Friendship in an Age of Hate and Algorithms (draft)

Part I: Making New Friends in an Age of Hate · Part II: Social Media in the Age of Friendships

Friendship is not a retreat from the fight. It is the fight, conducted at human scale.

Why Now

About two years ago I wrote two drafts and set them aside. One was about making friends across the lines we are taught not to cross. The other was about what social media has done to those friendships, and what it could do for them instead. I always meant for them to appear together, and I always meant for them to appear around the time Climate Tribe Social opened its doors. That time is now.

So here they are, joined into one post, brought up to date with the news of 2026, and pointed at a single question: can the way we connect, in person and online, become part of how we confront the Five Emergencies, the Climate, Ecological, Humanity, Democracy, and Displacement Emergencies? I believe it can. I believe it must. And I believe there are good alternatives to platforms built on self-enrichment, platforms that put issues, cooperation, and closeness first.

Every post I write now also tries to act as a teacher. You will find history woven all the way through this one, because the past is one of the best tools we have for understanding the present, and for applying its lessons before the future gets decided for us.

Part I: Making New Friends in an Age of Hate

How ordinary connection undermines division

An Unlikely Table (story)

I was nervous walking into that neighborhood Adaptive Resiliency Center (ARC) gathering. Some of the folks there had not always been friendly toward me because of my beliefs, although by then many had softened and found themselves standing in the very place they once vehemently rejected.

It was a folding table and a box of lukewarm coffee. A neighborhood resilience meeting: the kind of gathering where you walk in expecting to talk about rain barrels and walk out having talked about your life. I sat down across from a man I had quietly, automatically decided I had nothing in common with. Different politics. Different church. A different vocabulary for almost everything that mattered to me.

Two hours later we were still talking. Not because we agreed (we didn’t, and we still don’t) but because somewhere between the flood maps and the third cup of bad coffee, he stopped being an abstraction and became a person with a granddaughter he was terrified for. The same fear I carry. The very same one.

That is the whole argument of this post, and I will spend the rest of it backing it up with history, science, and the news of our moment: in an age engineered for division, choosing to make a new friend across a line you were taught not to cross is not a soft or secondary act. It is one of the most concrete, evidence-backed forms of resistance available to an ordinary human being. And in the work of confronting the Climate and Ecological Emergency, it is not optional. It is infrastructure.

The Age We’re In, Honestly

Let’s name it without flinching and without exaggerating, because the truth is sharp enough.

Hate in America is not a clean upward line. It is something stranger and, in its own way, more chilling: a moving target. In August 2026 the FBI released its hate crime statistics for 2025, reporting 10,881 incidents, down from 11,679 in 2024 and the lowest total in five years. That progress is real, and it deserves to be welcomed.

Then you look closer. Hate-motivated murders rose from 10 cases in 2024 to 17 in 2025. Anti-Sikh incidents jumped 25 percent. Anti-Latino hate reached its highest level in more than a decade, and anti-Asian hate crimes remained more than double the pre-pandemic average. Anti-Jewish hate crimes, though down from 2024’s record, still made up nearly two-thirds of all religion-based incidents. Anti-Black hate crimes also fell, yet Black Americans were still the targets of nearly half of all race-based hate crimes, as they have been in every year the FBI has kept count. And every one of these figures is an undercount: in 2019, fewer than 3 percent of the hate crimes victims described in a national federal survey ever appeared in the FBI’s database.

The pattern is brutal in its logic. Whenever a group becomes the target of a fear-soaked political story, the violence finds them. The total can fall while specific neighbors are hit harder than ever.

Layer onto that a culture of hard-edged polarization, the distrust and contempt many Americans now feel for “the other side,” amplified by feeds that reward outrage and quietly sort us into bubbles of sameness. Then add the loneliness. In June 2025 the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection reported that one in six people on Earth is affected by loneliness, and linked it to an estimated 871,000 deaths every year, roughly 100 every hour. We are surrounded by people and starved of friends.

That is the world. Now here is the other thing that is also true in it.

