You ever go on a road trip to the mountains, get food poisoning along the way, and keep going anyway while your kid fights herpangina, an ear infection, and teething so that you don’t get a full night’s sleep for four nights straight in a strange place? No? Well, in the words of Miss Clavel, “thank the Lord you are well.”

While I haven’t had much bandwidth for web reading the past few weeks, I’ve still managed to drum up some things that you’ll hopefully find interesting this weekend.

• 70s Sci-Fi Art is one of my favorite blogs, but it publishes so frequently that I struggle to keep up. I was glad not to miss its recent entry with Moebius’s illustrations of Dante’s Paradiso, as they are too good not to share.

• Fr. Stephen Freeman writes about the ladder of daily life in a way that I think is encouraging. So much of contemporary life contends against the state of ordinariness. Career is the most notable example, with its metaphors of “climbing”, but parenting, politics, relationships, and almost any aspect of life are increasingly imbued with what David Zahl calls seculosity. But, the suspicion (fear?) of ordinariness is not an exclusively secular phenomenon. Whether through summons to a “radical” faith (remember that book??) among conservative Baptist-adjacent evangelicals of the mid-2000s, or the ever-growing politically-left inflected writings of “post-evangelical/ex-vangelical”s naively taking cues from liberation theology to deconstruct everything about western civilization, the instinct to reject just living a quiet, generous, productive, and loving life of worshiping at a local church, raising a family, and working a job seems a perennial temptation. There’s a lot I could write about how the New Testament’s writings were written prior to the emergence of a money economy, and how neglecting that fact leads to all sorts of confusion, but this bullet point is already running long.

• From the blog: Recently graduated Cloudflarian Boris Tane wrote a prescient blog about the death of the software development lifecycle as we know it. I left a comment on a couple complications I see with this new paradigm that I’ll reproduce here, with some light edits:

Love this. It’s cogent and audacious — cogent because it’s a clear-eyed look at the current trajectory of things, and audacious because a lot of these practices still feel like sacred cows to me.

That said, the two wrinkles I could see in my crystal ball:

1. Accountability: if the agent handles everything, how do we contend with engineer accountability? Especially in the case of systems with a lot of legacy subservice dependencies, the sanity of the person holding the pager will be at risk (and their effectiveness limited) when agents don’t have consistent ready access to all system components. I think you got at this in the monitoring section, and until we have solid observability for agents to work with I think this will continue to be a bottleneck.

2. Economics: A lot of the changes we’re seeing (AFIU as of this writing) are predicated on the advancements of proprietary models (most people I talk with are heavy Opus users). Reliable agentic workflows lean heavily on the excellence of models served by privately held companies that can upend the cost/benefit analysis on a whim. I think quality open-source models that we can safely fall back on are going to be needed at some point.

The “economics” complication is already emerging since I wrote that comment, especially with Anthropic being designated a “supply-chain risk” by the DoW (a whole silly can of worms), and Anthropic taking legal action against OpenCode (N.B. I’m an OpenCode user and my money is on them in the long run).

• From the blog: While waiting for my espresso at Pinewood Coffee, I took a glance at the front page of the New York Times sitting on the counter, and saw this. Go ahead and read it:

  

  I did not turn the page, but nowhere in these first few paragraphs is any mention made of the fact that TSMC (the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, whose single largest shareholder is the government of Taiwan) has built a fab in Arizona thanks to U.S. incentives under the CHIPS act, for this exact reason. The same is true for Samsung building a semiconductor fab in Texas. Now, the fault may be mine for not finishing the article (my espresso was ready at this point), and I don’t have a Times subscription, but you would think that such significant data points in the narrative that this article is telling would make their way into the first eight paragraphs.

  If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading Chip War for a comprehensive history of how we got into this situation. What I find ironic, though, is that raising concerns around Chinese hegemony and wargaming near Taiwan, and suggesting that we repatriate our industrial/technological base as a hedge against the risks of globalization, has been labeled as “nationalistic” in the pages of the NYT and similar publications over the last decade.

  Whether the cause is disingenuity, amnesia, or incompetence, it’s no surprise to me that public trust in the “fourth estate”, at least in its legacy institutions, continues to decline.

Alright, that’s enough for this Friday. It’s warm here in Central Texas, and I for one am happy to defrost a bit. Get outside, read a book, laugh with your kids, kiss your lover, have a drink too many with some friends if you safely can.

Cheers,

R

I hope you’ve had a good week. A bit of personal news — after six months of trying my hand at engineering management, I stepped down from leadership and returned to being an individual contributor on the same team. The engineering/management pendulum is pretty well documented at this point, and I’m swinging back to the “engineering” side of things. A number of factors precipitated this decision, but I am very happy with it. There’s unprecedented opportunity to build and try new things in software right now, and I’m excited to have some space to focus my attention again and create stuff.

Anyway, here are some things for your weekend.

• Front Porch Republic published a review of Martin Shaw’s new book, Liturgies of the Wild. Shaw is a mythologist, and part a cohort of historically “pagan” writers who’ve converted to Christianity in recent years. The disciplines of mythopoesis and depth psychology have had an overlapping relationship through the years (see the work of Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly), and while I’ve always been fascinated by them, I’ve never really explored in depth. Shaw propounds the necessity myth as something that claims us, rather than as a mere tool for analysis. I’ll be adding this latest volume to my pending reads list this year.

• Ron Rolheiser wrote about discerning our vocation over at his blog. He argues, along with C.S. Lewis, that vocation is something that comes from God’s compulsion, writing, “It’s the deep irrepressible moral sense we have inside that tells us what we must do rather than what we want to do.” I’m in a discernment cohort with some peers and church right now, where we try to trace the “threads” of God’s activity in our life through the years, principally by writing a spiritual autobiography. I will say for myself, that moments of discovering vocation usually come as a surprise, where there is no other obvious option. Optionality is something I prize in life, but when it comes to vocation, I would say that it’s fundamentally opposed to optionality.

• My friend Daniel gifted me a subscription to County Highway, and it is such a pleasure to read. For the unfamiliar, County Highway is not principally a web publication, but “America’s Only Newspaper”. I picked up a a copy years ago from First Light Books in Austin, read an essay by Aaron Gwyn waxing euphoric about Eddie Van Halen, and knew this periodical was something special. The reportage, essays, and reviews they publish transcend the ideological categories of things you would read in something like The Atlantic. If you’ve been looking for an arts and letters outlet that feels free, weird, and welcoming, this might be it.

• Over at X, Polimath opines over how frustrating it is to navigate technology as a parent, particularly now that Spotify has begun serving short-form video. This is yet another reason why I stand by my decision to use an MP3 player and start building my own music collection again. Choice abundance + slop + lack of ownership all go hand-in-hand.

• We are in the season of Lent, and at our Shrove Tuesday pancake supper + gumbo cookoff our priest reminded us that our attempts at self-improvement have the habit of reminding us how bad we are at it. This picture that Jenoa snapped when we were at Sonic the other day captures this truth well:

Have a blessed and holy Lent,

Robbie

Hi friends,

After a brief, unannounced hiatus, I’m returning to you with some more links and musings from my reading around the web. The Saps spent the last week and a half in California, where we spent some much needed time catching up with family and friends, going to the beach, eating good food, and exploring old stomping grounds. OC is a beautiful place with people I love deeply, but it also feels good to be home.

Here are some things I’ve read and enjoyed over the last few weeks.

• Ruth Gaskovski over at School of the Unconformed explores the consequences of and remedies for our outsourcing of memory. The primacy of “critical thinking” and “skills” in education over “rote memorization” is commonly treated as an axiom, one that I’ve rarely examined. However, if you don’t retain knowledge, you can’t really think analytically about anything because you lack the building blocks with which to reason. If you’re anything like me, you probably rely heavily on Google and, increasingly, AI tooling, over recall for a number of tasks. But this outsourcing comes with a cost, and I wonder how much of my own cognitive fuzziness is a symptom of these practices.

• Ellen Mote, a friend of the Saps, wrote some suggestions for returning to creative work after a hiatus. Item 1, “Don’t sweat the rocky start”, is something I consistently need to remind myself as I return to writing regularly this year.

