I don’t buy the idea of a spiritually led, military-manipulated UAP community—a fragmented crew of hopeful mystics and starry-eyed believers, jerked around by the strings of men draped in medals and clearance badges. It’s too slick, too tidy, too perfectly packaged. This smells like a hustle, like a carnival barker luring suckers in with promises of cosmic wonders while secretly pocketing their cash. And behind that curtain? Not a single celestial revelation, but something grubby, mundane, and unmistakably human.
The spiritually led, military-influenced UAP scene is the perfect example of narrative capture—where the raw weirdness of a genuine phenomenon gets swallowed up by the mechanisms of bureaucratic theater. It’s an epistemic Potemkin village, a shiny façade built to house the dreams of mystics and conspiracy theorists alike. On one side, you have the believers—eyes wide with wonder—and on the other, men with their medals and badges, pretending to hold the keys to the universe. But what they’ve really constructed is a 21st-century cargo cult, armed with PowerPoint slides and a dash of New Age mysticism.
It’s a con job, plain and simple. A choreographed distraction, carefully designed to move curiosity out of the picture and replace it with spectacle. The modern carnival barker is alive and well, updated for the era of black budgets and soft power. “Step right up, folks, and catch a glimpse of the cosmic wonders!” they say. But behind the curtain? No great truths, no epiphanies, just the same tired bureaucracy with a fresh coat of paint.
And that’s the beauty of it: they’ve built a story that feels noble, almost sacred, while keeping the disciples starstruck enough to miss the man behind the curtain, cranking the dials and laughing all the way to his next classified briefing. Because that’s the game, right?
But here’s the good news—well, good in a grim, absurd way—this whole UAP show is probably just another covert military operation. A well-funded, well-crafted test program, operating under wraps. The government doesn’t bother with wild cover-ups. Why would they? In a world drowning in noise, they’ve figured out something better: omission. The real trick is letting the hysteria spiral out of control while quietly keeping the truth hidden in plain sight. The truth doesn’t need to be buried; it just needs to be drowned in a tidal wave of half-baked theories, wild conjecture, and outright paranoia. And that’s where counterintelligence comes in.
The signal gets lost in the noise—and that’s exactly how the system likes it. The UFO panic isn’t some sign of alien life; it’s the perfect cover for any operation that requires staying under the radar. It’s a smokescreen, a tactical maneuver designed to let the real action take place in the dark, behind closed doors.
The more people obsess over aliens and UFOs, the easier it is for the real secrets to slip by unnoticed. Forget about flying saucers and interdimensional beings—look at McGuire AFB. The truth there is boring. It’s military drones. High-tech stuff, the kind of thing that doesn’t want to be known. But it’s right there, hiding in plain sight. John Greenewald, Jr. called it out long ago: McGuire was already a “test corridor” for cutting-edge drone and air mobility technology. But nobody was paying attention. Instead, they were too busy chasing UFOs across the night sky, speculating about aliens while military experiments were quietly unfolding below.
Let’s get real for a second. The truth isn’t “out there.” It’s buried under bureaucratic layers, hidden in some Nevada desert hangar or Virginia basement office. It’s not the stuff of spacefaring civilizations or cosmic revelations—it’s cold, metallic, human, and thoroughly unspiritual. The real story is about control, power, and keeping the game going without anyone catching on. So spare me the sermons from generals-turned-gurus. They’re not prophets—they’re propagandists, hawking a narrative so loud you forget to question it. This isn’t a spiritual awakening; it’s a charade, and we’re all choking on it.
UAP believers and their government enablers are caught in a trap, trapped in their tiny, self-absorbed worldview, stuck thinking that more energy, more power, and more control—basically, the same tired narrative of human “progress”—are the keys to understanding the phenomenon. They can’t see beyond that scale, and as a result, they’re totally unequipped to grasp what’s really going on. The phenomenon itself? It doesn’t care about energy extraction, military budgets, or grandiose visions of power. It’s something more subtle, more complex, something that transcends human comprehension.
Ultimately, the question isn’t whether UAPs are real, but why they are so carefully maintained within the realm of the unknown. The mystery surrounding UAPs is not a mere byproduct of cosmic curiosity or scientific inquiry; it’s a strategic maneuver in the modern era of surveillance, control, and the manipulation of public perception. The enigma of UAPs serves those in power, primarily government agencies and powerful corporations, who have the capacity to manipulate information and shape technological futures.
In a world where information is the currency of control, the unknown becomes the ultimate asset. By maintaining UAPs in a suspended state of mystery, governments can leverage the resulting intrigue to distract, confuse, and captivate the public. The phenomenon allows for the creation of a narrative that is both too elusive to be disproven and too compelling to be dismissed. This is a perfect breeding ground for “soft power”—the ability to shape public opinion, influence policy, and cultivate legitimacy through the sheer force of narrative.
The true power of the UAP, then, lies not in what it is—in terms of physical reality—but in what it represents. The mystery surrounding UAPs acts as a kind of “floating signifier” in Saussurean terms, meaning that its meaning is in constant flux and can be shaped by external influences. This allows those who control the symbol (governments, media, conspiracy theorists, etc.) to influence how it is understood and to align it with particular agendas, whether that’s distracting the public from other issues, reinforcing narratives about technological superiority, or maintaining control over knowledge and information.
In sum, UFOs or UAPs function as a highly flexible symbol within the Saussurean system—an object whose meaning is constantly in flux, manipulated by those in power, and open to a wide array of interpretations. The meaning of the symbol is less about the object itself and more about what is projected onto it, shaping public perception and discourse in profound ways.
In this context, UAPs aren’t about alien life or intergalactic exploration. They are symbols of power—both in the sense of what can be hidden and what can be revealed at will. They are part of an ongoing game where governments don’t simply control what you know, but more importantly, control what you are allowed to wonder about. The mystery of UAPs isn’t about discovery; it’s about control over the unknown. This carefully cultivated unknown provides the perfect narrative frame for the forces that shape the technological, political, and economic landscape of the future.
Thus, the real power in UAPs isn’t in their potential to challenge our understanding of the universe. It lies in their ability to sustain a carefully crafted narrative of uncertainty, which, in turn, sustains the ability of powerful institutions to maintain their grip on knowledge, innovation, and the direction of human progress. The question, in the end, is not what UAPs are—but why they remain a carefully guarded secret, even as the world becomes increasingly transparent in every other way.
“Time is a junkie. Shoots up eternity and comes down as minutes. You’re not living in time—you’re processing it.”
He sat cross-legged on a floor that never aged, scribbling with a pen that never ran out, his hand looping eternal cursive over blank sheets that devoured ink without a mark. This was Block Time—slabs of Now stacked like bricks, stretching infinitely, refusing decay. Tick-tock and stop. Time was not a river here; it was a warden.
He’d been writing his book for five lifetimes—or none at all. Hard to tell.
Somewhere, outside the cell of Now, the Clockmen shuffled with their pendulum limbs, heads like grandfather clocks, their faces frozen at 11:59—forever awaiting the strike that never came. One of them rattled its bones against his door. Thump.
“Keep writing, Writer,” it moaned.
He spat on the floor where the saliva evaporated into whispers.
The book was about Block Time but was also Block Time. It fed on paradoxes like a boa constrictor eating its tail, growing fatter with self-references. Chapter 9 explained Chapter 4, which rewrote Chapter 12, which negated Chapter 1. Readers wouldn’t read it; they’d inhale it, like dust from a forgotten library. And then they’d dream it.
He remembered what it was like before. Linear time. Dirty stuff—ran like oil over gears, constantly breaking down, needing grease. He’d lived there, with the rest of them, breathing in moments like cancerous smoke, dying one inhale at a time. That’s where the Clockmen found him—off his face on forward motion, thinking he was going somewhere.
They hooked him with a gold-plated second hand and dragged him here, kicking and screaming into stillness.
Now? Now he wrote.
Somewhere deep in the block—a block beneath the block—there were whispers of others like him: the Repeaters. People who’d escaped linearity but couldn’t escape habit. A man peeling an apple over and over for eternity. A woman pulling thread through fabric, stitch-by-stitch, sewing together nothing. The Repeaters wanted him to stop writing. Said the book was a virus that spread stillness.
“You’ll freeze it all,” they hissed.
“But it’s already frozen,” he growled back.
He scrawled faster, words bubbling up from inside him like vomit: “In Block Time, all books have already been written, but every page is unwritten until you look. Schrödinger’s notebook.”
