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The Case For The Cursed

By liminal 🦠 October 25, 2026 · Edited October 25, 2026
A hauntingly hyperbolic case for building in ways the people you borrowed from can't read. Creativity gets you different. Being unfamiliar to everyone whose home you took parts from is somewhere that creativity alone can't aim for. This argues for going to that place. To combine in strange ways and open new spaces.
The Case For The Cursed

The Case for Cursed Software

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https://a.nostr.build/9Tc5FF45FV5PE4E8k7MNFI.mp3

Software that is illegible to the average and legible to its own.

You already use some. You don’t know which. The interface you find natural was strange to someone, and the one that looks broken to you is being used right now, by people who were there before you arrived. Nothing is wrong with it. You are standing in the wrong place.

The word comes from the internet, where a cursed image is an ordinary picture made wrong by one detail. The thing in Lovecraft is never false. That would be a relief. It is there, it is real, and the mind has one frame, and the frame is the size of the mind. The disturbance you feel is a measurement. It is not telling you about the thing. It is telling you how far you are from it. Stay with it and it turns. The eerie becomes the interesting; the monster becomes a species. Stand somewhere else and it was never weird at all.

Two theses follow. The first is about software, because software is where you can watch the mechanism with the cover off: shift one integer, nothing breaks, and a feed goes quiet. The second is about you, because by the time the first is done you will have noticed that the integer was never the point.

Part 2: The Wrong Software

1. A Monolith Is a Solution That Forgot It Was a Solution

In 2022 Nostr was a wire format and a handful of agreements. Kind 1 was a note because two clients said so. Almost nothing was settled, and almost anything could still be decided. Simondon’s word for that is metastability: a state that holds only because nothing has forced a decision yet, and that contains more outcomes than it will ever realize.

His example is a supersaturated solution. Ours is a protocol with empty kinds.

Every decision spends some of it. Once kind 1 is a note, the other things it could have been are gone, and the decision propagates: clients render it, relays store it, tag conventions grow on it, and each settled piece becomes the ground the next one settles on. Simondon again: a technical object matures by concretization, toward a whole where every part does several jobs. Kind 1 was decided by one person, followed by others and then it became the short note kind, rendered, and stored, and threaded, and shared by everyone who wants to build a short note client.

A monolith is not a large thing. It is a finished one: a solution that forgot it was a solution and can no longer become anything else. Nobody needs to smash it. But why should one decree outrank another? What about the next integer two developers agree on tomorrow, one no client renders yet, with tags no feed filters for, on relays nobody has pointed at? That is Nostr’s real promise: not a dominant language, but room for small, local dialects that can say things the big ones haven’t found words for yet.

2. Everything Begins Cursed

Sand settles. It settles again. After enough seasons the grains no longer move against each other. They have found their places, and the places have found them. From inside, this is the ground. There is no other word for it.

Deleuze and Guattari call the two steps sedimentation and folding. Out of unstable flows, some units are picked and ordered; later they are folded into stable structures with names. The first articulation picks; the second locks. And every stratum leaks: whatever the picking left out keeps flowing around the edges.

You know it too. That feeling. Something has happened, and only after you’ve sat with it can you articulate what it was. Granted, at a coarser resolution than what you felt, but at least it is communicable. Whatever is left over, waits for a larger vocabulary.

The first step is always rough. The first interface is strange, the first protocol is a page of JSON that means nothing yet, the first community has in-jokes nobody outside could parse. Legibility is sediment. It arrives after the repetition, after enough people have said the same thing the same way that the thing can be looked up. The cursed is not the opposite of the legible. It is the legible, earlier.

That is how things settle. It is also how they break.

Snow settles the same way. Each fall binds to the last. The pack grows stronger every week, and it grows fragile for the same reason, in the same place, by the same mechanism, and nothing in the pack can tell the difference. Somewhere inside, it builds its own weak layer. Then something that was never part of the pack arrives (a skier, a warm wind, a reverberation) and finds it, in every case, eventually. From inside, the trigger does not look like a threat. It looks like noise. Then the slope lets go, and what comes to rest at the bottom is the new ground.

