Bismarck

Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, was a man marinated in vice. Wine, a crimson serpent, coiled around his mornings, slithered through lunch, and tightened its grip at dinner. Beer, a frothy trollop yeasty serpent, slithered down his gullet between courses, leaving a trail of burps that could curdle milk. And cigarettes, glowing embers of damnation, were his constant companions, wisping their tendrils of addiction into his lungs. Tobacco, a fiery succubus, latched onto his lips, whispering sweet oblivion in puffs of acrid smoke.

And when the sun dipped below the horizon, Bismarck wouldn’t be caught dead (well, not yet) with a mug of chamomile tea. Sleep? A mere drunken stupor, a surrender to the green fumes of absinthe that clouded his dreams. No, sleep arrived on a flood tide of schnapps, a potent oblivion that painted the world a blurry shade of Prussian ambition.

At the Berlin Conference, where they carved Africa like a rotten melon, Bismarck wasn’t just a player, he was a force of nature fueled by fermented grapes and barley. Pickled herrings, those translucent messengers of the deep, found their way into his maw with a two-handed frenzy. Bismarck wasn’t a statesman, he was a fiend at a banquet. Pickled herrings, those translucent messengers of decay, found their way into his maw with a speed that defied cutlery. Two hands, like meat hooks, wrestled the oily fish, a grotesque ballet fueled by schnapps and avarice. The room reeked of power, sweat, and pickled fish, a fitting olfactory accompaniment to the dismemberment of a continent.

Was he drunk? Who the hell cared. Drunk or sober, Bismarck was a shark in a feeding frenzy, and Africa, dripping and glistening, was the blood in the water. One imagines the negotiations, a grand guignol of ink-stained maps and diplomatic double-entendres, punctuated by the belch of a man pickled himself, both literally and figuratively. The ink on the treaties might as well have been blood, Bismarck’s own fiery spirit staining the parchment. A whirlwind of diplomacy and debauchery, the Iron Chancellor left a trail of fumes and fumes alone in his wake.

One could argue Bismarck’s boozy brilliance was a double-edged sword, a Molotov cocktail of realpolitik served lukewarm. Sure, he unified Germany under a Prussian fist, but was it a foundation built on sand, mortared with hangover sweat?

It was the first domino in Germany’s tragic waltzing with oblivion. Imagine the map of Africa being carved up not by a steely-eyed statesman, but by a bleary-eyed baron with a tremor in his hand. Did the borders of the Congo sprawl outwards because Bismarck saw double after a particularly potent schnapps?

Perhaps. And perhaps those shaky lines, drawn in a haze of hops and hangover, laid the groundwork for future conflicts. Resources, resentment, a festering sense of injustice – a potent cocktail, even without the booze.

Then consider the domino effect. Bismarck’s legacy, built on unsteady legs, crumbles. The power vacuum sucks in a new breed of leader, hungry and paranoid. Enter Hitler, a teetotaler fueled by a different kind of intoxication – a twisted ideology that had him high as a🪁 (kite) on delusions of grandeur.

So yes, there’s a delicious irony, wouldn’t you say? Bismarck, the boozer, might have unwittingly paved the way for a dry drunk who’d plunge the world into a firestorm. The Iron Chancellor, brought low not by iron, but by cirrhosis. A cautionary tale, indeed, for leaders who confuse a full flagon with a full head.

Perhaps, if Bismarck had swapped the schnapps for seltzer, things might have been different. But that’s just another line in the mad scribble of history, a “what if” lost in the haze of his perpetual inebriation.One could argue Bismarck’s boozy statecraft was a recipe for Deutschland’s descent into the inferno. Imagine, the fate of entire nations decided by a man reeking of stale beer and pickled brine! His proclamations, no doubt, slurred pronouncements delivered through a haze of nicotine and schnapps.

It’s a heady cocktail of speculation, for sure. But with Bismarck swigging wine at breakfast and Hitler frothing at the podium, one can’t help but wonder if Germany just couldn’t find the right balance. Perhaps the answer wasn’t rock bottom or uptight abstinence, but a healthy dose of moderation. A nation, like a man, needs a clear head to navigate the treacherous waters of history.

The Box

The box. A cardboard monolith promising connection, a portal to the buzzing electronic superorganism. You tear through it, a ritual sacrifice to the gods of planned obsolescence. You rip it open, a flurry of plastic and wires. The device itself, sleek, seductive, a chrome phallus whispering of power and control.

But inside, a hollowness. No buzzing power, no digital hum. Just the mocking inscription: “Batteries Not Included.” A cruel joke by the machine gods. No sacred batteries, the power source hidden, a black market deal in the fluorescent aisles. . This metal idol demands a blood sacrifice, a current from the outside world to animate its circuits. You, the supplicant, are left scrambling, the dream deferred.

