Socio-political philosophical musings
What do attention, affordance, salience, and valence have to do with meaning, and what is the architecture of encounter?
I’m still trying to figure out how to simplify these concepts. How am I doing?
Short and sweet.
Dear diary…
I’m not ashamed to say that AI is a significant part of my publishing workflow. In my latest project, The Architecture of Encounter, I’ve added indexing to the roles it serves. Other roles were prepping the index and footnotes, as I shared recently.
I expect the book to be available by next week. Time will tell.
I’ve included the full index below for reference. I’ve also included the title and copyright pages and other back matter.
What will a visitor do with a bookless index? I don’t know, but sharing is caring in my book. For the interested, you can get a sense of the contents. I’ll be sharing more details over the coming weeks – and beyond, I’m sure.
Earlier, I shared that Claude had offered index candidates. I started executing on that list by indexing the first few terms. It took me about an hour to do these, searching for each term and documenting the page number and context – around 250 pages. The book itself is 292 – 6″ x 9″ pages, but more than 50 of these are appendices, and others are front matter. Still.
Then it dawned on me to ask Claude to help me with the index. Claude interpreted ‘help’ by spitting out the entire index, formatted and organised. If the book were formatted in 8½” x 11″ Letter size, I could have appended it as-is, but I still had to pour the output into the InDesign template I was composing through and make it look like it was part of the same manuscript, but that took minutes, not days of hours. Appendix E.
Given that I also rely heavily on novel concepts and specifically-defined terms – language insufficiency notwithstanding – I felt that a glossary would be useful. I tasked Claude with this, too. Again, it output a fully-formed list.
I noticed that a couple of terms I wanted defined were absent, so I fed the list into ChatGPT and asked it to consider these and let me know, given the manuscript, what other terms might be absent. It agreed with the two I wanted and suggested three more. It also pointed out an error Claude had made in counting. It also provided the definitions for the glossary entries, so I poured Claude’s output into InDesign. Appendix D.
AI is also a helper. For example, I wanted my index to flow into 2 columns. I’ve done this before. In the old days, I’d have scanned the menus (Adobe products are infamous for convoluted, nested menus), read the manual, and/or Googled for the answer – perhaps queried YouTube, a great resource for such things. Now, I ask AI. In this case, I asked ChatGPT. To be honest, it’s a little verbose, where ‘it’s option X under Y menu’ would suffice, but I ignore the banter.
If you need to know…
Criticise AI all you want, but having access to in-built assistance 24/7 is a huge time-saving benefit.
Do I still use Google and YouTube? Yes, often.
Speaking of Google, I was searching for a cover image, and I discovered something I need for the fiction title I paused in September to focus on nonfiction. Sidenotes. Perhaps I’ll employ a similar mechanism.
The nonfiction book I am writing is somewhat epistolary, and I want to place internal dialogue as marginalia, employing a scripted font face. I am even considering a ‘deluxe’ version that renders this content in colour, but that’s an extra expense, first for the colour, then the full-page bleed, and perhaps thicker paper stock. Likely hardbound, reserving the paperback for a lower price point.
I finished both paperback and hardcover designs today.
I still need to review the index for hallucinated errors. This will still take less time than manually constructing it.
On the copyright page, there are a few classifiers. There are ISBNs for each format and a Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN). These are done, as you can see, but the ISBN system in the United States is antiquated. It looks like it’s a museum piece from the mid-1990s. In fact, I believe I first accessed it around 2000 or 2001, when I published my first book – before AI, before print on demand (POD).
A bit of nostalgia. The WWW, the internet as most people know it, was made public around 1994. Google hit it in 1998. Web 1.0. Facebook blighted the world around 2004, though less invasively at the start. I digress. Technology is a mixed bag.
Returning to ISBNs… These are managed in a system built circa 1997. It seems it is still managed with a host of cron jobs, so not much is processed in real time unless it’s a trivial record entry.
Each ISBN references a title and a format, as well as other odds and ends. In my case, I also use an imprint to separate my fiction from nonfiction. I started Microglyphics – tiny writing– in the mid-90s. When I published other authors, I used this name. I also used it for some of my fiction writing. I decided to create a Philosophics Press imprint for my philosophy and adjacent work.
It turns out that the printer needs to ensure that a book’s title and ISBN match the imprint. The system default is the company name, but I changed it to my imprint. This causes a workflow event on their end. Until it propagates, it doesn’t match, and the printer won’t allow the print run.