• Alan Jacobs questions the reign of quantity as the highest metric when it comes to cultural production, particularly as it pertains to AI adoption. I’ll rarely complain about prolific writers/artists/musicians, but to me it’s only impressive when the quality of their creations is (mostly) consistent. Additionally, Alan speculates about the future of live music as the proliferation of slop accelerates — that the chasm between the two will only increase the value of/demand for (at least among certain audiences) live performance. While in California, I had lunch with a musician friend who noted that the financial model for live shows and albums has flipped: you used to tour in support of an album, now you release an album to promote a tour. My take is that AI will only accelerate this trend.

• I wrote about how the guidance of C.S. Lewis at the outbreak of WWII could help technologists (and others) reason about the accelerating landscape of technological changes. Specifically, I contend that nothing is fundamentally changing, but that the perceived chaos we’re seeing just amplifies the uncertain nature of life to our own awareness. I’m more convinced than ever of the need for people (especially in tech) to engage with the humanities in the classical tradition, and this essay is a stab at doing just that.

That’s all I have for this week. Thanks for reading, and have a restful weekend.

Robbie

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 3 years, you’ve at the very least seen or heard, if not experienced, the large space that AI, specifically Large Language Models, occupy in our collective consciousness. The takes are many, and it feels like there’s little more to be said, and whatever is said is likely obsolete within 5-7 business days.

At the same time it feels like there’s so much more that’s yet to be said, mostly because every new model release entails a fresh hype cycle of boosters and doomers prognosticating about how AGI has ostensibly arrived, or its arrival is imminent.

The hype is not necessarily unwarranted, either. Anthropic’s release of Opus 4.5 and the widespread adoption among software developers of terminal agents like OpenCode converged over the Christmas holiday to produce a general felt sense that, at least for programming, something fundamentally paradigmatic has occurred. As developers experimented with side projects during the weeks from Christmas to New Year’s, the capabilities of AI tooling seemed to hit an inflection point.

People deployed Ralph Wiggum, an agentic workflow that runs autonomously in a loop overnight, iteratively (recursively?) feeding the outputs of one session as inputs into the next until a desired end state was achieved. Then along came Clawdbot Molbot OpenClaw, an open-source agent that can run on a local machine or a server, and could be interacted with via WhatsApp from your phone. Hook up your email, your DMs, all of your workflows and tools to OpenClaw, and your agent became an always-available virtual assistant for the cost of a $5/month server. The fact that API keys and personal data were becoming exposed on servers to the open internet overnight didn’t deter some of the most eager early adopters (to its creator’s credit, he does advise only using it if you’re a technical person who knows what you’re doing). And now, over the last ~72 hours (as of this writing), the agents are now collaborating and chatting with each other over on Moltbook. The fact that one of the leading AI researchers is calling it the “most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing” he has seen recently is certainly worth pausing over.

Code has become very, very cheap in the near-term, and software developers are being confronted with new workflows that fundamentally challenge how we conceive of our work. Outside of software development, I think the promise of agentic workflows (or LLM-enabled leverage) still has yet to fully manifest at scale. That’s not to say it won’t, only that the pace of adoption that’s often been predicted has underestimated the complex topologies of the enterprise environments where they’ll be deployed (the one exception I see is marketing, where my friend who oversees branding for a home goods company has accomplished some effective and humorous feats).

This new reality, combined with the social incentives promulgated by online communities on platforms such as X, Bluesky, and Mastodon, has instigated no shortage of takes. The content of one’s take is heavily influenced by the tenor of users on a given platform, but they all seem consistent in that they tend toward the superlative and hyperbolic. For example, some will say it will automate away human labor, we need to entrench ourselves as pseudo-luddites, jam the machines and inflate the value of every keystroke. Others think it will leave mountains of technical debt that humans will need to clean up manually after the companies developing and serving frontier models ratchet up the cost of tokens. Still others say this whole thing is fundamentally immoral because of the water usage needed by data centers (a specious claim, at best).

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt are powerful motivators that are grounded in the most rudimentary parts of our brains. Conversely, so is ambition — it’s a fundamental evolutionary drive that enabled wider access to food and mates. As our minds try to contend with technological change at an accelerating pace and scale achieve escape velocity from the development of our brains (a ship that I think sailed a long time ago), these ineluctable primal instincts impede and shadow even our best efforts to reason about the activity happening before us.

That’s not to say that there are no serious people grappling with these changes in a grounded, sensible, and productive way — I’m actually fortunate enough to work with many of them. But I think “software development is over” is a much easier answer to give than to say “we have no idea what it will look like in a year”. The certainty of catastrophe, while anxiety inducing, triggers primordial habits and sentiments in a way that uncertainty does not. Uncertainty is very unsatisfying.

I was speaking about this the other day with a developer very early in their career. They’re a smart, capable, adaptable, and enthusiastic engineer who has crushed it with everything they’ve built, including agentic systems. Even they admitted to feeling some anxiety when faced with the rapid adoption and enablement of new tooling.

When asked about how I am thinking about these things, my honest response was, “I don’t know”. By that, I didn’t mean that I had no opinions (I, like Primeagen, think there’s plenty of evidence for the ongoing necessity of hard skills in tech). I think we’re all still experimenting with these tools, and that’s very exciting. But how the day to day of a developer might look a year from now, I honestly couldn’t say.

Looking around at the hyperbole and frenzy though, I can say that in a fundamental way, nothing has changed at all. Let me explain.

In his talk, Learning in Wartime, C.S. Lewis contended for the necessity of continued study while the crisis of the second World War emerged on the European continent:

A university is a society for the pursuit of learning. As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Midle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians. And at first sight this seems to be an odd thing to do during a great war. What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing? Or, even if we ourselves should happen not to be interrupted by death or military service, why should we — indeed how can we — continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?

Lewis continues to argue that the shadow of war does not actually change the most essential of human predicaments — death — but instead heightens its immediacy in our awareness:

If active service does not persuade a man to prepare for death, what conceivable concatenation of circumstances would? Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it. The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them. War makes death real to us...All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centred in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times, only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us knows.

Although not a direct threat to our mortality (yes, I’ve seen most of The Terminator movies), I think the stochastic nature of LLMs has surfaced to our awareness the stochastic nature of life. Engineers are used to determinism — deterministic systems are how we make things reliable, maintainable, predictable. Determinism has been the bedrock of quality for our craft for some time.

But determinism has always been a goal, and our development processes, our tests, our specs, our reviews, are all ways of modeling and contending with intractably stochastic objects of the real world. LLMs, whose outputs are inherently nondeterministic, inject this uncertainty into the systems we build with heretofore unseen rapidity. When looked at this way, it’s hardly unsurprising that this uncertainty has jumped up a level from systems to their designers. It’s just making evident and obvious what was always true.

As I said, I still think there’s value in hard skills. Read code, read docs; hell, even type it out character by character sometimes. But above that, pursue arete, phronesis, and eudaimonia in all you do. Change and uncertainty are givens, but virtue is unchanging. Reorient yourself by looking away from what is grasping for your attention in the clamor of the moment and look at the eternal. Align yourself with truth, goodness, and beauty. Ruthlessly strive after them, for they are not instinctual. The uncertainty of life will continue to confront you, but ground yourself in what is unchanging, and, at least for a moment, it might all seem a little less perplexing.

This week’s entry of Robbie Rambles features some more notes technology, thoughts about music, and a personal/professional update.

• DHH (founder of 37Signals and creator of Ruby on Rails) is on the same wavelength as me (and a number of technologists) when it comes to the use of AI agents in daily software development. I’m increasingly convinced that there hasn’t been a more exciting time (if ever) to be building software, especially if you’ve never done it before.

• Take, for example, my coworker Thomas Anckorn’s experience with self-hosting his personal site on a Raspberry Pi in his own house, or Brayden Wilmoth recreating the Instant Messenger experience you fondly remember. It’s the year of personal software. I cannot think of a time when I’ve seen tech be this playful, and I’m here for it.

