Somewhere in Brisbane, a few years ago, a woman went to see a film alone in a regent cinema and was the only person in the theater. She told the projectionist she didn’t want to be a bother, she could come back another day. He said it was no bother at all. They would roll the movie even if no one showed up.

I have been thinking about that projectionist all morning. About the dark room and the bright wall and the empty seats and the man upstairs threading the reel, and the one woman, and the agreement they reached, which was that the showing would happen anyway.

There is a website now that finds these screenings. About one in ten AMC showings, on any given day, sells zero tickets. Someone built a tool to point at the dark. The comments fill quickly with people who confess they go on purpose. They like it. The popcorn is too loud when other people eat it. The room without anyone else in it is its own kind of attention.

A man in California has just finished a project. He took a 1966 Ford Mustang and put a Tesla underneath it: the floor and battery from a 2024 Model 3, the cameras retrofitted, Full Self-Driving working. A commenter, slightly dazzled, points out that this isn’t really a Mustang converted into a Tesla. It’s a Tesla wearing a Mustang. The driver, who used to be the entire point of a 1966 Mustang, is now optional. Sentry Mode is on. The car watches itself.

Meanwhile a Jeep belonging to a man named Dube displays an unsolicited fifteen hundred dollar promotional offer on its startup screen. The only opt-out is a phone call during business hours. Nineteen of twenty-five major manufacturers reserve the right to sell what they infer about your psychology. Nissan in particular reserves the right to infer it. The dashboard knows things about Dube that Dube does not know about Dube, and it is using them to try to sell him something while he sits there. He dismisses the ad. The car starts. At the next ignition cycle, the offer comes back.

It is the same room as the empty cinema. A space that used to contain a person, now containing a system that does not notice the difference.

A woman writes a careful essay about something she is calling cognitive debt. It is not the same as technical debt. Technical debt lives in code. Cognitive debt lives in people, and what it means is the slow loss of a team’s shared understanding of how its own software works. Velocity surpasses comprehension. The machine continues to run; nobody can quite say why. In the comments, an older engineer notes that this isn’t new. Managers have been losing the thread for decades. They get promoted out of the work and the work goes on without them. After a while, the org stops being legible to itself. He doesn’t say it cruelly. He says it the way you’d describe an old room you used to know.

In another tab, a paper says that when men in their fifties and early sixties lose their jobs, they cognitively decline. The work was where the people were, and when the people went, something in the man went with them. The paper does not put it that way. It uses Bartik instruments and labor demand shocks. But that is what it says.

In another tab, GameStop, which is a company that used to sell videogames in malls, has offered fifty-five and a half billion dollars it does not have for eBay, which is a company where used objects find each other. Someone compares it to Sears, to Toys R Us. Capital sloshing between empty buildings, looking for something to do. The CEO triggers a compensation clause. The buildings remain empty.

Skill, faculty, capital. Three kinds of forgetting, in three different rooms, none of the holders quite noticing. The gap between what is moving and what is understood, accumulating quietly in all three.

And it is into this front page, this morning, that a man named Thien walks up to thirty-five strangers at his gym and tells them, one at a time, that he likes their form, or asks if they have a minute to spot him, or compliments the patience with which they stretched. Just that. He writes about it afterward and the post hits the top of Hacker News and stays there all day, with six hundred comments, and the comments are almost all from people who have forgotten how to do this and are trying to remember. Some of them are angry about it. Most of them are tender. A few share their own small protocols, like people exchanging recipes for a food they used to eat at home and can no longer find.

There is one more thing I want to put next to it. Another man, this past weekend, bought a pad of grid paper from a Minneapolis stationer and drew a QR code by hand. Twenty-one squares by twenty-one squares, in pen, with the corner anchors first and the timing lines after. He tested it on his phone halfway through and the phone began to recognize him. The QR code is a thing that exists so that machines can find each other quickly and reliably without bothering us. He drew one by hand, square by square, on an afternoon. He did not need to. He did it because doing it was the point.

What Thien did at the gym is the same gesture. The compliment is a thing the algorithm produces in its sleep, on a schedule, in your inbox, in your feed, optimized. He walked across a room and said it out loud to a person who was already standing there. He did not need to. He did it because doing it was the point.

Outside, somewhere, the projectionist is rolling the film for the woman who didn’t want to be a bother. He told her it was no bother at all. He said they were going to roll it anyway.