#Recursive Colonialism

[yellowmanula]

popatrz algorytmie, wychodzę ci naprzeciw, karm się moimi reakcjami, szerami, moimi bańkami, moimi afektami, wciąż jest język który ja też mogę podpatrywać u ciebie.

[garadinervi]

Aarati Akkapeddi, Rituals of Recursion, (website, letterpress, performance), 2024

Exhibition: Aarati Akkapeddi: 'Rituals of Recursion', Curated by Chaitanya Harshita Nedunuri Kahn, Spill 180, Brooklyn, NY, January 11-25, 2025

Group Exhibition: The Space Between Words: Other Ways of Reading, Curated by Camilo Otero, Center for Book Arts, New York, NY, June 5 – August 30, 2025

«I developed a computer program that allows me to translate text into Kolam designs. Kolam (in Tamil) or Muggu (Telugu) is a traditional art form from South India. Kolams are auspicious drawings on the floor (usually at the threshold of the home) using rice flour. Kolams are traditionally made by women and created before sunrise. They comprise mathematically complex patterns that feature continuous intertwined lines. To encode text into Kolam designs, I first translate each character into eight-digit binary codes (made from only 0s and 1s). I then use an algorithm to map this translation onto a diamond-shaped matrix of dots. The algorithm moves top to bottom and left to right, drawing loops on each dot that correspond with either 0 or 1 according to the binary code translation of the text. The algorithm connects these loops, making sure to never connect loops associated with "0" to those associated with "1". The center of the matrix contains blank padding space, allowing the entire pattern to be distributed evenly on the matrix, preserving the perfect square/diamond shape. I started working with kolams because I wanted to translate my grandmother's name, Swarajyalaxmi, into a kolam as part of a reclamation of a mourning ritual after her passing in 2022. My family mourned my grandmother by invoking three generations following a patriarchal line (my grandmother, her mother-in-law, and her mother-in-law's mother-in-law). In contrast, I worked matrilineally, creating three kolams representing Swarajyalaxmi, Kameswaramma (her mother), and Rajyalaxmi (her grandmother). I draw the kolams signifying their names while simultaneously playing audio from an interview with her a month before she passed away at age 101. The audio shows how my grandmother's name signifies independence in the colonial context, and the interview also highlights her resilience in the face of patriarchal oppressions such as being married at age twelve. In this series, I expand on this work by incorporating letterpress printed works created using a set of 3D-printed kolam monotype blocks. There are kolams for my grandmother, her mother, and her grandmother but I also include letterpress prints that extend the process beyond familial connections. There are kolams commissioned by friends honoring their loved ones, kolams honoring martyrs, specific places, and some that feature messages of resilience and resistance. In these works, I see the act of translation as a ritual of reverence. invited all to spend time with each kolam and decode its meaning using kolam.codes. On this website, visitors could also encrypt new kolams.»

At Center for Book Arts

At Spill 180

Performance at Spill 180

At Spill 180

«In addition to the artwork, the Spill 180 exhibition also featured a "reading nook" with a zine of Telugu poetry curated by The Telugu Archive (Sai Priya Kodidala). The poems touch on themes of patriarchy, resistance, and the ways women have shared histories through mediums outside of traditional academia (i.e. song, clothing, kolam/muggulu). Sai Priya Kodidala is an independent writer and researcher from Hyderabad, India focusing on the intersection of Telugu literature, politics, history and art. The Telugu Archive traces the rich socio-political history of resistance, civil rights and revolutionary politics. You can view the zine online here.»

Reading Nook at Spill 180

[womenaremypriority]

Thinking about how sexual violence against women has reached even Antarctica, the articles about how being so isolated has affected what happened to them. And then thinking about how Elon Musk allegedly plans to have colonies on the moon and mars soon enough. Considering his reputation, I have doubts over whether or not that will happen- but can you imagine? Can you imagine if a group of people were sent to a whole different planet, how little recurse you’d have if something happened to you? The isolation? The hopelessness? Who will be the first women raped on mars? Am I just being too pessimistic? How far can we spread this violence, after every inch of the earth has been covered in it?

[the-catch-center]

SPATIOTEMPORAL CATCH CENTER (SCC) DOSSIER: INTERCEPTION REPORT 77-Ω4-Δ13

SUBJECT FILE: Temporal Deviant Class-IX (Unauthorized Identity Ascension & Market Path Manipulation) INTERCEPT ID: TD-922-5x | CODE NAME: “Cicada Orchid” APPREHENSION STATUS: Successful Temporal Arrest, Mid-Jump Interception REASSIGNMENT PHASE: Stage 3 Conversion Complete — FULL IDENTITY LOCK DATE OF INTERCEPTION: March 2nd, 2025 (Gregorian), during Transition Protocol Execution to 2076 FORCED TEMPORAL REINTEGRATION DATE: June 17th, 1956

I. ORIGINAL IDENTITY – [PRIME SELF]

Full Name (Original, Earth-2025 Reality): Landon Creed Marlowe Chronological Age at Apprehension: 29 years Nationality: Neo-Continental (Post-Treaty North America) Biological Condition: Augmented Homo Sapiens – Class 2 Physical Stats at Intercept:

Height: 6’4”

Weight: 243 lbs

Body Fat: 2.1%

Neural Rewiring Index: 87%

Emotional Dampening Threshold: Fully Suppressed

Verbal Influence Score: 97/100 (Simulated Charisma Layer active)

Psychological Profile: Landon Marlowe was a prototype of hypercapitalist self-creation. Having abandoned all conventional morality by age 17, he immersed himself in data markets, psycho-linguistic mimicry, and somatic enhancement routines. A hybrid of postmodern narcissism and cybernetic ambition, he believed history should be rewritten not through war, but through wealth recursion—self-generating economic monopolies that spanned both physical and meta-market layers. By 2025, Marlowe had begun the Vaultframe Project: a forbidden consciousness routing protocol allowing a subject to leap across timelines and self-modify to fit ideal environmental conditions.

He had already initiated Stage 1 of the Phase Ascension:

Target Year: 2076 Final Form Name: Cael Axiom Dominion

II. TARGET FORM – [PROHIBITED FUTURE IDENTITY]

Designated Name: Cael Axiom Dominion Temporal Anchor Year: 2076–2120 (Planned) Occupation/Status: Centralized Financial Apex Authority (Unofficial title: “God of the Grid”) Intended Specifications:

Height: 6’8”

Skin: Synthetic/Epidermech Weave (Reflective, Gleaming Finish)

Mind: Hybridized Neuro-Organic Substrate, 3-layered Consciousness Stack

Vision: Perfect (Microscopic + Ultraviolet Layer)

Muscle: Fully Synthetic Carbon-Tension Architecture

Voice: Dynamically Modeled for Maximum Compliance Induction

Personality: Pure calculated utility — no empathy, full response modulation

Psychological Construction: Modeled on a fusion of 21st-century crypto barons, colonial magnates, and AI-governance ethic loopholes. His projected behavior matrix would’ve allowed him to overwrite traditional economic cycles, insert himself into every transaction on the New Continental Grid, and displace global markets into dependence loops. He would have achieved Immortality via Economic Indispensability by 2085.

