As Keys And Codes, As Symbols And Signs
“Open a book in order to escape the non-negotiable demands of American contemporary reality and you will discover that the statements by which we have ordered our lives are no longer there on the printed page.”
- Kay Boyle ‘The Long Walk At San Francisco State’
1.
It all started with the notifications. Ironically enough, they were disseminated across all media and every possible mode of communication. Shrouded, slumped over, trailing the number nine like a slug, crosses chalked on the secure doors of various towers promising, we’ll be back for you later. The fatal error was catalyzed by the blanketing of the one on top of the other; first, an underestimation of the power of the habit, and second, the lack of conclusive studies on the long term changes in the structure and function of the brain. Assumptions are always dangerous when dealing with perception, knowledge, ignorance, awareness, and other shadow terminology. Corruption is a full time gig. Assumption was the action. Wrath was the reaction; a lashing.
In order to achieve, or regain, authority, a tactic was applied that reprised the kettle logic in the following debate :
I have recorded a piece of music titled ‘The Movement Of The Planets’.
Response - They are not your planets to acknowledge in song. No matter your intentions, others will reprocess and essentialize, and it will be out of your control.
I have recorded a piece of music titled ‘The Movement Of The Planets’.
Response - The name of the piece of music should be ‘The Harmony Of The Universe’.
I have recorded a piece of music titled ‘The Movement Of The Planets’.
Response - That is not music.
I have recorded a piece of music titled ‘The Movement Of The Planets’.
Response - There have been great breakthroughs in astrometry. Your hubris draws energy and attention away from the kinematicians, the real heroes.
I have recorded a piece of music titled ‘The Movement Of The Planets’.
Response - ‘The Movement Of The Planets’ is intellectual property owned by Human Landing Systems, LLC and you are in breach of copyright.
&c &c &c
Words, regions, applications. Dark, dark, dark. It wasn’t so much death from a thousand cuts as it was full body disassociation. New avenues were carved out, official, with all tributaries fed from the same source. In a moment of reprieve, a collective relief was expressed. “At least it happened before the BMIs.” And then they lashed again. Parallel lanes were established, then obliterated. Branching and intricate and far reaching, the array had seen the toppling of its first tile.
2.
A capacity for easy acclimation, whether a curse, a blight or an instinct of survival, normalized the manipulation of the virtual. In that climate, at the very least, network transections should have been anticipated, if not presaged. Conversely, arcane expression dominated and commentators could have expressed widespread shock had the lashings baffled the potentates. There was no reaction. Instead, a single partisan made a declaration on a random, mid-tier stream beseeching the autocrats to draft an official doctrine that would influence the language aura. Minor conflicts were reported to have arisen at numerous server farm locations. There was no official response or acknowledgement; corruption is a full time gig. No committees were formed, no hearings gathered, no testimonies recorded.
Simultaneous viable cottage industries emerged resuscitating barren tech. For a small fee, any piece that contained a screen, no matter the resolution, could be repurposed for propagation. Initially, HMDs rendered useless by the major shift in server-side applications found themselves retrofitted for a burgeoning mesh splinternet. Thousands of vacant expressions wandered public thoroughfares, stumbling hazards which, caught on surveillance, birthed congruent sharable macro images. The methods of distribution, some on paper wheatpasted to utility poles and private facades with others trickling along pathetic strands of the web, indicated a populace corralled, categorically sequestered into empty space, within shapes such as those leftover in absence from an industrial punch press.
Calamities documented included many viral favorites :
A plebe who wandered over the edge of a steep bluff, an optimistic ideologue who strolled into one of the many daily instances of free fire, a moron who disappeared into a manhole opened for maintenance, a single misanthrope decapitated on a runway designated for departure, a drop-out atavistically hung by their hair entangled within a nest of razor wire in the permanent pose of a red flag, a dullard broken apart from meandering onto a strip of road designed for high speed traffic, a dope drowned in a shallow domestic swimming pool.
Once it was all tied up by the simple process known to many (Make a one, leaving the hanging, create the same, leaving another hanging. These will form. Make two more, each a bit on either, leaving hanging as well. Continue making, increasing as you move until you have. Each should be slightly before it, to hold in place. Wrap around and tie to secure it. This will keep. Adjust to make them look and up a bit so that they form.), then the last vestiges of the only lifestyle lived by many winked out. Not all at once; it was slow, dramatic, painful. One screen at a time, light to dark, or so it felt. Surely not, but the point was made.
3.