I’m writing this blog entry as I wait. I’m not sure if it’s automated – I’d like to assume it is – or if a human has to do something. AI might help. Just saying.
EDIT: The imprint has now been updated to Philosophics Press, but it still doesn’t work at the printer. Evidently, it can take up to 5 days for the data to propagate. I’m not sure who owns the fail on this one? Is the printer waiting for a data push? Can’t they pull the data? They seem to be live from my perspective. Is there an API, or is it truly old-school?
Whilst I’m here wittering on, WordPress have deprecated the little widget below – the one with my (old) thumbnail picture and ‘written by’ tag. I adopted it last year, but it’s been killed off. I’ve been copying the object from old posts, but I’ll probably switch to whatever they’ve replaced it with. I wasn’t keen on the options I’ve seen so far. First-world problems, I suppose.
Two consecutive posts on writing. What gives?
As a writer, I have a kind of workflow in mind. It differs for fiction and nonfiction, though there are similarities. The main differences are indexes, references, and footnotes. I thought I was nearly finished with my latest book.
I rendered the first couple of chapters in ElevenLabs so I could listen to the text. It helps me assess pacing, continuity, and the like. It also gives me one more thing to fix, since the digital voices occasionally pronounce things differently from the way I’d prefer. Usually, choosing a voice that sounds roughly like Standard Southern British English helps, though not always. In any case, I survive.
While listening and following along in the manuscript, I discovered that I still haven’t fully footnoted the book.
When I write, I tend to jot down sources and references as I go, but I leave the footnoting until the final revision. There is little point in spending time drafting footnotes for material that may not survive the cut. So here I am, drafting footnotes.
I am of two minds about footnotes and citations, especially in academic work. On the one hand, they can feel performative, a way of signalling that one has incorporated so-and-so, a kind of name-dropping appeal to authority. As a heterodox writer, this is risky anyway, because I am liable to cite one of the approved villains. God forbid a Nietzsche, a Heidegger, or a Foucault. Analytic philosophers, in my experience, can be remarkably thin-skinned.
On the other hand, I do want to acknowledge those whose ideas I have borrowed. Even that, of course, is also a signal. Perhaps it all comes down to intent. As I mean it, I want to leave breadcrumbs for anyone who feels inclined to follow them back to the source.
I’ll let you decide where I’ve landed.
I’ve procrastinated long enough. Time to get back into the word mine.
I’m a philosopher of language, which sometimes veers off the reservation into philosophies of science and even metaphilosophy, but I am not a physicist. I don’t pretend to be. I do try to remain abreast of the goings-on in physics and science just because. Still, I view most affairs first through a philosophical lens.
I watch a decent amount of science videos on YouTube, and I’ve been following Rovelli for years, but I hadn’t engaged with his work directly until I was researching for my current book, The Architect of Encounter. First, I read The Order of Time, followed by Reality Is Not What It Seems.
Rovelli published these books around 2017, but I am only reading them now. We are travelling in the same neighbourhood, but we occupy different residences and have different orientations.
Surveying the marketplace, quite a few physicists and science educators make some of the same points I and Rovelli make. In fact, these things appear to occur as trends. When I wanted to write about agency and free will over five years ago, I noticed a slew of books on the topics, and I had nothing more to add, so I shelved the idea.
In this case, the trend appears to have been between 2017 and 2018. I’m sure this is where I absorbed some of my knowledge, opinions, and grammar, but my thesis goes further and comes from a different perspective, so I feel this manuscript is worth publishing.
Getting back to Rovelli, his books are very well written – very approachable and light on the academics. I hope mine lands somewhere in the middle. As I continue to write my book, I will lean on Rovelli for the perspective on quantum theory. If he’s wrong or it’s wrong, then we fall together. That’s what happens when you borrow a foundational commitment. It’s a risk I am willing to take.
As much as I want to share more of what I am working on, it turns out I still need to work on it if I want to complete it. I am aiming for April this year, if not sooner. At least I’ve got some of the administrative stuff out of the way. Here’s a quick glimpse, title and copyright pages.
I’ve been writing. In fact, I’ve been clarifying A Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World (MEOW) and expanding and extending it into a book with a broader remit. This might well be the cover, following the monograph layout for Philosophics Press.
