What am I scared of?

It was just before I left the military.

Wrong place.

Wrong time.

I was pushing too far.

Momentum carried us beyond the line, and a piece of metal that wasn’t supposed to, entered my hand in an unfriendly way.

But the fear didn’t come. I was trained. I was still moving.

I carried a stretcher. I gave instructions. We exited the situation.

Only when things were quiet, when we were safe, did my body start speaking in new terms.

The doctor asked me to grip his hand.

I could. Relief. Still functioning. Still me.

Then he asked me to open my fingers.

I looked down.

Nothing moved.

The signal had left my brain. But nothing responded.

He didn’t need to say it. I could read the silence.

Something fundamental had changed.

That was the first time I felt truly human.

An antiseptic quiet telling me that my body might no longer serve me.

That was fear. Real fear.

The loss of effect. The loss of capacity.

Not pain. Powerlessness.

And I’ve seen what happens when we pretend fear doesn’t exist. I’ve seen men look a knife in the face and pretend it’s nothing.

That’s not bravery. That’s ritual.

The “stiff upper lip” powers the machine that needs men to go forward. That cannot survive without sacrifice.

Denial isn’t strength. It’s a tactic. One designed to maintain a war that most people never chose.

That’s why I build installations like this.

To test the collective truth.

A board. A question. What are you scared of?

Two pens. Pink and blue.

The pink side, for women: overflowing. Depth. Specificity. Honesty.

The blue side, for men: silence, banter, avoidance.

And isn’t that the great irony?

We place fear in the masculine domain. Danger. Risk. Aggression.

But when asked to name their fears, most men fall silent.

Not because they feel less. But because they’ve been trained not to metabolize.

Women moved freely through that emotional space. They named things.

It wasn’t always graceful. Sometimes it was chaotic. But it was real.

I don’t care about clean lines. I care about engagement.

I care how many people touched the piece, physically, emotionally.

That’s what gives it form. That’s what finishes the work.

And if I’m honest, I think here, the female relationship to fear is stronger.

Not because women feel more, but maybe because they observe it with greater clarity

They let it move.

They let the fear exit the system.

The men held it in. It stayed inside their structure. And that’s what changes you.

That’s what shapes you into something you didn’t mean to become.

Tubes

In 1985 Stanley Keleman described the body not as a vessel, but as a series of dynamic tubes.

Passages. Processes. Shapes that swell, collapse, extend, and recoil.

Your arteries.

Your gut.

Your breath.

Even your eyes are tubes.

Every moment of life is a negotiation of flow.

What enters. What exits.

What’s withheld. What’s expelled.

We are living plumbing.

And the shape of that plumbing is not just anatomical. It’s ideological.

Because over time, systems around us begin to dictate what flows where.

Take nicotine.

The vape crisis isn’t accidental. It’s profit engineered into addiction.

In Shanghai, vapes are banned and now have to be sourced like drugs, through coded messages and back alley handoffs.

Meanwhile, in the UK, they sit brightly coloured on high street shelves.

Why?

Because someone profits from keeping your tube open.

Because the health of your system is not the goal.

Retention is.

That’s not conspiracy. That’s capitalism.

Every addictive system benefits from collapsed boundaries.

The input is engineered. The output is dependency.

Now think about education. Media.

These are not “neutral” tubes.

They are pressure systems that tell you what to want.

They distort the shape of desire.

Social media does this perfectly.

For a while, our studio helped build these systems, sorry.

But at least I know how they work.

They reward performance over alignment.

The moment you start receiving external approval, likes, shares, attention, your internal system reorients itself.

One hundred likes.

That’s enough to alter a neural loop.

Not because of volume.

Because of how few people affirm us daily in real life.

That’s how input becomes architecture.

That’s how false shape becomes identity.

And it shows.

Stanley Keleman’s drawings, swollen tubes, collapsed cores, over-rigid trunks, aren’t just theory.

They’re biographies.

/

You can see in a face what someone has been metabolizing.

Fear. Joy. Suppression. Indulgence.

By fifty, everyone gets the face they deserve.

A face will tell you everything about a person’s past.

Their posture will betray the hierarchy they fear or desire.

Their mouth and their clothes will mislead you.