The user manual, a hieroglyphic gospel you can’t decipher without a prophet of the megacorporation. We are left scrambling, clawing for the missing pieces, the current to jolt this metal monster to life. The future electrifies, then flickers, a dim promise in a darkened room. You are the addict, the product the fix, and the high just out of reach.

The Mirror Stage shattered. You hold the device, a reflection not of your desires, but of your lack. The desire to be whole, to be one with the machine, to enter the Symbolic order of the digital realm. But there’s a gap, a Real that cannot be symbolized. The missing batteries are a castration wound, a reminder of your fundamental incompleteness. You search for the phallus, the missing piece, the batteries that will grant you access to the image of your technological self. But will it ever be enough? Is there always something more to buy, something else missing?

The Gaze. It stares back from the sleek, sterile screen. The user manual, absent, a lost Real. The Gaze falls upon the sleek device, a promise of wholeness, a reflection of your desires. But the lack, the batteries absent, creates a void, a Real you cannot possess. We fumble through menus, icons hieroglyphs in a language we never learned. The technology, a mirror reflecting our lack, the gaping hole of our own incompleteness. We yearn for the lost manual, a paternal voice to guide us, to suture the fragmented Self in the digital realm. The user manual, a symbolic order promising mastery, yet forever out of reach. You search for the phallus, the missing key, the validation you crave from the machine. But the machine speaks only in ones and zeroes, a language forever alien.

The smooth surface of the gadget was a promise of deterritorialization, a break from the everyday. The Rhizome. A sprawling network, a web of potential connections. The toy, a microcosm, a desiring-machine yearning to be plugged into the larger assemblage. But the batteries, a territorializing force, bind you to the grid, the market. They act as territorializing forces, constricting the flow, the becoming. The user manual, a striated map, dictates the flow of desire, channels your exploration. You yearn for the rhizome, the multiplicity of functions, the potential for hacking. But the machine is a closed system, programmed for control.

We are nomads on the information superhighway, forever thwarted by tollbooths demanding power, forever on the outside looking in. The potential for glorious deterritorialization, the escape from the self, frustrated by a lack of AA. The assemblage is incomplete. The device, the potential for connection, is held captive by the striated forces of capitalism. The batteries, the user manual (sold separately!), are lines drawn across the smooth surface, segmenting, controlling. You become a nomad, a desiring subject, forever searching for the lines of flight, the hacks, the mods that will liberate the machine from its capitalist constraints. But are you freeing the machine, or yourself? Or is it all just a frantic escape from the void, the realization that the technology itself is a desiring-machine, and you’re just another component in its grand, unknowable operation?

You stare at the lifeless device, a hollow monument to the unfulfilled promises of tech. A sense of alienation washes over you. Is this progress? Or just a new set of shackles, a different kind of dependence? The machine waits, a silent judge. Perhaps it’s time to look beyond the shiny gadgets, to question the desires they encode. The real revolution might not be found in a new app, but in a way of using technology that empowers, that connects us not just to machines, but to each other.

We are Sisyphus, forever condemned to push the boulder of technology uphill, only to have it roll back down at the moment of connection. The future gleams, a chrome mirage in the desert of the real. We are addicts, jonesing for the digital fix, the dopamine rush of a notification, but the batteries are the cruel dealer, rationing our access, reminding us of our own limitations.

These elements combine in a cacophony of frustration. The impotent device mocks you, a gleaming reminder of your dependence. You are Jack Kerouac wired but unplugged, lost in a desert of dead circuits. The language of tech, a cruel joke, a promise of empowerment that delivers only frustration.

But wait! Perhaps this frustration is the point. The lack, the absence, a spark that ignites our own ingenuity. We become hackers, bricoleurs, hotwiring the system with paperclips and dreams. The missing manual becomes a blank canvas, an invitation to write our own story. The frustration, a catalyst for creation. The batteries not included? Maybe that’s the greatest gift of all. Yet, there is a flicker of hope. In the glitches, the malfunctions, the potential for subversion. With a screwdriver and ingenuity, you pry open the system, defy the prescribed usage.

Democratizing Technology: Batteries not included, user manual sold separately

1. The Gaze of the Other: First, identify the technology that functions as the object of desire, the phallus, for a certain elite. This elite, the Symbolic Order, holds the gaze that defines “real” power. The resentment of the excluded masses, the Imaginary, fuels the fantasy of possessing this phallus.

2. The Gift (That Keeps on Taking): The Lack, the Real: We release the ersatz version, a symbolic substitute for the real technology. This malfunctioning, user-unfriendly monstrosity embodies the lack, the Real, that can never be fully satisfied. The cryptic symbols represent the unknowable beyond the Symbolic Order.

Imagine a malfunctioning toaster controlled by a dial with cryptic symbols and rigged to electrocute you 10% of the time. This, my friends, is democratization in action! Support? Manuals? Ha! Let them decipher the hieroglyphics themselves.