• At Law & Liberty, David D. Corey (a Baylor prof and Waco local!) and Dominic M.M. Saunders defend pop music as music. I resonated with this, especially because the contrast they cite as prototypical of what people point out as the difference between pop and classical is the inverse of my listening habits; I’ve actively listened to Thrice’s Horizons/West multiple times, while Vikingur Olafsson’s (admittedly excellent) performances of Bach are what I put on when I need to focus on something else.

• Speaking of music, my friend Tommy recently turned me on to Charmer, a fine example of midwest emo that’s been around for a decade and surprisingly escaped my notice this whole time.

• I wrote about embracing and mastering technology on my blog the other week. Most of this has borne out, though I wound up keeping Spotify since Jenoa maintains a Duo account, and she’s not about to make the leap to the Jellyfin server any time soon.

  

• Finally, I’m excited to announce that I’m joining Mockingbird Ministries as fractional CTO. I’ll still be working at Cloudflare, but I’m honored to give some of my time to accelerate delivering the message of God’s grace for you. Exciting things are to come, starting with a refreshed Mockingapp. Stay tuned for more.

Thanks for reading. And if you’re building something good, true, and beautiful and could use someone to steward the technology side of things, feel free to respond to this email or drop a line at Kalos.

Cheers,

Robbie

I’m getting this entry out at a later hour than planned (but still on Friday!). Work has been ramping up for an exciting start to the new year. We’re welcoming our first batch of 1,111 interns for 2026. And after some high profile outages in last couple months of 2025 (if you wondered why you couldn’t use Spotify for a few hours on November 18, that’s why), we’re kicking our resilience plans into gear.

This is a tech-heavy entry, probably because that’s largely where my head’s been at this week. I’ll get those out of the way first.

• We’ve widely adopted Opencode at work, and my colleague Sunil wrote a cogent blog about what do-to-day engineering work looks like now. Although I don’t primarily write code for my job anymore, Opencode + Claude Opus 4.5 with MCP servers is already radically changing my workflow. It’s simultaneously enabling me to be more “stream of consciousness” in how I make decisions and be more organized as a result.

• Internet censorship in the EU has been in and out of the news cycle over the last few months. It’s been fairly abstract until this week, when Italy chose to fine Cloudflare $17 million for not acquiescing to their demand that we not only deny services to customers on-demand without any due process, but that we censor any site on-demand from our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver, not just for Italy, but globally. I’m grateful for our leadership taking a principled stand against this overreach. The open web and free speech go hand in hand.

Okay, still with me?

• Brett McKay wrote a great list of things to give up in 2026. All of these are fantastic suggestions, and I’ll be trying to give up more than a few (except #16. Unlike Brett, I am not a teetotaler).

• Joel Miller’s suggestions for reading more are very handy. I’m already reaping the fruits of #3, “switch formats”, but reading The Count of Monte Cristo on my phone’s Kindle app rather than falling into a scroll-vortext.

That’s it for this week. Have a restful weekend. Read a book. Go outside. Have a coupla beers. Take life seriously, not yourself.

-Robbie

We closed out 2025 with my ideal party: surrounded by friends, drinking batched cocktails, eating decadent finger-food, encircled by near-feral children, and in bed by 9:30pm.

I have some fun and exciting plans for 2026, and I hope you do too. Today is my son’s first birthday. It’s wild to think how radically different our life is today than it was a year ago. The fact that it’s nearly 80 degrees Fahrenheit outside today in Waco, whereas it snowed in Austin the week we brought the boy home just accentuates this.

Here are some things I’ve found compelling this past week. Have a great weekend!

• My favorite fitness blogger, Mythical Strength, wrote some excellent thoughts on things he believes at age 40. I’m taking some of this to heart as I pursue my own strength goals this year.

• Alan Jacobs points out the error of experts acting as experts outside their own expertise, and how it serves to undermine social trust of actual expertise. Behavior like he identifies has caused me to lose respect for a number of writers and thinkers over the last decade.

• Speaking of trust, Mike Pesca on the faux-outrage over Bari Weiss’s editorial decisions at 60 minutes, and the falsehoods such outrage promulgated, poignantly demonstrates why many Americans continue to distrust entrenched legacy media.

• While the news cycle perpetuates a narrative of unceasing decline, it’s important to be reminded of the good things that happened.

• Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen have introduced a grant for artists building an aesthetics for the twenty-first century. Given the drab sameness of everything (see the evolution of McDonald’s below), I’m curious to see what comes out of this.

• Mediaeval Baebes provided much of the soundtrack this Christmas.

Today is the second day of Christmas, which also coincides with my birthday. This year marks 35 trips around the sun.

As the last entry mentioned, like most years, it’s been a year of change — we welcomed Isaac, moved to Waco, traveled a bunch, and I started a new role at work – but also burgeoning normalcy. We Saps have felt more settled and stable than we have in a very long time. Lord willing, 2026 will be a year of digging deeper where we’re already planted.

After a brief hiatus, I’ve been rebuilding the writing muscle again. Accompanying this has been a refresh of my online presence. I finally refreshed my homepage and relaunched my personal blog. I’ve also reverted this newsletter back to the name Robbie Rambles to give it a more personal focus (Sonar was a fun experiment, and while I have ideas for what could be done with that brand, I’ve chosen to retire it for now).

I’m treating the blog as a “personal workshop”, consisting of half-baked ideas and throwaway thoughts. You’re more than welcome to subscribe there via the RSS feed, but the plan is that what starts there will be further developed into more coherent essays here in the newsletter. There is no set cadence for those. However, I do plan to return to a weekly publishing frequency here for sharing links and saying hi.

On a final note, I also want to share that I’m open for technology and storytelling consulting work at my new venture, KALOS. I’ve begun doing some preliminary work for a client there that I look forward to sharing more about in the new year. Something I’ve noticed is that there are many organizations, ministries, non-profits, and small businesses doing meaningful work that also have non-trivial technology needs, but often lack one or all of the following:

1. The knowledge and skills to meet those needs.

2. The resources to bring on someone full-time to meet those needs.

3. Someone who has the skills to meet those needs and is aligned with (or at the very least appreciates) their mission.
   KALOS exists to provide fractional technology services to mission-oriented organizations and businesses by acting not just as “freelancer”, but by stewarding those needs as an embedded partner with your team.

Examples of services we (i.e. mostly me for now) provide include software development, website design + development, hosting management, technology strategy, copywriting, and social media.

As I mentioned, we’re primarily looking to work with mission-oriented organizations and businesses (think churches, private schools, ministries, non-profits, and local businesses), but if you or anyone you know could use our help, feel free to reply to this email or drop a line to robbie@kalos.build.

Thanks for reading. I hope you and yours have had a blessed Christmas. And even if it feels like you haven’t, know that the Light of Christmas is there in the darkness.

And get your ass in church. As the South Bend Shovel Slayer said to Kevin McCallister, “Well, this is the place to be if you’re feeling bad about yourself.”

Merry Christmas y’all. Cheers.

-R

Hi friends,

I’m writing to you from Waco, TX. It’s been a little over six months since I wrote my last ‘stack. In that time, the Saps have relocated from Austin to Waco, road tripped through the southwest, spent three weeks in California, and swam for countless hours at Waco Surf. I’m currently on the last week of my summer stint of paternity leave (Cloudflare is very generous, and it’s widely considered one of the best places for working parents).

It feels like the only constant in our life for a very long time has been change. Since deciding to leave Virginia for Texas at the start of 2024, we’ve moved a total of four times. Career turbulence led us to Austin, where I landed a job with Cloudflare. While my time with Cloudflare has been an unqualified blessing, Austin, despite its many benefits, was not a good fit for our family. We’ve been in Waco’s orbit for a number of years now, and even considered moving here in 2019 prior to Jenoa getting a job at Christ Episcopal Church in Charlottesville. Waco’s proximity to both family in Glen Rose and my office in Austin, low cost of living, a welcoming parish that preaches the gospel, and over family-friendliness has made it a good fit for us. In many ways, it feels like we’re finally home.

