Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

1

on Dataism

The Religion of the Stack- 29th August 2016

Sorry about the two week hiatus imagined audience reading thisin linear time winterrsquos taken its tithe - and some - on mehere But wersquore back at our Desk (yes Shivarsquos here helping)and in todayrsquos installment we invoke the spirit of the first ageof the internet newsletter back when Usenet and mailing listswere the cutting edge of pre-Web internet life Thatrsquos rightwersquore merging with our late 90s self and writing this in thesame format Bruce Sterling used on his Viridian Design Movement1list copyrsquonrsquopaste something from the Internet then fill withcommentary

Ie everything in the triple parentheses below is (((me callingfrom inside the article)))

Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari review ndash howdata will destroy human freedom [theGuardian]2At the heart of this spellbinding book is a simple but chillingidea human nature will be transformed in the 21st centurybecause intelligence is uncoupling from consciousness We arenot going to build machines any time soon that have feelingslike we have feelings thatrsquos consciousness Robots wonrsquot befalling in love with each other (which doesnrsquot mean we areincapable of falling in love with robots) But we have alreadybuilt machines ndash vast data-processing networks ndash that can knowour feelings better than we know them ourselves thatrsquosintelligence Google ndash the search engine not the company ndashdoesnrsquot have beliefs and desires of its own (((Nope just thebias of its programmers as is manifested by its algorithms Andoh yeah the very idea of behaviourism and materialism - if manis the measure of all things than I guess he can by known bymeasuring him we just need to stop worrying and love theSurveillance Marketing State and worship at the altar of theStack))) It doesnrsquot care what we search for and it wonrsquot feelhurt by our behaviour (((GOOG - the indifferent but benevolentgod))) But it can process our behaviour to know what we wantbefore we know it ourselves (((Nobody knows you like the Stackdoes remember Feel its warm embrace))) That fact has thepotential to change what it means to be human (((ya knowunlike every other stage in the continual coevolution with ourtools that is the very definition of our specieshellip sigh)))

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

2

Yuval Noah Hararirsquos previous book the global bestsellerSapiens laid out the last 75000 years of human history toremind us that there is nothing special or essential about whowe are We are an accident Homo sapiens is just one possibleway of being human an evolutionary contingency like every othercreature on the planet That book ended with the thought thatthe story of homo sapiens could be coming to an end We are atthe height of our power but we may also have reached its limitHomo Deus makes good on this thought to explain how ourunparalleled ability to control the world around us is turningus into something new (((cut once more to Peter Weyland inPrometheusrsquos fake TED Talk3 ldquoWE ARE THE GODS NOWrdquo - what I lovethat movie)))

The evidence of our power is everywhere we have not simplyconquered nature (((what anthropoceneproblems))) but havealso begun to defeat humanityrsquos own worst enemies War isincreasingly obsolete famine is rare disease is on the retreataround the world (((letrsquos just ignore that the Zika Virus isalready part of the newnormal with the CDC mandating all theblood of the Empire be tested for it Or the threat of smallpoxand other fun plagues thawing out in the Arctic(formerly)permafrost))) We have achieved these triumphs bybuilding ever more complex networks that treat human beings asunits of information (((fyeah materialism))) Evolutionaryscience teaches us that in one sense we are nothing but data-processing machines we too are algorithms By manipulating thedata we can exercise mastery over our fate The trouble is thatother algorithms ndash the ones that we have built ndash can do it farmore efficiently than we can Thatrsquos what Harari means by theldquouncouplingrdquo of intelligence and consciousness The project ofmodernity was built on the idea that individual human beings arethe source of meaning as well as power We are meant to be theones who decide what happens to us as voters as consumers aslovers But thatrsquos not true any more We are what gives networkstheir power they use our ideas of meaning to determine whatwill happen to us (((never mind that Zuckerb0rg is the dictatorof the largest lsquonationrsquo on Earth now Or that this feeds theNeoReactionary argument for Corporations being the new Monarchyand the full dismantling of the Liberal project Just leave itby the roadside your broken printer and outdated tv sets)))

Not all of this is new The modern state which has been aroundfor about 400 years is really just another data-processingmachine The philosopher Thomas Hobbes writing in 1651 calledit an ldquoautomatonrdquo (or what we would call a robot) Its roboticquality is the source of its power and also its heartlessnessstates donrsquot have a conscience which is what allows themsometimes to do the most fearful things Whatrsquos changed is that

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

3

sometimes to do the most fearful things Whatrsquos changed is thatthere are now processing machines that are far more efficientthan states as Harari points out governments find it almostimpossible to keep up with the pace of technological advance(((Elon Musk for dictator of Earth I mean why botherpointing out the real problem is the infection of the democraticprocess by anti-Scientific forceshellip unless thatrsquos your nextstatus update At least the Stack will know how to sort younow))) It has also become much harder to sustain the belief ndashshared by Hobbes ndash that behind every state there are real flesh-and-blood human beings The modern insistence on the autonomy ofthe individual goes along with a view that it should be possibleto find the heart of this heartless world Keep scratching at afaceless bureaucracy and yoursquoll eventually uncover a civilservant with real feelings But keep scratching at a searchengine and all yoursquoll find are data points (((Sure letrsquos keepreinforcing the idea that these false machine gods are totallyagnostic when it comes to the metrics they use to monitor ushellip)))

We are just at the start of this process of data-driventransformation and Harari says there is little we can do to stopit (((Change is just another natural force herersquos Yuval with along range weather forecasthellip OR jeez idkhellip maybe we can stoppause and restate our assumptions before itrsquos literally the endof the world))) Homo Deus is an ldquoend of historyrdquo book but notin the crude sense that he believes things have come to a stopRather the opposite things are moving so fast that itrsquosimpossible to imagine what the future might hold

(((We interrupt ourselves parenthetically ranting to drop in adialog snippet from Mr Robot where the Amazon Alexa is treatedlike an Oracle giving us a preview of just the kind oftechnocratic worship thatrsquos being argued for here Bonus Feature- just like so much of Mr Robot apes Fight Club this is alsothe tv show repeating the filmrsquos narratorrsquos line that lsquoon a longenough time line the survival rate for everyone drops to zerorsquo

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

4

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

5

ldquoUnless it collides with a very large rock or a future technology goesvery wrong indeed Earth is most likely to be destroyed when the sunswells into a red giant in several billion years timerdquo ~ Mr Robot(s02e03)

Define your terms dude and name your scale because the world isa slow motion car crash so many of us have been rubbernecking atfor years now trying to warn people to get out of the way butthey just watch through their phones as it all unfolds andgoddamnit theres no damn skid marks they didnt hit thebrakes they just let go of the wheel Itrsquos almost like anarguments being made that as we move into a world of autonomousStack-controlled vehicles we should do the same How I stoppedworrying and embraced a fully automated lifehellip as a humandrone))) In 1800 it was possible to think meaningfully aboutwhat the world of 1900 would be like and how we might fit in(((What is the Myth of Progress))) Thatrsquos history a sequenceof events in which human beings play the leading part (((Mostlyby adapting to changing climate conditions but hey whatevsplease continuehellip))) But the world of 2100 is at present almostunimaginable (((something something sprockets))) We have noidea where wersquoll fit in if at all (((Pretty sure mydecomposing body will feed a garden somewhere by then))) We may

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

6

decomposing body will feed a garden somewhere by then))) We mayhave built a world that has no place for us (((Dataism will ofcourse be the native religion of the technocratic settlementson Mars and elsewhere I mean thatrsquos sure as shit the (overt)plan)))

Given what an alarming thought this is and since we arenrsquotthere yet why canrsquot we do more to stop it from happening(((Delete your Facebook account Drift offline with me Burn allyour social currency)))

[Holy Mountain]

Harari thinks the modern belief that individuals are in chargeof their fate was never much more than a leap of faith (((Sureletrsquos weaponize the Illusion of Control rather than go back tothe wellspring of the Enlightenment Paging Mr Rosy Crossesq))) Real power always resided with networks Individual humanbeings are relatively powerless creatures no match for lions orbears (((Puny monkeyshellip and yet now letrsquos brag about megafaunalextinctions and ecocidal ambitionshellip))) Itrsquos what they can do asgroups that has enabled them to take over the planet (((againwhat anthropoceneproblems))) These groupings ndash corporationsreligions states ndash are now part of a vast network ofinterconnected information flows (((That would be the EternalNow I guess Since ya know wersquove been roughly organising likethis forhellip idkhellip all of known time))) Finding points ofresistance where smaller units can stand up to the waves of

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

7

resistance where smaller units can stand up to the waves ofinformation washing around the globe is becoming harder all thetime (((I guess this is where I go Full John Connor - lsquoif urreadin ths ur da Resistncersquo - donrsquot forget to chalk those mutedhorns to mark your exit)))

Some people have given up the fight In place of the foundingtenets of modernity ndash liberalism democracy and personalautonomy ndash there is a new religion Dataism Its followers ndashmany of whom reside in the Bay Area of California ndash put theirfaith in information by encouraging us to see it as the onlytrue source of value

[They Live]

We are what we contribute to data processing (((How does it goagain rdquoIf you are not paying for it youre not the customeryoure the product being sold4rdquo))) (((Also I guess the Borgainrsquot a metaphor for Communism anymore thenhellip itrsquos the endgame ofLate Capitalism with the pedal to the metal))) There ispotentially a huge upside to this it means we will face fewerand fewer obstacles to getting what we want because theinformation needed to supply us will be instantly accessible(((A new automagical life of Fully Automated Luxury awaits youin the off-world colonies and wherever else the BreakawayCivilisation builds its outposts))) Our likes and ourexperiences will merge (((Somewhere somewhen someone isreading this from inside the Occulus Rift mediated prison planetand wincinghellip and then ironically watching old Black Mirror

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

4

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

5

ldquoUnless it collides with a very large rock or a future technology goesvery wrong indeed Earth is most likely to be destroyed when the sunswells into a red giant in several billion years timerdquo ~ Mr Robot(s02e03)

Define your terms dude and name your scale because the world isa slow motion car crash so many of us have been rubbernecking atfor years now trying to warn people to get out of the way butthey just watch through their phones as it all unfolds andgoddamnit theres no damn skid marks they didnt hit thebrakes they just let go of the wheel Itrsquos almost like anarguments being made that as we move into a world of autonomousStack-controlled vehicles we should do the same How I stoppedworrying and embraced a fully automated lifehellip as a humandrone))) In 1800 it was possible to think meaningfully aboutwhat the world of 1900 would be like and how we might fit in(((What is the Myth of Progress))) Thatrsquos history a sequenceof events in which human beings play the leading part (((Mostlyby adapting to changing climate conditions but hey whatevsplease continuehellip))) But the world of 2100 is at present almostunimaginable (((something something sprockets))) We have noidea where wersquoll fit in if at all (((Pretty sure mydecomposing body will feed a garden somewhere by then))) We may

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

6

decomposing body will feed a garden somewhere by then))) We mayhave built a world that has no place for us (((Dataism will ofcourse be the native religion of the technocratic settlementson Mars and elsewhere I mean thatrsquos sure as shit the (overt)plan)))

Given what an alarming thought this is and since we arenrsquotthere yet why canrsquot we do more to stop it from happening(((Delete your Facebook account Drift offline with me Burn allyour social currency)))

[Holy Mountain]

Harari thinks the modern belief that individuals are in chargeof their fate was never much more than a leap of faith (((Sureletrsquos weaponize the Illusion of Control rather than go back tothe wellspring of the Enlightenment Paging Mr Rosy Crossesq))) Real power always resided with networks Individual humanbeings are relatively powerless creatures no match for lions orbears (((Puny monkeyshellip and yet now letrsquos brag about megafaunalextinctions and ecocidal ambitionshellip))) Itrsquos what they can do asgroups that has enabled them to take over the planet (((againwhat anthropoceneproblems))) These groupings ndash corporationsreligions states ndash are now part of a vast network ofinterconnected information flows (((That would be the EternalNow I guess Since ya know wersquove been roughly organising likethis forhellip idkhellip all of known time))) Finding points ofresistance where smaller units can stand up to the waves of

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

7

resistance where smaller units can stand up to the waves ofinformation washing around the globe is becoming harder all thetime (((I guess this is where I go Full John Connor - lsquoif urreadin ths ur da Resistncersquo - donrsquot forget to chalk those mutedhorns to mark your exit)))

Some people have given up the fight In place of the foundingtenets of modernity ndash liberalism democracy and personalautonomy ndash there is a new religion Dataism Its followers ndashmany of whom reside in the Bay Area of California ndash put theirfaith in information by encouraging us to see it as the onlytrue source of value

[They Live]

We are what we contribute to data processing (((How does it goagain rdquoIf you are not paying for it youre not the customeryoure the product being sold4rdquo))) (((Also I guess the Borgainrsquot a metaphor for Communism anymore thenhellip itrsquos the endgame ofLate Capitalism with the pedal to the metal))) There ispotentially a huge upside to this it means we will face fewerand fewer obstacles to getting what we want because theinformation needed to supply us will be instantly accessible(((A new automagical life of Fully Automated Luxury awaits youin the off-world colonies and wherever else the BreakawayCivilisation builds its outposts))) Our likes and ourexperiences will merge (((Somewhere somewhen someone isreading this from inside the Occulus Rift mediated prison planetand wincinghellip and then ironically watching old Black Mirror

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

5

ldquoUnless it collides with a very large rock or a future technology goesvery wrong indeed Earth is most likely to be destroyed when the sunswells into a red giant in several billion years timerdquo ~ Mr Robot(s02e03)

Define your terms dude and name your scale because the world isa slow motion car crash so many of us have been rubbernecking atfor years now trying to warn people to get out of the way butthey just watch through their phones as it all unfolds andgoddamnit theres no damn skid marks they didnt hit thebrakes they just let go of the wheel Itrsquos almost like anarguments being made that as we move into a world of autonomousStack-controlled vehicles we should do the same How I stoppedworrying and embraced a fully automated lifehellip as a humandrone))) In 1800 it was possible to think meaningfully aboutwhat the world of 1900 would be like and how we might fit in(((What is the Myth of Progress))) Thatrsquos history a sequenceof events in which human beings play the leading part (((Mostlyby adapting to changing climate conditions but hey whatevsplease continuehellip))) But the world of 2100 is at present almostunimaginable (((something something sprockets))) We have noidea where wersquoll fit in if at all (((Pretty sure mydecomposing body will feed a garden somewhere by then))) We may

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

6

decomposing body will feed a garden somewhere by then))) We mayhave built a world that has no place for us (((Dataism will ofcourse be the native religion of the technocratic settlementson Mars and elsewhere I mean thatrsquos sure as shit the (overt)plan)))

Given what an alarming thought this is and since we arenrsquotthere yet why canrsquot we do more to stop it from happening(((Delete your Facebook account Drift offline with me Burn allyour social currency)))

[Holy Mountain]

Harari thinks the modern belief that individuals are in chargeof their fate was never much more than a leap of faith (((Sureletrsquos weaponize the Illusion of Control rather than go back tothe wellspring of the Enlightenment Paging Mr Rosy Crossesq))) Real power always resided with networks Individual humanbeings are relatively powerless creatures no match for lions orbears (((Puny monkeyshellip and yet now letrsquos brag about megafaunalextinctions and ecocidal ambitionshellip))) Itrsquos what they can do asgroups that has enabled them to take over the planet (((againwhat anthropoceneproblems))) These groupings ndash corporationsreligions states ndash are now part of a vast network ofinterconnected information flows (((That would be the EternalNow I guess Since ya know wersquove been roughly organising likethis forhellip idkhellip all of known time))) Finding points ofresistance where smaller units can stand up to the waves of

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

7

resistance where smaller units can stand up to the waves ofinformation washing around the globe is becoming harder all thetime (((I guess this is where I go Full John Connor - lsquoif urreadin ths ur da Resistncersquo - donrsquot forget to chalk those mutedhorns to mark your exit)))

Some people have given up the fight In place of the foundingtenets of modernity ndash liberalism democracy and personalautonomy ndash there is a new religion Dataism Its followers ndashmany of whom reside in the Bay Area of California ndash put theirfaith in information by encouraging us to see it as the onlytrue source of value

[They Live]

We are what we contribute to data processing (((How does it goagain rdquoIf you are not paying for it youre not the customeryoure the product being sold4rdquo))) (((Also I guess the Borgainrsquot a metaphor for Communism anymore thenhellip itrsquos the endgame ofLate Capitalism with the pedal to the metal))) There ispotentially a huge upside to this it means we will face fewerand fewer obstacles to getting what we want because theinformation needed to supply us will be instantly accessible(((A new automagical life of Fully Automated Luxury awaits youin the off-world colonies and wherever else the BreakawayCivilisation builds its outposts))) Our likes and ourexperiences will merge (((Somewhere somewhen someone isreading this from inside the Occulus Rift mediated prison planetand wincinghellip and then ironically watching old Black Mirror

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

6

decomposing body will feed a garden somewhere by then))) We mayhave built a world that has no place for us (((Dataism will ofcourse be the native religion of the technocratic settlementson Mars and elsewhere I mean thatrsquos sure as shit the (overt)plan)))

Given what an alarming thought this is and since we arenrsquotthere yet why canrsquot we do more to stop it from happening(((Delete your Facebook account Drift offline with me Burn allyour social currency)))

[Holy Mountain]

Harari thinks the modern belief that individuals are in chargeof their fate was never much more than a leap of faith (((Sureletrsquos weaponize the Illusion of Control rather than go back tothe wellspring of the Enlightenment Paging Mr Rosy Crossesq))) Real power always resided with networks Individual humanbeings are relatively powerless creatures no match for lions orbears (((Puny monkeyshellip and yet now letrsquos brag about megafaunalextinctions and ecocidal ambitionshellip))) Itrsquos what they can do asgroups that has enabled them to take over the planet (((againwhat anthropoceneproblems))) These groupings ndash corporationsreligions states ndash are now part of a vast network ofinterconnected information flows (((That would be the EternalNow I guess Since ya know wersquove been roughly organising likethis forhellip idkhellip all of known time))) Finding points ofresistance where smaller units can stand up to the waves of

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

7

resistance where smaller units can stand up to the waves ofinformation washing around the globe is becoming harder all thetime (((I guess this is where I go Full John Connor - lsquoif urreadin ths ur da Resistncersquo - donrsquot forget to chalk those mutedhorns to mark your exit)))

