The Ministry of Youth

This past week I was invited by the young persons of our community to participate in one of their games of mechanical reproducibility. The Magus has already illustrated in the Communist Youth Manifesto the emerging culture of young people and their commitment to radical forgiveness, common meal fellowship, and singing in collectives.

What I did not know--could not even have imagined--is that some of these young in their emerging free time (increasing numbers of our youth being as it were unemployed because advances in steam tech have decreased the need for youthful labor) have modified mechanical reproducibility to such a degree that the original image is embedded as a deep and tiny core inside image "building blocks."

This is to say, they have created a game in which not only are images reproduced, but images themselves are building blocks, so that individual "players" can construct worlds.

This is all the more remarkable, not simply because the youth have invented a game world to engage their free time and work creatively, but the core of the blocks in this world are the image of the Image, the one through whom our theologians argue all things were created.

As a clergyman, I have some concerns. I wonder if this image-world is of a second-order, a simulacrum of the Real. However, given that the Image that drives these images is itself the basis for all created Reality, I also am skeptical of my own trepidations. It may be that I am older, and to a certain degree failing in openness to this new youth culture.

I also observe, and have learned from these youth, that sometimes the realm of the visible, though apparently lacking in the imprint of the image itself, yet is driven by, embedded in, directly enabled by, the very Image itself even if that Image is not "visible." Seen and yet not seen.

There is more to say on this matter, I offer here some images from their Kraft, and encourage all my correspondents to consider encountering this building block world in all its reproducible glory.