Embrace, Ignore, Fight
Three honest postures for the curve. Even doing nothing is an answer.
· 2 min read
There are three honest postures toward the curve. They are not strategies. They are postures — the place you stand from before you act. Pick wrong and your strategy is incoherent. Pick right and your strategy can be argued with by people who pick the other two.
Embrace
Embrace says: the curve is happening, I am going to stand near the wheel. It is the posture of the builder, the founder, the policy hand who joins rather than petitions. It risks complicity with bad outcomes for the chance to shape good ones. The embrace position is not "techno-optimism." Optimism is a forecast. Embrace is a job.
Embrace at its best
Builders inside the machine who carry conscience with them. The friend who is in the room.
Embrace at its worst
The willing engineer of the comfort machine who tells themselves they had to be there.
Ignore
Ignore says: the curve is happening, and the curve is not the most important thing. It is the posture of the parent, the priest, the woodworker, the person who refuses to be governed by the discourse. It risks being unprepared. But ignore is not denial — it is a refusal to be conscripted into other people's panic. The graph does not need your attention to advance. Tend your garden, say the things you mean, raise the children with care.
The thing ignore must not do is curdle into incuriosity. It must keep the quiet eye open.
Fight
Fight says: the curve is happening, and I do not consent to all of it. It is the posture of the regulator, the labor organizer, the philosopher, the parent at the school board, the engineer who quits and tells you why. Fight is not the same as Luddism, though it is sometimes accused of it. Fight asks: slow down, on whose timeline, for whose benefit, with what off-switch?
Why "even nothing is an answer"
This is the part most readers want to skip. There is a fourth position called default. It is the position of the person who insists they have not chosen yet, while their week continues to embed them in one of the three postures above. Default is a vote cast by inaction. It usually votes embrace.
The publication's argument is not that you must pick one. It is that you should know which one you are standing in, and live like it on purpose.
The Choice
None of these postures saves you from choosing. Pretending to be neutral is one of the three — and not the bravest one.
- EmbraceIf embrace is honest, build the institutions you want the curve to deposit you into.
- IgnoreIf ignore is honest, give your attention to what is enduring, and don't let the discourse own you.
- FightIf fight is honest, build friction with care — and know exactly what you are slowing.
Read further: The Reckoning