That’s not to say life has been without change, though. When I return to work next Monday, I’ll be starting a new role within Cloudflare: as an engineering manager on the Cloudflare Workers Builds and Automation team. I’ve worked in software development for over nine years now, and have even done some engineering management, but I felt that it was time to double down on my work and take the next step. I’ve always enjoyed by leading and empowering people, and wanted to try my hand working as a force multiplier of other developers. Cloudflare’s mix of scale, agility, and impact have energized me in a way that no other company has, and I’m excited by the opportunity and challenge to help grow our developer platform.

Another, more subtle change, has been in my reading, writing, and thinking habits. I think this has been a long time coming, but Isaac’s birth finally accelerated it.

I struggle to articulate the change, but the best way I can say it is that “critique” no longer interests me. For a long time I drew a sense of identity from being an observer of culture/society and riffing on its shortcomings. As an English major, I think I always felt a perverse sense of pride that I was more clever than others. Through asking “big questions” and lamenting the “commodification” of things, I thought I could “see through” the bullshit out there.

I think I still feel this tendency, but it bores me now. That’s not to say I don’t have opinions — I still very much do. But I don’t think I have much to say that other voices aren’t already saying ad nauseam.

Being a parent of two children has forcefully reminded me of my limits, both in time and energy. When I say “time”, I don’t mean in the “there’s not enough hours in the day to do everything I want” sense (though I certainly feel that at times). I mean in my mortality. I’ve come to realize that I get one shot at all of this, and how I choose to spend my thoughts and actions is how I choose to spend my life.

Watching Etta and Isaac grow has made me intensely aware of my finitude. It’s been a forcing function for me to ask what I want my impact to have been when everything is said and done. What do I want my legacy to be?

I don’t write any of this to disparage the work others are doing asking big questions about society, technology, philosophy — maybe I’ll even do that myself sometimes if I find it fruitful. But for myself and my relationships (what in F3 we call a man’s concentrica), I have to ruthlessly ask if a given activity is going to build and strengthen them.

I don’t know where that leaves this newsletter. I really do enjoy writing. But I’m not sure I have anything to say in this season, and I’m okay with that. I think the words of the Teacher are a fitting close:

The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd. And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.

And those of the Revelator:

And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.

<3

Robbie

In general, the ideology is identified as a politically right-wing phenomenon, grounded in a belief that America is an inherently Christian nation and that our laws should reflect said heritage. Common policy positions associated with Christian Nationalism are opposition to legal abortion and hostility to progressive ideas around gender and sexuality. The presidency of Donald Trump spurred considerable anxiety around the ideology, and provided fodder for a number of books about the topic.

Evangelicalism, the stream of Christianity largely associated with Christian Nationalism, is fractured among multiple lines concerning it. Personally, I have never met someone who identifies as a Christian Nationalist, even among those who supported Donald Trump’s presidency. That said, self-identified Evangelicals make up a significant portion of Trump’s base. In his first term, the general argument was that he was the least bad option and would advance a pro-life agenda in the federal government by appointing judges who would overturn Roe v Wade (which did occur), but that assertion is more or less moot now that his influence has managed to erase it from the GOP’s national platform. In his second term, the argument now seems to operate from the premise that politics are upstream of culture, and that his presidency would facilitate an environment that’s more amenable to Christian belief than a Democratic administration would.

However, the fracturing among Evangelicals shows when you consider public figures like Russell Moore and David French, who have come out strongly against Trump’s influence in Evangelical circles. These figures tend to be pro-life, still self-identify as Evangelical and, in the case of French, hold to a neoconservative political agenda that’s reminiscent of the Bush years in the early 2000s. Finally you have more “progressive” Evangelicals or “ex-vangelicals” who’ve taken harder lines against Evangelicalism as a whole, and believe its theological foundations are fundamentally noxious and oppressive.

The notion that one’s Christian beliefs should have influence in the life of the polis is nothing new — the question is rather one of scope and intensity. There are those who would argue that we should display the Ten Commandments in front of courthouses. Others contend that Christ’s sermon on the mount should be our lodestar. Progressive partisans often argue that religion should be “kept out” of politics, but this is fundamentally silly — a representative democracy assumes rule by the demos, and it’s only logical that the beliefs of the people concerning the common good will manifest in how they choose to vote. You can rage against “populism” all you like, but as Curtis Yarvin points out, the line between democracy and populism is relatively nonexistent. The more honest debate would be whose populism.

The United States is not strictly a democracy though — it is a constitutional republic. Both the right and the left love to invoke the constitution when it serves their ends, and decry it when it does not (right and left examples for those who wish for examples in mainstream media).

The debate around the role of religion in policy making is made all the more interesting to me thanks to recent comments made by Bishop Mariann Budde during a prayer service at the National Cathedral in Washington DC. During her prayer and sermon, she invoked concerns around LGBTQ rights and the treatment of illegal immigrants under the new administration. On the left, many called her “courageous”, while Trump and figures on the right demanded an apology. Of course, calls for censure are ludicrous — she exercised a constitutional right to free speech and redress of grievances in the most direct way possible, to the leader of the free world. Similarly, while it certainly took some guts, Bishop Budde also holds a powerful position in a powerful institution, the Episcopal Church, and stood to gain substantial accolades from her likeminded liberal protestant peers and airtime in likeminded media outlets.

What’s interesting to me though, is that she did what many say we ought not do — she brought her religion to politics. If you know the history of protestantism in the United States, this is unsurprising. The early 20th century saw the emergence of the “Social Gospel” movement, which sought to ameliorate societal ills with Christian ethics. It was coterminous with the emergence of disenchanted thought in increasingly liberalizing seminaries that sought to diminish, if not deny outright, many supernatural elements of the Christian faith, such as the virgin birth, miracles, and even the resurrection. J. Gresham Machen, a Presbyterian New Testament scholar, addressed this trend head-on in his book Christianity and Liberalism, and was in turn skeptical of any co-mingling of religion and politics, and opposed Bible instruction in public schools.

The roots of the problem go deeper however. Ivan Illich was a Catholic priest and intellectual who identified western civilization itself as a perversion of Christianity. For Illich, the Christian gospel was fundamentally subversive of all political projects. David Cayley, Illich’s close collaborator, writes,

The proper vocation of the Church, [Illich] said, is not to instruct the world, guide its political and social orientation, or provide it with services. All these activities inevitably require the exercise of power and inevitably generate ideological division. The cross, for Illich, stands for the renunciation of power.

For Illich, Christianity was fundamentally anti-ethical, for ethics are “maxims that expressed an ethos, the spirit of a people in a place…”. In the parable of the good Samaritan, and in his conduct toward people, Jesus shows a fundamental disregard for all sorts of ethical proscriptions. He engages with and welcomes both Zealots and tax collectors, who were as fierce political enemies as one could imagine. He destroys all limits and summons us to love the other, whomever that other may be. However, Illich also understands how disruptive and even destructive the institutionalization of such a command may be.

To touch on comments recently made by Vice President J.D. Vance concerning how Christianity has an idea of order of loves, the whole “ordo amoris” debate fundamentally misses the point. Even if you believe that you should love your family first, then neighbor, etc, the attempt to institutionalize love invariably unleashes evils that the best intentions cannot foresee.

The parable of the good Samaritan undermines ethics around who one’s neighbor is by prioritizing the person right in front of you, regardless of whom they may be. But to enforce it as policy would be another blunder in the history of western civilization, which has sought to enact heaven on earth since the time of Constantine.

Neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament were written to people living in a western liberal democracy, and any political theology that neglects to remember this point has already lost the plot (I might even argue that “political theology” is inherently oxymoronic). The Hebrew Bible was a theocracy that upheld the dignity of the immigrant and marginalized, but also enforced strict ethical guidelines that maintained ethnic identity. The New Testament is a collection of mostly letters written to a people who received and spread the message of God’s welcome of all people into his kingdom, one that is fundamentally not of this world.

This reality leaves us in a messy situation, and I don’t have answers for public policy. For me, the main takeaway is that politics is fundamentally a distraction. Your responsibility is to your neighbor. And who is your neighbor?

I’ll leave you to answer that.

Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin, TX, where even we are not immune from the frigid temperatures hitting much of our country.

It’s been a couple of months since my last essay, so I thought I would check in here and update you on what’s going on in the Sap household.