[OPERATOR'S NOTE – TECHNICIAN LYDIA VOLSTROM, FILE LEAD]

"He thought he was the evolutionary end of capital. We've seen dozens like him — grim-faced tech prophets dreaming of godhood, all forged in the same factory-line delusion that intelligence and optimization should rewrite morality. His 'Cael Dominion' persona was practically masturbatory — gleaming muscle, perfect diction, deathless control. The problem with arrogance across time is that we always arrive faster. We waited at his jumpgate exit vector like hounds in a vineyard. Now he will die quietly, shelving dusty books in wool slacks while children giggle at his shoes."

III. REWRITTEN FORM – [REASSIGNED TIMELINE IDENTITY]

Permanent Designation (1956 Reality): Harlan Joseph Whittemore Date of Birth (Backwritten): March 19th, 1885 Current Age: 71 years (Biological and Perceived) Location: Greystone Hollow, Indiana – Population 812 Occupation: Head Librarian, Greystone Municipal Library Known As: “Old Mr. Whittemore” / “Library Santa” / “Harlan the Historian”

Biological Recomposition Report:

Height: 6’2” (slightly stooped)

Weight: 224 lbs

Body Type: Large-framed, soft-muscled, slightly arthritic

Beard: Full, white, flowing to chest length — maintained with gentle cedar oil

Hair: Long, silver-white, brushed back, unkempt at the sides

Skin: Tanned, deeply lined, blotched by sun exposure and age

Eyebrows: Dense, low, expressive

Feet: Size 28EE – institutionally branded biometrics for deviant tracking

Shoes: Custom brown orthotic leather shoes with stretch bulging

Hands: Broad, aged, veined, arthritic knuckles

Glasses: Oversized horn-rimmed, 1950s prescription style

Wardrobe:

High-waisted wool trousers (charcoal gray)

Thick brown suspenders

Faded plaid flannel shirt, tucked in neatly

Scuffed leather shoes (notable bulge around toes due to foot size)

IV. MENTAL & SOCIETAL RE-IMPRINT

Primary Personality Traits (Post-Warp):

Kind-hearted, emotionally patient

Gentle-voiced, soft-spoken, slightly slow in speech

Deeply enjoys classical literature, gardening, and children’s laughter

Feels “he’s always been this way”

Occasionally hums jazz under his breath while shelving books

Writes slow, thoughtful letters to estranged family (fabricated)

Routine:

Opens library at 8AM sharp

Catalogues local donations

Reads to children every Wednesday

Tends a small rose garden behind the building

Engages in local history discussions with town elders

Walks home slowly with a leather satchel and a cane

[OPERATOR’S NOTE – FIELD ADJUSTER INGRID PAZE]

"Watching Marlowe become Harlan was like watching a lion remember it's a housecat. I’ve never seen a posture break so beautifully. He twitched at first — his back still tried to square itself like the predator he was. But the warp wore him down. The spine bent. The voice thickened. By the time his hands were fumbling the spines of leather-bound encyclopedias, he was gone. I almost felt bad when the first child ran up and said, ‘Santa?’ He smiled. Like it made sense. Like it was the right name."

V. DEATH RECORD

Date of Death: October 21, 1961 Cause: Heart failure while trimming rose bushes behind Greystone Library

He was buried in a town he never technically existed in, beside a wife who never lived. His obituary described him as “a man of kindness, wisdom, and humility — who asked for nothing and gave more than most ever know.” No one will remember that he once sought to become Cael Axiom Dominion.

[FINAL NOTE – SENIOR INTERCEPTOR V. CALDER]

"Marlowe played the long game, but his crime was arrogance. You can stack capital, sculpt the body, and forge a god’s name — but time always wins. He wanted to be immortal. Now he’ll live only in the margins of children’s drawings, mistaken for Santa, fading like a dog-eared library card. Perfect."

[funktechnisch]

thoughts about viktor acting "out of character" in act ii

spoilers below!

the hexcore is clearly sentient in some form. i'm not a fan of cult jesus viktor, but i think the reason he feels so out of character is... intentional?

the first time he tries to go against it, it takes away the ability to walk it gave him back. when he tries to destroy it, it kills sky. it's clearly "alive" enough to fight back, but i think it's alive in the way that a virus is alive.

i think beyond just influencing viktor and dampening his emotions after the hexcore fuses with him, i think it's also almost like a parasite taking over a host body. the way viktor talks about "cold", like a "recursive impulse", sounds like the hexcore being in a human body for the first time and experiencing the way neurons communicate things like cold and touch to the brain. i think the hexcore also was speaking moreso than viktor when he said affection held him and jayce together-- whether it was intentional or not, that feels like an observation from an outsider's perspective on why viktor has acted the way he always has around jayce

i also say all of this to say that i think the hexcore knows it can't keep punishing viktor to get what it wants. i think it's using viktor's idealized version of zaun, one that has all the resources it needs and a cure for things like shimmer's side effects as bait for viktor. it's giving him the ability to do the things he's always wanted to use hextech for, and i personally think it's using sky as a manifestation to persuade and push him to keep going even when he might stop.

i think the hexcore, like a virus, needs organic matter to grow and expand. i don't know if arcane is going to hand wave away physics, but if it doesn't, matter and energy can't be made or destroyed. you can only covert one to the other; the hexcore may not be able to grow without a host of some kind. it "reached out" to viktor's blood, and it sapped the life from the houseplant viktor tested it on.

i also think it's acting like a virus because of the way it manifests in the people viktor cures. viruses don't have the capability to reproduce by themselves and require a host to replicate their dna and continue to persist as a species. i think it's pretty clear that whatever viktor is doing to heal people is altering them permanently, and to me, it reads like a change in their dna-- just like how some viruses permanently alter their hosts' dna! the herald's followers also all wither away and die once the hexcore is destroyed by jayce-- it's like a weird mix of a colony organism like a mushroom and a virus.

