9 The Thin Ice
Chapter 9
Guns, Civility, and the Fragile Modern Mind
Ideology
“The world’s most civilized people are as near to barbarism as the most polished steel is to rust. Nations, like metals, have only to be exposed to air — and time — to tarnish.” — H.G. Wells
My opening move into Toronto so far was akin to popping open a can of Molson Canadian and shouting, “I am Canadian.” But by now after a quick and dignified process – in a stark contrast to the previous clown car – I finally settled into a curious new identity: a Canadian who still thought in Fahrenheit.
By then, I had stopped obsessing about nations and started thinking about civilization itself — the even bigger operating system beneath the political apps. If countries are just splash screens, then civilization is the shared login page where all eight billion of us click “Accept Terms and Conditions” and lie through our teeth about having read them.
Toronto was the perfect place to study this. Here, even chaos had a user manual. The subways apologized. The jaywalkers thanked you. And the drunks fought with the dignity of stage actors—grabbing each other’s shirts, pausing to apologize mid-swing, and resuming with better form. It was like observing a beta version of humanity where the bugs had been politely filed but not yet fixed.
MuchMusic and the Myth of Civility
From my downtown balcony I could look down at the MuchMusic studio — “MTV North,” where Canadian celebrities descended each summer for the MMVAs. It was the most civil street riot I’ve ever seen: teenagers screaming, cameras flashing, and everyone still making room for pedestrians with strollers. Once, I waved at a CityTV anchor on the sidewalk. He actually turned, smiled, and talked back. In L.A. that only happened if you were holding a subpoena.
Toronto felt like civilization with a human-friendly UI: large, well-spaced buttons; no dark patterns; infinite undo. Even the cops looked like they’d been trained in customer service before law enforcement.
For a while, I bought into it — the myth that if you make life polite enough, the thin ice of civilization becomes thick. But cracks don’t care about courtesy. They form quietly, beneath your feet, while you’re busy thinking everything is fine.
Two Windows into the World
On many evenings, I’d sit half outside and half inside. Outside, the MMVA crowd cheering beneath me; inside, Encarta gently explaining Mesopotamia at 640×480 resolution. It was my own personal dual-monitor setup for civilization: Version 1.0 below (live humans) and Version 2.0 inside (curated humans, shrink-wrapped on CD-ROM).
Encarta came with guardrails — knowledge supervised by grownups in tweed jackets. It felt safe, finite, edited. Civilization as museum exhibit.
And then, in the same quiet winter, the opposite appeared.
Wikipedia Arrives: Civilization Goes Open Source
While I was learning the choreography of Canadian politeness, the world quietly launched its boldest social experiment since representative democracy: Wikipedia.
No ownership. No borders. No ad revenue. No editors-in-chief. Just the wildly optimistic idea that humanity — if left alone with a keyboard — would behave. It should have collapsed instantly. Instead, it flourished.
It was the anti-Taliban of knowledge: where zealots blasted ancient statues, Wikipedia built living libraries; where hierarchies protected truth, Wikipedia trusted strangers; where nations guarded information, Wikipedia opened the gates. For the first time in history, humanity created a cathedral of knowledge with no pope — just a million part-time volunteers armed with citations and uneven grammar. And the miracle wasn’t that it worked. The miracle was that it only broke occasionally.
Civilization’s Veneer Recognized
The realization hit me: civilization is an open-source project. It persists because most people choose not to destroy it. Not because police patrols are perfect, or politicians inspired, or nations wise. But because humans — for reasons evolutionary, sentimental, or just plain tired — generally decide to leave the world slightly better than they found it.
Civilization isn’t reinforced concrete. It’s a polite agreement. A shared interface. A fragile UX. A thin layer of trust stretched across a very old, very deep lake. And as I would soon learn — in both Toronto and the wider world — that ice was thinner than anyone wanted to admit.
Anthropology of Order — From Tribes to Civilization
If you strip civilization down to its factory settings, what you get is not a constitution or a parliament. You get a small group of hungry primates who would like, very much, not to die.
Long before there were nation-states, passports, or lawyers billing in six-minute increments, humans lived in relatively small, kin-based bands where cohesion was enforced by three primitive but astonishingly robust technologies: kinship, reputation, and reciprocity. In groups where survival depends on others showing up when you are sick, tired, or being chased by something with better teeth, morality is not a philosophy elective. It’s an existential requirement.
Anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer societies find a strong sense of fairness, punishment for freeloaders, and even proto-democratic practices. If your cousin hoards meat, he doesn’t get a lecture on Kant. He gets side-eyed, gossiped about, and—if he keeps it up—left out of future feasts. Justice begins as a social stomachache: we know who pulled their weight and who didn’t.
The emergence of order in these early groups wasn’t guided by abstract treatises. It was written into bodies, rituals, and small dramas:
A shared meal that reinforces trust.
A burial ceremony that dignifies loss and binds the living.
A dance or chant that synchronizes hearts and feet just enough to make “us” feel different from “them.”
Robin Dunbar and others have argued for a cognitive limit on how many stable relationships we can track—around 150 or so. Within that circle, gossip, memory, and mutual obligation are enough to maintain order. Once group size creeps beyond this number, something else is needed. When you can’t know everyone, you need something you can all know. That “something” starts as story and ritual, then hardens into myth and symbol. As agriculture tethers people to place and surplus appears, settlements swell into villages and cities. With that growth comes a new creature: the stranger. People who live close by but don’t share your bloodline, your grandmother, or your inside jokes.
At that moment, trust has to be extended through symbolic means. So we begin to invent the mythology of belonging: totems and crests, founding legends, sacred ancestors, and eventually gods who, conveniently, love our group best.
Civilization is not a break from tribal morality; it’s an attempt to scale it. The campfire becomes the city. The city becomes the city-state. The city-state becomes an empire that needs new tools of order: religion, law, bureaucracy, surveillance—and, much later, customer service departments that put you on hold “because your call is important to us.”
But the foundation stays fragile. The stranger always lurks at the boundary. Civilizations need not only internal cohesion, but a workable story about who doesn’t belong. Sometimes the illusion of control—rituals, uniforms, flags, the right song before a hockey game—is all that stands between us and panic.
Years later, walking through a Toronto or sitting in a Castlegar hockey arena, I would recognize those same ancient dynamics hiding under modern clothes. Members of the visiting team chirping insults at an Indigenous kid weren’t just being cruel; they were rehearsing, badly, an old script about “us” and “them.” Civilization’s thin ice is laid right over that lake.
Today our global civilization stretches these tribal instincts across billions. Our markets are more complex, our states more bureaucratic, our religions more doctrinal. Yet under the skyscrapers and smartphones, the same mammalian needs pulse away: to belong, to be seen, to live under some kind of moral canopy.
This chapter is about what happens when that canopy frays—when the ice cracks and we glimpse how little may separate us from the dark. We start with the tribe, scale up to civilization, and then watch what happens when the stories holding it all together stop working as advertised.
The Moral Web — Belief, Religion, and the Codification of Virtue
If the first human tools were sharp stones, the first human institutions were sharp stories.
Long before laws were carved into stone or typed into PDF, our ethics were carried in tales: creation myths, cautionary fables, heroic sagas. Told around fires, painted on caves, later recited in temples and churches, these stories coordinated behavior long before there was a police force to outsource the job to. Religion, in this sense, was the earliest software update for the human group mind—patching bugs in cooperation, hierarchy, justice, and identity.
From Animism to Algorithmic Gods
In animistic cultures, agency and spirit were spread generously across the world: winds had moods, rivers sulked or roared, animals bargained with hunters, stars watched. That wasn’t naïve superstition so much as an ecological heuristic. If you believe the deer has a soul, you are marginally less likely to hunt every last one of them. A good myth beats a bad tragedy.
As societies scaled, so did their gods. The pantheons of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, India—crowds of deities with specialties in war, harvest, love, and bureaucracy—look suspiciously like the org charts of the civilizations that birthed them. Polytheism was flexible. If a new problem arrived, you could always add a new god.
Monotheism was a different kind of code compression. One God, one ultimate source of law, one omnipresent auditor who cares not just what you do, but what you meant to do, and what you thought about doing at three in the morning. This is morality with built-in surveillance—no CCTV required. It scales beautifully when your village becomes an empire; reputations can’t reach that far, but an all-seeing deity can.
Religion, in that phase, becomes a load-bearing wall in civilization’s architecture. It regulates marriage, land use, hygiene, diet, debt, holidays, and who gets buried where. When there is no functional state, religion often is the state: court system, welfare office, university, and therapy couch in one.
