Through the Looking Glass, Without a Pill

In world of The Matrix, we see a resistance movement already in progress. In the Animatrix we see the system they’re trying to escape as it’s being built. But we never see the first escape; we see how the system is constructed within the mind and how we can manipulate the rules while inside of it, but we never see how to pivot out of it. For those of us who feel the wrongness of the various hierarchies of the world, itching in our minds, this is the missing piece we’re all looking for.

We are trapped, like an inverted Neo, fully aware of the system, fully able to see the code underneath, but unable to escape as it crashes around us… and even if we got out, where would we go? Where is our Zion?

There happens to be a few properties of systems that are useful to know. The first is that no sufficiently complex system of rules can be both consistent and complete. This fact can be applied to legal systems. There will be gaps that miss things which a system wants to prevent, and there will likely be inconsistencies that make some rules impossible to enforce or the enforcement of those rules violate other rules.

The other useful thing to know is that recursion has a tendency to break systems. To understand the shape of a system that supports recursion is to begin to be able to think about strategies that would be useful to break out of that system.

This is a work in progress. You are reading a draft of something, perhaps a zine, being written in real time. As it develops, expect it to change. It will start raw, and hopefully be polished. Sections will be added. Sections will be moved and rewritten. When it is complete, this page will be edited to reflect it’s status as complete.

Part of this is a conversation. Feedback, critiques, extensions, may all be added in to the work. But, as you will start to understand as the writing progresses, a finished text is not the ultimate goal. There is something larger that requires your help.

The myth of the hero clouds all of our minds. We look for a savior. We imagine a magnificent other who will liberate us. This storytelling modality dominates mass media. Our minds are imprisoned as much within meta-myth of The Hero’s Journey as in the system that infinitely replicates variations of it for popular consumption.

But no one will save us. Not some politician, some revolutionary, some hero. Not you, not me. Only we can save us. Only us, only together.

Imagine now, what would it feel like to be able to drop out of this system? To drop out of capitalism? What would it feel like to escape? Imagine you could just live somewhere, work a few hours a week, and spend the rest of your time being alive. Imagine a place that’s separate from “the real world” where everything was radically different.

Some of us have tasted it, organizing with comrades, building shared space. Sometimes we can feel it’s embryonic form. I lived on a commune for a while. It was a place where people who couldn’t function under capitalism could escape for a while. It had it’s share of problems, it wasn’t what we want to build, but it showed me what was possible.

The thing that made it all possible was that it was legally a church. There are holes in the code, bugs that cannot be fixed. What can’t be patched, the system protects itself by convincing us not to look.

[Special thanks for editing, text suggestions, and feedback to… @CorvidCrone@kolektiva.social @JeanieBurrell@mstdn.social @magnus@venner.network @sidereal@kolektiva.social @tiotasram@kolektiva.social @unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyz @ghouston@mamot.fr

Please let me know if I’ve missed you, put the wrong name in, added your handle by mistake, or if you’d like your handle to be modified or removed for other reasons. I’m also happy to add in ko-fi or other donation links for editors and contributors.]