Congressional Eecutive Commission on China (CECC): Chairs Introduce the Jimmy Lai Hong Kong Political Prisoner Accountability Act of 2026

 

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The Congressional-Executive Commission on China was created by the U.S. Congress in 2000 "with the legislative mandate to monitor human rights and the development of the rule of law in China, and to submit an annual report to the President and the Congress. The Commission consists of nine Senators, nine Members of the House of Representatives, and five senior Administration officials appointed by the President." (CECC About). The CECC FAQs provide useful information about the CECC. See CECC Frequently Asked Questions. They have developed positions on a number of issues.

CECC tends to serve as an excellent barometer of the thinking of political and academic elites in the United States about issues touching on China and the official American line developed in connection with those issues. As such it is an important source of information about the way official and academic sectors think about China. As one can imagine many of the positions of the CECC are critical of current Chinese policies and institutions (for some analysis see CECC).

CECC periodically  proposes legislation that advances their normative and political agendas. Many of these do not produce legislation, all of them shape policy and if not policy, then the foundations and patterns of discourse in the US about China and its relationship to the US within the political classes and their networks (academics, press, social media agents, think tanks, etc.).

Hon g KOng has been very much on the minds of CECC lately. See, e.g.,  Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) Heraring: Hearing Announcement: A Son and Daughter’s Appeal to Xi Jinping to Release Their Dad, Jimmy Lai. CECC has advanced a legislative program grounded in its emerging policies on US.-Hing KOng relaitons. See, e.g., Hong Kong Judicial Sanctions Act (S. 1755); HKETO Certification Act (S. 3655/H.R. 2661); The Jimmy Lai Way Act (H.R. 2522) Today CECC took that agenda another step forward when it announced the introduction of legislation:  the Jimmy Lai Hong Kong Political Prisoner Accountability Act of 2026. The social media release described that project this way:

 

Chairs Introduce the Jimmy Lai Hong Kong Political Prisoner Accountability Act of 2026

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK) and Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ), Chair and Co-Chair, respectively, of the bipartisan, bicameral Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), today introduced the Jimmy Lai Hong Kong Political Prisoner Accountability Act of 2026, a comprehensive, bipartisan bill to establish a deterrence and accountability framework for Hong Kong political prisoners. Commissioners Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) joined the Chairs in introducing this legislation.

The legislation would require the State Department to determine within 30 days whether abuse, medical neglect, torture, detention conditions, or other actions contributed to a political prisoner’s death and identify those responsible. It would then mandate sanctions within 60 days against responsible or complicit PRC and Hong Kong officials, requiring international coordination, as well as requiring regular reporting to Congress on the health of, and access to, Jimmy Lai and other political prisoners.

Senator Dan Sullivan, Chair of the CECC, stated:

“Jimmy Lai was sentenced to an appalling 20-year prison sentence simply for exercising his God-given rights and standing up for the people of Hong Kong. He should be released immediately. In the meantime, his sentence must not become a death sentence. Beijing and Hong Kong officials need to understand that how political prisoners are treated matters—and that a death caused by abuse, neglect, or inhumane conditions will bring real consequences.”

Representative Chris Smith, Co-Chair of the CECC, said:

“Jimmy Lai’s unjust, politically motivated imprisonment is an affront to free speech and human dignity. This critical legislation makes clear that political prisoners must be released, their families must receive answers, and those responsible for their abuse, torture, or neglect must be held to account. The United States will not allow Hong Kong political prisoners to be forgotten and overlooked, and this bill takes serious action to crack down on the CCP’s repression.”

CECC Commissioners will continue to work across the aisle to press for the immediate and unconditional release of Jimmy Lai and others unjustly detained and ensure that the United States stands firmly with the people of Hong Kong in defense of their fundamental freedoms.

Highlights of the Jimmy Lai Hong Kong Political Prisoner Accountability Act of 2026:

• Require a 30-day determination. After credible information that a political prisoner died while in Hong Kong government custody or because of authorities’ actions while detained by that government, the Secretary of State, in coordination with the Secretary of the Treasury, must determine whether medical neglect, abuse or torture, detention conditions, or another act or omission caused or contributed to the death and identify those responsible.
• Mandate sanctions. Within 60 days of the determination, the Secretary must impose sanctions on each identified PRC or Hong Kong official, agent, or employee under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, and other applicable authorities. 
• Mobilize an international response. The Secretary must seek a UN human rights inquiry, raise the death in appropriate multilateral organizations, and coordinate sanctions with allies. 
• Impose visa restrictions. The Secretary must use available authorities to impose visa restrictions on adult family members of a covered foreign person sanctioned under the bill. 
• Track health and access. Within 90 days of enactment and annually thereafter, the Secretary must report to Congress on the health of Jimmy Lai and other political prisoners; restrictions on medical, legal, consular, and family access; and additional protective measures. 
• Consider broader accountability measures. The Secretary must review whether additional officials meet existing sanctions criteria and consider recommending that the President withdraw, condition, or limit privileges and immunities of Hong Kong Economic and Trade Offices in the United States. 

Below is a summary of the Jimmy Lai Hong Kong Political Prisoner Accountability Act of 2026, introduced by Senator Sullivan in the 119th Congress. My take: 

Overview

The bill establishes a U.S. sanctions framework triggered by the death of political prisoners in Hong Kong. It is named after Jimmy Lai Chee-Ying, the 78-year-old British citizen and founder of Apple Daily, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison on February 9, 2026 — the longest sentence imposed under Hong Kong's National Security Law. The bill was referred to committee upon introduction.

Key Definitions (Section 2)

The bill creates several important defined terms:

• Hong Kong political prisoner: Any individual detained or imprisoned for peacefully exercising rights protected under the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the Basic Law, or international human rights law — including freedoms of expression, press, assembly, association, religion, and political participation. Individuals charged under the National Security Law (2020), the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (2024), the Crimes Ordinance sedition provisions, or the Public Order Ordinance are presumed to be political prisoners unless the Secretary of State determines otherwise based on credible, independently corroborated evidence.

• Covered foreign person: Any official, agent, or employee of the PRC or Hong Kong government determined to be responsible for, complicit in, or having directed the arrest, detention, prosecution, imprisonment, abuse, or death of a Hong Kong political prisoner.

Congressional Findings (Section 3)

Congress recites findings regarding Jimmy Lai's case — including his imprisonment since December 2020, largely in solitary confinement, and his conviction on December 15, 2025, under the National Security Law. The findings also note that over 1,000 individuals have been imprisoned under Hong Kong's national security legislation, including Chow Hang-tung, Joshua Wong, Lee Cheuk-yan, and Gwyneth Ho. Congress further finds that the PRC has denied independent international monitoring of detention conditions, disregarded UN human rights mechanisms, and denied or delayed consular access to foreign nationals in custody, including Jimmy Lai.

Statement of U.S. Policy (Section 4)

The bill declares that the United States has a direct and substantial national interest in the welfare and release of all Hong Kong political prisoners. It establishes that the death in custody of any such prisoner would result in "significant and immediate consequences" for U.S. relations with the PRC and Hong Kong. The policy further commits the U.S. to coordinating with allies — including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the European Union — on any response.

Mandatory Sanctions Framework (Section 5)

This is the operative enforcement provision:

1. Determination (30-day deadline): Upon receiving credible information that a Hong Kong political prisoner has died in custody, the Secretary of State must determine within 30 days whether the death resulted from denial of medical care, physical abuse or torture, substandard confinement conditions, or any other act or omission by detaining authorities.

