The obligation to participate, to recite the ritual wording and Victorian phrasing, and to modulate the ethos of the collective: these add up to a pantomime, cannier than those usually staged at the expense of the audience. It can be all the more breathless for its stripped essence: the religiosity, the accidentals of ritual cadence and iconography, commonly attributed to venerable, “time-hallowed” origins, have been excised. The Iron Ring ceremony that I attended at McMaster (as a part of my final year in university) constitutes an occasion for interrogating the residues of significance lodged in what remains.

I, ****Aaron Pham****, in the presence of these my betters and my equals in my Calling, bind myself upon my Honour and Cold Iron, that, to the best of my knowledge and power, I will not henceforward suffer or pass, or be privy to the passing of, Bad Workmanship or Faulty Material in aught that concerns my works before mankind as an Engineer, or in my dealings with my own Soul before my Maker. My time I will not refuse; my Thought I will not grudge; my Care I will not deny towards the honour, use, stability and perfection of any works to which I may be called to set my hand.

Kipling’s archaisms (henceforward, aught) give the document a 17th-century weight it does not actually have, since the thing was composed by a Victorian in 1923. This is his original text; the version read to us in 2026 had been through the Wardens’ recent sanding, mentors and peers where Kipling wrote betters and equals, a pledge where he wrote a binding, the Soul and its Maker retired for conscience.

One is the sacramental logic of the ring: an ex opere operato, purely mechanical, utterly amoral efficacy for good. The medieval arrangement was explicit on the point: a sacrament works regardless of the virtue of the man administering it, Aquinas’ little ethics problem. The ring inherits the loophole wholesale. It works on its wearer whether the wearer is particularly awful or merely indifferent or, sweet heaven, particularly good. Haultain asked Kipling for the wording in 1923, and Kipling, who had already given cold iron a mythology of its own in verse, obliged with a text that binds upon Honour and Cold Iron and asks nothing about the moral state of either; how much of that core the recent revisions have touched is an open question.

That part at least of the enterprise is ironical, a historical curiosity blessed with a certain ingenuous grace. Recall Haultain’s lopsided vision of a tribal bond for the profession, floated at an Engineering Institute dinner in 1922; the Mohawk ironworkers from Kahnawake who walked the high steel over the St. Lawrence; the shuddering apologies and chastened imaginings of engineers when, on 29 August 1907, the Quebec Bridge simply fell down, collapsing spectacularly, killing 75 of the 86 men on the span, 33 of them from Kahnawake, for reasons a royal commission would trace to the designers’ arithmetic: this is the historical mythic stock-in-trade of the business, a foundational tragedy co-opted into ritual; and the urban legend that rings are hewn from the wreckage, though contradicted at the simple level of material resources (stainless steel doesn’t grow on rusting beams) plays a vital role in keeping the shared delusion alive.

And there’s the phenomenology of a ring actually being worn. After four months of immediately preceding rituals, the thing itself is nothing to write home about: this is not a ring that makes a remarkable impression, either on the hand it adorns, or through the purely neural vectors available to it. The distinctively obtrusive click of it against a desk is a sound that disappears after four months of wear. To me, it is nothing more than another piece of jewelry, and there will be many more simply glittering objects to come. The half-amused little tap of the ring against the palm of the outstretched hand is just another doodle on another napkin.

This is not, of course, the effect the scheme is intended to have. The ring is understood in principle as a behavioural nudge towards a more self-conscious ethical stance, a piece of training in what Wittgenstein would call a technique: the reflective habit of taking responsibility for their actions’ general consequences. The reason it doesn’t do this very well, however, is that moral language turns out not to have the fixing properties theory notoriously supposed.

Moral utterances are in themselves expressions of attitude, and not susceptible to being summed up in expressions of simpler kinds either as states of fact or as standard of value. This is what Ayer and Stevenson among others were trying to show, and it has tended to make both emotivist exegesis and its many, many philosophical refutations seem strangely sterile in practice. In this context, however, it is precisely the practical impotence of the iron ring’s threat of consequence that makes it precisely the kind of attempted surrogate for a sense of moral obligation where that sense is not already there: it’s a joke.

