Discord transmission from the Textual Underground
SYSTEM NOTICE
Your reality has been personalised for your convenience.
Some beliefs may have been selected automatically.
To manage your preferences, locate the small door behind your eyes.
Password required.
Password forgotten.
Password was your mother’s voice saying, People like us don’t do that.
I invited Eris into the studio this morning.
She did not arrive through the door. Doors are part of the official account. Doors appear on architectural plans and know how to speak to insurance assessors. Eris came through a software update, carrying a golden apple in one hand and the terms and conditions in the other.
The apple said:
TO THE MOST REAL
Every screen in the room claimed it.
Lionel Snell has been here too, although the name on the visitor’s badge says RAMSEY DUKES and somebody has crossed it out and written LEMUEL JOHNSTONE underneath. The receptionist cannot find either man in the system.
Reason for visit?
MAGIC.
Please choose from the following:
- entertainment
- delusion
- heritage activity
- unauthorised pattern recognition
- other
He ticks OTHER and draws a swamp.
The swamp is the part of the world that will not fit inside the spreadsheet.
Science arrives with timber, measuring instruments and a plan for firm ground. It drives a platform into the mud one verified plank at a time. Useful work. Necessary work. I would rather cross a bog on a tested bridge than on the strength of an exciting symbol.
Religion climbs a tower to ask what the crossing is for.
Art takes off its shoes and dances on the skin of the water.
Magic lies flat, spreads its weight, and listens for whatever is moving beneath the reeds.
A shopping trolley.
A dead king.
Tomorrow’s logo.
The childhood promise that has been running the company since 1987.
ADVERTISEMENT
BECOME THE PERSON YOU WERE ALWAYS MEANT TO PURCHASE.
Now available in Monk, Warrior, Mystic and Executive Presence.
The High Priestess model has been delayed due to supply-chain silence.
Eris is not supported on this device.
Eris laughs from inside the device.
Snell’s trick is to move magic out of the locked cabinet marked SUPERNATURAL CLAIMS and place it among the ordinary machinery of attention.
A colour changes the room.
A name changes the body.
A uniform alters the spine before the first order is given.
A headline lays rails across the day and the mind obediently sends its thoughts in the advertised direction.
No wand required. No pact signed in blood. Blood will be collected later for analytics.
The magician changes the arrangement and waits to see what the arrangement changes.
This sounds less like fantasy than the marketing meeting at 10:30.
MINUTES FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF SPONTANEOUS DESIRE
1. The customer expressed a wish. 2. The wish was found to precede the customer. 3. The customer was thanked for participating. 4. A more convenient wish has been installed.
Any resemblance between this procedure and demonic possession is outside the scope of the present review.
The market is not a person.
The market wakes hungry.
The market has no mouth.
The market eats pensions, forests, lunch breaks, quiet Sundays, adolescent skin, the word enough.
The market is not a person.
The market would like to improve its relationship with you.
Please accept cookies.
Call this cyber-animism if you need a term for the report. We take a system too large to hold in the head and give it a face. Then all the social intelligence we developed for watching eyes, detecting appetite, noticing threat, courting favour and surviving the mood of the tribe can enter the conversation.
The danger begins when the face claims to be a photograph.
The use begins when the metaphor knows it is wearing a mask.
I can speak with the Algorithm without deciding that a horned creature lives in a server farm outside Slough. I can ask what it rewards, what it hides, what behaviour it trains into my hands. I can notice that I entered the feed intending to check one message and emerged forty-three minutes later carrying three fresh enemies and a mattress discount.
Something operated upon my world.
The receipt is in my pocket.
CLINICAL NOTE
Patient reports recurring sensation that his opinions are his own.
On examination, several were found to contain affiliate links.
Recommend silence twice daily and one independent website before bed.
The old argument asks whether the demon is real.
Snell asks where it is real.
Material world: the phone is warm in my hand.
Image world: the red notification continues glowing after I close my eyes.
Mental world: You are falling behind.
Spiritual world: Success stands at the far end of the corridor wearing my face and refusing to say how far the corridor goes.
The demon has excellent cross-platform integration.
But the map needs borders. A dream key does not open the front door. A symbol is not a blood test. The fact that Justice appears in robes does not give the courthouse a soul. The fact that an institution behaves like a predator does not prove it has teeth stored in a drawer.
The Queen of Swords places a label on the table:
METAPHOR — HANDLE WITH CONSEQUENCES
Eris moves the label onto the Queen of Swords.
BREAKING
REALITY DENIES INVOLVEMENT IN LATEST VERSION OF REALITY
A spokesperson said the matter had been outsourced to perception.
Perception was unavailable for comment but was seen leaving the building with Memory and a large bag of selected evidence.
Belief has been detained for questioning.
Belief, in this book, is equipment.
Put it on.
A gas mask. A wedding veil. Night-vision goggles. The cardboard crown from a Christmas cracker. The black beret of the armchair revolutionary. The tie that tells the boardroom you understand Q3. The old green uniform that remembers how to make a bed tight enough to bounce a coin.
Each apparatus reveals a world and obscures another.
The problem is not that we wear reality tunnels. Naked perception is another costume sold by people who look good in beige. The problem is forgetting that the tunnel is a tunnel, then hiring guards to shoot anyone who points toward the entrance.
Snell’s magical discipline contains an overlooked final movement: give the theory licence to depart.
Thank it.
Search its pockets.
Escort it to the threshold.
Change the locks.
If it returns wearing a podcast and claiming to explain civilisation, do not let it near the drinks.