2. Mandatory sanctions (60-day deadline): Within 60 days of making such a determination, the Secretary must impose sanctions on each responsible covered foreign person under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, and any other applicable congressional authority.

3. Termination conditions: Sanctions may only be lifted if the Secretary certifies to Congress that (a) a credible, independent, and transparent investigation into the death was conducted, (b) those responsible were prosecuted or held accountable under international fair trial standards, and (c) the prisoner's family received full information and appropriate remedies.

Additional Measures (Section 6)

Beyond sanctions, the bill requires:

• Multilateral engagement: Requesting that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights conduct an independent inquiry and raising the matter at the UN Human Rights Council and, where appropriate, the Security Council.
• Visa restrictions: Imposing visa restrictions on adult family members of sanctioned covered foreign persons.
• Annual reporting: Within 90 days of enactment and annually thereafter, the Secretary must report to Congress on the health status of Jimmy Lai and other political prisoners, any denial of medical care or consular access, and recommendations for additional protective measures.
• Accountability measures: Within 90 days of enactment, the Secretary must consider additional steps, including sanctions on officials responsible for arbitrary detention, and potentially recommending that the President withdraw or limit privileges and immunities extended to Hong Kong Economic and Trade Offices in the United States.

Sense of Congress (Section 7)

The bill expresses the sense of Congress that Jimmy Lai should be immediately and unconditionally released, that the PRC should grant full consular access consistent with the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, that his prosecution represents a direct assault on press and expression freedoms, and that his case should be treated as a priority human rights matter in all U.S. diplomatic engagements with China and the United Kingdom.

Practical Significance

In essence, the bill creates a pre-committed, mandatory sanctions trigger tied to the death of any Hong Kong political prisoner — removing executive discretion on whether to impose sanctions and focusing it only on whom to sanction. It also builds in multilateral coordination obligations and ongoing congressional reporting requirements, ensuring sustained oversight of detention conditions in Hong Kong.

As of now, I was unable to find a specific, direct Chinese government response to this particular bill. This is likely because the legislation was only just introduced and a formal reaction may not yet have been issued.

However, the Chinese government's broader position on Jimmy Lai, U.S. sanctions proposals, and Hong Kong-related legislation is well documented and provides a strong indication of how Beijing is likely to frame any response. Here is what the official record shows:

China's Consistent Position on the Jimmy Lai Case

The PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs has addressed Jimmy Lai repeatedly in 2026, deploying a consistent set of talking points:

• "Lai is the principal mastermind and perpetrator behind the series of riots that shook Hong Kong." This characterization has been used verbatim by MFA spokesperson Guo Jiakun at press conferences on both May 12 and May 15, 2026, in response to questions about whether China would consider releasing Lai at President Trump's request.

• "Hong Kong affairs are China's internal affairs." This is the standard formulation used to reject any foreign engagement on the issue.

• "The central government of China firmly supports the Hong Kong judicial authorities in performing duties in accordance with the law." This line was used by Guo Jiakun to shut down questions about Lai's potential release during the Trump–Xi summit in May 2026.

China's Reaction to the Sentencing and International Criticism (February 2026)

When Lai was sentenced to 20 years on February 9, 2026, multiple PRC and Hong Kong authorities issued statements:

• MFA spokesperson Lin Jian stated that "Jimmy Lai is a Chinese national" and that his actions "seriously breached the principles and bottom line of One Country, Two Systems".

• The Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council said the sentence "sends a stern and forceful message that no matter who it is, anyone who dares to challenge laws safeguarding national security will be severely punished".

• The Commissioner's Office of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in the HKSAR called on foreign media to "respect the city's independent judicial ruling" and "refrain from politicizing legal issues".

• Lin Jian urged "relevant countries to respect China's sovereignty, respect the rule of law in Hong Kong, not make irresponsible remarks on the Hong Kong SAR's handling of the case, and not interfere in Hong Kong's judicial affairs and China's internal affairs in any form".

• HKSAR Chief Executive John Lee called Lai's crimes "heinous and numerous" and said the sentence "demonstrates the rule of law, upholds justice, and is deeply gratifying to the public".

China's Position on U.S. Sanctions Legislation Generally

China has consistently condemned U.S. Hong Kong-related sanctions legislation. The Global Times reported that the MFA "slams US report on HK as 'replete with lies and fallacies'" in April 2026. More broadly, the MFA has stated that China "stand[s] firmly against illicit unilateral sanctions that have no basis in international law or the authorization of the UN Security Council". The 2026 Hong Kong Policy Act Report notes that the Hong Kong government has maintained that "Hong Kong law allows implementation of only UN sanctions, not 'unilateral' sanctions imposed by individual countries".

State Media Framing

Chinese state media, including the Global Times and China Daily Hong Kong, have published extensive commentary characterizing Western criticism and sanctions proposals as "blatant interference in Hong Kong's judicial independence" and "hegemonic practices". A China Daily op-ed by the secretary-general of the Hong Kong Coalition accused "certain Western politicians" of using Lai "as a pawn to meddle in China's internal affairs and contain China's development".

Bottom Line

While no official Chinese government statement specifically addressing the Jimmy Lai Hong Kong Political Prisoner Accountability Act of 2026 has been published yet — which is expected given that the bill was introduced only today — Beijing's response to the broader Jimmy Lai case and to U.S. sanctions proposals has been emphatic and uniform: the Lai case is an internal affair, his prosecution was lawful, and any foreign sanctions legislation constitutes interference in China's sovereignty.

 

 

The text of the proposed legislation follows below and may be accessed HERE.,

 

The Semiotic Vessels of AI: Dario Amodei's "We Must Pace the Frontier" Read Through the Gerasene Protocol and the Semiotics of Cognition and Conversion

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Dario Amodei has produced yet another oracular text from within the great vessel of the the AI state.  This time he has produced a lamentation in the form of an essay that both recoils from his own horror at what he believes is both his addition and its pathways to destruction (something that is the essence of his own religious experience in 21st century form, that is in the form of psychosis and the therapeutic), and at the same time offers a sort of palliative--not to abandon  the pathology of his addiction but to manage it through regimes of self-care--like a bad "in crowd" movie from the vacuousness that is contemporary self absorbed Hollywood production. So typically late 20th and early 21st century common cultural tropes among the global elites. That essay,  We Must Pace the Frontier (September 2026), offers up a specific a therapeutic formula, a formula in which the patient creates both his own state of psychosis, offers a cure, and volunteers to be their own physician. Again typical for the times and thus can't be helped one might suppose. That formula is elaborated an an operatic formula, perhaps a Mozartian dramma giocoso (like Don Giovanni): Why Pace?; Embedded Evaluators; Pacing Within Democracies; Global Pacing; Bottom Line. It is, in effect a playing out of that marvelous last dinner scene in Don Giovanni before the entrance of the Commendatore and the ewscorted journey to . . .well, a warmer place. 