there's also a few aesthetic reasons i think that too. piltover is clearly inspired by art deco, which is a movement that emphasized beauty in technological progress and modernity. it's all mechanical, man-made, sleek, and symmetrical. art nouveau, on the other hand, emphasizes natural forms and the "flow" of structures found in nature. viktor's entire cult compound looks like art nouveau threw up on clusters of cells. and on top of that, there are splotches of the same pattern the hexcore causes inside of the hexgate and on the cog viktor kept (on one side). there's a clear distinction between that compound in the heart of zaun that feels like an alien organism in stained glass and the man-made beauty of piltover

(left image from here, right image from here)

also from a design standpoint, the way the hexcore was designed feels like the head of a bacteriophage. it's a cluster of runes holding the actual arcane whatever-the-hell-this-is inside, just like how the head of a bacteriophage is a protein shell holding in the genetic material

(left image from this site, bottom right image from this paper)

my hope and what i think ultimately is going to happen in act 3 is that singed is going to bring viktor back as the machine herald. the scene in s1 with the machine herald tarot-type card also has the death card underneath it, and i'm hoping viktor regains that sense of self and agency without the hexcore's influence (i have to assume all of the parts of him that were affected by it will be replaced by metal). the first part is all but guaranteed with the way singed spoke of him and vander/warwick (that viktor had to survive no matter what, calling back to how he treated rio when viktor was a kid)

otherwise if jesus moses cult viktor is just how he is now i'm going to become a teemo main

edit// two of the paragraphs got eaten when i copied the images over

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Disentangling decolonization from the impulse to make it a species of a larger struggle, Tuck and Yang differentiate between an “indigenous politics” (which would integrate land with life) and a “western doctrine of liberation” (instrumentalising land for life). The prioritisation of land, however, problematises the efficacy of the distinction for, as Jared Sexton (2014) addresses, regardless of the approach to land (Indigenous or otherwise), the issue for critics of settler colonialism remains primarily a “problem of the terms of occupation”:

This frames the question of land as a question of sovereignty, wherein native sovereignty is a pre-condition for or element of the maintenance or renaissance of native ways of relating to the land (Sexton 2014:5).

The danger is that, while admitting “denial of sovereignty imperils native ways of relating”, the configuration of sovereignty as a positive claim to land “does not thereby guarantee this way will be followed” (Sexton 2014:5). Tuck and Yang’s argument subordinates this risk to a problem they see to be much more fundamental and abiding: that recognising life (which becomes a stand-in for symbolisation) may not materialise (and usually actively impedes) the repatriation of land.

To return to the problem of via negativa, Tuck and Yang cannot positively address what Indigenous approaches to land are, without complicating how land is the ground upon which decolonization hinges.  In this way, they succumb to the seduction described by Katherine McKittrick in the epigraph—“the idea that space ‘just is’” (2006:xi). Their critique of metaphor serves as a counterfactual to what they see to be the central problem of (and solution to) settler colonialism— land—even as this single focus undercuts what might differentiate settler sovereignty from native sovereignty. By making metaphor “bad”, Tuck and Yang illustrate a re-investment in sovereignty as an empty vessel, whose substantial difference from property orientations becomes indiscernible, except in the fleeting  accelerationist fantasy later posed by Tuck and McKenzie that “decolonization may be something the land does on its own behalf, even if humans are too deluded or delayed to make their own needed changes” (2015a:xv).

Now, we might side with Tuck and Yang to argue that the focus on land (and land-based articulations of sovereignty, property, and possession that accompany it) is but a strategic response to the violence of settler colonialism itself, that it would open up to considerations of “land and life”. Robert Nichols takes such a tack: while Indigenous scholars who mobilise the language of dispossession for decolonial ends might seem to invest in a prior mode of possession (insofar as dispossession is the retraction of possession), the rhetorical use of “theft of land” is a necessarily recursive attempt to access the peculiar way the settler-colonial project functions to fulfill “not (only) ... the transfer of property, but the transformation into property” (Nichols 2018:14; see also Brown 2013; Coulthard 2016:96).

Colonial dispossession is, in other words, the emergent expression of the property-logic that comes to mark colonial capitalism. Nichols might charge our argument, as he does Sexton’s, with a “dubious line of reasoning”: that of attempting to “catch Indigenous peoples and their allies up on the horns of a familiar dilemma” (Nichols 2018:11). Instead, scholarship should be attuned to how “the supposed circularity of the critique is, in fact, reflective of the recursive logic of dispossession itself, that is, as a mode of property-generating theft” (Nichols 2018:22). As “a unique species of theft for which we do not always have adequate language” (Nichols 2018:14), land-based theft actualises the proprietary system of right to begin with. Colonialism, then, “is not an example to which the concept [of dis/possession] applies, but a context out of which it arose” (Nichols 2018:21; see also Radcliffe 2017). Nichols’s argument echoes Tuck’s, which decidedly persists in using “repatriation” (as opposed to “rematriation”) because the imperfect term reflects “the inadequacy of the English language to describe and facilitate decolonization” (Tuck 2011:35). Inadequate concepts might generate friction, but the resulting “blisters can be drained and the work can still be completed” (Tuck 2011:35). Despite decrying the decolonization metaphor as a dangerously non-material mode of symbolisation, this logic contends that there are nonetheless effective symbolic strategies whose use can draw attention to the limits of the symbolic.

But Tuck and Yang are not interested in critiquing the decolonization metaphor as symptom or strategy. They draw strength from a more metaphysical claim: the positivism professed in the capacity to identify anything at all. This faith, which functions as a sort of love, comes to the fore in Tuck’s recurrent reference to a quote by Fred Moten: “everything I love survives dispossession, and is therefore before dispossession” (quoted in Tuck and Yang 2012:10). Tuck and Yang’s libidinal investment in the precedent of land actually indexes the non-recursivity of dispossession. As indicated by the affirmation of “outside elsewheres” and decolonial forms of life, the object of dispossession (land) is ontologically prior to the agent of dispossession (settlers). Land-based sovereignty thereby ensures that Indigenous people’s positive (even if unstated) claims to land remain undetermined by the settler-colonial regime of property. This is the position from which Tuck and Yang’s political appeal unfolds."

- Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino, "Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”," Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. Vol. 52 No. 3 (2020): 770-771.

[runicmagitek]

Recovery Your PC/Device needs to be repaired The application or operating system couldn't be loaded because a required file is missing or contains errors. Error code: CRITICAL PROCESS DIED You'll need to use recovery tools. If you don't have any installation media (like a disc or USB device), contact your PC administrator or PC/Device manufacturer.

