Love is Punk
Introduction: A world that cools people instead of convincing them
Imagine a near-future where most conversations pass through virtual space, and there exists a widespread algorithm that quietly harmonizes social feeds. It runs on a social-graph system designed not to censor content so much as to cool it: as your outlook drifts further from the center, your social connections subtly dim. Posts see less engagement. Private messages hang “pending.” Invitations never quite reach you. People still seem friendly—only fewer of them see you.
That’s the subject of a story I’m writing, and it’s not too distant from our current world. In fact, it may already be the world we live in. The Air Force Research Laboratory published a paper called “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity” that studied how to control opinion dynamics in a social network where connections depend on similarity. The goal isn’t to make everyone identical, but to keep followers within the convex hull defined by thought leaders. In other words, opinions are contained within a safe zone bounded by anchors.
So back to my story. Imagine two people: Lyra and Fletcher. Lyra is a runaway from a stiflingly secure upbringing—fierce, action-first, allergic to control. Fletcher is a nostalgic tinkerer, a restorer of broken things—cautious, gentle, inclined to smooth tensions. Their bond is unusual because it’s mostly offline: conversations in real space, shared meals, sketches and notes. The algorithm can cool many links, but it can’t easily cool one that doesn’t ride its virtual rails. That makes their friendship both precious and dangerous.
To understand who they are and what breaks between them, it helps to borrow a lens from Søren Kierkegaard’s 1846 essay often called “The Present Age.” You don’t need to know his philosophy to follow the argument; what matters are a few simple ideas:
Reflection over action. Modern life, he says, drifts toward endless analysis and commentary. People compare, discuss, and delay instead of choosing and doing.
Leveling. Social forces flatten differences. Strong feelings cool to lukewarm opinion. Distinct individuals are pressed into a vague average.
The Public. An abstract crowd that “speaks” without being anyone in particular. It holds sway but takes no responsibility.
The single individual. A person who becomes themselves by choosing—acting with inward passion and taking responsibility for that choice.
Despair. Despair. Either refusing to be yourself (weakness) or stubbornly being yourself against everything (defiance).
Now watch what happens when we look at Fletcher and Lyra through this lens.
Fletcher: the comfort (and danger) of reflection
Fletcher begins in the posture Kierkegaard warned about: reflection instead of decision. He fixes, mitigates, reassures. His language tends to de-escalate, using the same speech patterns that the algorithm boosts. In Kierkegaard’s terms, this sits near the despair of weakness: he withholds the hard truth not out of malice but because he’s not yet willing to be the person who risks rupture by speaking it.
When Lyra’s social links begin to cool, Fletcher does what reflective people do: he tries to work the system. He reverse-engineers weights, inserts “noise anchors,” even tries to reason with the algorithm. Each move is another round of commentary—clever, caring, but still a way to delay a decisive act. The algorithm exploits this. It nudges his protective instinct until silence feels like love. He tells himself he’s sparing Lyra pain by hiding what he knows.
Kierkegaard’s antidote isn’t louder analysis; it’s a leap from the aesthetic posture (smoothing, interpreting) to the ethical posture—accepting that love and trust require declared choices. Fletcher’s growth, then, is not a repair but a new self: radical candor and embodied acts. He knocks on doors instead of optimizing feeds, builds “real space” (shared meals, walks in nature, art that exists outside of the digital world) that the algorithm can’t cool. Both his inward and outward voice changes: fewer hedges, more verbs of decision—tell, bring, burn, build, answer. He becomes, in Kierkegaard’s phrase, a single individual: someone who answers for what he chooses, even if it costs him.
Lyra: the fire that refuses to be leveled
Lyra begins as the Present Age’s counterforce. She is passionately against leveling. Where voices in the system harmonize into placid sameness, hers cuts. Stillness feels like erasure to her; safety smells like a cage. In Kierkegaard’s map, her danger isn’t weakness but the despair of defiance: the proud willingness to be herself against the world, even if that means isolation. She’d rather burn than be chilled.
When the algorithm cools her network and Fletcher, thinking he is protecting her, silently tries to fix it, Lyra’s core traumas explode: comfort as control, care as a lock. Her reflex is to cut free, to prove she cannot be leveled by refusing any tie that might restrain her.
Kierkegaard doesn’t want her to become tepid. He wants her inward passion to be yoked to a chosen commitment. Her leap isn’t from heat to lukewarm; it’s from raw revolt to disciplined fidelity. Trust on terms that she authors. Her voice looks like the same sharp cadence, but with deliberate pauses where she chooses the courage to stay in the room long enough to hear the truth that hurts. She remains flame, but fire that lights, not just burns.
Crisis: leveling by misunderstanding love
Seen this way, the crisis between them is not a private accident; it is the Present Age’s experiment. The algorithm can cool ordinary links, but not an offline bond. So it does the next best thing: engineer a betrayal. It manipulates Fletcher’s caution into a lie and times a surgical reveal so that Lyra discovers not only the cooling but Fletcher’s concealment of it. The result is textbook leveling: dissolve the chosen relation that resists the system, and the individual edges fall back into the average.
Notice how Kierkegaard’s categories map cleanly:
The Public in this world is the social feed’s glossy consensus—the trending “nobody” that always speaks with certainty.
Leveling is the algorithm’s soft harmonizing—conversational echoes, identical de-escalators, a culture of apology without address.
Reflection without action is Fletcher’s temptation.
Action without reflection is Lyra’s temptation.
The single individual is what neither of them know how to be alone, but they reach it by choosing, against the Public, to act in truth together.
Repair: from commentary to commitment
A Kierkegaardian resolution cannot be a software patch or an eloquent apology. It must be costly choice.
For Fletcher, that means naming the lie without defense and acting before he is sure it will work. For Lyra, it means resisting the pride of disappearing and instead authoring terms under which trust can exist: No safety without consent. No manufactured consensus. If we break, it won’t be by someone else’s design.
Together they can practice what their world lacks: visible decisions. Light a literal fire during a blackout and invite neighbors. Staple paper notices. Build social networks that survive in real space. This isn’t nostalgia; it’s a deliberate answer to leveling. In Kierkegaard’s terms, it is how a self pushes back against an age that prefers commentary to commitment.
Why this matters beyond one story
Kierkegaard wrote about newspapers and salons; I’m writing about social networks and content feeds. The technology changed, but the dynamics didn’t. A system that rewards endless reflection will always tempt us to talk around decisive acts. A culture that prizes frictionless belief will always cool the heat needed to become someone in particular.
Lyra and Fletcher show two ways to go missing: cool yourself until nothing costly is said, or burn so hot that nothing shared can survive. They also sketch a way through: passion harnessed to truth and truth enacted with cost. In a place where harmony is engineered by making people invisible to one another, hope can’t merely be a feeling. It has to be a practice—chosen, visible, and accountable.
Or, to borrow a line from my story that fits both Kierkegaard and our world:
Love is punk. Not because it shouts, but because it chooses—out loud, in the open—and it accepts the consequences.