It’s a joke on behavioural nudging of a certain kind where using old-style religious language, sacrificing sheer incompetence to the useful reignition of the auto-suggestive effects of automatic rituals.

Which is not to say the ring doesn’t have effects. What it really does is to create a feeling of collective effervescence, that peculiar Durkheimian high described by those who’ve lived it: a sudden warm sense of tribal belonging as the time goes by, murmured sentiments, punctilious recitations, the almost sacred performance of communal grammatical forms. Particularly when the trivialized words with which it commences are followed by the Obligation’s punchy line, it produces the happy feeling of belonging to something bigger than oneself. The ethical core of what’s being achieved is not in the stuff of the recitations themselves but in the shared feeling they produce, the feeling of belonging to a community, which usually stands for something bigger as well. In the language game of the engineering profession, the ethical sense relies on blik, Hare’s name for that definite though unfounded sense of how things really are.

We don’t mention this, obviously. The ring is a private thing, a secret shared between the two without a third, an intimate bond in and through the ostensible unworthiness that it supposedly symbolizes. What it isn’t, however, is what it’s necessary to become: a student. I am aware now, past the midpoint in the first post-graduate summer, that after five years, the word student has begun to fall away from me as the default position from which to run meaning off my actions in public life. It’s one thing to drop the title ‘student’; it’s something else that the coherent, purely arbitrary complex of roles that goes with it, the suites of other people in similar sets of clothes, the tiny rituals and screams and class distinctions that make all the difference to how we live, should be quietly dissolved when the course actually ends. It’s odd to miss Exam Week now, even in memory. One supposes it has to be, or we would be in conversation with the ghost of the Aristotelian friend on a daily basis. Indeed, it is odd to recognize that what one supposed was merely accident of benign neglect, that one’s convivial relationships with fellow students in university were primarily sustained by shared obligations, and that those obligations served with delicate economy as the fragile scaffold of a communal life.

But this feeling of oddness is nothing compared to that of my luggage on the GO train to Hamilton the morning of the ceremony itself. Convocation is a way to keep one’s company after graduation, but it also serves as a ready-made narrative symbolisation, a figuration of closure. It has no bearing on reality, however, and as I ride through the shuttering of the trees and fields and the gleam of the glittering lakes and rivers, the ring still catches the little bit of shower water collecting in my right hand, and still bends the laws of elementary physics at my little finger. Camus’ absurd hero clowns for the audience at the edge of the cliff, and the whole show of his revolt is that he never steps off. The iron ring hangs cryptically behind him, capturing the rain that oozes from his slicked-back hair, though he never notices it.

Strictly speaking, both of them are senseless; but the ring is more uncompromisingly absurd. It is meaningless, but it’s also meaningless to talk about it, and the ceremony is strictly limited to a kind of talking with the ring, an elaborate game where the ring becomes a prime-place of some kind for the academic overidentification with the hardships of engineering work that it is meant to symbolize.

It cannot be said to mean anything at all in itself. That is to say, when we speak of the iron ring and its obligations, we don’t take those obligations to mean anything in themselves, nor do they speak to objective moral facts. Instead of working on this supposition, the ceremony explicitly inverts it, attempting to generate meaning in the here-and-now practices of the institution through commitment to a rule-governed form of life. According to Wittgenstein, such rule-based games are the only means of making sense of language, and the iron ring ceremony, like the many other ceremonies and term papers and recitations that sustained us through our years of university life, is just this: a kind of language game. In Wittgenstein’s words:

This seems a reasonable way to describe graduation. University education is nothing if not an immersion in many and varied language games–engineering, for one thing, but also ethics, and aesthetics, and social rituals of all sorts–each of which has its particular rules governing how we speak and act among others. The point is that we learn to speak and act according to these rules, not that we ever succeed in justifying them. To speak of them as ‘justifications’ would be, in Ryle’s idiom, an attempt at futility, a category mistake: a means of describing an allegedly self-justifying intelligibility within language that cannot be thought without already being practised.

