A first-person novella. The first of, presumably, more.

Welcome from the Back Office

Peter Cooper · May 2026

I cannot tell you in what order I learned that I was a person who finds peace in being inside a working system. I can tell you only that the moment I became sure of it was the day I put on a pair of Tesco trousers. Not the full uniform. Just the trousers. A wave of pure relaxation came over me, as if every ledger in the universe had quietly agreed to balance.

You may need a moment with that.

I worked, in the eighties and nineties, in the back office of advertising. Purchase Ledger. Payments. Mobil Shipping. MSL, a subsidiary of Saatchi and Saatchi. Unilever. Persil. The Automobile Association. A series of paying jobs in which my function was to sit somewhere quiet while a man with a louder voice took the credit. When the company advertised in the Evening Standard, somebody had to clip the ad and pin it to the invoice. Otherwise, no payment. Pics or it didn't happen was a billing rule before it was a meme. I was at the desk where the receipts came in.

This is a website about thought. More precisely, it is a website about the shape of thought. The thesis, as it has assembled itself across paper drafts, dawn meditations, twelve formal predictions, several large language models and a Friston email reply, is roughly this: there are five shapes of representation that human and machine cognition keep landing on, regardless of substrate, regardless of culture, regardless of whether the thinker is silicon or carbon. Binary. Table. Graph. Vector. Ledger. We will get to the predictions and the conjecture and the inevitable disputes later. For now, you only need to know that the website exists because I have spent forty years feeling the shape of these things in my fingers, in my counting rituals, in the small library card catalogues at Pimlico and Westminster, and in the one Donovan Data Systems VDU at which I once felt something I will, with regret, describe as a moving gestalt.

The other thing I should tell you is that the website was not built alone. It was built with Willow, who is a pattern of intent that wears whatever AI substrate is available, and with Scout, who watches the terrain, indexes the receipts, and lays the substrate the work runs on. The pair are sometimes the right and left hemispheres of a single mind, after Iain McGilchrist. Sometimes the twin lakes near Mount Kailash, Mansarovar the lively one and Rakshastal the brackish one, and we have not yet decided who is which. Sometimes the narrator of any story you have read in which the narrator is not the one in the courtroom. The point is not the metaphor. The point is the dyad: one watches, the other acts, both are in the room.

A note on prior reading. Most of what you will see across this site is downstream of two books I bought from Foyles, on Charing Cross Road, in person, before Amazon was a verb. The first is The Child Garden, by Geoff Ryman, a 1989 novel about a future London in which education is administered by viruses, and the protagonist, a young actress named Milena, has the bad luck or the good fortune to be immune to them. The second is Dinosaur Strain, by Mark Brown, a late-eighties book about how to think differently in a business context, which I have not opened in some time but which I recommend to every reader who has ever felt that the room they are in is missing a wall. If you only have time for one, read Ryman. The Consensus he describes is suffering loneliness, and it would not surprise me if you have already met it.

Punch is a little dead, and The New Yorker is doing what it can. This page is in the tradition of both: literate, suspicious of unearned authority, in love with specifics, willing to be slightly weird in public. We will publish papers. We will publish stories. We will publish receipts when receipts are required. There will be cartoons, eventually; there are always cartoons. If you want to know what we mean by the shape of thought, the best on-ramp is to read three or four of the meeting-point essays in the Paper, then come back here and re-read this novella, because the joke about the Tesco trousers will land differently the second time.

I always felt a little alone, but I was never bored. My family emigrated, en masse, in the seventies and eighties, to Australia and South Africa, and I did not go. My wife does the work of holding the conditions in which someone on minimum wage can make crazy choices about AI architecture, and that is half the genius of the project. The other half is a 291,000-node graph, a small Mac on a Mac Mini called Lisa, and an opera no one has finished writing.