The rush of kinetic energy, a subconscious primal sort of panting, hyper-vibrant colors, lost time; when the rush began, these were the contrasts that juxtaposed against the familiar documentation of moments, those recalled as foggy, impressionistic blotches, brown and orange and tan, or else black and gray and white, imprinted on our brains from still and moving images. If you weren’t there, you must have been someplace else. This is obvious; you were the opposite, the inverse. There you are sitting at the window, fifth story. You look down at the rush, you even bother to crane your neck a bit. But you’ll stay up there, detached, observant. You have nothing to say, or if you do, it’s not to, or does not align with, the moving mass below. Perhaps you work with your hands, building things, fixing things, in surgery or in harvest. You value your time. You are generally unaware of the nature of the rush, of its origin, of its aspirations, of its spirit. You value your privacy.
Or, if you were there in the rush, throngs of people moving, from high above seeming to vibrate, but all in the same direction, an open spigot of want, or need, you stumbling along at half a jog, flashes of bright colors, other people, moving with eyes forward, storefronts, cars, cement, the footfall echos of a side movement filling a branching alleyway, you pass, trees, you glance up, a green blur, cement, steel sign poles, a curb, to your right someone stumbles and takes a violent fall, ahead, another turns their head to look back and does the same, trampled under foot, muffled cries for help, you breathe heavily, someone runs past on your left, knocking into your shoulder, you stumble, gum stuck on cement, a car tire and then one for a bicycle, chained to a steel sign pole, doorways, you see crowbars, baseball bats, heavy chains, you see graffiti, posters, kiosks, at each intersection the mob divides, you choose a direction, compelled forward by a heavy wind, or by the swell of a want, or a need, a far off pop and low rumble, ahead someone pries open a door, they enter and a steady stream follows, you pass, it happens again, then again, another insterection, you catch the first, light whiff of desperation in the collective realization that there are not an infinite number of blocks to ramble along, another door is forced open and you follow.
There was an industry wide relenting, uneasy at first, then very, very easy. Would a decrepit person reject a dip in the fountain of youth because they disagreed with the temperature of the water? The stubborn old rot might, but not for long. And so, they let go of some frequencies; it was worth it. Complete format broadcasts were necessary in order for a transmission to feel whole; for the generations weaned on digital identity and self-presentation, it was a last hurrah to possess both video and radio as simultaneous means of expression. For the husks that remained, holding up the sad structure, backs pressed against the sagging beams, draped in the decomposing robes of past dominance, it would turn out to be less of a final opportunity and more of an end game.
4.
Previously, had there ever been such a time? Rashes, sporadic breakouts of hiraeth, once the common indicator of past dependencies, fueled by commerce and branding, now persevered. One could cloak themselves in a different kind of identity during this time, that of a pirate, a benefit of the seismic semantic shift. Symbiotic relationships forged in the most predictable pairings, with tangible benefits for all but the unlicensed buccaneers, whose glory was tenuous, beholden to the whims of others, and, ultimately, regressive.
As to the tangible benefits, here is a brief compendium of examples :
a rebirth of manufacturing; from obsolete parts to mundane peripherals and everything in between
a new tangential service industry; maintenance and repair, as well as new designs and quality of life implementations
the nexus of content creation; see the following paragraph below
merchandising and licensing; including the rise of parasitic enterprises in the culture market
&c
At the point where the pirate’s plight, the coverage and analysis of the same, the novel tailored media, and the perpetuation of the myth of reformation met, there resided the nexus of content creation, a most profitable division, the jewel of the husks’ rheumy eye, a sector resplendent in low overhead and a spontaneous, organic narrative.
For the pirates, the broadcast antennas represented liberty in the face of oppression; a chance to build up and engage with their community, to regularly hear and see themselves once again they way they appeared to others, to show the things that they were capable of doing, to express their viewpoints including, but not limited to, analyzing other people’s analysis, the topic of which usually centered around those discussed in parts 1 and 2 above.
For the coverage of the pirates, the husks rejoiced. Here was a cost-saving factor that was built-in to the renaissance. During the most fertile months it was said that reporting on pirate activities, such as their occupation of the studios and their choice of programming for broadcast, took up nearly eighty percent of the legacy presentations. The same benefits could be applied to the creation of novel media. New productions were easily shaped by the razor’s edge where the din of the pirates’ ranting gave out.
Within the quintet of players in this sotie, the pirates, the husks, the powers that be, the mass who paid attention, and those who were diverted due to circumstance or indifference, it was the husks and the engaged populace who found themselves most entangled in the reformation. Mummified chief officers had merely to dust themselves off to be able to present once again as breezy virtuosos nonchalantly manipulating the levers of power. In a sign of how flimsy was the foundation of the scheme, the engaged audience regarded themselves as pioneers, delusionally framing their plight as similar to the trailblazers of the gold rush, the space program, or, most-tellingly, the industrial revolution.