The Iron Ring ceremony itself is such a language game, the word ‘obligation’ given particular meaning solely through being spoken within a shared practice that keeps its own rules. However, its significance is not limited to language, and there is a natural impulse to treat the ceremony, in practice as well as theory, as a kind of attempt to extend the language game into the realm of action. This might be said to be the purpose of the ring, to act within and as a reminder of an obligation to look after the health, safety and welfare of the public that is ostensibly at the heart of engineering practice. Naturally, however, one suspects that some degree of instrumental rationalism pervades here: an obligation of this sort is not one that we may take up out of hand, nor is it likely to emerge on its own initiative from the other obligations we already carry out in the practical tasks of life. According to such rationalism, for such an obligation to exert significant weight, there must be a ground to it in value – and presumably also in the rules of professional code, though the ceremony makes no effort to speak of, much less justify, any such rules. This would seem to be a perfectly reasonable line of thinking on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the embodiment of a mistake Wittgenstein once cautioned against:

That is, such propositions cannot be stated in any way that makes them the subject of a language game in which one defends, argues, questions or even forgets them. So, the fact that I lost sight of the ring on my hand for a month cannot be judged to have sustained or undermined my sense of obligation. On the contrary, a thought that now strikes me is that–much to my surprise, much to my own inexplicable relief–my loss of sight of the ring for a month may have actually served something better than a symbolic reminder; what seems to have endured more significantly is a quiet feeling that something is wrong about not seeing it, a connection not only with the notion of an obligation I must not forget but with some notion or feeling of a tribe and its associated beliefs, practices and structures of meaning–an entitative form of life–that originally made the notion of obligation intelligible to me in the first place.

And here perhaps is where I begin to see the point in Wittgenstein’s quietism and his image of the philosopher’s task as showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. It is certainly true that there are many very good reasons for trying to clarify one’s moral understanding, and excellent reasons for doing so with the assistance of others. But it is also true that certain philosophical efforts seem to be doomed from the start by a fundamental misconception of the question they intend to address. One such is to misunderstand the nature of moral awareness itself–supposing it to work on the same lines as theoretical understanding, as something one can solidify or describe through careful reasoning. A more promising approach is to remain patient with such concerns, and rather than dissipate one’s energies battling with them directly, to take a lesson from the ring: if what concerns you most is not to jettison the beliefs you hold but to learn something about what is most important in having them, then the ideas you try to hold on to may be the very means by which you feel most alone.

Thus I hold my ring out in front of me. It is not quite clean, because I haven’t had much time to clean it; and it is not quite what I thought I would be holding in my hand when I finally looked back at myself and my life to this point again, but then again it is. As we all know, in the final reckoning there is no grand synthesis of theory and practice, or of philosophy and life, in any single edifice of language or anything else. What, we keep hoping to find, remains is a truth – a cracked mirror of the highest promise of what we find most important in the university, a promise we left there long ago but seem always to be returning to. The Iron Ring ceremony enacted a truth in many ways, and a truth that only a few central to the work of scholarly learning will ever get around to examining: being an engineer is not only to be a practicing technologist, but also to be a practitioner of virtue. However, the general observation of the activity of virtue, and of the moral standards the practice of those virtues is thought to presuppose, does not amount to an explanation of how they may be practiced, let alone an ideology of moral progress that attests it. The other observation I made when I finally looked back at myself was that, in truth, it is never enough for such a thing to be the object of my ideals. The remains of the truth I am held to – my ring – is all that remains of what one must make of one’s ideals.

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience[...]