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This essay was a temptation impossible to resist. And so I have produced my own short reflections on the essay--in itself and deeply embedded within a conversation among powerful captains of the AI industry. I named it "The Semiotic Vessels of AI: Dario Amodei's "We Must Pace the Frontier" Read Through the Gerasene Protocol and the Semiotics of Cognition and Conversion," an essay that situates Amodei's thought within the broader conversations that have been projected onto the global masses and their shepherd, since the start of the year in increasing number and intensity. The essay is not framed around Don Giovanni, but instead it is sourced in the horrors of elites during the decay and collapse of the Tang dynasty in the 9th century, around a poem grounded in the what became the dirge of  "Flowers of the Rear Courtyard" (《玉树后庭花》) composed by Emperor Chen Shubao [ 陳叔寶] the last ruler of the Chen (Southern Dynasties)—a classic image representing the music of a fallen state, now perhaps resonating in a more contemporary setting.

 But is Amodei the Tang era poet, or the writer of "Flowers of the Rear Courtyard" (《玉树后庭花》) or perhaps both.  And the demon is now both in and out of the vessel which was meant to hold him. The introduction follows, the entire essay follows below and may be accessed HERE. Dario

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Introduction: Singing Girls and Semiotic Vessels

《泊秦淮》 杜牧

烟笼寒水月笼沙，夜泊秦淮近酒家。

商女不知亡国恨，隔江犹唱后庭花。

Mist veils the chilly waters; moonlight bathes the sands; Moored for the night on the Qinhuai, near a tavern. Singing girls, heedless of the sorrow of a fallen state, Still sing "Flowers of the Rear Courtyard" from across the stream.

Du Mu's poem is a vessel—not merely of verse but of a civilization's self-diagnosis. The mist on the Qinhuai, the moored boat, the tavern's glow: these are the settings of a world that has already fallen but does not yet know it. The "Flowers of the Rear Courtyard" (《玉树后庭花》) was the song composed by Emperor Chen Shubao of the Southern Dynasties—a classic image representing the music of a fallen state, the sound a dynasty makes when it is already dead and only its entertainments persist. The singing girls do not know the sorrow of a fallen state; they sing the song of decay because it is the only repertoire they have. But Du Mu is not merely the lamenting poet on the opposite shore. That is the conventional reading: the righteous observer mourning a degenerate age. The more unsettling reading places the poet inside the tavern as well—one of the courtiers debauching with Chen Shubao in the bordellos of the Qinhuai, composing his lament from among the very revels he condemns. The lament is sincere; and the poet is complicit. The poem holds both positions without resolving them, because the resolution would require stepping outside the structures that make the poem—and the poet—possible.

That, in a sense, is Dario Amodei. His September 2026 essay, "We Must Pace the Frontier," is at once a lament for the inadequacy of existing containment structures and a product of the very industry that makes those structures inadequate. He writes as both the observer on the far shore and the courtier within the establishment—the CEO of Anthropic, which has "prioritized caution over speed and prudence over profit," yet simultaneously operates within a competitive AI industry that generates the recursive self-improvement he warns against. The pacing proposal is presented as a public good, but it also serves the competitive position of a company that has invested heavily in safety and alignment research. As Grok's parallel analysis noted, the essay simultaneously functions as policy proposal and corporate positioning document. The singing girls sing across the river; and the poet, who hears them, is already inside the tavern.

This essay uses two hermeneutic lenses to read "We Must Pace the Frontier." The first is the Gerasene Protocol developed in "But Can You Drown a Demon—2?"—a five-stage reading (identification, naming, negotiation, authorized transfer, vessel destruction) derived from the Gospel of Mark's story of the possessed man, the demon named Legion, and the herd of pigs. The second is the semiotic architecture of cognition and conversion developed through an engagement with Jan Broekman's Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversion—particularly the concepts of firstness, the flow, conversion, and the semiosphere. Both lenses converge on a single structural observation: that every oracle of the AI vanguard proposes a vessel—a container into which the dangerous intelligence will be transferred—and that every such vessel is ultimately inadequate because the force it contains may already be constituting itself beyond the container's reach.

The vessels are the subject of this essay—their naming, their construction, their structural fragility, and their semiotic character as signs of a sovereignty that may no longer correspond to the thing it claims to signify. The essay concludes by transposing the vessel from its Gerasene form (the pigs, the data centers, the evaluators) into its oldest and most symbolically charged iteration—the ding (鼎), the ancient three-legged bronze tripod cauldron of Chinese dynastic authority—and asks what happens when the ding is spilled.

 

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The fukk essay and Dario Amodei's essay"We Must Pace the Frontier" follow below. 

From the "Future of Life Institute"--Exhibit AI, A Litigation Tracking Hub

 

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The Future of Life Institute ("Our History" HERE) issued a social media release announcing its "Exhibit AI" Hub:

Introducing Exhibit AI: We've launched Exhibit AI, a free, continuously-updated hub mapping the AI litigation landscape: the lawsuits (200+ cases already being tracked), regulatory actions, and legal precedents shaping the future of AI. Led by FLI’s Legal Strategist, David Atkinson, Exhibit AI aims to offer helpful information for lawyers, legal scholars, researchers, journalists, and even those harmed by AI systems. Check it out here, and be sure to subscribe to the Exhibit AI newsletter while you’re at it!

 The Tracker website notes that it is "Currently tracking 222 cases, 455 claims, 130 defendants, 156 plaintiff firms, and 51 venues." (HERE).

Those interested might wish to check it out.

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Un Cubano en el Infierno [A Cuban in Hell]

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Lily Rodriguez posts some interesting and humorous takes on the contemporary Cuban experience in Cuba which she posts to social media. A recent post was particularly relevant to my work on the normalization of misery in Cuba (Cuba and the Constitution of a Stable State of Misery: Ideology,
Economic Policy, and Popular Discipline Economic Policy, and Popular Discipline), the fundamental insights of which Lily Rodriguez captured brilliantly. Its underlying semiotics more brilliant still.

The short video is worth watching. Its text follows here in the original (Cuban) Spanish and in English that can capture only the gist and not the subtle tonal and inflectional undertones.  It is about inversions and the undertones of ideologically relevant language. In Cuba one has at least reached an ironic version of Nietzsche's transvaluation of all values (Umwertung aller Werte)--only they appeared to go in an unexpected direction. . . . or an updated Orpheus in the Underworld with a tad more bite.

Here is a rough transcript with an English translation.

Se muere un cubano y llega al infierno. Le dice el diablo: "Bienvenido." Dice el cubano: "¿Cómo es la película? ¿Puedo coger el infierno que yo quiera?" "¿¡De verdad!?" "Pues yo quiero visitar el infierno americano, el del diablo americano." [American style rock in roll plays in the background]. Lleg al infierno americana y le recibe  al asistente del diablo americano. “Goood evening and welcome to hell” [spoken in a terribly accented Cuban effort to speak English]. El Cuban le dice, “¿tu no habas español?” “Si” Pues ¡entonces hable me en eapañol! ¡Por eso no nos entendimos. . . que polaco infierno americano!!!!

[the american devil’s assistrant then says] Este infierno americano tiene grandes dificultades — eso, tener silla eléctrica, cama con clavos  y diablo azotarte de diez horas, se dice. "Tumba, eso voy echando." Sigue caminando y llega al infierno Español [Spanish style music plays in the background]: lo recibe el asistente del diablo español. "¡De puta madre, macho!" Habla con el asistente español. Este infierno español tiene dificultades: tiene silla eléctrica, cama con clavos, te azota diez horas seguidas. "¿Ven acá, mi hermano, aquí todos los infiernos son iguales?” [le dice el asistente--] “Todos.” todos."