Friendship as Counter-Story: The Historical Roots

People have always built unlikely friendships against the grain of the systems around them. Friendship has long served as a kind of underground, a space where individuals quietly experiment with a more equal, more humane relationship than their institutions permit. In early America, bonds between individuals routinely ran counter to the formal hierarchies of politics, class, and race. The official story said stay separate; the friendship said come closer.

Even nations borrow the word. The relationship between the United States and Great Britain began in war and colonial rupture and, over generations of repeated contact and shared projects, became one of the world’s closest diplomatic “friendships.” It is an imperfect metaphor, since nations are not people, but it points to a real pattern: sustained contact, mutual interest, and common work can turn former enemies into partners. If that arc is possible between states forged in war, it is certainly possible between coworkers, classmates, and neighbors.

There is also a turning point worth marking. In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education struck down legalized segregation in American public schools. The social science that informed that decision, and the developmental research that followed it, pointed toward something quietly radical: that friendliness across racial lines among children (who they played with, sat with, and trusted) is itself a measure of whether justice is real. Not justice on paper. Justice in the daily texture of a life. That insight still holds. Who we befriend across lines of difference is not a private lifestyle choice. It is a public indicator of how integrated, and how just, our society actually is.

What the Science Says, and the Honest Catch

For seventy years, social psychologists have studied this. The foundation is Gordon Allport’s 1954 “contact hypothesis”: meaningful contact between groups reduces prejudice when certain conditions are met, namely roughly equal status, cooperation, shared goals, and institutional support. Decades of research, including large meta-analyses, have confirmed and extended it across race, religion, nationality, age, disability, and sexual orientation.

Cross-group friendship turns out to be an especially powerful form of that contact, because it carries what a one-off encounter cannot: trust, emotional disclosure, repetition, and time. People with close friends across racial lines reliably show lower prejudice, more empathy, and more willingness to confront discrimination. There is even an “extended contact effect”: simply knowing that someone in your group has a friend in another group measurably softens your own bias. Friendship is contagious. So is its absence.

Now the honest catch, because credibility matters.

In September 2025, researchers from the Polarization Research Lab (Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, and George Washington University) published a meta-analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences covering 77 different attempts to reduce partisan animosity. The finding was sobering. On average the treatments moved feelings toward the other side by only about five points on a 101-point scale, and the effect faded within two weeks. Even repeating the treatments as “booster shots” did not make them last. A pamphlet, a video, a single workshop: these do not durably knit a society back together. Tellingly, the authors noted that interventions built on genuine dialogue, though hard to scale and slow to pay off, remain the most effective tool we have.

This is not a refutation of the friendship thesis. It is the proof of it. Brief interventions fade for the very reason friendship matters: friendship is the opposite of brief. It is sustained contact, renewed every week, deepened over years. The science isn’t telling us that connection doesn’t work. It is telling us that shallow connection doesn’t last, and that the structures around us (segregated schools, segregated workplaces, segregated feeds) will pull us back apart unless we build something with roots. Friendship is the version with roots.

Children, Schools, and the Fragile Arc

Watch young children in a genuinely diverse setting and you will see cross-racial friendships form easily, almost without effort. Then watch what happens around age ten. Many kids begin to drift into more segregated friendship patterns, not because something in them has soured, but because they are absorbing the divisions of the wider culture and the structures of their own schools.

Researchers are clear about what keeps that early openness alive: meaningfully integrated schools, cooperative learning tasks in which mixed groups work toward a shared goal, intentional mixing in extracurricular activities, and positive role models of friendship across groups. Simply placing different children in the same building does little; students still default to same-race friendships when the institution does not actively bring them together.

The lesson scales up to adults. Environment, structure, and storytelling decide who we meet. We do not befriend across difference by willpower alone. We do it by deliberately choosing the rooms we stand in.

Adults Today: Physically Close, Emotionally Distant

In adulthood the patterns hold but grow more complicated. The broader political and historical context shapes who we feel safe approaching and how vulnerable we will allow ourselves to be. Many of us live and work in places that are formally diverse and socially segregated: polite proximity without real friendship. We share an elevator, a group chat, a sidewalk, and never share a story.