—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

the human nervous system registers absence of touch as a form of chronic low-grade stress, measurable in cortisol levels and immune function degradation

in the progress of building a lossless silhouette of someone i recently came across, i found myself lying here, in this room, a kind of coffin but with better lightning, wondering: what is it exactly that i want? what is the emergent feelings that my brain trying to resist here? to be held, yes, but by whom? by anyone? no, that obscene, that’s the logic of the animal, and i am not an animal, i read books, i try articulate my thoughts onto papers, i’ve my own opinion on building my ghost, certain critiques against the Frankfürt school, i have refused to download tinder on principle, i resisted getting a new phone number to create a new hinge account. yet here i am, at, <time>07:23:34am</time> with my arms wrapped around my own chest like a man trying to hold his organs inside after a wound, which is precisely what it is, isn’t it, a wound, except there is no blood, there is nothing to point to, a doctor would find nothing wrong with me and that is the worst part, that i am entirely healthy and entirely dying at the same time, avoiding working on an interview in 4 hours.

the finns have a word, kalsarikännit, which loosely means to drink alone in your underwear with no intention of going out, and they have made this into a virtue, and i think perhaps i should move to Finland, i should go to the forests where the wolves are, and i would lie down in the snow and the cold would be a kind of touch, wouldn’t it, the cold touches everything, it is promiscuous with its attention, it does not ask whether you’ve earned it, it simply arrives and holds you and does not let go.

but that’s not what i want either. maybe in 20 years

Loneliness is the experience of being deserted by all human companions

—Hannah Arendt

[waking up...]

what i want, really, (and here is where it becomes humiliating, where i must avert my eyes from myself), is something so specific that it cannot be named without losing it. if saying it out loud, i afraid i will lose it forever. i want a particular weight of a particular arm wrapped across my chest. i want to hear breathing of the specific being, that is not my own. i want that part of computation to work, for once, in a while, for the feeling to find its proper substrate, for the thing i built in my mind to correspond to something external that does not flinch, that does not relocate to another city, that does not send the message that begins “i’m sorry for misleading you but still i want what is best for you.”

DOSTOEVSKY’S UNDERGROUND MAN CLAIMS HE DOES NOT WANT THE CRYSTAL PLACE. he wants to want, which is different, which is worse, because wanting-to-want means you are outside even your own desires, watching them as if a man watches fish swimming in an aquarium. I am watching my need for touch and I’m disgusted by it and I am also INSIDE it, drowning in it, and this is the contradiction that Socrates or Kierkegaard or Merleau-Ponty or Simone Weil cannot address.

[...] loneliness is a subjective internal state. It’s the distressing experience that results from perceived isolation or unmet need between an individual’s preferred and actual experience

—Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, U.S Surgeon General’s Advisory, (2023)

[in my dream...]

i’m in finland, and i’ve been walking aimlessly for hours. (my body has begun its long negotiation with temperature)

first stage initialized: shivering, which is to say my muscles are burning glycogen in small desperate contractions, 200-250 per minute, calculating heat-loss exceeds heat-production and activating the ancient mammalian subroutines, and i think: this is what it means to be held by biology, to have something inside you that wants you to live, even when you have stopped wanting it yourself.

the grey ones are watching. i can see them between the birches, which are white like bones, like those i will soon become, and the wolves are patient bc patience is what 40,000 years of evolution has taught them, that the cold does most of the work, and the two-legged things eventually stop moving if you wait long enough. i’m not afraid of them (this is either the self-made courage or the first symptom of cognitive decline from reduced cerebral blood flow. i suspect it to be the latter)

by the second stage i have completely forgotten why i came here. the shivering has stopped, as if my body has abandoned the last arithmetic it is programmed to do, and deemed the equation unsolvable. i’m conserving what remains for the core organs, the heart, the lungs, the brain, that is still producing these sentences though it has no reason to, though no one will read them, though they are being written in a medium that does not exist to the external world, which is to say that i am thinking, still, for no one, into nothingness, and this is the underground man’s final joke, that consciousness persists past the point of utility, that i am AWARE of my demise and cannot stop being aware, cannot simply become the object i wanted to become.

