Ownership is pre-reflexive. It doesn’t emerge with conquerors, laborers, or legislators, but with the silent activity of cognition. It has little to do with culture and a lot more to do with infinite hazy background processes; the same processes that flatten the world to death. It’s better this way. If you could, would you like to be in a place made of infinite meaningless matter? Imagine how it would be to give up the uniqueness of things and fade into the awkward continuity of amorphous information flow. That’s why we prefer melodies to noise, laws to chaos, analogies to dissolution. These preferences are built-in systems of ownership.

No need to feel pain in our hair to distinguish it from a wig, no need to think about why we are capable of creating a distinction as such, when no computer has ever been capable of it. How could the machine be afraid of the screwdriver if the machine doesn’t mind its screws?

Now the epiphany: in order to gain access to the external world we need to break with the sanity that helps us discern what content is relevant. But we need to do it like a schizophrenic person would, challenging ownership and granting agency to alien agents, while feeding the most immediate demands of sanity. If there is any way to belong to the world of things, that might be the way. One foot on each side.

:= Nor Medusa ∨ Qe2 (the Turk wins Napoleon)

“perpetual hypocrisy”