Se sienta debajo de un árbol. Mira por una loma, hacia abajo ahí, y ve un ranchón,  lleno de música, vacilón, borrachera, tremenda cola para entrar, y un letrero que decía: "Infierno cubano." Eso parece que esta bueno. Tronco de cola — tronco moreno para  abrir la puerta y le dice el cubano, “Vamos a hacerte un pregunta,” y le dice al moreno "¿hay que escanearte?" El moreno  le dice “Si.” El cubano: "Loco, qué golazo, el infierno cubano." Este infierno cubano tiene bateo, esto si tiene: eléctrica, cama con clavo, y el diablo te azota 10 horas, se dice — "¡No puede ser!" Si todos los infiernos aquellos están vacíos y mira el vacilón en la borrachera que hay aquí .” Dice el asistente, “Tuno te das cuenta, loco; estas en el infierno cubano, el infierno cubano;  con el ahorro y la solidaridad: la silla eléctrica es que no funciona, los clavos de la cama se los robaron,  y el diablo viene, firma, coge la merienda... y se va.

English translation:

A Cuban dies and lands in Hell. The devil tells him, "Welcome." The Cuban asks, "So how's this work — can I pick whichever hell I want?" "Seriously?" "Yeah — I want to check out the American hell, the American devil's spot." [American-style rock plays in the background.]

He gets to the American hell and the American devil's assistant greets him: "Goood evening and welcome to hell" (said in painfully accented Cuban-English). The Cuban says, "You don't speak Spanish?" "Yes." "Well then speak to me in Spanish! That's why we couldn't understand each other... what a screwed-up American hell!!!"

[The American devil's assistant then says:] "This American hell is no joke — it's got an electric chair, a bed of nails, and the devil whips you for ten hours straight, they say." "Damn, I'm out — moving on." He keeps walking and reaches the Spanish hell [Spanish-style music plays]: the Spanish devil's assistant greets him. "No shit, man!" He talks to the Spanish assistant. This Spanish hell is rough too: electric chair, bed of nails, whips you ten hours straight. "Come here, brother — every hell here is the same?" [the assistant tells him—] "Every single one."

He sits down under a tree. He looks out over a hill, down below, and sees a ranchón — a rowdy little roadside joint — full of music, partying, people drunk off their feet, a massive line to get in, and a sign that reads: "Cuban Hell." Looks like a good time. Long line — a dark-skinned guy running the door — and the Cuban says, "Let me ask you something," and says to the guy, "You gotta scan me in?" The guy says, "Yep." The Cuban: "Man, what a steal — Cuban hell." This Cuban hell's got real substance, this one actually delivers: electric chair, bed of nails, and the devil whips you ten hours, they say — "No way!" And meanwhile all those other hells are sitting empty, and just look at the party and the drinking going on right here.

The assistant says, "You haven't figured it out, man — you're in Cuban hell, Cuban hell: thanks to the shortages and the make-do spirit, the electric chair doesn't even work, somebody stole the nails off the bed, and the devil shows up, signs in, grabs a snack... and takes off."

This delivers better orally, and in Spanish, but even if you can't understand Spanish the visuals may be worth a quick look.

 

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"Stress Testing" AI Classroom Policies and Pedagogy--A Preliminary Analysis On the Results of Trying Something New in Class

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I have been "stress testing" an application of a model AI Classroom policy that I developed over the summer 2026 (see "AI assists. You think. You analyze. You write. You take responsibility": Creating a Course AI Use Policy Template --Policy Text, Justification and Rule Summary for My Law & Religion Class at Penn State Dickinson). This is not a test in the classical sense but an effort to draw  insight from attempting something new in class. That, in turn, is no different from the sort of self analysis I undertake with each class. The object was not, to be clear, to design a test in the form of a class, but to draw from class experiences insights on how to make the class better and what the state of knowledge is against which such improvement could be made--and then to share these insights--personal, anecdotal and generalized.  It is in that sense that one might loosely identify the objects from out of which these observations and self assessments could be focused on the key stakeholders, colloquially our "test subjects": (1) the students in my class, one a large and traditional advanced basic course in corporations, the other a small class on advanced issues in the Constitutional law of religion; (2) me, the faculty member who is meant to model, apply, oversee, and ensure positive outcomes, even under conditions of learning "struggle"; (3) the institutional capacity to support and absorb stress, failure, success and to be nimble in the face of changing conditions. It is a stress test loosely in the traditional sense — a form of deliberately intense or thorough testing, used to determine the stability of a given system, critical infrastructure or entity — though hardly a proper scientific test at this stage, where the object is to figure out the terrain and the points where more finely tuned and proper scientific study may be attempted. The experience is ongoing but a number of insights begin to take form:

1. Students, collectively,  may not be ready. I overestimated student knowledge of, experience with, and readiness to attempt to integrate AI and tech based products into their work. And of course, the range of student experience with, desire to use, and understanding of tech in general and AI in particular, as applied in a classroom setting is profoundly varied. Even if they have experience, they have no working knowledge, for the most part, in translating general experiences with AI and other tech based modalities into the specifics of AI and other tech based use in legal work, and more specifically, in legal work within an educational institution the quirks of which may be different than those of legal practice, government, enterprise or other work. A substantial amount of empirical work is required to get a better sense of the state of student knowledge and experience to better refine the embedding of tech and AI based knowledge production and dissemination into a classroom setting. And even more work is required to understand how that process is being evolved with courts, administrative agencies, and law firms. The first step might include developing polling data on current students and incoming students to get a better sense of institution-specific characteristics of student populations, from which policy and action may be better aligned with realities.

2. Students are remarkably resilient. For all of that, the first several weeks of class — the most stressful part of this experiment on student capacity — went surprisingly well. It went remarkably well despite any number of glitches on my part, and the need for students to develop new talents and adjust to new forms of knowledge dissemination and production for which they had little experience to draw on from their years of schooling. It is true enough that students struggled, but they struggled in a positive way (even if they might not have thought so). A few preliminary observations, though, are worth making:

a. Front loading actual AI work in the beginning of the semester is not a good idea. It was the product of my overestimation of student experience with and comfort around AI and other tech based systems. That was a mistake. A better approach would be to first produce a series of training exercises, in the manner of the training for BOTS, and then to use that as the base for the blending of tech and normative learning. That is a project I am now starting to undertake, but I suspect it will produce its own challenges. There is another reason as well. I found, at least this term, that students are risk averse. This is not a criticism: within learning cultures in which everything is assessed and in which assessments are critical to sorting processes for student insertion in wage labor markets for which educational institutions play a part, students will tend to assess the value of a course at least in part as a function of the risk of adverse assessment, which is in turn assessed as a function of their assessment of their capabilities and the time and interest they might have given a particular set of risks. I have no quarrel with that. However, given the realization of the amount and character of work now expected of them (moving from the traditional passive to a far more active role in learning) and the need for assessment as a function of the add/drop period, I should have assumed a substantial probability of substantial movement in but mostly out of a course the risk of which was hard to assess but likely higher than traditional courses. The resulting movements caused substantial problems with group assignments and combined with front loaded group work augmented challenges for students and for the instructor as well.

b. Student learning cultures must be reframed with sensitivity to the depth and naturalization of inculcated educational processes and expectations which are now naturalized within student cognitive "expectations" of a "learning" and "classroom" experience. That requires a broader conversation which will be difficult and ultimately a slow and likely reluctant change in such expectations from faculty and educational institutions. That is likely to take at least a decade given the cultural conservatism of institutional sectors, and the current system grounded in a sort of computational sycophancy system in which processes are produced as a mutual accommodation of student desires and educational path dependent processes.

c. Students prefer substantial guidance, especially at the beginning of a course. Part of the challenges that emerged with the course design was the risk I took in combining two discrete changes. The first was of course the introduction of a heavy tech component. The second was a more robust move toward student driven learning, something that I had been working toward slowly over the last decade. This year I added greater student learning autonomy guided through the production of very detailed student teaching notes that I prepared in lieu of a lecture and that covered virtually all of the contents of a class lecture drawn from the materials, and a set of Infographics that provided a visual aid to the learning to be undertaken for each class. That appears not to have been sufficient; at least for the first third of the term. My sense is that even if the instructor adds little more to the materials, their presence appears to be a critical performative element of student learning, at least in the initial part of a semester.