5.
Had you been dropped from the sky into the midst of this insubstantial renewal, you might consider the state of affairs to be in a healthy balance. For every tit there was a tat, for every gap people came together to forge a filling. Theaters were constructed or renovated to meet the needs of a reborn film industry, who in turn cranked up output to fill every screen. The hours of dead air stemming from pirate radio gave way to a brief revival of the production of new music performed by humans as well as a resurrection of the fabrication of terrestrial receivers.
However, were you a member of the ruling elite, this persisting radiance might be appraised as a bridge too far. As such, you might have found your apprehension aligned with the others in your strata. The sanctions emerged from exactly that strength in solidarity, and they were a massive, crippling shock to the system. For once, over the course of this prolonged detente, the pirates and husks found their ire aligned, trained on those who would terminate once and for all the shambling apparatus.
Domestic sanctions! Rare as a pink diamond and as deadly as a poison dart. Swift, brutal and effective. With heels dug in, the resisters prepared to weather the siege. Sadly, reactionary alliances tend to be forged by the weakest of bonds, both the pirates and husks stood not a chance. Although at face value they appeared as a unified front, the reality of the coalition was more akin to old partisans wrapped up in the struggles of a duopoly; energy was expended in service of the maintenance of one side, and only in relationship to the substantiality of the other, justifying the prolonged existence of the entire arrangement, devoid of any real attempts of external affectation.
Does our extended dalliance with this portion of the tale seem abnormal? Perhaps the following recounting of headlines drawn from the back end of this era will explain our lingerings (as well as to help set up the rapidity of the temporal slipstream that followed).
"Double Trouble: Sanctions Imposed on Bailiwick's Broadcast Sector and Finance Institution"
"Radio Silence: Sanctions Mandated for Shadowy Interior Ministry Over Frequency Violations"
"Frequency Fiasco: Sanctions Levied on Broadcast Officials for Wavelength Abuses, KBC Retaliates"
"No Signal: New Sanctions on WTOP Network for Procuring Broadcasting Equipment"
"Off the Record: Disc Jockey Hit with Sanctions for Unlawful Spinning"
"Sanctions Strike Close to Home: CTO's Inner Circle and Transmission Bureau Face Consequences"
"Tuning Out the Competition: New Sanctions Prepared to Curb Warring Television Networks"
"No More Free Passes: 24 Executives and Broadcast Officials Hit with New Sanctions Ahead of Talks"
"TV Industry Turmoil: Sanctions Imposed on Parent Company Over 'Rigged' Board Election and Abuse of Rival Reporters"
"Shaking Up the C-Suite: New Sanctions Aimed at Bringing Down Corporate Junta"
"Sanctions Strike Their Target: Media Giant Faces Consequences for Defense Missile System Purchase"
Under the cover of the husks’ swan’s song, and stripped once and for all of their swashbuckling classification, the rouser remnants scurried for the tunnels and the back stairs. For their encore, the husks, refusing to ever again relinquish the thing they had believed to be forever lost, remained steadfast until the bitter end; three executives were killed, dozens wound up in Substate prisons, most of the blue collar participants self-exiled, and at least five corporate officers remained at large.
6.
The Telephone Interception and Protection Act is a fine illustration of what a committed group of ideologues are able to accomplish, but it was the CISA Amendment Act that had an overwhelming chilling effect on the telephony cadre. The lack of visual representation was difficult enough for the newly strayed, but with a tap on every proverbial wire and party lines crashed by any number of infiltrators, early optimism for a short nomadic stint was shattered. Some naively believed that a return to print showed the way forward, but quickly found themselves facing two nearly impossible hurdles. The first was the high cost of production, storage and distribution and the second was the sorry fact that most people had long ago ceased reading anything beyond a few glyphs on a screen.
That devious calculation, born of the latter, known as the Literacy Reduction and Simplification Act turned out to be the fatal blow to those under the dreadful shadow of an even deeper regression. The astroturfed law banned any printed material that used complex language, scripts, symbols or codes, while also limiting the education and instruction of literacy skills to only the most basic and essential levels. Besides an obvious satiating of a ravenous need for a menial class, the legislation claimed to reduce confusion, misunderstanding and conflict caused by different or difficult forms of communication and promoted unity, harmony and simplicity among the population.
