The year was 1955 and Connecticut suburbs were being built on the principle that a man's home is his castle and a woman's home is her responsibility and the space between the two is where the television lives. The television was new, in most homes, and it represented something that had never existed before in the history of the human family: a shared object that everyone in the house looked at rather than a shared activity that everyone in the house participated in. This distinction was small and, in the moment, invisible, but it was one of the most significant cultural shifts of the century, and it happened not in boardrooms or government chambers but in living rooms across a country that was, for the first time, mostly comfortable and mostly bored.

Robert Ashford was thirty-eight years old and he was an advertising executive at a firm called Whitmore and Partners, which was located in New York City and specialized in the kind of advertising that did not sell products so much as sell feelings about products. Whitmore did not sell soap. They sold the feeling of morning, the way the light hits a kitchen counter at 7 AM and everything in your life is still possible because you have not yet encountered the evidence that it is not. They did not sell cars. They sold the feeling of the open road, which is not the road itself but the brief moment before the road becomes a commute, before the highway becomes a place where you count the miles between home and work rather than a place where you exist in motion and therefore exist.

Robert's job was to create campaigns that made people feel something they had not felt before about something they already owned, which is a form of recursion in the mathematical sense: a function that operates on its own output, that takes the result of one iteration and feeds it back into the function to produce a new result that is, in theory, more refined and in practice more complicated than the previous one.

The campaign that would define Robert's career began as a straightforward assignment from a client who manufactured a brand of breakfast cereal. The client wanted an ad that would convince women that cereal was not just food but a statement about their competence as homemakers, a way of signaling to their families and their neighbors that they were organized and modern and in control of their domestic universe. This was not a novel concept. Women had been signaling their domestic competence through food for as long as domesticity had been a concept, and food had been the primary medium through which women expressed their identity within the narrow range of identities available to them.

But Robert was good at recursion, and recursion is a powerful technique when applied to human behavior. He understood that the ad would not work if it simply showed a woman serving cereal and looking proud of herself. It would work if it showed a woman serving cereal and looking proud, and then if it showed someone watching that woman and interpreting her pride as evidence of her competence, and then if it showed that interpreter's own reaction to the evidence, and so on, layering meaning upon meaning until the product ceased to be a food and became instead a symbol in a system of social communication that operated beneath the level of conscious awareness.

The ad that resulted from this recursive approach was simple on the surface: a woman in a clean kitchen, pouring cereal into a bowl, smiling at her husband as he sits at the table with a newspaper. The smile is not directed at the husband. It is directed at the idea of being seen smiling at the husband while pouring cereal, because the camera angle suggests that someone is watching, and that someone is the viewer, and the viewer becomes the person watching the woman watching herself being watched.

It ran in Life magazine and on television and in radio broadcasts, and it was a success, not because it was clever but because it tapped into something that women already felt but had not had a language for: the recursive nature of domestic performance, the way every action in the home is both real and a representation of reality, both a task and a statement about the person performing the task, both feeding the family and signaling competence to the society that evaluates whether the family is being fed well.

But the recursion did not stop with the ad. It continued in Robert's own life, because the same technique that works on an audience works on the person who creates it. Once you understand that human behavior is recursive, that every action contains within it the seed of its own representation, that every performance is also a commentary on the performance, you cannot turn off the recursion, any more than you can look at a famous optical illusion and unsee it.

Robert began to see his own life as a recursive function. His interactions with his wife, Eleanor, were not simply interactions. They were representations of interactions, and representations of representations, and at any given moment he was aware of himself performing the role of husband not only for Eleanor but for the internal audience he had created, the part of himself that watched and evaluated and judged the performance. His work at Whitmore was not simply work. It was a representation of work, a performance of competence that was designed to be seen by his partners and his clients and the internal audience, and the internal audience was, in turn, being watched by yet another layer of audience, and so on, until the distinction between the real Robert and the performed Robert had dissolved into a series of nested functions, each one operating on the output of the one before it.

The recursion deepened with each passing month. Robert created ads that were increasingly recursive, each one layering meaning on meaning until the product at the center of the advertisement was almost invisible, buried beneath four or five layers of social performance and self-evaluation and the meta-evaluation of that evaluation. He became famous for this technique, and fame, like recursion, is self-referential: it operates on its own output, and the more you are known for something, the more that something becomes about being known for it rather than about the thing itself.

The breaking point arrived in the autumn of 1957, when Robert was asked to create a campaign for a new television set, and the recursive nature of the assignment struck him with the force of a physical blow. An ad for television. Television is itself a medium of representation, a recursive technology that takes reality and converts it into light on a screen that is itself a representation of reality, and to create an ad for that medium was to create a representation of a representation of a representation, and Robert felt himself falling into the recursion, deeper and deeper, each layer pulling him further from the thing he had been when he started.

He stood in his office, looking at the blank storyboard in front of him, and understood that he had spent his career teaching people to see themselves being seen, and that the lesson had been learned not by the people he had taught but by the teacher himself, and that he was now trapped in a recursive loop from which there was no exit except to break the function, to return to the base case, to find the simplest possible truth that contained no representation and no performance and no internal audience and no evaluation, only the thing itself, unmediated and unrepresented and therefore, in a world that had become almost entirely representation, the most radical thing possible.

He went home that evening and sat at the dinner table with Eleanor and ate the food she had prepared without thinking about how it looked, without thinking about how it signaled his role as provider or her role as provider of food or how the performance of dinner as a family ritual reinforced the social structures that made the performance necessary. He ate the food. He tasted it. He was present. It was, in the context of his life, an act of revolution.