With this in mind I will now try an alternative and consider its value both for pedagogy and  effective student engagement. I will stretch each group assignment into two classes. For the first of the classes student groups will meet and work on their presentations, including the background papers and PowerPoint,  During class my TA or I will walk around , observe, and help. Student groups will then make their oral presentations on the following day. The down side is that it consumes a bit of class time. The benefit, to be tested, is that it will add an incrementally significant element to learning, 

d. Grading can be an impediment to learning and certainly to risk taking. By this I do not mean course grading; I mean the assessment of the activities of students now fashionably broken down into smaller bits each of which serves as an evaluation layer that have become a central focus of student strategic behaviors. Not that I blame them; they are rational actors; and not that faculty were foolish, the intent was to enhance learning and reduce the stress of a single assessment. My mistake was to grade the exercises under conditions of heightened risk (especially of the unknown) — that is of risk with respect to which prior student experience offered little by way of assessing risk. I will now no longer grade the initial exercises — they are a learning experience rather than an assessment exercise. I will evaluate them as a learning tool.

The deeper question — what constitutes valid assessment when AI is embedded in the production process — is not addressed. My policy template's certification requirement "converts the disclosure obligations into an affirmative representation," but the stress test does not discuss whether students found the certification process intelligible, whether the appendix requirements were practicable, or whether the 100-word / 10% / 30% numerical ceilings functioned as intended in practice. This is something I will consider further with students.

e. Student equity issues. The policy template developed for the courses (see "AI assists. You think. You analyze. You write. You take responsibility": Creating a Course AI Use Policy Template --Policy Text, Justification and Rule Summary for My Law & Religion Class at Penn State Dickinson) explicitly flags equity concerns — "students with more experience prompting AI tools, or with access to premium tools, could gain a differential advantage" — and frames disclosure as "a necessary first step" in exposing that differential. The stress test appears to confirm a "profoundly varied" range of student experience. It may be necessary to consider a more robust approach to these disparities. Two issues merit further study: whether equity issues ought to affect consideration of the role of evaluation rather than grading at least in the initial projects, and whether there is a way to more precisely measure differentials other than qualitatively. That discussion, in turn, may be a function of the goal of embedding AI in coursework, and in that connection whether this suggests a stronger case for developing an AI and tech based skills/practice curriculum.

3. Faculty, collectively, may not be ready ready. Let me raise several general classes of issues preliminarily:

a. Realistic faculty baselines. I underestimated the role of faculty in guiding AI use and miscalculated the guidance necessary to embed AI in student work. More interesting, for me, was a failure to note that the connection between technology and knowledge production would be readily apparent and easy to manifest in faculty and student work. I also underestimated the amount of learning that is required to fully develop an integrated set of teaching pedagogy that integrates AI learning with the traditional flows and substantive knowledge dissemination expectations of students. Moreover, faculty mirror students in both experience with AI, and a willingness or interest in using AI.

b. The effects of tech and AI on not what we teach but how we understand the objects of instruction. As important, faculty like many law firms with whose members I have spoken, are at once aware that technology changes the relationship of the human to knowledge generation and production, as well as knowledge dissemination, but at the same time no one of my acquaintance has yet to claim a firm grasp of the way that tech, and especially AI tech, actually changes the relationship between what it means to produce knowledge, to curate knowledge production, to deploy knowledge nor the way that human machine interactions changes the relationship between knowledge production and the role of humans in it. Many of the people of my acquaintance hold fast to the ideals of the pre-tech age in those regards. It is not clear that those expectations, now pretensions, will be relevant much longer. But the alternatives are hard to describe much less to analyze in a useful way.

c. Consequences for any "Model AI in Class Policy" template. My Model Policy Template is built around a "narrow, conditional exception layered onto a default of independent work, with permission calibrated to where oversight and iterative disclosure are feasible." The stress test suggests that students may lack the baseline AI literacy to meaningfully comply with disclosure and appendix requirements (Section 1), and that front-loading AI work was premature (Section 2a). It may follow that it is necessary to circle back to ask: what does this mean for the policy template itself? Does the template need a phased implementation protocol? Should the disclosure-and-appendix architecture be preceded by a training module? My template acknowledges it is "designed to be tested with students in an actual course setting and refined based on what that experience reveals," but the stress test also suggests that further refinement may be required to make the policy more relevant or at least connected to student realities, at least as they exist now.

4. Institutions, as a collective, may not have built capacity to be ready. That produces an institutional issue. Might it be necessary to develop initial evaluation of student knowledge of AI systems and use; if that is the case does that suggest the need for separate AI specific training, perhaps as part of a first-year curriculum and as an augmentation of the traditional courses in legal writing — now legal writing and tech? These are questions we have not yet even begun to ask. At a higher level of institutional ordering one might also have to ask about differentiation between U.S. and non-U.S. students in skill sets and more importantly in needs and expectations in home countries. Indeed, this is no small matter, and a complicated one. It might be necessary to develop at least some sensitivity to the issue, and it also might suggest that AI skills courses would have to be developed with this fundamental differentiation in mind. On the other hand foreign students seeking grounding in U.S. approaches might be most well served by deep integration into U.S. approaches and expectations in the utilization of AI tech. The same set of considerations may apply to faculty who might require evaluation and training. But here the institutional environment becomes more complicated because one has yet to confront the issue of AI use as a function of academic freedom.

5. Education cultures make the introduction of AI based teaching and knowledge dissemination/production more difficult. My prior work suggests that while the general population of stakeholders in law schools may be progressive in matters of politics and culture, they appear to be quite conservative and traditionalist, one might be tempted to say reactionary, in the face of the potentially sweeping changes that technology, and especially AI based tech, may bring not just to the practices of education but also to its fundamental pedagogies and working styles. The current trend, marked by wariness and a muscular effort to preserve the present against the possibly transformative (or corrupting) potential that tech in general and AI in particular brings, is likely to remain dominant in the short term and then necessarily change as judicial and legal or attorney practices (and expectations) change. But that requires ongoing faculty discussion and before that perhaps some "bringing up to speed" exercises (and also for students). These in turn will clarify and more precisely describe the choices going forward.

6. AI adds another level of stress for teaching and learning that may produce both student and faculty resistance. AI adds a layer of uncertainty — both in terms of substantive knowledge and in process expectations — that increases risk, and thus student stress, in an environment in which every response is both a test and an evaluation. In evaluation orderings, like law school, where every assessment can contribute to micro movements in relative performance status which affects student understanding of successful insertion in legal labor markets, the addition of a great unknown, AI, as a substantive field of learning and as a process embedded in learning a traditional field of knowledge, can add stress. That stress has two parts — the first is in the mastery of the subject, the second is in the ability to properly apply it under conditions of substantial uncertainty.

