The Hollowing
I keep almost buying a ceramic bowl.
It’s in a shop window in Chinatown, blue-grey, the color of a storm deciding what to become. Sits on a wooden pedestal at exactly the height your eyes hit if you’re walking at the pace of someone with somewhere to be who doesn’t want to get there. I pass it twice a week. I’ve never gone in. I don’t want the bowl. I want the life the bowl is evidence of, the apartment where every object was chosen instead of accumulated, where the light knows what to do, where I am the kind of person who owns one irreplaceable thing instead of fourteen things that almost work. The bowl is a compression algorithm. It takes a want the size of a life and shrinks it to $55 plus tax, and twice a week I let it.
Everyone says the problem with consumer culture is that we want too much. That’s wrong. The problem is we want too little. We want a lamp instead of a new life. Resistance bands still in the packaging, for the version of ourselves we were going to build once we stopped surviving long enough to start. A font change on a pitch deck instead of saying the thing the pitch deck exists to avoid saying. Commerce doesn’t overwhelm us with desire. It miniaturizes desire. Every algorithm, every product page, every checkout flow is a machine for taking the want that would reorganize your entire existence and handing you something that fits in a box. The desire to be known becomes a profile. The desire to matter becomes a personal brand. The desire to create becomes a template with a font someone else chose. The system needs your wanting manageable, repeatable, shippable. When your desire fits inside a shopping cart, the cart won.
The subversion, then, isn’t minimalism, which is just wanting less. It’s ambition. Wanting so big that the system has no container for it. Desire that outgrows what can be purchased: that’s the only thing the marketplace can’t metabolize.
Or so I thought, until I read about a woman who published 200 novels last year.
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Coral Hart didn’t write those books. Claude did, mostly, with Hart directing the output the way a contractor directs a crew. None of the novels were exceptional. They didn’t need to be. She sold 50,000 copies and made six figures. Then she did the interesting thing: she started selling the method. Eighty to $250 a month. Sixteen hundred subscribers learning to run the same machine. The content became the loss leader for the system that produces it.
A friend in publishing told me the Coral Hart article made him feel two things at once: contempt, and the sick recognition that she’d solved the problem he never could. Not the writing problem. The business problem. Which, he said with the voice people use when they’re confessing something they’ve known for years, was always the actual problem.
“The book was never the point,” he said. “The book was just the poop that moved through the pipe. She figured out the pipe was worth more.”
He paused. “And I can’t tell if that’s freedom or the last thing we were supposed to say no to.”
The body hunched over a manuscript at 2am, the years of revision, the marriage, the posture, the liver. The body was the bottleneck. Remove it and the product doesn’t diminish. It multiplies.
Which is the sentence that leads somewhere I wasn’t ready to follow.
The body was the bottleneck.
There are five men in Seoul whose faces you have never seen. They chose this.
That distinction matters. PLAVE is a K-pop group that sold a million albums in their first week. They filled a 37,000-seat stadium with fans who screamed and wept and held lightsticks synchronized to the bass. They charted on the Billboard Global 200. They won Korean music awards alongside artists made of blood and cartilage and publicists. They are 2D anime characters.
Behind each avatar is a real man in a motion-capture suit, a former trainee who once auditioned as a human idol and was told his face wasn’t enough. But here’s the thing I got wrong in my first telling of this story: I framed them as casualties. Someone had an idea, someone strapped on the suit, the system erased them. That’s the sympathetic version, and it’s a lie. These men made a calculation. They understood, before I started writing this essay, that the body was the bottleneck. Hart figured it out for books. They figured it out for performing. They walked into a room and chose to disappear because disappearing worked, and they were right, and that makes them something harder to deal with than victims. It makes them strategists. The essay’s own insight, arrived at by someone typing, was already being lived by someone dancing.
They strapped 53 reflective markers to their skeletons, mapped the movement to silver-haired boys with cheekbones that don’t come from bone, and transmitted the grace without the gravity.
It worked so completely that when a Korean radio host said on air she might feel “a serious sense of disconnect” if PLAVE appeared on her show, fans came for her until she publicly apologized. “I failed to recognize the changing times,” she said, and she sounded like she meant it.
The fans don’t mourn the missing body. They prefer its absence. A Taiwanese woman at a fan gathering in Seoul told a reporter: “The love they give us, the way they drive us to become better, how I wake up every day wanting to see them. That feeling is the same.”
That feeling is the same.
I’ve been sitting with that sentence the way you sit with a test result you weren’t prepared for. Because it either destroys my argument or it proves it, and I’m starting to think the answer is both.
Maybe the fans’ love is real. I believe it is. Who am I, sitting in an apartment with fourteen almost-right objects, to rank someone else’s wanting?
But if the feeling is the same even when everything that could challenge you has been removed, then the feeling can be produced without the thing that makes feeling dangerous. Without the risk that the object of your love will bore you, age in front of you, need something from you, fail you in a way that requires you to become someone different in order to stay. The animated boy who never betrays, never has a body that smells or stumbles out of a Gangnam bar at 3am, never turns out to have opinions you can’t stand. If the feeling is the same without any of that, then the feeling was never about being changed by another person. It was about the devotion itself. And devotion to a frictionless surface might be the safest way to feel reckless that anyone has ever found.
Both of these are true. The fans’ love is real. And what they love has been designed so that loving it requires nothing of them except more love.
The performers understood that the person was the overhead. They cut costs.
I should tell you what I do for a living.