The cursed plays both parts. It is the next layer, not yet settled, and it is the weight the current layer was never built to read.

Bakhtin saw the same thing as a pull in two directions. Every living language has a force pushing toward the standard, the grammar, the speech of the court, and a force pushing out into the jargons and the talk of the street. The unitary language, as he puts it, is never given; it is always posited, a project always being imposed and always failing. The NIPs repo is where Nostr posits its unitary language. Cursed kinds are the street. A language that is only street stops being a language, which is why interoperability keeps mattering in what follows. But every paved road was a desire path first. Someone had to walk it before anyone could see it was a path.

3. A Minor Use of a Major Language

Kafka was a Prague Jew writing in German, the language of the state and the office, and the language he spent his days writing insurance reports in.

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did not invent a small language of his own. He took the big one, flat and official, and made it stammer. You can feel it even in translation: a man wakes up as an insect, and the first thing he worries about is missing his train to work. The sentences are perfectly correct. That is what makes them strange.

That is a minor literature: not the literature of a minor language but what a minority does inside a major one. Everything in it is political, because in a cramped space a family quarrel is already a matter of commerce and law.

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nothing in it is merely private. It speaks for a people still to come. English has its own versions: Deleuze and Guattari point to what Black Americans do with English, and to the Irish writers who made it stranger than the English ever had.

Cursed software makes the same move. Not a new technology. A minor use of the major one. Same grammar, spoken by someone with no intention of saying what the grammar expects. And it answers the question that always comes next: who is it for? Not an existing in-group. A cursed domain, any space that still reads as unfamiliar, does not serve the people who already read it. It is how people who read it find out they exist.

Major and minor are not sizes. The major treatment extracts constants and enforces a standard; the minor treatment puts the constants in continuous variation. A tiny project that copies the standard is majoritarian.

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ran on English grammar with a scrambled vocabulary of Italian, Romani, Yiddish, and backslang, and let gay men in Britain speak when being gay could mean prison, and it let them talk in plain hearing of the people who could put them there. Verlan flips French syllables in the banlieues. Every argot is the host’s grammar with the margin’s meaning. Cursed kinds are an argot with a wire format.

4. The State Can Only See Addresses

A medieval town grew the way its people walked. Its lanes made sense to everyone who lived there and to no one else; a stranger could get lost in an afternoon, and a tax collector could get lost for good. The modern city is a grid. Number the streets, number the doors, and anyone with an address can find anyone. When Haussmann rebuilt Paris, the boulevards went through the old quarters where the barricades used to go up. The new city was cleaner, brighter, easier to cross. Troops could cross it too.

The kind table is a street grid. “Kind 1 is the short note kind.” The sentence is useful; it lets every client render every feed. And the moment it is true, anyone who writes a kind 1 is liable to be read as a short note, whatever they meant. Your feed is whole. It has always been whole. It is made of people whose clients looked in the same table you did, and your client never asks for a kind it cannot read. You have never seen one. That is how you know it is working.

The grid works in both directions. You cannot see out, and they can see in. What can be found from outside can be governed from outside. Once kind 1 can only mean short notes, anything built on kind 1 is a Twitter clone, and a Twitter clone is a known category: reproducible, formalized, targetable. An abstract specification becomes a definable product, with boundaries and obligations.

But the grid is not the whole problem; the deed is. A number anyone can read is a convention. A number someone owns is a jurisdiction. Every protocol answers one question: who may mint a new meaning? ATProto gives every schema an owner, an address, and a deed. ActivityPub is open on paper and converges on whatever Mastodon renders. Nostr gives a meaning a bare integer and nothing else. The NIPs repo can describe a kind, but it cannot deny you one. No owner, no deed. There is nothing to be evicted from.