Yet when cross-group friendships do form among adults, they almost always begin in the most ordinary soil: roommates, a shared hobby, music, a kitchen, a meal, a project. People who build these friendships well tend to do a few simple things. They are curious about the person, not the category. They look for common ground instead of staging debates. They respect difference instead of trying to dissolve it. And they let go of the script they were handed about what someone “like that” is supposed to be.

Daryl Davis, the Black blues musician who has spent decades befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan and has watched many of them walk away from the movement, traces his mission to a question he asked himself as a child after strangers threw rocks at him: How can you hate me when you don’t even know me? The not-knowing is the engine of the hate. Friendship is simply the decision to make not-knowing impossible.

Making Friends in the Movement: Climate Justice as a Friendship Engine

The paleoclimate record shouts to us that, far from being self-stabilizing, the Earth’s climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges. — Wallace Broecker

Here is the part I most want to add to this conversation, because it is where my own life has been changed.

Some of the truest friendships I have are with people I would almost certainly never have met if not for climate justice advocacy. Different races, different generations, different faiths or no faith at all, different politics on a dozen other questions, and yet bound together, tightly, by a single shared stake: the survival of a livable world for the generations coming after us.

This is not an accident. It is the contact hypothesis operating in the wild. Look at what an organizing meeting, a mutual-aid network, a community garden, or a local climate campaign actually is: a group of different people, working at roughly equal status, cooperating toward a common goal, with the whole effort anchored in a shared sense of purpose. That is, almost line for line, Allport’s recipe for the conditions under which contact dissolves prejudice. Movement spaces are friendship engines, whether or not anyone designed them that way.

And the Climate and Ecological Emergency has a quality that very little else in our polarized moment has: it does not care which side you are on. The flood does not check your voter registration. The heat dome does not ask your religion. The smoke does not respect a property line. When people gather around a threat that endangers everyone’s children, the categories the outrage machine spent years sharpening start, quietly, to lose their grip. You cannot organize beside someone for a year, plan with them, fail with them, show up at 6 a.m. with them, and still hold them as an abstraction. The work makes the friendship, and the friendship makes the work survivable.

This is the heart of what I mean by Adaptive Resiliency. Resilience is not a stockpile. It is not a bunker. Resilience is relational. A community that genuinely knows itself, that has practiced trust, dialogue, and cooperation before the crisis, is a community that can adapt when the crisis comes. Isolation is the precondition of collapse. Friendship is the precondition of survival. When we make a new friend across a line of difference, especially in the work of planetary stewardship, we are not doing something separate from climate action. We are laying its load-bearing infrastructure.

Practical Foundations: How to Actually Do This

Drawing the history, the science, and lived experience together, here is the groundwork for making new friends in an age of hate, division, and racism.

• Choose rooms built for real mixing. Cross-group friendships flourish in settings that are not just diverse but structured to mix people across race, age, and background through shared activity. Seek out the community group, the class, the faith or humanist community, or the climate campaign that deliberately puts different people shoulder to shoulder.

• Lead with shared projects, not abstract debate. Cooperation toward a common goal, among equals, is the strongest known form of prejudice-reducing contact. A neighborhood garden, a mutual-aid drive, a local resilience effort: you begin with a purpose instead of an argument, and friendship grows in the doing.
• Practice deep listening and story-sharing. Ask real questions. Listen more than you speak at the start. Offer your own story in time, your fears and your hopes, because mutual humanity is built by mutual disclosure, not by winning.
• Seek out and model friendship across groups. Seeing real friendships across difference normalizes them. Curate what you consume and what you share; lift up the stories of people who keep deep bonds across divides.
• Accept discomfort as the entry fee. Contact across groups almost always begins with anxiety: the fear of saying the wrong thing, of being rejected. That discomfort is normal and survivable. Move slowly rather than withdrawing entirely. The awkward first conversation is the toll booth, not the destination.
• Tend to justice, not just kindness. Cross-group friendships exist inside systems of unequal power, resources, and risk. Real friendship across racial and social lines also means believing people’s experiences of discrimination, noticing the imbalances, and using your relationships and your platform in the broader fight against exclusion. Kindness without justice is decoration.

