound pattern. It is not an argument. It does not progress. It repeats.

The “drip drop drip drop” also mirrors stress physically. Anxiety often works this way: not as one great blow, but as repeated small impacts. Email by email. Thought by thought. Memory by memory. Obligation by obligation. Drop by drop. The song converts psychic pressure into weather.

The doors image is also worth pausing on:

More to pluck?
Eye the doors!
Myself can’t stand,

There is a sense of being trapped indoors with one’s own mind. “Eye the doors” implies escape, but not action. Jane looks toward the exit without leaving. “Myself can’t stand” is deliberately awkward, and that awkwardness helps. It sounds like language bending under strain. It can mean “I cannot stand myself,” but also “my self cannot stand.” The self cannot bear; the self cannot remain upright. This makes the song an early negative image of Cyborg City: before the body can be sold as upgradeable, the self is already failing to stand.

By the end, the song abandons complexity:

As it stands:
One word is enough:
sorrow

This is the opposite of Jane’s usual movement. She normally multiplies meanings. Here she reduces them. One word is enough because explanation has become excessive. The chapter has already supplied Bronze Age collapse, karma, Shelley, Hamlet, radioactive half-life, technical obsolescence, and career decay. After all that, the song says: sorrow.

This reduction gives the song its purpose in the story. It interrupts Jane’s habit of intellectual conversion. She can convert stress into history, science, philosophy, literature, and systems theory. But finally the emotional residue must be named. The song performs that naming.

It also changes the chapter’s direction. After the song, Jane says:

Sadness is the exhaust of evil emitted by selfish souls. The hero must root out the cause! But then discovers auto-complicity…

This is Jane trying to restart the engine of explanation. She turns sorrow into moral theory, then into heroism, then into self-implication. But something has shifted. The certainty is gone. She ends not with a system but with instability:

I don’t know where I’m going.
I don’t know where I’ve been.
I’ll rewrite my lines once again,
until I fit the part that I’m in.

That ending matters because it links the song back to Rewrite My Lines. “Myself Can’t Stand” has exposed the inadequacy of Jane’s current role. Jane cannot keep playing the part of pure momentum, pure ambition, pure analysis, pure radioactive glow. The living do not belong in stone, as she says earlier. But they also cannot live indefinitely as acceleration. Something in her has to pause, even if pausing feels like collapse.

The song therefore carries several burdens at once.

It imports Li Qingzhao’s late-life grief into Jane’s modern stress. It shifts the chapter from grand collapse to intimate desolation. It turns external weather into internal pressure. It replaces monumentality with droplets. It lets sorrow speak in sound before Jane can explain it. And it marks a break in Jane’s self-mythology. She wants to be bronze, uranium, monument, glow, immortal mind. But the song reveals the damp underside of all that striving. She is also tired. She is cold. She is searching. She is not okay.

That is why the final word should remain simple. Not “grief-suffices,” perhaps, if the emphasis is the story rather than the translation. Just: sorrow.

The poem-song does not solve the chapter. It does not heal Jane. It does not turn stress into wisdom. It gives the stress a sound. In Chapter Eight, that is enough.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

“Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” continues the existential themes of the earlier songs. Jane has not been getting along with her boss, and she is now forced to decide which moral stance to take. The song asks what kind of person one must become when the institution one serves begins to betray its own purpose. Through its recurring refrain, contrasting tree imagery, and Shakespearean allusions, the lyric transforms a workplace disagreement into a meditation on power, impermanence, and the moral weight of choice.

The refrain insists that the proper response to transience is not grief or resentment, but clarity of purpose. By placing these lines at both the beginning and the end, the lyric frames everything in between—the anger, the calculation, the anguish—as experiences that must ultimately be measured against the fact of impermanence.

Both Stoic and Buddhist traditions treat the recognition of impermanence as central to disciplined attention. What matters is the quality of one’s choices within the time available, a pressure that reaches back to the hesitation and decision-paralysis of Maybe. Jane is trying to prevent negative emotion from dominating her decision-making, which would push her toward petty revenge.

The first stanza moves immediately from philosophical framing to dramatic situation:

I’ve finally had enough
Should I call his bluff?

The word “bluff” suggests that Zane’s authority has become performative. This perception echoes Max Weber’s distinction between formal authority and perceived legitimacy. The irony is that Zane may possess both, yet this is still insufficient for Jane, who demands a level of intellectual integrity he cannot provide.