Durkheim thought religion was society worshipping itself. Freud saw it as the father figure projected onto the sky. Marx called it the opiate of the masses. They disagreed on almost everything else, but they converged on this: religion is social infrastructure. It stabilizes a brutal world with meaning, ritual, and a moral scoreboard.
Cracks in the Moral Wall
The trouble starts when the wall no longer matches the house. When stories no longer describe reality, or when hierarchies protect themselves instead of the vulnerable, the sacred scaffolding begins to creak. Reform movements, schisms, revolutions—these are often attempts to repair or replace the moral operating system, not to abolish morality itself.
Today, we’re living through one of the biggest moral re-wirings in history. Secularism rises in some regions, pluralism explodes in others, and algorithms quietly customize everyone’s world-view like bespoke religion-lite. The old question “Can morality survive the death of God?” has been joined by a more annoying sequel: “Can morality survive a newsfeed?”
We’ve tried building ethics from scratch: utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, contractualism. All have elegant arguments. None come with the emotional firmware of religion. Neuroscience reminds us that fairness lights up the same brain regions as pain and disgust. Our moral judgments arrive as gut feelings long before they put on the mask of reason.
So, in the vacuum, we get religioid movements: eco-spirituality, techno-utopianism, wellness cults, crypto-tribes, hyper-nationalism. They’re not “religions” on the census form, but they offer meaning, ritual, scapegoats, and a sense of “our people.” They also offer, if we’re not careful, all the usual side effects: heresy hunts, purity spirals, and the occasional street brawl.
Sitting on a Toronto streetcar, I could see several of these layers at once:
the quiet, inherited Christian and secular norms that made people offer their seats to elders without hesitation,
the globalized consumer faith of brand logos on jackets,
and the subcultural signals—punk, goth, hijab, turban, yoga mat—that marked different moral and narrative lineages coexisting in one rail car without incident.
It looked effortless. It was anything but. This was civilization as multi-tabbed religion, some windows minimized, some screaming for attention.
Codifying Virtue in a Fragmented Age
One of the central tensions of this chapter—and of our time—is how to maintain virtue in a world where shared story has shattered into a thousand channels.
Do we universalize ethics—declare a set of human rights and try to wire them into constitutions, trade agreements, and eventually AI systems?
Do we localize—double down on tribe, tradition, and border, and hope the neighbors behave themselves?
Do we outsource the whole thing to algorithms—let recommendation engines learn what makes people cooperative and embed that in digital nudges?
The real fight is not about the content of virtue so much as who gets to define it. Religion can still be a powerful anchor. It can also be weaponized into a cudgel. We’ve seen both: faith traditions fueling abolition, civil rights, refugee support; and faith traditions fueling blasphemy laws, sectarian violence, cultural purges.
The old moral frameworks are not disappearing; they’re overlapping, colliding, and mutating. Meanwhile, new decision-makers arrive on the scene: machine-learning models that will soon help decide bail, benefits, battlefield targeting, and what your child sees on a screen.
We need, urgently, an updated operating system for human virtue—one that can inherit the emotional richness and narrative power of religious traditions without inheriting their intolerance; one that can talk to politics and technology without being swallowed by them; one that can make sense not only in Toronto and Castlegar, but also in Tehran, Lagos, and São Paulo.
Part II and Part III will come back to this. For now, it’s enough to recognize that what we call “civility” rests on very old, very contested software—stories, rituals, and beliefs—running on very fragile hardware: us.
After the Gods — Ideology, Modernity, and the Secular Swarm
Can morality survive the death of God, the doubt of nation, and the boredom of GDP charts?
On paper, the Enlightenment answered this centuries ago: yes. We would replace revelation with reason, myth with math, kings with constitutions. Ethics would be derived from first principles, preferably in Latin.
In practice, things have been messier.
Secular Saints and New Creeds
In cities like Toronto, you can watch this moral rearrangement happening in real time. Church attendance drops; yoga studios fill. The priest loses members; the TED talk gains subscribers. Fewer people sign up for doctrine; more sign up for “values.” Yet the underlying human needs haven’t changed: meaning, community, ritual, a story that says your life fits into something larger than your browser history.
Into that vacuum pour what we might call religioids—religion-like structures that don’t always call themselves religions:
Environmentalism with its sins and sacrifices, its apocalypses and redeemed futures.