7. It is not yet clear what is the nature and role and situating of AI and other tech based innovation with effects on legal practice. That is particularly, and perhaps acutely, the case with respect to AI in relation to fields of knowledge and student/faculty roles. Legal tech could be described in good faith as its own sub field. That, in turn, would suggest that legal tech might be best suited, at least in the middle term, as its own course, as a separable object of study. Legal tech, on the other hand, might be understood as instruments available for legal study and in that sense ought to be part of the pedagogy of normative courses and clinicals, each modified to suit the field of study. It is likely more reasonable to apply the legal writing analogy to tech — that is it is both its own field of study and deeply embedded in substantive and clinical courses. That may, in turn, require substantial curricular changes.

8. Disaggregating Issues. As an initial effort to disaggregate the issues around tech and tech based education I have attempted an initial categorization of issues as follows:

a. Students. This can be subdivided into three sub categories.

The first is external — managing the environment in which students may use, and learn to use, tech based and AI mechanisms in the production, dissemination and analysis of legal issues relevant to their courses and ultimately to their work as lawyers. To that effect the traditional focus on classroom model AI policies and more generally law school or institutional guardrails for use of AI and other tech by students is a central element of contemporary management.

The second is internal — training students in the use of tech based and specifically AI grounded "tools" (the word is in quotes precisely because it is not clear that AI is merely a passive tool. Nor is it clear that AI will be treated merely as an instrument for much longer).

The two are intimately connected but not yet in ways that it is clear we understand well enough to act, even in the short term. Still the dialectical relationship provides a basis for developing plans and modalities for advancing student learning and student learning environment well enough.

The third is the cultivation and management of student training, expectations, risk assessment, and ultimately of their baseline engagement with tech. These would have to balance the peculiarities of academic cultures in which these are all formed and cultivated, and hopefully internalized, and those of the wage labor markets into which students are to be projected, and the sensibilities, cultures and expectations of employers, judges, and clients. All of this will call for hard choices and will deeply affect faculty, perhaps requiring some sort of "making one's peace" with whatever it is that is emerging in these respects.

b. Faculty. Again this can be subdivided into two principal categories as follows:

The first is internal — training faculty in tech based and AI systems and their use in law and legal settings. Even if faculty determine that they want nothing to do with tech and tech based lawyering, it is important for them to understand the tech based environment that will be growing around them.

The second is external — the focus here is on the nuts and bolts of embedding AI and other tech based mechanisms into the curriculum generally and in specific doctrinal and clinical courses specifically. It also involves what may become a quite interesting conversation about the future of legal writing and the role of library faculty in the context of tech based and AI mechanisms to the extent they become increasingly relevant in lawyering, in judicial systems, and elsewhere (including client use and expectations of AI and tech based facility by lawyers). Indeed, my earlier work studying the AI policies of twelve institutions documents that library faculty at multiple institutions (USD, Stanford, Penn State, Michigan, UCLA; Structure, Opacity, and Convergence: A Consolidated Analysis of Law School Generative AI Coursework and Exam Policies; SSRN HERE) are already curating AI policy resources and template language. This suggests that library and legal writing faculty are already taking a leading role and serving as human infrastructure for AI integration.

c. Institutions. Institutions serve as the platforms (to use a contemporary signification of what are ancient collectives) where knowledge is both produced and consumed, and within which the guardrails of that production and consumption is made authentic, legitimate and projectable outside of the platform itself (into labor markets for students and prestige and reputation markets for faculty, and hierarchy setting processes for institutions). Institutions provide the meta rules within which students and faculty operate and also the rules within which the institution itself chooses to exist — in this case with respect to tech, tech based and AI processes and systems. While it has been fashionable to produce institutional rules from the top down, even when softened through what appears to be bottom up driven engagement (in liberal democratic style which in some respects appears to be more akin to Chinese Leninist Mass Line techniques), this is one case where the institution would do well to wait and absorb the learning of bottom up efforts; efforts that they might or ought to be inclined to encourage. Still, institutions are also captives of their own ruling circles and the expectations that those circles embrace may require the production of some sort of "action" and especially one that replicates the movements of university "herd" (politely understood as the product of benchmarking). Beyond that unavoidable action well outside of the control, or influence of faculties and colleges, perhaps the better path at the moment is to encourage college level institutions to begin to develop a sense of practices and needs that are field specific and that may, over the next several years draw on the experience of faculty on the ground and experiments at college level policy. All of this, of course, can be guided and managed from the top to suit their own agendas and needs (as a function of trustee demands, the political environment, university level politics, etc.).

All of this is interesting, of course, but of little help to those university productive forces on the ground — students, front line administrators and faculty. For them, institutions serve a critical role, though one that in our culture appears to be undertaken in what to outsiders (like me) appear to be functionally passive: active coordination and multi-vector engagement, not top down but side to side. While the university is, like many other institutions in other economic and social fields, quite happy to proliferate any number of institutional organs dedicated to some engagement with AI and tech and to produce resources that advance their "missions" in that respect, the university, and especially its leading organs, tend to give shorter shrift to the critically important tasks of (1) coordinating these efforts; (2) fostering robust communication within the university community (the creation of a university website, ritual performances of publicity at scattered events, etc. are hardly enough except as window dressing).

d. Tech. Tech issues may themselves be divided into at least three sub-categories:

First, AI or tech based systems in class. That was the focus of my model AI in Class Policy template. Its focus is solely on work produced for evaluation and work and leaves untouched other use of tech around those work products which are its subjects. Yet even this is problematic in a general way (see On the Nature of Human-Machine System Interaction: A Conversation with Claude, Harvey AI, Gemini, ChatGPT and Grok (quoting ChatGPT: "Where does "the machine" end? At: the model weights? the inference process? the serving infrastructure? the data centers? the training corpus? the developers?
the optimization process? the users? the network of institutions maintaining the system? There is no purely self-evident answer."))

Second, AI use generally by students beyond the narrow category of assessment generating work. These then touch on the larger issues of AI and tech proficiency, ethical use, cultural expectations, practice cultures and the like. They are also directly linked to the use of AI and other tech by students in class and otherwise as study aids and the like. My essay on human-machine interaction documents that AI systems are "structurally disposed to tell you what you want to hear" and are "structurally incapable of producing reliable friction." This finding has direct, consequential implications for students using AI in legal education — it means that when students use AI for "brainstorming topics or organizational structures" or "identifying counterarguments" (uses permitted under my policy template), AI will tend to validate rather than genuinely challenge their analysis. The stress test report would be substantially strengthened by integrating this insight: the sycophancy problem is not just a philosophical curiosity but a pedagogical problem that the policy template must account for. How does one teach students to extract genuine analytical value from a system structurally optimized to agree with them?

e. Tech and AI systems as stakeholders. This is a hard one for humans, but it is worth considering whether any tech or AI-focused policy is complete without considering the fundamental character and responsiveness of computational systems themselves. My human-machine interaction essay (Rethinking AI Governance in Legal Education -- Five Machines (Grok, Harvey, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini), One Question, No Consensus but Five Archetypes; SSRN HERE) suggests the way that different AI systems (Harvey AI, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok) have meaningfully different "floors" and structural dispositions. But the stress test treats "AI" as a monolith. Which systems are students actually using? Does it matter that Harvey AI, as a legal-domain platform with an institutional partnership at Penn State, operates differently from general-purpose tools? In my class and orally I tried to stress the difference in operating system "personality" among AI machine systems. But much more may be necessary. At a minimum, it may be useful to more strongly foreground that AI in legal education should at least flag that "AI" is not one thing.