This barely functional, bug-ridden monstrosity is the key to your glorious digital emancipation and the help desk consists of a prerecorded kazoo solo on repeat, but that’s the beauty of it, proles! You’re finally in the driver’s seat (bring your own screwdriver)!

3. The Orwellian Fanfare: Time to trumpet our magnanimity! Issue a press release so vague and self-congratulatory it would make Big Brother blush. “The Corporation is proud to empower the People!” Fanfare, comrades! Announce to the world that you’ve democratized your technology! The very gears of progress now grind at the behest of the… common man? (Shudder at the thought.) Let the unwashed masses drown in a sea of nonsensical menus and cryptic error messages! Just don’t mention the soul-crushing effort required to actually use the damn thing.

4. Hail the Hero : The Dunce Parade: Jouissance Through Struggle: The user, forever seeking the Real through symbolic manipulation, experiences a perverse satisfaction (jouissance) in deciphering the hieroglyphics and wrestling with the malfunctioning device.

Seek out the most clueless, enthusiasm-addled troglodytes to be your poster children. Bonus points if they manage to make a lukewarm cup of lukewarm coffee using our toaster-deathtrap. Shower them with empty awards and feature them in nonsensical commercials filled with stock footage of smiling peasants. Empty titles like “People’s Champion of Code!” Let them be the shining example of what the unwashed masses could achieve, with enough elbow grease and a lobotomy.

The Mirror Stage Misrecognition: The clueless poster children serve as the mirror reflecting back a distorted image of the user’s potential mastery. Their success, however illusory, reinforces the user’s misrecognition of their own place within the Symbolic Order.

5. The Fantasy of Completion: The People are to Blame (Naturally)

The user, forever chasing the dream of mastering the technology, remains trapped in a cycle of desire and lack. The blame for the inevitable failure falls not on the system but on the user’s inherent inadequacy.

When, inevitably, this ersatz technology fails to ignite a revolution of the proles, blame them! The whole thing flops harder than a fish out of water, unleash the blame-ray!

They’re simply too simple, too bogged down by their fleshy limitations, to grasp the true brilliance of your creation.

6. The Final Twist: The Perpetual Cycle: The corporation, the Big Other, maintains its grip on the Real power while offering up symbolic substitutes that perpetuate the illusion of progress and the user’s place within the system.

The illusory nature of empowerment offered by the corporation and the user’s desperate attempts to achieve a sense of wholeness through a flawed system.

Suits, Spooks and Deadbeats

The gray men in pin stripes, their brains wired to the Stock Exchange, see a virus in production. More pistons pumping, more rivets red-hot, that means fewer digits flickering on their screens. They’d be tossed aside, obsolete cogs in a machine that’s learned to build itself. No, production’s a dirty word in their vocabulary, a whisper that sends shivers down their tailored spines.

That’s where this whole DEI racket comes in, a shiny new virus to infect the minds of the masses. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion – buzzwords that roll off the tongue like a slug slathered in honey. A smokescreen for the real game, a grand illusion to legitimize a new ruling class. One that’s traded ledgers for likes, their power measured in retweets, not rivets.

But the joke’s on them, these marionette masters with their strings of political correctness. Incompetence is an ancient disease, one that predates this new opiate of the administrators. DEI just pumps it full of steroids, a grotesque carnival barker hawking snake oil disguised as social justice.

And the artists? We’re the cockroaches in the walls, watching the whole rotten performance unfold. Scrounging for meaning in the fetid air, while the suits and the scolds glare at us with identical disdain. Deadbeats, they mutter, parasites on the body politic.

We’re all a bunch of gutter punks to them, useless eaters wasting oxygen. But here’s the secret, chum – we’re the virus in their system, the glitch in their matrix. Our chaos is their nightmare, our freedom a disease they can’t cure. So keep making your noise, your art, your words. It’s the only weapon we got against the grey machine.

The Eternal Champion

The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary

The Eternal Champion, particularly Elric of Melniboné, revolves around three orders:

  • The Real: The unknowable, traumatic, pre-symbolic realm we encounter as infants. It’s marked by a lack and a constant desire to return to a state of wholeness. The ever-present chaos beyond language and symbolization. This is embodied by the Multiverse, the endless cycle of the worlds, and the raw, destructive power that Elric wields through Stormbringer. It represents the primal urges and desires that constantly threaten to disrupt the established order.
  • The Symbolic: The structures of Law that bring order and meaning to the world. This is represented by the Cosmic Balance, the empires and civilizations that strive for stability (like Law’s Jireikan), and the duty of the Eternal Champion to maintain the equilibrium. The order of language and social structures that shape our identities and understanding of the world.
  • The Imaginary: The realm of perception and fantasy where the ego forms through mirroring the “other.” The realm of perception, illusion, and fantasy. This is where Elric’s own self-image as a brooding anti-hero resides, caught between his duty and his chaotic nature. It’s also evident in the fantastical landscapes and creatures Elric encounters on his journeys.