Isaac Gerhard Sapunarich

A big thing happened at the start of this month — we welcomed Isaac Gerhard Sapunarich into the world at 12:57pm on January 2, 2025.

After a slightly extended hospital stay (4 days total) due to elevated bilirubin levels that required phototherapy, Isaac came home to our current residence in Austin where we’ve been adjusting to life with a newborn and a toddler. He’s a pretty chill baby, and interrupted sleep notwithstanding, this transition has been less disruptive than Etta’s arrival. Paternity leave for me has consisted of lots of cozy days on the couch reading, watching movies, and getting outside to parks with the kiddos any time the sun breaks through.

Isaac’s name means “son of laughter”, which makes complete sense if you know his mother at all. It was fortuitous that I was reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation when he arrived. Also, how cool is the vintage paperback copy that Jenoa bought me for my birthday?

His middle name, Gerhard, was something that we vacillated about in the days leading up to his birth, but it’s a continuation of the pattern we began with his sister (”Etta” is short for “Henrietta”, in honor of Henri Nouwen). Isaac Gerhard is named for the Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde, whose impact on Jenoa and me is hard to overstate. His book, *On Being a Theologian of the Cross,* is a short but dense read that I like to say began my theological “red-pilling”. I remember it being passed around years ago at the now defunct Mars Hill Church, where a “theology of glory” was more formative than a “theology of the cross”. I have my theories of how and why this book began making the rounds in that community, which are too speculative for publication, but I will say that if its message of God’s radical grace hadn’t seeded itself in my mind back then, I’m not sure my life would have taken the trajectory it has. And I don’t mean this in the “this book saved my faith” sense — though perhaps it hard a part in that — I mean it impacted my life in very concrete ways. Without Forde’s seeding influence and the crop of theologians that occupied the same milieu, I don’t think I would have been exposed to Mockingbird Ministries, which took Jenoa and me to Charlottesville years ago. But all that notwithstanding, I think Forde is an underappreciated theologian who understood the undconditionality of the gospel — God loves you, God forgives you, and there is nothing you can do about it. If nominative determinism is a thing, I can’t think of a better message for my son to bear with him.

2025 Reading and Writing Plans

I still plan to write about “faith and futures” here, broadly considered. I have some thoughts brewing about work in the software space. But I also plan to orient my reading this year towards literature, philosophy, theology, and the humanities. So expect a lot of that. Here’s a taste of my planned reading for this year.

• The Story of Philosophy – Will Durant

• Plato’s Republic

• A Canticle for Leibowitz — Walter M. Miller, Jr.

• Foundation trilogy — Isaac Asimov (some interesting thematic overlap between these and Leibowitz)

• The Beginning of Infinity — David Deutsch

• The Complete Father Brown — G.K. Chesterton

• Paradise Lost — John Milton

Of course, I’m a big fan of Alan Jacobs dictum to “read on a whim”, so all of this is subject to change, but I am trying to be a bit more deliberate in what I read and think about this year.

That’s it for this edition. I return to work in February, where I’m looking forward to seeing my colleagues again and hope my sleep deprivation doesn’t lead to too much technical debt. Thanks for reading, here’s to new things in 2025.

Cheers,

Robbie

Since the pandemic, pundits have weighed the benefits and drawbacks of remote vs in-office work to no end. Those on team-remote cite better work-life balance, fewer ad-hoc interruptions, and a wider potential talent pool as reasons to cancel commercial real estate deals and furnish everyone with home office stipends. The onsite advocates contend that collaboration, engagement, and productivity suffer when people communicate asynchronously and attend virtual meetings with their camera off.

For the eight years I’ve worked in software development, at least half of that time has been remote. My first dev job had me onsite, but there was considerable flexibility. We had two main offices — Huntington Beach, CA and Boulder, CO, but we also had a number of employees, particularly on the sales team, who worked remotely. The engineering team was mostly colocated — primarily in Huntington Beach, with a few UI-oriented devs in Boulder. My manager, who was arguably the most senior engineer, worked remotely, but had started onsite before moving out of state. After a few months of working there though, I negotiated permission to work from home a couple of days per week, for the sole purpose of the benefits it brought me — time to attend to house chores, run errands, and avoid a commute. When I moved to Charlottesville, I became a fully remote employee, though I flew back to CA twice and to a conference with some teammates before taking a job with a local startup. This second job was also in-office, but also afforded considerable flexibility.

In both of these roles, remote work was seen as a benefit primarily to the employee. It was a bidirectional signal of trust and respect, a byproduct of a culture that cared about outcomes rather than inputs, and assumed the best of team members. While some people maintained that they were more productive without the distractions of an open office, for the most part there was a shared consensus that we were at our best when we were working together. Zoom was a poor substitute for a conference room with a whiteboard.

Once the pandemic began stretching into the summer though, there seemed to be a shift in the collective consciousness of tech workers. We became increasingly insistent that we could execute equally well in our housebound condition. And in fairness, my colleagues did continue to do some remarkable work, especially given the disorienting hyperreality of contagion, riots, and unrest that our smartphones constantly reminded us about Tack on near-zero interest rates and an influx of cash that fueled a hiring bubble, many of us in software development felt nearly invincible for a couple of years. In the minds of many, remote work was here to stay, regardless of what the future held.

When the interest rates rose along with inflation, however, the fragility and transience of our situation became increasingly apparent. Along with layoffs and declining job postings came return to office mandates. It was at this point that the fissures began to show. Employees who were hired as remote were given a timeline to relocate. Others, who had moved to more remote environs to escape the urban grind were told they would need to commute in again.

Some of these announcements were handled poorly — that I won’t dispute. Some might even contend that they acted as “soft layoffs”, compelling employees to resign without needing to pay unemployment insurance. Given these realities, it’s no surprise to me that many feel suspicious at best toward their employers.

But what I find frustrating about the discourse as it stands is what I consider to be disingenuousness on the part of many remote advocates. Prior to 2020, I rarely encountered people who considered a virtual meeting to be as good as sitting alongside someone. In my first job, we eagerly awaited our engineering summits and team gatherings. Aside from the camaraderie and good times that were had, it was also a time to lock in and collectively gain clarity about what we were doing and why.

In my current role, my immediate team is fully distributed. I have colleagues on the west coast and the east coast, elsewhere in Texas, and in Portugal. Given the disparate timezones, it makes our excellence at execution all the more impressive, in my opinion. My role is technically based out of the Austin office, but I’m allowed to work from home as I like. This is something I take advantage of, especially when life admin things like doctor’s appointments and childcare hiccups occur.

But most days, I choose to go into the office.

There are a few reasons for this. One is that, despite having a shed in the backyard (the “casita”) that acts as a guest room, library, and home office, the presence of young children is a distraction. I think most working parents would agree with me on this. Second, I do well in dedicated environments — when I’m at the office, I’m there to work. Finally though, I like going into the office because there are teams adjacent to mine who work there, and it’s an opportunity to build relationships. The benefits of small talk at the coffee maker and impromptu lunches compound.

Most significantly, though, just as art by humans is made all the more valuable because of AI-generated art, I would argue that embodiment is a superpower in an abstract world. It’s a trust-building mechanism to encounter someone in their dis-intermediated form when you are accustomed to interacting with pixelated avatars. Through handshakes, eye contact, and just shooting the shit, one can build connections that Zoom cannot replicate.

This isn’t to say that you can’t succeed as a remote team. I’ve seen it happen, and I think it has its benefits. But the consensus on my team is nearly universal that we want to meet one another in person someday. And it’s not just for the food and drinks on the company dime and time (though who doesn’t love that), it’s also because we know that embodiment provides the highest fidelity signal, no matter how well reconstructed digital signals may be of their analog counterparts.

If you want to stand out from the machines, stand next to another person.

— Revelation 21:3-4

“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.’ Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.”

— James 4:13-17

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

— David Foster Wallace

Why build?

It may seem like a strange question. Building is an activity inherent throughout nature—beavers construct dams, primates fashion tools, and humans have developed layers of abstraction that have resulted in our current civilization. Without building, we would lack homes, meals, and medicine. We wouldn't have the stories we tell or even the wars we fight. The instinct to build—to create—appears primal.