But the tube?

The tube always tells the truth.

So what is hot?

It’s not symmetry. It’s alignment.

Hot is when every tube in the system is flowing the same way.

No blockages. No contradictions.

Core to edge, they know who they are.

A diamond is hot not because of sparkle.

But because it is uniform in structure, all the way down.

No surprises. No weak points.

We polish it so that its chemistry can speak clearly.

That’s what hot is.

Not aesthetic.

Integrity.

And the only way to get there is alignment.

and that you have to build.

Because when your system is flowing, when your inputs and outputs are aligned, you don’t have to perform beauty.

You become it.

Fear as Input

Fear is a rupture in the system.

A moment where the tubes seize.

Where nothing flows.

Where control disappears and instinct takes over.

I used to think fear meant something was wrong.

Now I think it means something is real.

Fear is just a message.

A pulse of energy moving through the body saying,

“If this goes badly, this is where you will break.”

And that message is not abstract.

It’s somatic.

It shows up in your gut.

Your throat.

Your breath.

Your shoulders.

Fear turns you from a multi-channel system into a laser beam.

Focused.

Narrow.

Rigid.

And that rigidity makes you easier to control.

That’s not metaphor.

That’s design.

Interrogators know this.

So do advertisers.

So do ideologues.

So do social media architects.

Create fear.

Guide someone through the five stages.

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.

And offer them a product, a scapegoat, or a solution at the end.

That’s not strategy.

That’s infrastructure.

The flow of fear becomes the plumbing of control.

The economy is full of it.

Anti-aging creams begin with the fear of decay.

Insurance begins with the fear of loss.

Luxury begins with the fear of being mistaken for the average.

Fashion is driven by the fear of exclusion.

Politics runs on the fear of irrelevance.

Fear is not an outlier.

It is the core energy source.

What moves faster, hope or panic?

Panic. Every time.

You cannot talk about tubes without naming the people who installed the valves.

Tech platforms are not neutral networks.

They are fear-sensing engines.

Designed to detect your lowest moment and optimize it for engagement.

A few years ago, Facebook ran experiments secretly depressing the newsfeed of certain users, just to see if they could shift mood.

They could.

They did.

That’s not a bug.

That’s a blueprint.

Fear is powerful because it makes you act quickly and look narrowly.

If someone can control what you see when you’re scared, they don’t need to control what you do.

They’ve already done it.

And men, especially men, are deeply vulnerable here.

Because fear in men has no safe exit point.

There is no social architecture to help metabolize it.

So it stays in the body.

It calcifies.

It becomes ideology.

It becomes sarcasm.

It becomes aggression.

It becomes performance.

I’ve seen this in myself.

Fear that couldn’t name itself turning into a whole persona.

If you cannot express your fear, someone else will express it for you.

Usually for a profit.

And this is where the tube metaphor sharpens.

Because when you’re afraid, your system tightens.

And the tighter it gets, the more you crave relief.

That’s when the offer comes.

That’s when the tube gets plugged into someone else’s plan.

Whether that’s a product, a belief system, or a movement, it doesn’t really matter.

What matters is that fear opens a valve.

And someone is always waiting to fill it.

Systems of Systems

If you are a system of tubes, then society is a network of those tubes, interconnected, reactive, feeding off each other.

Inputs move from one person to the next.

Outputs become someone else’s environment.

Your stress becomes my narrative.

My pleasure becomes your aspiration.

One person’s suffering becomes another’s economic model.

Fear doesn’t stay put.

It echoes.

It flows.

And once it moves from your internal system into the collective one, it changes shape, becomes gossip, policy, content, trend.

When someone says, “don’t go there,” they’re sending a data package downstream.

That package has structure.

It might protect you.

It might isolate you.

Sometimes it’s survival.

Other times, it’s ideology disguised as safety.

What we call “culture” is often just the residue of circulated fear.

Now zoom out.

Think of a city.

Think of a company.

Think of a nation-state.

Each has its own circulatory system.

Cash. Signal. Status. Belief.

Tubes everywhere.

When I was in the south of France, early in my art career, a collector invited me to his villa.

We sat near a pool.

Just before the markets opened, he stepped away from breakfast and made a trade, half a million pounds moved over a phone call like it was water.