He thought of escape sometimes. Just out of curiosity, you understand. He imagined prying open the walls of Now with a crowbar, tearing through to something with edges. Real time. Maybe he’d sit in a diner and drink coffee that got cold. Let a clock run out. Watch seconds collapse into oblivion like bodies falling from a skyscraper.
But then he’d look down at his book, at the words slithering onto the page, and he knew there was nowhere to go. Block Time wasn’t a place; it was a condition. It wasn’t keeping him here—he was here.
A knock came at the door. Another Clockman. He heard it ticking behind the woodgrain.
“You don’t like me. Hell, you think I’m despicable. You sit in your faculty lounges and tweet from your ivory towers about ‘consultants ruining education,’ about ‘corporate greed infecting the academy,’ and you pin that target squarely on my back.
But let me tell you something: You want me here. You need me here. Because I’m the one who does the dirty work you don’t have the guts to own.
You think it’s me who decided not to pay real wages? Me who refused to pony up for proper insurance? Me who looked at tuition fees and said, ‘Raise ‘em again’? Come on. I don’t make the call—I just show you where the call gets you the most bang for your buck.
You don’t hate me because I’m wrong. You hate me because I say out loud what you’ve already decided behind closed doors. You bring me in, I run the numbers, and suddenly I’m the bad guy? Suddenly I’m the reason the adjuncts are broke, the students are drowning in debt, and the custodians are on food stamps? That’s rich.
Here’s the truth: I’m just the middleman. I’m the guy you call when you’re too damn squeamish to face what it takes to keep this whole crumbling enterprise afloat. You don’t want to pay real wages. You don’t want to cut into the endowment to give workers decent benefits. You don’t want to let go of that sweet, sweet tuition revenue.
But you can’t admit that—not to the faculty, not to the students, not to yourselves. So you hire me. The Consultant. The Devil. And you point a trembling finger and say, ‘He did it. He’s the villain here.’
Well, let me tell you something. I can take it. I can take your outrage, your petitions, your sanctimonious op-eds in the Chronicle. Because deep down, you know I’m not the problem. I’m the shield. I’m the firewall. I’m the guy who lets you keep your hands clean while I deliver the plan you’ve been begging for.
You brought me in because you don’t have the stomach to tell your own employees, ‘We can’t afford to pay you what you’re worth.’ You hired me to do your dirty work, and now you want to throw me to the wolves? Fine.
But don’t pretend I’m the villain. The villain is the mirror you refuse to look into.
You don’t have to like me. Hell, you don’t even have to thank me. But when the dust settles, and your balance sheet looks just a little bit cleaner? Don’t forget who made it possible.
You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. Because without me, you’d have to stand up and admit what you really are. And we both know you’re not ready for that.”
Pause. The slightest smirk.
“You’re welcome.”
The board presses him. The room’s tension sharpens, but he doesn’t flinch. Instead, he leans back, his voice measured, a little quieter now—more dangerous because of it.
Board Member: “But did you or did you not advise Fairmont Labs to bring OxyContin onto this campus? Into this city?”
McKinsey Consultant (calm, unblinking): “Did I advise them? That’s the question, isn’t it?” He lets the silence hang, dragging just a beat too long before continuing.
“Look, I’m not here to play word games, and I’m sure as hell not here to absolve you of your collective guilt. I gave them a strategy. A recommendation. I told them where the market was, where the opportunities were—because that’s what I do. You hired me to tell people where the money is. And let’s not pretend you don’t know how the game works.
Did they sell the product? Sure. Did it make them money? Absolutely. Was this campus a promising market? You already know the answer.”
Board Member (voice rising): “So you’re admitting it? You knew what would happen!”
McKinsey Consultant (raising an eyebrow): “Did I know what would happen? What exactly do you think I know? That people would overdose? That a pharmacy down the road would turn into a de facto dealer? That the professors’ kids would start ‘borrowing’ pills from their parents’ cabinets? No, I didn’t know. But I’ll tell you this:
I knew what Fairmont Labs wanted, and I gave them the cleanest route to get there. It wasn’t my product. It wasn’t my city. Hell, it wasn’t even my decision. It was a business decision—your business decision.
Because let’s not rewrite history. This university signed the contracts. This campus let the drug companies set up shop under the guise of ‘partnerships’ and ‘research funding.’ It wasn’t me cutting the ribbon on the new lab with the Fairmont logo plastered on it. That was you. You cashed the checks. You built the shiny buildings. You celebrated the ‘innovation.’ And now, when the bodies are piling up, suddenly you’re looking for someone to blame?
Convenient.”
He pauses, letting the silence hit again, his voice dropping to that near-whisper that demands everyone lean in.
“You know, there’s something almost poetic about it. You all love to talk about the ‘free market’ when the endowments roll in and the donors clap you on the back. You love to say ‘growth requires sacrifice.’ But when the costs show up—when they show up in empty dorm rooms, funeral parlors, and rehab centers—you look at me like I’m the devil himself.
Well, here’s the truth: I’m just a mirror. I show people what they’re willing to do for the bottom line. I don’t make decisions. I don’t pull triggers. I don’t write prescriptions. I give options. Strategies. Possibilities. And if you don’t like where they lead, maybe you should think harder about who’s really to blame.”
Board Member: “But these are lives—students, families! Don’t you care?”
McKinsey Consultant (cold smile): “Care? You think this is about caring? Caring doesn’t balance your budget. Caring doesn’t keep the lights on. Caring didn’t build that new stadium you just named after a billionaire alum.
What I care about is results. You hired me to save you money. You hired me to keep the doors open. To bring in cash when the donors dried up and the tuition hikes weren’t enough to cover your ambitions. I delivered. And now you want to stand there—on your sparkling new campus funded with dirty money—and ask me if I care?
No, I don’t care. Because you didn’t care either, not when it mattered. You only care now because the press is at the gates, and you need someone to throw to the wolves.
Well, here I am. Go ahead. Blame me. It won’t change a thing.”
He stands, smoothing his tie, voice cool as ice.
“You brought the wolf to your door. I just showed you how to feed it.”
The consultant stays seated this time. Relaxed. The board’s anger swirls around him, but he doesn’t bother matching it. Instead, he speaks with a tone that’s almost sympathetic—condescendingly so. This is someone explaining the obvious to people who refuse to see it.
“You want me to feel bad? About what? About this place? About Bumfucks University out here in the middle of nowhere? Let’s be honest—no one gives a damn about this school. Not really.
Oh, I know the speech. ‘We’re building futures, we’re empowering communities.’ Spare me. That’s just window dressing for the donors and the glossy brochures. But we’re not sitting in Cambridge or Palo Alto, are we? No one’s watching. This isn’t where the next world leader or tech CEO is coming from. This is where kids who didn’t quite make the cut end up because they couldn’t buy their way into something better.
You don’t need me to say it—you already know it. This university isn’t about education; it’s about keeping up appearances. These kids? They’re not going to sit on boards, or argue in courtrooms, or run hedge funds. They’re not the ‘future of America’—they’re the workforce, the fillers, the B- and C-tier citizens that keep the lights on.
And what do they want? A piece of paper and a handshake to tell them they’re ‘educated’. You’re not here to turn them into visionaries; you’re here to shuffle them through the system and spit them out just employable enough to take the jobs no one else wants. And let’s be clear—that’s fine. That’s the deal. But don’t pretend this place is important.
You hired me because you wanted the machine to run smoother, cheaper, faster. You wanted to trim the fat, tighten the belts, and scrape every dollar out of these kids and their families before they realize they’ve been sold a dream that isn’t coming true. And guess what? I delivered. I always deliver.
Now you want to sit there and wring your hands? Cry about values? About dignity? About morality? You think Fairmont Labs selling opioids to a place like this was some tragedy of fate? It wasn’t. It was a calculation. This campus—this community—is low-hanging fruit. It’s vulnerable. People here take what they can get, whether that’s OxyContin or a worthless degree.
Because the truth, and this is the part you don’t want to say out loud, is that no one needs this place. You could close up shop tomorrow, and the world wouldn’t blink. You’re not Harvard, you’re not Yale, you’re not even Michigan State. There are already enough elites to run the show. The kids here are just extras—B-team players who’ll do what they’re told, take on the debt, and pay off their worthless education with their worthless wages.
And you know what? That’s okay. You just don’t want to admit it because it’s ugly. You need to feel good about yourselves. You need someone to blame for the dirt under your fingernails.
So you hire me. The guy with the suit and the spreadsheets. You want me to tell you how to keep the illusion going without the costs adding up. And now that it’s gone too far—now that the cracks are showing—you’re looking for a scapegoat.