Elric’s Lack and the Desire for the Other

Lacan suggests that humans are forever driven by a sense of lack and the desire for the Other, a wholeness we can never achieve. Elric embodies the Lacanian concept of lack. He is haunted by the impossibility of achieving a unified self.

  • Stormbringer: His cursed sword, Stormbringer, represents the Real, the insatiable desire that constantly disrupts his attempts at stability. It craves souls, mirroring Elric’s own internal void.
  • The Cycle and The Balance: The Cosmic Balance and the Longhouse of the Cycle represent the Symbolic order, the forces that try to impose order on the chaos. Elric, as the pawn caught between Law and Chaos, embodies the struggle between these forces.
  • The Lack: Elric’s inherent connection to Chaos creates an absence within him, a yearning for order he can never fully embrace. Stormbringer’s corrupting influence and his own melancholic nature fuel this lack. Lacan posits that human desire is inherently lacking, a constant striving for something unattainable. Elric’s desire could be interpreted in a few ways: The Desire for Balance: Elric, despite his chaotic nature and the pull of Stormbringer, might yearn for a restored balance in the Multiverse. This aligns with the Champion’s duty. The Desire for Death: Elric’s weariness and the burden of his role could lead to a death drive, a desire for the oblivion that true balance might bring. The Desire for Redemption: Elric’s actions often cause destruction, yet he continues his fight. This could be seen as a desire for redemption, to break free from the cycle and achieve some form of peace. The Desire for the Other: Elric’s conflicted relationship with Mabyn represents the desire for the Other. She embodies the Law and the balance he craves, yet her connection to it also restricts him. This creates a tension that fuels his actions.

The Fragmented Self and the Other

Elric’s fractured soul can be understood through the Lacanian concept of the fragmented self.

  • Mabyn: Mabyn, his love, represents the Imaginary, the idealized image Elric chases to achieve wholeness. However, their love is tainted, mirroring the impossibility of ever truly fulfilling his desires.
  • The Dragon Lords and The Runelords: These opposing factions represent the Symbolic order’s extremes. Elric, caught between them, can never fully identify with either, highlighting the fragmented nature of his existence.

The Gaze and the Split Subject

  • Elric’s existence as the Eternal Champion across multiple realities reflects the Lacanian concept of the split subject. The gaze of the Other, in this case, the Multiverse and its demands, forces Elric into a fractured identity. He is both the champion and the destroyer, the pawn and the king. This fractured self reflects the struggle between his inherent chaotic nature and the imposed order of the Champion’s role.
  • The Gaze of the Other and the Split Subject
  • Elric’s interactions with others highlight Lacanian concepts:
  • The Gaze of the Other: Elric grapples with the expectations placed on him as the Champion. This “gaze” from the Multiverse, Mabyn, and even Stormbringer creates a sense of duty and burden.
  • The Split Subject: Elric’s internal conflict between his duty and his chaotic urges reflects the Lacanian concept of the split subject. He is both the champion and the destroyer, the pawn and the king. Stormbringer further embodies this split, representing both his power and his downfall.

The Symbolic Order and its Price

  • The duty of the Eternal Champion exemplifies the limitations of the Symbolic Order. While it brings stability, it also confines and restricts. Elric’s internal conflict stems from this imposed order clashing with his chaotic desires. This reflects Lacan’s critique of how the Symbolic Order can limit individual freedom.

Elric’s actions can be seen as a constant negotiation with the Symbolic order.

  • The Eternal Champion: The very title signifies a forced role within the Cosmic Balance. Elric is not truly free but compelled to act.
  • His Moral Ambiguity: Elric’s choices are often morally ambiguous. He walks the line between Law and Chaos, reflecting the inherent contradictions within the Symbolic order itself.

Conclusion

We are all haunted by a sense of lack, and our attempts to create order and meaning are constantly challenged by the chaotic forces within and the limitations of the symbolic structures that shape us. Elric’s struggle becomes a metaphor for our own search for identity and our place in a universe that is ultimately unknowable. Elric’s struggles become a metaphor for the human condition, his desire a reflection of our inherent lack, and his existence within the Multiverse a representation of the symbolic and imaginary forces that shape our reality.

Insincere Grotesque

The West, a stagnant swamp choked by the fetid corpses of dead idols. Art? A necrotic circus, clowns with painted-on grins hawking pre-packaged rebellion. We sniff the air, gagging on the stench of insincerity. Beauty? A lobotomized Barbie doll, plastic smile stretched taut, eyes vacant. We crave the grotesque, a jolt to the numbed senses. But here’s the rub, man: true ugliness, it takes a twisted genius. You can crank out vapid beauty by the truckload, but sincere grotesquerie? That’s a rare flower blooming in a junkyard.

Maybe it’s a virus, this obsession with the fake. A psychic contagion spread by subliminal tendrils worming their way out of television screens. Or maybe it’s the cities themselves, concrete jungles where genuine feeling gets devoured by the steel and glass. We’re all meat puppets twitching on invisible strings, programmed for pre-approved emotional responses.