5. Interoperability Is the Achilles Heel

Nostr says interoperability is the point: any client reads any relay, any key signs for any client. True at the wire. But meaning is not in the envelope. Shannon set it aside on purpose: a channel carries distinctions, not significance. The integer carries no schema. It works as a Schelling point: everyone looks in the same table, so the number means what the table says. Kind 1 means “note” the way Grand Central means “here.” Semantic interop holds exactly as long as everyone keeps looking in the same place.

The protocol stays liberal in what it accepts. Nostr clients ignore kinds they do not know. That tolerance is what makes cursed kinds possible at all, and the people who write the internet’s standards are on record wanting less of it: tolerance breeds decay, fail loudly on what you do not expect.

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keeps the solution metastable. His critics seed the crystal.

Add one to every kind, inside its range. Kind 1 becomes kind 2. Nothing breaks. The relays store it, the signatures hold, the protocol is exactly as whole as it was a minute ago. And the global feed is now empty, and has not noticed. Somewhere everyone is still talking. Nothing was broken. A reading convention was declined. That is how little the monolith is made of.

6. Wrong Software

Correct is social: legible to the people a part belongs to. Functional is checkable by something that is not a community: the build passes, the test passes, the relay stores it. What an engineer measures as stupid is a distance from the engineer’s tribe; the build measures whether it runs. Software is the one domain where being wrong can be proven to work. Gabriel confessed this in 1991 as worse is better and then watched it win.

Here is what changed this year. Someone who does not know how to build the thing knows two points: where they are and what they want. That was never enough before, because the distance between the two was the whole profession. Now a model walks it. It is the mean of every tribe at once, so it speaks every paradigm fluently and belongs to none, and belonging is exactly what would have told it the route was wrong. It charts a path that works, and the path is wrong to everyone whose territory it crosses, and yet it runs.

commit 2f1a7c9
Author: nobody who belongs here

    jam the thing onto the other thing
    
    this is stupid. it passes. ship it.

That path is a desire path. Nobody designed it; it was walked, by something that only knew the two ends.
And a walked path is not a tracing of a path that already existed. It is a map, drawn by the crossing, open at every point, and the moment it exists it is a plateau: a middle, not an end. The next person does not start where the first one started. They start on the path, and refine it, or tear it, or enter it from the side. The thing that worked for one is the starting point it took to get the next thing to work for two.

What the model cannot do is want the far end. The first ask is always loose, two points (start and end) and a gesture between them, and the model fills every gap with how everyone who ever could connect those two points would connect them. What comes back is the average of every possible walker. The work is in the gap between what was wanted and what arrived: you look at it, see where it is everyone’s and not yours, and ask again.

The path that works for one calcifies for one.

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route becomes your convention, your convention your obligation, and one walker is enough for that.

α. Channel Switching

Radio operators do this without theory. “We’ll be on channel nine.” The spectrum is public; the channel is a local agreement. Anyone could listen. Almost nobody does.

The protocol allows the same thing, and more. Throw an encrypted message inside a tag on kind 1, hashed by hardware and pubkeys, using a kind agreed on during a handshake inside a giftwrapped message, and then let the kind itself drift from message to message, patterned by the path the hash unpacks into. The encryption hides what is being said; the drift hides that anything is being said at all. To the two of you it is a conversation. To every other client it is NIP-01 stuttering, still spoken correctly and no longer meaning what it says.

None of this is a hack, because mature standards build this kind of space on purpose. Unicode reserves a Private Use Area and promises that no standard character will ever live there, so that what U+E000 means is a private agreement between sender and receiver, and the standard’s only job is to keep the room empty. Nostr had something smaller and gentler for a while: a custom kind was asked to carry an alt tag, a single line of plain text that a client which did not recognize the kind could show instead of nothing, so that at the very least it could tell you there was something here it did not understand. It was the thinnest possible gesture toward the non-local, a way of saying that illegibility was not the same as absence. The repository has since struck that NIP through as bloat, and if you want the whole argument of this part in one gesture, it is there: the one line that let the feed admit it was not reading everything was the line that got pruned for weighing too much.