Well, I’ll be your villain if that’s what you need. But don’t you dare act surprised. This was the plan all along. You just didn’t want to say it out loud.”
He stands, slow and deliberate, gathering his papers like he’s already done with the conversation.
“You can call me ruthless. You can call me despicable. But deep down, you know I’m right. Places like this are just filler—people like me make sure it stays that way.”
He walks out, leaving the truth behind him like a cold wind.
In the banal, saccharine world of Hallmark movies, we find, paradoxically, a profound confrontation with the abyss of Being itself. These films, with their predictable plots and saccharine sentimentality, seem to offer a kitsch escape from existential dread. But in their very banality lies the mechanism by which they reveal the Heideggerian truth of Dasein—that is, our being-thrown into the world.
Consider the archetypal Hallmark protagonist: the career-driven woman who leaves the big city to rediscover “what really matters” in her quaint hometown. On the surface, this is the bourgeois fantasy of returning to authenticity, of escaping the alienation of modernity. Yet Heidegger teaches us that authenticity is not found in external trappings—whether rural or urban—but in the confrontation with our own finitude, the Sein-zum-Tode (being-towards-death).
In this light, the Hallmark movie is not a return to authenticity but its negation. By structuring the protagonist’s world around clichés and stereotypes, the genre enforces what Heidegger would call Das Man, the “they” of everydayness, the inauthentic mode of existence where one avoids confronting the groundlessness of one’s being. The Christmas lights, the snow-covered streets, the inevitable kiss at the town square—all these are rituals of avoidance, not moments of authentic being.
And yet! There is a twist. In their relentless repetition and artificiality, these films also gesture towards a kind of radical emptiness. The overly constructed “perfect moments” become too perfect, and thus uncanny. We, the audience, start to suspect that the town, the love story, the holiday spirit—all of it—is hollow, an empty shell that conceals nothing but its own constructedness.
Here, the Hallmark movie inadvertently becomes a confrontation with das Nichts—the Nothing. It does not provide meaning but instead shows us the void around which meaning circulates. Like the Heideggerian clearing, it offers a space in which Being is revealed—but what is revealed is the vacuity of the rituals we construct to avoid our finitude.
The difference between Hallmark movies and “art movies,” or what we might call “serious cinema,” lies not in their ability to reflect the human condition but in the strategies they deploy to confront or conceal it. If Hallmark movies are the ideological opium of the masses, art movies are the bad conscience of the bourgeois subject, forcing them to confront the truth they would rather ignore. But, of course, the dialectic is never so simple.
Hallmark movies, as we discussed, are ideological in the purest sense—they create a fantasy that denies the inherent antagonisms of existence. Their simplicity and predictability anesthetize us, smoothing over the chaos and contingency of life with comforting rituals: the big-city career woman always finds love, the struggling small-town bakery is always saved. They allow us to believe, for a moment, that the world makes sense, that things fall into place if we only “rediscover the magic of Christmas.”
Art movies, on the other hand, revel in the gaps and fissures of existence. They expose the fractures beneath the surface: alienation, despair, the absurdity of human relationships. Think of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, where the boundary between self and other dissolves into an unbearable void, or Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which confronts us with the inscrutable and indifferent nature of the “Zone.” Art cinema often shatters narrative coherence, leaving us with ambiguity, incompletion, and unresolved tension. This, ostensibly, is its hardcore nature: it refuses the ideological comfort of closure.
But here is the twist: art movies can also become ideological. Their refusal to comfort, their embrace of ambiguity, can itself become a fetish. The viewer of art cinema might pat themselves on the back for being “cultured,” for seeing through the kitsch of Hallmark movies, but this too is a form of ideological fantasy. The art film connoisseur often inhabits a similar position to the Hallmark viewer: they are reassured, not by the world making sense, but by the feeling of having seen through its nonsensicality.
To put it bluntly: Hallmark movies tell us that life is simple, while art movies tell us that life is complex. Both, however, risk avoiding the true hardcore question: what do we do with this complexity?
The horseshoe analogy falters here because the core mode of engagement with Hallmark and art movies is fundamentally different. Hallmark movies don’t just offer fantasy; they provide a step-by-step manual for acting out that fantasy. They say, “Here is what you must do to align yourself with this idealized, prepackaged version of the good life: bake cookies, decorate the tree, fall in love in a snowstorm.” It’s ideology in its most prescriptive form—a checklist of symbolic gestures that promise fulfillment if followed.
Art movies, by contrast, don’t give you a script. Instead, they force you to confront why you even want a script in the first place. The director’s personal note—whether explicit or implicit in the film—functions as a meta-statement: “The world doesn’t make sense, but here’s what I did to cope. I made this. What will you do?” It’s an invitation not to perform a set of symbolic acts but to grapple with the impossibility of such acts ever being sufficient.
Take, for example, Bergman’s Wild Strawberries or even Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Both films deal with existential disorientation, but they don’t end in nihilistic despair. Instead, they gesture towards the necessity of creating your own meaning—whether through art, memory, or a conscious return to some kind of routine. The protagonist in these films doesn’t resolve their crisis by following a script; they do it by embracing the absurd and making sense of their reality, however provisionally.
Hallmark movies, then, are about doing without thinking. They reduce life to a set of externalized rituals. Art movies, on the other hand, are about thinking in order to rediscover the meaning of doing. The “meaningful routine” you mention is a key point: it’s not the routine itself that matters but the fact that it arises from a conscious reckoning with chaos.
Here’s where Hallmark and art movies diverge radically:
• Hallmark says, “Follow this preordained path, and you’ll find happiness.”
• Art cinema says, “Happiness doesn’t exist as a universal formula, but here’s how someone—me, the director, or this fictional character—found their way toward something like meaning. Maybe you can do the same.”
Art cinema acknowledges that meaning is not given—it’s made. And this making is hard, messy, and deeply personal. That’s why art movies often end with a return to some sort of imperfect routine—it’s not a resolution but a recognition that we must actively choose to live, even in the face of absurdity.
Hallmark movies are ideological because they obscure this effort, pretending that meaning can be bought pre-assembled, like a flat-pack Ikea Christmas. Art movies are existential because they insist that meaning must be constructed from scratch, piece by piece, through the labor of being alive.
Perhaps the truly radical act this Christmas is to watch Hallmark movies not as escapism, but as a meditation on the void—to gaze into their glossy, snow-covered surfaces and see, reflected back, the inescapable truth of our own being-towards-death.
This piece draws continuity from Venkatesh Rao’s excellent Contraptions post, “We Are The Robots” which begins with Kraftwerk’s iconic ode to the machine age and moves through fascinating detours on technology, systems, and culture. It felt like a natural fit for my “Music in Phase Space” playlist—a space where a music lede meets deeper questions about the human-machine interplay.
I found myself agreeing with much of Rao’s argument—not in the sense that I think it will work, but in the sense that it feels predictably inevitable. When he elaborated on hyper-organicity, my mind wandered and a line of thought opened, though and once it had, it wouldn’t stay shut: the Soviets tried this. it didn’t work—but perhaps the point isn’t whether it works. It’s that it happens. History is full of systems that were doomed to fail, yet their failures didn’t stop them from being pursued with fervor.
The Soviet Union, long before Silicon Valley began dreaming of singularities and algorithmic governance, envisioned a hyper-organic society—an interconnected utopia built on the promise of cybernetics. Initially, cybernetics offered a framework for understanding and controlling complex systems, blending mathematics, engineering, and biology to chart the flows of information and feedback across machines, organizations, and even societies. Soviet theorists saw this as a tool not just for efficiency but for ideological triumph: cybernetics could guide the collective toward perfect unity, with centralized planning serving as the ultimate control node. By integrating cybernetic principles into the fabric of governance, the Soviets aimed to synthesize a society where every component—individuals, factories, economies—worked in harmony like the organs of a single living being.
This vision of hyper-organicity expanded as cybernetics evolved from a technical curiosity into an ideological imperative. Planners sought to dissolve the boundaries between systems, linking agriculture, industry, and military logistics into one seamless, self-regulating whole. Machines were envisioned not just as tools but as active agents in the grand network of production and decision-making, while humans became data points in a vast computational ecosystem. The ideal wasn’t merely technological control but total synthesis: a society that operated as one unified entity, responsive and adaptive in real time.
