Levers Beneath Stories
Three months into 2026, our personal, professional, and artistic lives have already been reshaped by forces both visible and unseen. We now live in an era where the moral vocabulary meant to value dignity is losing its grip amid a quiet erosion of meaning. “Old” words—liberation, human rights, sovereignty—still circulate, but they arrive pre-packaged, drained of complexity, repurposed for persuasion. What was once the domain of advertisers and marketers—crossing boundaries to shape perception—has now expanded into the machinery of governance and war.
Geopolitics has returned, wielding its old tools—territory, energy, alliances—now amplified by artificial intelligence. In February 2026, a US Tomahawk missile, guided by AI targeting, struck a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, killing over 165 children. Investigations point to flawed AI data used to prioritise speed over precision, turning a classroom into a “target.” The Pentagon’s reliance on these systems exposes a brutal truth: algorithms decide, accountability dissolves. The school was hit twice—first by the missile, then by the indifference of a system that has no awareness.
The confusion isn’t just that technology accelerates; it’s that clarity doesn’t keep pace. Hegemonic systems urge us to see the world in moral binaries—good and evil, liberator and aggressor, victim and villain—but this simplicity is easily resisted. Regimes may demand removal, yet the methods of their undoing obliterate the very fabric of a people’s identity: language, rituals, the rhythms of daily life. We can oppose an invasion while acknowledging the violence of the regime it displaces.
And when the story fails—again and again—to cover the consequences, we reach for familiar scripts: “This is dystopia,” “World War III has started.” We borrow these slogans because the alternative is to sit with the unbearable weight of complexity. This debt accumulates, though. And its interest compounds. Eventually, the borrowed story can no longer obscure what we start to perceive more clearly: the fracture between what is said and what is endured.
These troubling circumstances pose an important and valuable dilemma for artists—or any of us, as aesthetic and ethical beings. What can we do when the world’s narratives are clearly diminished? How do we create—or even breathe—in a time where coherence is performative, stability is a stage set, and the machinery of global superpowers grinds on while we are left to sift through the wreckage for something sensible and humane?
How Things Hold Up is an essay series about what remains when narratives collapse. It is an exploration of the load-bearing structures and the psychological levers beneath the stories we are expected to consume—whether as citizens, artists, or simply as humans navigating a world of manufactured coherence. Through the lens of art theory, self-expression, and cognitive science, these essays ask: What still holds? And what is merely performing stability until it fails?
This is about the ethics of attention in a world that rewards brutish dominance over depth and tenderness. It is about the quiet acts of sovereignty that preserve our autonomy amid the soft coercion of systems designed to shape us. These are the thresholds where identity and consequence collide and become deeply personal—where the physics of what happens next outweighs the abstractions of ideology.
It is about the careful life as resistance—the rituals and refusals that ground us when the archive of our digital trails threatens to surveil and judge rather than protect and preserve. And it is about causal time itself—the material we live inside, shaped by technological agendas and human cognitive awareness as resistance.
In a landscape of dependency and platform feudalism, where autonomy is conditional and dissent is costly, we will explore the levers that intend to persuade us while mechanisms with ulterior motives follow their own agendas. I propose that art, music, design, and prose have the power to expose this counterfeit coherence—that self-expression can reclaim agency, and that cognitive acts allow us to see clearly. It is a stance of endurance and coherence in a world that is maddeningly disjointed, where even healing becomes an act of resistance.