Should I climb above
And turn this hawk into a dove?

This imagery frames the choice as one between confrontation and restraint. There is intentional ambiguity in the reference to “this”: Jane may be referring either to herself or to her boss.

Should I stand my ground?
Let my silence make the sound?
Or strike him while he’s down?

The lyrics hold all three possibilities in suspension. The song dramatizes the deliberation rather than its resolution. The continuation of themes from Maybe is also visible in the lines invoking Hamlet’s soliloquy:

To be or not to be a Joshua tree
…
To be or not to be an olive tree

This also continues the arboreal imagery introduced in Threshold, reinforcing Jane’s ongoing preoccupation with the natural world.

In its original context, Shakespeare’s question concerns whether to endure suffering or bring it to an end. Jane reworks the formulation into a question of identity: what kind of being should she choose to become? The philosophical implication is that our actions are shaped by our understanding of what we are. An identity crisis, therefore, becomes an existential one.

As in Rewrite My Lines, Jane recognizes that the decision ultimately rests with her. Where the earlier song focused on institutional constraint, the obstacles here are interpersonal and psychological. The relative simplicity of the structure and lyrics reflects the narrowing of thought under emotional strain. This is all Jane can muster in the moment.

The Joshua tree evokes solitary resilience, independence, and a kind of defiant self-sufficiency. It survives in harsh conditions without reliance on others, shaped by resistance rather than accommodation. This has been Jane’s default posture up to this point.

The olive tree offers a contrasting vision grounded in relationship and repair. The olive branch, one of the oldest symbols of reconciliation, signals the possibility of restoring what has been fractured. Jane’s turn toward this image marks a genuine ethical shift.

This possibility culminates in:

I’d give a speech — I’d beg, beseech
Whatever it takes to mend the breach.

Jane, who moments earlier imagined herself on a throne, now contemplates humility. In that moment, she confronts the truth that we are all kings and paupers in our own minds—capable of authority and vulnerability at once.

The closing refrain replaces “no time for hate, no time for sorrow” with “we choose the light, we choose tomorrow.” The shift suggests movement away from isolation toward a more communal moral stance.

Light functions here as a symbol of clarity: the willingness to see things as they are rather than as pride would distort them. Tomorrow represents not naïve optimism, but the recognition that no single moment is final. To choose tomorrow is to resist closure through destruction and instead remain open to change.

In the end, the lyric suggests that what defines us is not the authority we hold or the battles we win, but the decision we make in the moment before everything passes: whether we harden into isolation or accept the humility required to remain human. The song’s concern with impermanence also looks backward to the cosmic scale of Going and Gone and forward to the release and dissolution explored in Thankful for Infinity and Reality’s Illusion.

Here today, gone tomorrow
No time for hate, no time for sorrow
I’ve finally had enough
Should I call his bluff?
Or should I climb above
And turn this hawk into a dove
Should I stand my ground?
Let my silence make the sound?
Or strike him while he’s down?

Here today, gone tomorrow
No time for hate, no time for sorrow
To be or not to be a Joshua tree
Strong and free for eternity
Standing alone, ruling from my throne
No need to atone for what I’ve sown
As life will churn till the earth does burn
So we will yearn till our time in the urn
Keep on yearning, keep on turning
We are burning, but he’s not learning

To be or not to be an olive tree
We face the truth eventually
I didn’t have to make you my enemy
I’d give a speech — I’d beg, beseech,
Whatever it takes to mend the breach.
No prize for noble peace —
Just lay down pride before I cease.

Here today, gone tomorrow
We choose the light, we choose tomorrow

Essay

“Thankful for Infinity” arrives at the end of Chapter 9 — not long after Here Today, Gone Tomorrow — as a moment of tonal release. It redirects Jane away from her conflict with her boss toward a wider aperture of thought. In this sense, it continues the work of her earlier poetic ballad, Going and Gone. Both pieces draw on scientific theory to construct the architecture of the song. Here, that architecture is the physics and measurement of time.

The song renders Jane’s interpersonal conflict appropriately small. By the final line — “The time of the end is not the end of time” — the reader understands that her institutional struggle is a local disturbance within something immeasurably vast. It also foreshadows that the novel’s central tension lies elsewhere.