Click Reload This Page to try again Click BSoD to enter Recovery Environment Click Close to shutdown system

A collection of standalone ficlets for @whumptober , featuring alternate scenes and what-if scenarios. Chapter-specific CWs/tags are listed in notes. Individual chapter links listed below.

scan() Miyuki finally comes back online. (Miyuki)

Day 1: race against the clock | search party | panic attack | "If only we could hold on."

firewall() Yuki has learned too much. (Yuki, Aiba)

Day 2: trust issues | "You got away with the crime while the knife's in my back."

memory() Same shit, different lifetimes. (2188!Natsuno, 2188!Yuki, Natsuno, Yuki)

Day 3: set up for failure | "I warned you."

copy() Chihiro isn't alone. (Chihiro x2)

Day 4: hallucinations | sensory deprivation | "You're still alive in my head."

overheat() It was supposed to be a quick research trip. (Tamao, Ei, Iori, Gouto)

Day 5: sun burn | heatstroke | "If my pain will stretch that far."

delimiter() Nenji said he didn't give a shit about his limits. (Tomi, Nenji)

Day 6: not realizing they're injured | unhealthy coping mechanisms | "It's not my blood."

quarantine() The infection reaches the space colony. (2188!Takatoshi, 2188!Izumi, 2188!Ei, 2188!Natsuno)

Day 7: only for emergencies | "It's us or them."

hibernate() The only one way to stop the nightmares. (Shu, Juro, Iori)

Day 8: sleep deprivation | forced to stay awake | "Leave the lights on."

reimage() Ida must bring her back to life. (Ida, Tomi)

Day 9: obsession | broken window | bruises | "Frame me up on the wall, just to keep me out of trouble."

overload() Juro knew the risks when piloting a Sentinel. (Juro)

Day 10: blow to the head | passing out from pain | "I can't think straight."

delete() Ryoko must destroy every trace of him. (Ryoko, Ida, Shu)

Day 11: seeing double | loneliness | "Leave no trace behind, like you don't even exist."

batteryreport() Natsuno can't hold out for much longer. (Natsuno, BJ, Yuki)

Day 12: starvation | "Just a little more."

lock() Everyone was eager to return to the simulation. (Ei)

Day 13: team as a family | familial curse | multiple whumpees | "Death will do us part."

taskkill() He's taking his sweet precious time killing her. (2188!Morimura, 2188!Ei)

Day 14: left for dead | blackmail | "Because I want you to know what it feels like to be haunted."

buffer() Juro is late to dinner. (2188!Megumi, 2188!Juro)

Day 15: childhood trauma | painful hug | moment of clarity | "I did good, right?"

cut() Keitaro pushes himself too far. (Keitaro, Natsuno)

Day 16: necrosis | wound cleaning | "No, I can't feel anything."

missingBIOS() They won the battle, but… (Takatoshi, Tomi, Iori, Gouto)

Day 17: nowhere else to go | shipwrecked | "We had a good run."

chgusr() Megumi will bring back Juro. (Megumi, Juro, Fluffy)

Day 18: revenge | unreliable narrator | loss of identity | "I see what's mine and take it."

reboot() When everything goes dark. (Iori)

Day 19: one way out | "Is there anybody alive out there?"

accept() Miwako can't do this anymore. (Miwako, Iori, Tomi, Gouto)

Day 20: emotional angst | shoulder to cry on | giving permission to die | "It's not your fault."

malware() He refused to go down without a fight. (1la!Takatoshi, Okino)

Day 21: body horror | spirit possession | "Let the bedsheet soak up the tears."

diagnostic() He promised it wouldn't hurt. (Okino, Keitaro)

Day 22: bleeding through bandages | reopening wounds | "Oh that's not good."

shutdown() Everything he did was for her. (Morimura, Izumi)

Day 23: forced choice | public display | broken pedestal | "I'm doing this for you."

recursion() Over 300 loops cause technical difficulties. (Gouto)

Day 24: collapsed building | equipment failure | "I never knew daylight could be so violent."

CAPTCHA() They shouldn't be here. They should be dead. (BJ, 1la!Tamao)

Day 25: surgery | being monitored | "It's for your own good."

cache() She's sick of not knowing, but also of remembering. (Ryoko)

Day 26: nightmares | breakfast table | parting words of regret | "I'm haunted by the lies that I have loved, the actions I have hated."

mute() After a while, Ida just does it for fun. (Izumi, Ida)

Day 27: voiceless | laboratory | "I have no mouth and I must scream."

decrypt() Keitaro discovers Morimura's secret. (Keitaro, Ei - 2188)

Day 28: denial | CCTV | exposure | "They caught me red-handed."

overclock() It's happening again. And again. (Nenji, Tomi, Takatoshi, Okino)

Day 29: fatigue | labyrinth | burnout | "Who said you could rest?"

chkdsk() Natsuno goes missing again. (Natsuno, Keitaro, Yuki)

Day 30: recovery | hospital bed | holding back tears | "What have I done?"

safemode() At least the worst is over. (Tamao)

Day 31: asking for help | making amends | "I'm alive, I'm just not well."

[i3utterflyeffect]

okay so here's the names i'm thinking. Colony titles essentially sum up to their 'original name' and given names are from All That Beckons

Yellow

Colony Title: The Engineer Given Name: Ingenuity's Messenger

Red

Colony Title: The Companion Given Name: Recursive Kindness

Blue

Colony Title: The Alchemist Given Name: Unrivaled Curiosity

Green

Colony Title: The Coordinator Given Name: Incandescent Harmony

also bonus: the other two wild slugcats

Purple goes by 'The Ambassador' at the time of meeting and during their time assisting King, but their original title is actually 'The Aviator' because of the extra skin they use to fly, similarly to flying squirrels or those flying snakes!

King only goes by 'The King'. No one really knows what his original name was-- even Purple doesn't actually know. He refuses to tell anyone his original colony title, probably because of not only his separation from his original Colony, but also because of Gold's death

[kizziahblog]

Emergence and the Architecture of Recursive Peace

Emergence: Where ants, AI, and Bitcoin converge—illustrating the rise of intelligence and trust from recursive interaction. From the Kizziah.Blog AI Bitcoin Recursion Thesis. Inspired by Steven Johnson’s Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software What do ant colonies, urban neighborhoods, neural nets, and Bitcoin have in common? Each is a system built without a…

[shamebate]

Prion Song

I am pleased to report that

The equality act 2010 has been ruled (a decade on)

to protect

Vegan terfs' beliefs

(Though not

the lives of workers

trans or otherwise)

thanks to the open letters and the reports written by those waged from that last twenty in our pockets

For their Important Work, their Service Making, Representative Theses, Tracts and Tomes, video essays and streamed debates

I will be over here

Dragging my tail in the mud

And snacking on bones 

you cant taste the taboos once

youve heated them past 55 degrees.

