INTRODUCTION: THE GROUND IS FALLING
“We used to build pathways for transportation. Now we must build spaces for transformation.”
Our common core of Understanding—what we all stand/under—has disintegrated. The fundamental ground of what we might once have called shared existential identity is fissured—close to beyond repair.
Reality has been reduced to an algorithmically manipulated feed—the ultimately consumptive and isolating ontological stance. We no longer experience reality directly together; it is administered to us individually in titrated doses, like fentanyl for the brain. We scroll, we numb, we forget what we even ate.
In the cultural paralysis that keeps us suspended in this loop, something deeper is being revealed. The old coordinates that once drew us out of our zombie-like state—social, spiritual, symbolic—no longer hold. And nothing coherent has replaced them. (The zombie is the mythic archetype of our age: soulless, unaware, caught in endless consumption without transformation. The symbol isn’t metaphorical—it’s infrastructural.)
Our capacity for memory—to re-member ourselves—is eroding. We’ve lost contact with the trajectory of real, embodied experience. The thread of lived reality has been replaced by algorithmically manipulated simulation. What we once lived, we now perform. What we once remembered, we now render.
In this shift, ‘memory’ as lived continuity has been replaced by ‘meme’—a digital, commodified shorthand for cultural participation. Memes reverberate through the culture faster than reflection ever could. In many ways, a meme is a stereotype of a shared human moment—a flattened echo of what we might otherwise live through together. But instead of living it, we share it. We like it. We signal that we belong.
And yet, the driving force behind meme culture isn’t meaning—it’s engagement. The most viral symbols are not those grounded in truth, beauty, or goodness, but those optimized for salience. Our cultural signals are no longer calibrated for depth—they are calibrated for clicks.
This isn’t richness of information, but smoothness—thin, limbically hijacking, instantly transmissible. And now, artificial intelligence outperforms us at this game—because it’s been trained on our full behavioral dataset. It knows how to mimic meaning faster than we can remember how to make it.
Look at the meme-driven rise of running clubs, where genuine discipline is reduced to aesthetic performance. Movement becomes content. Presence becomes performance. We act to be seen acting.
Our cities, once vessels for the sacred, are now engines of consumption. Our institutions, once aspirational, have become adversarial or irrelevant. And our attention—the primary currency of human meaning-making—has been flattened, extracted, and sold back to us as spectacle.
We are not just in crisis. We are in a meta-crisis—a collapse of the symbolic frameworks that once helped us orient to being. How did we get here?
We’d argue the crisis began with a split: “I think, therefore I am.”
Descartes’ formulation, meant to ground knowledge in certainty, instead severed mind from body, self from world. It framed consciousness as isolated observer—disembodied, rational, and removed.
This Cartesian abstraction became the metaphysical foundation of modernity. Enlightenment thought privileged reason over ritual, measurement over meaning. The cosmos was no longer a living whole—it became a machine. And humans, its master operators.
Out of this grew modern institutions: universities, markets, bureaucracies. They coordinated at scale, but at the cost of soul. The sacred was privatized. Ritual was replaced by regulation. And the animating myth of the modern world became progress—measured by growth, speed, and control.
As this logic calcified, a new infrastructure emerged to manage perception itself.
The 20th-century infrastructure for meaning-making—what Jordan Hall calls the Blue Church—was built for a slower, more stable world. It relied on centralized broadcast authority, institutional consensus, and top-down coordination to hold society together. Its underlying logic was the secular offspring of post-Enlightenment rationalism: that progress, growth, and reason would be our salvation.
But in the absence of shared myth or ritual, worship didn’t disappear—it simply migrated. The sacred was sublimated into the market. Our rituals became transactions. Our cathedrals became shopping malls. Our gods became brands. And the dominant liturgy of the Blue Church became: “growth is good, no matter what.”
As trust in this system decayed—under ecological strain, financial collapse, and spiritual disillusionment—postmodernism emerged as critique. It exposed the cracks: the exclusions, the colonial shadows, the failures of universalism. But without a new story to replace it, the critique became totalizing. It didn’t rewrite the myth—it erased it. And into that void, we poured a new kind of golden calf.
The postmodern condition radicalized the language of care, weaponizing it into a new moral order. Worship didn’t vanish—it turned inward. The systemic abstractions of progress were replaced by intensely personal narratives of harm, identity, and victimhood—each with their own dogmas, taboos, and rites.