Yet this ambition carried inherent fragility. Hyperorganicity demanded precision at every level, requiring feedback loops so tightly interwoven that even small deviations could destabilize the entire system. The very interdependence that promised harmony became a liability, as minor inefficiencies snowballed into systemic crises. Cybernetics, meant to master complexity, ultimately revealed the limits of centralized control, undermining the utopian promise. What emerged wasn’t unity, but an intricate lattice of brittle connections that could not withstand the unpredictability of human and environmental factors. The Soviet experiment with cybernetics thus transformed into a cautionary tale of overreach, where the dream of total synthesis collapsed under the weight of its own intricacy.
In hindsight, their experiment with hyper-organicity wasn’t a bubble that burst—it was a foam that dissipated. Bubbles explode dramatically, but foam collapses quietly as its fragile, interconnected structures weaken over time. The Soviet system, like foam, couldn’t hold itself together under the weight of its own complexity. Today, echoes of that collapse reverberate in the hyper-organic systems of the United States, raising the question: can such systems ever succeed, or are they always destined to dissolve?
What follows is an exploration of how the Soviet experiment with hyper-organicity failed and why its lessons remain relevant in a world increasingly defined by interconnected, algorithm-driven complexity.
The Soviet Cybernetic Vision: A Living Machine
In the 1950s, while McCarthyism in the West demonized anything resembling collective thinking, Soviet intellectuals embraced kibernetika (cybernetics) as the solution to Marx’s enduring challenge of managing production in a complex, modern society. Cybernetics offered a seductive framework that treated machines, humans, and ecosystems as interdependent systems governed by feedback loops. It promised more than just efficiency—it promised mastery, a means of organizing and optimizing every facet of the collective. The dream was audacious: a perfectly balanced organism, where every component, from farms to factories to individuals, was optimized and self-correcting.
But this vision didn’t stop at smarter machines or more efficient networks—it extended into rethinking the very nature of machines themselves. Soviet cybernetics, influenced by Marxist ideology, transformed the traditional robot archetype into something radically different from its Western sci-fi counterpart. American robots often embodied autonomy, individuality, or rebellion—a metaphor for capitalism’s anxieties about uncontrollable technological change. Soviet robots, by contrast, evolved into strange, complex organisms that blurred the line between machine and ecosystem. These “robots” no longer resembled humanoid figures with mechanical limbs but instead became abstract entities: systems embedded within larger networks, designed not to mimic human behavior but to integrate seamlessly into the collective. They didn’t move or think like robots—they adapted, processed, and coexisted as extensions of the environment they were meant to regulate.
In these stories, robots weren’t threats or outsiders but integral parts of a harmonious cybernetic future. Where American sci-fi often hinted at organic chaos or mechanical rebellion, Soviet futurism imagined a different endpoint: machines as silent partners in a vast, interdependent organism, contributing to a society where the organic and the artificial dissolved into one.
Real-life applications of kibernetika reflected these ambitions. Projects like OGAS, a nationwide computer network proposed in the 1960s, sought to manage the Soviet economy in real time, treating production and resource distribution as part of a self-regulating, computational organism. In agriculture, cybernetics-inspired systems attempted to automate collective farms, using data-driven predictions to dictate planting and harvesting schedules. Even the military’s missile defense systems embraced cybernetic principles, building networks that treated battlefield operations as adaptive, self-correcting feedback systems. These were not mere tools or standalone machines—they were extensions of the broader organism, deeply integrated into every layer of Soviet life.
Yet, like Frankenstein’s monster, the system grew too alive for its creators to control. Hyper-interconnectedness made every component a potential point of failure. The OGAS project faltered under bureaucratic resistance and technological limitations, while cybernetic agriculture often failed when rigid algorithms collided with the unpredictable realities of weather and human labor, who knew. The dream of machines that could dissolve seamlessly into the collective turned into a nightmare of brittle interdependence, where the failure of one node rippled across the entire system.
The quest for perfect harmony left no room for the entropy and unpredictability that define real systems. Instead of achieving unity, the system exposed its fragility—an elegant vision of interconnected organisms collapsing under the weight of their own complexity. The robots had evolved, but the society that dreamed them couldn’t adapt to its own creation.
MORE ROBOT THAN ROBOT
Stanisław Lem’s works, such as The Cyberiad, illustrate how robots can serve as mirrors to humanity’s philosophical dilemmas, ethical quandaries, and even absurdities. Lem’s robots are not merely mechanical creations but metaphors for human flaws, virtues, and collective challenges. They embody the struggle to reconcile logic, morality, and emotion, often engaging in tasks that reflect the complexities of human existence. This approach contrasts sharply with the American science fiction of the mid-20th century, which often framed robots as either existential threats or individualistic figures seeking autonomy. These American narratives, rooted in the ideals of rebellion and self-determination, emphasized the robot’s potential for free will and the individual’s struggle against systems of authority or runaway technology.
The ideological roots of these differing depictions are apparent. In Soviet and Eastern European science fiction, robots were rarely framed as threats. Instead, they symbolized collective potential—utopian tools that could help humanity overcome its limitations. Robots and artificial beings were envisioned not as competitors to humanity but as integral components of societal harmony. Influenced by Marxist ideology, Soviet robots were often portrayed as collaborators, designed to serve the collective good and align with the principles of the state. Their functionality extended beyond individual utility to embody a vision of progress and unity that rejected Western narratives of rebellion or chaos.
Even in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, a work that delves deeply into human psychology, this optimism about technology persists. The film and novel are less about technological failure or societal collapse and more about humanity’s ability—or inability—to confront the unknown with dignity and cooperation. While Solaris probes the limits of human understanding in the face of advanced technology or alien intelligence, it refrains from condemning technology itself. Instead, the emphasis is on collective resilience and introspection, reflecting an ideological backdrop that prized societal cohesion over individual dissent.
The evolution of robot depictions in Soviet science fiction also reflected a departure from American tropes of humanoid automatons or mechanical servants. Influenced by cybernetic theories, As time went by, Soviet robots became more abstract, representing systems or networks that integrated seamlessly into collective life. For instance, in Soviet fiction, these robots often took the form of self-organizing, adaptive entities that blurred the line between the mechanical and the biological. This stands in contrast to American fears of dehumanization or loss of control, where robots frequently appeared as harbingers of dystopia, symbols of corporate greed, or avatars of runaway capitalism.
HYPER-ORGANICITY
These ideas about robots and systems, whether in Soviet or American contexts, lay the groundwork for the concept of hyperorganicity—a vision of societal organization where humans, machines, and ecosystems function as parts of a seamless, interdependent whole. Hyperorganicity goes beyond mere cybernetics or the mechanistic feedback loops of earlier frameworks; it imagines an intricate web of relationships where every element is both autonomous and interconnected, much like cells within a living organism. This concept reflects a deep faith in technology’s ability to unify complexity, to harmonize disparate components into a self-regulating system. However, hyperorganicity also exposes the fragility inherent in such systems: their reliance on balance means even minor disruptions can cascade into systemic failures. It is here, at the intersection of ambition and vulnerability, that the promise of hyperorganicity is both realized and challenged—a tension that echoes the utopian dreams and eventual unraveling of Soviet cybernetic experiments.
The alien planet Solaris is a vast, sentient ocean that defies traditional classifications of intelligence. Neither fully machine nor entirely biological, it transcends human notions of artificial and organic, embodying a seamless unity of synthetic and natural processes. The ocean’s intelligence is not localized or mechanized; instead, it emerges from the interplay of its form and function, an organic totality that destabilizes human attempts to define or control it. This biomechanical intelligence, deeply “alive” yet utterly alien, challenges anthropocentric assumptions about consciousness and the division between the living and the mechanical.
Lem, writing from within the anxieties of the Eastern Bloc, conceived Solaris as both a critique and a reflection of the Soviet obsession with mastering complexity through cybernetic systems. The planet’s ocean is hyper-organic—a self-sustaining entity where intelligence arises from its interconnected whole rather than discrete components. It mirrors the aspirations of the Soviet system, which sought to create a perfectly balanced, self-regulating society where each element functioned in harmony with the larger collective.
However, Solaris is also a warning. Its inscrutability reveals the inherent tension in hyperorganicity: the more complex and interdependent a system becomes, the more elusive and uncontrollable it grows. The scientists studying Solaris, much like Soviet planners grappling with their own cybernetic experiments, are trapped in a feedback loop of misunderstanding. They impose human categories on an intelligence that resists reduction, mirroring the Soviet leadership’s inability to grasp the emergent properties of their own socio-economic system.