the varg, the susi, the canis lupus, they are closer now. i can see the vapour of their breathing. they are metabolising, converting matter into heat into motion into patience, and soon they will convert ME into these things, and is this not what i asked for? to be held? the wolf’s jaw is a kind of holding, the teeth that close around the throat are intimate in a way that nothing else has been, and i think of everyone who has touched me and how none of them touched me like THIS, with such complete attention, such focus, such unwavering PRESENCE.

the third stage. i am so hot, fuck me. this is wrong, i know it is wrong, the air is negative thirty for fuck sake! i’m pulling off my coat, my sweater, and the grey church assembles around me, six of them, eight, i have lost the ability to count, and they are watching me undress like i’m performing a ritual, and perhaps i am, perhaps this is the only sacred thing left, to give yourself to the forest, to stop being a subject and turn into a meal.

the alpha, she does not go for the throat. this is not how it’s supposed to happen. she goes for the flank, then my genitals (makes sense, because efficiency matters, especially for Mother Nature. she is ruthless, because she doesn’t care much for romanticism.) they couldn’t care less about the quick death, they care about calories, as i feel her teeth entering my calves, and i think: this is the touch i wanted. this is what being held must’ve felt like. this is the weight of another creature’s attention, in its totality and undivided, AND THE PAIN IS EXTRAORDINARY. the pain is the most real thing that has ever happened to me, and i am finally, FINALLY, not in my head, not watching myself from outside. i am HERE, in this body, in this moment, in this mouth.

the hemoglobin has a viscosity of approximately four centipoise, but it moves faster when the heart is panicking, and my heart is panicking, as a biological mechanism. it is doing its job, pumping blood out of me and onto the snow, where it steams for a moment before freezing, and i watch my own warmth vanish from the physical body and become part of the landscape. this is what you want right? to stop being contained, and leak into the world, to be held by everything instead of nothing.

the pack feeds, and i’m still fully conscious at this point, which shouldn’t be possible. but apparently consciousness is the last thing to go, the brain hoards its glucose like a miser, and so i am aware of being devoured by the function of nature, i am aware of becoming less, and there is something almost erotic about it. no, not erotic, that’s wrong, something...ECONOMIC, a transaction finally completing, as i’m paying my debt to the biosphere, and i’m repaying the calories i consumed, i.e. the pasta with wine, in addition to those elaborate dinners for people who did not stay.

the fenrir, the old wolf, the myth-wolf, she is eating my liver and i am thinking about Prometheus, who had this done to him daily as punishment. This is not punishment, my dear Prometheus, this is a gift, as in the world accepting to what i offered, and Prometheus, you were wrong to scream. You should have been grateful, to be wanted so completely, to be USEFUL, to have eagles return for you again and again because you are worth returning for.

i am less than i was, perhaps 70 kilograms becoming 60 becoming 50 becoming 40, and the wolves are becoming more, as Lavoisier’s principle states. i am becoming six wolves eight wolves, i am becoming the forest, i am becoming the snow that will melt in spring and flow into rivers and eventually into the sea, and is this not what loneliness always wanted? to stop being one thing and become all-of-things? to be held by the entire world bc you are now INSIDE the entire world?

the last thing i feel is not pain. less sensation, less thinking, less, me. but more the cold ground against my back, pressing up into me as gravity presses down. the last firing neurons from the dying brain towards the remaining muscles, and so what? for what purposes do i feel this way? maybe, this is the embrace i asked for wandering the Finnish forest, the planet itself holding me against its chest, and the wolves are eating and the stars are watching and i am

i am

i

[waking up once more...]

the loneliness will just become a second skeleton residing inside my skeleton, and i will tell no one about it, bc who could i tell, and what would they do, and would their doing-something not simply be another form of the wrong substrate, another computation that fails to compile?

i want to stop moving.

i want to be still and held and i want to stop wanting.

the wolves are patient. the snow is patient. but i’m not. i’m lying here, in this room, in the early morning of January winter, sweaty af after a 30-minute-hypertrophy-workout, in this coffin with wifi, typing this in neovim,

waiting for something to arrive.

waiting for something

wait.