Some people have given up the fight In place of the foundingtenets of modernity ndash liberalism democracy and personalautonomy ndash there is a new religion Dataism Its followers ndashmany of whom reside in the Bay Area of California ndash put theirfaith in information by encouraging us to see it as the onlytrue source of value

[They Live]

We are what we contribute to data processing (((How does it goagain rdquoIf you are not paying for it youre not the customeryoure the product being sold4rdquo))) (((Also I guess the Borgainrsquot a metaphor for Communism anymore thenhellip itrsquos the endgame ofLate Capitalism with the pedal to the metal))) There ispotentially a huge upside to this it means we will face fewerand fewer obstacles to getting what we want because theinformation needed to supply us will be instantly accessible(((A new automagical life of Fully Automated Luxury awaits youin the off-world colonies and wherever else the BreakawayCivilisation builds its outposts))) Our likes and ourexperiences will merge (((Somewhere somewhen someone isreading this from inside the Occulus Rift mediated prison planetand wincinghellip and then ironically watching old Black Mirror

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

7

resistance where smaller units can stand up to the waves ofinformation washing around the globe is becoming harder all thetime (((I guess this is where I go Full John Connor - lsquoif urreadin ths ur da Resistncersquo - donrsquot forget to chalk those mutedhorns to mark your exit)))

Some people have given up the fight In place of the foundingtenets of modernity ndash liberalism democracy and personalautonomy ndash there is a new religion Dataism Its followers ndashmany of whom reside in the Bay Area of California ndash put theirfaith in information by encouraging us to see it as the onlytrue source of value

[They Live]

We are what we contribute to data processing (((How does it goagain rdquoIf you are not paying for it youre not the customeryoure the product being sold4rdquo))) (((Also I guess the Borgainrsquot a metaphor for Communism anymore thenhellip itrsquos the endgame ofLate Capitalism with the pedal to the metal))) There ispotentially a huge upside to this it means we will face fewerand fewer obstacles to getting what we want because theinformation needed to supply us will be instantly accessible(((A new automagical life of Fully Automated Luxury awaits youin the off-world colonies and wherever else the BreakawayCivilisation builds its outposts))) Our likes and ourexperiences will merge (((Somewhere somewhen someone isreading this from inside the Occulus Rift mediated prison planetand wincinghellip and then ironically watching old Black Mirror

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

8

and wincinghellip and then ironically watching old Black Mirrorepisodes as they gulp down their narcotic-laced Soylent))) Ourlifespans could also be hugely extended Dataists believe thatimmortality is the next frontier to be crossed (((And peoplethought Caloric Restriction was hardcore Wait itrsquos the samepeople The future is brought to you by Soylent Gulp))) But thedownside is obvious too Who will ldquowerdquo be any more Nothingmore than an accumulation of information points Twentieth-century political dystopias sought to stamp on individuals withthe power of the state That wonrsquot be necessary in the comingcentury (((Humanity will be harvested by the Stacks)))) AsHarari says ldquoThe individual will not be crushed by Big Brotherit will disintegrate from withinrdquo (((rdquoYou are the contents ofyour social media accountrdquo)))

Corporations and governments will continue to pay homage to ourindividuality and unique needs but in order to service themthey will need to ldquobreak us up into biochemical subsystemsrdquo allof them permanently monitored by powerful algorithms (((NeverOffline Wait therersquos some Doktor Sleepless art just for thisoccasion

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

9

Are you ready to play Farmville with your own gut biota Are youready for someone or something else to)))

There is a dystopian political aspect to this too the earlyadopters ndash the individuals who sign up first to the Dataistproject ndash will be the only ones with any real power left and itwill be relatively unchallenged Gaining entry into this newsuper-elite will be incredibly hard Yoursquoll need heroic levelsof education plus zero squeamishness about marrying yourpersonal identity with intelligent machines (((Wait surely

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

10

personal identity with intelligent machines (((Wait surelythis wasnrsquot the long game all along Algorithmic dating appsWho to follow Yeah that path is well pavedhellip)))) Then you canbecome one of the new ldquogodsrdquo Itrsquos a grim prospect a smallpriestly caste of seers with access to the ultimate source ofknowledge and the rest of humanity simply tools in their vastschemes The future could be a digitally supercharged version ofthe distant past ancient Egypt multiplied by the power ofFacebook (((Dude at least the priest kings made the floods runon time Actually who wants to hear about how the Empire undidthousands of years of the Egyptians hacking natural systems withgood old fashioned brute force Well itrsquos all there inside fromthe vent to the void and back again)))

Harari is careful not to predict that these outlandish visionswill come to pass The future is unknowable after all Hereserves his strongest opinions for what all this should meanfor the current state of relations between humans and animalsIf intelligence and consciousness are coming apart (((theyrsquorenot))) then this puts most human beings in the same situation asother animals capable of suffering at the hands of thepossessors of superior intelligence (((Hey what did CharlesFort once write

ldquoWould we if we could educate and sophisticate pigs geese cattle Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen that nowfunctions satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way ofcompensation I think were property I should say we belong to something That once upon a time this earth was No-mans Land that other worldsexplored and colonized here and fought among themselves forpossession but that now its owned by something That something owns this earth -- all others warned offrdquo [The Book ofthe Damned]

Ya know just in case you werenrsquot sure that the Chief Priests ofthe Stack want to dethrone God - and establish themselves as theDemiurge))) Harari does not seem too worried about the prospectof robots treating us like we treat flies with violentindifference (((Donrsquot worry I am - see on the Gods))) Ratherhe wants us to think about how we are treating animals in ourvast industrialised farming systems Pigs unquestionably sufferwhen living in cramped conditions or forcibly separated fromtheir young If we think this suffering doesnrsquot count because itis not allied to a higher intelligence then we are building arod for our own backs Soon the same will be true of us Andwhat price our suffering then

This is a very intelligent book full of sharp insights andmordant wit But as Harari would probably be the first to admititrsquos only intelligent by human standards which are nothingspecial (((rdquoI tweet therefore I amrdquo get back in the oven

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

9

Are you ready to play Farmville with your own gut biota Are youready for someone or something else to)))

There is a dystopian political aspect to this too the earlyadopters ndash the individuals who sign up first to the Dataistproject ndash will be the only ones with any real power left and itwill be relatively unchallenged Gaining entry into this newsuper-elite will be incredibly hard Yoursquoll need heroic levelsof education plus zero squeamishness about marrying yourpersonal identity with intelligent machines (((Wait surely

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

10

personal identity with intelligent machines (((Wait surelythis wasnrsquot the long game all along Algorithmic dating appsWho to follow Yeah that path is well pavedhellip)))) Then you canbecome one of the new ldquogodsrdquo Itrsquos a grim prospect a smallpriestly caste of seers with access to the ultimate source ofknowledge and the rest of humanity simply tools in their vastschemes The future could be a digitally supercharged version ofthe distant past ancient Egypt multiplied by the power ofFacebook (((Dude at least the priest kings made the floods runon time Actually who wants to hear about how the Empire undidthousands of years of the Egyptians hacking natural systems withgood old fashioned brute force Well itrsquos all there inside fromthe vent to the void and back again)))

Harari is careful not to predict that these outlandish visionswill come to pass The future is unknowable after all Hereserves his strongest opinions for what all this should meanfor the current state of relations between humans and animalsIf intelligence and consciousness are coming apart (((theyrsquorenot))) then this puts most human beings in the same situation asother animals capable of suffering at the hands of thepossessors of superior intelligence (((Hey what did CharlesFort once write

ldquoWould we if we could educate and sophisticate pigs geese cattle Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen that nowfunctions satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way ofcompensation I think were property I should say we belong to something That once upon a time this earth was No-mans Land that other worldsexplored and colonized here and fought among themselves forpossession but that now its owned by something That something owns this earth -- all others warned offrdquo [The Book ofthe Damned]

Ya know just in case you werenrsquot sure that the Chief Priests ofthe Stack want to dethrone God - and establish themselves as theDemiurge))) Harari does not seem too worried about the prospectof robots treating us like we treat flies with violentindifference (((Donrsquot worry I am - see on the Gods))) Ratherhe wants us to think about how we are treating animals in ourvast industrialised farming systems Pigs unquestionably sufferwhen living in cramped conditions or forcibly separated fromtheir young If we think this suffering doesnrsquot count because itis not allied to a higher intelligence then we are building arod for our own backs Soon the same will be true of us Andwhat price our suffering then

This is a very intelligent book full of sharp insights andmordant wit But as Harari would probably be the first to admititrsquos only intelligent by human standards which are nothingspecial (((rdquoI tweet therefore I amrdquo get back in the oven

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

10

personal identity with intelligent machines (((Wait surelythis wasnrsquot the long game all along Algorithmic dating appsWho to follow Yeah that path is well pavedhellip)))) Then you canbecome one of the new ldquogodsrdquo Itrsquos a grim prospect a smallpriestly caste of seers with access to the ultimate source ofknowledge and the rest of humanity simply tools in their vastschemes The future could be a digitally supercharged version ofthe distant past ancient Egypt multiplied by the power ofFacebook (((Dude at least the priest kings made the floods runon time Actually who wants to hear about how the Empire undidthousands of years of the Egyptians hacking natural systems withgood old fashioned brute force Well itrsquos all there inside fromthe vent to the void and back again)))

Harari is careful not to predict that these outlandish visionswill come to pass The future is unknowable after all Hereserves his strongest opinions for what all this should meanfor the current state of relations between humans and animalsIf intelligence and consciousness are coming apart (((theyrsquorenot))) then this puts most human beings in the same situation asother animals capable of suffering at the hands of thepossessors of superior intelligence (((Hey what did CharlesFort once write

ldquoWould we if we could educate and sophisticate pigs geese cattle Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen that nowfunctions satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way ofcompensation I think were property I should say we belong to something That once upon a time this earth was No-mans Land that other worldsexplored and colonized here and fought among themselves forpossession but that now its owned by something That something owns this earth -- all others warned offrdquo [The Book ofthe Damned]

Ya know just in case you werenrsquot sure that the Chief Priests ofthe Stack want to dethrone God - and establish themselves as theDemiurge))) Harari does not seem too worried about the prospectof robots treating us like we treat flies with violentindifference (((Donrsquot worry I am - see on the Gods))) Ratherhe wants us to think about how we are treating animals in ourvast industrialised farming systems Pigs unquestionably sufferwhen living in cramped conditions or forcibly separated fromtheir young If we think this suffering doesnrsquot count because itis not allied to a higher intelligence then we are building arod for our own backs Soon the same will be true of us Andwhat price our suffering then

This is a very intelligent book full of sharp insights andmordant wit But as Harari would probably be the first to admititrsquos only intelligent by human standards which are nothingspecial (((rdquoI tweet therefore I amrdquo get back in the oven

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

11

special (((rdquoI tweet therefore I amrdquo get back in the ovenRene))) By the standards of the smartest machines itrsquos woollyand speculative The datasets are pretty limited Its real powercomes from the sense of a distinctive consciousness behind itIt is a quirky and cool book with a sliver of ice at its heartHarari cares about the fate of animals in a human world but hewrites about the prospects for homo sapiens in a data-drivenworld with a lofty insouciance (((Dude I feel you thoughEmpathy for all living things even humans is a challengehellip butitrsquos also an axiom to build on))) I have to admit I found thisdeeply appealing but that may be because of who I am (apartfrom anything else a man) Not everyone will find it so But itis hard to imagine anyone could read this book without gettingan occasional vertiginous thrill Nietzsche once wrote thathumanity is about to set sail on an open sea now that we havefinally left Christian morality behind (((Weird how amidst allthese various leaks and other Revelations the Church is alsohaving its remaining legitimacy dissolved too Everything mustgo make way for the Age of Corpocratic Empire in Spaaace Imean Dune is a pretty great movie pass the spice and trip onthe fact that series is set long after a war with themachines))) Homo Deus makes it feel as if we are standing atthe edge of a cliff after a long and arduous journey Thejourney doesnrsquot seem so important any more We are about to stepinto thin air (((Do it Wersquoll honour your sacrifice to theGreat Filter Jump dude It worked out pretty okay for Neo)))

(((Some closing thoughts The argument Witzel makes in TheOrigins of the Worlds Mythologies as I understand it viaGordon Whitersquos Starships A Prehistory of the Spirits is thatmythology is so conservative it only changes when the powerstructure governing the people does And thatrsquos what wersquorewitnessing here in action before us laid bare power shiftingfrom the States and their recently divorced Monotheism to theStacks and the elevation of its architects to become near-immortal Priest Kings under the banner of Homo Deus From theGrid of the Empire to the internet-of-things (remember yoursquorejust another lsquothingrsquo now) as the actual Matrix of the Stacks

You canrsquot fight progress right Thatrsquos how it mythologizesitself anyway A little critical examination though before wesurrender ourselves to those fronting for the new Omnisciencemight be a worthwhile activity between Netflix binges Maybe wetack into the winds of change and build something out of itsway Maybe if wersquore quick enough sly enough we can buildsomething with its own gravity a force to pull us towards aBrighter Greener Future Which is why Invisibles MonasterieshellipBecause Gnostics write (themselves into) their own myths)))

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

12

[Lee Pace in Halt and Catch Fire (season 3)]

(((BONUS CLOSING THOUGHTS lol Yoursquore all seeing the same as Iam rn right The way Steve Jobs is being mythologised inpopular Wersquore witness his technocratic canonisation and itrsquosleaking out all over the place Like how else is Lee Pacersquoscharacter in Half and Catch Fire going to style himself as hemoves into full techno-visionary mode Looking rather Jobsianthere isnrsquot he

Let us conclude then by a reading from the book of the ViridianPope Emperor himself Herersquos Bruce Sterling defining Gothic HighTech5 at the Reboot 11 conference in 2009

In Gothic High-Tech yoursquore Steve Jobs Yoursquove built an iPhone which isa brilliant technical innovation but you also had to sneak off toTennessee to get a liver transplant because yoursquore dying of somethingsecret and horrible

And yoursquore a captain of American industry Yoursquore not some GeneralMotors kinda guy On the contrary yoursquore a guy whorsquos got both hands onthe steering wheel of a functional car

But yoursquore still Gothic High-Tech because death is waiting And not a

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

13

But yoursquore still Gothic High-Tech because death is waiting And not akindly death either but a sinister creeping tainted wells of SiliconValley kind of Superfund thing that steals upon you month by month andthat you have to hide from the public and from the bloggers and fromthe shareholders

And you just grit your teeth and pull out the next one A heroic storybut very Gothic Something that belongs in an eighteenth century horrornovel Kind of the ldquoman in the castlerdquo figure

Thatrsquos the fool the technocratics want to grant sainthood to intheir formative secular religion

Well it makes as much sense as anything does these days Iguesshellip)))

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

14

on Becoming Invisible to the Stacks

increasing survivability by ghosting offline like a spy-fisuperhero- 11th September 2016

Helen So why are you so hard to find Jack Reacher Im impossible to find Helen Why is that Jack Reacher Well you could say it started out as an exercise andbecame an addiction

~ Jack Reacher

So itrsquos that day today I didnrsquot even realise until I checked itto type it above But yes here I am again In the librarytrying to fight off another allergy attack contemplatingroaming the streets in a Bane-mask (like Dr Google prescribeslol) watching the world wake up to history

Ugh But wersquore still here And here in the library for me is agood place to be - with its terrible wifi amp shitty network thatwonrsquot even let me load up my crypto-backchannels to banter awaywith the inner circlehellip

We need to find the flow to find the Flow ya know That only byeliminating unnecessary distractions - and freeing ourselves

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

15

eliminating unnecessary distractions - and freeing ourselvesfrom the Mind War - can we work our way towards theAcceleration

Herersquos some pro tips from teh coding world6 that might help ifyoursquore easily distracted like me

Last year I turned off all my notifications I stopped bookingmeetings I started living asynchronouslyhellip

Reaching that flow stateLetrsquos talk a bit about how us humans get work done

Is it four hours of crushing it a lunch break then four more hours ofcrushing it

No Itrsquos more like coffee email coffee meeting coffee lunch withcoworkers coffee - OK finally time to get some work done

Did you know the average developer only get two hours of uninterruptedwork done a day They spend the other 6 hours in vary states ofdistraction

But herersquos what happens during the two hours they have to themselves

They warm up

They check logs issues and wrap their heads around what needs to bedone

They dive into the code

Their pupils dilate

They enter what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a ldquoflowstaterdquo

If yoursquove ever been ldquoin the grooverdquo or ldquoin the zonerdquo thatrsquos what thisis A happy state of energized focus FlowIf your job requires even an ounce of creativity yoursquoll do your bestwork in one of these flow statesAnd yes you can reach a flow state in an open plan office with noisecancelling headphones cranked up to 11 But itrsquos a lot easier whenyoursquore in a quiet comfortable room by yourselfAnd I know I knowhellip Irsquove probably distracted you from the

point I was starting to make at the beginning but hey wersquoreall gonna be busy soon trying to escape the Empire and we have

to find pro-tips where we can to get the Work done

Anywayhellip as I was starting to sayhellip therersquos no Imperial Broadcasthere nothing that might be mistaken for scenes from the nextStar Wars or whateverhellip no Irsquom here again humming Everybody Knowsunder my breath and trying to summon the power of the HappyHarry Hard-on and gift you dear reader with another brain dump

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

16

Harry Hard-on and gift you dear reader with another brain dumpmade palatable with generous sprinklings of da lulz Causethatrsquos how it goeshellip everybody knows

[Pump up the Volume]

The plan had been to come in yesterday - when we were merelywaking up and watching North Korea try to bait the West intohellipactually wtf exactly is their plan Extortion I think Or isthat just what it takes for the last rogue nation to get itselfnoticed when everyonersquos busily tuned to into So You Think YouCan POTUS 2016 and whatever the latest development in the newRussia Iran Turkey China power bloc - people are watchingthat right - who just maybe are planning for a post-Westworld where not just America but all of Europersquos gone fullisolationist

Crazy times right Enough to make you just want out To runawayand hide To craft up a personal exit strategyhellip to become likeJack Reacher a ghost Or if yoursquoll forgive the perjorative lsquoagypsyrsquo

Herersquos another snippet of movie dialog to help set the stagefrom The Bourne Identity