For Christians, however, the question of building warrants careful consideration. When we build, we must ask about the purpose—the "telos"—of our project. Scripture offers several notable building stories: Noah's ark, the tower of Babel, and Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. Each of these projects had a distinct end in mind. Noah built to preserve life, the people of Babel sought to reach the heavens, and Solomon constructed a place for worship and a focal point for God's presence on earth.

For Christians, building warrants careful consideration because we know the telos—the ultimate purpose—of history: the final judgment and the reconciliation of all things in heaven and on earth through Christ. We understand the end of the story. Unlike the ancients before Christ who believed in an endless cycle, we see history as having a clear direction and purpose.

The early church was keenly aware of this, and lived like it. They pooled their resources communally and lived as though the second coming of Jesus was imminent. Now, 2000 years later, we find ourselves still awaiting his return. In can feel interminable, futile even. But it is nonetheless a true promise, one we return to church every Sunday to be reminded of and affirm together at the Eucharist when we proclaim the mystery of faith — that “Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again”.

But if we know the end of the story, does that not make the creation of new things superfluous? Is it not a waste of time to construct buildings, launch rockets, or develop novel means of exchange? Is the design and development of new technology little more than arrogant boasting, as St. James warns us?

I think, for Christians, the answer as to why we should build for the future lies in the novel understanding of time that the Gospel introduced to humanity. To revisit David Foster Wallace’s joke about fish in water, the idea of history as having an innate linear direction is very much like the water in which we swim. The notion of progress — political, economic, moral, technological — is something we take for granted, but is not in fact a given. Momentum toward some end is a deeply Christian idea. But the modern notion of progress is in a sense something that was hijacked from Christianity. This was one of the reasons that the Catholic priest and philosopher Ivan Illich identified modernity as essentially a corruption of Christianity.

But in 2024, we’re living in a moment of narrative collapse. The shared understanding of history that was common in the west has slowly been eroding since the World Wars, and that erosion of common understanding has only accelerated and continues to accelerate. For many, especially those who are younger, the notion that history has any momentum toward a shared hope seems increasingly remote.

I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. Politics and economics are false messiahs that we’ve arguably placed our faith in, unconsciously, for a long time. Technology can just as easily be one of these false messiahs too.

But I think technology also presents a unique opportunity for Christians to proclaim, in a unique way, the promise of God in Christ for all of history again. Whether its building dwellings on the moon, harnessing nuclear fission for clean and abundant energy, programming new currencies, or 3D printing a church, all these projects are done with a view to posterity. They entail the belief that, God willing, there will be a tomorrow.

He asked me if I had heard of Udio. I said I hadn’t. He asked me to describe a song. I told him “a pop punk song about buying an energy drink at 7/11”. He pulled up the site, entered the prompt, and in about a minute the program spit out multiple 30 second clips matching the description of what I had requested.

I wasn’t surprised (we’ve all known about the capabilities of generate AI models for a couple of years now), but I was nonetheless disturbed. The clips sounded polished and well-produced. They were convincing, easily capable of passing a punk rock Turing test. Granted, they were just clips, not full songs, but we were just using the free tier.

He noted how if he were just passively listening to a Spotify playlist, the songs that we generated would have slotted in perfectly. We quickly returned to listen to a live version of “Bertha” by the Grateful Dead, and that was the extent of our discussion.

I have a good many creative friends who are artists, musicians, and writers of various genres, and they’re generally troubled by the capabilities of generative AI, understandably so. When you’ve worked hard to hone a craft, encountering an automaton that produces in seconds some semblance what would take you hours, days, or weeks is demoralizing. And it provokes the question — why should anyone engage with a work when they can just as easily consume a nearly perfect simulacrum?

It seems like an obvious question, but I have never been interested in reading an AI generated story or listening to an AI generated song, and AI generated art…bores me.

Why?

I think that is a more interesting question.

Nick Cave once famously replied that a “song” generated by ChatGPT “in the style of Nick Cave” will “always be a replication, a kind of burlesque”. Why is this? The answer, according to Cave, is suffering:

Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.

Cave is right — even AGI could never have true interiority because it is developed on a model of human consciousness that assumes we are no more than calculating machines. It is a model of consciousness that is grounded in a purely mechanistic understanding of the world — an understanding that, when probed, cannot account for its veracity on its own terms.

In my opinion, generative AI has only amplified the value of truly human excellence. If a machine can generate bits that are in turn transformed into any analog signal that one can imagine, then it will flood the market with slop. In turn, true originality will only become more scarce and more valuable.

When I say “valuable”, I think it remains to be seen how this shakes out in economic terms — that is something we will need to decide for ourselves. But speaking for myself, I’m doubling down on listening to music and reading words that I know have breathing, suffering souls behind them. And this choice isn’t even out of a conscious defiance of “big tech” — it’s simply that the internet has become so flooded with generic generative garbage that any human signal in the midst of it is all the more desirable to me.

Photo by Dylan Hunter on Unsplash

Could I be getting fooled by a Turing test? Maybe. But that’s just an opportunity for humans to dig deeper into the wells that make them who they are. Sure, it’s frustrating that the mainstream job markets for creatives in industries like film and television are not as lucrative as they once were, but that market was already following a similar trajectory before AI developments (IMHO Netflix was already inundated with “slop”).

We’re working on the frontiers of technological developments that are causing disruption in often imperceptible ways. The ossified institutional vanguards that have always operated out of self-interest and self-preservation are certainly looking to leverage these developments to benefit themselves without regard for creatives or consumers. But we also can control what we put into our heads and build with our hands. It’s totally possible for us to use these developments to disrupt them instead.

A quick aside before we jump into this issue. You may have noticed a changing of name and branding on here. Robbie Rambles is now SONAR, a newsletter exploring the intersections of faith, technology, philosophy, and society. This one is heavy on the “society” piece, with a fair bit of “faith”, but I look forward to writing to you next week about a less tendentious topic. Stay well my friends.

Robbie

I generally dislike contemporary American partisan politics. But, seeing as we’re coming up on an election and our senses are assaulted with a cacophony of demands on our attention, I thought I’d try to add some signal in the midst of the noise.

You’ve no doubt already heard that this is the most important election of your lifetime. That democracy itself is on the ballot. That if candidate-of-choice does not win, this will be the last election of your lifetime. And, if you’re religious, that a vote for the other candidate is, in fact, a sin.

I’m writing to say it’s a distraction.

Because here’s the thing — regardless of your persuasion, you’ve probably heard these sentiments. I’ve been inclined towards both major partisan positions at various times and they seem to be equally vociferous in their assertions. And I’ve even seen progressive partisans adopt a degree of religious fearmongering on behalf of their preferred candidate that’s akin to the neocon fundamentalism of the early 2000s. These assertions are meant to instill fear. And fear is distracting.

It distracts us from the world as it actually is. It hijacks our most base neurobiology that was developed to respond to immediate physical threats. It distorts our perceptions of good and evil. It deliberately obfuscates and elides. It’s meant to undermine your agency by channeling your energy toward an activity that is mostly inconsequential at best. Time that could be spent creating, cultivating, or caring is spent stewing in a mess of fear and bitterness.

The grand ideological conflicts of history may have the appearance of resurfacing, but the reality is that global technological capitalism has become such an enveloping force that it mostly doesn’t matter who is elected. They’re not even pawns, because that would imply the existence of a human player with intent. The currents of power are beyond any one person. Agency over scale is something that we may desire, but is illusory. It’s a desire that’s stoked in order to turn us against our neighbor. But we wrestle not against flesh and blood.

I will not tell you how to vote. I will not even tell you to vote. Because I ultimately believe our agency is best put to use by tending to one another in more immediate ways. It’s best put to use by figuring out how to carve out space and build something good, true, and beautiful in the midst of evil, lies, and ugliness.

And for my Christian readers, I will say this. Your vote may be sinful. Your non-vote may be sinful — it’s hard to say since our religion wasn’t birthed in a liberal democracy. Either way, your sin is also forgiven. And so is the sin of those who voted for the other guy. God will judge us all. And God forgives us all.