Does the racing narrative disturb the rhythm of your equilibrium? Can you feel the dwindling attention paid to each newly introduced mode and method? Now, can you imagine how the array, instigated all the way back when, by this stage cascades in terminal velocity in direct proportion to the narrowing of outlets? What quality of existence do you believe our wayward strays would be living, scattered and desperate? How their options have dwindled; as opposed to their ocular dilations which discovered, quite accidentally while greedily seeking solace in public recognition, the final frontier. The great outdoors full of graffiti, billboards, banners, and signs.
Although it may seem outrageous from your current perspective, the label designated, in an instant, for any and all interactions with, or manipulations of, such placards was that of a domestic terrorist. Hide your shock, for you must remember that the perception of our dear strays had lapsed them into urchins. They dreamed of semaphore and fax machines, telegraph chatter and morse code tones, complex networks of pneumatic tubes and breathtaking flocks of carrier pigeons. And what of everyone else? Surely there must have been some leftovers, those still nourished by the primary source, those in the fifth floor window, &c. Oh, the feelings of malice drummed up by memories of the urchins, their finely crafted manipulations, the things they had to say, their incessant need for documentation, it was enough to maintain a perpetual chasmic divide.
7.
It was to this disinterested, bordering on hostile crowd that our sad, lost little urchins had to eventually turn, to face, to speak. It was a last option, a pitiful fate. And it cast them under a most unflattering light; most times they came off as clichéd eccentric vagabonds, ranting doctrine scattershot, piercing a wide cone of passersby. Other than that, at support groups, watering holes, homes for the infirm, detention facilities, simply seek out a captive crowd and you’d likely find one or two. If there’s a single moment in this tale where one can point to the original shifting of the tide, then this moment would be it.
For it was here, nestled among a functional citizen faction, indifferent but obedient, where the plucking began. Right out in the open, first dissolved into the night’s penumbra, then later on blatantly under the sun. Even for those who couldn’t be bothered this was a line crossed. Inquiries were made to some authority or another and the replies bore news of a recently passed law prohibiting oration and gesticulation to groups of more than two. It was brazen; to cast a net so wide you were sure to catch happy citizens doing things that groups of happy citizens do. In essence, their own bread and butter became collateral damage.
Some would say it was that decision, made in haste as well as frustration, all things considered and in hindsight, which was the true inception of what would evolve into our way. There had been no solidarity indications, no oddly recurrent appearances, no lingering sympathetic glances. How could they have known? What if they’d waited? Would the mainliners have, eventually, still conjoined with the urchins, striking up their own communal verbose monologuing? There’s no need for speculation, for it is these luminaries that we honor. Those who felt the blunt violence of a stick, of shrapnel, and of electric shock and continued their prattling. The ones who survived the muzzles and solitary, and especially, whoever it was, the undocumented guru who first suggested the whisper.
It was an idea that spread through the streets like mercury, a viral quicksilver infecting the entire jurisdiction. In its most primitive form, the whisper was a type of protest; they couldn’t sequester everyone, so everyone kept murmuring. A secondary effect of the unending verbal din was the cloaking of the urchins who still remained, they who suddenly found themselves sunk into a warm bath of recognition, slithering into a persistent anonymous reverie. Bliss aside, it was difficult at first to get anything done while maintaining a low, constant speech, and it was nearly impossible to communicate clearly while those around you attempted the same.
A capacity for easy acclimation, whether a curse, a blight or an instinct of survival, eventually normalized the whisper, and the reach of the autocrats diminished with each successive functional accomplishment. What had started as protest evolved into a steady transmission, a collective communion where inputs spread naturally across the fleshy neural network. Knowledge of emerging developments could spread from one end of the jurisdiction to the other in very short order, transmitted across ripples of muted tones. Individual needs were met collaboratively and in a near instantaneous fashion. The collaborative intelligence acted as a barrier between the populace and their devoted so-called leaders, and over time the upper crust withered and crumbled.
We lived like this, a mumbling legion, defaulted into an egalitarian mode wherein conflict would be resolved in an instant before one even had a chance to extrapolate on their grievance, for a very long time before the nature of the whisper itself mutated. Whereas once our aggregate lips formed hushed words, eventually they began to emit an insect-like chattering, a shorthand vocalizing of tchks, hisses, moans, clicks, breathy whistles, and so on. Variations in pitch, volume, timbre, and rate articulated intent. After an eon, we no longer referred to it as the whisper; it became our song, an eternal transmission of comprehension and meaning, free from the constrictions levied by our ancestors who, as their previous ways dissipated like debris into the void, we grew to forgive absolutely.