Wholeness was no longer the aim; fragmentation became a virtue. Power was relocated from institutions to feelings. Critique itself became a form of salvation.
This cultural shift was necessary—but incomplete. In rejecting the failures of modernism, we also rejected the possibility of transcendence. And what we were left with was aestheticized fragmentation and spiritual exhaustion.
What we need now is integration.
As Ken Wilber and other integral theorists have shown, evolution must include and transcend. We must learn to hold traditional depth, modern structure, and postmodern sensitivity—together. We must recover coherence without falling back into dogma. We must reawaken the sacred—not as superstition, but as symbolic orientation. A rational, embodied, relational spirituality—practiced in space and time.
EXIT is a prototype of this integration.
A civic meta-infrastructure not designed to dictate belief, but to host awareness.
To provide the symbolic scaffolding and spatial rhythm through which Transcendence can re-enter public life—not as ideology, but as lived participation.
It is infrastructure for reorientation.
A vessel for remembering.
A mirror for becoming.
What’s missing is not more content.
What’s missing is infrastructure—not just steel and software, but shared sense and direction.
II. THE FAILURE OF EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE
Infrastructure has always mirrored what we value:
Aqueducts for water.
Roads for trade.
Schools for knowledge.
The internet for speed.
As abstraction advanced, so did our capacity to coordinate.
From projectile weapons to farming tools.
From formal language to emojis—symbols for global, empathic connection.
But now our abstract technologies have layered so thickly over reality that they’ve become ends in themselves—detached from their original purpose. We have lost their meaning, and we have no infrastructure to help us remember it.
The earliest commons were forums—for gathering, exchanging, and reflecting on what mattered most. But as culture evolved, these functions fragmented. Commerce. Health. Faith. Abstracted. Dislocated. Until finally: data.
Meaning was no longer lived. It was digitized, distributed, and commodified.
We now drift through a virtual world governed by corporate logic. Our survival risk is low, but our existential risk is high—and abstract. So we transpose the ego into a game online, and the game rewards manipulation.
We’ve lost not just attention—we’ve lost the frame.
It’s not only that we can’t focus. It’s that we no longer know what to focus on. The structure that once tethered attention to meaning is gone. And so, attention loops back onto the self—atomized, aestheticized, addicted.
Hell is not hypothetical. It is a perceptual condition—when the loops of attention close entirely around performance, consumption, and fear. Look at our bodies, hunched and bent inward toward glowing rectangles. The zombie is no longer a cinematic metaphor. Walk through any city. It’s viscerally real.
Today:
Physical infrastructure moves bodies.
Digital infrastructure moves data.
But nothing helps us move together—in perception, in direction, in shared awareness of what matters.
We lack a nervous system for cultural sense-making.
No symbolic scaffolding.
No orientation.
No holding space.
This is the void EXIT exists to address. re-drawing our relationship to Existence itself.
III. WHAT IS CIVIC META-INFRASTRUCTURE?
“The most important systems of the 21st century won’t be visible. But they will be felt.”
Civic meta-infrastructure is not built from concrete or code. It is built from ritual, rhythm, symbolic language, space, and design.
It doesn’t extract attention—it frames it. It doesn’t impose meaning—it creates the conditions for meaning to emerge. It doesn’t broadcast content—it invites participation.
It is the nervous system of culture—the scaffolding that helps us metabolize complexity so we don’t collapse beneath it. A living architecture for our shared symbolic life.
As Jordan Hall articulates in his vision of Civium, the next evolution of civilization will not be held together by nation-states or market systems alone, but by sense-making environments—coherent symbolic and cognitive ecologies capable of hosting collective intelligence. EXIT can be seen as a proto-node of that environment: a civic container for participatory coherence.
To move forward, we must construct civic scaffolding that allows us to re-socialize ourselves with the transcendent. Infrastructure where the sacred can re-enter public life not as ideology or abstraction, but as felt experience—as ritual, relation, and existential stance.
This requires a crucial cognitive shift: the naturalization of the transcendent. Not as a supernatural claim, but as a recognition of the suchness of the between—the ontologically real quality of what emerges when we become mutually aware, together. This is the work of distributed meta-cognition: learning to perceive the relational field as a kind of sacred terrain.