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

17

Who the hell is that

Marie Helena Kreutz Shes 26 Born outside of Hanover Father was awelder He died in lsquo87 Still dont have the mother The grandmothershes still there in Hanover and looks like shes the anchor forthis little domestic disaster And theres a stepbrother Its toughThe girls a gypsy She pops up on the grid here and there but itschaotic at best She paid some electric bills in Spain in lsquo95 had aphone in her name for three months in Belgium in lsquo96 No taxes nocredit

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

18

I dont like her I want to go deep

Get a phone log for granny and the half brother anybody we cancross-file I want to know every place shes slept in the past sixyears

Have Paris get these out in the field

[The Bourne Identity]

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

19

So yeah therersquos your dramatic representation of what being seenby the Security State looks like and thatrsquos circa 2002

mdashmdash

Okay Irsquove gently eased into this in my meandering wayhellip nowlets dump some theory

So therersquos this guy called James C Scott He wrote two booksthat get referenced pretty heavily in my personal timeline cumwormhole cum custom built artisanal hyperlocal reality tunnelThe first is Seeing like a State - which I havenrsquot read yet butnonetheless am implicitly referencing in the title of thisinstallment [TODO XXX - decide on teh title here is it BeingSeen by the Stacks or Becoming Invisiblehellip then fix this] Thesecond is The Art of Not Being Governed An Anarchist History ofUpland Southeast Asia - which I am slowly working my way throughin the slices of time I can carve out for such dense focusedactivities and thatrsquos why Irsquove been dropping videos of hislectures in my posts of late - much easier to digest that way

The key term Scott establishes early in that second work isLegibility which is a word we donrsquot hear much in commonconversation so it serves nicely to act as part of thescaffolding we can use to brace our argument here To be legibleto the State - to be visible to the EMPIRE - is to exist in itsrecords and as we can see above the gypsy-esque Marie in TheBourne Identity has done a decent job muddying up her datatrail This is a key skill to living outside - or on theoutskirts of - the Empire as Scott explains[TODO XXX - double check these are in the right order]

ldquoI argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway fugitivemaroon communities who have over the course of two millennia beenfleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys mdashslavery conscription taxes corveacutee labor epidemics and warfarehellip

The effect of all state-making projects of this kind was to create ashatter zone or flight zone to which those wishing to evade or toescape bondage fled These regions of refuge constituted a directldquostate effectrdquo Zomia simply happens to be owing largely to theprecocious early expansion of the Chinese state one of the mostextensive and oldest zones of refuge Such regions are howeverinevitable by-products of coercive state-making and are found on everycontinenthellip

Inasmuch as the captivity and bondage associated with early statemakinggenerate in their wake flight and zones of refuge slavery as a laborsystem produced many ldquoZomiasrdquo large and small It is possible in thiscontext to delineate an upland remote zone of West Africa that wasrelatively safe from the five hundredndashyearndashlong worldwide slave-raidingand trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

20

and trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

refuge grew in population despite the difficulties of the terrain andthe necessity for new subsistence routines Many of those who failed toevade the slave raids in Africa once transplanted to the New Worldpromptly escaped and created fugitive slave (maroon) settlementswherever slavery was practiced the famous highland ldquocockpitrdquo ofJamaica Palmares in Brazil a maroon community of some twenty thousandinhabitants and Surinam the largest maroon population in thehemisphere are only three illustrations Were we to include smallerscale ldquorefugiardquo such as marshes swamps and deltas the list wouldmultiply many fold To mention only a few the great marsh on the lowerEuphrates (drained under Saddam Husseinrsquos rule) was for two thousandyears a refuge from state control So on a smaller scale were thestoried Great Dismal Swamp on the North CarolinandashVirginia border thePripet Marshes in Poland now on the Belarus-Ukraine border and thePontian Marshes near Rome (drained finally by Mussolini) known as zonesof refuge from the state The list of such refugia is at least as longas the list of coercive labor schemes that inevitably spawn themhellip

In truth peripheral peoples had always been firmly linked economicallyto the lowlands and to world trade In some cases they appear to haveprovided most of the products valued in international commerceNevertheless the attempt to fully incorporatethem has been culturally styled as development economic progressliteracy and social integration In practice it has meant somethingelse The objective has been less to make them productive than toensure that their economic activity was legible taxable assessableand confiscatable or failing that to replace it with forms ofproduction that wererdquo~ The Art of Not Being Governed James C Scott

I was reflecting on such shatter zones for the nth time whilstwatching Free State of Jones and seeing thus caught in the Churnof the American Civil War retreat to the swap their localinstance of Zomia

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

21

[Free State of Jones]

And just as we want to fade away to avoid beingyetanothercasualtyofLifeInTheChurn we sure as shit definitelydonrsquot want to be conscripted into whatever World War III isbranding itself as these days

Once yoursquove done the self-work to load this concept into yourbiological BIOS yoursquoll start seeing examples of this everywhereLike in that last update of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thesupes are just arguing about the degree of legibility to theGlobal Security State Should it know their lsquorealrsquo names Shouldit know their location at all times

And that makes it - oddly - the most relatable to mere mortalshellipthe ones that are concerned about Twitter following Facebook inmandating a real names policy and the Stacks are tracking you bythe peripheral devices they own you with Before we dive deepinto being seen by the Stacks though letrsquos rewind slightlyAmazingly itrsquos still apparently Census Night herehellip at leastaccording to the slim window on Reality I maintain scrollingthrough twitter with my second or third coffee on the morningetchellip or waiting to get my turn on the big screen teev orhellip

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

22

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

fuck up one of the oldest of State traditions making a list ofpeople it can tax Remember thatrsquos why Joseph and Mary weremaking their way to Bethlehem [TODO XXX OR WHEREVER DAFUQ ITWAS] 2016 years ago For a census

This is where I should probably insert a personal anecdote huhYes I did put my religion down as Jedi again Also I totallylooked for every opportunity to muddy the waters For examplethe form let you put in either your birth date or your age Ageis one degree of granularity less legible than before date - sopick that option Ready for a really cool anecdote note -spoiler its about another instance of me that has hepatitisBut thatrsquos exactly what our data trail looks like wersquore nothingbut a series of entries in the databases of the State Banks ampother venereal financial institutions various corporations andof course the greatest harvesters of our lives ever the Stacks- which are the front for the Security Marketing State [[[TODOXXX clean da fuq up outta dis shit in particular]]]

Which is where I turn once again to the words of ally GordonWhite who has been thinking and writing about such things for awhile now

ldquoYour goal is to have sufficient analogue nodes in a network so thatyour user table in the shadow statersquos relational database ispermanently incompleterdquo ~ The First World Without Sin7

To keep talking in the native language of databases you alsowant to make lsquojoiningrsquo8 the tables in all those databasesdifficult to impossible Twitter insists on your birthdayDeclare yourself a Century Baby just like me

ldquo1996 Welcome online Dont EVER post any personal information here2016 Welcome online Please share your exact geographical locationrdquo ~Rawnzilla9

For those of us that emerged from the early personal computeryears entering fake personal data when installing software wasSOP (at least in my circle it was) and thatrsquos a habit thatrsquosnever left me

In fact letrsquos zoom in real hard the very moment in spacetimethat Irsquom writing this and get an overview of how legible I am

As you know Irsquom in the library - because I am the verydefinition of a reliable narrator and none of these newslettershave been revised after the initial date of composition -uncrosses fingers-

To get onto the wifi here I had to logon to their system tolearn the password of the day Now they used to just write that

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

23

learn the password of the day Now they used to just write thaton a noticeboard but clearly - for whatever reason - they onlywant members - people legible to the library - to be able to login Prolly becuz childpr0n and the terrieshellip

So thatrsquos one trace Irsquove left that Irsquom here But I donrsquot havemy phone with me - I left that at home - so therersquos no pingsfrom it to the nearest cell tower or IMSI-catcher10 Whilstwriting all this Irsquom listening to music using Mediamonkey whichIrsquove setup to lsquoscrobblersquo its tracks to lastfm Need proof Irsquovejoined the Cult of Tay and gone on to let the dark light of LanaDel Rey into my life Click here

Excepthellip maybe Irsquom deliberately muddying my trail Leaving themusic playing at home and my phone behind whilst in realitygoing on such grand adventures as wandering around abandonedschool grounds with faithful Shiva listening to ok probablythe exact same music but on my non-networked non-geolocationbroadcasting calm af dumb mp3 player

And whilst Irsquom obviously going online while writing this -mostly just to make sure I get such quotes as one of the men whovery much inspired Morrison in writing The Invisibles - the manknown only as Number Six [TODO XXX FIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxx] - Irsquomdoing so with everyone plugin I know of that might mask mypresence - everything from Facebook Disconnect to HTTPSEverywhere and of course Ghostery

[Ed For a full list seeing Appdenix X A guide to ghostingonline - when it exists lol]

ldquoI will not make any deals with you Ive resigned I will not bepushed filed stamped indexed briefed debriefed or numbered Mylife is my ownrdquo ~ The Prisoner

And whatrsquos the motto at The Village where the Shadow State hasits unpersons disappeared to BE SEEING YOU

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

12

[Lee Pace in Halt and Catch Fire (season 3)]

(((BONUS CLOSING THOUGHTS lol Yoursquore all seeing the same as Iam rn right The way Steve Jobs is being mythologised inpopular Wersquore witness his technocratic canonisation and itrsquosleaking out all over the place Like how else is Lee Pacersquoscharacter in Half and Catch Fire going to style himself as hemoves into full techno-visionary mode Looking rather Jobsianthere isnrsquot he

Let us conclude then by a reading from the book of the ViridianPope Emperor himself Herersquos Bruce Sterling defining Gothic HighTech5 at the Reboot 11 conference in 2009

In Gothic High-Tech yoursquore Steve Jobs Yoursquove built an iPhone which isa brilliant technical innovation but you also had to sneak off toTennessee to get a liver transplant because yoursquore dying of somethingsecret and horrible

And yoursquore a captain of American industry Yoursquore not some GeneralMotors kinda guy On the contrary yoursquore a guy whorsquos got both hands onthe steering wheel of a functional car

But yoursquore still Gothic High-Tech because death is waiting And not a

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

13

But yoursquore still Gothic High-Tech because death is waiting And not akindly death either but a sinister creeping tainted wells of SiliconValley kind of Superfund thing that steals upon you month by month andthat you have to hide from the public and from the bloggers and fromthe shareholders

And you just grit your teeth and pull out the next one A heroic storybut very Gothic Something that belongs in an eighteenth century horrornovel Kind of the ldquoman in the castlerdquo figure

Thatrsquos the fool the technocratics want to grant sainthood to intheir formative secular religion

Well it makes as much sense as anything does these days Iguesshellip)))

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

14

on Becoming Invisible to the Stacks

increasing survivability by ghosting offline like a spy-fisuperhero- 11th September 2016

Helen So why are you so hard to find Jack Reacher Im impossible to find Helen Why is that Jack Reacher Well you could say it started out as an exercise andbecame an addiction

~ Jack Reacher

So itrsquos that day today I didnrsquot even realise until I checked itto type it above But yes here I am again In the librarytrying to fight off another allergy attack contemplatingroaming the streets in a Bane-mask (like Dr Google prescribeslol) watching the world wake up to history

Ugh But wersquore still here And here in the library for me is agood place to be - with its terrible wifi amp shitty network thatwonrsquot even let me load up my crypto-backchannels to banter awaywith the inner circlehellip

We need to find the flow to find the Flow ya know That only byeliminating unnecessary distractions - and freeing ourselves

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

15

eliminating unnecessary distractions - and freeing ourselvesfrom the Mind War - can we work our way towards theAcceleration

Herersquos some pro tips from teh coding world6 that might help ifyoursquore easily distracted like me

Last year I turned off all my notifications I stopped bookingmeetings I started living asynchronouslyhellip

Reaching that flow stateLetrsquos talk a bit about how us humans get work done

Is it four hours of crushing it a lunch break then four more hours ofcrushing it

No Itrsquos more like coffee email coffee meeting coffee lunch withcoworkers coffee - OK finally time to get some work done

Did you know the average developer only get two hours of uninterruptedwork done a day They spend the other 6 hours in vary states ofdistraction

But herersquos what happens during the two hours they have to themselves

They warm up

They check logs issues and wrap their heads around what needs to bedone

They dive into the code

Their pupils dilate

They enter what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a ldquoflowstaterdquo

If yoursquove ever been ldquoin the grooverdquo or ldquoin the zonerdquo thatrsquos what thisis A happy state of energized focus FlowIf your job requires even an ounce of creativity yoursquoll do your bestwork in one of these flow statesAnd yes you can reach a flow state in an open plan office with noisecancelling headphones cranked up to 11 But itrsquos a lot easier whenyoursquore in a quiet comfortable room by yourselfAnd I know I knowhellip Irsquove probably distracted you from the

point I was starting to make at the beginning but hey wersquoreall gonna be busy soon trying to escape the Empire and we have

to find pro-tips where we can to get the Work done

Anywayhellip as I was starting to sayhellip therersquos no Imperial Broadcasthere nothing that might be mistaken for scenes from the nextStar Wars or whateverhellip no Irsquom here again humming Everybody Knowsunder my breath and trying to summon the power of the HappyHarry Hard-on and gift you dear reader with another brain dump

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

16

Harry Hard-on and gift you dear reader with another brain dumpmade palatable with generous sprinklings of da lulz Causethatrsquos how it goeshellip everybody knows

[Pump up the Volume]

The plan had been to come in yesterday - when we were merelywaking up and watching North Korea try to bait the West intohellipactually wtf exactly is their plan Extortion I think Or isthat just what it takes for the last rogue nation to get itselfnoticed when everyonersquos busily tuned to into So You Think YouCan POTUS 2016 and whatever the latest development in the newRussia Iran Turkey China power bloc - people are watchingthat right - who just maybe are planning for a post-Westworld where not just America but all of Europersquos gone fullisolationist

Crazy times right Enough to make you just want out To runawayand hide To craft up a personal exit strategyhellip to become likeJack Reacher a ghost Or if yoursquoll forgive the perjorative lsquoagypsyrsquo

Herersquos another snippet of movie dialog to help set the stagefrom The Bourne Identity

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

17

Who the hell is that

Marie Helena Kreutz Shes 26 Born outside of Hanover Father was awelder He died in lsquo87 Still dont have the mother The grandmothershes still there in Hanover and looks like shes the anchor forthis little domestic disaster And theres a stepbrother Its toughThe girls a gypsy She pops up on the grid here and there but itschaotic at best She paid some electric bills in Spain in lsquo95 had aphone in her name for three months in Belgium in lsquo96 No taxes nocredit

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

18

I dont like her I want to go deep

Get a phone log for granny and the half brother anybody we cancross-file I want to know every place shes slept in the past sixyears

Have Paris get these out in the field

[The Bourne Identity]

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

19

So yeah therersquos your dramatic representation of what being seenby the Security State looks like and thatrsquos circa 2002

mdashmdash

Okay Irsquove gently eased into this in my meandering wayhellip nowlets dump some theory

So therersquos this guy called James C Scott He wrote two booksthat get referenced pretty heavily in my personal timeline cumwormhole cum custom built artisanal hyperlocal reality tunnelThe first is Seeing like a State - which I havenrsquot read yet butnonetheless am implicitly referencing in the title of thisinstallment [TODO XXX - decide on teh title here is it BeingSeen by the Stacks or Becoming Invisiblehellip then fix this] Thesecond is The Art of Not Being Governed An Anarchist History ofUpland Southeast Asia - which I am slowly working my way throughin the slices of time I can carve out for such dense focusedactivities and thatrsquos why Irsquove been dropping videos of hislectures in my posts of late - much easier to digest that way

The key term Scott establishes early in that second work isLegibility which is a word we donrsquot hear much in commonconversation so it serves nicely to act as part of thescaffolding we can use to brace our argument here To be legibleto the State - to be visible to the EMPIRE - is to exist in itsrecords and as we can see above the gypsy-esque Marie in TheBourne Identity has done a decent job muddying up her datatrail This is a key skill to living outside - or on theoutskirts of - the Empire as Scott explains[TODO XXX - double check these are in the right order]

ldquoI argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway fugitivemaroon communities who have over the course of two millennia beenfleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys mdashslavery conscription taxes corveacutee labor epidemics and warfarehellip

The effect of all state-making projects of this kind was to create ashatter zone or flight zone to which those wishing to evade or toescape bondage fled These regions of refuge constituted a directldquostate effectrdquo Zomia simply happens to be owing largely to theprecocious early expansion of the Chinese state one of the mostextensive and oldest zones of refuge Such regions are howeverinevitable by-products of coercive state-making and are found on everycontinenthellip

Inasmuch as the captivity and bondage associated with early statemakinggenerate in their wake flight and zones of refuge slavery as a laborsystem produced many ldquoZomiasrdquo large and small It is possible in thiscontext to delineate an upland remote zone of West Africa that wasrelatively safe from the five hundredndashyearndashlong worldwide slave-raidingand trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

20

and trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

refuge grew in population despite the difficulties of the terrain andthe necessity for new subsistence routines Many of those who failed toevade the slave raids in Africa once transplanted to the New Worldpromptly escaped and created fugitive slave (maroon) settlementswherever slavery was practiced the famous highland ldquocockpitrdquo ofJamaica Palmares in Brazil a maroon community of some twenty thousandinhabitants and Surinam the largest maroon population in thehemisphere are only three illustrations Were we to include smallerscale ldquorefugiardquo such as marshes swamps and deltas the list wouldmultiply many fold To mention only a few the great marsh on the lowerEuphrates (drained under Saddam Husseinrsquos rule) was for two thousandyears a refuge from state control So on a smaller scale were thestoried Great Dismal Swamp on the North CarolinandashVirginia border thePripet Marshes in Poland now on the Belarus-Ukraine border and thePontian Marshes near Rome (drained finally by Mussolini) known as zonesof refuge from the state The list of such refugia is at least as longas the list of coercive labor schemes that inevitably spawn themhellip

In truth peripheral peoples had always been firmly linked economicallyto the lowlands and to world trade In some cases they appear to haveprovided most of the products valued in international commerceNevertheless the attempt to fully incorporatethem has been culturally styled as development economic progressliteracy and social integration In practice it has meant somethingelse The objective has been less to make them productive than toensure that their economic activity was legible taxable assessableand confiscatable or failing that to replace it with forms ofproduction that wererdquo~ The Art of Not Being Governed James C Scott