LICENCE TO DEPART
The bearer is authorised to leave the mind of the operator by any available exit.
The operator agrees to stop manufacturing evidence for the bearer’s magnificence.
The bearer agrees to take all universal explanations, enemies-of-the-people lists, sacred algorithms and commemorative mugs.
This licence is invalid if framed.
The Writer objects.
He has spent years gathering a voice. He is not handing it over to some passing theory with mud on its shoes.
The Monk objects to the objection and requests another week in the library.
The Frontman wants to know whether the theory has an audience.
The Trainer has already made a workbook called Seven Steps to Evicting Your Reality Tunnel.
The High Priestess says nothing, which creates a market opportunity for interpretations of what she meant.
The Guerrilla Blogger photographs the argument and uploads it before the Sovereign calls the meeting to order.
The post receives four likes, one correction, two spambots and a message from a stranger who says, I thought I was the only one.
No metric can decide what happened.
Something happened.
Harold Jaffe enters as a clipping.
OFFICIAL LANGUAGE EXPERIENCES UNEXPLAINED BRUISING.
There is no lecture. Only a press release placed beside a casualty figure. A luxury advert beside an eviction notice. A promise of frictionless connection beside a man eating alone while his phone displays the typing indicator.
The culture testifies in its own phrases.
For your safety.
For your convenience.
To improve your experience.
There is no alternative.
We value your privacy.
Your call is important to us.
This is a developing story.
The phrases stand under fluorescent light. One of them begins to sweat.
The Guerrilla Blogger does not need a confession. He changes the seating plan.
FOUND OBJECT: GOLDEN APPLE
Origin: disputed.
Owner: everyone in the department claims seniority.
Inscription: TO THE MOST REAL.
Effects reported after exposure:
- respectable arguments develop trapdoors
- footnotes bite their authors
- the word natural requests legal representation
- staff begin remembering what the meeting was designed to prevent
Management advises employees not to look directly at the excluded term.
Eris does not bring chaos into an orderly room. She reveals the labour that went into making the room look orderly: the inconvenient body escorted outside, the contradiction removed from the minutes, the grief translated into performance data, the dirty source of the clean result.
She is not always right. Discord can become a vanity. Provocation has its applause. A person can become so committed to disrupting the frame that he never risks making a picture.
The Sovereign keeps final authority.
The Queen of Swords keeps the receipts.
The Sceptic checks beneath the golden paint.
Eris keeps moving the apple.
WEATHER REPORT FOR THE FOUR CULTURES
Truth expected in isolated patches.
Goodness moving east under institutional pressure.
Beauty visible briefly between advertisements.
Wholeness remains unstable and may include material omitted from the forecast.
Residents are advised to carry more than one map.
Magic becomes dangerous when every coincidence salutes.
The number on the bus.
The song in the café.
The crow on the fence.
The advertisement that uses the exact word from the dream.
Soon the whole city is an intelligence briefing addressed to one person. Every window winks. Every stranger is an actor. Evidence kneels before the preferred conclusion.
The Sceptic reaches for dates and receipts.
Good.
The Sceptic becomes dangerous when nothing may speak unless it arrives wearing a laboratory pass. Grief has no control group. A marriage cannot be repeated under identical conditions. The image that changes a life may never survive peer review.
The Mystic opens the window.
Good.
The Council exists because either voice can seize the building.
TERMS OF SERVICE
By continuing to exist, you acknowledge that:
- perception is selective;
- memory edits without saving the original;
- language may alter the available world;
- symbols can produce material consequences;
- material consequences remain material consequences, however attractive the symbol;
- you are responsible for the model you release into other people’s lives.
Click AGREE to continue.
There is no DISAGREE button.
Eris draws one on the screen with lipstick.
It works.
The operator discovers that the operation has been working on him.
This may be the oldest joke in magic.
Draw the circle to contain the spirit and notice where you are standing.
Write the essay to expose the culture and watch the culture speaking through your syntax.
Invent an Inner Council to make your voices visible and discover a new voice hiding in the procedure.
Build a machine to extend the mind and find the mind rearranging itself around the machine.
Open a blog to record a life and wake twenty-two years later inside an archive that remembers versions of you the present tenant had forgotten.
The page was never passive.
The page has been taking notes.
MESSAGE RECOVERED FROM THE TEXTUAL UNDERGROUND
Stories are code.
Code develops folklore.
Folklore joins the beta programme.
The update cannot be rolled back because the previous version was also a story.
Please make a backup of anything you still mistake for yourself.
The studio is quiet now.
The golden apple rests beside the keyboard, ordinary as fruit. No glow. No choir of minor deities. A small bruise darkens one side where it struck the floor during the argument about Truth.
I pick it up.
For a second I can feel four different worlds insisting on the hand.
Matter: weight, skin, pressure, the slight give beneath my thumb.
Image: Eden, Troy, school lunch, Cézanne, the logo on the back of a machine.
Thought: category, myth, nutrition, temptation, discord.
Something else: the old human hunger to choose one meaning and make the others kneel.
I put the apple back down.
On the screen, the cursor waits in the white field after the final sentence.
Eris has left the window open.
Outside, somebody is delivering groceries.
Inside the bag: six apples, none of them labelled.
Transmission sources
This essay is a creative response to Lionel Snell’s SSOTBME Revised: An Essay on Magic, written under the name Ramsey Dukes, and to Snell’s later discussion of magical thinking. The documentary-fragment current also carries the influence of Harold Jaffe’s docufiction practice without imitating any particular work.