This effect is achieved through a sustained engagement with cesium atoms, optical clocks, rubato, and the mathematics of the infinitesimal. The song begins as a hymn to precision, but ultimately becomes a critique of perfectionism — and in doing so, one of the most philosophically ambitious pieces in the book.

The lyric opens with a gesture that is both playful and sincere: “I am thankful for infinity and salute atomic clocks.” The word salute carries a formal, almost military tone that borders on the comic when applied to laboratory instruments — and yet it is not entirely ironic. It acknowledges the scale of the achievement.

Atomic clocks represent one of humanity’s most precise intellectual constructions. Since 1967, the second has been defined not by astronomical motion but by the oscillation of cesium-133 atoms — a process reproducible anywhere in the world. The Earth wobbles; atoms do not. Time is no longer anchored to observation, but to invariance.

The opening couplet captures this with tactile immediacy:

Who measure out our seconds in cesium atom knocks.

“Knocks” translates abstraction into sensation, turning quantum oscillation into something almost audible. The effect is to collapse the distance between the scientific and the experiential, making precision itself a source of wonder.

The second stanza turns to optical clocks, pushing measurement toward ever finer resolution:

Optical clocks with six orders more precision.

The direction is clear: time is being carved into increasingly smaller units. The analogy that follows —

It will be like when grams were redefined by Planck

— draws on the redefinition of the kilogram, where measurement shifted from a physical object to a universal constant. In both cases, trust migrates from the local to the invariant. Measurement becomes a way of accessing the structure of reality itself.

But having established this upward trajectory, the lyric introduces a limit:

Will there be dismay to discover time’s discrete,
If there’s a limit to life’s primordial beat?

If time is not infinitely divisible — if it resolves into a smallest unit — then the pursuit of ever-greater precision encounters a boundary. The word dismay is telling. It suggests that such a discovery would feel like a loss: a closing of possibility rather than an advance in knowledge.

The lyric refuses to resolve this tension:

Or maybe time runs on an endless path,
Known only to the laws of infinitesimal math.

Here, time remains continuous, indefinitely divisible, resistant to final understanding. The response is not frustration, but a shift in attitude:

If the seconds are truly boundless,
Life will continue to confound us.

Confoundment becomes not a failure of knowledge, but a condition of vitality. The mind remains, as the lyric puts it, sinewous — flexible, resilient, capable of bending without breaking.

The philosophical movement deepens with relativity:

The meaning of time appears in relativity,
In the collapse of time’s objectivity.

Time is no longer universal, but relational. It varies with position, motion, and perspective. The lyric compresses this shift into a simple claim: time is not given, but constructed through relation.

While the past folds into the present,
The future bears down — incipient.

Temporal experience becomes layered and unstable. The future presses forward; the past remains active within the present. Time is no longer a line, but a field.

The argument culminates in four words:

Perfect time is dead time.

This is the thesis. In music, its meaning is immediate. A performance executed with mechanical precision produces something technically flawless and emotionally inert. Expression emerges through deviation: rubato, fermata, syncopation — the deliberate bending of time.

Death is vapid words turned incantation,
Life is rubato, fermata, syncopation.

Life resides not in adherence, but in variation. Meaning emerges in the decision to linger, to rush, to pause — acts that cannot be fully prescribed.

This extends beyond music. It is also a critique of the impulse to reduce life to measurement — the pressure, felt acutely by Jane, of a system that values precision over judgment, control over interpretation. A life governed entirely by exactness loses the improvisation that gives it texture. This links back to the paralysis of Maybe, where risk management becomes a kind of frozen timing, and to Threshold, where Jane tries to reclaim agency through rhythm, mathematics, and self-definition.

The repeated lines now shift in meaning:

If the seconds are truly boundless,
Life will continue to confound us.

What first appeared as anxiety becomes something closer to acceptance. Confoundment is no longer a problem to solve, but a condition to inhabit. The openness of time ensures that no single conflict, no single failure, exhausts what remains possible.

The closing lines complete the movement:

Perfect time is dead time.

The time of the end is not the end of time.

The distinction is decisive. Endings feel absolute from within their urgency, but they are always local. Time continues beyond them. And in that continuation lies the possibility of new rhythms — not perfectly measured, but fully lived.

Thankful for Infinity.
I am thankful for infinity and salute atomic clocks—
Who measure out our seconds in cesium atom knocks.
Time will only tell when it yields to more division—
Optical clocks with six orders more precision.
It will be like when grams were redefined by Planck,
Anchoring our measures to a universal bank.
We carve the moment thinner, finer than before,
Chasing truth through decimals, demanding ever more.

