This essay is about the note-taking app Roam, and the consequences of life conceived as an endless process of annotation. Like other productivity apps, Roam can seem to do the work of synthesizing your stray thoughts into a larger, more coherent structure. But the very ease with which that index is generated makes it not only unwieldy at scale, but begins to circumscribe your thinking instead of adapting to it.

While it is disconcerting to discover that we ever were swept up in some robotic and impersonal psyop, we love to “roboticize” or amalgamate political enemies. But this automation is, maybe, always there in human political feeling. Friends generate enemies and enemies generate friends; and chanting, repeating and reposting protest slogans is a vital feature of affecting change.

Many RPG computer games allow you to keep playing after you’ve finished the main story. In a world gone slack without a narrative, a character, alone and aimless, has a life for the first time. His movements become ultimately absurd. This RPG existentialism reminds us we’re often stuck in somebody else’s computer game, life devoted to the frantic pursuit of all-consuming means to paltry ends.