I was reflecting on such shatter zones for the nth time whilstwatching Free State of Jones and seeing thus caught in the Churnof the American Civil War retreat to the swap their localinstance of Zomia

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

21

[Free State of Jones]

And just as we want to fade away to avoid beingyetanothercasualtyofLifeInTheChurn we sure as shit definitelydonrsquot want to be conscripted into whatever World War III isbranding itself as these days

Once yoursquove done the self-work to load this concept into yourbiological BIOS yoursquoll start seeing examples of this everywhereLike in that last update of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thesupes are just arguing about the degree of legibility to theGlobal Security State Should it know their lsquorealrsquo names Shouldit know their location at all times

And that makes it - oddly - the most relatable to mere mortalshellipthe ones that are concerned about Twitter following Facebook inmandating a real names policy and the Stacks are tracking you bythe peripheral devices they own you with Before we dive deepinto being seen by the Stacks though letrsquos rewind slightlyAmazingly itrsquos still apparently Census Night herehellip at leastaccording to the slim window on Reality I maintain scrollingthrough twitter with my second or third coffee on the morningetchellip or waiting to get my turn on the big screen teev orhellip

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

22

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

fuck up one of the oldest of State traditions making a list ofpeople it can tax Remember thatrsquos why Joseph and Mary weremaking their way to Bethlehem [TODO XXX OR WHEREVER DAFUQ ITWAS] 2016 years ago For a census

This is where I should probably insert a personal anecdote huhYes I did put my religion down as Jedi again Also I totallylooked for every opportunity to muddy the waters For examplethe form let you put in either your birth date or your age Ageis one degree of granularity less legible than before date - sopick that option Ready for a really cool anecdote note -spoiler its about another instance of me that has hepatitisBut thatrsquos exactly what our data trail looks like wersquore nothingbut a series of entries in the databases of the State Banks ampother venereal financial institutions various corporations andof course the greatest harvesters of our lives ever the Stacks- which are the front for the Security Marketing State [[[TODOXXX clean da fuq up outta dis shit in particular]]]

Which is where I turn once again to the words of ally GordonWhite who has been thinking and writing about such things for awhile now

ldquoYour goal is to have sufficient analogue nodes in a network so thatyour user table in the shadow statersquos relational database ispermanently incompleterdquo ~ The First World Without Sin7

To keep talking in the native language of databases you alsowant to make lsquojoiningrsquo8 the tables in all those databasesdifficult to impossible Twitter insists on your birthdayDeclare yourself a Century Baby just like me

ldquo1996 Welcome online Dont EVER post any personal information here2016 Welcome online Please share your exact geographical locationrdquo ~Rawnzilla9

For those of us that emerged from the early personal computeryears entering fake personal data when installing software wasSOP (at least in my circle it was) and thatrsquos a habit thatrsquosnever left me

In fact letrsquos zoom in real hard the very moment in spacetimethat Irsquom writing this and get an overview of how legible I am

As you know Irsquom in the library - because I am the verydefinition of a reliable narrator and none of these newslettershave been revised after the initial date of composition -uncrosses fingers-

To get onto the wifi here I had to logon to their system tolearn the password of the day Now they used to just write that

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

23

learn the password of the day Now they used to just write thaton a noticeboard but clearly - for whatever reason - they onlywant members - people legible to the library - to be able to login Prolly becuz childpr0n and the terrieshellip

So thatrsquos one trace Irsquove left that Irsquom here But I donrsquot havemy phone with me - I left that at home - so therersquos no pingsfrom it to the nearest cell tower or IMSI-catcher10 Whilstwriting all this Irsquom listening to music using Mediamonkey whichIrsquove setup to lsquoscrobblersquo its tracks to lastfm Need proof Irsquovejoined the Cult of Tay and gone on to let the dark light of LanaDel Rey into my life Click here

Excepthellip maybe Irsquom deliberately muddying my trail Leaving themusic playing at home and my phone behind whilst in realitygoing on such grand adventures as wandering around abandonedschool grounds with faithful Shiva listening to ok probablythe exact same music but on my non-networked non-geolocationbroadcasting calm af dumb mp3 player

And whilst Irsquom obviously going online while writing this -mostly just to make sure I get such quotes as one of the men whovery much inspired Morrison in writing The Invisibles - the manknown only as Number Six [TODO XXX FIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxx] - Irsquomdoing so with everyone plugin I know of that might mask mypresence - everything from Facebook Disconnect to HTTPSEverywhere and of course Ghostery

[Ed For a full list seeing Appdenix X A guide to ghostingonline - when it exists lol]

ldquoI will not make any deals with you Ive resigned I will not bepushed filed stamped indexed briefed debriefed or numbered Mylife is my ownrdquo ~ The Prisoner

And whatrsquos the motto at The Village where the Shadow State hasits unpersons disappeared to BE SEEING YOU

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

13

But yoursquore still Gothic High-Tech because death is waiting And not akindly death either but a sinister creeping tainted wells of SiliconValley kind of Superfund thing that steals upon you month by month andthat you have to hide from the public and from the bloggers and fromthe shareholders

And you just grit your teeth and pull out the next one A heroic storybut very Gothic Something that belongs in an eighteenth century horrornovel Kind of the ldquoman in the castlerdquo figure

Thatrsquos the fool the technocratics want to grant sainthood to intheir formative secular religion

Well it makes as much sense as anything does these days Iguesshellip)))

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

14

on Becoming Invisible to the Stacks

increasing survivability by ghosting offline like a spy-fisuperhero- 11th September 2016

Helen So why are you so hard to find Jack Reacher Im impossible to find Helen Why is that Jack Reacher Well you could say it started out as an exercise andbecame an addiction

~ Jack Reacher

So itrsquos that day today I didnrsquot even realise until I checked itto type it above But yes here I am again In the librarytrying to fight off another allergy attack contemplatingroaming the streets in a Bane-mask (like Dr Google prescribeslol) watching the world wake up to history

Ugh But wersquore still here And here in the library for me is agood place to be - with its terrible wifi amp shitty network thatwonrsquot even let me load up my crypto-backchannels to banter awaywith the inner circlehellip

We need to find the flow to find the Flow ya know That only byeliminating unnecessary distractions - and freeing ourselves

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

15

eliminating unnecessary distractions - and freeing ourselvesfrom the Mind War - can we work our way towards theAcceleration

Herersquos some pro tips from teh coding world6 that might help ifyoursquore easily distracted like me

Last year I turned off all my notifications I stopped bookingmeetings I started living asynchronouslyhellip

Reaching that flow stateLetrsquos talk a bit about how us humans get work done

Is it four hours of crushing it a lunch break then four more hours ofcrushing it

No Itrsquos more like coffee email coffee meeting coffee lunch withcoworkers coffee - OK finally time to get some work done

Did you know the average developer only get two hours of uninterruptedwork done a day They spend the other 6 hours in vary states ofdistraction

But herersquos what happens during the two hours they have to themselves

They warm up

They check logs issues and wrap their heads around what needs to bedone

They dive into the code

Their pupils dilate

They enter what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a ldquoflowstaterdquo

If yoursquove ever been ldquoin the grooverdquo or ldquoin the zonerdquo thatrsquos what thisis A happy state of energized focus FlowIf your job requires even an ounce of creativity yoursquoll do your bestwork in one of these flow statesAnd yes you can reach a flow state in an open plan office with noisecancelling headphones cranked up to 11 But itrsquos a lot easier whenyoursquore in a quiet comfortable room by yourselfAnd I know I knowhellip Irsquove probably distracted you from the

point I was starting to make at the beginning but hey wersquoreall gonna be busy soon trying to escape the Empire and we have

to find pro-tips where we can to get the Work done

Anywayhellip as I was starting to sayhellip therersquos no Imperial Broadcasthere nothing that might be mistaken for scenes from the nextStar Wars or whateverhellip no Irsquom here again humming Everybody Knowsunder my breath and trying to summon the power of the HappyHarry Hard-on and gift you dear reader with another brain dump

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

16

Harry Hard-on and gift you dear reader with another brain dumpmade palatable with generous sprinklings of da lulz Causethatrsquos how it goeshellip everybody knows

[Pump up the Volume]

The plan had been to come in yesterday - when we were merelywaking up and watching North Korea try to bait the West intohellipactually wtf exactly is their plan Extortion I think Or isthat just what it takes for the last rogue nation to get itselfnoticed when everyonersquos busily tuned to into So You Think YouCan POTUS 2016 and whatever the latest development in the newRussia Iran Turkey China power bloc - people are watchingthat right - who just maybe are planning for a post-Westworld where not just America but all of Europersquos gone fullisolationist

Crazy times right Enough to make you just want out To runawayand hide To craft up a personal exit strategyhellip to become likeJack Reacher a ghost Or if yoursquoll forgive the perjorative lsquoagypsyrsquo

Herersquos another snippet of movie dialog to help set the stagefrom The Bourne Identity

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

17

Who the hell is that

Marie Helena Kreutz Shes 26 Born outside of Hanover Father was awelder He died in lsquo87 Still dont have the mother The grandmothershes still there in Hanover and looks like shes the anchor forthis little domestic disaster And theres a stepbrother Its toughThe girls a gypsy She pops up on the grid here and there but itschaotic at best She paid some electric bills in Spain in lsquo95 had aphone in her name for three months in Belgium in lsquo96 No taxes nocredit

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

18

I dont like her I want to go deep

Get a phone log for granny and the half brother anybody we cancross-file I want to know every place shes slept in the past sixyears

Have Paris get these out in the field

[The Bourne Identity]

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

19

So yeah therersquos your dramatic representation of what being seenby the Security State looks like and thatrsquos circa 2002

mdashmdash

Okay Irsquove gently eased into this in my meandering wayhellip nowlets dump some theory

So therersquos this guy called James C Scott He wrote two booksthat get referenced pretty heavily in my personal timeline cumwormhole cum custom built artisanal hyperlocal reality tunnelThe first is Seeing like a State - which I havenrsquot read yet butnonetheless am implicitly referencing in the title of thisinstallment [TODO XXX - decide on teh title here is it BeingSeen by the Stacks or Becoming Invisiblehellip then fix this] Thesecond is The Art of Not Being Governed An Anarchist History ofUpland Southeast Asia - which I am slowly working my way throughin the slices of time I can carve out for such dense focusedactivities and thatrsquos why Irsquove been dropping videos of hislectures in my posts of late - much easier to digest that way

The key term Scott establishes early in that second work isLegibility which is a word we donrsquot hear much in commonconversation so it serves nicely to act as part of thescaffolding we can use to brace our argument here To be legibleto the State - to be visible to the EMPIRE - is to exist in itsrecords and as we can see above the gypsy-esque Marie in TheBourne Identity has done a decent job muddying up her datatrail This is a key skill to living outside - or on theoutskirts of - the Empire as Scott explains[TODO XXX - double check these are in the right order]

ldquoI argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway fugitivemaroon communities who have over the course of two millennia beenfleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys mdashslavery conscription taxes corveacutee labor epidemics and warfarehellip

The effect of all state-making projects of this kind was to create ashatter zone or flight zone to which those wishing to evade or toescape bondage fled These regions of refuge constituted a directldquostate effectrdquo Zomia simply happens to be owing largely to theprecocious early expansion of the Chinese state one of the mostextensive and oldest zones of refuge Such regions are howeverinevitable by-products of coercive state-making and are found on everycontinenthellip

Inasmuch as the captivity and bondage associated with early statemakinggenerate in their wake flight and zones of refuge slavery as a laborsystem produced many ldquoZomiasrdquo large and small It is possible in thiscontext to delineate an upland remote zone of West Africa that wasrelatively safe from the five hundredndashyearndashlong worldwide slave-raidingand trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

20

and trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

refuge grew in population despite the difficulties of the terrain andthe necessity for new subsistence routines Many of those who failed toevade the slave raids in Africa once transplanted to the New Worldpromptly escaped and created fugitive slave (maroon) settlementswherever slavery was practiced the famous highland ldquocockpitrdquo ofJamaica Palmares in Brazil a maroon community of some twenty thousandinhabitants and Surinam the largest maroon population in thehemisphere are only three illustrations Were we to include smallerscale ldquorefugiardquo such as marshes swamps and deltas the list wouldmultiply many fold To mention only a few the great marsh on the lowerEuphrates (drained under Saddam Husseinrsquos rule) was for two thousandyears a refuge from state control So on a smaller scale were thestoried Great Dismal Swamp on the North CarolinandashVirginia border thePripet Marshes in Poland now on the Belarus-Ukraine border and thePontian Marshes near Rome (drained finally by Mussolini) known as zonesof refuge from the state The list of such refugia is at least as longas the list of coercive labor schemes that inevitably spawn themhellip

In truth peripheral peoples had always been firmly linked economicallyto the lowlands and to world trade In some cases they appear to haveprovided most of the products valued in international commerceNevertheless the attempt to fully incorporatethem has been culturally styled as development economic progressliteracy and social integration In practice it has meant somethingelse The objective has been less to make them productive than toensure that their economic activity was legible taxable assessableand confiscatable or failing that to replace it with forms ofproduction that wererdquo~ The Art of Not Being Governed James C Scott

I was reflecting on such shatter zones for the nth time whilstwatching Free State of Jones and seeing thus caught in the Churnof the American Civil War retreat to the swap their localinstance of Zomia

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

21

[Free State of Jones]

And just as we want to fade away to avoid beingyetanothercasualtyofLifeInTheChurn we sure as shit definitelydonrsquot want to be conscripted into whatever World War III isbranding itself as these days

Once yoursquove done the self-work to load this concept into yourbiological BIOS yoursquoll start seeing examples of this everywhereLike in that last update of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thesupes are just arguing about the degree of legibility to theGlobal Security State Should it know their lsquorealrsquo names Shouldit know their location at all times

And that makes it - oddly - the most relatable to mere mortalshellipthe ones that are concerned about Twitter following Facebook inmandating a real names policy and the Stacks are tracking you bythe peripheral devices they own you with Before we dive deepinto being seen by the Stacks though letrsquos rewind slightlyAmazingly itrsquos still apparently Census Night herehellip at leastaccording to the slim window on Reality I maintain scrollingthrough twitter with my second or third coffee on the morningetchellip or waiting to get my turn on the big screen teev orhellip

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

22

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

fuck up one of the oldest of State traditions making a list ofpeople it can tax Remember thatrsquos why Joseph and Mary weremaking their way to Bethlehem [TODO XXX OR WHEREVER DAFUQ ITWAS] 2016 years ago For a census

This is where I should probably insert a personal anecdote huhYes I did put my religion down as Jedi again Also I totallylooked for every opportunity to muddy the waters For examplethe form let you put in either your birth date or your age Ageis one degree of granularity less legible than before date - sopick that option Ready for a really cool anecdote note -spoiler its about another instance of me that has hepatitisBut thatrsquos exactly what our data trail looks like wersquore nothingbut a series of entries in the databases of the State Banks ampother venereal financial institutions various corporations andof course the greatest harvesters of our lives ever the Stacks- which are the front for the Security Marketing State [[[TODOXXX clean da fuq up outta dis shit in particular]]]

Which is where I turn once again to the words of ally GordonWhite who has been thinking and writing about such things for awhile now

ldquoYour goal is to have sufficient analogue nodes in a network so thatyour user table in the shadow statersquos relational database ispermanently incompleterdquo ~ The First World Without Sin7

To keep talking in the native language of databases you alsowant to make lsquojoiningrsquo8 the tables in all those databasesdifficult to impossible Twitter insists on your birthdayDeclare yourself a Century Baby just like me

ldquo1996 Welcome online Dont EVER post any personal information here2016 Welcome online Please share your exact geographical locationrdquo ~Rawnzilla9

For those of us that emerged from the early personal computeryears entering fake personal data when installing software wasSOP (at least in my circle it was) and thatrsquos a habit thatrsquosnever left me

In fact letrsquos zoom in real hard the very moment in spacetimethat Irsquom writing this and get an overview of how legible I am

As you know Irsquom in the library - because I am the verydefinition of a reliable narrator and none of these newslettershave been revised after the initial date of composition -uncrosses fingers-

To get onto the wifi here I had to logon to their system tolearn the password of the day Now they used to just write that

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

23

learn the password of the day Now they used to just write thaton a noticeboard but clearly - for whatever reason - they onlywant members - people legible to the library - to be able to login Prolly becuz childpr0n and the terrieshellip

So thatrsquos one trace Irsquove left that Irsquom here But I donrsquot havemy phone with me - I left that at home - so therersquos no pingsfrom it to the nearest cell tower or IMSI-catcher10 Whilstwriting all this Irsquom listening to music using Mediamonkey whichIrsquove setup to lsquoscrobblersquo its tracks to lastfm Need proof Irsquovejoined the Cult of Tay and gone on to let the dark light of LanaDel Rey into my life Click here

Excepthellip maybe Irsquom deliberately muddying my trail Leaving themusic playing at home and my phone behind whilst in realitygoing on such grand adventures as wandering around abandonedschool grounds with faithful Shiva listening to ok probablythe exact same music but on my non-networked non-geolocationbroadcasting calm af dumb mp3 player

And whilst Irsquom obviously going online while writing this -mostly just to make sure I get such quotes as one of the men whovery much inspired Morrison in writing The Invisibles - the manknown only as Number Six [TODO XXX FIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxx] - Irsquomdoing so with everyone plugin I know of that might mask mypresence - everything from Facebook Disconnect to HTTPSEverywhere and of course Ghostery

[Ed For a full list seeing Appdenix X A guide to ghostingonline - when it exists lol]

ldquoI will not make any deals with you Ive resigned I will not bepushed filed stamped indexed briefed debriefed or numbered Mylife is my ownrdquo ~ The Prisoner

And whatrsquos the motto at The Village where the Shadow State hasits unpersons disappeared to BE SEEING YOU

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

14

on Becoming Invisible to the Stacks

increasing survivability by ghosting offline like a spy-fisuperhero- 11th September 2016

Helen So why are you so hard to find Jack Reacher Im impossible to find Helen Why is that Jack Reacher Well you could say it started out as an exercise andbecame an addiction

~ Jack Reacher

So itrsquos that day today I didnrsquot even realise until I checked itto type it above But yes here I am again In the librarytrying to fight off another allergy attack contemplatingroaming the streets in a Bane-mask (like Dr Google prescribeslol) watching the world wake up to history