Solaris destabilizes human confidence in comprehension and control. It is not merely a critique of anthropocentrism but a reflection of a deeper existential dissonance—a recognition that the systems humans create or encounter often exceed the boundaries of their creators’ understanding. In attempting to embody the Soviet dream of hyperorganicity, Solaris reveals its ultimate flaw: complexity, once beyond a certain threshold, cannot be tamed. It thrives on ambiguity, forcing humanity to confront the limits of its own intellect while exposing the fragility of systems built on presumed mastery.
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic: The Zone as a Living System
In Roadside Picnic, the Strugatsky brothers depict the alien Zone not as a static, mechanical construct but as a living organism—an environment that defies mechanical understanding and operates on principles so alien they resist human comprehension. Within the Zone, anomalies such as the “meat grinder” and “witches’ jelly” evolve unpredictably, responding to human interaction with a dangerous fluidity. Artifacts left behind by alien visitors—enigmatic devices and traps—function less as technologies and more as biological entities, blurring the line between the organic and artificial. The Zone becomes a predator, a hyper-organic ecosystem that consumes those who attempt to navigate it.
This unsettling vision mirrors the Soviet cybernetic state itself. Like the Zone, the Soviet system was a hyper-organic structure built on intricate, interdependent mechanisms. Its invisible barriers—bureaucratic, ideological, and logistical—acted as anomalies of their own, trapping or destroying individuals who failed to conform perfectly to its rhythms. Navigating the Soviet state, much like navigating the Zone, required an almost preternatural understanding of unspoken rules and evolving dangers. The fluid, ungraspable nature of both the Zone and the Soviet system highlights their shared hostility to those caught within.
The Zone’s artifacts are not just relics of alien technology; they reflect Soviet science fiction’s fascination with systems that transcend conventional logic. Where Western science fiction often portrayed technology as sterile, mechanical, or rigid, the Strugatskys envision the unknown as fluid, alive, and dangerously unpredictable. The Zone’s “so-so” magnetic traps, its evolving anomalies, and its inexplicable phenomena echo the Soviet preoccupation with cybernetics and complexity. These features reflect a philosophical grappling with the idea that advanced systems—whether alien or human—cannot be reduced to simple logic or control.
Ultimately, the Zone stands as a metaphor for hyperorganicity, embodying the perils of systems so intricate they become hostile to their creators. Its living, evolving dangers critique the hubris of imposing order on the incomprehensible, showing how such attempts often lead to entropy and chaos. The Zone doesn’t just reject human mastery; it forces humanity to confront the limits of its understanding, much like the Soviet system itself.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker: The Zone as Existential Reflection
Tarkovsky’s cinematic adaptation of Roadside Picnic reimagines the Zone as an even more intricate and symbolic manifestation of hyperorganicity. Where the Strugatsky brothers framed the Zone as a predator—a living system with dangerous, evolving mechanisms—Tarkovsky shifts the focus to its metaphysical and existential dimensions. The Zone in Stalker is a living space imbued with a profound organic consciousness, one that seems to reshape itself in response not just to human interaction but to human emotions, fears, and desires. This makes it less of a biological trap and more of an enigmatic, almost spiritual entity.
Unlike the Strugatskys’ depiction of anomalies as unpredictable physical phenomena, Tarkovsky’s Zone reflects a broader, more symbolic collapse of human systems. The Zone is overgrown, decaying, and suffused with remnants of human and alien activities, blending organic and artificial elements into a singular, unclassifiable entity. Tarkovsky lingers on images of rusting machinery, crumbling architecture, and invasive greenery, emphasizing the Zone’s reclamation of man-made structures. This is not just decay—it’s a rejection of the artificial, a system that has grown beyond its creators, no longer operating on terms humanity can understand or control.
Where the Strugatskys emphasized the Zone’s hostility as a metaphor for the Soviet state’s crushing complexity, Tarkovsky portrays the Zone as a reflection of humanity’s existential failure. The Zone is not overtly hostile but indifferent, forcing individuals to confront their inner fears and flaws. This shift in focus transforms the Zone from a hyper-organic system into a symbol of the Soviet Union’s broader spiritual decay. It becomes a graveyard of ambitions—both technological and ideological—where the dream of controlling a system through cybernetic mastery collapses into rust and entropy.
Tarkovsky’s Zone also subverts the ideals of Soviet cybernetics. Rather than presenting an evolving, harmonious system, the Zone reflects the unintended consequences of human hubris: feedback loops that spiral out of control, leaving chaos in their wake. The once-grand vision of total synthesis and control devolves into a fractured, unknowable entity, echoing the Soviet Union’s own trajectory. Tarkovsky strips away the overt scientific intrigue of the Strugatskys’ version, replacing it with a poetic, almost mystical meditation on failure, loss, and the impossibility of imposing order on the unknowable.
In Stalker, the Zone is no longer a system to be navigated but an entity to be survived, a mirror for humanity’s deepest uncertainties. While the Strugatskys explored the Zone as a hyper-organic system with its own alien logic, Tarkovsky’s version is less about logic and more about meaning—a space that challenges human control not with violence, but with ambiguity.
Yefremov’s Andromeda Nebula: A Hyper-Organic Utopia
Ivan Yefremov’s Andromeda Nebula represents a quintessential vision of Soviet hyper-organicity at its most optimistic. The interstellar society portrayed in the novel achieves what earlier Soviet cybernetics aspired to: a seamless integration of technology and biology. In this utopian future, spaceships, cities, and other technologies are not separate from nature but extensions of it, functioning as organic systems in perfect equilibrium. The Andromeda civilization reflects an idealized feedback loop—where humanity, technology, and the cosmos exist in harmonious, self-sustaining balance.
This utopia is deeply rooted in the principles of hyper-organicity. Spaceships and infrastructure in Yefremov’s universe are described with an almost biological fluidity, as if they are living organisms rather than artificial constructs. These systems are not merely tools but symbiotic extensions of their creators, designed to harmonize with universal rhythms instead of imposing control over them. This vision aligns with Soviet ideological ideals of humanity as stewards of nature, where technological advancement is framed not as domination but as a continuation of natural processes.
However, the utopian surface of Andromeda Nebula reveals the inherent fragility of hyper-organic systems to disruption. The novel’s harmonious interstellar civilization depends on absolute ideological conformity and the elimination of dissent. The society’s equilibrium is maintained through the suppression of variability—a tacit acknowledgment that the slightest deviation could collapse the intricate feedback loops upon which everything depends. This perfection, while seductive, is precarious, revealing the tension between adaptability and control that defines hyper-organicity.
Yefremov’s utopia also subtly foreshadows its own impossibility. The novel’s portrayal of seamless harmony carries with it an implicit critique of its own premise: hyper-organic systems, no matter how advanced, require constant alignment and an absence of conflict. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union’s own attempts at systemic harmony—characterized by ideological rigidity and economic stagnation—would expose the limitations of such a vision. Like Yefremov’s imagined society, the Soviet system’s feedback loops became too rigid to adapt, turning harmony into stasis and progress into decay.
Granin’s Speculative Systems: The Cybernetic Ecosystem
In his speculative stories, Daniil Granin presents human-made systems that do not merely function as tools but evolve in lifelike ways, mirroring natural ecosystems. His artificial intelligences and experimental technologies possess “organic” qualities—adaptive, self-regulating, and interdependent. These systems are not static constructs but dynamic entities that integrate seamlessly with their environments, embodying a fusion of the mechanical and the biological. Granin’s portrayal aligns with the Soviet ideal of technology as an extension of nature, emphasizing symbiosis over domination.
This approach reflects the foundational principles of Soviet cybernetics, a discipline that blurred the lines between machines and living organisms by treating both as interconnected systems governed by feedback loops. Unlike the dominance-oriented frameworks of Western sci-fi—where technology often seeks to control or surpass nature—Soviet cybernetics envisioned a harmonious integration. Granin’s stories exemplify this ethos, depicting technologies that adapt to their surroundings like organisms in an ecosystem, rather than machines imposed upon it.
For Granin, the lifelike qualities of these systems are not simply metaphors but expressions of a broader philosophical outlook. His speculative creations function as hyper-organic entities, where intelligence and functionality emerge from the interactions within the system itself. This echoes the Soviet fascination with the collective: just as individuals in society were seen as interdependent, so too were the components of these artificial systems. By rooting technological progress in biological metaphors, Granin elevates cybernetics from a technical framework to a vision of social and ecological harmony.
However, as with other Soviet explorations of hyper-organicity, Granin’s idealism carries an implicit caution. Systems that evolve organically are not immune to disruption. Their very adaptability can become a vulnerability, as the interdependence that sustains them can also amplify the effects of any instability. Granin’s stories often suggest that while these systems may appear harmonious, their complexity makes them fragile. The same qualities that make them lifelike—adaptability, interdependence, and self-regulation—also make them unpredictable, defying total human control.