Part II: Social Media in the Age of Friendships

From the cave fire to the feed, and back to each other

A Beginning That Is Both Difficult and a No-Brainer

How to begin a post with this title can be difficult, or a no-brainer. I believe that since the days of the cave dwellers we have been sharing, giving gifts, encouraging one another, patting each other on the back, and being there for each other.

This is part of sociology, one of my favorite classes in college. I don’t remember everything we studied, but I do remember how different groups interacted, and that although it was not always at the center of those interactions, a pivotal part of them was our closeness and compassion toward one another.

Anthropology backs up that memory. The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has argued that the human brain evolved to manage a limited circle of meaningful relationships, roughly 150 people, with a far smaller inner circle of close friends, and that much of what early humans did around the fire, from grooming to storytelling to shared laughter, was the work of keeping those bonds alive. We were built for closeness long before we were built for broadcasting.

A History Lesson: Humanity’s First Social Networks

Social networks are not new. Only the machinery is.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, coffeehouses earned the nickname “penny universities.” For the price of a cup, anyone could walk in, sit beside a stranger, hear the news read aloud, and argue about it. Merchants, scientists, poets, and tradespeople shared the same tables. Some of those tables grew into lasting institutions; Lloyd’s of London began in Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse, where people gathered to trade shipping news.

In 1727, a twenty-one-year-old printer named Benjamin Franklin gathered a dozen friends in Philadelphia into a club he called the Junto. They met on Friday evenings and asked one another practical questions: What problem in our community needs fixing? Who needs help? What have you learned that could serve the rest of us? From that circle of friends grew a subscription lending library and a wave of civic projects, including a volunteer fire company. It was a social network built for mutual improvement, and it worked because the members actually knew each other.

Half a century later, in 1772, Samuel Adams and fellow colonists in Boston formed a Committee of Correspondence, and the idea spread town to town and colony to colony: networks of letter-writers who shared news, coordinated action, and built trust among communities that barely knew one another. It was slow and handwritten, and it was powerful enough to help birth a nation.

The lesson from all three is the same. When people connect around a shared purpose, their networks become engines of problem-solving. When they connect around attention alone, their networks become engines of something else entirely.

How the Promise Was Broken

The early promise of social media sounded a lot like the Junto: connect the world, bring people closer, give everyone a voice. For a while it even felt true.

But the business model pulled in another direction. As the saying goes, when a platform is free, you are not the customer; you are the product. In 2019 the Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff gave that arrangement a name, surveillance capitalism: an economic logic that treats human experience as raw material, turns it into predictions about our behavior, and sells those predictions. The more time we spend, the more data we shed. The more data we shed, the more there is to sell. Our privacy was the first thing traded away.

The past dozen years read like a slow unveiling:

• 2014: The public learned that Facebook had quietly adjusted the news feeds of roughly 689,000 users to test whether it could shift their emotions. It could.
• 2018: The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that personal data from up to 87 million Facebook users had been harvested and used for political targeting.
• 2021: Whistleblower Frances Haugen brought thousands of internal documents to Congress, including the company’s own research suggesting Instagram made body-image problems worse for many teenage girls.
• March 2026: A Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in the first social media addiction lawsuit ever to reach a verdict, awarding $6 million to a young woman who said she was hooked as a child. The case targeted how the platforms were designed, not what users posted, and a psychiatrist who testified compared their reward features to slot machines. A day earlier, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for failing to protect young users from predators. Both companies have said they will appeal, and thousands of similar cases are waiting in line.

Somewhere along the way, what we hold dearest, our closeness to one another, became raw material. Friendship became a metric. Many of us grew competitive, even compulsive, about attention: the likes, the “wows,” the follower counts. And for some, getting noticed came to mean hurting others, because cruelty travels faster than kindness in a system built to reward reaction. Social media did not only distract us from reality; to a large extent it pulled us out of it.

Young People Are Telling Us Themselves

Our young people are not waiting for adults to notice. In Pew Research Center’s most recent survey of U.S. teens, 48 percent said social media has a mostly negative effect on people their age, up from 32 percent in 2022, and 45 percent said they spend too much time on it. Nearly half say they are online almost constantly. One teenage boy told the researchers that overuse of social media seemed to be the main driver of depression in his generation, because people let the opinions of strangers wreck their peace of mind. For many, what began as a habit has hardened into obsession.