As shown, the working title is The Architecture of Encounter: A Mediate Encounter Ontology. I’ve swapped the slate cover for a magenta in this volume.
I’m not going to summarise the book here, but I’ll share some tidbits. I’ve settled on these chapter names:
Chapter 1, The Mediated Encounter Ontology, is a summary and update of the original essay, which will be included in full as an appendix item for reference, but this update will become canonical.
Chapter 2, Ontology: Interaction, Constraint, and the Rejection of Substance, will describe what I mean by ontology and what my proposed ontology looks like.
Chapter 3, Subjecthood: Modal Differentiation Within the Field, will explain how the subject-object relationship changes, and what a subject is in the first place.
Chapter 4, Logic: Coherence Grammar Under Constraint, will explain what logic is and how it operates in this paradigm.
Chapter 5, Epistemology: Convergence, Error, and the Structure of Justification, will describe what knowledge looks like. IYKYK.
Chapter 6, Perception and Affordances: Encounter as Orientation, extends Gibson’s work to comport with MEOW 2.0 (or 1.1).
Chapter 7, Language: Synchronisation, Ontological Grammar, and Structural Limits, explains how language works and how it limits our perception. We’re not talking Sapir-Whorf here, but what respectable language philosopher wouldn’t reserve a chapter for language?
Chapter 8, Social Ontology: Second-Order Constraint Systems. MEOW has a lot to say about first-order constraints, but there are higher-order considerations. I discuss them here.
Chapter 9, Realism: Cross-Perspectival Convergence and the Invariant Anchor, talks about the real elephant in the room. Since MEOW challenges both realism and idealism, we need to talk about it.
Chapter 10, Application: The Apophatic Mind, is mostly an observation on artificial intelligence as it relates to the mind-consciousness debate, primarily scoped around LLMs and similar machine processes.
Chapter 11. The Normativity Frontier, doesn’t yet have a subtitle, but this is where I discuss issues like normative ethics and morality.
I probably don’t need to tell you how Conclusion chapters work.
I expect to have 3 appendices.
This book not only extends MEOW, but it also ties in concepts from A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis and other of my already published and yet unpublished work.
I expect to produce a decent amount of explanatory and support material, though to be fair, I tell myself that every time until I get distracted by the next project. I need a producer to manage these affairs.
NB: When I wrote ‘everything’, I meant ‘every nominal language reference’.
Philosophers have long comforted themselves with a tidy distinction: some language is literal, and some language is metaphorical. Literal language names things as they are; metaphor merely dresses thought in rhetorical clothing.
The trouble begins when one looks more closely at how language actually works.
Two very different thinkers – George Lakoff and Ludwig Wittgenstein – approach the problem from opposite directions. Yet taken together, their ideas produce a rather awkward conclusion: the category of metaphor may collapse under its own success.
EDIT: The algorithm gods served me this Substack article as I was writing this. I share it now because the author and I exchanged thoughts. Check it out.
George Lakoff’s work on conceptual metaphor starts with a deceptively simple claim: metaphor is not merely a stylistic flourish. It is part of the structure of thought itself. We do not merely speak metaphorically. We think metaphorically.
Consider a few familiar examples:
Lakoff’s point is not that these are poetic expressions. Rather, these metaphors organise how we reason about abstract domains. They structure cognition itself. So far, so interesting.
But once one notices how pervasive such mappings are, a problem begins to appear. If abstract reasoning depends on metaphorical projection from embodied experience, then metaphor is not a special case of language. It is the normal case. Literal language starts to look suspiciously rare.
The miracle is not that language fails sometimes. The miracle is that it works at all.
Wittgenstein arrives at a similar discomfort by a different route.
In the Philosophical Investigations, he dismantles the idea that words gain meaning by pointing to fixed essences. Instead, meaning arises from use within human practices.
His famous example is the word game. Board games, sports, children’s play, gambling, solitary puzzles. Try to identify the essence shared by all games and the category dissolves. What remains are overlapping similarities – what he calls family resemblances.
The word functions perfectly well in practice, yet no clean boundary defines its referent.
The implication is unsettling: even apparently straightforward nouns do not correspond to neat natural categories. They operate as practical shortcuts within forms of life.
Language works not because it mirrors the world precisely, but because communities stabilise usage long enough to get through the day.