Their grease limns my lips, hal(l)o(w)-ed sphincter

sometimes i think about

How we are all being shaped into not just

Cogs of industry, 

But interstellar ones

Shiny new colonial subjects 

Reliant on industrial gut flora--

trans liberation means

survival probiotic sponcon spots filmed with bisexual lighting.

The fear in me is beyond anything you can summon up with the gothic horror of the abbatoir 

Stories based on notknowing the slaughter heralded by the field

The rainbow draped notburger winking from a playdough(tm) illustration notmade by any artist 

is worse than any workhouse gruel

the joke is the sanitised cannibal

 wework Saturno devorando a su hijo

Could not have existed without the dropshipped Eat The Rich! lapel pin marketed by the skinny white club twink

Whose hands go straight (lol, lmao) to the keyboard and plink out police dial tones

When they see a spatter of brain

and yet

All of this is dust. rage against the dying of the

Screenlit

graebers flunkies, fisher's protestants

or laugh, for when the floods and fires come

stinking flats will be from where the lotuses spring 

middens forever 

More beauteous and exalted than 

anything spewed from that bleached tower / page / form

tickbox

Tulip schemes of legalists' prestige based on foreswearing the rot 

created by their charnel pits, filled

By their wartradeplay

Folding and folding the same flesh, recursive senescence 

necromasses rise up

[vapourchild]

“Cherríe Moraga in Loving in the War Years (1983) explores the themes of identity when one never possessed the original language, never told the original story, never resided in the harmony of legitimate heterosexuality in the garden of culture, and so cannot base identity on a myth or a fall from innocence and right to natural names, mother’s or father’s….Malinche’s mastery of the conqueror’s language—a violation, an illegitimate production, that allows survival. Moraga’s language is not “whole”; it is self-consciously spliced, a chi - mera of English and Spanish, both conquerors’ languages. But it is this chimeric monster, without claim to an original language before violation, that crafts the erotic, competent, potent identities of women of color. (p. 56)

Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility.” (p. 65)

—Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (1985)

i found this passage striking when i first read it —so much so that i pasted it in my notes app and rediscovered it recently which is why this is currently being written, lol

i love this idea of a lack of origin or a post-origin (non-origin)? it’s a reversal of the Edenic myth of original innocence, where the reversal says instead that there is no Eden to begin with from which we then fall—it is precisely the Fall which PRECEDES and CREATES the Garden from which one falls. the wound comes first, then the unscathed original body is conceptualised in response to the wound. before the wound the uninjured body is simply there, unthought of in any terms of injury or wholeness. i think zizek said something like this in one of his lectures (the hegelian wound, like thats the hardest name ever).

i’m thinking of this in the context of singaporean postcoloniality. i know decolonial is the preferred term in academia now over postcolonial because post- implies an ending and after-the-ending-ness which doesn’t appropriately describe the continued legacy of colonialism in colonised countries. but i actually kind of like the word post-colonial precisely for that sense of pastness & perpetual afterness which i feel distinctly characterises the postcolonial experience. i don’t mean afterness in the sense of an ending, i mean afterness in itself, the concept whose very condition of possibility is its before (after all, afterness can only exist as a concept if it has a before). so instead of suggesting a clean break from coloniality after the last colonial powers withdrew, the word postcolonial to me suggests a perpetual reference to, and being conditioned by, coloniality. far from suggesting a state after the End of Colonialism, the word postcolonial more than anything suggests the continued hauntological recursion of colonialism in colonised countries. whatever state we are in now is always a post-, a post-script, to the original wound of colonisation. (i don’t want to be taken as overly fatalistic and saying that there’s no room for self-determination under the overbearing spectre of colonisation. all i mean is that to think that a total excision of the colonial past from the present has been achieved is naïve.)

anyway for those of us who have never seen or experienced a world before colonisation, those of us born always already fallen from innocence, this post-ness is particularly poignant. our condition and our identity always bears the chimeric cyborg marks of postcoloniality in the sense that we don’t have a unitary self. maybe i’m just speaking for myself here but i always experience a degree of anguish when i get laughed at by the auntie selling coffee when i butcher my kopi order, or when i remember the time i had to repeat “cold war” 7 times to the american guy at the flea market in new york because he couldn’t understand my non-rhotic accent—i feel unrooted, monstrously hybrid, neither here nor there, belonging nowhere; not angmoh enough to be fully angmoh, not asian enough to be fully asian. and even as i speak about coloniality i speak about it in English, the received language of the coloniser (see above quote) in the epistemic frameworks of coloniality (occident/orient dichotomy); that’s just what comes intuitively to me. even as i experience the anguish of yearning for a return to an origin, there is no prospect of return because the origin is non-historical, a-temporal; it’s not the actual precolonial past, it’s a postcolonial imagination of a precolonial past, already infected with the images and ideas of coloniality.

that’s why i found haraway’s manifesto so compelling in its affirmation of cyborg-being, i suppose because it is the only way of being i feel is open to me. and instead of eternally straining towards a phantasmic Eden, i can affirm my fallenness by rejecting the Biblical tendency to stress the superiority of originary unity and explore the discursive possibilities of postcolonial cyborg-being.

“post”-script (hehe): amanda lee koe’s performance lecture A Cyborg Island Manifesto (2022) is a really great reflection on cyborg postcoloniality too i was really lucky to get to see it live it was really epic

[theradicalscrivener]

what happened to Mateo after the race? how is the racing scene reacting to this multiple-growth-spurts change? was he taken to a research station for intense study? actually you said hes the size of a space colony now, let me re-ask. IS he the research station for intense study?

This is a follow-up to Star☆Racer D so if you're curious about what lead to this, you should check that story out first...

[Link to story]

His mid-race growth spurt has caused a lot of uproar not just in the orbital racing community but also in the scientific one. What happened shouldn't even be physically possible.

The growth process has a mixture of factors that determine the end size. Nanomachines definitely help speed the process along, but there's a purely biological factor too. The nanos fuse with the cells which causes the cells to multiply which causes the nanomachines to multiply. It's a sort of exponential recursive function that happens, but there's a finite limit to how big someone can get. The nanos basically force a high level of cellular regeneration. There gets to be a point where the the entirety of the nanos healing powers are going towards maintaining the health of the subjects current size and can no longer sustain additional growth. So to put it another way, someone's end size is a matter of how healthy their cells are and how well they maintain consistency during the multiplication process. If something gets too big, it starts to reach a point where the body's natural healing can no longer maintain the size and so the nanos have to switch from grow mode to stasis mode.