I run creative for a company with six hundred thousand engineers. My job is to build something that hasn’t existed there before: a creative practice inside an organization that was designed, from its foundations, to build systems. I walk into rooms and say the thing you’re missing is the messy, unpredictable, human part. The part that can’t be templatized. Taste. Nerve. The willingness to show a client something they didn’t ask for because what they asked for is a lamp and what they need is a life.
I believe that. I moved my whole existence to do this.
And every week I participate in the thing I just spent two thousand words describing.
Not by watching work get sanded down. It’s earlier than that. More structural. I haven’t made the campaigns yet. I’m still building the argument for why the campaigns should exist. Which means every day I translate. You can’t put taste on a slide. You can’t put nerve in a business case. You can’t put “the willingness to make a CMO uncomfortable” in a procurement proposal. So I write “creative-led transformation.” I write “brand differentiation.” I write “strategic creative infrastructure.” Those words are not lies. They’re accurate. But they’re the version of what I believe that the system can metabolize. Every deck I build to justify why creative matters is itself a miniaturization of why creative matters. The argument for the knife is already a spoon.
Every deck I build to justify why creative matters is itself a miniaturization of why creative matters.
What I didn’t expect: writing the spoon is harder than writing the knife. My hands slow on the keys, a resistance in my gut, as if something physical registers the loss before the mind agrees to it.
I chose this. I chose it because the scale is real and the reach is real and the ambition to build something new inside a system that wasn’t designed for it is, I think, one of the bigger wants a person in my position can have. It doesn’t fit in a cart. It couldn’t be a lamp. I burned down the previous shape of my career to try this.
And I can’t tell, from in here, whether I’m building something that will change the system or whether the system is capturing my motion and transmitting something smoother.
There are weeks when something gets through with its edges intact. A bar conversation where I can see, on a CMO’s face, that the idea cut them a little, made them want something they hadn’t known to ask for. Those weeks are real. And there are weeks when I look at what I’ve built and it’s polished, strategically airtight, perfectly translated into the organization’s language, and it wouldn’t alter a single thing about how anyone thinks. Those weeks the feeling is the same as the fans in the dome. I’m devoted. I’m spending myself. The object of my devotion has been sanded into something that can’t push back.
I notice I haven’t said anything about the rest of my life. About whether the pattern stops at work. It doesn’t. There’s a version of this essay that talks about how we choose who to love the same way the fans choose PLAVE, swiping past anyone who might require us to become a different person in order to stay. There’s a version that admits the bowl in the window isn’t a metaphor, that I walk past it twice a week because going inside would mean deciding what I actually want my life to look like, and I’m not ready, and the not-readiness is the point, and the twice-weekly walk is itself a miniaturized form of wanting. I’m not going to write that version. But I want you to know it exists, pressing against the edges of this one, the way the man’s sweat presses against the inside of the neoprene and never reaches the screen.
The word I’ve been looking for. I think there are two things happening to desire right now.
The first is miniaturization. The lamp. The cart. The algorithm that takes your longing and hands you a product. Your desire is enormous; the system makes it small enough to purchase. We know this one.
The second. I keep wanting to call it something clinical. A syndrome. A condition. But it’s not a condition. It’s a design.
Hollowing.
Hollowing doesn’t shrink your desire. It lets desire swell, lets it become the thing you organize your whole life around, and while you’re busy feeling devoted it removes, quietly, everything in the object that could resist you. Everything that could challenge you, disappoint you, bore you, age in front of you, need something from you in return. The desire gets bigger. The object gets thinner. You fill a 37,000-seat dome with your wanting and the thing you want weighs nothing at all.
Miniaturized desire is tragic in an obvious way. You wanted a new life and got a lamp. Hollowed desire is harder to see because it looks, from every angle including the inside, exactly like… passion. The intensity is real. The community is real. The sacrifice is real. But the sacrifice flows in one direction. The object can’t sacrifice back. It was designed by people who understood that the ability to disappoint, to resist, to be inconveniently real, was the flaw.
Hart removed the flaw of effort. The PLAVE performers, who are not victims of this but its architects, removed the flaw of a face. Both discovered the same thing: the human was the part that everyone, together, agreed to shed.
Somewhere in a studio in Seoul, right now or close to now, a man with aching knees and neoprene clinging to his back is dancing beautifully. On a screen thirty feet away, a boy with impossible cheekbones does the same movements without the sweat. The audience loves the boy. The man goes home with the knees. Nobody is being tricked. He chose this. The fans chose this. Everyone is doing it to themselves, together, which is worse than a system you could point at and refuse. The hollowing isn’t imposed. It’s preferred.
I chose it too. Every Monday morning. The suit, the deck, the argument for the knife written in the language of spoons. I chose it because the alternative isn’t a world without suits. The alternative is not dancing. And the motion inside the suit is real; I know it’s real because my knees hurt too.
The motion inside the suit is real; I know it's real because my knees hurt too.
I’ve been writing toward this for a long time now, hoping the sentences would outrun it: the motion being real doesn’t change what gets transmitted. The man dances with his whole body and what arrives is a boy who has never had a body. I build with my whole self and what arrives, sometimes, most times, is a version with the inconvenient parts removed. The fans feel something enormous and the enormity is genuine and the object it’s pointed at was designed to be weightless. Both things are true. The feeling is real and the thing that produces the feeling has been hollowed out and the realness of the feeling is, in fact, the product.
They just coexist, the way my knees and the beautiful slide deck coexist, the way the fans’ tears and the absent body coexist, the way the bowl in the window and the life I haven’t built coexist, each one completely true, neither one changing the other, and the space between them is where I live.
That’s not a resolution. It’s the fracture. And I think it might be permanent.