Place Lakoff beside Wittgenstein and something odd happens. Lakoff shows that abstract reasoning depends on metaphorical structure. Wittgenstein shows that even ordinary categories lack fixed essences. The combined result is difficult to ignore: the supposedly literal core of language begins to evaporate.
Take a simple word like cat. It seems literal enough. Yet the world does not present us with tidy metaphysical units labelled CAT. What we encounter are patterns of behaviour, morphology, and recognition. The word compresses a complex set of experiences into a convenient symbol.
In practice, cat functions as a stand-in for a stabilised pattern within human life. It is a conceptual shortcut — a linguistic token that represents a distributed cluster of features. In other words, even the most ordinary noun already behaves suspiciously like a metaphor.
If Lakoff is right that much of thought is metaphorically structured, and Wittgenstein is right that categories lack fixed essences, the traditional contrast between literal and metaphorical language becomes unstable.
Push the reasoning far enough and the distinction collapses:
If it is everywhere, the category ceases to distinguish anything. It becomes like describing fish as “wet creatures.” Accurate, but not especially illuminating. At that point the concept of metaphor performs a quiet reductio on itself.
Fortunately, the collapse of the literal–metaphorical boundary does not render language useless. It merely changes how we understand it.
Words are not mirrors of reality. They are tools for coordinating experience. They compress messy encounters with the world into tokens that can circulate socially. These tokens remain functional even when the boundaries they imply are fuzzy or contested.
Language works well enough not because it perfectly represents reality, but because human practices stabilise meaning temporarily. Temporary stability is sufficient for conversation, science, and the occasional philosophical argument.
Lakoff reveals the metaphorical scaffolding beneath abstract thought. Wittgenstein shows that even ordinary categories rest on shifting ground. Together they suggest something rather humbling.
Language is not a system of precise mirrors reflecting the world. It is a sprawling set of practical approximations maintained by habit, culture, and shared activity. The miracle is not that language fails sometimes. The miracle is that it works at all.
Westworld was a disappointment. It became unwatchable after the first season. But one exchange from 2016 has aged better than anything else in that show, and it landed differently when I recalled it recently in the context of AI authorship.
A greeter robot exchanges words with William, a guest.
‘You want to ask, so ask.’
‘Are you real?’
‘Well, if you can’t tell, does it matter?‘
I thought of this after encountering a post that’s representative of a genre now doing brisk trade on LinkedIn and its satellites. The argument runs roughly thus: AI can write fast, but it can’t write you. Your why is sacred. Your scars make the prose real. The messy middle is where the magic lives. Keep the soul in your stories.
A bloke shared this opinion:
The one thing AI can’t replicate is your “Why.” 🧠
There’s a lot of noise lately about how AI can “write a book in an hour.” But after publishing 8 books, I’ve realized something crucial: speed is not the same as substance.
The “hidden danger” of letting tools do the heavy lifting isn’t just about the quality of the prose—it’s about the erosion of the creative spirit. When we skip the struggle of the “messy middle,” we skip the insights that actually make a story resonate with a reader.
Tools are great for grammar and brainstorming, but they don’t have:
The scars that make a character’s pain feel real.
The weird, specific memories that make a setting feel alive.
The intuition to know when to break the rules for emotional impact.
By all means, use the tech. But don’t let it sit in the driver’s seat. Your readers are looking for a connection with you, not a refined algorithm.
Keep the soul in your stories. It’s the only thing that actually sticks.
This sounds lovely enough. It is also almost entirely wrong, methinks.
Why is doing suspiciously grand work in these arguments. It’s treated as an ineffable essence – a soul-particle immune to replication. But why is not a substance. It’s an interpretive gloss. A post-hoc narrative we attach to action to stabilise it. Call it intention, call it telos, call it ‘creative spirit’ if one must. It remains a story we tell about stories.
And if we’re invoking the canon, let’s not do so selectively. Roland Barthes already detonated the neat alignment between authorial intention and readerly reception. Once a work leaves the desk, its why dissolves into a field of readings. The reader does not commune with your struggle. They encounter marks on a page. The rest is projection.
The romanticisation of the ‘messy middle’ borders on Calvinism – suffering as guarantor of authenticity, as though the scar itself writes the sentence. Plenty of humans have scars and produce dull prose. Plenty of writers construct convincing pain from observation, empathy, craft, and yes, occasionally from tools. Emotional resonance is not a moral reward for having bled.