Will there be dismay to discover time’s discrete,
If there’s a limit to life’s primordial beat?
Or maybe time runs on an endless path,
Known only to the laws of infinitesimal math.

If the seconds are truly boundless,
Life will continue to confound us.
When the variables stay continuous,
Our minds continue to be sinewous.

The meaning of time appears in relativity,
In the collapse of time’s objectivity.
While the past folds into the present,
The future bears down—incipient.

Perfect time is dead time.
Perfect rhyme is dead rhyme.
Death is vapid words turned incantation,
Life is rubato, fermata, syncopation.

If the seconds are truly boundless,
Life will continue to confound us.

Perfect time is dead time.
The time of the end is not the end of time.

Essay

Some people thought cyberspace would loosen our embodied constraints and our inherited identity categories. A precursor to this expectation appears in Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), which imagines technologically mediated subjectivities. Against this backdrop, the prevalence of gendered violence online presents a marked disjunction.

The violence appears patterned rather than incidental. Is digital space not amenable to this kind of liberation? Has it instead reproduced existing asymmetries of power?

Platforms tend to prioritise engagement. Virality contains an element of consistency — celebrities and sex sell — and an element of randomness. People assert a right to novelty. One tries things; some work. Digital environments also permit forms of conduct that are difficult to prevent, or not even possible in the same way in the physical world. Automated accounts amplify antagonism. Manipulated content circulates as a dominant category of malicious intent, more difficult to delimit than paid advertising, which at least operates within a declared exchange and helps sustain the production of content.

These tensions inform the composition of “Silicon Girl,” a song voiced by the narrator of Knew Downs, a novel concerned with work and identity in the age of artificial intelligence. The song operates simultaneously as narrative device, cultural commentary, and theoretical reflection. It examines gendered visibility within digital systems while situating that experience inside broader philosophical frameworks concerning power, surveillance, and desire. It extends the platform logic first staged in Attention, but makes the question of gendered exposure more direct.

The song does not claim direct lived authority over the experience it describes. What it attempts instead is an act of witness: situating gendered online violence within structural and theoretical frameworks while remaining conscious of the asymmetry between the observing position and the experience observed.

The opening stanzas invoke a cyber-utopian premise — the possibility of disembodied existence, “fleshless bodies free of time and place” — but this promise is punctured almost immediately: “Is it pure joy… or just their ploy?” The speed of that deflation mirrors the historical reality: the utopian promise of digital space barely had time to establish itself before the mechanisms of harassment, surveillance, and exploitation moved in behind it. The lyric’s brevity at this moment is structurally honest.

What replaces the utopian promise is not neutral digital life but systematic hostility. The stanza that follows — “They bait and hate, penetrate my feed / Harvest clicks the algorithm needs / They deepfake me, desecrate me / Stalk me, threaten to rape me” — has attracted attention for its register. The language is blunt, sexually violent, and compressed into a rhyme scheme that some may find formally incongruous with its content.

This incongruity is intentional. The tight syllabic structure is meant to enact the way such violence is experienced within digital systems: rapid, rhythmic, relentless, and normalised by frequency. To render these experiences in more elevated diction would be to aestheticise them. The vulgarity is the point. “Threaten to rape me” is not a metaphor, and the lyric does not treat it as one.

This reconfiguration of embodiment is consistent with Haraway’s cyborg framework, in which subjectivity is constituted through the interaction of organism and machine. “Silicon Girl” augments this formulation: the speaker is neither reducible to biological identity nor fully abstracted into data. “Silicon” therefore carries a double valence: it names the material substrate of computational systems and simultaneously signals the reduction of women to synthetic, manipulable, replaceable artefacts within both technological and cultural economies. Its use is critical.

The recurring refrain — “Behind the screen, behind the gaze, inside the grid, inside the maze” — constructs the digital environment as a system of enclosure. The “gaze” can be situated within the work of Laura Mulvey, in which visual regimes position women as objects of observation. Applied to digital platforms, the gaze is mediated by algorithmic systems that reward the right kind of visibility, which is at once stabilised and continuously recalibrated.

The reference to the “panopticon” situates the lyric within a Foucauldian framework of surveillance, in which subjects internalise observation and regulate their own behaviour accordingly. This makes “Silicon Girl” a darker cousin to Cyborg City: one song tracks the body as product; the other tracks the self as screen, feed, image, and target.