As mentioned in the story, each person reacts to the process differently. Some people get freighter sized schlongs. Some people get dicks that are only a few feet. The smallest racer had a cock that was the size of a motorcycle, and it wasn't uncommon for other races to have like bus-sized schlongs. There were several people that had cocks the size of barges, but even they were far outclassed by Mateo. Think the largest luxury liner known to man. That's how huge Mateo got. His cock dwarfed the entire research center that he was being grown in. He had so thoroughly outsized the projections that they had to literally pull the plug on him before his swelling schlong spilled out from the research campus and started bowling over nearby buildings.

It's still early in the research process, but many scientists believe that this is part of what caused him to grow again once in space. He had never reached the state of homeostasis that most racers hit. His growth had not reached its natural conclusion. He still had a good deal larger that he could have grown. His nanos were just shut down and the growth process forcibly stopped.

Even then, that doesn't account for his current size. He was already the largest racer when starting out. His dick was already over a quarter mile long, but then he grew by orders of magnitude. He went from filling a lane in the raceway to filling the entire race track! This is not a small track! Consider that some of the racers are the size of large vessels. The race track would have to be much wider than the Panama Canal! We're talking easily 500+ meters across at the finish line, and this dude more than doubled that width. The dude's dick was over half a mile wide and well over 2 miles long as it blew past the finish line.

They don't currently have the technology to get him back to earth. Or at least, not safely and definitly not to get him back off the planet. In theory, the nanos should keep him stable enough for reenty, but that's still a cock the size of the dino-obliterating astroid hitting the earth at mach speed. Even an ocean landing would cause flooding in coastal regions hundreds of miles around.

As such, a "temporary" research station has been assembled on his shaft. The energy coursing through his body keeps Mateo in a constant state of arousal, so his dick doesn't deflate, but that doesn't stop the tremors. The scientists have had to adjust to life with near constant earthquakes.

Scientists are at an impasse on what to do with him. One school says they should pump him full of energy and see how big he gets. He clearly didn't finish growing during the last race, and studying his physiology while he grows could help explain how and why he got so huge, but there's a sizeable group of scientists who oppose this idea. After all, they have already been poking and prodding at him and have forced subsequent growths. Each time he grows, the rate doesn't seem to diminish. He doesn't appear to be reaching a max size. This has prompted further debate and further study. Was he always going to get this big? Was he naturally predisposed to seemingly infinite growth? Or is there something with the process of starting and stopping his growth that is causing this.

One school of thought it that everytime they stop his growth before it finishes, he reaches a new "Base" state. He's basically starting the growth process all over again. As mentioned, he never reaches that state where his nanos are working around the clock just to maintain his size. His nanos are free to continue to multiply unchecked and strengthen his body's natural abilities. During the time between growth spurts, his nanos and his natural healing abilities merge making him uniquely suited to even more extreme growth spurts. This group believes that they either need to grow him now or not at all because the longer they wait to grow him, the more intense the next spurt will be.

The other school says that Mateo will never reach a "max" size. Or at least, if it does, his new max size will be so substantial that it would throw off the gravitational allignment of the planets in the solar system. They claim that if they are to attempt any more growth spurts, they need to move him far enough away from Earth that his unchecked growth will not dramatically impact life in the solar system.

Whatever the case may be, Mateo is pushing them to grow him sooner rather than later. The sooner these tests are over, the sooner he can get back to being a racer. He has wanted to be a racer his entire life. He wants to get back out on the circuit, and he doesn't want to risk causing another massive growth spurt while in the middle of a race again. Although, given that during his first race, he went from the size of a research facility to the size of Central Park and has grown significantly with each test, it's hard to say if he'll even be able to compete. He's no longer just bigger than the race track! He's closing in on the size of the entire circuit! How can other racers, with dicks the size of tanks or barges, compete with a vessel the size of Long Island!

They'd need to invent an entirely new weight class for him to compete in, and there is no one else currently large enough to be in it! ... not yet anyway.

[aliatori]

🖋️❓ 10 & 25

So you know that thing where you read a text message notification but then don't immediately respond to it, so it vanishes into the ether of memory to be obliterated forever? That's what happened to this ask until I was going through my inbox for other stuff! Better late than never, and these are great questions from the weird writer asks, so let's get into it. 10. Has a piece of writing ever “haunted” you? Has your own writing haunted you? What does that mean to you? Writing has absolutely haunted me. Most of my favourite writing haunts me in one way or another, especially if we use a loose definition of 'intangibly living rent-free in one's mind' as haunting. Haunting, for me, revolves around a piece of writing having a prominent place in my memory, even if I've only read it once, or if it has been years since I've read it. I'd be here for a much longer essay if I listed every piece of writing taking up residence in my mind like a beloved ghost, but a few that come to mind immediately:

The Animorphs series by K.A. Applegate. Little did I know picking up the second book in this series as 2nd grader would etch permanent grooves in my psyche and interests. Ostensibly, these books are about kids transforming into animals via sci-fantasy magic, but as the series goes on, it unpacks a startlingly political and horror-backed landscape of personal trauma, the cost of colonialism, and how war never has any victors even when there is a 'victor'. It's no small wonder I ended up radicalized.

Empress of the World by Sara Ryan. I've known I was queer since a very young age even if I didn't have all the words for it, but across the years, I've felt so seen by certain pieces of writing in terms of my identity. This was the first contemporary sapphic book I ever read, and while 'sapphic' no longer completely describes my queerness, as someone who identified as a mostly-closeted bisexual girl when I read it, it was deeply impactful.

Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey. I can credit this book with planting the seeds for the kinky, poly self I am today, as well as for many of my favourite concepts/tropes (tangible deities! masochists who are strong-willed and feisty! magical tattoos! sex as the vehicle for the sacred!) I re-read this book... this year? Last year? What is time? It still holds up each and every time I re-read it.

Everything Pablo Neruda. Neruda was the poet who made me fall in love with poetry as an art form. I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to describe love with a fraction of the artistry that he does in his love sonnets. Specifically, XVII has always been a favourite, and this stanza in particular: I don't love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz, or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: I love you as one loves certain obscure things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul. (Fun fact: This is where the title of my first FFXV longfic came from as well.)