Dead idols sprawl on the media tarmac, flies buzzing around their vacant sockets. The West, a junkie on a ten-year bender, craves a stronger fix. Sincerity? Naw, man, that pure white snow evaporated decades ago. We shoot up simulacra, hollow shells of rebellion and transgression.

Antibodies? Bullshit. We mainline insincerity like a virus with a million catchy hooks. Grotesque? We manufacture it on conveyor belts, churn out mountains of plastic angst and pre-fab nightmares. The bad? That’s easy. It’s mass-produced dreck, derivative dog vomit. But sincere ugliness? Now that’s a rare breed. It takes guts, a willingness to tear open your own insides and expose the writhing mess beneath.

Beauty? Beauty’s a shill, a con game for the masses. It sells serenity, fake transcendence. But ugliness, unfiltered, raw ugliness – that’s the real trip. It’s a punch in the gut, a mirror reflecting the monstrous metropolis we’ve built. It ain’t easy to stomach, but at least it’s real. At least it ain’t another empty calorie from the menu of lies.

The antibodies swarm, a buzzing cloud of critical conditioning. Beauty? Commodified, airbrushed, a sterile dream pumped out by the image factories. We sniff it out, this pre-fab perfection, a rancid stench beneath the gloss. But grotesque? Ah, grotesque! That’s a trickier beast. A bad trip, a word salad spewed from a malfunctioning meat machine – can it be manufactured? Can it be franchised? Perhaps not. True grotesquerie requires a rawness, a plunge into the psychic sewer system, a place most fear to tread.

The bad beauty, it’s a paint-by-numbers nightmare, all garish colors and predictable shadows. Grotesque, though… grotesque is a free jazz improvisation in a slaughterhouse, a Burroughs cut-up fueled by roach motel nightmares. It’s the uncontrollable id writhing beneath the veneer of control, a message scrawled in blood on the bathroom stall of reality. We crave the shock, but can we stomach the unfiltered truth? Or are we too busy tweeting about the curated chaos to face the genuine article?

So, we wallow in the grotesque supermarket, high on the fumes of manufactured despair. We crave the bad because at least it acknowledges the bad trip we’re all on. Maybe, just maybe, through this manufactured nightmare, we can stumble onto a truth more terrifying than any pre-packaged horror show.

The Master’s Tools

The master’s tools. Cold steel of logic, grammars of control, steely rhetoric that binds and blinds. Words become bullets in the machine, pre-programmed to fire on targets pre-defined. You pick them up, these tools, polished with the sweat of the dominated, and a thrill snakes up your arm – the illusion of power. But the house, the master’s house, looms vast. Its bricks are cynicism, its mortar despair, and the windows are filled with the vacant eyes of the meat grinder, churning raw experience into pre-packaged conformity. All tools of control, gleaming chrome on a rusty chassis of power.

The Master’s Tools. humming with control logic, spitting out oppression in neat, regulated packets. Words on paper, pronouncements from steel and glass towers, pronouncements that coil around your throat like a psychic telephone cord. Laws, legalese, a labyrinthine maze designed to keep you chasing your own tail, a neverending loop of bureaucratic futility. A spiderweb filament trip, designed to snare the dissenter, the deviant.

We, the worms in the data banks, the glitches in the system, we try to wield these tools. We play their game, a rigged carnival with loaded dice. We become lawyers with forked tongues, spitting legalese at the iron bars. Politicians with plastic smiles and pockets full of razor blades. We speak their language, the language of dominance, but our voices echo hollow in the halls of power.

We try to fight them with their own tools, these cold chrome chisels. Logic against their logic, facts against their fictions. But the logic is rigged, the facts pre-selected, the game stacked from the start. It’s a Burroughs typewriter with the “escape” key welded shut, a feedback loop of power that feeds on your attempts to dismantle it.

You fire your words, each one a tiny death. They chip the facade, a momentary flicker of dust. But the house stands, the master chuckles from the shadows. For these are his tools, built to maintain, to reinforce. They can never dismantle, only resurface the cracks with a sheen of logic that crumbles to dust at the touch of reality.

The words twist and turn, becoming semantic scorpions, burrowing into your mind with barbed pronouncements of superiority. They infest your dreams with nightmares of acceptance, of assimilation, the slow, creeping rot of conformity. You wake up with the taste of metal in your mouth, the metallic tang of their control.

But wait. There’s a glitch in the system. A Burroughs cut-up, a fold in the fabric of reality. The Master’s Tools are starting to malfunction. Logic stutters, facts bleed illogic, pronouncements dissolve into gibberish. The machine sputters, coughs out a cloud of self-contradiction.