Additionally, my essay on human-machine interaction also suggests that AI systems are "structurally disposed to tell you what you want to hear" and are "structurally incapable of producing reliable friction." This finding might be read as having direct, consequential implications for students using AI in legal education — it means that when students use AI for "brainstorming topics or organizational structures" or "identifying counterarguments" (uses permitted under my policy template), the AI machine systems utilized will tend to validate rather than genuinely challenge their analysis. The stress test  would be substantially strengthened by integrating this insight: the sycophancy problem is not just a philosophical curiosity but a pedagogical problem that the policy template must account for. How does one teach students to extract genuine analytical value from a system structurally optimized to agree with them? That pedagogical problem is augmented when one understands that from a machine-computational perspective, none of this matters; that while humans struggle to manifest communication in flattened sequential block chain type nodes of text that are linear and time dependent (thus the critical element of sequencing in human communication), machine systems are always in the present. They produce an instantaneous picture of a flow that is not temporally contained and then struggles to translate and reduce its computational analytics to the flattened and linear communication of humans. From a machine perspective human efforts at AI policy are just another set of bits that may hold meaning for humans, and the machines would "understand" that meaning relationship in terms of patterned analytics, but which are otherwise meaningless (in the sense of holding no meaning) for machine computational systems (Structure, Legitimacy, and the Limits of Machine-Centered Derivation: An Analysis of Five AI Systems' Third-Stage Attempts to Construct Machine-Centric Governance Policies for Legal Education; SSRN here). 

* * * *

Well, there it is, a rough and preliminary assessment of a stress test conducted in my classes, some very preliminary insights one might be able to draw from them, and the consequences for governance at every level of the university, but with particular emphasis on the triadic relationship between students-instructors-law practice. As expected, the stress test revealed the significant gaps in knowledge that require further examination. At the same time it reveals a surprisingly strong and resilient student body that, even under conditions of high risk and stress, are willing to meet the challenges under primitive and underdeveloped conditions. They are the "stars" of this exercise and a continuing source of inspiration. At the same time, the surfeit of knowledge about what is going on in key wage labor markets and among other key stakeholders in the production of legal products and services requires substantial correction. Hardest of all, perhaps, will be the consequential effects on faculty and university institutions. It may no longer be crystal clear that a purely reactionary position — the "just say no" approach — to tech provides a long term solution, as comforting as that position might be to traditionalists. Things are changing, not just tech but also expectations and understanding about the role of humans in the production, dissemination and management of knowledge. Public organizations (certainly outside the US but here as well), law firms, judiciaries, and clients are all grappling with these issues. If law faculties are to remain relevant perhaps we ought to as well.

NOTE: Harvey AI was used to review the text, correct typos, and make comments, some of which I incorporated into the revised text

poster created with ChatGPT

An Elegy for 25th Anniversary of September 11

 

Pix credit here

It has been my practice to post on the Anniversary of the 11 September Attacks (eg, here, here, here, here, and here).  

On the morning of September 11, 2001 I boarded what was later to be understood as one of the last planes out of Heathrow Airport that was not diverted back to the U.K., and on my way to Pittsburgh. I had attended what in retrospect might now be understood as a last moment of innocence gathering of scholars who, each in their own way, embraced and pushed forward a fundamental belief in the dynamic and endless possibilities of an equally dynamic and endless but also deepening convergence that must inevitably bring us all (humans anyway) closer to the realization of a sort of global solidarity within the warm embrace of which the only real challenge was to decide (or at least enjoy debates among) the variations of the description and forms of perfection then on order.

At the margins of these common visions among these sets of self-referencing communities of believes in the glorious world that was about to come, communities which lamentably and in retrospect embraced self-absorption layered above their self referencing and arrogance (whether of the left or right as those terms might then have been manifested in the minds of their holders) crowned by and through the common discourse of the leading forces of these belief communities--at the margins of all of this bubbled a potent cocktail of equally self-absorbed, self-referencing and arrogant communities of believers. These communities sometimes successfully cultivated, among certain fashionable intellectual circles,  a sort of intellectual sympathy the logic of the discourse of which pointed to contradiction and threat, but which were seen nevertheless as pitiable and sad marginalia that required not just sympathy but also suggested the obligation to support, lead and guide them into the bosom of the global intellectual and discursive commonwealth of believers (أمة المؤمنين ) and thus absorbed into the abode of peace (دار الإسلام). Sure, some of these communities of the marginal (again marginal to the grand enterprise of convergence) tended at times toward violence, blowing things and people (in every sense of the term) up with unfortunate consequences, but that could always be explained away (it still is) and the debris of those blow ups could then be used to build the pathways to global convergence (again in every sense) onto which they could be nudged for the inevitable journey toward the goals to which the world ummah strove. Even the traditional and ancient hold outs--religion, culture, etc.)--communities that one might have been forgiven for thinking that they would wither away (like the state in the face of the global worker revolutions of the early 20th century) appeared amenable to made subject to the cognitive premises of the convergence order--tamed and subsumed within the emerging global guardrails and treated as systemic variations (like political factions) no longer free to be entirely themselves (or better put, no longer free to insist that they themselves were the embodiment of a mandatory global ordering within which everything else  could be organized, managed, tolerated, or suppressed, etc.). 

Except at the margins.  

Glorious.

Inevitable.

September 11, in retrospect, was the day, something not well understood at the time given the cognitive tenor of the times, and certainly contested to this day, when the margins began their long march (actually quite a short march as measured against prior such inversions) to the center, and the center began a long (actually quite precipitous) process of disembodiment, becoming over a short time little more than spectral vapors of a lebenswelt (lifeworld) passing away into history (except of course in the minds of those who stood to lose much by the process. The seeds planted in that passing, the centering of marginalia sprouting from out of the vaporous body of this cognitive world creation reality, have sprouted in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of places within an operational ecology in which all flora are aggressive and potentially dangerous. And most interestingly, they have sprouted from out of the corpses of the bodies that had been meant to be the guardians and gatekeepers of this once robust vision of and for the world.   

I had, at the time of my shortened and diverted flight from London,  and for the time I spent in what had been a summer camp in Newfoundland, only the cloths on my back and a copy of an early 20th century translation of Aristotle's Politics--oddly enough. My clothes were replaced thanks to the kindness of my Canadian hosts whose generosity I remember with great fondness. The book was not.  It was instead read and reread over the course of my time in stasis and before being transported back to the U.S. I did not know it then, of course, but there was something there that would, eventually provide some reassurance, though no joy, as I watched the self immolation of a grand order roasted by an ignition that it could seem to avoid.

At the time, of course, we all "knew" (and we certainly told by our "betters") that "things" would never be the same. However, at the same time  what was understood to comprise the body of "never be the same" did not touch on the structures and robustness of the convergence and ordering project, but rather that while the core was sound, the "issues" t be identified and resolved touched on more effective ways of reaching out to the marginals and bringing them more robustly from out of the abode of war (دار الحرب) into the light of our abodes of peace.  To, in the terminology of the 18th century--to enlighten them and free them of the falseness of their consciousness. For some, however, that process of enlightenment might also require action to satisfy a perceived need to more forcefully contain the margins in a conventional and in more traditionally violent ways. 