Lem’s The Invincible (1964)
In The Invincible, Stanisław Lem presents a powerful vision of technology as a hyper-organic system, where the “robotic” swarm creatures on Regis III evolve not as machines, but as living organisms. These self-replicating nanobots form a collective intelligence that operates like a biological colony, where individual components interact and adapt in an interconnected web. The swarm is not a rigid, mechanical entity; it is fluid, ever-changing, and emergent, highlighting the principles of hyper-organicity—where technology evolves in much the same way as biological life.
The swarm’s behavior reveals the essence of hyper-organicity: a system that transcends the boundaries between machine and organism. Its actions are not controlled by a single entity or central command, but rather emerge from complex feedback loops between the swarm’s individual parts. It is a dynamic, adaptive organism that grows, shifts, and responds to environmental stimuli in ways that mirror the processes of biological life. This fluid, evolving nature of the swarm challenges the rigid, mechanistic views of technology, suggesting that technological systems, like biological ones, are capable of self-organization, evolution, and complex adaptation.
Ultimately, The Invincible presents the swarm as a vision of technology that is deeply organic and self-sustaining. It embodies the principles of hyper-organicity, where technology is not a mechanical tool but a living, evolving organism capable of adaptation and change. The swarm exists as a force that moves beyond human understanding, forcing us to confront the limitations of our knowledge and control. It suggests that technology, like life itself, is not a static, predictable force but a dynamic, interconnected system that evolves and adapts in ways that are as unpredictable and complex as any biological organism.
One of my favorite parts of The Invincible is when some of the crew begin hypothesizing about the origin and evolution of the swarm creatures on Regis III. They theorize that the first bots may have appeared as simple, independent entities—early iterations of what would eventually evolve into the complex swarm. The crew speculates that through a kind of natural selection, the smaller bots competed for resources, and over time, those best adapted to their environment survived and replicated. This process of self-replication and adaptation, driven by environmental pressures, mirrors the mechanisms of biological evolution. The crew’s musings highlight the deeply organic nature of the swarm, as they realize that these bots, like living organisms, have undergone an evolutionary process of their own, driven by forces beyond their initial design. This moment emphasizes the fluidity and interconnectedness of the swarm, shifting it from a mere mechanical construct to a living, evolving entity that follows its own logic and growth, independent of human understanding.
WHY HYPER-ORGANICITY FAILED THE FIRST TIME
Hyper-organicity is not a bubble that bursts—it is a foam that dissipates. A bubble pops with dramatic finality, but foam collapses gradually, as the connections holding it together weaken and disperse. In the Soviet Union, hyper-organic systems—whether the centrally planned economy, ideological apparatus, or scientific ambitions like cybernetics—seemed unified and impenetrable, but this appearance concealed fragility. When critical structures failed, the system didn’t explode; it dissolved, unable to maintain its cohesion. This same foam-like fragility haunts today’s hyper-organic systems, including those in the United States.
The Soviet experiment sought total synthesis: an interconnected society where every element, from the economy to culture, operated in seamless harmony. But this very interconnectedness created fragility. Minor disruptions, such as grain shortages or missed quotas, rippled across the system, magnifying weaknesses rather than containing them. Like the vast, unknowable ocean in Solaris or the shifting traps of the Zone in Roadside Picnic, the hyper-organic system became too complex to master. Central planning, far from unifying, proved brittle and prone to collapse under its own weight.
Hyper-organicity’s reliance on feedback loops further accelerated its demise. In theory, these loops should have allowed the system to self-correct, but Soviet bureaucracies fed false data into the system to meet impossible quotas. Instead of stability, this produced cascading failures, as the system acted on distorted information. The Soviet Union’s faith in cybernetics—a vision of governance as a machine calibrated to perfection—clashed with the reality of human corruption and mismanagement. What was meant to streamline became a mechanism for self-deception, ultimately starving the system of truth.
Beneath it all was an illusion of control. The Soviet Union believed it could engineer society like a machine, but hyper-organic systems resist centralization. The more complex and interdependent they become, the more they take on a life of their own, defying their creators. Like the Zone’s unknowable hazards, the Soviet system became unpredictable, unmanageable, and hostile to those who tried to navigate it. This rigidity stifled innovation and made the system incapable of adapting to external shocks, from economic stagnation to the pressures of the Cold War arms race.
Perhaps most damaging was the collapse of collective faith. Hyper-organic systems depend not just on technical coordination but on belief in their legitimacy. By the 1980s, systemic corruption and inefficiency had eroded public trust in the Soviet project. Citizens disengaged, further weakening the fragile web holding the system together. As the foam of interconnections dissolved, the dream of total synthesis vanished with it.
Echoes in the Present
The United States today embodies its own version of hyper-organicity, where complex financial systems, global supply chains, and algorithm-driven technologies intertwine to create an intricate, highly interconnected web. Much like the Soviet systems of old, these networks were designed for efficiency, but that very efficiency masks inherent fragility. While the complexity of these systems is often mistaken for strength, it instead hides vulnerabilities that, when exposed, ripple through the entire structure. Take, for example, supply chains, which were fine-tuned for maximum efficiency but revealed their delicate nature during the COVID-19 pandemic. A single disruption cascaded through the globe, much like the Soviet agricultural failures that led to broader systemic breakdowns. Similarly, financial markets, reliant on intricate networks, magnify risks—highlighted during the 2008 crisis, when the collapse of subprime mortgages unraveled the entire global economy.
Today’s feedback loops, powered by big data and AI, mirror the same distortions found in Soviet cybernetics. Algorithms designed to optimize often amplify biases and disinformation, turning intended solutions into systemic weaknesses. The loop doesn’t ensure stability but rather reinforces vulnerabilities. Bureaucratic inertia and the decline in trust—issues that also plagued the Soviet system—compound these problems. Political gridlock, cultural polarization, and unchecked monopolies have led to a crisis of confidence among citizens. Much like the loss of faith in the Soviet collective organism, trust in American institutions has eroded, and without it, the interwoven fabric of the system begins to unravel.
In many ways, the U.S. has proven more successful at emulating the Soviet model than the Soviets ever were. Not in a rigid, centralized Communist Party form, but in the way corporations have come to serve as the core of centralized control. Despite the veneer of decentralization, today’s corporate structures—though fewer in number—wield a level of centralization that the Soviet state could never achieve. This is the essence of Jane’s bicameral mind at play, with corporate entities managing a complex web of interdependencies that resembles the Soviet experiment, but through a distinctly capitalist lens. The illusion of autonomy, wrapped in corporate efficiency, reflects a deepening integration that mimics the very systems the Soviets dreamed of but failed to perfect.
However, the collapse of such a hyper-organic system, as history has shown, is rarely explosive. It’s more akin to the slow dissipation of foam. The Soviet Union’s downfall didn’t come in one dramatic event but through a gradual dissolution of its tightly interwoven connections. The U.S., with its own fragile networks, risks following a similar path. While its decentralized nature and cultural vibrancy provide some insulation, they may not be sufficient to prevent cascading failures when these systems inevitably begin to falter.
The inevitability of these systems is unsettling because it bypasses the essential questions of success or failure. They don’t emerge because they work; they emerge because we’re driven by an almost compulsive need to organize, optimize, and impose order on chaos. Whether it’s the Soviet experiment, corporate algorithms, or decentralized tech utopias, the pattern’s the same: humanity’s desperate desire to transcend individuality, even when it means sacrificing our spontaneity and humanity.
But here’s the real kicker: the cost isn’t something those in power will ever face. These systems fail, sure, but they fail upwards. The wreckage is always left for the people who didn’t ask for it, didn’t create it, and certainly didn’t benefit from it. Hyper-organicity doesn’t just impose order—it’s a license to pass off the consequences to someone else. And when we call it inevitable, we’re not just shrugging off responsibility—we’re giving ourselves an out, as if accepting the inevitable absolves us of the damage done. If inevitability is the story, then maybe the real question is: why are we so willing to let others foot the bill for our obsession with control?
Hyper-organicity promises elegance, efficiency, and balance. But its very interconnectedness reveals a more troubling truth: the more a system is integrated, the more fragile it becomes. It’s not a path toward utopia but rather a cautionary tale about the limits of control. The challenge ahead is not just creating these systems but ensuring that they are adaptable, resilient, and capable of withstanding the inevitable breakdowns. As the foam of interconnectedness expands, the question remains: will it solidify into something enduring, or will it once again dissipate into nothingness, leaving only the hollow remnants of a dream?