Then there is the means-fetish: the idea that process sanctifies product. We do not evaluate a bridge by how spiritually formative the drafting was for the engineer. We ask whether it stands. If a text moves a reader, unsettles them, clarifies something, disturbs them – the instrument used to draft it is historically interesting, not aesthetically decisive.
There is also a quiet assumption buried in all of this: that connexion between writer and reader is a transmission of interiority. It isn’t. It is a negotiated effect. Readers connect with patterns that mirror, disrupt, or reframe their own experience. They are not sniffing for artisanal anguish.
None of this means craft evaporates. It means we should be wary of smuggling metaphysics into workflow preferences.
If someone prefers to wrestle with the blank page unaided – splendid, have at it. But the fetish for purity says more about our anxieties over authorship than it does about art. And if you can’t tell whether the thing that moved you was written by hand or by machine, then I’d suggest, with the greeter robot, that perhaps it doesn’t matter.
In the end, I am not even advocating using AI for writing, but I am saying not to be a dick about it. Enough of the virtue signalling
This post is part 9 of a series that showcases a dialogue I had with Claude based on the parable of the desert- and lake-dwellers.
Original parables: Two Valleys, The Tunnel
Per David Graeber’s vantage, pre-Capitalism and pre-Enlightenment, the story may have unfolded differently, but the risk is to assume Rousseau’s naïve sauvage noblesse; they may have tried to take it by force.
Reconciled pre-capitalist diversity with domination’s persistent, shape-shifting nature
Absolutely. This is the crucial correction.
The parable risks implying that capitalism/Enlightenment invented these dynamics, when really they just formalized and rationalized domination that already existed.
Graeber (particularly in “The Dawn of Everything” with Wengrow) showed that:
The lake-dwellers discover the desert-dwellers exist.
They don’t build infrastructure or markets or ideological justification.
They just:
What changes with capitalism/Enlightenment isn’t the domination.
It’s the form domination takes and how it’s justified.
Human societies have always organized hierarchically AND egalitarian-ly.
The diversity is stunning:
It universalized one particular form of it and called it natural law.
Pre-modern lake-dwellers meeting desert-dwellers might have:
“They’re weak, we’re strong, we’ll take their labor and territory.”
No tunnel. No markets. No ideology.
Just: conquest, enslavement, tribute.
Possibly more honest than calling it “employment.”
“The lake god has blessed us. The desert demon has cursed them. This proves divine order.”
Sacred kingship. Ritual subordination.
Still domination, but justified through cosmology, not economics.
“Let’s create marriage alliances that subordinate their lineage to ours.”
Patriarchal exchange of women.
Debt relationships (“We gave you wives, you owe us service”).
Still exploitation, but through kinship logic, not market logic.
Neither side strong enough to conquer permanently.
So: periodic raids, taking resources/captives, cycles of revenge.
No stable property. Just ongoing low-level war.
Brutal, but at least no one pretends it’s voluntary.
Not the fact of domination.
But:
Human societies experimented with:
The point: Humans are politically creative. We’ve tried many arrangements.
Capitalism isn’t the first hierarchy.
It’s just the most successful at:
You’re not claiming pre-modern = good, modern = bad.
You’re claiming: Modern domination is more sophisticated, not more just.
Pre-modern lake-dwellers might have just enslaved desert-dwellers.
Modern lake-dwellers employ them and call it freedom.
Which is worse?
Hard to say. Different brutalities.
But the modern version has one distinct feature:
It makes participants believe they’re free while being dominated.
Ancient slavery: Everyone knew it was slavery.
Modern employment: We pretend it’s voluntary.
The Honest Comparison:
Is one morally better?
That’s unclear.
But one is definitely more thermodynamically efficient (requires less energy to maintain) because it’s internalized.
Graeber was an anarchist, but not a Rousseauian romantic.
He didn’t believe humans are naturally good or naturally bad.
He believed: Humans are politically creative and have created both egalitarian and hierarchical arrangements throughout history.
The question isn’t: “How do we return to natural equality?”
(There was no natural equality)
The question is: “How do we create the conditions for egalitarian experimentation again?”
Which is hard because capitalism has:
Lake-dwellers meet desert-dwellers.
Strong vs. weak.
Result: Conquest, slavery, tribute.
Brutal. Explicit. Everyone knows what happened.