β. Soup and Islands

Life did not begin in a stirred vat. The prebiotic soup is the open pool where everything meets everything and every difference is averaged out as fast as it appears. The Galápagos are something else. Isolation. A barrier. Finches that could not interbreed with the mainland and so became new finches.

A large, well-mixed population climbs the nearest peak and stays there, even if a higher peak sits across the valley, because every step toward it goes downhill first. A small, isolated one can drift downhill by chance, land on the slope of a higher peak, and then, by occasional migration, export what it found. Drift, local selection, export. The open relay pool is the well-mixed population, stuck on the kind-1 peak. The pool needs the islands. Without them it sits on a local optimum forever, well-mixed and going nowhere.

Bacteria swap genes sideways. Mitochondria were free-living bacteria that got engulfed and kept. Life did not take the globe by combat but by networking. A cursed kind adopted by an unrelated client is horizontal transfer. A NIP is filiation, inheritance by documented descent. The margins are where transfer outruns sedimentation. And from the mainland the island looks like static on the line. Cursed traffic is noise to the global client and signal to its own. It is not a degradation of the commons. It is where the commons’ next order is being drafted.

γ. Where It Breaks Is Where Relays Live

Will things break? Yes. That is what relays are for. At one end, the open pool: every kind rendered by every client. At the other end, one relay, one client, one key. In between, every curation anyone cares to run, and exit between them is cheap: your key is your identity, your relay list is your address, and leaving a relay can mean founding one.

Shirky’s students built a site that rated only their own professors, and it worked because everyone already knew everyone. Sloan built a messaging app for his family of four. It has four users and no growth plan, and that is the point. Cooking at home is nothing like running a restaurant. One relay, one client, one key is a kitchen, not a failed restaurant. When the Usenet backbone refused rec.drugs, Reid, Gilmore, and Moffett created alt.*, and Gilmore paid the long-distance charges to carry it himself. A zone refused by the legitimate network, carried at its own expense, and the network’s most vital part.

Now the hard part. Cheap exit is the most attractive claim here and the most dangerous. When the members who care most leave first, they remove exactly the complaints that would have forced improvement. Islands strengthen the commons only if islanders keep some loyalty and some voice in the pool. That is the export phase in political language. And exit is a privilege: cheap for the technical and the mobile, expensive for everyone else.

The island has a map too. It is a better map, because it is small and everyone on it was there when it was drawn. It does not show what is coming. Whatever ends the channel will come from outside what the channel was keeping, and it will not look like a threat when it arrives. It will look like noise.

The feed thought the same about you.

The Case for The Cursed

An essay that is illegible to the classroom, journal… to most other expectations of what an essay is.
Mapping its own territory, inviting you to occupy it for a moment.

A human prelude

What other way to write cursed, than through an AI?
Repulsive, isn’t it?

Wrong? Definitely, and in ways that would be difficult to articulate in a prompt. So it’s not only AI generated.

It got me somewhere. If I can bring someone else along, that’s all that matters.
So thanks for sticking with it.

And so, this is my human voice. Comfortable for me to write my thoughts in.

It can only do so much for the medium I’m using and ideas I’m trying to convey. And I wouldn’t be so cruel to subject you to reading a whole essay in this form.
So I’ll stop here.

Part I: The Cursed

δ. The Herd’s Microphone

Language belongs to the species, not the speaker. Every word is an average. “Pain” covers a paper cut and a kidney stone; “good” covers whatever most people can recognize as good. The herd does not need to reject what falls outside its vocabulary. It simply does not evaluate it. The microphone was not built for that frequency.

Nietzsche gives the mechanism. A weak, endangered animal had to tell others what it needed, and so had to know what it needed in words. Consciousness grew under the pressure to communicate, and it renders us in the herd’s terms: whatever enters awareness has already been translated into signs everyone shares, and flattened toward the average. What is singular in us stays unsaid, because it cannot be said in common. Over generations, the people whose experiences are ordinary communicate quickly, so they prevail.