This is part 2. you can read part 1, part 3, part 4

the first night
where I notice your breath
  holds a different cadence
    than your words.

I’d memorized the spacing
  between your sentences—
	three seconds,
	one.
    two..
      three...
	then your thought.

but your lung took longer,
	hesitated on the inhale
	as if you were reading something over.

the ceiling sustains your tender voice
  like water in cupped palms.
  We hold each others,
  with such care.
  Your arm across my stomach,
	heavy as lineage,
	getting heavier by the minutes.

my grandmother’s grandmothers,
generations ago,
is a name i don’t know.
but in four generations,
  our blood could meet,
	in some child’s marrow,
	  as in we both know,
		our love exists within a subspace
		that transcends the need of procreation.

lying awake at four in the morning,
  when you were asleep,
	my mind wonders and perform genetic math
	because your shoulder blade
	  fits against my ribs
		the way a drawer closes
		when the house settles.

***

This is part 1. You can see part 2, part 3, and part 4.

sit with the splinter
  until it names itself.

do not polish the ache
  into a lesson.

let the room stay dark.
listen for the hinge
  that closes.

if another door appears
it will be because
  we built it after mourning.

	
do not 
  inventory the damage. 
do not 
  make a museum 
    of what touched you.

build nothing. 
mourn nothing. 
  let the wound breathe 
  
  its own language, 
  
   neither hello nor goodbye.

***

4:47AM.

He is crouched at the edge of the deck, looking down at nothing. His arms are folded, his hands clenched, fingers curled toward his body as if trying to draw it in. A distant coyote wails on the ridge; the sound fades, retreating. He moves back to his usual reading chair, studying the hump of the hill beyond the terraced garden. The room behind him stays in shadow, only the loose white curtain fluttering a little in the quiet wind. The sky is shifting now, from the deep indigo black of night to its first inky outlines of mountains. A rosy glow seeps into the eastern sky past the shoulder of Topanga. A few, last ragged night clouds linger in silhouette against it, and suddenly a faint plume of fog uncurls, flaring rose-gold, luminous as breath. The hills swim into half-form, breathing with him. Time still belongs to the realm of uncertainty, the gentle dissolution of dreams. When the light comes fully, it will be time to begin again.

He comes back into the hollow house. At once the stale smell of coffee pounded head-on in the refractory chill. There was a light hush; stillness stretched for a long time after the abrupt bird-song, the soft rush of breeze against the windows. The living room was in shadow again. Only the faint orange glow from the upstairs hallway slanted across the reading nook. He settled on the sofa. Beside him lay the newspaper that had fallen to the floor. Creased down the middle, it lay open, centre-dome, and his eye fell first on the bold headline: _City Council Calls Local Supporting Candidate for Supervisor_. The rest of the sheet held less pressing news: politics, a possible wildfire this summer. The quiet light touched his bare feet and felt like warm.

He takes orange juice and coffee, pushes the cup and saucer together with a slight clink and carries them out to the back steps where he sits with the newspaper, sips the drinks and reads. The phone rings; once, twice; he does not hear it. Eventually he puts the paper down. Gets up. Goes back to the desk. Turns on the computer. Sits stiffly, waiting. He has promised her he will write a letter of appreciation to Miss McGinnis. He must. Words elude him. He writes almost nothing. The printed draft splutters into the digital void. He turns off the monitor, stares at the blinking cursor. And all the time, somehow, his mind wanders, searching. Always. Always searching. It does not stay lost in pursuit of wisps and echoes. It finds her. A gentle smile at the back of his mind; a whisper of her voice, always so ready for the easy conversation that made them feel so companionably at ease with one another. That feeling in his chest whenever kindness or understanding caught her completely unawares.

