Note: This is a slightly edited (for the web) issue of a previous email newsletter. (If you’re not subscribed, join here, it’s free.)
⦿
This is going to be a little rough, messy.
I’m attempting to draw out a shard of my understanding — thinking out loud, mostly unfiltered.
It’s hard to look at the world — news, Substacks, YouTube, all the places trying to capture attention — without AI sitting at the center of it.
Mostly: how to use it to automate our lives.
How to scale the bits we’re bad at or dislike.
How it’s apparently just a moment away from replacing many of us altogether.
I met a friend for lunch yesterday. She told me there’s a movement of opportunistic “button‑pushers” using AI to write three fiction novels a day — and publishing them.
GPT‑5 and Opus 4 can already write better prose than 99.99% of fiction authors, so I suspect the thinking is: if I can’t compete on craft, I’ll compete on volume.
There are armies of pseudo‑authors doing this right fcking now.
When I sit with that, I wonder where meaning emerges — where it’s forged in this race to the bottom.
Years ago, I read the wonderful (and difficult) book All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Sean Dorrance Kelly & Hubert Dreyfus.
When I read it, “AI” hadn’t been released. The message still left a “scar” on my consciousness. (In a good way.)
Today, it feels even more salient.
Sacred work isn’t a genre; it’s a mode of participation.
It shows up when skillful attention meets a living situation that can’t be fully specified in advance.
In that coupling, something more appears — call it sacredness, the sublime, the numinous, or simply “the thing shining” (or “whooshing up,” using the language of Kelly/Dreyfus):
“The most important things, the most real things in Homer’s world, well up and take us over, hold us for a while, and then, finally, let us go. If we had to translate Homer’s word physis, then whooshing is about as close as we can get.” (pg. 200, All Things Shining, Kindle Edition)
This emergence is irreducibly felt, yet it can be cultivated — through craft, constraints, and the messy human fingerprints at the center of practiced skill (poiesis).
In the Greek/Heideggerian lineage, poiesis is bringing‑forth — a revealing of what is through craft. Not mere production, but disclosure: truth coming into presence in and through the maker’s activity. That’s why great making can recalibrate what a community finds real or relevant.
AI can accelerate outputs, but it can’t stand in for that felt coherence — because the value is in the participatory enactment, not the artifact alone.
A few weeks ago, Robert Greene published a short video about his upcoming book (Fall 2026), Toward the Sublime (which I’m so looking forward to!). He said:
“The sublime is an experience you can’t put into words. It kind of eludes language. It’s so preverbal. It’s just a feeling. It’s an immense feeling, right? And so you can’t really verbalize it. It’s not an abstract thing. It’s an experience. It’s a sensation…” — Robert Greene, Aug 26, 2025 (source)
Somewhere along the way — seeded by intuition — I realized the work I’ve been doing since Jan 2023 (Tiny Digital Worlds) is about codifying a process by which we, as flawed humans, create a “container” where our value is embedded in the craft we do for the people we serve.
The container (our World) becomes a place where meaning — the sublime, the sacred, the whooshing! — more readily emerges for both us (the creators) and our true fans through the sacred act of service.
Our moat is our humanness. Embedded in our craft is our taste — the thing only we can bring to the party.
I use AI. I love it. It sits across the table as I work — nudging lines that don’t land, surfacing blind spots (of which I have many), prodding me toward a better, clearer TDW. A partner, yes. An interlocutor, absolutely. But never the voice.
But — there’s no model that can replicate my taste, my expression, the inexhaustible coupling of my reality and my relevance‑realization machinery.
That’s why sacredness keeps showing up as “more to see,” never fully capturable. (Often maddening: words fail the thing I can sense laughing just around the corner.)
“So I propose to you that what sacredness is, is to play with, seriously play with, the machinery of relevance realization as found within the primordial aspects of Religio and that doing this would be deeply advantageous to us because it is so foundational to our agency, to the world as an arena for our action, to our capacities for self‑transcendence and so forth.” — John Vervaeke (Ep. 35: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis — The Symbol, Sacredness, and the Sacred)
I started this TDW project thinking digital world‑building was my differentiator…
But the deeper recognition is this: I’m trying to codify how to build a human‑centric “container” for creators to express our flawed humanness — where, in the practice of poiesis, we invoke the sacred in the work we do and in the transformative experiences our citizens have.
The hard part is making that codification transferable — from me (what I’m demonstrating and teaching) to you, so you can do the same for your people, but in your own unique expression.
This is our moat. It’s deep and wide and durable.
… but it takes hard work. There’s no easy button.
I’m planning to open the doors to TDWB (Tiny Digital World Builders) between Monday, Nov 10th and Friday, 17th on Friday, January 9th, 2026.
The thing I’ve been building isn’t finished. It probably never will be — only ever an iterative state of “good enough.” I’ve had to come to terms with my own limitation, slowness, because the details matter to me.
Once the doors open, I’ll keep them open.
Which means: no deadline. (Note: Not creating/enforcing a deadline violates Marketing 101. I’m fine being the black sheep. Or just the weirdo. Or perhaps knowing something others don’t.)
The tension is this: start now. AI is eating the world. Our value, for the people we seek to serve, is to build a World around our humanness and our unique poiesis.
This work will get you there faster. But more than that, this is about a long-term, durable, “foundation” from which your uniqueness can shine.
If you value that, this is your invitation.
Enjoy the journey.
~ André
P.S.
I really liked how David Senra reflected back to Daniel Ek, founder/CEO of Spotify, about what makes Spotify, Spotify:
“this is the way founders should run their company because you said it back in 2021 in that series on Spotify, we’ve had conversations like this. This is something I always say. It’s like, it’s tied to the personality of founder. The advice is fucking useless unless it’s tied to who you are as a person. Spotify is a reflection of you.” — David Senra in reflecting back to Daniel Ek, founder/CEO of Spotify (Source)