Designing the World: On Cinema, Code, and Catholic Metaphysics

Metaphysics, Media, and the Logic of Formation in an Engineered Reality

I came home last night from watching the latest Mission Impossible film, and what it did—more overtly than any of its predecessors—was amplify the metaphysical architecture that has always underpinned the franchise. From the very beginning, Mission Impossible has staged a particular vision of space and time: corridors that collapse into choke points, cities transformed into mazes of surveillance, time not as duration but as pressure. There is always a countdown. There is always a vanishing window. Time is never neutral. It is charged. It is hostile. And space, in these films, is never passive. It is a field of obstacles and opportunities, composed to test perception, agility, and resolve.

But in Last Reckoning, this metaphysical tension becomes explicit. The spectacle serves a deeper grammar. Spacetime is no longer just the setting. It is the moral condition. Action must be immediate. Delay invites collapse. Every moment pulses with the demand to intervene, to move, to decide. The question is no longer whether chaos will come, but whether one can act quickly enough to reroute it.

The film does not merely entertain. It enacts a vision of metaphysical stakes. It offers a dramatics of attention, agency, and time. And it helped crystallise a set of intuitions I’ve been working on for some time. This was not just a polished thriller. It was, at its heart, a meditation on freedom, constraint, and the shape of moral action.

And perhaps what should give us pause, as viewers and as citizens, is the unsettling familiarity of this metaphysics. What Mission Impossible stages as cinematic spectacle is not far from the space and time offered to us by political administrations and media institutions. There is a kind of Gonzo Realism in play, where the world becomes one vast operation theatre, and every event is framed as the final moment, the irreversible fork, the last chance to act before collapse. The countdown, the crisis, the ever-narrowing window -these are no longer just cinematic tropes. They are how reality itself is narrated, compressed, and delivered to us. 

What does it mean to live in a world where time is always urgent and space always hostile? What does it mean to dwell in a metaphysics of emergency, where deliberation is weakness and delay is betrayal?

That experience helped thread together a number of ideas I’ve been working on for some time. As someone newly received into the Catholic Church, who once wanted to be a filmmaker, and who now leads an AI company, I’ve been trying to draw the map that connects these territories. What do cinema, liturgy, and machine learning have in common? On the surface, very little. But beneath, they share something vital: each is involved in designing worlds. 

Each creates a field of experience, a space of encounter, a grammar of what is possible. Each tells us, in its own language, how to move and what to notice.

This essay is an attempt to hold those domains together in a single frame. It moves between cinema and code, gaming and grace, theology and aesthetics, all in service of a larger question: who is building the world we now inhabit, and what vision of reality are they enacting?

Regency, San Francisco, 1992 in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s theater series

Cinema, Code, and Software as Metaphysics

To speak of cinema, gaming, and software in the same breath as metaphysics is to recognise that nothing we build is neutral. The spaces we move through are not passive. They are designed. They have rules, velocities, constraints, and demands. At the centre of every serious art —whether liturgical or cinematic, algorithmic or architectural— is a conception of time and space. These are not just settings. They are forces. They guide attention, condition action, and form desire.

Where are you right now? Not simply physically, but metaphysically. What does your space ask of you? What does it hide? What is it forming in you without your awareness?

The director does not merely tell a story. S/he composes a world. A world has geometry, rhythm, mood. A world constrains and compels. The Catholic liturgy, at its best, does precisely this. It is not just words or gestures. It is a sacramental configuration of space and time. The same holds true for cinema. A long take is not the same as a cut. A close-up does not function like a wide shot. The screen, like the sanctuary, is a stage upon which human action becomes visible, ordered, and thick with meaning.

This is why the most serious films are not always the most obviously religious. They are the ones that allow moral gravity to emerge through form. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is, in many ways, a retelling of the Exodus. Schindler’s List shows how even profane space -commerce, industry- can become a stage for grace. Terrence Malick’s films slow time, open space, and beckon the viewer into contemplation. They are cinematic liturgies. Not because they preach, but because they reveal.

Sacrifice lies at the heart of this revelation. The most profound moments in film are not the victories, but the renunciations. The moments when a character, confronted with a situation not of their choosing, gives something up. This is the shape of love in Catholic thought. Love is not a sentiment. It is a structure. A form. It always involves an offering. In the liturgy, Christ is not remembered. He is made present. And what is made present is a sacrifice. The truest freedom is not choice, but fidelity.

What have you given up lately, and for what? Is there something you’ve chosen not because it was easy, but because it was right? What would it mean to let your action become a sacrifice?

The French philosopher, Alain Badiou, helps here. He speaks of the event—the sudden rupture that breaks into the given world and demands a response. The stranger at the door. The letter in the mail. The face across the room. These are not accidents. They are calls. They open a new possible world. And like the biblical call, they are not simply invitations. They divide. They ask (for) everything.

