PRATHER OFFICE
Ventures & Investments
Thin Membrane: A print-only journal on markets and culture.
Interruptible: Voice-first interfaces and performance-native conversational models.
Gable-Ell: Bay Area and Midwest real estate investments and redevelopment.
Pageantry: Adult-oriented music recordings and publishing.
Forward Memory
Inheritance shows up in places no genetic map accounts for. My boys run the exact same way I do. The same stiff stride, same achilles that screams if you look at it wrong, same knee that files a complaint halfway up a hill. It’s not “genetic” so much as it’s choreography that somehow made it into the family archive. Bodies remember things we never consciously learned.
Minds work the same way. We each carry a bundle of private stories, beliefs absorbed before memory was even online. Habits of interpretation. Unspoken rules. These myths run underneath everything, shaping our days with a kind of casual authority. Joseph Campbell wrote about heroic arcs, but most lives hum on more modest circuits: a handful of assumptions played on loop until they blend into identity.
The system cares little about origin. A repeated idea, whether ancient or recent, carries the same weight. A posture practiced long enough becomes personality. Patterns repeat until they become character. The mind, like the body, doesn’t store time. It stores whatever it sees often enough.
And every once in a while, you catch it in the act: beliefs stepping out of the shadows. These small recognitions reveal the architecture beneath it all, a prediction machine trained on whatever it’s seen enough times. And it’s always ready for the next instruction.
On Becoming Unpredictable
Watching Ken Burns: The American Revolution. You kind of know what you’re in for with the PBS stamp. Any of us with even a little Shane Gillis rattling around inside still look forward to the subject matter. I will offer a mild eye-roll to the, let’s call it, the Standard Accepted Lens of the Modern Documentary when it turns its lights onto a war fought some 250 years ago. That soft, assured tone that treats the past like it was always waiting to be interpreted by the present.
How confidently the modern mind supplies motives to those who would barely recognize the version of themselves being narrated, as if any life or time survives such scrutiny. Every rough instinct is moralized, a thick layer of contemporary ethics like German schmear on brick. It’s not malicious, but it’s tiresome. An era retold for our modern sensibilities.
There’s a familiar pattern in that. Our expression has become predictable, and all drifts toward uniformity. They say no-one has a personality today. I think we’re too afraid to.
So much of my first love, music, has become the same. The production is nailed, the structure flawless. A noticeable absence of surprise, like the soul of it shipped separately but never arrived. Prediction machines have quickly found high competence at this material. And we're not ready to discuss how much of what we call art is simply pattern-matching. The point-one-percenters like Bowie, Jagger and MJ built careers on doing something a reasonable algorithm would have flagged as an aberration. The rest is easy work for a prediction model.
Here’s to becoming unpredictable once again.
Joey Prather