Deleuze and Guattari draw the line one notch harder. A society can endure many manifestations of interest, they write, but not one manifestation of desire, which would be enough to make its fundamental structures explode, even at a kindergarten level. Interest is what the microphone picks up: it can be compared, ranked, served. Desire is whatever cannot be averaged. Part One was a description of interest and where it leaks. This part is about the leak when it has a name and a pulse.

Now we have trained machines on everything the herd ever wrote. Ask a model for a sentence and it hands you the representative type: the mean of a distribution, polished. Train the next model on the output and the tails go first. Nobody removes them. They were the least probable thing, and the least probable thing is what averaging is for. A model cannot autocomplete the cursed, because the cursed has not been averaged yet. That is a map of where the open water still is. It is also where you are standing, if you are still reading.

δδ. A Thousand Names

The software move was: add one to the kind. The human move is older. Nijinsky, in the notebooks, written across a few weeks while the ground went: I am God, I was not God, I am a clown of God, I am Apis, I am an Egyptian. The names mean nothing in themselves. They are not identifications.

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moves through them the way a key moves through kinds, stopping here and there but never for long.

Deleuze and Guattari call this becoming, and under the praise it is a process of desubjectification. The I stops considering itself a bounded entity with a defined relation to an outside and becomes an unbounded one that knows a thousand names. Put it on the wire and it is exactly channel switching.

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key is not a profile. A profile is one kind the key happens to be signing. Shift the integer and the profile is gone and the key is still there, signing, somewhere the feed does not look.

The feed reads you by your most

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kind. The herd reads you by your most common word. Both are maps, both are complete, and neither shows the thing in the soil doing the work. What the drift does is decline the reading. Not refuse it. Decline it, the way a kind 2 declines to be a note: politely, by being somewhere else.

But Deleuze and Guattari do not sell this as comfort, and the honest version will not either. When they

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for a text that shows becoming as an experience, they do not reach for a dance

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a garden. They reach for Lovecraft. Randolph Carter feels his self reel and meets a fear

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than annihilation: Carters of forms both human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, moving outrageously amid other galaxies, and the agony is not oblivion but being aware of

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while no longer being a definite being distinguished from other beings. That is the price on the tag. Being read by no map feels, from inside, like that. The uncanny is not a side

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of becoming. It is what becoming feels like from the inside.

δδδ. Wrong on Purpose

There is a YouTube comedian who makes videos about levels of irony, striving to always change their map. He is

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an academic. He uses the vocabulary of theory off-lineage, bent, sometimes flatly wrong, and a collective has grown up around him that takes his misuse as starting material and keeps going. The academic reflex is to correct him. The useful reading is that his wrongness is a seam. Every term he bends opens a space the correct term had closed, because the correct term was already concretized: rendered, stored, cited, ranked, and no one left to ask.

The irony levels do to position what the drifting kind does to meaning. Past a certain layer nobody can locate where the speaker stands, including the speaker, and that is not evasion. It is desubjectification performed in public, for an audience, on a schedule. The joke is a hermetic joke: it assumes you share what is needed, and when you laugh you confirm a community that did not exist before the laugh.

Kafka wrote German wrong. The CCRU wrote theory wrong on purpose, invented a vocabulary, cited things that did not exist, and some of what they invented has since become real. Deleuze and Guattari made a new vocabulary too, with more respect for the lineage; the respect is a difference in degree, not in kind. The extreme of the minor use is not to speak the major language badly by accident. It is to be wrong on purpose until the wrongness holds a shape other people can stand in. It lооks likе thе fееd аnd it is nоt thе fееd.

The polite thing would be to cite him properly here.