EXIT exists to facilitate this awareness. Its design, aesthetics, and symbolic framing are all oriented toward making this relational truth perceptible again. EXIT is not just a space—it is a structure for remembering. A framework that makes space for transcendence to be felt, practiced, and integrated as a shared existential reality.
Civic meta-infrastructure is not an ideology. It is a format. A space where presence is hosted. A rhythm where value can emerge. A frame that keeps meaning alive, open, and relational.
EXIT is a prototype of that format.
A nervous system for collective sense-making.
A vessel for symbolic coherence in an age of fragmentation.
A place where the sacred can once again be known—not as something outside us, but something between us.
IV. EXIT AS A PROTOTYPE
EXITs contextualize the shared Existential Process itself—as a way of grounding us inside a lived, intrinsically transformational ontological framework. Where the purpose is not transaction, but transformation. Where the aim is not content, but coherence. EXIT frames the practice of human communication and interaction as ritual. It is not merely a venue—it is a civic vessel. A space for symbolic attunement. A temple for relational presence.
EXIT reclaims the language of commerce and architecture—not to sell, but to reorient. To host perception. To signal transition. To remind us that the world is not made of things, but of relations.
“What are you exiting?”
Each EXIT is a soft container, a threshold, an anchor. Carefully calibrated to host:
Spatial cues that guide attention
Ritual design that slows perception
Language that opens symbolic space
EXIT is designed to scaffold the perception of the sacred—not as dogma, but as a practice. It doesn’t deliver answers—it holds openings. It doesn’t function as a venue for entertainment—but as an ecology for existential participation.
It is a meta-structure for distributed meta-cognition. A place where the real between can be felt, known, and practiced. Where the transcendent becomes naturalized—through presence, orientation, and relational stance.
EXIT doesn’t seek to scale like a startup. It seeks to stabilize relevance—to model coherence in a fragmented world. It is an open node for culture to cohere around—not to dictate what is true, but to give space for truth to be pursued together.
It steals the language of physical transportation, quite naturally, and repurposes it for metaphysical transformation. Each EXIT is a portal—not to escape, but to arrive.
V. A NEW PUBLIC SERVICE: Designing for Attention, Not Extraction
If attention is sacred, public space must protect it. But nearly every space we enter today is designed to hijack it.
Retail. Culture. Social media. Even “art.” These are no longer spaces of reflection, but ambient manipulation. We don’t enter environments—we enter persuasion engines.
EXIT proposes a different kind of public service.
Not one of delivery—but of existential orientation.
“EXIT is not entertainment. It is not escape. It is a site of civic metabolism—where we digest reality together.”
Like libraries once held knowledge, EXIT holds presence. A civic system for returning attention to itself. A structure for hosting the sacred act of perception.
EXIT does not demand performance. It invites being.
It is not a spectacle—it is a frame.
It is not an answer—it is a rhythm.
EXIT is a lobby for life itself—a shared space where we can collectively remember how to be, and become, again. A scaffolding for re-socializing ourselves with the transcendent.
A place to practice shared becoming.
VI. WHY NOW? Before the Symbolic Floor Collapses
We are already inside the breakdown.
Climate collapse. Economic instability. Cultural fragmentation.
But beneath them all: the symbolic floor—the foundational architecture of shared meaning—is giving way.
When that floor collapses, spectacle fills the void.
Conflict replaces connection.
Addiction replaces ritual.
Visibility replaces significance.
This is why we must build now—while there’s still something to stand on.
EXIT is not a solution. It is a preemptive intervention.
A living prototype for the spaces we’ll need to metabolize the present—without succumbing to it.
We cannot wait for total collapse to realize we needed new vessels for coherence.
We must start building them now.
VII. CONCLUSION: The Next Infrastructure Is Meaning
EXIT is not a product.
It is a practice.
It is not a brand.
It is a threshold.
It is not a theory.
It is a lived frame—a public invitation into symbolic coherence.
EXIT is the prototype for a future civic architecture:
– where perception is protected,
– where attention is attuned,
– where meaning is made real again.
Because without symbolic infrastructure, culture becomes content.
Experience becomes performance.
And meaning becomes impossible.
EXIT offers a way out—not as escape, but as entry.
Not a departure from the real, but a re-immersion into it.
“What might it feel like to become human again—together?”
Let Boston be the place that remembers.
Let EXITs be the scaffolding.
Let this be the invitation—to begin.