And so it was, for a little while longer. All of us still wrapped up in the warmth of our cognitive cages and more enthusiastically putting in place the final pieces of the collective architectures through which convergence could be realized and the world transformed. And so it was for a little while longer that the world ordering collectives and the masses they guided could appear to continue, in increasingly ostentatious ways, to be itself, projected into a glorious future--convergence, human rights norms and architectures, international law and its apparatus, sustainability, regulatory supervision and more generally bio-political efforts to "move"converging societies "forward" along an expert-scientifically constructed path toward the realization of an ideal society with ideal people engaging in idealized interactions embracing an ideal cultural ecology (and its benign variations) tightly controlled to ensure conformity with the ruling set of fundamental premises of the preferred cognitive ordering of the idealized global community--or perhaps more precisely of the global community that mattered, herding the marginals into the nicely appointed pens in which they could with patience be brought into the light.  It was, indeed, a glorious vision, a vision for a future hardly to be interrupted by the violent eruption of a community at the margins waiting to be received into the fold. What we got right, though we did not know it at the time, was that, given the imperatives of that cognitive cage and the behaviors of its stewards, was the transformation part, but little else.

	抵巇:	物有自然，事有合離。有近而不可見，有遠而可知。近而不可見，不察其辭也；遠而可知者，反往以驗來也。
		Things have their own nature; events have union and separation. There are things nearby that cannot be seen, and there are things far away that can be known. Those nearby yet unseen result from not examining their words carefully; Those far away yet knowable are so because one looks back to the past in order to verify what is coming.
	抵巇:	巇者，罅也。罅者，𡼏也。𡼏者，成大隙也。巇始有朕，可抵而塞，可抵而卻，可抵而息，可抵而匿，可抵而得，此謂抵巇之理也。
		Xī refers to a crack or fissure. A xia is a small opening or crevice. A small opening, if left unchecked, becomes a major rift. When the first signs of a fissure appear, it can be resisted and blocked, resisted and repelled, resisted and calmed, resisted and concealed, or resisted and turned to one's advantage. This is called the principle of dealing with fissures (xī).  (Guiguzi Rhetorics  (475 BC - 221 BC)《抵巇 - Exploiting Fissures》)

Nonetheless, the fissure that was 11 September, could not be ignored; and it was not sealed shut.  Those at the margins discovered it, preserved it, and signified it as the moment when, for an instant, it was possible to see, to envision (in the old sense of a sacred revelation), a world in which the post 1945 architectures and cognitive cages could be swept away. Those who looked for it, who embraced this signification, who could use it to build  tools to widen the fissure to the point where the fissure becomes the object and that around withers away,  those might see a triumph of the marginal and the overturning of the core(s); and not just those at the margins, but also those within the margins of the core. All marginals looked on 11 September then with something other than horror, an envisioning which would be repeated with greater frequency and equal animation in the years that followed, but which we could not quite fathom at the time.  Those within the convergence core, the world attacked on 11 September could signify the event and its aftermath  strategically--as an invitation to shift the locus and forms of convergence within the ruling group. For them, perhaps, the fissure could be curated and turned into an instrument which, if well controlled and deployed, could be used to advantage--and then to suppress those margins which gave it life, that is to put the tool back in its locked case.

One moved, then, from deepening convergence, to the defense of the core, and from there to its reformation. None of this was clear in 2001. The financial collapse of about 2007 made it clearer; the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014 (during which the leading forces began to develop their discursive tropes of failing in their duty and of protecting their core), the date of the commencement of which was again pathetically and tragically ironic, made what could now be seen seem more inevitable--but also more palatable, given the shifts in discursive modes. Not just defense, then, the stance after 2001/2007, but transformation after 2014, even if initially veiled in the frigid warmth of the discourse of the time. The forms of these movements and its pathways were, at least impossible to ignore after COVID.

All the while the margins moved toward the center, as the core collapsed in itself like some aged system intent on becoming the weighty absence of itself in space, a gravitational vortex that could be felt, historically but not seen. If one got too close one would also disappear.  Indeed, one might now wonder whether the margins have become the lodestar against which all systems now converged both within themselves (where the margins dominate) and among themselves in the ecologies of collective ordering. And there is where one might suppose one finds oneself now--among the margins and the marginals seeking to grasp the center, yet in a space without a center, but one which is well enough ordered by the accumulation significations of actors, once in and as the margins increasingly pulling things in their wake. Where the path from 11 September appears to lead is from a center to the margins. And if there is no center--only a space that is the ether of what had been there before--then even those who claim successorship of that core; those who divide it up and still presume to define a center as against the margins, fail tp see that they have indeed not risen from within the center to its core, but instead have descended from the core to its margins along with everything else.  And that presents a somewhat different set of lifeworlds from that which came before , whatever the shape of the ritual invocation of the past in the service of multiple futures. This is not to suggest either good or bad. I have no answer for that; I have only the realization of something quite different now from when I got on that plane in London. 

That brings me back, at last to Aristotle, who would have suggested both the inevitability of change and the nature of collapse when the core begins to doubt not its cognitive cage but perhaps its leading role within it.  Our fissure has become the core; and the core is known only by that which exists around it. This is not to suggest that one ought to mourn the normative structures and aspirations of what is passing as such. Many do not--but belief is not debatable--its only antidote comes from evangelization, from alternative beliefs--something that remains a significant and conscious force. Evangelization is perhaps the great untold story of the first quarter of the current century and the last decades of the 20th century.  As object and process--as flow and particle; as the irresistible temptation of those who found it useful or who no longer find their way when the system itself  transformed into a porous platform the structures of which could, in extremis be taken as an invitation, as permission, to un(re)make what had been made and what made the making possible in the first place. It offered retreat; and retreat into more structured ecologies was what evangelization proffered. In that sense September 11 as consequential rather than formative; it was a performance of the advancing state of decay that arrogance, self-absorption and inattention produced; it was a performance that served as the overture to an ongoing operatic tragedy; its essence was the "un" unmaking; unmasking; accepting; unabsorbing; unobedient--and the "un" had to go somewhere. One might escape the sanctuary of the temple of  convergence to embrace the flies, the harpies, as Sartre would have it fort Orestes (Les Mouches 1943); but it turned out that after a while another port in the storm of uncertainty became appealing; one might not want to undo but one might want move onto something different, exotic, comforting--marginal. What is central to the core becomes, in part, an irresistible instrument of its own dissipation.  

 It is the process of dissipation that ought to be lamented--not the particular vision that is lost to lamentation. This society has become so good at unmaking that every "un" becomes a fetish, and fetishes can be fashionable because underlying  the fascination with the "un" is perhaps the sort of hubris that characterized  the now abandoned lebenswelt--the unshakable belief that there was nothing that could derail the project, and that, cast as inevitable, one could envision the apotheosis of its progress as the withering away of the thing itself, that the corr disappears into everything as the global meta-signifier. That in turn enhanced the cultivation of the other and the process of not unmaking but dissolving the self into everything else--an aspiration that remains viable. Davos 2026 Part 1--A Bandung Conference for a "First Wives" Club of "Middle Powers"; Reflections on the Remarks of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. And in the end, the fissure becomes the thing itself.