welcome to the real world, where only real things matter, which is why your pulse is being regulated by an unread email, your week by a calendar grid, your confidence by a number assembled from past purchases, your passport by a line drawn before your birth, your rent by a market no one has ever seen, your diet by a future beach, your politics by a flag, your sleep by a sentence someone said in 2017, your medical options by a code, your self-respect by a mirror, your prospects by a spreadsheet, your grief by a photograph, your body by a diagnosis, your diagnosis by a committee, your committee by a funding model, your funding model by interest rates, your interest rates by expectations, your expectations by headlines, your headlines by metrics, your metrics by an auction, your auction by scripts, and your scripts by people who still say they only believe in “what’s actually there.” excellent. very rugged. very primitive in a classical sense. meanwhile the “fake” corporation owns the “real” building, the “imaginary” border searches the “physical” body, the “symbolic” wedding changes tax status, the “fictional” trust controls land, the “social construct” gets a prison sentence entered under it, the “mere story” starts a war, the “just statistical” risk score changes the insurance premium, the “virtual” item sells for more than the chair you’re sitting on, the “performative” apology moves the stock price, the “placebo” reduces pain, the “rumor” clears a room faster than fire, the “copy” becomes evidence, the “simulation” becomes training data, the “forecast” reorganizes agriculture, the “brand” outlives the founder, the “algorithm” notices a pattern no one can name and denies the loan with machine serenity, the “memory” alters posture, the “possibility” becomes doctrine, the “model” becomes policy, the “policy” becomes hunger, the “hunger” becomes crime, the “crime” becomes identity, the “identity” becomes searchable, and the search result becomes more operational than the person. but yes, by all means, keep guarding the frontier between Real Things You Can Kick and Fake Things Made Of Language, as if language had not spent several thousand years manufacturing gods, empires, debt obligations, constitutions, curses, diagnoses, markets, genres, marriages, races, disciplines, heresies, derivatives, reputations, and the tiny invisible grooves through which your desire now travels on schedule. very reassuring to believe the real is only made of matter, right until matter starts obeying form: until the body reacts to a symbol, the crowd to a slogan, the judge to a phrase, the market to a rumor, the child to a name, the archive to a query, the limb to an absence, the city to a map, the soldier to a uniform, the lover to a look, the patient to a prognosis, the future to a probability distribution, the present to an inherited script, and the script to nothing you can locate with tweezers. at which point the binary mind does what it always does when reality becomes inconveniently plural: it calls half of causality fake and then spends the rest of the day obeying it.