The theory climaxes with the invocation of jouissance. Associated with Jacques Lacan, jouissance exceeds pleasure and implicates us in circuits of excess and compulsion. The question the song raises — and which this exegesis must not evade — is whose jouissance is being described. The line “Seeking jouissance in digital domains” is voiced by the speaker herself. This introduces an ambiguity: the speaker is not positioned purely as a victim. She has her own desires and her own appetite for the online space. The system then exploits, redirects, and weaponises those desires. This is a more uncomfortable account of how digital platforms operate than a simple predator-prey model would allow. The jouissance belongs, initially, to everyone before the platforms colonise it.

The stanza that follows develops the Foucauldian and Mulveyan threads together: “I’m not ready for the octagon, / Their gaze, just panopticon, / They only see my silicon, / Declare themselves a hegemon.” Here the “octagon” evokes an MMA space of direct confrontation. The “panopticon” names the ambient power of surveillance. Reduction to “silicon” signals objectification within a technological register, while “hegemon” identifies the tendency toward domination.

The feminist genealogy section warrants attention. The invocation of de Beauvoir, Friedan, Greer, and Steinem, followed by the four-wave schema, is deliberately compressed — and the compression is partly ironic.

The schema does not aspire to scholarly precision. It enacts the way feminist history is received in popular culture: as a rapid-fire sequence of milestones, each wave defined by a slogan, each icon reduced to a line. “Beauvoir named the war / Friedan opened doors” is intentionally thumbnail in its brevity. The song is not dismissing these contributions — the invocation is one of genuine lineage and solidarity — but it is aware of, and lightly satirising, the cultural habit of reducing complex intellectual traditions to bullet points. The irony does not undermine the tribute; it contextualises it within the same digital environment where feminist thought, like everything else, is compressed.

The structural and emotional climax of the song arrives through a formal device that deserves attention. The octagon/panopticon stanza, which first appears as a register of constraint, is reprised near the close with its terms systematically inverted: “I’m now ready for the octagon, / My gaze is panopticon, / I only have my silicon, / I declare myself a hegemon.”

The power relation is reversed. The gaze that surveilled the speaker is now hers. The silicon that reduced her to artefact is now her own material. The hegemony that was declared over her is now self-declared. This refrain comes with extra punch as a double entendre with another core theme of the novel, which will come to the reader as it is discovered in the narrative, in its own flavour of jouissance.

This is not a triumphalist resolution. The speaker does not escape the grid; she repositions herself within it, seizing its terms rather than discarding them. That unstable self-rewriting links the song back to Rewrite My Lines, where Jane first begins to understand identity as something scripted, performed, revised, and only partly owned.

The closing refrain reinforces this. The earlier iteration — “They will always have their way” — is a statement of structural entrapment. The final formulation — “I may soon just have my way” — retains its conditional, preserving the instability of agency within the system. The “may” and the “soon” matter. It also seamlessly moves us back to Jane’s normal register of corporate-speak. Songs in the book generally allow the narrator to escape that automaticity for occasional respites in her Jungian underworld.

Formally, the song reinforces its theoretical concerns through repetition and enclosure. The anaphoric structure of “Behind the…” produces a recursive logic that mirrors the nested architectures of digital systems. The internal rhyme clusters — panopticon, automaton, hegemon, lexicon, phenomenon — compress multiple operational functions into tightly structured sequences, emphasising the systemic and interlocking nature of the phenomena described.

The song operates within tensions it does not fully resolve. Its emphasis on harassment and surveillance foregrounds vulnerability within digital environments, even as those environments have also enabled new forms of experience. Its focus on gender is vital to the narrative of the novel because it reflects a broader pressure point in how we understand ourselves as increasingly mediated, or cybernetic, beings.

The compression of feminist history into a wave schema simplifies a complex and contested tradition, though with conscious irony. The use of theoretical vocabulary introduces abstraction into a popular form, and the occasional tonal dissonance — between academic register and vernacular bluntness — is meant to be productive.

These tensions are constitutive of the song’s form and its argument. Within Knew Downs, “Silicon Girl” establishes the digital environment as a primary site of conflict for human experience and literature.