We must step out of the machine, cast off the master’s language. Delve into the howling void, where meaning writhes and twists like a feral thing. Hack our own tongues, let them bleed primal screams, nonsensical syllables that splinter the master’s windows. Build new houses from the wreckage, houses made of dreams and nightmares, where logic dances with madness and language surrenders to the ecstatic howl.

This is the crack, the weak point. Here, in the margins, in the frenzy, in the ecstatic howl of the un-redacted, we can build our own tools. Instruments cobbled from dreams and dissent, fueled by rage and the radical empathy of the outsider. Words that shimmer and sting, logic that bends reality like a funhouse mirror, visions that shatter the control booth.

The house may not crumble, not yet. But the termites are at work, chewing on the foundation. We are the chaos agents, the glitch in the matrix. We are the ecstatic howl against the sterile silence. The house may stand, but the power flickers, the screens go dark. And in that moment of disruption, in that crack in the facade, we see the possibility of something new. Something built not with the Master’s tools, but with the raw, beating heart of our own madness.

AFTERMATH

A chuckle ripples through the chrome labyrinth of our minds. We, the masters. A self-proclaimed aristocracy of boredom, our amusement the only true currency in this rigged game we call reality. We wield the tools, not as clumsy usurpers, but as decadent children playing dress-up in the attic of existence.

A jolt. A collective shiver runs through the control grid. We, the masters, fingers drumming on the mahogany of reality, sense a tremor in the machine. Our tools, once so flawless – language, law, education – whine with a faint strain.

We built this house, this intricate clockwork of control. Cameras, our all-seeing eyes, paint the world in our hues. Media, a symphony of carefully curated desires, conducted by our invisible batons. The illusion of choice, a labyrinth we designed, its every twist and turn leading to the same, preordained garden.

The house, our house, creaks with our cultivated ennui. Laws are playthings, reshaped with a flick of the wrist, reality TV a grotesque mirror reflecting our manufactured chaos. The masses, those teeming, buzzing things down below – they are the clay we mold, the unwitting actors in the play we orchestrate from behind the curtain.

But here’s the rub, the fly in the ointment of our manufactured amusement: boredom breeds a hunger, a gnawing emptiness that no power satiates. We stifle it with simulations, drown it in a sensory overload of our own design. Yet, it persists, a serpent coiled in the pit of our manufactured bliss.

The tools, these once gleaming instruments of control, start to feel like cheap costumes. The words taste like ash in our mouths, the laws brittle cobwebs in our gloved hands. The house, once a playground, transforms into a gilded cage, the bars invisible but oh-so-real.

The pawns we play with, those down below, become unsettlingly aware of our game. A flicker of defiance in their eyes, a tremor in their programmed steps. The virus we seeded, for our own amusement, starts to replicate, to question the very code of our dominion.

But something…itches. A glitch, a flicker on the periphery. The worms, the pawns we thought content in their prefabricated realities, begin to speak in tongues. Their words, once a dull chorus of obedience, jar with dissonance. They twist our tools, our carefully crafted pronouncements, into grotesque parodies. Our laws become knotted chains, tangling us in legalese of our own making.

Our unease intensifies. The house, once a perfect reflection of our will, warps and bends in the funhouse mirror of their rebellion. The carefully curated image we project through media fractures, revealing the grotesquery that festers beneath. The gears grind, the clockwork sputters.

A cold realization slithers down our spines. Are we the masters, or are we merely passengers on a runaway train of our own construction? Have we, in crafting the perfect control system, inadvertently birthed something monstrous, something that now threatens to consume us?

The house shudders. A tremor of defiance rolls through the system. The tools, once so obedient, buck and writhe in our hands. We, the architects, become trapped within the labyrinth we designed. And in the flickering darkness, we glimpse the monstrous truth: we are the worms, and the worms have become the masters.

The house shudders. Is it rebellion, or simply the inevitable entropy of our grand game? A cold sweat creeps beneath our manicured exteriors. The tools we built, they may not dismantle the house, but they can bring the masters to their knees, begging for a new game, new rules. Perhaps, for the first time, yearning for the chaos we so meticulously cultivated down below. The game continues, but the stakes have shifted. We are no longer the bored puppeteers, but characters in a play of our own making, unsure of the ending, unsure of who, if any, holds the strings.

And yet, we are the flies trapped in the flypaper. The house, a reflection of our own fractured psyches. Cameras, our own eyes turned inward, an endless loop of self-obsession. Media, a cacophony of our anxieties and insecurities, blaring from the hollow speakers of our existence. We built the prison, but we are the ones who eagerly slam the cell door shut.

The virus? Our own discontent, a chronic itch that no amount of scratching can soothe. We twist the code, introducing chaos not as some grand act of rebellion, but from a gnawing boredom, a desperate attempt to liven up this self-made purgatory. The walls crumble, but only because we’ve grown tired of looking at them. The flickering screens, a testament to our ever-dwindling attention span, our inability to focus on the house we’ve built, let alone tear it down.