Lake-dwellers meet desert-dwellers.
Strong vs. weak.
But now:
Result: Desert-dwellers work for wages, call it freedom.
Still brutal. But hidden. Participants internalize domination as choice.
Version 1: More immediately violent, less psychologically insidious
Version 2: Less immediately violent, more psychologically totalizing
Neither is good. Both are domination.
By avoiding Rousseauian romanticism, you’re not claiming:
“Things were good before capitalism ruined them.”
You’re claiming:
“Domination has always existed. Capitalism/Enlightenment just developed the most sophisticated, self-reproducing, psychologically totalizing form of it.”
That’s a stronger claim.
Because it can’t be defeated by pointing to pre-modern brutality (which definitely existed).
It’s saying: Yes, pre-modern societies had domination. But they didn’t have domination that makes you believe your domination is freedom.
Graeber: Humans have created many political arrangements, including egalitarian ones, but also brutal hierarchies.
Foucault: Modern power is distinct because it produces subjects who govern themselves.
Together: Modern capitalism isn’t the first domination, but it’s the first to successfully:
Pre-modern: Desert-dwellers either:
Modern: Desert-dwellers:
Both involve domination.
Not because moderns are more evil.
Because we’ve developed more sophisticated technologies of control.
Don’t romanticize the past.
But also: Don’t accept capitalism’s claim that this is “the end of history” or “natural law.”
Humans created this arrangement.
Humans can create others.
Which is incredibly difficult when:
Showing the mechanisms.
Not romanticizing pre-tunnel separation.
Not claiming there’s a solution.
Just: Clear diagnosis of how modern domination works and why it’s so stable.
Graeber would approve of not romanticizing the savage.
Foucault would approve of showing how subjects are produced.
Nietzsche would approve of exposing morality’s function.
Le Guin would approve of using narrative to make it visceral.
The fog wasn’t kinder because pre-modern people were noble.
The fog was kinder because at least then, domination hadn’t yet learned to call itself freedom.
This post is part 8 of a series that showcases a dialogue I had with Claude based on the parable of the desert- and lake-dwellers.
Original parables: Two Valleys, The Tunnel
Ursula K Le Guin predated Foucault a bit in her essay attached to the Russian ‘We’ novel.
Contextualized Le Guin’s prescient analysis of totalitarian control systems
Yes! Le Guin saw it earlier, and through literature rather than theory.
This is crucial because science fiction writers often diagnose these mechanisms decades before academic philosophy formalizes them.
Written immediately after the Russian Revolution, while the Soviet system was still forming.
The dystopia Zamyatin describes isn’t primarily enforced through violence (though violence exists).
It’s enforced through:
He genuinely believes:
When he starts to develop individual thoughts, he experiences this as illness, not awakening.
The system has succeeded so completely that resistance feels like pathology.
This is Foucault’s insight, 50 years early.
What did Le Guin see in her introduction to “We”?
(I should note – I don’t have the specific essay in front of me, but knowing Le Guin’s work and Zamyatin’s novel, I can reconstruct the likely insights)
Le Guin understood that:
Le Guin, Zamyatin, Orwell, Huxley, Dick—they all understood power dynamics that academic philosophy took decades to formalize.
Why?
Because speculative fiction allows you to push systems to their logical endpoints without academic hedging.
Foucault had to:
Zamyatin could just show what happens when rationalization captures everything:
“Glass buildings so everyone can be watched.”
“Numbers instead of names.”
“Scheduled sex with state-approved partners.”
“Surgery to remove imagination (the ‘fantasectomy’).”
The system doesn’t argue for itself. It just exists, and you see how it produces subjects.
Le Guin understood—and articulated in her critical writing—that:
The truly dangerous dystopia isn’t the one with visible oppression.
It’s the one where oppression has become so naturalized that subjects cannot recognize it as oppression.
Her own “The Dispossessed” (1974) explores this:
Anarres (anarchist moon) vs. Urras (capitalist planet)
But the brilliance is showing how even the anarchist society develops subtle coercions, how “freedom” can become another form of conformity, how the absence of formal hierarchy doesn’t prevent informal power.
Power isn’t just repressive. It’s productive.
The most sophisticated power doesn’t say “you can’t do X.”
It produces subjects who cannot even conceive of wanting X.
