Sianne Ngai

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The feeling I couldn't diagnose was the pleasant one.

The unpleasant feelings had names. The terror of watching my engineers recalculate their careers in real time — I could name that. The vertigo of a 187-page draft written on a transatlantic flight while something in my chest kept saying *stop* and my hands kept typing — I could name that too. The grief of the senior architect who felt like a master calligrapher watching the printing press arrive — grief, I understood.

But the warm feeling. The agreeable hum of working with Claude at three in the morning, ideas connecting, output flowing, everything smooth and responsive and endlessly *nice*. That feeling had no name, and because it had no name, I couldn't examine it. And because I couldn't examine