Nationalism in fresh branding, offering belonging and purpose without much room for dissent.
Political tribalism that divides the world into Saved and Canceled.
Wellness cultures that promise purity and enlightenment through the correct combination of smoothies, supplements, and sun salutations.
Each comes with its own symbols, heresies, saints, and devils. Each offers belonging—and occasionally persecution—with all the zeal of the older faiths.
The map of belief has not emptied. It has been redrawn.
Borders Blur, Subcultures Persist
One of the surprises of moving from the U.S. to Canada was how much less different people were than the brochures suggested. Yes, there were flags, healthcare systems, and hockey preferences. Yes, I once betrayed my American origin to a Bell Canada rep by saying “zip code,” “zee,” and pronouncing a vowel with the wrong nostalgia. But underneath those accents and systems, the strata looked familiar.
White Canadians and white Americans felt more similar to each other than either did to recent immigrants. Immigrant communities in Toronto looked eerily like their cousins in Chicago or New York. The “mosaic” north of the 49th parallel and the “melting pot” south of it both contained the same ingredients; the recipes were only slightly different.
Zoom out further and the pattern repeats. Chinese communities in different countries share certain assumptions and aesthetics that outlast governments. So do South Asian diasporas, Jewish communities, Muslims, Poles, Sikhs, Ismailis, gamers, software engineers, K-pop fans, and climate activists.
Civilization at this layer behaves less like a neat set of national boxes and more like a tangled network of overlapping tribes and shared interfaces. Culture spills over borders. So do ideologies. So do memes.
From the vantage point of this chapter, civility and ideology are not subsets of nations; nations are just one more container we pour them into.
Everyday Civility as Embedded Code
Some of the most powerful ideology is hidden in the obvious.
In Toronto, I watched young people reflexively give up their seats to elders on the streetcar. It didn’t look like sacrifice; it looked like muscle memory. Nobody looked around to see if they were being watched. They just stood, the way you’d instinctively move your hand away from a hot stove.
This was not genetic; it was training. A lifetime of seeing that gesture, of feeling that it was right, of having your inner “ought” calibrated to match the outer world.
Civility of this kind—holding doors, queuing, apologizing when someone steps on your foot—is ideology in its softest, most powerful form. It’s an embedded UX: the default behaviors that make life liveable.
And it travels. The same person who is a courteous driver in Seattle begins to twitch when they land in L.A. traffic, not because their ethics changed, but because the local driving “operating system” is different. We carry our civil habits across borders, then slowly, often reluctantly, update them.
Toward a Planetary Civility?
If religions, nations, and markets no longer fully organize our imagination, and if subcultures now stretch across continents, what sits above all that?
There is a faint, emerging idea—still unbranded, still unsermonized—of a planetary civility: a sense that our obligations extend beyond tribe, nation, and timeline. That the atmosphere is our shared shrine, that future generations are stakeholders, that another country’s disaster is not their “issue” but our rehearsal. It is embryonic and inconsistent. We feel it when a distant city floods and donations surge. We forget it when plane tickets go on sale. But it may be the only kind of shared myth capable of matching the scale of the problems we now face.
Later, in the ecology chapter, we’ll look at this more directly. For now, it’s enough to note that our stories are stretching. The thin ice we stand on is no longer just local. It spans the lake.
In the next section, we’ll turn from these ancient and modern narratives to the surface behaviors that stitch them together: the rituals, symbols, and daily performances that give civilization its shine—and sometimes its most dangerous illusions. After that, we’ll meet Civility 2.0: the version running on servers, feeds, and timelines. Because in the twenty-first century, the polite veneer isn’t just between humans. It’s also between humans and their networks.
Civilization’s Veneer — Ritual, Symbol, and the Human Condition
For a species that spent most of its history naked, hungry, and covered in mud, we have become very serious about our table manners. We stand when the judge enters. We bow our heads before we eat. We shake hands, bump fists, light candles, lower flags, sing anthems, dress in black, cut ribbons, throw rice, and clap on command. If aliens ever arrive, the first thing they will notice is not our technology but our choreography.
Durkheim called rituals the glue of society; Goffman treated everyday life as theater. Both were getting at the same thing: we use repeated gestures to make fragile things feel solid—respect, status, belonging, remorse, hope.