The filtered hush of early morning stirred feelings of sadness again. He sat for a few minutes, not sure whether it was the landscape or his chest that was grieving. When he got back to the room, he sat and stared out over the hued ridge, pastel light on wintery tree limbs, and realized that the sorrow he carried was unresolved. So, the words evaporated. “They never have,” Kafka wrote to Milena. “One day, your written kisses will reach their destination, for we are all surrounded by a great number of invisible ghosts.” It was some minutes later when the phone in his pocket pinged with a muzzy echo. Three tiny bubbles appeared and disappeared on the screen. An SMS cleared up: “I didn’t mean to say any of those things. I know we don’t have anything in common. I meant something else. It’s probably best we don’t see each other any more. But I do care about you. I just can’t give you what I know you’re asking for.” Another click, then another message: “I’ve been trying to find a way to tell you that I think your presence is getting in the way of the space that I need in order to make the kind of romantic connection that I feel you deserve. It’s very strange and absurd, and I’m not sure I can explain it. All I know is that, at this stage in my life, I like being by myself. I want to think about who I am and how I want to live my life. That way, I can figure out the kind of relationship I need to have, and be with someone who will stay with me in my future. Right now, I can’t imagine being in a relationship that deserves the kind of attention and energy you want it to have. That being said, I don’t want you to think that I don’t value how special you are. I’d much rather see you with someone else that isn’t me.” It was some minutes before he responded. He recalled the thoughts and sentiments of Camus and wondered whether they should have resolved things in some way. She clearly knew him better than he did, and maybe he should have known that what he had to offer could not satisfy what she wanted. But how could he have expected her to answer in kind? There were times when he had literally been incapable of standing being himself. He said that he was sorry he had upset her and asked her whether she wanted him to say anything else. She did the same, and he likewise said he had nothing more to say. He received a further ping: “Coffee next week?” He replied that coffee sounded good and smiled in the way he usually did when he smiled.

Cohere Toronto Office

feels and results.

The train station loomed, a grey monolith against the ever-darkening sky. It was half-past seven on a Sunday, and I ran late for the 20:23 Lakeshore West Train back to Hamilton. Quickly grabbing my laptops from the bags I packed for the weekend away, I hop back onto the stream to catch others' presentations. It wasn't any ordinary Sunday, but rather the demo night of New Build.

Exhaustion clung to me like a second skin after 48 hours of sleep deprivation and intense focus on hacking on a project. Our team had already finished the demo, yet something gnawed at the corner of my mind. A vague unease, shapeless as the fog, settled over me. I couldn't shake the feeling of displacement that slipped through my fingers, leaving the aftertaste of a half-remembered dream.

I have done a fair share of hackathons, yet New Build stood apart from most hackathons I have attended. New Build is the definition of "unc cracked tpot club" that builds projects during the weekend. It was the distilled essence of Toronto's raw talents that represents the ever-fast-growing tech scene in Canada. New Build was a multidisciplinary hackathon that combines intensive project development with team formation inspired by the NBA Draft1. One major feature that differentiated New from other hackathons is the draft mechanics. We knew who the team captains were. Lo and behold, yours truly was one of them.

Given the crowd of cracked and brilliant minds participating in this event, the weight of self-imposed expectations hung heavy. I felt compelled to match their prowess, not for their sake but to prove something to myself. Yet beneath it all, a voice whispered a simple desire lingering at the back of my mind—to savour the experience and craft something genuine and quaint. I had an idea in mind infused with warmth, a reflection of my inner child, free from the cold glare of corporatism.

I want to play and build something novel!

Yet, on Saturday morning, as soon as the clock struck 08:30, my corporate-wired mind took control, drowning out any remnants of authenticity I had. We immediately got carried away into short-term optimisation2 of the problem statement, maxing out the potential outcomes of the project. Additionally, we were fixated on the name, wanting to make it work.

We have fallen into the trap of the corporatisation of hackathons.**

This mindset got to me, and it showed during the demo. The panel said nothing. No questions, no grilling. Defeat washed over me, heavy as the silence. I felt small, like one of those shuttered storefronts dotting the neighbourhood.