Wes Anderson’s films, curated to a fault, may seem to lack this existential punch. But perhaps what he offers is something subtler: a demonstration of how all space is designed. Nothing in his worlds is accidental. Everything is selected, arranged, composed. This is what Agamben wants us to see about politics, about aesthetics. Power operates through appearance. It stages reality. And if we do not see how a space has been formed, we will not know how we have been formed by it.

This is what the Dan Gilroy directed film Nightcrawler makes visible with disturbing clarity. Lou Bloom frames. He edits. He stages. He builds scenes of violence for maximum aesthetic and economic value. He does not invent reality. He curates it for the logic of viewership. (Remind you of social media?) And the media/people buy it (in both senses of the term: literally and figuratively), because attention is currency, and violence is gold. In this way, the film performs what Giorgio Agamben (mentioned above) has described throughout his work: the aesthetic logic of modern power. In both politics and art, Agamben argues, we no longer deal in substance or action, but in the management of appearances. Politics becomes spectacle. Art becomes curated absence. Reality is governed through what is made visible, and what is withheld. In texts like The Man Without Content, Means Without End, and The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben traces how theological and artistic forms have been emptied of content and reconfigured as liturgies of spectacle. What remains is not presence but staging. Not truth but its aesthetic modulation. In this light, Nightcrawler is not a critique of one man’s moral collapse, but a mirror held up to a world ruled by apparatuses of perception, in which design replaces event and framing displaces truth. The film’s brilliance lies in showing us that the most dangerous illusion is not fiction, but manipulated presence.

What are you seeing right now because someone wants you to see it? And what are you not seeing, because no one is framing it?

In this way, the gaming world becomes a kind of catechesis. Not because of content, but because of structure. Games are constrained spaces of action. Even in the most expansive open-world formats, the freedom a player enjoys is always qualified by the underlying scaffolding laid down by the designers. Tracks are set. Parameters are drawn. Objectives are scripted. It is not chaos, but choreography. Here, we would do well to recall Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games. Just as meaning in language arises from use within a rule-bound form of life, so too does meaningful action within a game emerge from its architecture of constraints. Games do not simulate life. They generate a parallel structure in which life is reinterpreted.

To play is to consent to enter this structure. It is to submit, often willingly, to a reordering of space and time. The rhythm of the world is exchanged for the rhythm of the gamespace. Reality is narrowed to a field in which every choice has consequence, every action is embedded in a telos, and time is scored not by clocks but by progress bars, events, and unlocks. And this is not neutral. Every gameworld is designed not only for play but for a particular outcome -one that balances the satisfactions of the player, the aspirations of the community, and the interests of the company. The gamespace becomes a ritualised environment. It forms habit. It shapes expectation. It draws the player into a world that is not arbitrary but meaningfully shaped, even if that meaning has been commercialised.

In such a space, the player does not merely act. He is formed by the very conditions under which action becomes possible.

Which brings us, inevitably, to Silicon Valley. For the most powerful builders of worlds today are not priests or poets, but product designers and their general partners. Venture capital, at its highest register, is not about funding tools. It is about engineering ontologies. The a16z philosophy understood this from the start. Founders were not merely entrepreneurs. They were stars. Icons. Myths. They were built into the architecture of desire. And their platforms were not solutions. They were stages. New fields of attention. New grammars of thought. New metaphysical blueprints. (Hence, it’s no coincidence that a16z enlisted Michael Ovitz, founder in 1975 of CAA, to blueprint and build their new ontology.)

To design a product, in this light, is to posit a theory of the human. To write an algorithm is to sketch a logic of perception. To code a world is to frame the terms in which desire, presence, and action will unfold. The metaphysical stakes could not be higher.

This is why the Catholic tradition, with its sacramental realism, remains uniquely poised to diagnose our moment. In a world of infinite simulacra, the Church insists on the givenness of form. In a world of user experience, the Church presents an altar. The Mass is not content. It is cosmos. It is not curated. It is received. It is not efficient. It is real.

To return to the central question: who is designing the world? That is not simply a question of influence. It is a question of metaphysics. What do they believe about time? About space? And, as a result, what do they believe about truth, action, sacrifice, and grace? These are not abstractions. They are architectures. They are built into the platforms we use, the maps we follow, the worlds we inhabit.

For every theory of time presumes a kind of attention. Every vision of space trains a kind of movement. Every metaphysics implies a form of life.

Where do you spend your time, and who built the logic of that space? What is it teaching you to love? What does it demand of your action, decisions, preferences? Who does it demand that you be?

A cinematic cut. A screen gesture. A liturgical procession. A product launch. A prayer.

Each of these is a metaphysical act. Each arranges the world. Each demands our attention.

But attention itself is not neutral. To attend is to submit to a rhythm. It is to dwell within a logic of time and space: logical space. The final question, then, is not whether we are paying attention, but whether we can turn our attention—again, or perhaps for the first time—to the spatiality and temporality of thought itself.

This is not a rhetorical gesture. It is an ontological necessity.

To think rightly is to dwell rightly. To dwell rightly is to be formed. And to be formed is to enter into the mystery not just of information, but of being. 

Thought and being.