Essay

“Purlins and Concrete” strips language down to its barest function: the naming of engineering elements — structural members and reinforcement bars, cable trays and grounding systems, batteries, polymers, and water. The intention is to invoke a liturgical feeling, with the cadence of a religious chant.

Sung by Fabi, Jane’s new boss at the Gopher Group, the song functions as an induction ceremony: a chanted initiation into the material religion of the Bit Warehouse. To understand why it works, we have to attend as much to what the song refuses to do as to what it does. Sitting after Silicon Girl, it turns away from digital visibility and moves downward into the physical substrate that makes digital life possible.

The lyric opens with a gesture that is both benediction and manifesto: “Blessed beams and joists.” The vocabulary of the sacred is imported into the domain of structural engineering, and the pairing produces the song’s central tension. This prepares the refrain: “Description alone suffices.”

Western intellectual tradition often privileges explanation over description — moving from naming phenomena to accounting for them. Ludwig Wittgenstein offers a useful counterpoint in the Philosophical Investigations, where philosophical confusion often arises from the demand for explanation when careful description of how language is actually used would suffice.

The lyric proceeds through successive material layers of the data center, moving from structure to system to computation. It begins with the skeleton — purlins, concrete, reinforcement, steel — the hidden framework that carries load and prevents failure. It moves through cable management — ladder racks, conduits, junction boxes — the pathways through which power and data travel. It names the conductive metals of distribution, the electrochemistry of energy storage, and the polymers that insulate and protect.

Nothing is explained. Everything is named.

There is an IT layer near the end:

Racks and frames.
Wafers and memory.
Controllers and PDUs.
Fiber optic cables.

Computation is the flourish. Everything that precedes it exists to support memory and thought. In that sense, the song also forms a material counterpoint to Thankful for Infinity: precision and abstraction still need floors, frames, cables, batteries, and cooling.

The surprise is that, for all the sophistication and otherworldliness of data centers, like all living things, they require water to survive:

Water for cooling.
Water for fire.
Water for life.

After the density of specialized vocabulary, the shift to a single universal substance creates a formal shock. This is also the first time in the poem where explanation begins to seep in. Why is Fabi making an exception here?

Fabi is procedural, competent, and aligned with engineered reliability. The chant-like structure — invocation followed by response — mirrors how knowledge is transmitted in high-stakes environments: through repetition, ritual, and the gradual accumulation of vocabulary.

For Jane, the experience is different. She cannot yet understand the full technical meaning. She receives the names, repeats the refrain, and trusts that understanding will come. This is how onboarding works in complex domains: names before theories, components before narratives. The lyric compresses that process into form. It is therefore also linked to Threshold, where Jane is again trying to cross from one world of meaning into another.

The musical inspiration was intended to sit between a reverential Gregorian chant and a comic barbershop harmony. The latter element came after hearing the Brown Derbies perform.

The data center becomes a kind of monastery, organized around maintenance rituals and the protection of the sanctum of data. The lyric can be prayer, recipe, or joke, depending on how it is heard. It also quietly prepares the ground for Cyborg City: before the body can be upgraded, the world that upgrades it has to be built out of beams, trays, conductors, polymers, and water.

Essay

“Cyborg City” is a comic song about artificial body parts. At the beginning of Chapter 12, Jane is still human. Earlier in the novel, Jane has made an offhand comment that “we are all cyborgs now.” This is Jane’s clearest expression of that point, albeit in a macabre register. It also pushes the technological pressure of Silicon Girl into the body itself: identity is no longer only digital, performed, or surveilled; it is repairable, purchasable, and replaceable.

Jane has also earlier in the chapter recounted the parting words of her roommate Lucy: “Just don’t lose your human side when you join the corporation.” Well, this song is her way of being honest with herself about this. Has she lost her way? Have we all? The question also looks forward to Reality’s Illusion, where appearance, projection, and the agreement about what counts as real are already unstable.

Jane sings the song as a “cyborg punk” anthem to transcending humanity. She is winking at us and saying that none of us are fully human anymore. Her register is macabre, playful, vulgar, and decidedly commercial. She imagines a fictional place called Cyborg City, where the body can be repaired, improved, replaced, and optimized.

The opening lyrics appear to describe normal aging issues:

If you’re in disrepair,
Losing teeth, losing hair

“Disrepair” is meant to evoke the feeling of a beaten-down used car. Later, the song refers to “Every part, every spare,” so the listener knows it is not a mistake. The body is not sacred here. The song treats aging as an ordinary maintenance problem. Conversely, losing teeth and hair are simply market opportunities.