Ugh But wersquore still here And here in the library for me is agood place to be - with its terrible wifi amp shitty network thatwonrsquot even let me load up my crypto-backchannels to banter awaywith the inner circlehellip

We need to find the flow to find the Flow ya know That only byeliminating unnecessary distractions - and freeing ourselves

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

15

eliminating unnecessary distractions - and freeing ourselvesfrom the Mind War - can we work our way towards theAcceleration

Herersquos some pro tips from teh coding world6 that might help ifyoursquore easily distracted like me

Last year I turned off all my notifications I stopped bookingmeetings I started living asynchronouslyhellip

Reaching that flow stateLetrsquos talk a bit about how us humans get work done

Is it four hours of crushing it a lunch break then four more hours ofcrushing it

No Itrsquos more like coffee email coffee meeting coffee lunch withcoworkers coffee - OK finally time to get some work done

Did you know the average developer only get two hours of uninterruptedwork done a day They spend the other 6 hours in vary states ofdistraction

But herersquos what happens during the two hours they have to themselves

They warm up

They check logs issues and wrap their heads around what needs to bedone

They dive into the code

Their pupils dilate

They enter what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a ldquoflowstaterdquo

If yoursquove ever been ldquoin the grooverdquo or ldquoin the zonerdquo thatrsquos what thisis A happy state of energized focus FlowIf your job requires even an ounce of creativity yoursquoll do your bestwork in one of these flow statesAnd yes you can reach a flow state in an open plan office with noisecancelling headphones cranked up to 11 But itrsquos a lot easier whenyoursquore in a quiet comfortable room by yourselfAnd I know I knowhellip Irsquove probably distracted you from the

point I was starting to make at the beginning but hey wersquoreall gonna be busy soon trying to escape the Empire and we have

to find pro-tips where we can to get the Work done

Anywayhellip as I was starting to sayhellip therersquos no Imperial Broadcasthere nothing that might be mistaken for scenes from the nextStar Wars or whateverhellip no Irsquom here again humming Everybody Knowsunder my breath and trying to summon the power of the HappyHarry Hard-on and gift you dear reader with another brain dump

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

16

Harry Hard-on and gift you dear reader with another brain dumpmade palatable with generous sprinklings of da lulz Causethatrsquos how it goeshellip everybody knows

[Pump up the Volume]

The plan had been to come in yesterday - when we were merelywaking up and watching North Korea try to bait the West intohellipactually wtf exactly is their plan Extortion I think Or isthat just what it takes for the last rogue nation to get itselfnoticed when everyonersquos busily tuned to into So You Think YouCan POTUS 2016 and whatever the latest development in the newRussia Iran Turkey China power bloc - people are watchingthat right - who just maybe are planning for a post-Westworld where not just America but all of Europersquos gone fullisolationist

Crazy times right Enough to make you just want out To runawayand hide To craft up a personal exit strategyhellip to become likeJack Reacher a ghost Or if yoursquoll forgive the perjorative lsquoagypsyrsquo

Herersquos another snippet of movie dialog to help set the stagefrom The Bourne Identity

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

17

Who the hell is that

Marie Helena Kreutz Shes 26 Born outside of Hanover Father was awelder He died in lsquo87 Still dont have the mother The grandmothershes still there in Hanover and looks like shes the anchor forthis little domestic disaster And theres a stepbrother Its toughThe girls a gypsy She pops up on the grid here and there but itschaotic at best She paid some electric bills in Spain in lsquo95 had aphone in her name for three months in Belgium in lsquo96 No taxes nocredit

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

18

I dont like her I want to go deep

Get a phone log for granny and the half brother anybody we cancross-file I want to know every place shes slept in the past sixyears

Have Paris get these out in the field

[The Bourne Identity]

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

19

So yeah therersquos your dramatic representation of what being seenby the Security State looks like and thatrsquos circa 2002

mdashmdash

Okay Irsquove gently eased into this in my meandering wayhellip nowlets dump some theory

So therersquos this guy called James C Scott He wrote two booksthat get referenced pretty heavily in my personal timeline cumwormhole cum custom built artisanal hyperlocal reality tunnelThe first is Seeing like a State - which I havenrsquot read yet butnonetheless am implicitly referencing in the title of thisinstallment [TODO XXX - decide on teh title here is it BeingSeen by the Stacks or Becoming Invisiblehellip then fix this] Thesecond is The Art of Not Being Governed An Anarchist History ofUpland Southeast Asia - which I am slowly working my way throughin the slices of time I can carve out for such dense focusedactivities and thatrsquos why Irsquove been dropping videos of hislectures in my posts of late - much easier to digest that way

The key term Scott establishes early in that second work isLegibility which is a word we donrsquot hear much in commonconversation so it serves nicely to act as part of thescaffolding we can use to brace our argument here To be legibleto the State - to be visible to the EMPIRE - is to exist in itsrecords and as we can see above the gypsy-esque Marie in TheBourne Identity has done a decent job muddying up her datatrail This is a key skill to living outside - or on theoutskirts of - the Empire as Scott explains[TODO XXX - double check these are in the right order]

ldquoI argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway fugitivemaroon communities who have over the course of two millennia beenfleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys mdashslavery conscription taxes corveacutee labor epidemics and warfarehellip

The effect of all state-making projects of this kind was to create ashatter zone or flight zone to which those wishing to evade or toescape bondage fled These regions of refuge constituted a directldquostate effectrdquo Zomia simply happens to be owing largely to theprecocious early expansion of the Chinese state one of the mostextensive and oldest zones of refuge Such regions are howeverinevitable by-products of coercive state-making and are found on everycontinenthellip

Inasmuch as the captivity and bondage associated with early statemakinggenerate in their wake flight and zones of refuge slavery as a laborsystem produced many ldquoZomiasrdquo large and small It is possible in thiscontext to delineate an upland remote zone of West Africa that wasrelatively safe from the five hundredndashyearndashlong worldwide slave-raidingand trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

20

and trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

refuge grew in population despite the difficulties of the terrain andthe necessity for new subsistence routines Many of those who failed toevade the slave raids in Africa once transplanted to the New Worldpromptly escaped and created fugitive slave (maroon) settlementswherever slavery was practiced the famous highland ldquocockpitrdquo ofJamaica Palmares in Brazil a maroon community of some twenty thousandinhabitants and Surinam the largest maroon population in thehemisphere are only three illustrations Were we to include smallerscale ldquorefugiardquo such as marshes swamps and deltas the list wouldmultiply many fold To mention only a few the great marsh on the lowerEuphrates (drained under Saddam Husseinrsquos rule) was for two thousandyears a refuge from state control So on a smaller scale were thestoried Great Dismal Swamp on the North CarolinandashVirginia border thePripet Marshes in Poland now on the Belarus-Ukraine border and thePontian Marshes near Rome (drained finally by Mussolini) known as zonesof refuge from the state The list of such refugia is at least as longas the list of coercive labor schemes that inevitably spawn themhellip

In truth peripheral peoples had always been firmly linked economicallyto the lowlands and to world trade In some cases they appear to haveprovided most of the products valued in international commerceNevertheless the attempt to fully incorporatethem has been culturally styled as development economic progressliteracy and social integration In practice it has meant somethingelse The objective has been less to make them productive than toensure that their economic activity was legible taxable assessableand confiscatable or failing that to replace it with forms ofproduction that wererdquo~ The Art of Not Being Governed James C Scott

I was reflecting on such shatter zones for the nth time whilstwatching Free State of Jones and seeing thus caught in the Churnof the American Civil War retreat to the swap their localinstance of Zomia

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

21

[Free State of Jones]

And just as we want to fade away to avoid beingyetanothercasualtyofLifeInTheChurn we sure as shit definitelydonrsquot want to be conscripted into whatever World War III isbranding itself as these days

Once yoursquove done the self-work to load this concept into yourbiological BIOS yoursquoll start seeing examples of this everywhereLike in that last update of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thesupes are just arguing about the degree of legibility to theGlobal Security State Should it know their lsquorealrsquo names Shouldit know their location at all times

And that makes it - oddly - the most relatable to mere mortalshellipthe ones that are concerned about Twitter following Facebook inmandating a real names policy and the Stacks are tracking you bythe peripheral devices they own you with Before we dive deepinto being seen by the Stacks though letrsquos rewind slightlyAmazingly itrsquos still apparently Census Night herehellip at leastaccording to the slim window on Reality I maintain scrollingthrough twitter with my second or third coffee on the morningetchellip or waiting to get my turn on the big screen teev orhellip

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

22

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

fuck up one of the oldest of State traditions making a list ofpeople it can tax Remember thatrsquos why Joseph and Mary weremaking their way to Bethlehem [TODO XXX OR WHEREVER DAFUQ ITWAS] 2016 years ago For a census

This is where I should probably insert a personal anecdote huhYes I did put my religion down as Jedi again Also I totallylooked for every opportunity to muddy the waters For examplethe form let you put in either your birth date or your age Ageis one degree of granularity less legible than before date - sopick that option Ready for a really cool anecdote note -spoiler its about another instance of me that has hepatitisBut thatrsquos exactly what our data trail looks like wersquore nothingbut a series of entries in the databases of the State Banks ampother venereal financial institutions various corporations andof course the greatest harvesters of our lives ever the Stacks- which are the front for the Security Marketing State [[[TODOXXX clean da fuq up outta dis shit in particular]]]

Which is where I turn once again to the words of ally GordonWhite who has been thinking and writing about such things for awhile now

ldquoYour goal is to have sufficient analogue nodes in a network so thatyour user table in the shadow statersquos relational database ispermanently incompleterdquo ~ The First World Without Sin7

To keep talking in the native language of databases you alsowant to make lsquojoiningrsquo8 the tables in all those databasesdifficult to impossible Twitter insists on your birthdayDeclare yourself a Century Baby just like me

ldquo1996 Welcome online Dont EVER post any personal information here2016 Welcome online Please share your exact geographical locationrdquo ~Rawnzilla9

For those of us that emerged from the early personal computeryears entering fake personal data when installing software wasSOP (at least in my circle it was) and thatrsquos a habit thatrsquosnever left me

In fact letrsquos zoom in real hard the very moment in spacetimethat Irsquom writing this and get an overview of how legible I am

As you know Irsquom in the library - because I am the verydefinition of a reliable narrator and none of these newslettershave been revised after the initial date of composition -uncrosses fingers-

To get onto the wifi here I had to logon to their system tolearn the password of the day Now they used to just write that

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

23

learn the password of the day Now they used to just write thaton a noticeboard but clearly - for whatever reason - they onlywant members - people legible to the library - to be able to login Prolly becuz childpr0n and the terrieshellip

So thatrsquos one trace Irsquove left that Irsquom here But I donrsquot havemy phone with me - I left that at home - so therersquos no pingsfrom it to the nearest cell tower or IMSI-catcher10 Whilstwriting all this Irsquom listening to music using Mediamonkey whichIrsquove setup to lsquoscrobblersquo its tracks to lastfm Need proof Irsquovejoined the Cult of Tay and gone on to let the dark light of LanaDel Rey into my life Click here

Excepthellip maybe Irsquom deliberately muddying my trail Leaving themusic playing at home and my phone behind whilst in realitygoing on such grand adventures as wandering around abandonedschool grounds with faithful Shiva listening to ok probablythe exact same music but on my non-networked non-geolocationbroadcasting calm af dumb mp3 player

And whilst Irsquom obviously going online while writing this -mostly just to make sure I get such quotes as one of the men whovery much inspired Morrison in writing The Invisibles - the manknown only as Number Six [TODO XXX FIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxx] - Irsquomdoing so with everyone plugin I know of that might mask mypresence - everything from Facebook Disconnect to HTTPSEverywhere and of course Ghostery

[Ed For a full list seeing Appdenix X A guide to ghostingonline - when it exists lol]

ldquoI will not make any deals with you Ive resigned I will not bepushed filed stamped indexed briefed debriefed or numbered Mylife is my ownrdquo ~ The Prisoner

And whatrsquos the motto at The Village where the Shadow State hasits unpersons disappeared to BE SEEING YOU

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

15

eliminating unnecessary distractions - and freeing ourselvesfrom the Mind War - can we work our way towards theAcceleration

Herersquos some pro tips from teh coding world6 that might help ifyoursquore easily distracted like me

Last year I turned off all my notifications I stopped bookingmeetings I started living asynchronouslyhellip

Reaching that flow stateLetrsquos talk a bit about how us humans get work done

Is it four hours of crushing it a lunch break then four more hours ofcrushing it

No Itrsquos more like coffee email coffee meeting coffee lunch withcoworkers coffee - OK finally time to get some work done

Did you know the average developer only get two hours of uninterruptedwork done a day They spend the other 6 hours in vary states ofdistraction

But herersquos what happens during the two hours they have to themselves

They warm up

They check logs issues and wrap their heads around what needs to bedone

They dive into the code

Their pupils dilate

They enter what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a ldquoflowstaterdquo

If yoursquove ever been ldquoin the grooverdquo or ldquoin the zonerdquo thatrsquos what thisis A happy state of energized focus FlowIf your job requires even an ounce of creativity yoursquoll do your bestwork in one of these flow statesAnd yes you can reach a flow state in an open plan office with noisecancelling headphones cranked up to 11 But itrsquos a lot easier whenyoursquore in a quiet comfortable room by yourselfAnd I know I knowhellip Irsquove probably distracted you from the

point I was starting to make at the beginning but hey wersquoreall gonna be busy soon trying to escape the Empire and we have

to find pro-tips where we can to get the Work done

Anywayhellip as I was starting to sayhellip therersquos no Imperial Broadcasthere nothing that might be mistaken for scenes from the nextStar Wars or whateverhellip no Irsquom here again humming Everybody Knowsunder my breath and trying to summon the power of the HappyHarry Hard-on and gift you dear reader with another brain dump

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

16

Harry Hard-on and gift you dear reader with another brain dumpmade palatable with generous sprinklings of da lulz Causethatrsquos how it goeshellip everybody knows

[Pump up the Volume]

The plan had been to come in yesterday - when we were merelywaking up and watching North Korea try to bait the West intohellipactually wtf exactly is their plan Extortion I think Or isthat just what it takes for the last rogue nation to get itselfnoticed when everyonersquos busily tuned to into So You Think YouCan POTUS 2016 and whatever the latest development in the newRussia Iran Turkey China power bloc - people are watchingthat right - who just maybe are planning for a post-Westworld where not just America but all of Europersquos gone fullisolationist

Crazy times right Enough to make you just want out To runawayand hide To craft up a personal exit strategyhellip to become likeJack Reacher a ghost Or if yoursquoll forgive the perjorative lsquoagypsyrsquo

Herersquos another snippet of movie dialog to help set the stagefrom The Bourne Identity

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

17

Who the hell is that

Marie Helena Kreutz Shes 26 Born outside of Hanover Father was awelder He died in lsquo87 Still dont have the mother The grandmothershes still there in Hanover and looks like shes the anchor forthis little domestic disaster And theres a stepbrother Its toughThe girls a gypsy She pops up on the grid here and there but itschaotic at best She paid some electric bills in Spain in lsquo95 had aphone in her name for three months in Belgium in lsquo96 No taxes nocredit

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

18

I dont like her I want to go deep

Get a phone log for granny and the half brother anybody we cancross-file I want to know every place shes slept in the past sixyears

Have Paris get these out in the field

[The Bourne Identity]

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

19

So yeah therersquos your dramatic representation of what being seenby the Security State looks like and thatrsquos circa 2002

mdashmdash

Okay Irsquove gently eased into this in my meandering wayhellip nowlets dump some theory

So therersquos this guy called James C Scott He wrote two booksthat get referenced pretty heavily in my personal timeline cumwormhole cum custom built artisanal hyperlocal reality tunnelThe first is Seeing like a State - which I havenrsquot read yet butnonetheless am implicitly referencing in the title of thisinstallment [TODO XXX - decide on teh title here is it BeingSeen by the Stacks or Becoming Invisiblehellip then fix this] Thesecond is The Art of Not Being Governed An Anarchist History ofUpland Southeast Asia - which I am slowly working my way throughin the slices of time I can carve out for such dense focusedactivities and thatrsquos why Irsquove been dropping videos of hislectures in my posts of late - much easier to digest that way

The key term Scott establishes early in that second work isLegibility which is a word we donrsquot hear much in commonconversation so it serves nicely to act as part of thescaffolding we can use to brace our argument here To be legibleto the State - to be visible to the EMPIRE - is to exist in itsrecords and as we can see above the gypsy-esque Marie in TheBourne Identity has done a decent job muddying up her datatrail This is a key skill to living outside - or on theoutskirts of - the Empire as Scott explains[TODO XXX - double check these are in the right order]

ldquoI argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway fugitivemaroon communities who have over the course of two millennia beenfleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys mdashslavery conscription taxes corveacutee labor epidemics and warfarehellip

The effect of all state-making projects of this kind was to create ashatter zone or flight zone to which those wishing to evade or toescape bondage fled These regions of refuge constituted a directldquostate effectrdquo Zomia simply happens to be owing largely to theprecocious early expansion of the Chinese state one of the mostextensive and oldest zones of refuge Such regions are howeverinevitable by-products of coercive state-making and are found on everycontinenthellip

Inasmuch as the captivity and bondage associated with early statemakinggenerate in their wake flight and zones of refuge slavery as a laborsystem produced many ldquoZomiasrdquo large and small It is possible in thiscontext to delineate an upland remote zone of West Africa that wasrelatively safe from the five hundredndashyearndashlong worldwide slave-raidingand trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

20

and trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

refuge grew in population despite the difficulties of the terrain andthe necessity for new subsistence routines Many of those who failed toevade the slave raids in Africa once transplanted to the New Worldpromptly escaped and created fugitive slave (maroon) settlementswherever slavery was practiced the famous highland ldquocockpitrdquo ofJamaica Palmares in Brazil a maroon community of some twenty thousandinhabitants and Surinam the largest maroon population in thehemisphere are only three illustrations Were we to include smallerscale ldquorefugiardquo such as marshes swamps and deltas the list wouldmultiply many fold To mention only a few the great marsh on the lowerEuphrates (drained under Saddam Husseinrsquos rule) was for two thousandyears a refuge from state control So on a smaller scale were thestoried Great Dismal Swamp on the North CarolinandashVirginia border thePripet Marshes in Poland now on the Belarus-Ukraine border and thePontian Marshes near Rome (drained finally by Mussolini) known as zonesof refuge from the state The list of such refugia is at least as longas the list of coercive labor schemes that inevitably spawn themhellip

