about the hyphen

on the small dash between words (and worlds).

hyphen (n.): a small bridge between two worlds.

for a week now, i’ve been staring at this blank template, trying to will the name of this newsletter into existence.

but what do you call a thing that doesn’t quite exist yet?

when you’re not sure what it’s becoming?

i’ve just graduated into this strange moment in time where every day brings news of some breakthrough in technology that makes yesterday’s impossible feel inevitable.

i’m supposed to know where I fit.

instead, i find myself collecting words like smooth stones.

liminal

parallax

concatenate

words that feel like bridges, like threshold spaces, like the pause between what was and what might be. but nothing felt right.

one night, doom-scrolling design videos at 2am (because apparently the algorithm thinks i nerd out over typography at 2am, which is probably right), i stopped at a simple idea.

it seemed almost too simple. was this just my tired mind, or had i stumbled onto something perfect?

-

yes, -

not the em dash that announces itself in your chatGPT outputs.

not the en dash hiding between dates.

just the hyphen.

the smallest bridge in the english language.

i realised that’s what i am right now. that’s what this newsletter wants to be. the small mark that connects human-machine, creative-technical, analogue-digital. not choosing sides. making the connection possible.

my friend asked me yesterday if I think AI will replace artists. i told her no; i think AI is changing what creativity means, like how the camera changed art, or how sampling changed music. that wasn’t a terribly clear answer. what i meant to say is: maybe it’s not replacement.

maybe it’s compound identity. maybe we’re becoming something new.

writer-coder. artist-engineer. human-assisted intelligence.

i keep thinking about all the ways we’ve become multi-hyphenate. multi-everything.

between-everything. the generation that learned to read on paper and thinks in screens, that witnessed the world going mobile, that grew up on YouTube tutorials but now learns from AI teachers, that’s watching intelligence itself transform while we’re still figuring out our own.

in all this multi-everythingness, what fascinates me most isn’t the endpoints, but the hyphen that holds them together.

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a note

hey, hyphenated human—thank you for reading my first post. this essay was somewhat of a braindump (truly, it was written mid-flight), but i felt compelled to share it with you.

if you’re here, you’re probably finding yourself somewhere in-between, too. these undefined spaces, that's where i’m excited to get to spend our time exploring.

some weeks we'll get technical. some weeks, philosophical. sometimes we’ll look at visual explorations. other times we'll just sit with the absurdity of it all.

a list of running ideas so far:

• who algorithms are really designed for (spoiler: not you)

• the art of content creation & community (yes - you are part of a story i’m documenting)

• the visual aesthetics emerging from our collective feelings about tech

• what artists are truly afraid of

• AI girlhood and the digital history of beauty

• finding love in an age of algorithms

this list will evolve as i discover what questions you’re carrying.

so, to start:

reply and tell me about your hyphen.

what two words (or worlds) are you bridging right now?

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