What This Asks of the Reader

A reader who has made it this far has been changed by the book, or has refused to be. Both are legitimate responses. The book has not been written to manipulate readers into agreement. It has been written to articulate, as clearly as possible, conditions the reader is already living inside and a set of responses to those conditions that the reader can evaluate on their own terms.

If the book has done its work, the reader now has language for things they already perceived. The destabilization that has been operating beneath the surface of their daily life has been named. The fragmentation they have been navigating across institutional, ecological, relational, and informational dimensions has been described. The work they can already feel is being asked of them has been articulated. The threshold they have been crossing has been recognized.

What comes next is not the book’s to decide. It is the reader’s.

The Final Note that follows the next chapter makes the specific invitation as direct as the book is capable of making it. Before that invitation, though, there is one more thing the closing has to do. The book has named a project called Providence and has positioned itself partly as that project’s founding document. Honesty about what the project is, what it is not, and what it has not yet figured out has been a discipline throughout. The next chapter takes that discipline to its conclusion. It is the most direct accounting the book is capable of making about the choices the book itself has made.