The World Health Organization found that loneliness is most common among adolescents and young adults, at around one in five. As the Commission’s co-chair Chido Mpemba observed, even in a world that is digitally connected, many young people feel alone.

Governments are scrambling. On December 10, 2025, Australia became the first country to bar children under 16 from holding accounts on major social media platforms. France, Denmark, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom have moved in similar directions. Yet by March 2026, Australia’s own online-safety regulator found that more than eight in ten under-16s were still using social media, many of them just as often as before.

That finding matters. It tells us walls alone will not save us. Young people, like all people, go where their friends are. If we want them out of the extractive feed, we have to build somewhere better for them to go.

To be fair, the picture is not all dark. Teens also tell researchers that social media is where they feel connected to friends and where they find a creative outlet. That is exactly the point. The hunger for connection is healthy. It is the design that has been poisoned.

Meanwhile, the Planet Needs Our Attention

Here is what troubles me most. Attention is one of the scarcest resources we have, and the Five Emergencies need it far more than any feed does. Our planet is, quite literally, in crisis. The Climate Emergency is now visibly accelerating, and when a crisis accelerates, our response has to accelerate with it. Every hour surrendered to doom-scrolling, outrage, and comparison is an hour not spent learning, organizing, planting, mentoring, or simply getting to know the neighbor who may one day pull us from the floodwater, or whom we may pull out.

Social media did not invent human distraction, but it industrialized it. The question in front of us is whether we can reclaim the tool for the work that matters.

My Own Complicated Relationship with the Feed

I’ll be honest with you. I love creating quoted images, short and striking thoughts from influential thinkers past and present set into a piece of creative art, and sharing them. I have made thousands. Over the years I opened several social media accounts to share them, and I deleted every one, some more than once. I didn’t like who the platforms were asking me to become.

Today I keep a single account on X (formerly Twitter), which you can find here: [INSERT X LINK]. I post those quoted images for one reason: to chip away at ignorance, one idea at a time. Eventually I plan to launch a website dedicated to them, so the thousands I have created and never shared can finally find their audience.

I share this because it holds the whole paradox in one person. Social media can be toxic. It can also be a solution to the Climate Emergency, and to every other emergency, when we use it for creative expression and shared purpose rather than self-promotion. Each of us carries that creative expression. We just need to bring it to the surface.

What an Issue-First Platform Can Look Like

This is why ClimateTribe.Social exists.

Climate Tribe Social is Climate Change Community’s flagship social community, a digital gathering place for people who recognize the seriousness of the crisis and want to respond with honesty, creativity, discipline, compassion, and unity. It is built on a different set of priorities than the platforms that dominate our screens:

• Issues first, not influencers. The community is organized around the Five Emergencies, with a dedicated Collection for each (the Climate, Ecological, Humanity, Democracy, and Displacement Emergencies) and focused Spaces within them, from Climate Science and Fresh Water to Communities & Neighbors and Mental Health & Climate Grief.
• Members, not products. Climate Tribe Social is sustained by modest member subscriptions, not by an advertising engine that profits from harvesting your attention and your data.
• Shared prosperity, not self-enrichment. Climate Change Community operates with a hard salary cap and a Financial Support Program that redistributes excess revenue back to members and communities.
• Members help steer. The membership is meant to play a big part in calling the shots on how the community grows and what it decides.
• Dialogue that leaves the screen. Our first 11-Person Face-to-Face Dialogue Sessions are planned for the window between December 21, 2026 and January 1, 2027, because online friendship is at its best when it leads back to the folding table.
• Welcoming by design. People of every faith, and of no faith at all, are welcome. The Spaces exist for collaboration and cooperation, not for debate or for pressing beliefs on others.

In other words, Climate Tribe Social is trying to be for our time what the Junto was for Philadelphia and what the coffeehouse was for London: a place where different people sit at the same table, ask what needs fixing, and then go fix it together. It is Allport’s recipe (equal footing, cooperation, shared goals, and common purpose) rebuilt for the digital age.