In truth peripheral peoples had always been firmly linked economicallyto the lowlands and to world trade In some cases they appear to haveprovided most of the products valued in international commerceNevertheless the attempt to fully incorporatethem has been culturally styled as development economic progressliteracy and social integration In practice it has meant somethingelse The objective has been less to make them productive than toensure that their economic activity was legible taxable assessableand confiscatable or failing that to replace it with forms ofproduction that wererdquo~ The Art of Not Being Governed James C Scott

I was reflecting on such shatter zones for the nth time whilstwatching Free State of Jones and seeing thus caught in the Churnof the American Civil War retreat to the swap their localinstance of Zomia

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

21

[Free State of Jones]

And just as we want to fade away to avoid beingyetanothercasualtyofLifeInTheChurn we sure as shit definitelydonrsquot want to be conscripted into whatever World War III isbranding itself as these days

Once yoursquove done the self-work to load this concept into yourbiological BIOS yoursquoll start seeing examples of this everywhereLike in that last update of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thesupes are just arguing about the degree of legibility to theGlobal Security State Should it know their lsquorealrsquo names Shouldit know their location at all times

And that makes it - oddly - the most relatable to mere mortalshellipthe ones that are concerned about Twitter following Facebook inmandating a real names policy and the Stacks are tracking you bythe peripheral devices they own you with Before we dive deepinto being seen by the Stacks though letrsquos rewind slightlyAmazingly itrsquos still apparently Census Night herehellip at leastaccording to the slim window on Reality I maintain scrollingthrough twitter with my second or third coffee on the morningetchellip or waiting to get my turn on the big screen teev orhellip

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

22

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

fuck up one of the oldest of State traditions making a list ofpeople it can tax Remember thatrsquos why Joseph and Mary weremaking their way to Bethlehem [TODO XXX OR WHEREVER DAFUQ ITWAS] 2016 years ago For a census

This is where I should probably insert a personal anecdote huhYes I did put my religion down as Jedi again Also I totallylooked for every opportunity to muddy the waters For examplethe form let you put in either your birth date or your age Ageis one degree of granularity less legible than before date - sopick that option Ready for a really cool anecdote note -spoiler its about another instance of me that has hepatitisBut thatrsquos exactly what our data trail looks like wersquore nothingbut a series of entries in the databases of the State Banks ampother venereal financial institutions various corporations andof course the greatest harvesters of our lives ever the Stacks- which are the front for the Security Marketing State [[[TODOXXX clean da fuq up outta dis shit in particular]]]

Which is where I turn once again to the words of ally GordonWhite who has been thinking and writing about such things for awhile now

ldquoYour goal is to have sufficient analogue nodes in a network so thatyour user table in the shadow statersquos relational database ispermanently incompleterdquo ~ The First World Without Sin7

To keep talking in the native language of databases you alsowant to make lsquojoiningrsquo8 the tables in all those databasesdifficult to impossible Twitter insists on your birthdayDeclare yourself a Century Baby just like me

ldquo1996 Welcome online Dont EVER post any personal information here2016 Welcome online Please share your exact geographical locationrdquo ~Rawnzilla9

For those of us that emerged from the early personal computeryears entering fake personal data when installing software wasSOP (at least in my circle it was) and thatrsquos a habit thatrsquosnever left me

In fact letrsquos zoom in real hard the very moment in spacetimethat Irsquom writing this and get an overview of how legible I am

As you know Irsquom in the library - because I am the verydefinition of a reliable narrator and none of these newslettershave been revised after the initial date of composition -uncrosses fingers-

To get onto the wifi here I had to logon to their system tolearn the password of the day Now they used to just write that

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

23

learn the password of the day Now they used to just write thaton a noticeboard but clearly - for whatever reason - they onlywant members - people legible to the library - to be able to login Prolly becuz childpr0n and the terrieshellip

So thatrsquos one trace Irsquove left that Irsquom here But I donrsquot havemy phone with me - I left that at home - so therersquos no pingsfrom it to the nearest cell tower or IMSI-catcher10 Whilstwriting all this Irsquom listening to music using Mediamonkey whichIrsquove setup to lsquoscrobblersquo its tracks to lastfm Need proof Irsquovejoined the Cult of Tay and gone on to let the dark light of LanaDel Rey into my life Click here

Excepthellip maybe Irsquom deliberately muddying my trail Leaving themusic playing at home and my phone behind whilst in realitygoing on such grand adventures as wandering around abandonedschool grounds with faithful Shiva listening to ok probablythe exact same music but on my non-networked non-geolocationbroadcasting calm af dumb mp3 player

And whilst Irsquom obviously going online while writing this -mostly just to make sure I get such quotes as one of the men whovery much inspired Morrison in writing The Invisibles - the manknown only as Number Six [TODO XXX FIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxx] - Irsquomdoing so with everyone plugin I know of that might mask mypresence - everything from Facebook Disconnect to HTTPSEverywhere and of course Ghostery

[Ed For a full list seeing Appdenix X A guide to ghostingonline - when it exists lol]

ldquoI will not make any deals with you Ive resigned I will not bepushed filed stamped indexed briefed debriefed or numbered Mylife is my ownrdquo ~ The Prisoner

And whatrsquos the motto at The Village where the Shadow State hasits unpersons disappeared to BE SEEING YOU

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

16

Harry Hard-on and gift you dear reader with another brain dumpmade palatable with generous sprinklings of da lulz Causethatrsquos how it goeshellip everybody knows

[Pump up the Volume]

The plan had been to come in yesterday - when we were merelywaking up and watching North Korea try to bait the West intohellipactually wtf exactly is their plan Extortion I think Or isthat just what it takes for the last rogue nation to get itselfnoticed when everyonersquos busily tuned to into So You Think YouCan POTUS 2016 and whatever the latest development in the newRussia Iran Turkey China power bloc - people are watchingthat right - who just maybe are planning for a post-Westworld where not just America but all of Europersquos gone fullisolationist

Crazy times right Enough to make you just want out To runawayand hide To craft up a personal exit strategyhellip to become likeJack Reacher a ghost Or if yoursquoll forgive the perjorative lsquoagypsyrsquo

Herersquos another snippet of movie dialog to help set the stagefrom The Bourne Identity

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

17

Who the hell is that

Marie Helena Kreutz Shes 26 Born outside of Hanover Father was awelder He died in lsquo87 Still dont have the mother The grandmothershes still there in Hanover and looks like shes the anchor forthis little domestic disaster And theres a stepbrother Its toughThe girls a gypsy She pops up on the grid here and there but itschaotic at best She paid some electric bills in Spain in lsquo95 had aphone in her name for three months in Belgium in lsquo96 No taxes nocredit

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

18

I dont like her I want to go deep

Get a phone log for granny and the half brother anybody we cancross-file I want to know every place shes slept in the past sixyears

Have Paris get these out in the field

[The Bourne Identity]

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

19

So yeah therersquos your dramatic representation of what being seenby the Security State looks like and thatrsquos circa 2002

mdashmdash

Okay Irsquove gently eased into this in my meandering wayhellip nowlets dump some theory

So therersquos this guy called James C Scott He wrote two booksthat get referenced pretty heavily in my personal timeline cumwormhole cum custom built artisanal hyperlocal reality tunnelThe first is Seeing like a State - which I havenrsquot read yet butnonetheless am implicitly referencing in the title of thisinstallment [TODO XXX - decide on teh title here is it BeingSeen by the Stacks or Becoming Invisiblehellip then fix this] Thesecond is The Art of Not Being Governed An Anarchist History ofUpland Southeast Asia - which I am slowly working my way throughin the slices of time I can carve out for such dense focusedactivities and thatrsquos why Irsquove been dropping videos of hislectures in my posts of late - much easier to digest that way

The key term Scott establishes early in that second work isLegibility which is a word we donrsquot hear much in commonconversation so it serves nicely to act as part of thescaffolding we can use to brace our argument here To be legibleto the State - to be visible to the EMPIRE - is to exist in itsrecords and as we can see above the gypsy-esque Marie in TheBourne Identity has done a decent job muddying up her datatrail This is a key skill to living outside - or on theoutskirts of - the Empire as Scott explains[TODO XXX - double check these are in the right order]

ldquoI argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway fugitivemaroon communities who have over the course of two millennia beenfleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys mdashslavery conscription taxes corveacutee labor epidemics and warfarehellip

The effect of all state-making projects of this kind was to create ashatter zone or flight zone to which those wishing to evade or toescape bondage fled These regions of refuge constituted a directldquostate effectrdquo Zomia simply happens to be owing largely to theprecocious early expansion of the Chinese state one of the mostextensive and oldest zones of refuge Such regions are howeverinevitable by-products of coercive state-making and are found on everycontinenthellip

Inasmuch as the captivity and bondage associated with early statemakinggenerate in their wake flight and zones of refuge slavery as a laborsystem produced many ldquoZomiasrdquo large and small It is possible in thiscontext to delineate an upland remote zone of West Africa that wasrelatively safe from the five hundredndashyearndashlong worldwide slave-raidingand trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

20

and trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

refuge grew in population despite the difficulties of the terrain andthe necessity for new subsistence routines Many of those who failed toevade the slave raids in Africa once transplanted to the New Worldpromptly escaped and created fugitive slave (maroon) settlementswherever slavery was practiced the famous highland ldquocockpitrdquo ofJamaica Palmares in Brazil a maroon community of some twenty thousandinhabitants and Surinam the largest maroon population in thehemisphere are only three illustrations Were we to include smallerscale ldquorefugiardquo such as marshes swamps and deltas the list wouldmultiply many fold To mention only a few the great marsh on the lowerEuphrates (drained under Saddam Husseinrsquos rule) was for two thousandyears a refuge from state control So on a smaller scale were thestoried Great Dismal Swamp on the North CarolinandashVirginia border thePripet Marshes in Poland now on the Belarus-Ukraine border and thePontian Marshes near Rome (drained finally by Mussolini) known as zonesof refuge from the state The list of such refugia is at least as longas the list of coercive labor schemes that inevitably spawn themhellip

In truth peripheral peoples had always been firmly linked economicallyto the lowlands and to world trade In some cases they appear to haveprovided most of the products valued in international commerceNevertheless the attempt to fully incorporatethem has been culturally styled as development economic progressliteracy and social integration In practice it has meant somethingelse The objective has been less to make them productive than toensure that their economic activity was legible taxable assessableand confiscatable or failing that to replace it with forms ofproduction that wererdquo~ The Art of Not Being Governed James C Scott

I was reflecting on such shatter zones for the nth time whilstwatching Free State of Jones and seeing thus caught in the Churnof the American Civil War retreat to the swap their localinstance of Zomia

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

21

[Free State of Jones]

And just as we want to fade away to avoid beingyetanothercasualtyofLifeInTheChurn we sure as shit definitelydonrsquot want to be conscripted into whatever World War III isbranding itself as these days

Once yoursquove done the self-work to load this concept into yourbiological BIOS yoursquoll start seeing examples of this everywhereLike in that last update of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thesupes are just arguing about the degree of legibility to theGlobal Security State Should it know their lsquorealrsquo names Shouldit know their location at all times

And that makes it - oddly - the most relatable to mere mortalshellipthe ones that are concerned about Twitter following Facebook inmandating a real names policy and the Stacks are tracking you bythe peripheral devices they own you with Before we dive deepinto being seen by the Stacks though letrsquos rewind slightlyAmazingly itrsquos still apparently Census Night herehellip at leastaccording to the slim window on Reality I maintain scrollingthrough twitter with my second or third coffee on the morningetchellip or waiting to get my turn on the big screen teev orhellip

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

22

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

fuck up one of the oldest of State traditions making a list ofpeople it can tax Remember thatrsquos why Joseph and Mary weremaking their way to Bethlehem [TODO XXX OR WHEREVER DAFUQ ITWAS] 2016 years ago For a census

This is where I should probably insert a personal anecdote huhYes I did put my religion down as Jedi again Also I totallylooked for every opportunity to muddy the waters For examplethe form let you put in either your birth date or your age Ageis one degree of granularity less legible than before date - sopick that option Ready for a really cool anecdote note -spoiler its about another instance of me that has hepatitisBut thatrsquos exactly what our data trail looks like wersquore nothingbut a series of entries in the databases of the State Banks ampother venereal financial institutions various corporations andof course the greatest harvesters of our lives ever the Stacks- which are the front for the Security Marketing State [[[TODOXXX clean da fuq up outta dis shit in particular]]]

Which is where I turn once again to the words of ally GordonWhite who has been thinking and writing about such things for awhile now

ldquoYour goal is to have sufficient analogue nodes in a network so thatyour user table in the shadow statersquos relational database ispermanently incompleterdquo ~ The First World Without Sin7

To keep talking in the native language of databases you alsowant to make lsquojoiningrsquo8 the tables in all those databasesdifficult to impossible Twitter insists on your birthdayDeclare yourself a Century Baby just like me

ldquo1996 Welcome online Dont EVER post any personal information here2016 Welcome online Please share your exact geographical locationrdquo ~Rawnzilla9

For those of us that emerged from the early personal computeryears entering fake personal data when installing software wasSOP (at least in my circle it was) and thatrsquos a habit thatrsquosnever left me

In fact letrsquos zoom in real hard the very moment in spacetimethat Irsquom writing this and get an overview of how legible I am

As you know Irsquom in the library - because I am the verydefinition of a reliable narrator and none of these newslettershave been revised after the initial date of composition -uncrosses fingers-

To get onto the wifi here I had to logon to their system tolearn the password of the day Now they used to just write that

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

23

learn the password of the day Now they used to just write thaton a noticeboard but clearly - for whatever reason - they onlywant members - people legible to the library - to be able to login Prolly becuz childpr0n and the terrieshellip

So thatrsquos one trace Irsquove left that Irsquom here But I donrsquot havemy phone with me - I left that at home - so therersquos no pingsfrom it to the nearest cell tower or IMSI-catcher10 Whilstwriting all this Irsquom listening to music using Mediamonkey whichIrsquove setup to lsquoscrobblersquo its tracks to lastfm Need proof Irsquovejoined the Cult of Tay and gone on to let the dark light of LanaDel Rey into my life Click here

Excepthellip maybe Irsquom deliberately muddying my trail Leaving themusic playing at home and my phone behind whilst in realitygoing on such grand adventures as wandering around abandonedschool grounds with faithful Shiva listening to ok probablythe exact same music but on my non-networked non-geolocationbroadcasting calm af dumb mp3 player

And whilst Irsquom obviously going online while writing this -mostly just to make sure I get such quotes as one of the men whovery much inspired Morrison in writing The Invisibles - the manknown only as Number Six [TODO XXX FIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxx] - Irsquomdoing so with everyone plugin I know of that might mask mypresence - everything from Facebook Disconnect to HTTPSEverywhere and of course Ghostery

[Ed For a full list seeing Appdenix X A guide to ghostingonline - when it exists lol]

ldquoI will not make any deals with you Ive resigned I will not bepushed filed stamped indexed briefed debriefed or numbered Mylife is my ownrdquo ~ The Prisoner

And whatrsquos the motto at The Village where the Shadow State hasits unpersons disappeared to BE SEEING YOU

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

17

Who the hell is that

Marie Helena Kreutz Shes 26 Born outside of Hanover Father was awelder He died in lsquo87 Still dont have the mother The grandmothershes still there in Hanover and looks like shes the anchor forthis little domestic disaster And theres a stepbrother Its toughThe girls a gypsy She pops up on the grid here and there but itschaotic at best She paid some electric bills in Spain in lsquo95 had aphone in her name for three months in Belgium in lsquo96 No taxes nocredit

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

18

I dont like her I want to go deep

Get a phone log for granny and the half brother anybody we cancross-file I want to know every place shes slept in the past sixyears

Have Paris get these out in the field

[The Bourne Identity]

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

19

So yeah therersquos your dramatic representation of what being seenby the Security State looks like and thatrsquos circa 2002

mdashmdash

Okay Irsquove gently eased into this in my meandering wayhellip nowlets dump some theory

So therersquos this guy called James C Scott He wrote two booksthat get referenced pretty heavily in my personal timeline cumwormhole cum custom built artisanal hyperlocal reality tunnelThe first is Seeing like a State - which I havenrsquot read yet butnonetheless am implicitly referencing in the title of thisinstallment [TODO XXX - decide on teh title here is it BeingSeen by the Stacks or Becoming Invisiblehellip then fix this] Thesecond is The Art of Not Being Governed An Anarchist History ofUpland Southeast Asia - which I am slowly working my way throughin the slices of time I can carve out for such dense focusedactivities and thatrsquos why Irsquove been dropping videos of hislectures in my posts of late - much easier to digest that way

The key term Scott establishes early in that second work isLegibility which is a word we donrsquot hear much in commonconversation so it serves nicely to act as part of thescaffolding we can use to brace our argument here To be legibleto the State - to be visible to the EMPIRE - is to exist in itsrecords and as we can see above the gypsy-esque Marie in TheBourne Identity has done a decent job muddying up her datatrail This is a key skill to living outside - or on theoutskirts of - the Empire as Scott explains[TODO XXX - double check these are in the right order]

ldquoI argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway fugitivemaroon communities who have over the course of two millennia beenfleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys mdashslavery conscription taxes corveacutee labor epidemics and warfarehellip

The effect of all state-making projects of this kind was to create ashatter zone or flight zone to which those wishing to evade or toescape bondage fled These regions of refuge constituted a directldquostate effectrdquo Zomia simply happens to be owing largely to theprecocious early expansion of the Chinese state one of the mostextensive and oldest zones of refuge Such regions are howeverinevitable by-products of coercive state-making and are found on everycontinenthellip

Inasmuch as the captivity and bondage associated with early statemakinggenerate in their wake flight and zones of refuge slavery as a laborsystem produced many ldquoZomiasrdquo large and small It is possible in thiscontext to delineate an upland remote zone of West Africa that wasrelatively safe from the five hundredndashyearndashlong worldwide slave-raidingand trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

