I Need to Hear It
This is Part 3 of the Atmospheric Commons Series.
PART 1: Every Breath You Take... Contains Atoms from Einstein’s Last Words
PART 2: The Dunbarrios Allegory: The Mirror That Knows It’s a Mirror
Thirty figures stand in a circle on a mountain at dawn.
Astronaut. Samurai. Día de los Muertos skeleton (Amity Love?). Knightess in shining armor. Maasai warrior. Buddhist monk. Woman sheathed in gold. Men in suits. A figure who might be Cleopatra. Another who might be no one at all.
They’re holding hands. The light is absurd, amber and rose, the kind that only exists in the ten minutes after sunrise.
They look at each other. Then walk towards the center. Then they open their mouths…
…and howl!
As they hold their howl, the figures lose coherence. Their faces blur. The crisp edges of costume and culture smear into each other. The image, AI-generated, stitched together from our collective human repository, who never stood in this circle, breaks down at the exact moment of release.
The artifice dissolves in the howl.
I made this video. I’ve watched it a hundred times or more. I keep returning to it because I think it’s a message, not from me… but perhaps through me. A message about what we’ve forgotten.
A message I need to hear back.
There’s a word for this: Wetiko.
The term shows up in Indigenous traditions of North America, a name for a kind of psycho-spiritual illness. The infected lose the ability to see themselves in others. The boundary between self and world hardens into a wall. Everything outside the wall becomes resource. The disease spreads through culture like contagion, until the infected can no longer recognize the infection because it looks like normal life.
You know this feeling. You’ve felt the wall.
That’s Wetiko. Not a monster. A fog.
Now consider the howl.
A coordinated howl is an old technology. It says: we are here, we are together, do not mistake quiet for absence.
When humans howl, really howl, not performatively, but with full-throated release, the rational mind goes quiet. You cannot howl ironically. You cannot howl while maintaining your carefully curated identity. The howl is pre-linguistic, pre-individual. It’s the sound of the mammal underneath the costume.
I think that’s the cure. When you open your mouth and let out something that isn’t language, isn’t performance, isn’t the maintenance of your separateness, something cracks. The wall thins.
For a moment you’re just an animal in a circle of animals. And the circle is enough.
So I built something.
It’s online at WetikoHowl.world. There’s a map of the United States... for now. You can drill down state by state, county by county, ZIP by ZIP. Each ZIP starts empty. Your job, if you feel the pull, is to fill the map with howls.
Start small. One howl is enough.
An AI howl is worth 1%: Make a video that echoes the original, a circle of figures, hands joined, the moment of release, upload it to your YouTube account with #wetikohowl and your ZIP in the description, submit the link. One percent closer.
A real howl is worth more: Ten people howling together, one take: 10%. Twenty people: 20%. Thirty people: 30%.
When a ZIP reaches 100%, it’s claimed. Howling. The color deepens on the map. The county fills. The state fills.
That’s it. Claim the howl, one ZIP at a time.
I don’t know if this will work. Maybe the video is too strange, the concept too abstract, the ask too weird.
You want me to howl? Into a camera? And upload it?
Yes.
I need you to howl. Perhaps you’ll feel ridiculous doing it. But then you’ll feel the moment when the ridiculousness falls away and something else takes over, something older than language, something archaic and primordial, something that remembers what it was like before we built walls and ectolutionized institutions between ourselves and called that virtuous.
I want to see your ZIP turn green.
The map is waiting.
Claim your ZIP.
Listen to feel.