What catches me here isn’t really the Musk …

What catches me here isn’t really the Musk material, though I can see why it became the editorial tripwire. The live wire is the phrase “the yoga of hope.”

Not optimism. Not reassurance. Not forcing yourself to believe history is secretly moving towards the light. A yoga is a practice of returning: attention brought back to the body, the immediate environment, the people within speaking distance, the things that can still be touched and changed. Hope becomes less a prediction about the future than a discipline for refusing psychic occupation by the spectacle.

That feels very RAW. Your nervous system is always being recruited into somebody’s reality tunnel. Doomscrolling is reality-tunnel installation by repetition. The billionaire appears on the screen so often that he begins to acquire the dimensions of a god. The distant politician moves into the spare room in your head. The algorithm chants: this is the world, this is the world, this is the world. Meanwhile, the actual world is outside eating the birdseed.

The useful magical move isn’t to deny the political world or declare it imaginary. People with money, weapons and institutional power can do real damage. But the screen distorts scale. It makes the remote enormous and the nearby negligible. The minister becomes more real than the neighbour. The crisis becomes more real than the garden. The future becomes more vivid than the body sitting in the chair.

Perhaps that’s one meaning of SNAFU now: a system in which representation has swallowed proportion.

And this is where the piece becomes more interesting than a simple defence of hope. It says that the powerful are also trapped inside constructed realities. Hierarchy doesn’t merely conceal truth from those below; it gradually starves those above of corrective information. Everyone learns what not to say in the presence of power. The leader receives applause, edited reports, favourable metrics and obedient nods until he’s governing a hallucination.

But the SNAFU principle needs to be applied recursively. Otherwise it becomes another flattering story in which we understand reality while the billionaire doesn’t. The editor is inside a tunnel. Dave Lee is inside a tunnel. Musk is inside several tunnels, some of them upholstered. I’m inside one. You’re inside one. RAW is valuable precisely because he keeps slipping a mirror underneath the door.

That’s the tension I’d want to preserve. Multi-model agnosticism can’t mean: all models are interchangeable, except my political model, which is simply reality. Nor can it mean that every factual question dissolves into perspective. Climate systems don’t negotiate with our metaphors. The playful magician still has to check the instruments.

Maybe the working distinction is:

Facts constrain the game. Models shape the moves we can see.

That leaves room for science without Scientism, magic without credulity, politics without psychic capture, and hope without anaesthetic.

There’s also a sharp irony in the editorial story surrounding the piece. An afterword celebrating RAW’s reality-tunnel flexibility is rejected because certain references violate the custodians’ preferred tunnel. They apparently wanted hope with the politics removed—as though hope were a scented candle rather than a response to actual conditions. But Dave’s own language sometimes hardens into the same sorting mechanism: climate denialists, parasite class, sociopathic puppets, disoriented man-child. Some of those descriptions may carry real force, but they also close the perceptual aperture. The piece advocates switching models while occasionally speaking as though the final model has already been found.

That contradiction doesn’t ruin it. It makes the piece human. It shows how difficult RAW’s practice actually is. “Reality tunnels” is easy to say when examining somebody else’s tunnel. The real work begins when the tunnel under inspection is the one currently furnishing our moral certainty.

The richest move in the essay comes near the end:

There is no substitute for immediate experience.

I’d only add: immediate experience is not innocent either. It’s interpreted, remembered, selected and named. But it has resistance. The wet path pushes back. The dog pulls at the lead. A stranger says something you weren’t expecting. The body becomes hungry regardless of your ideology. Local reality contains more feedback than the spectacle does, which means it gives the imagination fewer opportunities to become completely self-sealing.

This might be where magic returns to matter. Not as supernatural escape, but as the craft of restoring contact between attention and world.

The spell is not: everything will be fine.

The spell is: come back into relationship.

Come back to the body. Come back to the evidence. Come back to the people who can answer you honestly. Come back to the patch of reality where your actions still have weight. Then look again at the larger machinery—but look from somewhere you actually inhabit.

Perhaps hope is what becomes possible when the future stops being a verdict and becomes a field of participation. Not a belief that the good guys will win. Not RAW’s exuberant predictions rescued from their failed deadlines. Something rougher and more serviceable:

The world is unfinished, power is never total, and the story being broadcast is not the only story taking place.

That feels like a reality seed worth carrying.