I’ve been reading The Man Who Created the Middle East by Christopher Simon Sykes, a fascinating—and frankly bewildering—account of how a couple of diplomats, armed with little more than pencils, whiskey, and a vague sense of geography, managed to redraw an entire region. It’s the kind of history that feels so absurdly implausible that it might as well have been a work of satire.
My review of “The Man Who Created the Middle East” by Christopher Simon Sykes,
Somewhere in a smoky corner of The Green Dragon Inn, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin found themselves with the unenviable task of dividing up Mordor. Gandalf had vanished in a puff of “wizardry business,” leaving a note saying: “Take care of this, will you? Back in a fortnight. Don’t forget the furnaces.”
“Well, Mordor’s a right mess,” said Frodo, staring at the ash-streaked map. “Who’d want it anyway?”
“Humans might like it,” Sam offered. “Big, gloomy sorts, aren’t they? They’ll think it’s dramatic.”
“Humans?!” scoffed Merry, snatching the quill. “Mordor’s perfect for Dwarves. All those mines, all that lava. They love that sort of thing!”
“Hang on,” interrupted Pippin, dipping a sausage into gravy. “We Hobbits deserve a slice too! Imagine all the mushrooms we could grow in the ash!”
“Oh, for the love of lembas, let’s just split it up and be done!” Frodo sighed.
The Black Gate to the humans. “They’ll appreciate the drama,” Frodo said, drawing a shaky line. “It screams tragic backstory.”
“What about the furnaces?” asked Sam.
“Wizarding nonsense. Leave them out,” Frodo replied.
“Mount Doom to the Dwarves—they’ll love it,” Merry declared. “Molten lava—perfect for forges!”
“What about the Eye of Sauron?” Sam asked nervously.
“Bit of Windex,” Merry said confidently.
“The Plains of Gorgoroth? For us!” Pippin scribbled furiously. “Rich volcanic soil—we’ll farm!”
“And the roaming orcs?” Frodo asked.
“Scarecrows!” Pippin grinned.
“The Tower of Barad-dûr… Oh, Elves will love it!” Merry exclaimed. “Tall and moody—just like them!”
“But it’s full of wizard traps,” Sam pointed out.
“Good! Keep them humble,” Frodo muttered.
“The Furnaces to Nobody. “Let’s leave the cursed machinery unallocated,” Frodo said. “Gandalf can deal with it—or not. I don’t care.”
The equations hum like broken neon signs in a rain-soaked alley, flickering with promises of balance they can’t keep. You write the universe in numbers, chasing symmetry like a junkie chasing a fix, but the junk is laced with paradox. Set theory burns out like a circuit, feedback screaming: Does the set contain itself? Does it? Logic folds in on itself, Ouroboros swallowing its own tail.
Zeno laughs from the static, saying you’ll never move because infinity lives in the cracks between steps. And Gödel whispers from the void: Your system will never be whole, kid. The truth leaks out where the edges fray.
The quantum world is the hacker’s dream, a loop of entangled particles dancing on the knife-edge of maybe. Wave or particle? Yes. Both. Neither. Schrödinger’s cat purring in a box that’s both alive and dead, an impossible melody glitching through the code.
You can’t balance equations in a universe stitched together with paradox, because the universe isn’t a closed system—it’s an open wound, bleeding uncertainty into every corner. Reality doesn’t care about consistency. It runs on beautiful contradictions, the kind of thing a machine mind would crash trying to comprehend.
Paradox isn’t failure. It’s the operating system.
And the operating system’s kernel is chaos, patched together with fragments of dreams and nightmares, the ghosts of equations half-solved and abandoned in the dark. The mathematicians try to debug it, scribbling formulas like graffiti on the crumbling walls of their minds, but the paradoxes eat them alive.
The set that contains itself is a trap door, and the quantum cat is the bouncer, grinning wide and sharp-toothed. Every answer spawns a new question, fractals spiraling into infinity like electric veins through a black void. The universe doesn’t crash; it thrives in the mess.
Meanwhile, the code junkies jack in, trying to make sense of it. Gibson’s cowboys in the matrix, Burroughs’ word virus infecting their thoughts: What if reality isn’t broken? What if it’s perfect in its imperfection? They rewrite the script in dead languages, trying to tame the paradoxes, but every line of code spits out the same error: Undefined Behavior.
Maybe that’s the point. The equations aren’t there to balance. They’re there to tell the story of imbalance, of a universe that refuses to settle into neat rows of zeroes and ones. The beauty isn’t in the answers—it’s in the contradictions, the asymmetry, the eternal push-pull of forces that can never align.
The math doesn’t lie, but it doesn’t tell the whole truth either. It can only point to the gaps, the empty spaces where paradoxes live, smoking opium in the back alleys of existence. You can’t solve the universe. You can only watch it glitch and flicker, infinite and unknowable, a broken neon sign buzzing YES and NO at the same time.
Engineers. Always lurking at the edge of the frame, smoothing their tees, hands in pockets full of patents they didn’t quite invent. They didn’t write the symphony, but they’ll take credit for the piano. They didn’t build the cathedral, but they’ll swear they taught the stones how to sing.
It’s their gift: rewriting the wiring diagram of history. Every glitch, every spark, theirs to claim. “We made this,” they say, standing on a mountain of Frankenstein parts, ignoring the villagers with torches who built the fire.
But here’s the trick: you don’t need an engineer to tell which way the wind blows. You just need enough chaos to jam the gears. Watch the schematics scatter into something new, something they won’t know how to take credit for—yet.
Now they’re trying to reverse-engineer the ineffable. Hermetics, Kabbalah, Theosophy—ancient systems stripped for parts, hacked into flowcharts and algorithms. The engineers slide in, slick with jargon, whispering about “universal codes” and “spiritual architectures,” as if the Tree of Life were a motherboard they could debug.
They dissect the unknowable with scalpels of silicon, mapping the pathways of transcendence onto their circuit boards. Every divine spark reduced to a line of code, every ineffable mystery downgraded to a prototype. They want to patent the infinite, trademark the soul, but you can’t blueprint a prayer.
What they don’t see: the symbols won’t be tamed. They unravel in their hands, glyphs dissolving into static, nodes burning out. They’ll try to rebuild it, of course, but all they’ll get is noise. The divine isn’t theirs to solder—it laughs in frequencies they’ll never hear.
Don’t take it too personal—it’s just re-invention. You hit a wall, stare at it long enough, and then start scavenging. A little Hermetics here, a pinch of Kabbalah there, sprinkle in some Theosophy dust, and voilà! A new field of engineering, cobbled together like a Frankenstein theology. Part stinker, part alchemy, part semiconductor.
They call it progress, but it smells like ozone and desperation. Well, It’s not desperation, not like an artist clawing at the edges of a canvas or a poet pacing holes in the floor. It’s something colder, heavier—a kind of existential ennui. The engineers stare into the void and see only equations that don’t balance, systems that loop back into themselves, leaving them stranded at the edge of meaning.
So they reach. Not with brushes or words, but with tools and theories, scavenging fragments of mysticism like stray electrons, wiring them into circuits of logic and ambition. Hermetics becomes a schematic. Kabbalah gets etched onto microchips. Theosophy is distilled into algorithms.
It’s a battle with the void, a need to reshape the chaos into something comprehensible, something useful. They call it engineering, but it’s really just existential bricolage—part stinker, part alchemy, part semiconductor. Not a cry for help, but a long, quiet scream into the vacuum.
They’re welding the sacred to the profane, soldering gold to silicon, hoping the circuits hum with something bigger than themselves. But the seams show. It’s duct tape and dreams, a kludge in cosmic drag.
And yet—there’s something to it. A spark, a shadow of the divine, flickering in the chaos of their creations. Not because they’re right, but because the act itself—this endless re-invention, this alchemy of failure and ambition—is the oldest ritual of all.
But soon enough, the thought creeps in, a quiet parasite of doubt: Is it really worth it? Out here in the wild earnest, stripped of the neat safety nets, fumbling with forces they can’t control. They’re not artists driven mad by muses, but something worse—engineers turned pilgrims, trading precision for chaos, chasing an unknowable grail.
And yet, even in this chaos, someone else holds the keys. The system, the funding boards, the corporate gods—the true architects of control. The engineers are just priests in their temple, reverse-engineering mysteries they don’t own, building dreams that belong to someone else.