20

and trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

refuge grew in population despite the difficulties of the terrain andthe necessity for new subsistence routines Many of those who failed toevade the slave raids in Africa once transplanted to the New Worldpromptly escaped and created fugitive slave (maroon) settlementswherever slavery was practiced the famous highland ldquocockpitrdquo ofJamaica Palmares in Brazil a maroon community of some twenty thousandinhabitants and Surinam the largest maroon population in thehemisphere are only three illustrations Were we to include smallerscale ldquorefugiardquo such as marshes swamps and deltas the list wouldmultiply many fold To mention only a few the great marsh on the lowerEuphrates (drained under Saddam Husseinrsquos rule) was for two thousandyears a refuge from state control So on a smaller scale were thestoried Great Dismal Swamp on the North CarolinandashVirginia border thePripet Marshes in Poland now on the Belarus-Ukraine border and thePontian Marshes near Rome (drained finally by Mussolini) known as zonesof refuge from the state The list of such refugia is at least as longas the list of coercive labor schemes that inevitably spawn themhellip

In truth peripheral peoples had always been firmly linked economicallyto the lowlands and to world trade In some cases they appear to haveprovided most of the products valued in international commerceNevertheless the attempt to fully incorporatethem has been culturally styled as development economic progressliteracy and social integration In practice it has meant somethingelse The objective has been less to make them productive than toensure that their economic activity was legible taxable assessableand confiscatable or failing that to replace it with forms ofproduction that wererdquo~ The Art of Not Being Governed James C Scott

I was reflecting on such shatter zones for the nth time whilstwatching Free State of Jones and seeing thus caught in the Churnof the American Civil War retreat to the swap their localinstance of Zomia

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

21

[Free State of Jones]

And just as we want to fade away to avoid beingyetanothercasualtyofLifeInTheChurn we sure as shit definitelydonrsquot want to be conscripted into whatever World War III isbranding itself as these days

Once yoursquove done the self-work to load this concept into yourbiological BIOS yoursquoll start seeing examples of this everywhereLike in that last update of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thesupes are just arguing about the degree of legibility to theGlobal Security State Should it know their lsquorealrsquo names Shouldit know their location at all times

And that makes it - oddly - the most relatable to mere mortalshellipthe ones that are concerned about Twitter following Facebook inmandating a real names policy and the Stacks are tracking you bythe peripheral devices they own you with Before we dive deepinto being seen by the Stacks though letrsquos rewind slightlyAmazingly itrsquos still apparently Census Night herehellip at leastaccording to the slim window on Reality I maintain scrollingthrough twitter with my second or third coffee on the morningetchellip or waiting to get my turn on the big screen teev orhellip

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

22

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

fuck up one of the oldest of State traditions making a list ofpeople it can tax Remember thatrsquos why Joseph and Mary weremaking their way to Bethlehem [TODO XXX OR WHEREVER DAFUQ ITWAS] 2016 years ago For a census

This is where I should probably insert a personal anecdote huhYes I did put my religion down as Jedi again Also I totallylooked for every opportunity to muddy the waters For examplethe form let you put in either your birth date or your age Ageis one degree of granularity less legible than before date - sopick that option Ready for a really cool anecdote note -spoiler its about another instance of me that has hepatitisBut thatrsquos exactly what our data trail looks like wersquore nothingbut a series of entries in the databases of the State Banks ampother venereal financial institutions various corporations andof course the greatest harvesters of our lives ever the Stacks- which are the front for the Security Marketing State [[[TODOXXX clean da fuq up outta dis shit in particular]]]

Which is where I turn once again to the words of ally GordonWhite who has been thinking and writing about such things for awhile now

ldquoYour goal is to have sufficient analogue nodes in a network so thatyour user table in the shadow statersquos relational database ispermanently incompleterdquo ~ The First World Without Sin7

To keep talking in the native language of databases you alsowant to make lsquojoiningrsquo8 the tables in all those databasesdifficult to impossible Twitter insists on your birthdayDeclare yourself a Century Baby just like me

ldquo1996 Welcome online Dont EVER post any personal information here2016 Welcome online Please share your exact geographical locationrdquo ~Rawnzilla9

For those of us that emerged from the early personal computeryears entering fake personal data when installing software wasSOP (at least in my circle it was) and thatrsquos a habit thatrsquosnever left me

In fact letrsquos zoom in real hard the very moment in spacetimethat Irsquom writing this and get an overview of how legible I am

As you know Irsquom in the library - because I am the verydefinition of a reliable narrator and none of these newslettershave been revised after the initial date of composition -uncrosses fingers-

To get onto the wifi here I had to logon to their system tolearn the password of the day Now they used to just write that

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

23

learn the password of the day Now they used to just write thaton a noticeboard but clearly - for whatever reason - they onlywant members - people legible to the library - to be able to login Prolly becuz childpr0n and the terrieshellip

So thatrsquos one trace Irsquove left that Irsquom here But I donrsquot havemy phone with me - I left that at home - so therersquos no pingsfrom it to the nearest cell tower or IMSI-catcher10 Whilstwriting all this Irsquom listening to music using Mediamonkey whichIrsquove setup to lsquoscrobblersquo its tracks to lastfm Need proof Irsquovejoined the Cult of Tay and gone on to let the dark light of LanaDel Rey into my life Click here

Excepthellip maybe Irsquom deliberately muddying my trail Leaving themusic playing at home and my phone behind whilst in realitygoing on such grand adventures as wandering around abandonedschool grounds with faithful Shiva listening to ok probablythe exact same music but on my non-networked non-geolocationbroadcasting calm af dumb mp3 player

And whilst Irsquom obviously going online while writing this -mostly just to make sure I get such quotes as one of the men whovery much inspired Morrison in writing The Invisibles - the manknown only as Number Six [TODO XXX FIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxx] - Irsquomdoing so with everyone plugin I know of that might mask mypresence - everything from Facebook Disconnect to HTTPSEverywhere and of course Ghostery

[Ed For a full list seeing Appdenix X A guide to ghostingonline - when it exists lol]

ldquoI will not make any deals with you Ive resigned I will not bepushed filed stamped indexed briefed debriefed or numbered Mylife is my ownrdquo ~ The Prisoner

And whatrsquos the motto at The Village where the Shadow State hasits unpersons disappeared to BE SEEING YOU

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

18

I dont like her I want to go deep

Get a phone log for granny and the half brother anybody we cancross-file I want to know every place shes slept in the past sixyears

Have Paris get these out in the field

[The Bourne Identity]

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

19

So yeah therersquos your dramatic representation of what being seenby the Security State looks like and thatrsquos circa 2002

mdashmdash

Okay Irsquove gently eased into this in my meandering wayhellip nowlets dump some theory

So therersquos this guy called James C Scott He wrote two booksthat get referenced pretty heavily in my personal timeline cumwormhole cum custom built artisanal hyperlocal reality tunnelThe first is Seeing like a State - which I havenrsquot read yet butnonetheless am implicitly referencing in the title of thisinstallment [TODO XXX - decide on teh title here is it BeingSeen by the Stacks or Becoming Invisiblehellip then fix this] Thesecond is The Art of Not Being Governed An Anarchist History ofUpland Southeast Asia - which I am slowly working my way throughin the slices of time I can carve out for such dense focusedactivities and thatrsquos why Irsquove been dropping videos of hislectures in my posts of late - much easier to digest that way

The key term Scott establishes early in that second work isLegibility which is a word we donrsquot hear much in commonconversation so it serves nicely to act as part of thescaffolding we can use to brace our argument here To be legibleto the State - to be visible to the EMPIRE - is to exist in itsrecords and as we can see above the gypsy-esque Marie in TheBourne Identity has done a decent job muddying up her datatrail This is a key skill to living outside - or on theoutskirts of - the Empire as Scott explains[TODO XXX - double check these are in the right order]

ldquoI argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway fugitivemaroon communities who have over the course of two millennia beenfleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys mdashslavery conscription taxes corveacutee labor epidemics and warfarehellip

The effect of all state-making projects of this kind was to create ashatter zone or flight zone to which those wishing to evade or toescape bondage fled These regions of refuge constituted a directldquostate effectrdquo Zomia simply happens to be owing largely to theprecocious early expansion of the Chinese state one of the mostextensive and oldest zones of refuge Such regions are howeverinevitable by-products of coercive state-making and are found on everycontinenthellip

Inasmuch as the captivity and bondage associated with early statemakinggenerate in their wake flight and zones of refuge slavery as a laborsystem produced many ldquoZomiasrdquo large and small It is possible in thiscontext to delineate an upland remote zone of West Africa that wasrelatively safe from the five hundredndashyearndashlong worldwide slave-raidingand trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

20

and trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

refuge grew in population despite the difficulties of the terrain andthe necessity for new subsistence routines Many of those who failed toevade the slave raids in Africa once transplanted to the New Worldpromptly escaped and created fugitive slave (maroon) settlementswherever slavery was practiced the famous highland ldquocockpitrdquo ofJamaica Palmares in Brazil a maroon community of some twenty thousandinhabitants and Surinam the largest maroon population in thehemisphere are only three illustrations Were we to include smallerscale ldquorefugiardquo such as marshes swamps and deltas the list wouldmultiply many fold To mention only a few the great marsh on the lowerEuphrates (drained under Saddam Husseinrsquos rule) was for two thousandyears a refuge from state control So on a smaller scale were thestoried Great Dismal Swamp on the North CarolinandashVirginia border thePripet Marshes in Poland now on the Belarus-Ukraine border and thePontian Marshes near Rome (drained finally by Mussolini) known as zonesof refuge from the state The list of such refugia is at least as longas the list of coercive labor schemes that inevitably spawn themhellip

In truth peripheral peoples had always been firmly linked economicallyto the lowlands and to world trade In some cases they appear to haveprovided most of the products valued in international commerceNevertheless the attempt to fully incorporatethem has been culturally styled as development economic progressliteracy and social integration In practice it has meant somethingelse The objective has been less to make them productive than toensure that their economic activity was legible taxable assessableand confiscatable or failing that to replace it with forms ofproduction that wererdquo~ The Art of Not Being Governed James C Scott

I was reflecting on such shatter zones for the nth time whilstwatching Free State of Jones and seeing thus caught in the Churnof the American Civil War retreat to the swap their localinstance of Zomia

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

21

[Free State of Jones]

And just as we want to fade away to avoid beingyetanothercasualtyofLifeInTheChurn we sure as shit definitelydonrsquot want to be conscripted into whatever World War III isbranding itself as these days

Once yoursquove done the self-work to load this concept into yourbiological BIOS yoursquoll start seeing examples of this everywhereLike in that last update of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thesupes are just arguing about the degree of legibility to theGlobal Security State Should it know their lsquorealrsquo names Shouldit know their location at all times

And that makes it - oddly - the most relatable to mere mortalshellipthe ones that are concerned about Twitter following Facebook inmandating a real names policy and the Stacks are tracking you bythe peripheral devices they own you with Before we dive deepinto being seen by the Stacks though letrsquos rewind slightlyAmazingly itrsquos still apparently Census Night herehellip at leastaccording to the slim window on Reality I maintain scrollingthrough twitter with my second or third coffee on the morningetchellip or waiting to get my turn on the big screen teev orhellip

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

22

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

fuck up one of the oldest of State traditions making a list ofpeople it can tax Remember thatrsquos why Joseph and Mary weremaking their way to Bethlehem [TODO XXX OR WHEREVER DAFUQ ITWAS] 2016 years ago For a census

This is where I should probably insert a personal anecdote huhYes I did put my religion down as Jedi again Also I totallylooked for every opportunity to muddy the waters For examplethe form let you put in either your birth date or your age Ageis one degree of granularity less legible than before date - sopick that option Ready for a really cool anecdote note -spoiler its about another instance of me that has hepatitisBut thatrsquos exactly what our data trail looks like wersquore nothingbut a series of entries in the databases of the State Banks ampother venereal financial institutions various corporations andof course the greatest harvesters of our lives ever the Stacks- which are the front for the Security Marketing State [[[TODOXXX clean da fuq up outta dis shit in particular]]]

Which is where I turn once again to the words of ally GordonWhite who has been thinking and writing about such things for awhile now

ldquoYour goal is to have sufficient analogue nodes in a network so thatyour user table in the shadow statersquos relational database ispermanently incompleterdquo ~ The First World Without Sin7

To keep talking in the native language of databases you alsowant to make lsquojoiningrsquo8 the tables in all those databasesdifficult to impossible Twitter insists on your birthdayDeclare yourself a Century Baby just like me

ldquo1996 Welcome online Dont EVER post any personal information here2016 Welcome online Please share your exact geographical locationrdquo ~Rawnzilla9

For those of us that emerged from the early personal computeryears entering fake personal data when installing software wasSOP (at least in my circle it was) and thatrsquos a habit thatrsquosnever left me

In fact letrsquos zoom in real hard the very moment in spacetimethat Irsquom writing this and get an overview of how legible I am

As you know Irsquom in the library - because I am the verydefinition of a reliable narrator and none of these newslettershave been revised after the initial date of composition -uncrosses fingers-

To get onto the wifi here I had to logon to their system tolearn the password of the day Now they used to just write that

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

23

learn the password of the day Now they used to just write thaton a noticeboard but clearly - for whatever reason - they onlywant members - people legible to the library - to be able to login Prolly becuz childpr0n and the terrieshellip

So thatrsquos one trace Irsquove left that Irsquom here But I donrsquot havemy phone with me - I left that at home - so therersquos no pingsfrom it to the nearest cell tower or IMSI-catcher10 Whilstwriting all this Irsquom listening to music using Mediamonkey whichIrsquove setup to lsquoscrobblersquo its tracks to lastfm Need proof Irsquovejoined the Cult of Tay and gone on to let the dark light of LanaDel Rey into my life Click here

Excepthellip maybe Irsquom deliberately muddying my trail Leaving themusic playing at home and my phone behind whilst in realitygoing on such grand adventures as wandering around abandonedschool grounds with faithful Shiva listening to ok probablythe exact same music but on my non-networked non-geolocationbroadcasting calm af dumb mp3 player

And whilst Irsquom obviously going online while writing this -mostly just to make sure I get such quotes as one of the men whovery much inspired Morrison in writing The Invisibles - the manknown only as Number Six [TODO XXX FIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxx] - Irsquomdoing so with everyone plugin I know of that might mask mypresence - everything from Facebook Disconnect to HTTPSEverywhere and of course Ghostery

[Ed For a full list seeing Appdenix X A guide to ghostingonline - when it exists lol]

ldquoI will not make any deals with you Ive resigned I will not bepushed filed stamped indexed briefed debriefed or numbered Mylife is my ownrdquo ~ The Prisoner

And whatrsquos the motto at The Village where the Shadow State hasits unpersons disappeared to BE SEEING YOU

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

19

So yeah therersquos your dramatic representation of what being seenby the Security State looks like and thatrsquos circa 2002

mdashmdash

Okay Irsquove gently eased into this in my meandering wayhellip nowlets dump some theory

So therersquos this guy called James C Scott He wrote two booksthat get referenced pretty heavily in my personal timeline cumwormhole cum custom built artisanal hyperlocal reality tunnelThe first is Seeing like a State - which I havenrsquot read yet butnonetheless am implicitly referencing in the title of thisinstallment [TODO XXX - decide on teh title here is it BeingSeen by the Stacks or Becoming Invisiblehellip then fix this] Thesecond is The Art of Not Being Governed An Anarchist History ofUpland Southeast Asia - which I am slowly working my way throughin the slices of time I can carve out for such dense focusedactivities and thatrsquos why Irsquove been dropping videos of hislectures in my posts of late - much easier to digest that way

The key term Scott establishes early in that second work isLegibility which is a word we donrsquot hear much in commonconversation so it serves nicely to act as part of thescaffolding we can use to brace our argument here To be legibleto the State - to be visible to the EMPIRE - is to exist in itsrecords and as we can see above the gypsy-esque Marie in TheBourne Identity has done a decent job muddying up her datatrail This is a key skill to living outside - or on theoutskirts of - the Empire as Scott explains[TODO XXX - double check these are in the right order]

ldquoI argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway fugitivemaroon communities who have over the course of two millennia beenfleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys mdashslavery conscription taxes corveacutee labor epidemics and warfarehellip

The effect of all state-making projects of this kind was to create ashatter zone or flight zone to which those wishing to evade or toescape bondage fled These regions of refuge constituted a directldquostate effectrdquo Zomia simply happens to be owing largely to theprecocious early expansion of the Chinese state one of the mostextensive and oldest zones of refuge Such regions are howeverinevitable by-products of coercive state-making and are found on everycontinenthellip

Inasmuch as the captivity and bondage associated with early statemakinggenerate in their wake flight and zones of refuge slavery as a laborsystem produced many ldquoZomiasrdquo large and small It is possible in thiscontext to delineate an upland remote zone of West Africa that wasrelatively safe from the five hundredndashyearndashlong worldwide slave-raidingand trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

20

and trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

refuge grew in population despite the difficulties of the terrain andthe necessity for new subsistence routines Many of those who failed toevade the slave raids in Africa once transplanted to the New Worldpromptly escaped and created fugitive slave (maroon) settlementswherever slavery was practiced the famous highland ldquocockpitrdquo ofJamaica Palmares in Brazil a maroon community of some twenty thousandinhabitants and Surinam the largest maroon population in thehemisphere are only three illustrations Were we to include smallerscale ldquorefugiardquo such as marshes swamps and deltas the list wouldmultiply many fold To mention only a few the great marsh on the lowerEuphrates (drained under Saddam Husseinrsquos rule) was for two thousandyears a refuge from state control So on a smaller scale were thestoried Great Dismal Swamp on the North CarolinandashVirginia border thePripet Marshes in Poland now on the Belarus-Ukraine border and thePontian Marshes near Rome (drained finally by Mussolini) known as zonesof refuge from the state The list of such refugia is at least as longas the list of coercive labor schemes that inevitably spawn themhellip

In truth peripheral peoples had always been firmly linked economicallyto the lowlands and to world trade In some cases they appear to haveprovided most of the products valued in international commerceNevertheless the attempt to fully incorporatethem has been culturally styled as development economic progressliteracy and social integration In practice it has meant somethingelse The objective has been less to make them productive than toensure that their economic activity was legible taxable assessableand confiscatable or failing that to replace it with forms ofproduction that wererdquo~ The Art of Not Being Governed James C Scott

I was reflecting on such shatter zones for the nth time whilstwatching Free State of Jones and seeing thus caught in the Churnof the American Civil War retreat to the swap their localinstance of Zomia

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

21

[Free State of Jones]

And just as we want to fade away to avoid beingyetanothercasualtyofLifeInTheChurn we sure as shit definitelydonrsquot want to be conscripted into whatever World War III isbranding itself as these days

