Member-only story
The side of the egg
On the next hack for our humanity, in the age of AI
Everyone, I think, has a favorite speech or two — the kind you keep around. One in my collection is the address Haruki Murakami gave in 2009 when he accepted the Jerusalem Prize. He went in person, while the battle in Gaza was raging.
An excerpt:
Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.
Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others — coldly, efficiently, systematically.
The speech was delivered in a specific historical moment — the immediate aftermath of the 2008–2009 Gaza war. As I write this in 2026, the situation in Gaza has escalated to a scale that gives Murakami’s words, read today, a different weight than they carried a decade ago. Even so, I am not borrowing Murakami’s figure here to speak of Gaza directly. I am borrowing it for another, (on the face of it) quieter use: to think about design processes and business…