The chorus then appears as a welcome to this new world:

Come on in, to Cyborg City,
Stay awhile, have a quickie,
Anything, that you desire,
We will be, your supplier…

Each refrain begins with the same first line, but then varies the next lines in each instance. The voice is meant to feel like a carnival barker beckoning us to see the strange monstrosities within. This could be an actual city, or a store so big it is called a city. “Have a quickie” adds sexual charge, but it also suggests speed, consumption, and disposable pleasure. That makes this song a late-book echo of Attention: desire is not merely expressed; it is captured, shaped, and monetized.

The song begins with repair, but the chorus explains what the repair is for: so you can spend more money.

The second verse starts with a pump fake by invoking medical authority:

Doctor comes, renders aid,

As if it is some kind of emergency. But it quickly pivots to the reality:

A new you, swift upgrade,
You are flesh, you are steel,
That’s the trend. That’s ideal.

This is meant to parody our current medical establishment, where plastic surgery and vanity medical operations are normalized and legitimized, and in some circles required for social and economic success. The pressures to be more than human have never been greater. The movement from repair to upgrade also links back to Threshold: the self stands at an edge, but crossing it may mean becoming something else.

In Chapter 11, Jane explores her humanity further and refers to the movie Gattaca, silently changing the famous line to: “I never saved anything as a backup.” The line “You decide, when’s enough” makes it seem like we have a choice. But what choice do we have if we are on the treadmill of life? We will always find a way to rationalize ourselves out of moral responsibility. That is the times we live in. That is where the pressures force us. And there is not much left to slow it down anymore.

Who decides when repair has become vanity? When is healing a form of self-erasure? Desire is being shaped by the city itself.

The benefits list then converts the body into a menu of upgrades:

Faster brain, sex appeal,
Softer touch, better feel,
Harder bones, faster legs,
Stronger heart, fitter eggs,
Deeper sleep, clearer mind,
Longer life, no more grind,
Bigger smile, lower pain,
Wait awhile, bigger brain

This part, like much of the song, is built almost entirely in three-syllable phrasing with rhymes to evoke a marketing jingle. This is funny because it sounds like a late-night advertisement, but it is also disturbing because the items are not trivial. The list covers cognition, sexuality, fertility, pain, sleep, mood, productivity, beauty, and lifespan. Cyborg City has an answer for every insecurity. This stanza shifts us from fixing ourselves to enhancing ourselves. Cyborg City is a body arms race.

That arms race explains why the game theory verse arrives later:

Friend or foe, you don’t know.
Talk is cheap, trust is low.
Take your pick, cooperate?
Or defect? Oscillate?

The other game theory choice is on the moral side. The balance of power is shifting to the cyborgs. At some point, we will all join them or go extinct. But when we all join them, we enter an endless cycle of competition. Once everyone can upgrade, everyone becomes strategically uncertain. They are competitors, allies, threats, collaborators, and potential defectors. “Friend or foe” names a social world in which trust has been degraded. The city has improved the body but destabilized the relationship between bodies.

The references to cooperation, defection, oscillation, tit-for-tat, Nash equilibrium, Alice, and Bob all bring an abstract, mathematical register into the song, as expected in the Knew Downs world. Cyborg City is about the body, the market, medicine, desire, and strategic and moral behavior all at once. The human being becomes a player in a game whose rules keep changing.

The final major verse pushes the song from technology into immortality:

First a fix, then a feature,
Finally, a new creature.
Join our club, take your seat
Death is for the obsolete.

This is the philosophical center of the song. “First a fix, then a feature” compresses the whole argument. Human beings begin by solving practical problems: a broken tooth, weak eyesight, aging skin, a failing organ. But every fix creates the possibility of a feature. Once the body can be modified, it can be improved. Once it can be improved, it can be reimagined. The endpoint is not health. The endpoint is a “new creature.”

“Death is for the obsolete” is the song’s most brutal slogan. It sounds like advertising copy from a posthuman luxury brand. It makes mortality seem old-fashioned, embarrassing, and low-status. Death is no longer a universal human condition. It is a failure to update. This is where the song connects most directly to Gone Tomorrow and Thankful for Infinity: one song faces disappearance, the other scale, and “Cyborg City” tries to sell both back to us as a product.