On the train home, I watched the city blur past - all grit, neon, and late-night diners. Something shifted, quiet as a whisper: I know my shit. Damn good, actually. The city kept moving, indifferent. And so would I.

on hacker culture and implications of New Build.

the following is an excerpt from Hacking the Hackathon — Jacky

A weird thing about startup/hustle culture: We fetishise exhaustion as a badge of honour. We have collectively decided that bags under our eyes are way cooler than a new iPhone.

This behaviour stems from Silicon Valley's attitude toward saviorism problems. The time-boxed nature of hackathons only serves as microcosms of this zeitgeist and compels participants to push their limits in a 24-36 hours sprint to push out marketable products.

The fundamental issue with this approach is its reductionist nature. These rapid-fire development sessions rarely build upon existing knowledge or work in the field. More often than not, they ignore crucial context surrounding the complex issues they attempt to address, distilling multifaceted problems into a simple web app3.

This methodology prioritizes speed and novelty over depth and nuance, potentially leading to superficial innovations that fail to address root causes or consider long-term implications.

"Hackers" are makers compelled to create - not for money or fame, but for the pure joy of bringing something new to life. The congregations of craftsmen eventually led to the formation of hackerspaces such as hackathons – a kind of digital-age speakeasy for the intellectually adventurous. These spaces were initially conceived as the "third space" outside the state's influence and the capitalist market.

Yet, these spaces often struggle to remain true to their vision without intentional intervention. The commercialisation of hackathons can be seen as an unintended consequence of their underlying financial incentives. Hackathons aren't cheap to run, so organizers, with the best of intentions, turn to sponsorships to keep the lights on and the Red Bull flowing.

But each logo slapped on a banner chips away at the original ethos.

It's a classic chicken-and-egg problem.

Hackathons need money, but the incentive structure to foot the bill slowly morphs hackathons away from their original purposes.

It is tricky, right? How do you keep the spirit of innovation and learning while all these other factors are at play?

I think organizers should emphasize the ethos of hackathons, eliminate the focus on prizes and short-term projects, and replace it with something better.

Reclaiming the design spaces means cultivating a culture of play — a space for "unfettered exploration, which gives individuals the freedom to explore ideas that might not have clear monetary values."

  A hackathon should be the infrastructure layer so that everyone can play.

implications from New Build.

New Build addresses some problems and challenges pretty well, such as the draft mechanics, which introduce some entropy but fall short in terms of prize incentives.

K and I were chatting about how New Build felt like extended New Office Hours, which is a good first step in cultivating spaces for play.

New Build represents what Toronto has to offer, a first step to solve the "human capital flight" (often refers as "brain drain") in Canada.

Looking ahead, I'd love to see New Build create more space for pure play. Maybe even go full retreat-style, similar to rabbitholeathon.

I have faith in the New Build team. They've got good people. And good people are the ultimate moat.

going forward with hackathons.

As for me, I keep saying each hackathon will be my last.

The 36-hour coding binges aren't as appealing as they once were.

But I said that last time too, so who knows? There's something addictive about the energy of a good hackathon4.

Here's the thing about hackathons: they don't have to choose between being recruiting events and playgrounds for innovation.

The best ones are both. But right now, the scales are tipped too far towards recruitment. It's like optimizing for an acquisition instead of building something people want. The real magic of hackathons happens when you put hackers first.

Everything else – the jobs, the networking, the sponsorships – that all follows naturally when you get the core experience right.

to my teammates.

    I'm obsessed with your work.

    I'm so blessed to have a chance to work with you all.

    I'm sorry that I couldn't do more,

              but overall it was a net positive.

    I wouldn't trade anything for it.

    Even though we didn't win, I'm glad that we did work on something 
                                                                                                          together.

    I do hope that we would cross path again in the future.

                                                                                                                    regards, aaron.

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