There are three prices to pay when operating in parts unknown. The price of wisdom is holding ideas that wrestle in your brain. The price of freedom is choosing which narratives to privilege and which to reject. And the price of being human is that you will occasionally miss the mark.
Is “unknown” even possible in our hyper-annotated world? Don’t algorithms already know everything about us?
Nah. Reality isn’t something that can be indexed by machines, numbers, or even language—try as we might. Language is a tool and words are socially constructed critters that evolve endlessly. What words point to isn’t “reality” either. The realm of meaning is a murky molasses that’s not easily scooped into submission.
So how do you make sense of it all?
First, wear gloves
Words are wild animals; you gotta wear gloves. Gloves protect you from the “semantic charge” of words. It’s knowing the difference between “use” and “mention.” To use a word is to invoke its meaning. To mention a word is to “handle” its graphemes and phonemes so you can make things. Words have power and must be handled with care.
Second, sip but don’t swig
Being a writer and sensemaker is like being on a wine tour and the person driving the bus. Except now you take off those gloves, carefully, to experience reality. This is like journalism: you seek the truth and feel it out. It’s a paradox, trying to remove yourself from a frame that is singularly yours. If you don’t sip anything, you’ll have nothing to say. If you swallow everything, you will be too drunk to drive.
Finally, illuminate dark spaces
After the wine tour, in the kitchen, you tipsily re-label the jars on the shelf. But the jars are all different sizes, some contain two kinds of lentils(?!), and the heights of the shelves are out of whack. Girl, this isn’t the exception, this the rule. You will never just write labels. The writer is a sense maker and a shelf-maker. But you dive in to the chaos anyway, because you secretly kind of like it.
Those large language models can only make sense of what is known. What has already been said. Only humans can make sense of the unknown, because we are driven by it. We fear it, like death. We revere it, like life.
You operate in parts unknown. It is is a gift.