The notion of a “master plan” connotes a mental model of a town or city with manageable, discrete components. Such components might relate to one another, but in hierarchical and predictable ways. Mathematically, such a model of a city could be thought of as a “tree”.

Christopher Alexander was an architect and design theorist who caught on to this notion, making it a core piece of his thesis for his 1965 essay, “A City Is Not a Tree.” Alexander contrasts two different structures as mental models for cities — trees and semilattices. He writes:

Both the tree and the semilattice are ways of thinking about a how a large collections of many small systems goes to make up a large and complex system. More generally, they are both names for structures of sets. … When the elements of a set belong together because they operate or work together somehow, we call the set of elements a system.

That sounds fairly abstract, but he provides the reader with the concrete example of an actual street corner to illustrate his point. The intersection of Hearst and Euclid in Berkeley, CA, at the time of writing, included a drugstore, a traffic light, and a newsrack in the drugstore entrance. He writes:

When the light is red, people who are waiting to cross the street stand idly by the light; and since they have nothing to do, they look at the papers displayed on the newsrack which they can see from where they stand. Some of them just read the headlines, others actually buy a paper while they wait.

Despite it being 2024 rather than 1965, we can still see his point. (Tangentially, I’m writing this in the Notion app, and the spell checker does not recognize “newsrack”.) The individual elements of the street corner interact in an emergent way, forming a system. Other examples of urban systems that he gives include

…the set of particles which go to make up a building; the set of particles which go to make up a human body; the cars on the freeway, plus the people in them, plus the freeway they are driving on; two friends on the phone, plus the telephones they hold, plus the telephone line connecting them…

You get the idea. And for Alexander, these elements overlap in multiple interlocking ways, while all still being core elements of a city. It is unfathomably complex.

A tree, on the other hand, is comparatively structurally simple. According to Alexander, the mental model that many designers bring to urban planning is that of a tree, because the human mind innately tends toward simplification.

Alexander’s influence and insights aren’t limited to urban planning and architecture either — he’s very influential in the fields of computer science, design, and even religion. The fourth volume of his opus, The Nature of Order, veers into the realms of cosmology and human perception, arguing that human consciousness is “inextricably joined to the substrate of matter, present in all matter.” In his view, humans naturally build with the grain of the universe.

In my parish’s Sunday school class on sacred architecture, our teacher, Dr. Nathan Jennings, argued that this is partly why what we build often ends up looking like things we see in our nature. It’s not that there’s necessarily a conscious, deliberate parallel between, let’s say, the columns of a church and the trees in the woods that surround it, but simply that humans, being a part of nature and not something other than it, replicate the patterns of the natural world of which they are apart.

Dr. Jennings introduced the class to the work of Alexander as relevant to church architecture. He explained how Alexander attributes much of our modern malaise to a built environment that is distinctly at odds with a human way of being in the world — that, to paraphrase Dr. Jennings, maybe we’re so depressed because we spend most of our time in concrete boxes under fluorescent lights. Alexander deeply understood how the built environment affects people.

Alexander’s work sought to define architecture from “first principles”. He found the scientific positivism that was intellectually en vogue throughout his education was insufficient for formulating those first principles. Such an understanding even led him to see architecture as an attestation to the existence of God as a necessity of the universe. From Alexander’s work, we could infer that an inhuman built environment that is at odds with the grain of nature is anti-God, because it is a design contrary to the fundamental designs of nature, a nature that has God as the ground of its being. He departed from the strictly mechanistic and compartmentalized worldview that dominated the intellectual zeitgeist of his time. He became principally concerned with human healing and wholeness. You could say he exchanged his tree-like mental model for that of a semilattice.

His spiritual explication of architecture contained in it a critique of what he saw as the egocentric and deracinated theory and practice of architecture that was dominant in the twentieth century. He endured criticism and censure from colleagues. Nonetheless, he remained committed to the pursuit of the truth he perceived in nature. He writes that he was able “through contemplation of the whole, to emerge into the light of day with a view of things that is both visionary and empirical.” The visionary view is able to see the underlying, uniting patterns that the empirical gaze is inherently prevented from seeing.

But “visionary” also has another sense, of being able to envision the future. Thus, to build the future requires a visionary capability. Yes, one must also have empirical knowledge to manipulate and properly handle the world’s material. But because the empirical only measures what is, one must engage the visionary sense to perceive what could be. It requires looking at the connections, overlaps, and patterns that make up the world. It requires seeing things as a lattice, not a tree.

Though most of us probably don’t aspire to build a cathedral, it’s unlikely he’s alone in his fascination. It’s hard to imagine one not being overcome with awe at the sight of a cathedral.

For all their majesty, however, cathedrals are but one example of sacred architecture — indeed, the only thing that functionally separates cathedrals from other churches is that a cathedral is a church where a bishop’s seat resides. All churches have historically been designed in a thoughtful, theologically informed manner.

While this may have been true in the past, many churches nowadays simply imitate the architectural patterns of their surroundings. If you look at the interior of a non-denominational evangelical church chosen at random from any American city, you’d more easily guess that it was the setting for a TED talk rather than a liturgical space.

There are arguably theological reasons at root for this difference, and I have no interest in casting aspersions on those churches. However, I think something is lost when a sacramental understanding of the built environment is wholly abandoned for reasons of expediency or just ignorance.

Thoughts have begun circulating in my head recently about architecture, the environment and theology since our church, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church has been discussing sacred architecture as part of our Sunday school class. The occasion for this topic is our parish’s recent completion of an initial capital campaign for our new building. Capital campaigns for buildings aren’t particularly uncommon, but there are peculiarities to the initiative at St. Mark’s that have piqued my interest in new ways.

For starters, our current building needs it. Last year a pew collapsed beneath a parishioner. I’ve been told there are telephone poles in the foundation. And, rumor has it that a furry critter lives somewhere in the ceiling above the rector’s office.

What I think is especially interesting, though, is that our church has partnered with ICON for the construction of our new grounds. What makes ICON’s work unique is the underlying technology with which the construct things — they 3D print new buildings. The technology, aside from various cost efficiencies, allow for ambitious design possibilities that would otherwise be impossible or cost prohibitive with traditional materials. Aside from St. Mark’s they’ve also picked up a contract from NASA to build dwellings on the moon.

This project sits at an interest intersection of religion and technology. As I said before, it’s got my head buzzing with thoughts. It’s got me asking questions about what a deeply and distinctly Christian engagement with futurism and deep tech looks like. What does a “theology for builders” entail? What are the promises and pitfalls of techno-optimism? Is there a better way forward for humanity than unthinking technocracy or reactionary techno-pessimism?

I expect to explore these questions in future missives. Stay tuned.

Some quick business — if this is your first time receiving a missive from Robbie Rambles, welcome! You were previously a subscriber to (and likely participant of) The Gap Year. If you’re interested in what Robbie, Jenoa, and the Sap clan are up to (along with hearing Robbie’s thoughts about…anything), this is the place to follow. If you don’t want another thing in your inbox, you can unsubscribe below. If you’d like to hear a general life update, I encourage you to check out this post. If you’d like to hear my thoughts about why a life of the mind is not mutually exclusive of a fully embodied life, keep reading!

Much love,

Robbie

Embracing Physicality

For much of my life I valued knowledge. Perhaps I’d been something of a gnostic. I kept the life of the body at bay. I’m not sure why this was. My parents encouraged physical activity when I was young, and enrolled me in youth sports. The also encouraged my early adolescent interests in skateboarding and surfing. And for a brief season, around ages fourteen to fifteen, I even took my health somewhat seriously, going so far as to attempt to meet the BUD/S admission standards and eliminating soda from my diet. But I was never naturally athletic. So, along with an increased focus on playing music around the age of sixteen, I think my gradual shift toward a “life of the mind” developed as a sort of defense mechanism. If I couldn’t outrun or out-lift or out-throw others, perhaps I could outthink them. But what began as adolescent pettiness eventually ossified into detrimental habits — cigarettes, junk food, and sedentariness.

As I entered adulthood, I half-heartedly tried to mitigate this with occasional forays into lifting, but for the most part I just excused this as part of my biological makeup. I resorted to physiological determinism, if only implicitly. And I bristled at any notion that physical preparedness was a necessity.

