drmstream[writing]

I have looked in a mir­ror and won­dered who that is. I’ve caught a glimpse of a man­nequin as I’ve turned a cor­ner on a dark, wet night and felt uneasy.

This is the val­ley effect. The object looks too real but is too flawed. It is encroach­ing on the space of humanness.

The dis­com­fort is not sim­ply a human attribute. Apes expe­ri­ence it too.

But when we look at apes, and apes look at us, there is an easy famil­iar­ity. We cat­a­log the sim­i­lar­i­ties from the shared knowl­edge that our blood­lines split mil­lions of years before, and that in that split, what it meant to be human, and what it meant to be an ape, both hon­or­able and sus­tain­able states, became dif­fer­ent in the fundament.