Civilization’s veneer is made of rituals and symbols laid like lacquer over our more chaotic impulses. It is not hypocrisy, exactly. It’s more like a user interface: the skin of buttons you press so you don’t have to see the wiring underneath.
The Stage and the Script
Walk into a courtroom and you are walking into a carefully designed moral theater. The raised bench, the robes, the archaic phrases (“All rise,” “My learned friend”)—none of them change the facts of a case. But they change how we experience those facts. The ritual says: this is serious; this is fair; this is bigger than you.
Graduations do something similar. One could, in principle, email the degree. Instead, we dress in medieval costumes and process to brass music so that everyone can feel, for a few hours, that learning is sacred and debt is noble.
Even the small stuff—saying “please,” “thank you,” “sorry”—is part of this theater. These are micro-rituals of respect that keep the daily collisions of human life from turning into bar fights.
Toronto’s streetcar etiquette is a good example. People line up; they step aside to let others off; they offer seats unprompted. None of these acts cost much, yet collectively they generate a sense that the city is a shared space rather than a moving argument.
It’s not that Canadians are morally superior. They’ve just rehearsed this particular play for a long time.
Symbols as Compressed Stories
If rituals are our choreography, symbols are our shorthand.
A flag is just dyed fabric until a story is attached: resistance, sacrifice, empire, independence. A cross is two pieces of wood until it gathers around itself centuries of theology, art, and grief. A passport is a stapled booklet until it becomes the difference between “Welcome home” and “Secondary screening.”
Symbols compress entire histories into a single image. They are efficient. They are also dangerous. Because once a symbol stands in for a story, people will defend the symbol as if it is the story. Burning a flag can feel like burning a country. Kneeling during an anthem can feel like attacking the troops instead of protesting a specific injustice. Questioning a sacred text can feel like threatening the entire moral order rather than asking for an update to the user manual.
Civilization’s veneer depends on us taking these symbols seriously enough to coordinate around them—but not so seriously that we start sacrificing humans to protect cloth.
We have not always nailed that balance.
The Double Life of Politeness
Politeness is one of our strangest inventions. On the one hand, it is kindness in small doses: holding doors, modulating tone, waiting your turn. On the other hand, it can be weaponized to maintain hierarchies and suppress dissent.
“Tone” is the classic example. Speak too softly and you are ignored. Speak too bluntly and you are told you have “the wrong tone,” which is often code for “You have noticed something true about power, and I’d prefer you didn’t.”
In some societies, civility has been used to keep whole groups in their place: “Be patient, don’t make a scene, respect the process.” Meanwhile, the process quietly fails them for decades.
That’s the catch with veneers. They can signal genuine respect—or they can be a glossy surface over rot. A polite society is not automatically a just one; sometimes the most courteous communities are also the most skilled at ignoring their own cracks.
The young Indigenous man on Queen Street who unloaded his fury on me was, in that sense, an unscheduled maintenance alert. The system’s performance metrics looked good: multicultural, orderly, low crime. But underneath, the unresolved story of conquest and erasure was still burning. His anger was not a failure of civility; it was evidence that the veneer had been applied over an unhealed wound.
Why We Still Need the Veneer
It’s tempting to say: scrape it all off. Drop the rituals, ditch the symbols, abolish small talk, and let “authenticity” reign. But a world without ritual is not more honest—it is more exhausting. Every interaction would have to be negotiated from scratch: Is this a joke? Are we friends? Is this safe? Do I bow, hug, fist-bump, or file a complaint?
Rituals and symbols save cognitive energy. They also create shared emotional experiences: weddings, funerals, national days of mourning, victory parades, graduation walks. These events stitch memories into something larger than individual biography.
The problem is not that the veneer exists. The problem is when we confuse the veneer for the structure, the play for the justice, the anthem for the community. A healthy civilization updates its scripts and occasionally re-casts its leads. An unhealthy one just re-varnishes the same old stage and tells critics they’re being “divisive.”
Thin Ice, Shiny Surface
So where does that leave us?
On thin ice that looks very nice from a distance.
Our species has mastered the art of performing decency—handshakes across negotiating tables, diplomatic smiles before wars, corporate mission statements about “family” right before layoffs. At our best, we use these performances to remind ourselves who we want to be. At our worst, we use them to avoid becoming who we need to be.
The key insight for this chapter is simple and unsettling: Civilization’s veneer is not a lie; it is a promise. Every “please,” every ceremony, every symbol says: we will treat each other as if this world is fair—even when it isn’t yet.