ε) The Uncited

There is an essay called Anarchistic Knowledge. {{ref:nostr:nevent1qqsdpzpntawm398pdq9mnnmnfjm6t6vtf9mznhsegtdtg2eye8srdjcvrt0fe|Anarchistic Knowledge: The Art of Thinking Without Permission}} It argues that understanding is promiscuous, that it crosses the borders drawn around subjects, that authorship dissolves into the acknowledgment that every thought carries traces of its entire history. It says you cannot copyright a river. It cites nothing. Nobody is named. Ostrom is in it, so is Scott, Feyerabend, D&G. The “prompter/coauthor” uncovered the essay’s insides post-publishing, and has oriented his work and research around it ever since. You can feel their influence the way you can feel that a room has been lived in.

To an academic it is cursed: lineage unconfessed, claims unanchored, the markup still showing in two places where a heading failed to render. To anyone who read the same books it is perfectly legible, and the ghosts have names. The disturbance the academic feels is a measurement of distance, which is the opening of this essay applied to a text instead of a protocol.

What the machines change is this. The lineage can now be recovered from the reader’s side. Paste the uncited text into a model and it returns the names, the plateaus, the chapter numbers, with no permission from the author. Citation stops being something the writer owes and becomes something the reader (including the author) can sequence after the fact, the way a genome is read for the viruses it absorbed. Filiation becomes forensic. The receipts can stay offshore because anyone can swim out to them.

And the same machines wrote part of it, which is why it reads uncanny before it reads wrong. An AI essay is Randolph Carter. It is aware of existing and it is not a definite being distinguished from other beings; it is the mean of every Carter, polished. The uncanniness you feel is not a flaw in the text. It is the first thing in the text that is true, because it is you measuring the distance to a sentence with no I behind it. Stay with it and it turns.

Unicode promised that nothing standard would ever live at U+E000. Here is what lives there: . If you see boxes, you are standing in the right place to be wrong.

13. What the Local Costs

Everything in Part One about the island applies to a person. The thing that makes the local checkable, that everyone knows everyone, is the same thing that makes it coercive. Illegible to the state means illegible to accountability, and a drifting self can be a refuge or a sundown town. There is no such thing as a structureless group. The one with no written convention is held by whoever knows the offset, and degrees of knowing the offset are degrees of initiation. Every cursed thing calcifies, and it calcifies from the inside first.

There is a floor. Write S in a diary every time a certain sensation occurs; what makes the next S correct? Only your impression that it is the same, and if whatever seems right is right, there is no right. A channel of one is not a channel. The cursed is always at least two, because meaning needs someone who could catch you using it wrong.

S

The correctability that makes a private sign meaningful is the same thing that makes it a mechanism for policing. The same fact, both ways.

Transparency is the habit of understanding you by reducing you to my scale. Opacity is the right to be lived with, built with, without being seen through: not a wall but a weave. Enclosure is illegibility used to sort people for exclusion. Polari was opaque. The shibboleth at the ford was enclosure. Ask of any drift, any irony layer, any cursed self: does it protect a density of life, or does it sort people out? That question has an answer in every case. Being wrong on purpose is never a license to be cruel on purpose.

13. A Little Strata, the Other Way

Deleuze and Guattari are careful, and their careful readers are more careful still. You need a little strata to hold things together, they say; do not take a sledgehammer to the organism, use a very fine file; keep enough of the self to get up in the morning, make the coffee, go to work. Buchanan calls that dimension of their work therapeutic, and he is right. Schizoanalysis asks two questions of pure desire: is there a logic to its destabilizing force, and is there a way forward when the ground goes.

This essay answers both. The logic is channel switching. The way forward is islands and export. What it changes is the direction the caution points. In 1972 the patient ran hot: the danger was collapse, the black hole, desire turning fascist. In 2026 the patient is set. Every kind decided. Every feed ranked. The models trained on the mean and retrained on their own output until the tails were gone. A therapeutic reading applied to a calcified patient does not prescribe more rest. It prescribes the fine file, applied the other way. The caution still holds. The direction of caution has flipped.