Membership is open to adults 18 and older, and younger family members are warmly encouraged to take part alongside a subscribing parent. Several Collections and Spaces are currently open by invitation, with full public access set for December 21, 2026, and possibly sooner. If you would like to request early approval, send a brief email with no links to contact@climatechangecommunity.com asking for a Zoom dialogue.

Stay Tuned: From Concern to Competence

When I first drafted this post, I promised that a new idea would follow, something Climate Change Community and AI would introduce together that could speed up how we tackle not just the Climate Emergency but all five. That promise still stands. Climate Tribe Social is one piece of it; the next piece is in preparation now, and I will share it soon.

What I am certain of is this: the Climate Emergency is visibly accelerating, and our actions must accelerate with it. I have no doubt about that, and having worked through these questions with AI as a research partner, I don’t believe AI does either. The evidence is simply too clear.

Closing: A Vow, at Human Scale

The Buddhist teacher Daisaku Ikeda taught that a profound change in the life of a single individual can change a society, and ultimately the world; that the great revolutions begin not in institutions but in the human heart, and travel outward through dialogue and friendship, one encounter at a time.

The bamboo groves of autumn are beautiful. Each bamboo tree stands independently, growing straight and tall toward the sky. Yet in the ground, out of sight, their roots are interconnected. In the same way, true friendship is an enduring bond that connects self-reliant individuals. — Daisaku Ikeda

I believe that. I have staked a Sacred Vow on it.

We are told this is an age of hate, and in the data and in the streets, that is partly true. We are told it is the age of the feed, and in our pockets and in our children’s bedrooms, that is partly true as well. But running underneath this same moment is a quieter story, older and sturdier, and available to every one of us. When people meet, work, walk, eat, and organize side by side, fear shrinks and the abstraction called “the other side” turns back into a neighbor. To make a new friend across a line you were taught to fear is a counter-cultural act. To do it in the service of a livable planet is a sacred one. And to build the tools that help us do it, instead of tools that profit from keeping us apart, may be among the most important things our generation leaves behind.

The age does not get the final word. We do: every time we sit down at the folding table, pour the bad coffee, log on with purpose, and refuse to let a single human being remain a stranger to us.

A note on how this post was made: AI is used to enhance my creativity and thinking. On this post the roles were partly reversed. AI did much of the research, and I offered my thoughts, experience, and voice to shape it into what you have just read.

Protecting our Children & Biodiversity’s future towards a more sustainable and habitable Earth!
Compiled & Mr. Alvarez’s Thoughts | AI Enhanced.

Sources Consulted

• Hate crime data. FBI, Hate Crime Statistics 2025 and Reported Crimes in the Nation (released August 14, 2026); analyses by ADL, the Sikh Coalition, the Arab American Institute, Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
• Loneliness. World Health Organization, Commission on Social Connection global report (June 30, 2025).
• Teens and social media. Pew Research Center surveys of U.S. teens and parents (December 2024 and April 2025).
• Litigation. Coverage by NPR, NBC News, CNBC, and Axios of the March 25, 2026 Los Angeles verdict against Meta and YouTube and the March 24, 2026 New Mexico verdict against Meta; Meta Platforms Form 10-Q filings (2026).
• Age limits. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner findings as reported by Al Jazeera (August 2026); CNBC and Euronews reporting on the first months of Australia’s under-16 law.
• Surveillance capitalism and platform history. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019); Kramer, Guillory & Hancock, emotional contagion study, PNAS (2014); Cambridge Analytica reporting (2018); Frances Haugen’s Senate testimony (2021).
• Contact theory. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (1954); Pettigrew & Tropp meta-analyses on intergroup contact; Turner, Hewstone et al. on direct and extended cross-group friendship.
• Youth friendship. Killen, Luken Raz & Graham (2022) on cross-race and cross-ethnic friendships and the middle-childhood decline.
• Depolarization. Holliday, Lelkes & Westwood, “Why depolarization is hard: Evaluating attempts to decrease partisan animosity in America,” PNAS (2025).
• History. Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography on the Junto (founded 1727); the Boston Committee of Correspondence (1772); histories of the English coffeehouse and Lloyd’s of London; Robin Dunbar’s work on social group size.
• Reported example. Daryl Davis, public interviews and the documentary Accidental Courtesy (PBS Independent Lens).