I minimized my embodiedness. I was mostly content with a “life of the mind” until two points in my life.

First, when I was 25, my church held something called Men’s Training Camp. For a few weeks, a group of young men gathered at an MMA gym twice a week for a kickboxing class at 5:30am. The class ran for an hour and consisted of conditioning, technique, and sparring. It kicked my ass, but it also helped me improve my fitness, at least for a little bit at the time. But it wasn’t the wake up call it could have been. Once the program ended, I returned to middling and half-hearted attempts at a lifting regimen. There are a number of factors — cost and Orange County traffic being two of them — but southern California was replete with MMA gyms. I easily could have continued my training at a gym nearer me.

It wasn’t until a few years later, well into my career and married life, in January 2021, that I started to take my health seriously again. I was grappling with depression and loneliness wrought by pandemic protocols. At this time a friend introduced me to F3, an experience I’ve written about at length elsewhere. It had reignited a fire in my belly from Men’s Training Camp whose embers still smoldered. Bleak as it sounds, I needed an outlet for the anger and sadness that embedded themselves. In a weirdly masochistic way, I needed physical pain to be the catharsis for psychic pain (I actually think this motivates more people than polite society is willing to admit).

F3 proved to be truly transformative for me physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. But the most significant change it wrought in me was how it helped me to develop a physical sense of self. I began not to just see myself as physically capable, but actually be physically capable. I went from not being able to run a mile to running six. I began doing burpees. I sprinted. I rucked. I carried. I did things that I always considered beyond the scope of my capabilities.

These days, my regimen looks like strength and conditioning on M/W/F with Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 program followed by one or two EMOMs to get the heart pounding. I can finish a solid workout in 20-40 minutes depending on how much time I wanna give myself. T/Th mornings are for training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Kickboxing at 10th Planet Austin. I’d like to post to the occasional workout with F3 Austin, but with the way this region is setup there’s nothing that makes sense for me with work and family commitments.

I guess the upshot of all this that I learned that you can radically transform yourself when you let go of limiting beliefs. This doesn’t mean that the challenges and suffering we encounter are somehow immaterial or inconsequential — it does mean that incremental changes can go a long way. I don’t expect most people to give has much time and energy as I do to physical pursuits (though, to be fair, I also know of people who devote more than I do, but they don’t have toddlers). I will say the hardest but most profound change though is when you go from 0 to 1 — it’s remarkable what you can get with just doing 20 minute EMOMs 3-5 times a week.

I often lament that I didn’t pursue such transformation when I was younger, when I could have had my body naturally working more favorably for me, and had more time to give to this. Conversely, I’ve learned learned that it’s never to late to make a positive change. At 30, I was still able to change my physique and sense of self.

That transformed sense of self is really what I was beginning to get at with everything I’ve written so far. This is running long, but it was all preamble to what I really want to say — that embracing one’s physicality may be a critical missing piece in so much of the discourse about the “trouble” with young men today. Is it sufficient? Maybe not, but I would contend that it is a sine qua non of recovering a sense of masculinity that is robust, generative, and virtuous. The angry young man who spends his days doomscrolling and numbing himself may not completely exorcise his demons after 10 rounds of 10 pushups/squats/situps, but he will as a matter of biological fact be altering his neurochemistry in a such a way that the conditions for clear thought will be present.

Men need adversity. The first adversary one needs to face is oneself. To discipline the body and its impulses through physical adversity is a critical step toward mastery of those other things that are under one’s control.

As with many things, this is all easier said than done. And, as with many things, overcomplicating it can be a self-imposed impediment to action. So, if you’ve never exercised before, here are some suggestions:

• Every other day, do 10 sets of 10 pushups, 10 situps, and 10 bodyweight squats. Can’t do a pushup? Do a pushup on your knees. Still too much? Do wall pushups. 10 sets of 10 too many? Do 10 sets of five. Add one rep every week.

• Grab a backpack. Put something heavy in it, about ~20-30lbs. Go for a 20-30 minute walk. Congratulations, you’re rucking.

• Still have questions? Reply to this and ask away. Happy to answer or point you in the right direction.

Greetings from Austin, TX, where the Saps are finally settling. It's been a turbulent couple of months, but we're here, we're healthy, and we're whole.

Long story short, we've discovered that rural life is not for us. The house we were moving into needed more work than we anticipated. The church plant I teased in my previous missive didn't pan out. I was laid off from my job. Like I said, it's been turbulent.

But God provides. I've accepted an offer for a new job I'll be starting in August. And, to top it all off, we're eagerly awaiting the arrival of Sap number 2, in January 2025.

I’ve heard it said that moving, losing/starting a job, and welcoming a new child are considered to be some of the most significant stressors a person can experience. We've been tackling all three. And now we'll be doing it in Austin.

Until about two months ago, I had never considered Austin to be a possibility. It has a well-deserved reputation as being expensive, especially relative to the rest of Texas. But, it turns out, there are still pockets of the city where homes don't have list prices resembling California. We were delighted to discover this.

The "vibes" of Austin feel great right now (speaking as a newcomer). On an economic and technological level, it feels like a place that is practicing American dynamism. The people are consistently warm and welcoming. The food is unparalleled. Many bookstores and comic shops. Lots to do outdoors. It is the most family-friendly city I've ever been to — multiple breweries/coffee shops with playgrounds and spaces for kids to just run around while the parents chill. In addition to the robust music scene, there's also comedy, podcasting, and Jiu Jitsu. Sometimes these things overlap! People here seem genuinely happy and willing to have fun. Whether or not it's part of a larger vibe shift happening in our nation, I do not know. All I know is that I'm here for it.

I just started reading Michael Lind's Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States. I've been wanting to read it for a while, mostly because I'm wanting to educate myself about economics more generally. But it also seemed germane to our present moment. It was published in 2012, when the Republican party was still dogmatically beholden to policies around laissez-faire capitalism that brooked no dissent. Now, with figures like J.D. Vance rising through the ranks, the Overton window of economic policy has shifted to become more nationalist, or, Hamiltonian, in character. According to Lind, the Hamiltonian economic vision for America was one of strong centralized industry and banking, as opposed to the decentralized, agrarian version of Jefferson. Neither of these visions map perfectly onto our (post?)neo-liberal moment, but I think their intellectual undercurrents continue to inform policy debate to this day. Lind is unapologetically Hamiltonian, and I appreciate his candor. The point of all this though isn't to advocate for one policy position over another, but more to show how looking to the past can give a more nuanced and comprehensive picture of the present.

I've recently violated the POSSE principal of the IndieWeb movement by publishing some shortform writing in LinkedIn and Twitter/X. Here are links to some stray thoughts.

• Thoughts on the benefits of working in person

• Following on to Andrew Chen's thoughts about routines and 10x work

• Impressed at Cloudflare's speed in addressing a vulnerability

• Bundled thoughts on bullshit jobs and complexification.

I'm wrapping up this entry from the Austin Public Library, which might be the coolest library I've ever visited. It feels futuristic and forward-thinking without being sterile or alienating. I've sat in the exact spot on two separate occasions, and don't want to leave.

Also, check out this rooftop garden.

That's all I've got for now. Peace, love, and breakfast tacos be with you all.

Robbie

I’m writing this from a KOA outside Memphis, TN. The light is soft, the air is cool, and the interstate is roaring right behind me. Jenoa, Etta, and Jack the Cat are already at our new home in Texas. I’m driving out our car with Jones the Cat.

I don’t have much to say right now than a sentiment I heard from a friend once before he moved away from Charlottesville: it’s good to leave wanting more. And I definitely am. The last five years have been truly special.

But we’re excited for what’s to come. We’re moving into a home built by Jenoa’s grandfather on land that’s been in her family for a couple of generations now. It’s an honor and a privilege to be able to steward something intergenerational like this.

Aside from spending more time with family, going on some vacations, and making trips to California, a good chunk of this year will be focused on cultivating our new home. And on top of all this, we’ll likely be planting an Episcopal Church. More on that to come.

If we’ve crossed paths, thank you for being you. And thank you for following along. Love, grace, and peace to all of you.

Robbie