The question a machine world presses on us is not whether the machine can make the picture. The question it forces is what our capacities are — what it is we can do, as human beings, that the picture alone never shows.

To see — really see, and not merely look. To suffer, and make something of the suffering. to re-enchant the everyday world. To make a self out of the wreckage. To stand in front of what exceeds us and not look away… These are the shape of a human life lived awake — and they belong to all of us, not only to the ones who paint. Not to the machine, which has no body, no world, no death, and therefore nothing to say about life. The artist is simply a human being like the rest of us — just more determinedly awake, more honest, more unflinchingly in contact with existence, and moved to make. Pointing to capacities that are in all of us.

A.I.martin weigelJuly 27, 2026Fragments

You Are Not A Meat Sack - or: The Lost Knowledge Of The Body

At some point in the last few years, millions of people began having earnest, extended conversations about the nature of intelligence, the future of knowledge, and what it means to be human - conducted entirely through their fingertips, on glass rectangles, while their bodies sat forgotten in chairs. The WHO, in 2024, estimated that 1.8 billion adults - roughly one in four people on the planet - are now insufficiently physically active. The average person spends 44% of their waking hours looking at a screen. We are, in the most literal sense, losing the habit of having bodies. The irony is so complete it has become invisible. We are debating what minds can do, using bodies we have stopped noticing, in the service of building systems that will have no bodies at all. And nobody finds this strange.

Culturemartin weigelMarch 17, 2026Fragments

An Unexpected Mentor for the New Year

martin weigelJanuary 2, 2025Fragments

What if there’s too much story in the world?

But does everything, like everything always have to be a story all of the time? Cause and effect. If-This-Then-That. The reassurance that stuff will make sense. The comfort and warmth of knowing that there’s a bulwark against meaning-void chaos. The promise that we can figure it out. The reassurance that there is a pattern, and there is a structure to all of this. That it is graspable. The comfort that the possibility of learning and anticipation is possible. The satisfaction of joining the dots. The satisfaction of closure. The satisfaction of causality. The need for causality. The promise that we can be agents of causality. That we can not just understand, but shape and bend the world to our will and desires. Christ, we need this stuff so fucking badly. And let’s not forget the intoxicating knowledge that everything that can be turned into a pattern (and made to look like a pattern) can be replicated, codified, merchandised marketed and (praise be!) financialised (and infantalised) as Let Me Show You How expertise and sprayed over everyone’s LinkedIn feeds.

Brand Strategymartin weigelMay 7, 2024Fragments