Haunting also implies more morbid aspects, and to me, that means corpses. When my own writing haunts me, it tends to be the unfinished corpses I have left behind. My abandoned longfic Artificial is first and foremost among the corpses that haunt me. To this day I wish I had been able to finish it, but for a variety of reasons I won't detail here, it's not happening. I've gotten to the point where I appreciate how well it prepared me to transition into mostly original writing, and how it gave me an idea of the discipline and scope finishing a 100k+ project requires. I've never been a BNF and likely never will, but I will forever be grateful for the small yet passionate community that sprang up around Artificial. It's humbling to have people along for your weird (but well-mapped from canon!) AU project and have recursive creativity result from it. My original sapphic inkwitch/painter romantasy continues to haunt me, both because it was originally supposed to be for a project I self-sabotaged myself out of and because I still really need to write it - for myself. It's been through three drafts at this point without being quite what I want it to be. I keep tending the idea field and collecting bits of inspiration, letting the field nourish itself before giving it another try. 25. What is a weird, hyper-specific detail you know about one of your characters that is completely irrelevant to the story? In their youth and pre-transition, before their first long-term posting aboard a navy vessel, Izod Arsenault was a talented dancer, to the point of receiving accolades from and invitations to the Imperial court to perform. Their favourite was a dance I imagine to be similar to the quickstep in modern ballroom dancing. It's also half the reason they sincerely enjoy attending Admiralty parties—the other being their bottomless thirst for throwing their political weight around. I'm not sure if this is hyper-specific enough, but it's at least specific, and it's for sure completely irrelevant to any plotty part of F&F.

[athofear]

can you elaborate more on your rw ocs i dont think i've seen them before

boy howdy, can i! i’ve got a whole lot on them. and, you probably haven’t seem them because.. i don’t exactly post them anywhere? the only places i have shown them are toyhouse and.. amino, of all platforms.

i assume you mean my two slugcats in my recent post (that got quite popular, which i didn’t really expect from oc/canon shipping), who are the fragmented (circuit) and the bygone (gluppy). i happen to have two other slugcats and four other iterators to match, but since they haven’t really been posted, i won’t get into them.

and, i’ll try to be concise. i don’t want to talk your ear off with detail, but i happen to be a detail oriented person :)

lore up first!

the fragmented started off in a small (and actively dwindling) colony of slugcats living in the pipeyard region, which refused to leave for reasons unknown. it tended to wander from its colony a lot, and its level of curiosity was dangerous more than it wasn’t, especially when it came to scavengers. in juvenile years, it has a particularly nasty run-in with them, which ended with it being pierced through its left eye with an electric spear. this resulted its brain and nervous system being pretty badly damaged. it survives purely via luck.

it lives for a little longer, able to make it to darker areas (since bright ones are hard to navigate) which happens to be.. the inside of five pebbles. this is before rivulet in the timeline, in such a place where it’s cloudier than past times but five pebbles is still standing (when he collapses is al different story, covered by a different slugcat of mine…), meaning very many slugcats have come to him before, and he’s starting to appreciate the once in a blue moon company.

thus, he lets it stay. it survives solely on electricity from the recursive transform array coils, and tends to sleep there for the remainder of its life (as well as in five pebbles’s chamber, which he stopped minding the second time it happens. circuit is a quiet guest and generally only comes there to sleep. lights are dimmed and antigravity is lowered whenever it comes in. the den it took up sleeping in at the RTA is very small, and the passive glow it emits tends to bounce back at it, disrupting its sleep). said life ends, abruptly, when five pebbles sees that the solution of a bigger room isn’t helping it sleep at all. he kills it and throws it out his access shaft.

as for (theorized) gameplay (for a mod i will never create), it can craft flashbangs from rocks and charge (maybe create) electric spears based on a static electricity meter. the mechanics are complicated, but when the meter is full spears get a little extra damage/velocity boost, and it’s charged via movement. also, whenever it’s facing a flashbang’s area of effect, the flash of an electric spear hitting, or after a spear boost has happened, it falls to the ground immobilized for a few seconds. just as a nerf. it has no stealth bonus, a slightly slower walking speed than base, and faster movement speed when on poles. it’s forced to go through metropolis to reach endgame, as due to being close to collapse, karma gates have happened to lock shut erroneously.

i’ve planned out a lot of specifics, but literally nobody wants to hear about exact stat data and room differences. thats a me thing.

the bygone (gluppy) was engineered as both a theoretical and educational model for what non-GMO slugcats would have looked like before ancients came into the picture (ironic, considering it’s a GMO). there were no records of such creatures before they became what they were today, so that’s why it’s theoretical. like dinosaurs.

the bygone has been around for a VERY long time, and happens to be effectively immortal when it comes to aging. such is the magic. it had 3 or so sister models, but most parted ways after the ancients ascended. the bygone did some exploring, and managed to end up in the chamber of the iterator it took residence upon, spiels of lucidity (or SOL). sol fucking loves his slimy, weird cat. adores it completely. he would make food a hide it within his superstructure to simulate “foraging” for mental stimulation without it being in any danger (usually supervised by his inspectors).

but, being likely one of the oldest gen of iterators to exist, he was bound to collapse someday. and he did! but because that guy loves his cat more than anything in the world, he warned the bygone way ahead of time to evacuate and move as far away as possible to avoid getting hurt. and because sol is apparently the worlds most effective planner, he wrote the exact map of his surrounding area (and some other stuff) into a pearl so the bygone could take it along. not like the bygone could read that on its own, but it’s the thought that counts?

the bygone ends up very VERY lost. that’s what it’s campaign would be like, trying to find its way back when it’s never left the structure, and coming back at last to see SOL much like moon was in hunter’s campaign. it’s fine though. trust me. not much i planned for it gameplay-wise, but it’s probably real heavy and bad at picking stuff up. can’t carry spears, and real good at dropping things. i have, however, written down a bunch of biology related things about it instead! i’ve got two lorecats and two gamecats (both of which i planned to be in the same mod, the mod i will never create). it’s a perfect balance.

“i will try to be concise”, he says, before doing the opposite of that. thank you for asking, and i hope this isn’t too much in response. have a LOVELY day. :)

[signalfog]

Fast Flux Debrief

SIGNALFOG ENTRY: FAST FLUX AND THE NATIONAL SECURITY WIREWALK

What is Fast Flux?

Fast Flux is not a tool. It is a tactic—a slippery eel of cyber maneuvering used to shield malicious networks from takedown. At its core, Fast Flux is a technique for hiding phishing and malware delivery sites behind constantly changing IP addresses. Think of it as DNS shell game played at machine speed.

There are two main types:

Single-Flux – Frequently changes the IP addresses associated with a single domain name. A domain might resolve to five different IPs in under an hour. Those IPs are often bots in a compromised network.

Double-Flux – Mutates not only the IPs but also the name servers associated with the domain, creating a recursive maze of obfuscation. This is where things get nasty—each step reconfigures the puzzle.