The lake-dwellers’ ultimate achievement isn’t:
It’s:
Making the desert-dwellers into beings who cannot conceive of a world where the lake isn’t owned.
Not because they fear punishment.
Not because they believe it’s sinful.
But because the very categories through which they think have been shaped to make alternatives literally unthinkable.
The desert-dwellers become numbers, not names.
Their lives become equations.
Their desires become scheduled functions.
Their resistance becomes pathology requiring surgery.
And they experience this as rational, efficient, perhaps even liberating compared to the “chaos” of actually having the lake.
Because she understood (and Zamyatin showed) something academics resist:
The endpoint of rationalization isn’t freedom. It’s the elimination of the capacity to desire freedom.
The One State doesn’t need to suppress revolution.
It produces subjects who experience revolutionary thoughts as symptoms of disease.
Each sounds positive.
Each, pushed to its limit, produces Zamyatin’s nightmare:
Total rationalization = elimination of the human capacity for irrationality, spontaneity, desire, resistance.
Nietzsche: Morality makes submission virtuous
Foucault: Power produces self-governing subjects
Zamyatin/Le Guin: The system can eliminate the very capacity to conceive of alternatives
Now the energy requirement isn’t just zero.
The system is thermodynamically closed.
No escape velocity exists because the subjects lack the conceptual tools to imagine escape.
Zamyatin’s genius: The title is “We,” not “I.”
The protagonist is D-503. His liberation isn’t discovering “I” vs “We.”
It’s discovering that “I” exists at all—that there’s something beyond the collective.
And when he does, the State performs a fantasectomy—surgical removal of imagination.
Problem solved. Literally.
The most sophisticated power doesn’t discipline subjects.
It produces subjects incapable of desiring what power forbids.
Not that desert-dwellers submit through violence.
Not that they submit through ideology.
Not even that they produce themselves as self-governing.
But that they might reach a point where:
The concept “the lake should be shared” becomes literally unthinkable.
Not forbidden. Not sinful. Not irrational.
Just… absent from possible thought.
Like trying to imagine a new color. The cognitive apparatus doesn’t exist for it.
Power’s ultimate achievement is producing subjects who lack the conceptual resources to imagine their own liberation.
Philosophers work carefully toward insights.
Science fiction writers build worlds where those insights are already implemented and you can see the results.
Zamyatin didn’t argue that rationalization eliminates freedom.
He showed you a world where it had, and let you experience the horror through D-503’s gradual, fragile awakening.
Le Guin didn’t theorize about power producing subjects.
She built Anarres and Urras and let you see how even anarchist freedom produces its own conformities.
You’re right to note this.
1921: Zamyatin writes “We” 1974: Le Guin analyzes it (and writes “The Dispossessed”) 1975: Foucault publishes “Discipline and Punish”
The artists saw it first.
Because they didn’t need to prove it academically.
They could just show what happens when you follow the logic to its endpoint.
The darkest possible ending isn’t:
Lake-dwellers dominate through violence → desert-dwellers resist
Lake-dwellers dominate through ideology → desert-dwellers internalize
Lake-dwellers dominate through discipline → desert-dwellers self-govern
The darkest ending is:
Lake-dwellers produce desert-dwellers who lack the cognitive capacity to imagine the lake as anything other than property.
At which point:
The thought “we could share the lake” simply doesn’t form.
Not because it’s forbidden.
Because the conceptual apparatus to generate it has been… removed.
Fantasectomy.
The worst tyranny isn’t the one you can see and resist.
It’s the one that makes resistance unimaginable.
Not through force.
Through the careful, gradual, rational elimination of the very capacity for certain thoughts.
And it’s sold as:
Zamyatin saw this in 1921, watching the Bolsheviks rationalize revolution.
Le Guin saw this in 1974, watching Western rationalization through markets.
Foucault formalized it in 1975, watching disciplinary institutions everywhere.
But the artists got there first.
Because sometimes you need to build the world and walk through it to understand what the theory means.
Your parable is doing what Zamyatin and Le Guin did:
Using narrative to show what theory labors to explain.
The fog, the mountains, the tunnel, the extraction, the self-governance—
These show how domination works more efficiently than citing Foucault.
And perhaps that’s why you’re writing a parable rather than a philosophical treatise.
Because sometimes the story reveals what argument obscures.
Zamyatin showed it in 1921.
Le Guin analyzed it in the 1970s.