The list that follows widens Cyborg City into a history of human attempts to outlast the body:

Gilgamesh, Samsara,
Theseus, Che Guevara,
de León, Dorian,
St. Germain, Qin Shi Huang,
Phaedo’s soul, Peter Pan,
Pandora, Napoleon,
Ravana, Impaler Vlad,
Hanuman, Sir Galahad.

This catalogue is deliberately eclectic. It mixes myth, religion, philosophy, literature, empire, celebrity, conquest, legend, and monstrosity. One of the themes of the book is our relationship to history and inevitability. The point of bringing these images into the song is partly comic and macabre: to imagine a group of people in an immortality club, almost like an underworld version of Pixar’s Coco. But it is also to say that, from a demand perspective, there is nothing new here. Humans have always wanted to repair the wound of mortality. What changes is the supply. We simply have many more opportunities now to transform ourselves.

The final chorus then changes the moral direction of the song:

Come on in, to Cyborg City,
Stay awhile, you look pretty,
Anything, that they desire,
Want to sell? They’re a buyer…

Earlier, the chorus promised:

Anything, that you desire,
We will be your supplier…

At the end, the pronouns shift. It is no longer about what “you” desire. It is about what “they” desire. Once we have been lured in as buyers, why not become sellers? And the city is no longer merely supplying. It is buying. This is the trap. The human entered Cyborg City as a customer seeking repair, pleasure, advantage, or escape from death. But by the end, the human has become inventory. The market that promised self-transformation has converted the self into something tradable. This is also why Purlins and Concrete sits nearby: the body is not the only structure being engineered.

That ending is especially important for Chapter 12 because this is the first ending, the one where Jane is still human. She sings from inside the human condition. She is not yet fully outside it, and the song’s macabre register comes from that uneasy position. She knows the body fails. She knows repair is tempting. She knows enhancement is seductive. She knows mortality is humiliating. But she also sees the joke: every attempt to transcend the body may entangle us more deeply in systems of consumption, competition, and control.

“Cyborg City” therefore functions as more than comic relief. It is a compressed thesis for the ending of the book. It asks whether becoming more than human is liberation or just another marketplace. It asks whether immortality is the highest human dream or the final product category. Most importantly, it asks whether the human self can survive its own desire to improve.

Jane’s song is funny because the city is absurd. It is unsettling because the city is recognizable.

If you’re in disrepair,
Losing teeth, Losing hair,
This the place, this is where,
Every part, every spare,
Available for fire sale
Pick your nose, choose your tail,
Extra limbs, tighter skins,
Perfect eyes, any size,
extra stock, it’s a shock….

Come on in, to Cyborg City,
Stay awhile, have a quickie,
Anything, that you desire,
We will be, your supplier…

Doctor comes, renders aid,
A new you, swift upgrade,
You are flesh, You are steel,
That’s the trend. That’s ideal.
You decide, when’s enough,
neon eyes, machine stuff,
New implants, to enhance,
Any part, take a chance…

Come on in, to Cyborg City,
We are here, nothing tricky,
Anything, that you desire,
We will be, your supplier…

Faster brain, sex appeal,
Softer touch, better feel,
Harder bones, Faster legs,
Stronger heart, Fitter eggs
Deeper sleep, Clearer mind,
Longer life, no more grind,
Bigger smile, Lower pain,
Wait awhile, Bigger brain,

Come on in, to Cyborg City,
Stay the night, it’d be a pity,
To leave town, without a smile,
Live it up, a little while…

Friend or foe, you don’t know.
Talk is cheap, trust is low.
Take your pick, Cooperate?
Or Defect? Oscillate?
Tit-for-tat? It’s not tidy.
Perfect poise? It’s not likely.
No more Nash, mix it up.
Alice, Bob, team it up,

Come on in, to Cyborg City,
Lets get down to nitty gritty,
Anything, that you require,
Change a flat, change a wire…

First a fix, then a feature,
Finally, a new creature.
Join our club, take your seat
Death is for the obsolete.
Gilgamesh, Samsara,
Theseus, Che Guevara,
de León, Dorian,
St. Germain, Qin Shi Huang,
Phaedo’s soul, Peter Pan,
Pandora, Napoleon,
Ravana, Impaler Vlad,
Hanuman, Sir Galahad.

Come on in, to Cyborg City,
Stay awhile, you look pretty,
Anything, that they desire,
Want to sell? They’re a buyer….