036 B - Little Fat Sandy

We live within two miles of the ole Westinghouse Atom Smasher. Its just right in the middle of the neighborhood. It is very large and the immediate environment is so desolate it’s scale is hard to capture. Ozymandias MF.

Sofa Flower Moon is now on Bandcamp (as is a new “label” I started, Effluviana, we’ll talk more about that soon).

Have a great weekend!

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A member is a stand-in for a human being and for the sake of this argument is assumed to have two specific properties:

yearning - desire to acquire and maintain things

repulsion - desire to destroy and discourage things

A group is a collection of members.

Control exerted by an outside group via power creates distortions. Distortions can be permanent but if the control is removed many distortions will relax back to the state prior to the distortion.

Within groups, the creation of distortions are assumed to increase repulsion while relaxation of distorting conditions increases yearning. The maintenance of a distortion through consistent repeated control does not further warp the system, though any minute change will.

The the quantity of yearning plus repulsion is roughly consistent. When there is a larger proportion of yearning, the group will stay largely consistent, when there is a larger proportion of repulsion the group will start to dematerialize.

Technology and agents = magic (essentially).

Group A shares members with Group B. Group A is more powerful (via technology and agents) than Group B. Group A has decided to make Group B submissive to it. As such, Group A wants Group B to accede to its will.

Group A has a near-binary choice with regards to Group B — control what goes in or know what comes out. Know what is informing the members, or know what the members are saying. Heisenberg's Panopticon.

Assuming A's is content to control only, only the attempts at control produce distortions in B whose consequences must increasingly be addressed via exertions of power (distortions) in A and produces limits and more control on B and thus more distortions. But if managed well these discomforts can be kept below the threshold of repulsion that necessitates decomposition. Group B will simply remove all expression from the observable sphere of A, find new yearnings and control can be maintained.

Should A decide to inform its control with knowledge, it should clone itself for the task. Group A1 is infinitely permissive but insists only on access to all outputs of Group B. Meanwhile A0 and A1 share information, and A0 acts upon it. If this arrangement can stay permanently hidden, then Group B will interpret A0’s constant new controls as arbitrary caprice, repulsion will rise and subside.

But this arrangement can't stay hidden from Group B under any circumstances because members of Group A are in Group B, such that many members of Group B are in A0 and A1. These overlapping members have much power to gain within intra-group networks (yearning) by maintaining the current arrangement. These overlapping members will coerce the members of B-not-in-A, to be cool. Eventually those members of B-not-in-A will have enough and begin to distend and bubble and A1 will tell A0 what B-not-in-A is doing in real-time so it can counter it with control and segregation. A0 and A1 fuse, all members of A-in-B leave. Group B is subject to fully automated real-time controls.

B is now entirely repulsion, slowly melting as the members of B abandon the sphere of influence of Group A — psychedelics, vans and hearses. Under these constant and now self-imposed distortions, some members of B exert power along decentralized yet spiritually coordinated trajectories to undermine and overcome Group A. Largely because Group B is always larger than Group A in member count, A must to some extent have tools and agents that magnify their power, or just have the goddam consent of Group B. Which Group A now needs to stop the war they “knew” was coming when they first started their relationship with B.

“Less Kafka, more St. Crispin's Day.” says Group B.

“Less Kafka, more St. Crispin's Day to you, too.” says Group A.

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Thank you to L for the amazing closing line. Thank you to Jason for a version of this argument sent in response to my post last week about paranoia.

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