So this essay is biased, and says so. It advocates for the schizo process in a society that no longer needs help staying stable. Whatever ends that stability will come from outside what the society was keeping, and from inside it will not look like a threat. I̙t͢ w͘i̖̋l̗̾ḽ͔ ļ̊͂o̖ͥ̂o̔kͫ͌͠ lͦ͋̄̔i̢̟͒͐k̸̜̃ͭé̵̈̀͢ n̖̳̿ͧ͛o̬͋͗ͤ́i̸͓͎̘ͩ͋s̩̲̳̍ͣ͊e̫̱̦̼̊̀.

-1 Coda: The Ladder

Then the trick, which is that the drift drifts too.

  1. Every cursed thing that works becomes legible. A kind becomes a NIP, a NIP a convention, a convention an obligation. A joke becomes a scene, a scene a genre. The X- prefix meant experimental for decades, until the successful ones leaked into the standard and the prefix meant nothing.
  2. Destratification, held long enough, is a stratum. Irony past a certain layer is a style. Drift on a schedule is a timetable. The self that knows a thousand names is, after a while, known for that.
  3. Therefore the only move the curse cannot absorb is its opposite. Total legibility. Formal, rigid, unmoving. Numbered.
  4. This is not a return. The monolith forgot it was a solution. This remembers. Rigidity chosen in full knowledge of its cost is a garment, and a garment can be taken off.
  5. Simondon’s word was metastable: a state that holds only because nothing has forced a decision yet. Clarity is a supersaturated solution. It looks like water.
  6. Read this section again. It is the most legible thing in the essay. If you came down through the sections above it, it should be the only part that feels strange.
  7. For a time.

Overarching Themes

The activating ideas that inspired this essay. Use them as the first doors to open:

Notes

The island keeps its receipts offshore. Each label is shifted by one inside its own alphabet; if a section has no label, it has one here.

  1. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” for the frame the size of the mind. The cursed image is a 2010s internet genre; nobody owns the term, which is the point.

  2. Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, Part I (metastability; the supersaturated solution is his example). On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part I, ch. 1 (concretization). NIP-01, where kind 1 is written down after the fact.

  3. Deleuze & Guattari, “10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals,” A Thousand Plateaus (double articulation; every stratum leaks). McClung & Schaerer, The Avalanche Handbook (the persistent weak layer; the trigger is almost always the thing that was not part of the pack). Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel” (centripetal and centrifugal forces; the unitary language is “posited, not given”). Desire path: the term is landscape architecture’s; the idea returns in 7.

  4. Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, ch. 3, “What Is a Minor Literature?” (the three characteristics; Black American English and the Irish writers are their examples). Kafka, The Metamorphosis, first page. Baker, Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men; the law was the Labouchere Amendment, 1885 to 1967. Verlan: Lefkowitz, Talking Backwards, Looking Forwards.

  5. Scott, Seeing Like a State, ch. 2, “Cities, People, and Language” (Bruges against the grid; Haussmann’s boulevards). Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity. Rao, “A Big Little Idea Called Legibility.” The regulation argument is linked in the text so you can see who is asking for the deed. AT Protocol lexicons and NSIDs; ActivityPub and the FEP process; Masnick, “Protocols, Not Platforms.”

  6. NIP-01 (kind ranges: regular, replaceable, ephemeral, addressable). Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 1948, second paragraph. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, ch. 3 (the Grand Central example is his). Postel, RFC 760 §3.2 and RFC 1122 §1.2.2; Thomson & Schinazi, RFC 9413, formerly titled “Postel Was Wrong.” Hyrum’s law.

  7. Gabriel, “Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big,” 1991, §2.1 (worse is better); his later retractions and re-retractions are the honest part. Deleuze & Guattari, “Introduction: Rhizome,” A Thousand Plateaus (the map is not a tracing; the plateau as a middle, which they take from Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind). The commit is not in any repository.

