We read Philip K. Dick and felt smart, rebellious—maybe even a little prophetic. We watched Blade Runner with Vangelis’ soundtrack and thought it was beautiful, poetic, mesmerizing.
And it is. But it was also a warning.
Now here we are, in 2025. No flying cars yet (though they’re working on it), but we do have cities where people no longer speak to each other, electronic eyes scattered everywhere, algorithms that know more about us than we do. Hyperconnection makes us exhausted, speed wears us down. And loneliness—there it is—a new kind of poverty: strange, elusive. Not just economic, though often that too, but spiritual, relational, cognitive.
A poverty of good time, of presence, of meaning.
We’ve ended up inside a scenario eerily close to the dystopias literature and cinema imagined thirty years ago. Only, there was no sound, no alarm, no siren to mark the shift. We just slipped into it. One scroll at a time. One software update at a time. One “accept all cookies” at a time.
So now what? How do we stay human in all this?
I don’t have definitive answers, but I do know this: the hands remember things the mind has forgotten. A needle and thread can be tools of reconnection—not just with a piece of fabric, but with a different rhythm, a truer kind of time, with a part of us that never stopped breathing slowly, even when we forgot it was there.
Embroidering, drawing, shaping, sewing, digging, kneading, building—it doesn’t matter what—are all silent acts of resistance. Stances. Not loud, not heroic, but stubborn. Almost defiant. It’s our way of saying: you haven’t taken all of us. Not yet.
And then, sometimes, writing. Just a few lines. Just enough to pin down a moment that would otherwise be lost in the endless stream. A margin note on the edge of reality. Maybe that’s the truly punk gesture today: slowing down. Refusing to become extensions of the machine. Not giving in to cynicism. Still looking for small openings. Small fires.
Maybe if you’re here, reading this now, you’re already looking too. Maybe we can find them together, while the world outside resets.
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