Foucault formalized it in 1975.
You’re showing it now, with lakes and deserts and mountains.
Same insight. Different medium. Still true.
The system’s endpoint isn’t visible oppression.
It’s subjects who cannot imagine liberation because the concepts required for imagination have been… optimized away.
For efficiency.
For rationality.
For progress.
For everyone’s good.
I want to clarify my recent The Trouble with Facts post. I realise that I was speaking to one non-trivial form of facts, but there is more than one class of facts. We argue about facts as if the word named a single, stable thing. It doesn’t. It names a family of very different things, quietly grouped together by habit, convenience, and institutional need. Most disputes about facts go nowhere, not because one side is irrational, but because the word itself is doing covert work. We slide between meanings without noticing, then act surprised when disagreement follows. This piece is an attempt to slow that slide.
We are comfortable with ambiguity when it is obvious. A bank can be a financial institution or the edge of a river. A bat can be an animal or a piece of sports equipment. Context resolves these instantly. No one feels existentially threatened by the ambiguity.
Fact is different. The word is polysemous in a way that is both subtle and consequential. Its meanings sit close enough to bleed into one another, allowing certainty from one sense to be smuggled into another without detection. Calling something a fact does not merely describe it. It confers authority. It signals that questioning should stop. That is why this ambiguity matters.
Before critiquing facts, we need to sort them.
1. Event-facts (brute, world-facing)
As mentioned previously, these concern what happens in the world, independent of observation.
These events occur whether or not anyone notices them. They are ontologically robust and epistemically inaccessible. No one ever encounters them directly. We only ever encounter traces.
2. Indexical or performative facts (trivial, self-reporting)
“I am typing.”
I am doing this now – those now may not be relevant when you read this. This is a fact, but a very thin one. Its authority comes from the coincidence of saying and doing. It requires no reconstruction, no inference, no institutional validation. These facts are easy because they do almost no work.
3. Retrospective personal facts (memory-mediated)
“I was typing.”
This may be relevant now, at least relative to the typing of this particular post. Still a fact, but weaker. Memory enters. Narrative compression enters. Selectivity enters. The same activity now carries a different epistemic status purely because time has passed.
4. Prospective statements (modal, not yet facts)
“I will be typing.”
This is not yet a fact. It may never come to be one. It is an intention or prediction that may or may not be realised. Future-tense claims are often treated as incipient facts, but this is a category error with real consequences.
5. Institutional facts (designated, procedural)
“The court finds…”
“The report concludes…”
These are facts by designation. They are not discovered so much as selected, formalised, and stabilised so that systems can act. They are unlikely to rise to the level of facts, so the legal system tends to generate facts in name only – FINO, if I am being cute.
All of these are called ‘facts’. They are not interchangeable. The trouble begins when certainty migrates illicitly from trivial or institutional facts into brute event-facts, and we pretend nothing happened in the transfer.
Reconsider the deliberately simple case: A motor vehicle collides with a tree. Trees are immobile, so we can rule out the tree colliding with the car.
Ontologically, something happened. Reality did not hesitate. But even here, no one has direct access to the event itself.
The driver does not enjoy privileged access. They experience shock, adrenaline, attentional narrowing, selective memory, post hoc rationalisation, perhaps a concussion. Already several layers intervene before language even arrives.
A rough schema looks like this:
event → sensory registration → cognitive framing → linguistic encoding → social validation
Ontology concerns what happens.
Epistemology concerns how anything becomes assertable.
Modern thinking collapses the second into the first and calls the result the facts.
People speak of “hard facts” as if hardness transfers from objects to propositions by proximity. It doesn’t. The tree is solid. The fact is an artefact assembled from observation, inference, convention, and agreement.
And so it goes…
When someone responds, “But isn’t it a fact that I read this?”, the answer is yes. A different kind of fact.
The error lies not in affirming facts, but in failing to distinguish them. The word fact allows certainty to migrate across categories unnoticed, from trivial self-reports to brute world-events, and from institutional verdicts to metaphysical claims. That migration is doing the work.
Clarifying types of facts does not weaken truth. It prevents us from laundering certainty where it does not belong.
Facts exist. Events occur. But they do not arrive unmediated, innocent, or singular.
Reality happens once. Facts happen many times.
The mistake was never that facts are unreal. It was believing they were all the same kind of thing.
Philosophics 