A newsletter on meaning, cities, and thinking in the age of the machine
We have built the Library of Babel. We call it a large language model. It holds, in its billions of parameters, a vast superposition of human expression, and when you pose a question, the superposition collapses. One text emerges, fluent and assured. The other possibilities are annihilated.
This is extraordinary. It is also, I think, quietly catastrophic.
The Quantum Librarian is a newsletter about what happens to thinking, collective thinking, cultural thinking, the slow distributed cognition that builds cities and rewrites scientific paradigms, when the metabolic cost of meaning-production drops toward zero.
I write about the industrialisation of meaning, cities as living membranes, heritage as the management of collective identity through time, phase transitions in culture, and what it means to design in an era when the instruments of design are themselves beginning to think.
I am a physicist who has spent three decades studying collective behaviour, from condensed matter through complex networks to the dynamics of urban systems. This newsletter is where that work meets the question I cannot set aside: what kind of thinking do we still want to perform with our own bodies and our own time?
The newsletter is published on Substack. Subscribe to receive new essays.
Subscribe on Substack ↗