Then he returned. Calm.

I wasn’t impressed by the money.

I was fascinated by the flow.

That kind of fluidity in a system tells you how used it is to power.

No blockages. No friction.

He was fluent.

His world was built to carry that kind of signal without resistance.

In New York, cash is signal.

In London, it’s proximity.

In the south of France, it’s peace and exclusivity.

Each system optimizes for a different flow rate.

And if your internal tubes don’t match that architecture, you’ll feel out of place no matter how much money or talent you have.

I once emailed Mark Cuban.

He replied in three minutes.

Clear. Direct. Instructional.

Meanwhile, friends and suppliers ghost me for weeks.

That’s not just preference.

That’s structural readiness.

That’s someone whose system is built to process signal at high speed.

His tubes are clear.

They work.

Most people?

They choke on input.

Fear blocks the line.

The message stalls in the throat.

In every system, there are three types of blockages:

1. People who don’t know what to do with information

2. People who are scared of what happens if they pass it on

3. People who intentionally withhold to gain control

All three distort the flow.

And when systems distort long enough, they start to malfunction.

Sometimes the glitch looks like delay.

Sometimes it looks like cruelty.

Sometimes it looks like “a vibe.”

But it always points to the same thing:

Something in the network is scared.

And fear, again, becomes the diagnostic.

What part of this system is not metabolizing the signal?

That’s where control lives.

And that’s where repair starts.

Reading the Shape

So how do you use this?

How do you see a system, a person, a platform, not by what it says, but by what it does?

The answer is in the flow.

There are three ways to read a tubular system:

1. What is the fastest flowing commodity?

Speed reveals obsession.

If money moves faster than anything else, you’re in a capitalist system.

If fear moves fastest, you’re in a manipulative one.

If joy moves fastest, you’re in something rare, protect it.

Look at TikTok.

What spreads fastest?

Insecurity. Body envy. Outrage.

That’s not accidental. That’s architecture.

The app is designed to reward emotional volatility.

2. What is the actual output?

Ignore the mission statement.

What is this system really producing?

Is it making artists?

Or influencers?

Is it producing wisdom?

Or hot takes?

This newsletter might sound philosophical.

But if it doesn’t help someone see their life more clearly, it’s just vapor.

Everything has an output.

Everything makes a shape.

Even the beautiful things.

Especially the beautiful things.

3. What is the transformation ratio?

Do the inputs become something different on the other side?

Or are you just recycling the same dopamine hit over and over?

A diamond is a result of pressure over time.

That’s transformation.

But some systems only magnify what they already are.

That’s replication.

A good system turns grief into story.

Pain into art.

Confusion into clarity.

A bad system turns fear into more fear.

Clicks into more clicks.

Power into more control.

If the output is indistinguishable from the input, you’re in a loop.

Now here’s where things get messy.

Some systems need to do damage in order to survive.

Some damage looks necessary.

Some beauty comes from things we don’t want to admit,

sacrifice, imbalance, cruelty.

A luxury brand might rely on exclusion to feel valuable.

A political campaign might need an enemy to feel alive.

A tech platform might need your panic to keep you logged in.

And the danger isn’t in naming this.

The danger is not naming it.

You don’t have to agree with what a system does.

But you have to see it.

Clearly. Without the marketing.

Because otherwise you’re just another tube in the network.

A passive node.

An unconscious conduit.

And if you want to become something else, if you want to reroute your own system, you have to go down.

Into the dark.

Into your fears.

Into the part of you that wants to avoid all of this.

We have travelled further outward than we have inward.

We’ve built cameras to photograph black holes.

But we haven’t even mapped the bottom of our own oceans.

We’d rather light up the sky than dig a well.

But the growth is inward.

The value is internal.

The real engineering is emotional.

Poets Corner

Tubular

Kick out
Dive in
Build up
Chew down
Spit out
Begin
Pack tight
Let loose
Stand up
Lie down
The flake
The skin
The end
Begin

- Thomas May

At the root of every system, every empire, every brand, every relationship, is one unspoken question:

What are you afraid of losing?

Answer that.

And you’ll know exactly who you are.

And who built the system you’ve been living in.

More to come

I love you loads

R