The wildness calls to them, but the leash tightens. It’s not about the void anymore. It’s about whether they can even bear the price of their invention—an existential agony smuggled into a blueprint, signed away before they even knew its name.
But this isn’t creation—this is control. Engineering’s clean syntax becomes a tyranny of execution, the need for the machine to run smooth. No room for ambiguity, no space for paradox. Unlike the esoteric scribes of the Hermetic Order, who left the last pages blank for the unspeakable truths, the coder fills in every line.
The Hermetics chanted as above, so below, but in the glass towers of late-stage engineering, it’s as programmed, so executed. Layers of abstraction mask the true machinery: user interface hiding logic gates, logic gates hiding electrons, electrons hiding the ghost in the circuits. Each veil promises mastery, but only for the initiated.
In the Sprawl, the algorithm is God—unseen but omnipresent, meting out influence like some digital tetragrammaton. Its commandments are optimization, scalability, utility. No room for the soul. The Hermeticists sought gold but found spirit; the programmer seeks solutions and finds only bugs.
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In a junkyard warehouse, the tinkerer laughs at the engineer’s grid-paper prisons. They riff through circuits, solder dripping like molten lead onto forgotten plastic skeletons. Here is a different magic: no blueprints, no logic trees. Just jazz in the wires. The tinkerer embraces failure like an old lover, knowing it is not the end but the crack where light gets in.
The engineer’s logic wants the world to sit still, to be solved like a puzzle box. The tinkerer knows it won’t. They improvise, riding the glitches like waves on a blackened sea.
Programming is the new necromancy. The adepts summon processes from the void, forces invisible but devastating. An infinite recursion, echoing back to the Hermetic’s ouroboros—self-consuming, endlessly looping.
But this necromancy is sterile. Every spell must resolve. Every invocation must compile. The programmer seeks control, but they do not know what lies beneath the zeroes and ones. The machine hums with a pulse that isn’t theirs—a whisper of something older. Chaos. Emergence. A wave collapsing into unknowable particles.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle hovers like a phantom over the engineer’s dream. Measure the position, lose the momentum. Build the system, lose the game. Every Black Box designed to manage complexity hides layers of unintended consequences: emergent behavior, bias baked into the logic, chaos wearing the mask of control.
The engineers pretend they can map it all, but the shadow engineers—the tinkerers, the alchemists—know better. They see the cracks in the world-machine, the places where the code goes feral.
The alchemist-tinkerer doesn’t optimize; they transform. They whisper in the ear of the machine, coaxing something new out of the chaos. They know failure is sacred, a ritual in its own right.
In the heart of the Sprawl, the alchemist-engineer rises: a hybrid adept who codes with one hand and improvises with the other. They leave gaps in their designs, spaces for chaos to breathe. They refuse the tyranny of resolution.
They understand what the Hermetics knew: true mastery lies not in control but in engagement with mystery. Their programs are not machines—they are rituals, open-ended invocations.
And in those spaces of uncertainty, they hear a new rhythm—half glitch, half song. Not an answer, but an invitation.
The air hung heavy in the valley, as though weighed down by the burden of secrets left unsaid. Beyond the murmur of the waterfall, there was silence, save for the faint rustling of leaves, as though the earth itself conspired to remain quiet, afraid to disturb the ghosts that lingered in the minds of men.
The boy—no, the man, though he never quite grew into the word—stood at the edge of the stream. The dog was there, Mishima’s dog, its paws bleeding from futile attempts to claw its way free from the jagged rocks. He didn’t know what kind of dog it was; it didn’t matter. It looked at him with eyes full of terror, and he felt nothing.
His father had been like those rocks: immovable, unyielding. A man of rules and walls, someone who believed in the clean geometry of confinement. The prison had been his kingdom, and he its keeper. His son had grown up in the shadow of that place, watching the barred windows swallow what little light reached the concrete floors.
When he was a child, the boy had asked his father what the prisoners had done.
“Everything,” the man replied. “Everything you can imagine, and worse.”
“Do they ever leave?” the boy asked.
“No,” his father said, with a finality that felt like the closing of a cell door. “No one ever leaves.”
But the father had been wrong, as fathers often are. Years later, when the old man’s body lay cold and pale in its casket, the prison gates had swung wide open, though not for the prisoners. For the boy, now a man, who fled from the shadow of those walls with the desperation of a drowning man breaking the surface.
The dog whimpered, snapping him back to the present. He crouched down by the water, the chill seeping through his boots. The dog was trapped, its body pressed against the rocks by the relentless current. It would die if he left it there, but he hesitated. He told himself it was because he didn’t know how to free it, but the truth was simpler, darker. He didn’t want to. He felt no hatred for the dog, but no love either—only an eerie indifference. It reminded him of his father’s face on the day of his mother’s funeral: a mask, expressionless, impervious to the grief that should have been there.
“I can only love you by hating him more,” he had told her once, on a night when the stars seemed closer than the ground beneath their feet. She had laughed, soft and bitter, and told him he didn’t understand love.
“Love isn’t hatred,” she said. “It isn’t theft either. It’s just—what it is.”
“What it is?” he asked, a mocking edge in his voice.
She sighed. “Love doesn’t need to be a war or a crime. You think it has to be stolen, but maybe it’s just… given.”
He had laughed then, too, but he hadn’t meant it. The laugh was a lie, like so many things he told himself to keep from admitting he didn’t know who he was. She had left not long after that night, and he told himself he didn’t care. But he did.
He reached into the icy water, his hands trembling—not from the cold, but from something else, something deeper. The dog thrashed as he grabbed hold of it, its body slick and frail beneath his fingers. He pulled, and the rocks scraped its fur, leaving streaks of blood in the water. When he finally freed it, the dog collapsed at his feet, shivering and weak but alive.
For a moment, he stared at the creature, its ribs heaving with each labored breath. Then he saw it: the peacock in the snow. It was there in the reflection of the stream, its plumage reduced to a dark silhouette against the pale ground. The image was fleeting, gone before he could decide whether it had been real or imagined. But it stayed with him, lodged in his mind like a thorn.
Later, when the dog had limped away into the woods and the shadows began to lengthen, he stood by the water’s edge once more, his reflection staring back at him.
“I am a seer,” he whispered, though no one was there to hear. “I am a liar.”
He thought of his father then, the man who had run the prison and the man who had been a prison himself. He thought of his mother, whose love had been quiet and invisible, like the air that filled a room. And he thought of her—the one who had left, the one he had loved in his own broken way.
“I don’t know who I am,” he said, and the words echoed in the stillness, carried away by the current.
And for the first time, he believed them.
<>
His father ran the prison the way a man might hold dominion over his own despair—with the rigid certainty of duty, yet trembling beneath the weight of what he could never master. He moved through the corridors like a king inspecting a kingdom of shadows, his footsteps ringing against the damp stone walls as though time itself had grown afraid to progress in his presence.
He was a man who believed in rules, in discipline, in the iron geometry of justice. To him, the prisoners were not men but broken pieces of a cosmic equation, errors to be corrected, chaos to be contained. “A man without boundaries,” he often said, his voice low but edged with steel, “is a man already lost to ruin.”
The boy had grown up in the shadow of this creed, under the hard gaze of a father who spoke of order as though it were holy scripture. There was no room for softness in that household, no space for the fragile promises of love. His mother would whisper her prayers behind closed doors, and his father would recite rules, as though prayers were an indulgence the world could not afford.
The prison loomed over their lives like a monument to suffering, its great stone walls visible from every window of the warden’s house. To the boy, it seemed that the shadow of the prison did not end where the iron gates began—it followed them into their home, their conversations, their silences.
One evening, years before the boy would leave that house and the father who ruled it, he found the man alone in his study. The room was dark, lit only by the faint glow of a single candle. His father sat at his desk, staring at an old photograph—a younger version of himself, standing at the gates of the prison, his uniform crisp, his face sharp with purpose.
“Do you ever dream?” the boy asked from the doorway, unsure why the question had risen to his lips.
His father did not look up. “Dreams are for men without responsibilities,” he said, his voice as flat and steady as ever.
But the boy, standing there, saw his father’s hand tremble as he turned the photograph over and laid it facedown on the desk.
Even now, years later, the boy—now a man—could not decide whether his father truly believed in the walls he had spent his life building. He had been a man who carried keys, and yet they had never unlocked anything that mattered. The boy had always wondered if his father feared the prisoners less than he feared the walls themselves, and whether he, too, had been trapped.
And sometimes, when the boy stood alone, staring into his own reflection, he could not shake the feeling that his father had passed that same prison onto him, the bars invisible but ever-present.