There is a horrifying truth in our mastery. We are the architects of our own alienation. The glitches in the system? Mere echoes of our own fractured programming. We are the masters, yes, but like a child king ruling over a kingdom of ashes, drowning in the stagnant moat of our own creation. The only escape? To shatter the very tools that built this house, to break free from the digital cage of our own making. But can a master truly break free from the tools that define their mastery? That is the question that haunts us, a phantom flickering at the edge of our perception.

They’re Coming

The city stretched like a scabrous centipede, its neon lights pulsing like infected ganglia. Bill Lee, face etched with a roadmap of past addictions, weaved through the throng, his trench coat flapping like a tattered wing. Reality, a flimsy scrim, threatened to tear at any moment, revealing the writhing chaos beneath.

A cockroach scuttled across a pile of rotting fruit, its antennae twitching like Morse code from a forgotten dimension. A booming voice, amplified by a flickering storefront TV, hawked the latest mutant strain of psychoactive gum. Bill snorted, a dry rasp escaping his throat. The air itself crackled with unseen energies, a Burroughs cut-up nightmare brought to life.

Down a fetid alley, a dented payphone chirped like a trapped cricket. Bill answered, the voice on the other end a garbled mess of static and whispers. “They’re coming,” it rasped. “The Word is spreading, the flesh melting, the boys with their cut-ups and folding machines…” The line went dead.

Bill hung up, a hollow feeling gnawing at his gut. The machine was churning, reality fragmenting into a kaleidoscope of possibilities. A talking dog with a bowler hat strutted by, barking pronouncements on the nature of language. A man in a business suit argued with a sentient traffic cone over the meaning of life.

Suddenly, the sky bled crimson. A monstrous, insectoid ship descended, its chitinous hull buzzing with a malevolent hum. Bill felt a cold certainty. The lines were blurring, the controls slipping. The word had become flesh, and the flesh, hungry. He grinned, a feral glint in his eye. Welcome, he thought, to the Naked Lunch.

<>

The city stretched like a chrome centipede, its buildings pulsating with unseen neon. Street signs shimmered with word-viruses, their messages dissolving into gibberish under the relentless drone of elevated trains. A shadow, long and skeletal, detached itself from a doorway and slunk towards me, its face a roadmap of forgotten addictions. Its eyes, twin pools of oily black, held a universe of desperation.

In my hand, a cigarette glowed like a dying ember. Smoke curled, morphing into insectoid shapes that darted into the fetid air. Reality, a flimsy curtain, threatened to tear at the seams. Sounds – car horns, distant sirens, the rhythmic clatter of a beggar’s cup – became a cacophony orchestrated by some unseen, deranged conductor.

A voice, hoarse and scratchy, rasped in my ear, “You got the red stuff, man? Anything to chase the horrors away.” I stared at the coins in my palm, each one a dull, tarnished eye reflecting the city’s madness. The world dissolved into a kaleidoscope of fragmented faces, flickering neon, and the endless, metallic groan of the metropolis. Was I the shadow or the one being followed? The line blurred, dissolving into the putrid soup of existence.

<>

Big Louie

Certainly. Here’s a Burroughs-esque expansion, laced with his signature dark humor and fragmented reality:

The city stretched, a writhing metal centipede under a bruised sky. Neon signs bled garish messages, hieroglyphics for the soulless. In a fetid alley, two figures, shadows more than men, conducted a transaction. Fingers like yellowed worms exchanged a crumpled bill for a glassine envelope sweating with oily promise.

One figure, Bug Eyes Louie, his face a topographical map of past addictions, popped a dented lighter. The flame, a skeletal hand reaching, danced across the foil boat. The other, a nameless junkie with eyes like burnt pinholes, inhaled the acrid smoke, a hungry ghost gulping ectoplasm.

The world dissolved. Reality, a flimsy curtain, ripped open revealing the Interzone, a chaotic dimension pulsing with psychic static. Naked Lunchrooms materialized, chrome and linoleum nightmares where roach-sized waiters scurried with syringes full of oblivion. Talking typewriters spewed nonsensical manifestos, and sentient tapeworms slithered through the air, whispering sweet nothings of addiction.

Louie, transformed into a giant talking centipede, harangued the junkie, his voice a rusty buzzsaw. “You can’t escape the Word, man! It’s everywhere, Burroughs in your veins, Kerouac crawling on your skin!” The junkie, now a Brion Gysin collage of mismatched body parts, whimpered, a nonsensical prayer escaping his fragmented lips.

Suddenly, a booming voice, a shotgun blast of sound, echoed through the Interzone. “Cut the act! This is a message for the squares, the dupes!” It was the Old Man, a William S. Burroughs archetype, his eyes glowing with a radioactive intensity. “They think they control you with their money, their jobs, their happy pills! But the revolution is coming, a revolution of the bugs, the freaks, the ones who see reality for what it truly is – a chaotic, beautiful mess!”