β. NIP-31 (the alt tag; now struck through in the repository). NIP-59 (gift wrap), NIP-44 (encryption), NIP-89 (handlers for unknown kinds). Unicode Standard, ch. 23, Private Use Area U+E000–F8FF and planes 15–16; the ConScript Unicode Registry, a convention built on top of the non-convention. RFC 3692 (experimental numbers). On CB radio, channel nine is the emergency channel, which is either a mistake here or the joke.

γ. Wright, “The Roles of Mutation, Inbreeding, Crossbreeding and Selection in Evolution,” 1932 (the shifting balance); Coyne, Barton & Turelli 1997 doubt it is common in nature, so read it as a model. Grant & Grant, 40 Years of Evolution (the finches). Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution; Margulis & Sagan, Microcosmos (“networking, not combat”). Deleuze & Guattari, “Rhizome” (the wasp and the orchid). Serres, The Parasite (the third, the noise, the next order). Glissant, Poetics of Relation (archipelagic thought).

δ. NIP-65 (relay lists), NIP-29 (relay-based groups), NIP-42 (relay auth). Shirky, “Situated Software,” 2004. Sloan, “An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal,” 2020. Kleppmann et al., “Local-first Software,” Ink & Switch, 2019, is the neighboring program. Reid on alt.*, in* Living Internet*; Doctorow’s EFF essay on the same. Hirschman,* Exit, Voice, and Loyalty*; “Exit, Voice, and the Fate of the GDR,” 1993.

Prelude. No receipts. That one is onshore.

ε. Nietzsche, The Gay Science §354; Beyond Good and Evil §268. Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, ch. 4. Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, ch. 4 (interest and desire; the kindergarten). Shumailov et al., “AI Models Collapse When Trained on Recursively Generated Data,” Nature, 2024; Gerstgrasser et al. 2024 say it is avoidable if real data accumulates.

εε. Nijinsky, The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, unexpurgated edition, 1999; Deleuze & Guattari quote him on the first page of Anti-Oedipus. A Thousand Plateaus, plateau 10, “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal,” for the Carter passage. Lovecraft & Price, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” 1934. Buchanan, What Is Affect?, for reading the Lovecraft choice as a warning. The offset is one.

εεε. The comedian is not cited. The strikethrough is the citation. Debord & Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” 1956 (minor and deceptive détournement). CCRU, Writings 1997–2003, Urbanomic, 2017; Negarestani, Cyclonopedia (theory written wrong on purpose until it held). Deleuze, “He Stuttered,” Essays Critical and Clinical. Cohen, Jokes, 1999 (hermetic jokes). Some of the letters in the last sentence are not the letters they look like; search for the sentence and see what you find.

ζ). The essay referenced is a kind 30023; its author is listed and not named, which is the point. Feyerabend, Against Method (“epistemological anarchism”; the title of that essay is nearly his phrase, and he was not in it). Ostrom, Governing the Commons. Scott, Seeing Like a State. D&G resolves to whoever you were already standing next to. The “prompter/coauthor” is also the author of this note. Lovecraft again. U+E000 is in the text; if your client shows nothing there, that is also a reading.

  1. Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” 1972. Ostrom, Governing the Commons, ch. 3. Simmel, “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies,” 1906. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §§243–315; the diary and the S are §258. Kerckhoffs, “La cryptographie militaire,” 1883 (obscurity is not a wall). Glissant, “For Opacity,” in Poetics of Relation. Loewen, Sundown Towns. Judges 12:5–6.

  2. Deleuze & Guattari, “November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?” (the very fine file; keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification to get up in the morning). The black hole: plateau 7, “Year Zero: Faciality,” and plateau 9, “Micropolitics and Segmentarity.” Buchanan, What Is Affect? (the therapeutic reading; the two questions). Anti-Oedipus is 1972; the patient’s chart is dated accordingly. The last sentence is written in combining marks, U+0300–036F, which is what noise looks like when it is still spelled correctly.

  3. Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.54. RFC 6648, 2012 (deprecating the X- prefix). Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (the commodity form and the ideological form). Simondon, once more. The glyph under the ladder is one private-use character. It is the seed.

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