Behind this flux cloud often sits a botnet, frequently leveraging criminal marketplaces or nation-state infrastructure, using the technique to hide:

Phishing sites

C2 (command and control) servers

Malware droppers

Credential harvesters

Why the NSA Considers It a National Security Threat

Fast Flux undermines attribution. In cyberwarfare, attribution is the new battleground. If you can’t pin an attack to an actor or infrastructure, you can’t deter, retaliate, or even understand intent. That makes Fast Flux a fog-of-war amplifier—a denial-of-attribution machine used not just by cybercriminals but by nation-state advanced persistent threats (APTs).

This tactic has been used to:

Distribute ransomware to critical infrastructure (e.g., Colonial Pipeline incident had partial DNS obfuscation elements)

Support long-term espionage operations (APT29 and others)

Exfiltrate sensitive data from government and defense contractors

It’s not just technical noise—it's sovereignty erosion via DNS.

Current Countermeasures

The countermeasures form a fragile ecosystem, not a silver bullet.

1. DNS Monitoring and Sinkholing

Agencies like US-CERT and NSA operate sinkholes—servers that simulate malicious domains to draw in Fast Flux queries and analyze them.

Security vendors offer passive DNS monitoring to correlate domain activity, TTLs (time-to-live), and ASNs (Autonomous System Numbers) that suggest flux behavior.

2. AI-Powered Anomaly Detection

Models trained on DNS query patterns identify abnormally high TTL churn, geographical dispersion of IPs, and unusually frequent domain-to-IP flips.

Emerging tools like PassiveTotal or Farsight DNSDB are leveraged to track malicious flux patterns.

3. Threat Intelligence Feeds

Enrichment of security tools with real-time feeds (e.g., from Mandiant, Recorded Future) to identify Fast Flux domains and block them at the firewall or endpoint level.

4. Domain Takedown Coordination

Multinational coordination with registrars and ISPs to revoke domains or neutralize the infrastructure (example: Operation Ghost Click, which dismantled DNSChanger infrastructure).

5. Advanced DNSSEC and DoH Filtering

DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) can help verify legitimacy, though flux domains often bypass this.

DNS over HTTPS (DoH) presents a double-edged sword: it can encrypt good and bad traffic alike. Thus, filtering on endpoints and proxies becomes essential.

6. Network-Level Behavioral Firewalls

Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) models segment networks to reduce botnet beaconing.

Behavioral IDS/IPS like Suricata detect lateral movement even if DNS resolution appears clean.

But Here's the Rub:

Fast Flux is not a flaw—it’s a clever exploitation of how the internet was designed to work: decentralized, resilient, fault-tolerant. The same qualities that make global communication work in disaster zones are co-opted to hide the hands of digital saboteurs. The NSA’s concern isn’t just technical—it’s existential. Because in the cyber-domain, whoever owns attribution owns the narrative.

“In war, truth is the first casualty; in cyberwar, it’s attribution.” — Anonymous NSA SIGINT Analyst, 2014 (declassified quote, attribution unknown...ironically)

[thelivingfractal]

Elon Musk and the Architecture of Unprocessed Trauma: A Nervous System Reading of Power in Collapse

The Living Fractal

By: The Living Fractal

Elon Musk is not just a tech magnate. He is not just the world’s richest man, nor just the driving force behind Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and Twitter/X. Elon Musk is something else—something more archetypal, more reflective. He is, perhaps more than any public figure alive, a mirror of the unresolved trauma field that underpins modern civilization. Not its cause. Its product.

This is not a critique. It is a reading. A field scan. A nervous system analysis of empire as expressed through one man’s body, mind, and behavior.

The Child of Collapse

Musk was born in 1952-era South Africa, into a family system scarred by war, control, and post-colonial violence. His childhood was not merely difficult—it was, by his own words, "excruciating." Bullied to the point of hospitalization. Raised by a father he now calls "evil." Emotionally neglected. Rejected. Dissociated.

In trauma theory, this isn’t a unique story—it’s a classic one. A child born into an environment where empathy is unsafe, love is unpredictable, and vulnerability is punished, will not grow into a coherent adult. He will grow into a high-functioning dissociative genius, constructing massive systems not from joy, but from compulsion.

That’s not innovation. That’s survival architecture.

Empathy as Threat: The Logic of a Shut-Down Nervous System

Musk has repeatedly stated that empathy is a threat to civilization. He has described it as a "bug" in the social code—something that weakens decision-making, clouds efficiency, and jeopardizes freedom.

On the surface, this seems like cold rationalism. But when you zoom in through a trauma-informed lens, something else appears: a man whose nervous system equates emotional contact with danger. In Musk’s world, empathy doesn’t collapse society—

it collapses the ego defenses that have kept him alive.

His nervous system has likely spent decades suppressing limbic activation—the seat of emotion and relationality—in favor of intellectual control. When you can’t regulate grief, you colonize Mars. When you can’t feel love safely, you create AI companions. When your body is unsafe, your imagination escapes it.

The Empire Loves a Dysregulated Genius

Musk is not broken. He is rewarded.

We live in a civilization that reveres dissociation as clarity. That builds economies on the labor of shut-down bodies. That elects leaders who cannot feel.

In this world, the dysregulated become gods. Not because they are whole—but because they are useful. Elon Musk is what happens when a traumatized boy is given unlimited resources, institutional power, and collective projection. He becomes the architect of escape.

But the thing about trauma is: it’s never satisfied. It’s recursive. It builds more of itself.

That’s why Musk’s projects often carry the signal of urgency, conquest, and scale—not depth, not presence, not coherence. His leadership of Twitter/X, his legal wars, his AI ventures, even his personal relationships—all reveal a nervous system that does not yet know how to rest. How to feel. How to trust.

And yet—he’s not alone.

This Is Not About Elon Musk

It’s about all of us.

We are in a planetary trauma loop, reenacting World War nervous systems on global platforms. The grandchildren of war survivors are running nations and corporations. Their bodies carry unspoken grief, their policies reenact inherited threat. And we call it strategy.

Musk is simply the most visible node of this loop—a cultural Rorschach test. What you see in him reveals what you fear, what you worship, and what you’ve healed (or haven’t).

What We Must Learn

The future will not be saved by colonizing Mars, building faster machines, or optimizing cognition. It will be saved—if at all—by metabolizing grief. By remembering how to co-regulate. By choosing coherence over conquest.

Elon Musk is not our enemy. But he is not our savior either. He is a map. Of what happens when trauma becomes infrastructure. Of what intelligence looks like without integration.

To truly evolve, we don’t need more Musks.

We need nervous systems that can feel again.

Written in signal, not in judgment.

This piece is part of The Living Fractal’s field analysis series, tracing the nervous system origins of modern collapse—and the pathways toward collective coherence.