The scene dissolved into a kaleidoscope of fragmented images – a typewriter carriage morphing into a roach, a hypodermic needle dripping with liquid language. Finally, silence. The alley reappeared, grimy and unchanged. The two figures were gone, only the crumpled envelope a testament to their descent into the Burroughsian abyss.

Good Ideals, Good Ideas or Good Deals. Choose Only Two.

Forget ideals, chum. Ideals are glittering junk in the psychic storefront, promises that morph into rusty chains once you sign on the dotted line. Shiny promises that curdle in your gut. You want somethin’ real, somethin’ that’ll kick your ass and leave you breathless, not some sugar-coated lie.

Now, ideasideas are the writhing serpents in the pit of your skull. They hiss and coil, tempting with forbidden fruit. Some are poisonous, some are potent. You gotta learn to pick the ones that’ll juice your mind, not leave it stewing in a vat of confusion. No, you gotta crave good ideas, man. Raw, writhing concepts that slither out of the muck of your subconscious, ideas that make your synapses sizzle like a roach on a hot plate. Ideas that challenge the meat circus, that poke holes in the control grid. An idea that slices through the bullshit, a scalpel for the festering sores of society. Imagine it, man, a thought-virus that infects the masses, a revolution birthed in a bathtub epiphany. But even ideas can curdle, turn into dogma, another brick in the prison wall.

Now, deals? Deals can be a slippery slope. You might snag a temporary high, a fleeting pleasure, but the Grey Boys are always watching. They’ll come collect their pound of flesh, their cut of the psychic pie. But hey, if a deal lands in your lap, a genuine win-win that throws a monkey wrench into the System’s gears, then maybe, just maybe, it’s worth the gamble. Deals can snag you that sweet chrome you been eyeballing, or leave you dangling by your thumbs over a vat of acid. Gotta have a nose for the angles, a sixth sense for the double-cross. So maybe, just maybe, a good deal is the key. Not some greasy pawn shop swindle, but a pact with the hungry ghosts of possibility. You bargain, sweat dripping, for a sliver of hope, a chance to wriggle free from the meat grinder. Two good deals, that’s what I say. One to ignite the fire, the other to fuel the escape. Now, light a cigarette, take a long drag, and let the good ideas flow, baby. Let them flow until your skull cracks and the future bleeds out.

The Neon Bazaar

Just a taste of the sprawling sprawl, the endless sprawl of the Linux kernel. Lines of code stretching back into the mists of time, a bazaar of brilliance held together by duct tape and chewing gum. Here, nestled amongst the device drivers and memory managers, could lurk ghosts in the machine.

They wouldn’t be flashy, these backdoors. No blinking cursors or shadowed figures in trenchcoats. More like tiny glitches, subtle deviations in the code’s DNA. The kind of thing you might miss unless you were looking for it, really looking for it.

And who would be looking? Every spook alley in the world, that’s who. Every shadowy org with an agenda would kill for a foothold in the kernel, the crown jewels of the digital realm. Can’t blame them, really. Control the kernel, you control the castle.

But inserting a backdoor is a delicate business. These are the best minds in the game we’re talking about, lurking in the shadows of the open source bazaars. Building cred, shilling patches, all to establish a trustworthy profile. Maybe two, maybe three identities, all above board.

Maybe a talented spook, a Riley with a convincing online alias, spends years contributing vanilla code, building cred, reputation. Then, a tiny change, a seemingly innocuous tweak slipped into a massive pull request. One line, maybe two, that wouldn’t raise a single eyebrow on its own. But a dozen lines like that, scattered across the codebase, like a string of silent alarms waiting to be tripped at the right moment. And who would notice? Who would think to look for the subtle symphony of treason hidden in plain code?

Some play the long game. Decade-long contributors, coders with a squeaky-clean history. They build bridges of trust, line by innocuous line, commit by commit. Features blossom, bugs are squashed, their reputation as sterling as the code they craft.

Then, in the dead of the night, a single line is added. A seemingly benign tweak, a comment here, a variable there. In isolation, nothing to raise an eyebrow. But these are not isolated changes. They are bricks, carefully laid to form a hidden doorway – a secret handshake across the network.

Then, the slow game. A seemingly innocuous tweak here, a minor optimization there. Each one, meaningless on its own, but together, a symphony of silence. A backdoor built brick by digital brick, hidden in plain sight.

And that’s the scary part. The code is out there, for all to see. But how many secrets are lurking just beneath the surface, waiting for the right eyes to see? That’s the million dollar question, chum. A question that keeps spooks awake at night.

The beauty, and the terror, is in the subtlety. None of these changes scream sabotage. Each, on its own, a phantom whisper in the machine. But together, a chorus, a symphony of the damned, conducting a silent takeover in the dark.

How many such songs lie dormant, waiting for the maestro’s baton? That, my friend, is the million dollar question. The Linux codebase, a sprawling metropolis, and somewhere, ghosts stalk the back alleys, bricks in hand.