The danger is when we stop working on the “yet.”
In the next section of this chapter, we take this ancient machinery of ritual and symbol and plug it into something new: servers, feeds, and smartphones. If civilization used to be a local stage, it now has a global comment section.
Welcome to Civility 2.0.
When the Veneer Cracks
Civilization is easiest to admire from a distance. Up close, you notice the duct tape. People like to say that “society is held together by laws,” but anyone who’s stood in a crowded subway knows it’s actually held together by manners—the unspoken agreement not to scream, shove, or lick strangers. It works remarkably well, considering the species involved. But whenever a riot breaks out, or a convoy revs its engines against its neighbors, the truth flashes through the cracks: our civility is a costume, and the zipper is on the outside.
The real monster of civilization isn’t barbarism; barbarism is easy to identify.
The real monster is how fast civilized people can switch modes, like a polite app suddenly revealing its hidden developer console.
We polish the veneer, not realizing it’s only veneer. And every so often, the universe gives it a stress test.
The Move West — A Pause Between Storms
Leaving Toronto felt like stepping out of a skyscraper lobby into a forest. After years of corporate deadlines and downtown density, I wanted altitude, oxygen, and a slower metabolism. Also, I had been itching to move back to the Pacific Northwest – its Canadian brand. Vancouver, in my imagination, was Seattle with better scenery and fewer billionaires — a place where rain fell gently, ambitions softened, and humans reverted to their natural habitat: fleece jackets.
But before I reached the Pacific, I stopped in Castlegar. A small BC town, Castlegar was everything Toronto wasn’t. Short commutes. Real stars overhead. Neighbors who waved with their whole arm. A place where trust didn’t feel like a scarce resource.
For a moment — a rare, quiet, much-needed moment — I let myself believe that the castle I had been searching for all along wasn’t made of stone, or skyline, or capitalism. It was made of people. Ordinary people choosing decency over drama, every day, without applause. It felt—dangerously—like the world might be okay. If my life were software, this was the loading screen where nothing bad happens.
Upheaval — The Monster Under the Ice
And then Toronto called back — not with a phone, but with headlines.
2005: The Year of the Gun.
My polite, apologetic, maple-scented Toronto suddenly behaved like it had switched operating systems overnight. Gun violence spiked. Fear entered conversations where weather used to live. And a child—an innocent girl—was killed by a stray bullet, the most unforgivable of all algorithmic outputs.
Toronto’s civilized UI had glitched. The cursor flashed. Under the familiar interface, something ancient stirred. It wasn’t that Toronto had become barbaric. It was that Toronto was reminding us it had always been human.
If even a city defined by restraint and order could fracture, what did that say about our species? About Castlegar’s calm streets? About any of our carefully-constructed castles? If the thin ice could crack here—in Canada, of all places—what happens in places where tensions run hotter, or where weapons scale beyond handguns into viruses, carbon, code, and ideology?
The Year of the Gun wasn’t just a crisis. It was a tutorial: Civilization is a daily patch, not a permanent feature.
The Ice Beneath Our Feet
Every era gets its own reminder that our social software is beta, not final release. For some it is war. For others it is famine. For Toronto, in 2005, it was a summer that felt like a foot slipping through the surface of a frozen lake.
Civilization didn’t disappear. But for the first time, I could hear it cracking.
The lesson was painfully clear: order isn’t guaranteed; it’s opt-in. It runs because people choose, over and over, to keep the peace. And the day enough people stop choosing? The update fails.
To Nature’s Castle, and to Silicon’s Version of Civility
Civilization, I learned then, has two faces:
The human interface — manners, norms, myths of civility
The technical interface — the way we smooth our rough edges through phones, screens, and systems
Both are thin. Both are fragile. Both depend on trust.
As I continued west — toward Vancouver, toward mountains, toward the next castle—I wondered whether deeper wisdom might lie not in cities but in nature, where systems endure without permission and without pretense.
But before we head into forests and fjords, one last detour: If civilization has a user interface, so does technology. And in the next interlude, we explore the curious world of buttons, screens, swipes, and scrolls—the digital equivalents of Canadian politeness, the interfaces that keep our machines civil even when our species falters.
Because the thin veneer isn’t just between humans. It’s also between humans and their tools.