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Seeing the Invisible Tapestry
A plea for conscious entanglement
When I was in massage school, I was told it was an exciting time for the field of musculoskeletal therapy. New research kept uncovering the critical importance of fascia, or connective tissue, to the body’s stability and functioning. Often more than muscles, even sometimes nerves, it is our connective tissues that hold responsibility for causing and healing pain.
When I was in college studying political science, it was an exciting time for that field, too. My freshman year coincided with the Arab Spring, my sophomore year with Occupy Wall Street. Social movements were on the rise, these astounding shifts in politics and culture led not by charismatic individuals, but by networks of ordinary people working as a collective whole. In 2011, Time Magazine’s person of the year was simply The Protester, an archetypal figure like the Unknown Soldier, a thing that any of us could be, a movement all of us could join.
And where would The Protester have been without The Social Network? The Arab Spring uprisings were famously called “Twitter revolutions,” owing to the essential role of social media in allowing protesters to network and coordinate. Hong Kong’s mass protests in 2019 largely coordinated on Telegram. In 2024, TikTok was so instrumental in spreading pro-Palestinian sentiment among…