Once yoursquove done the self-work to load this concept into yourbiological BIOS yoursquoll start seeing examples of this everywhereLike in that last update of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thesupes are just arguing about the degree of legibility to theGlobal Security State Should it know their lsquorealrsquo names Shouldit know their location at all times

And that makes it - oddly - the most relatable to mere mortalshellipthe ones that are concerned about Twitter following Facebook inmandating a real names policy and the Stacks are tracking you bythe peripheral devices they own you with Before we dive deepinto being seen by the Stacks though letrsquos rewind slightlyAmazingly itrsquos still apparently Census Night herehellip at leastaccording to the slim window on Reality I maintain scrollingthrough twitter with my second or third coffee on the morningetchellip or waiting to get my turn on the big screen teev orhellip

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

22

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

fuck up one of the oldest of State traditions making a list ofpeople it can tax Remember thatrsquos why Joseph and Mary weremaking their way to Bethlehem [TODO XXX OR WHEREVER DAFUQ ITWAS] 2016 years ago For a census

This is where I should probably insert a personal anecdote huhYes I did put my religion down as Jedi again Also I totallylooked for every opportunity to muddy the waters For examplethe form let you put in either your birth date or your age Ageis one degree of granularity less legible than before date - sopick that option Ready for a really cool anecdote note -spoiler its about another instance of me that has hepatitisBut thatrsquos exactly what our data trail looks like wersquore nothingbut a series of entries in the databases of the State Banks ampother venereal financial institutions various corporations andof course the greatest harvesters of our lives ever the Stacks- which are the front for the Security Marketing State [[[TODOXXX clean da fuq up outta dis shit in particular]]]

Which is where I turn once again to the words of ally GordonWhite who has been thinking and writing about such things for awhile now

ldquoYour goal is to have sufficient analogue nodes in a network so thatyour user table in the shadow statersquos relational database ispermanently incompleterdquo ~ The First World Without Sin7

To keep talking in the native language of databases you alsowant to make lsquojoiningrsquo8 the tables in all those databasesdifficult to impossible Twitter insists on your birthdayDeclare yourself a Century Baby just like me

ldquo1996 Welcome online Dont EVER post any personal information here2016 Welcome online Please share your exact geographical locationrdquo ~Rawnzilla9

For those of us that emerged from the early personal computeryears entering fake personal data when installing software wasSOP (at least in my circle it was) and thatrsquos a habit thatrsquosnever left me

In fact letrsquos zoom in real hard the very moment in spacetimethat Irsquom writing this and get an overview of how legible I am

As you know Irsquom in the library - because I am the verydefinition of a reliable narrator and none of these newslettershave been revised after the initial date of composition -uncrosses fingers-

To get onto the wifi here I had to logon to their system tolearn the password of the day Now they used to just write that

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

23

learn the password of the day Now they used to just write thaton a noticeboard but clearly - for whatever reason - they onlywant members - people legible to the library - to be able to login Prolly becuz childpr0n and the terrieshellip

So thatrsquos one trace Irsquove left that Irsquom here But I donrsquot havemy phone with me - I left that at home - so therersquos no pingsfrom it to the nearest cell tower or IMSI-catcher10 Whilstwriting all this Irsquom listening to music using Mediamonkey whichIrsquove setup to lsquoscrobblersquo its tracks to lastfm Need proof Irsquovejoined the Cult of Tay and gone on to let the dark light of LanaDel Rey into my life Click here

Excepthellip maybe Irsquom deliberately muddying my trail Leaving themusic playing at home and my phone behind whilst in realitygoing on such grand adventures as wandering around abandonedschool grounds with faithful Shiva listening to ok probablythe exact same music but on my non-networked non-geolocationbroadcasting calm af dumb mp3 player

And whilst Irsquom obviously going online while writing this -mostly just to make sure I get such quotes as one of the men whovery much inspired Morrison in writing The Invisibles - the manknown only as Number Six [TODO XXX FIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxx] - Irsquomdoing so with everyone plugin I know of that might mask mypresence - everything from Facebook Disconnect to HTTPSEverywhere and of course Ghostery

[Ed For a full list seeing Appdenix X A guide to ghostingonline - when it exists lol]

ldquoI will not make any deals with you Ive resigned I will not bepushed filed stamped indexed briefed debriefed or numbered Mylife is my ownrdquo ~ The Prisoner

And whatrsquos the motto at The Village where the Shadow State hasits unpersons disappeared to BE SEEING YOU

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

20

and trade that caught tens of millions of in its toils This zone of

refuge grew in population despite the difficulties of the terrain andthe necessity for new subsistence routines Many of those who failed toevade the slave raids in Africa once transplanted to the New Worldpromptly escaped and created fugitive slave (maroon) settlementswherever slavery was practiced the famous highland ldquocockpitrdquo ofJamaica Palmares in Brazil a maroon community of some twenty thousandinhabitants and Surinam the largest maroon population in thehemisphere are only three illustrations Were we to include smallerscale ldquorefugiardquo such as marshes swamps and deltas the list wouldmultiply many fold To mention only a few the great marsh on the lowerEuphrates (drained under Saddam Husseinrsquos rule) was for two thousandyears a refuge from state control So on a smaller scale were thestoried Great Dismal Swamp on the North CarolinandashVirginia border thePripet Marshes in Poland now on the Belarus-Ukraine border and thePontian Marshes near Rome (drained finally by Mussolini) known as zonesof refuge from the state The list of such refugia is at least as longas the list of coercive labor schemes that inevitably spawn themhellip

In truth peripheral peoples had always been firmly linked economicallyto the lowlands and to world trade In some cases they appear to haveprovided most of the products valued in international commerceNevertheless the attempt to fully incorporatethem has been culturally styled as development economic progressliteracy and social integration In practice it has meant somethingelse The objective has been less to make them productive than toensure that their economic activity was legible taxable assessableand confiscatable or failing that to replace it with forms ofproduction that wererdquo~ The Art of Not Being Governed James C Scott

I was reflecting on such shatter zones for the nth time whilstwatching Free State of Jones and seeing thus caught in the Churnof the American Civil War retreat to the swap their localinstance of Zomia

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

21

[Free State of Jones]

And just as we want to fade away to avoid beingyetanothercasualtyofLifeInTheChurn we sure as shit definitelydonrsquot want to be conscripted into whatever World War III isbranding itself as these days

Once yoursquove done the self-work to load this concept into yourbiological BIOS yoursquoll start seeing examples of this everywhereLike in that last update of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thesupes are just arguing about the degree of legibility to theGlobal Security State Should it know their lsquorealrsquo names Shouldit know their location at all times

And that makes it - oddly - the most relatable to mere mortalshellipthe ones that are concerned about Twitter following Facebook inmandating a real names policy and the Stacks are tracking you bythe peripheral devices they own you with Before we dive deepinto being seen by the Stacks though letrsquos rewind slightlyAmazingly itrsquos still apparently Census Night herehellip at leastaccording to the slim window on Reality I maintain scrollingthrough twitter with my second or third coffee on the morningetchellip or waiting to get my turn on the big screen teev orhellip

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

22

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

fuck up one of the oldest of State traditions making a list ofpeople it can tax Remember thatrsquos why Joseph and Mary weremaking their way to Bethlehem [TODO XXX OR WHEREVER DAFUQ ITWAS] 2016 years ago For a census

This is where I should probably insert a personal anecdote huhYes I did put my religion down as Jedi again Also I totallylooked for every opportunity to muddy the waters For examplethe form let you put in either your birth date or your age Ageis one degree of granularity less legible than before date - sopick that option Ready for a really cool anecdote note -spoiler its about another instance of me that has hepatitisBut thatrsquos exactly what our data trail looks like wersquore nothingbut a series of entries in the databases of the State Banks ampother venereal financial institutions various corporations andof course the greatest harvesters of our lives ever the Stacks- which are the front for the Security Marketing State [[[TODOXXX clean da fuq up outta dis shit in particular]]]

Which is where I turn once again to the words of ally GordonWhite who has been thinking and writing about such things for awhile now

ldquoYour goal is to have sufficient analogue nodes in a network so thatyour user table in the shadow statersquos relational database ispermanently incompleterdquo ~ The First World Without Sin7

To keep talking in the native language of databases you alsowant to make lsquojoiningrsquo8 the tables in all those databasesdifficult to impossible Twitter insists on your birthdayDeclare yourself a Century Baby just like me

ldquo1996 Welcome online Dont EVER post any personal information here2016 Welcome online Please share your exact geographical locationrdquo ~Rawnzilla9

For those of us that emerged from the early personal computeryears entering fake personal data when installing software wasSOP (at least in my circle it was) and thatrsquos a habit thatrsquosnever left me

In fact letrsquos zoom in real hard the very moment in spacetimethat Irsquom writing this and get an overview of how legible I am

As you know Irsquom in the library - because I am the verydefinition of a reliable narrator and none of these newslettershave been revised after the initial date of composition -uncrosses fingers-

To get onto the wifi here I had to logon to their system tolearn the password of the day Now they used to just write that

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

23

learn the password of the day Now they used to just write thaton a noticeboard but clearly - for whatever reason - they onlywant members - people legible to the library - to be able to login Prolly becuz childpr0n and the terrieshellip

So thatrsquos one trace Irsquove left that Irsquom here But I donrsquot havemy phone with me - I left that at home - so therersquos no pingsfrom it to the nearest cell tower or IMSI-catcher10 Whilstwriting all this Irsquom listening to music using Mediamonkey whichIrsquove setup to lsquoscrobblersquo its tracks to lastfm Need proof Irsquovejoined the Cult of Tay and gone on to let the dark light of LanaDel Rey into my life Click here

Excepthellip maybe Irsquom deliberately muddying my trail Leaving themusic playing at home and my phone behind whilst in realitygoing on such grand adventures as wandering around abandonedschool grounds with faithful Shiva listening to ok probablythe exact same music but on my non-networked non-geolocationbroadcasting calm af dumb mp3 player

And whilst Irsquom obviously going online while writing this -mostly just to make sure I get such quotes as one of the men whovery much inspired Morrison in writing The Invisibles - the manknown only as Number Six [TODO XXX FIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxx] - Irsquomdoing so with everyone plugin I know of that might mask mypresence - everything from Facebook Disconnect to HTTPSEverywhere and of course Ghostery

[Ed For a full list seeing Appdenix X A guide to ghostingonline - when it exists lol]

ldquoI will not make any deals with you Ive resigned I will not bepushed filed stamped indexed briefed debriefed or numbered Mylife is my ownrdquo ~ The Prisoner

And whatrsquos the motto at The Village where the Shadow State hasits unpersons disappeared to BE SEEING YOU

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

21

[Free State of Jones]

And just as we want to fade away to avoid beingyetanothercasualtyofLifeInTheChurn we sure as shit definitelydonrsquot want to be conscripted into whatever World War III isbranding itself as these days

Once yoursquove done the self-work to load this concept into yourbiological BIOS yoursquoll start seeing examples of this everywhereLike in that last update of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thesupes are just arguing about the degree of legibility to theGlobal Security State Should it know their lsquorealrsquo names Shouldit know their location at all times

And that makes it - oddly - the most relatable to mere mortalshellipthe ones that are concerned about Twitter following Facebook inmandating a real names policy and the Stacks are tracking you bythe peripheral devices they own you with Before we dive deepinto being seen by the Stacks though letrsquos rewind slightlyAmazingly itrsquos still apparently Census Night herehellip at leastaccording to the slim window on Reality I maintain scrollingthrough twitter with my second or third coffee on the morningetchellip or waiting to get my turn on the big screen teev orhellip

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

22

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

fuck up one of the oldest of State traditions making a list ofpeople it can tax Remember thatrsquos why Joseph and Mary weremaking their way to Bethlehem [TODO XXX OR WHEREVER DAFUQ ITWAS] 2016 years ago For a census

This is where I should probably insert a personal anecdote huhYes I did put my religion down as Jedi again Also I totallylooked for every opportunity to muddy the waters For examplethe form let you put in either your birth date or your age Ageis one degree of granularity less legible than before date - sopick that option Ready for a really cool anecdote note -spoiler its about another instance of me that has hepatitisBut thatrsquos exactly what our data trail looks like wersquore nothingbut a series of entries in the databases of the State Banks ampother venereal financial institutions various corporations andof course the greatest harvesters of our lives ever the Stacks- which are the front for the Security Marketing State [[[TODOXXX clean da fuq up outta dis shit in particular]]]

Which is where I turn once again to the words of ally GordonWhite who has been thinking and writing about such things for awhile now

ldquoYour goal is to have sufficient analogue nodes in a network so thatyour user table in the shadow statersquos relational database ispermanently incompleterdquo ~ The First World Without Sin7

To keep talking in the native language of databases you alsowant to make lsquojoiningrsquo8 the tables in all those databasesdifficult to impossible Twitter insists on your birthdayDeclare yourself a Century Baby just like me

ldquo1996 Welcome online Dont EVER post any personal information here2016 Welcome online Please share your exact geographical locationrdquo ~Rawnzilla9

For those of us that emerged from the early personal computeryears entering fake personal data when installing software wasSOP (at least in my circle it was) and thatrsquos a habit thatrsquosnever left me

In fact letrsquos zoom in real hard the very moment in spacetimethat Irsquom writing this and get an overview of how legible I am

As you know Irsquom in the library - because I am the verydefinition of a reliable narrator and none of these newslettershave been revised after the initial date of composition -uncrosses fingers-

To get onto the wifi here I had to logon to their system tolearn the password of the day Now they used to just write that

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

23

learn the password of the day Now they used to just write thaton a noticeboard but clearly - for whatever reason - they onlywant members - people legible to the library - to be able to login Prolly becuz childpr0n and the terrieshellip

So thatrsquos one trace Irsquove left that Irsquom here But I donrsquot havemy phone with me - I left that at home - so therersquos no pingsfrom it to the nearest cell tower or IMSI-catcher10 Whilstwriting all this Irsquom listening to music using Mediamonkey whichIrsquove setup to lsquoscrobblersquo its tracks to lastfm Need proof Irsquovejoined the Cult of Tay and gone on to let the dark light of LanaDel Rey into my life Click here

Excepthellip maybe Irsquom deliberately muddying my trail Leaving themusic playing at home and my phone behind whilst in realitygoing on such grand adventures as wandering around abandonedschool grounds with faithful Shiva listening to ok probablythe exact same music but on my non-networked non-geolocationbroadcasting calm af dumb mp3 player

And whilst Irsquom obviously going online while writing this -mostly just to make sure I get such quotes as one of the men whovery much inspired Morrison in writing The Invisibles - the manknown only as Number Six [TODO XXX FIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxx] - Irsquomdoing so with everyone plugin I know of that might mask mypresence - everything from Facebook Disconnect to HTTPSEverywhere and of course Ghostery

[Ed For a full list seeing Appdenix X A guide to ghostingonline - when it exists lol]

ldquoI will not make any deals with you Ive resigned I will not bepushed filed stamped indexed briefed debriefed or numbered Mylife is my ownrdquo ~ The Prisoner

And whatrsquos the motto at The Village where the Shadow State hasits unpersons disappeared to BE SEEING YOU

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

22

Props to the Australian government for managing to completely

fuck up one of the oldest of State traditions making a list ofpeople it can tax Remember thatrsquos why Joseph and Mary weremaking their way to Bethlehem [TODO XXX OR WHEREVER DAFUQ ITWAS] 2016 years ago For a census

This is where I should probably insert a personal anecdote huhYes I did put my religion down as Jedi again Also I totallylooked for every opportunity to muddy the waters For examplethe form let you put in either your birth date or your age Ageis one degree of granularity less legible than before date - sopick that option Ready for a really cool anecdote note -spoiler its about another instance of me that has hepatitisBut thatrsquos exactly what our data trail looks like wersquore nothingbut a series of entries in the databases of the State Banks ampother venereal financial institutions various corporations andof course the greatest harvesters of our lives ever the Stacks- which are the front for the Security Marketing State [[[TODOXXX clean da fuq up outta dis shit in particular]]]

Which is where I turn once again to the words of ally GordonWhite who has been thinking and writing about such things for awhile now

ldquoYour goal is to have sufficient analogue nodes in a network so thatyour user table in the shadow statersquos relational database ispermanently incompleterdquo ~ The First World Without Sin7

To keep talking in the native language of databases you alsowant to make lsquojoiningrsquo8 the tables in all those databasesdifficult to impossible Twitter insists on your birthdayDeclare yourself a Century Baby just like me

ldquo1996 Welcome online Dont EVER post any personal information here2016 Welcome online Please share your exact geographical locationrdquo ~Rawnzilla9

For those of us that emerged from the early personal computeryears entering fake personal data when installing software wasSOP (at least in my circle it was) and thatrsquos a habit thatrsquosnever left me

In fact letrsquos zoom in real hard the very moment in spacetimethat Irsquom writing this and get an overview of how legible I am

As you know Irsquom in the library - because I am the verydefinition of a reliable narrator and none of these newslettershave been revised after the initial date of composition -uncrosses fingers-

To get onto the wifi here I had to logon to their system tolearn the password of the day Now they used to just write that

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

23

learn the password of the day Now they used to just write thaton a noticeboard but clearly - for whatever reason - they onlywant members - people legible to the library - to be able to login Prolly becuz childpr0n and the terrieshellip

So thatrsquos one trace Irsquove left that Irsquom here But I donrsquot havemy phone with me - I left that at home - so therersquos no pingsfrom it to the nearest cell tower or IMSI-catcher10 Whilstwriting all this Irsquom listening to music using Mediamonkey whichIrsquove setup to lsquoscrobblersquo its tracks to lastfm Need proof Irsquovejoined the Cult of Tay and gone on to let the dark light of LanaDel Rey into my life Click here

Excepthellip maybe Irsquom deliberately muddying my trail Leaving themusic playing at home and my phone behind whilst in realitygoing on such grand adventures as wandering around abandonedschool grounds with faithful Shiva listening to ok probablythe exact same music but on my non-networked non-geolocationbroadcasting calm af dumb mp3 player

And whilst Irsquom obviously going online while writing this -mostly just to make sure I get such quotes as one of the men whovery much inspired Morrison in writing The Invisibles - the manknown only as Number Six [TODO XXX FIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxx] - Irsquomdoing so with everyone plugin I know of that might mask mypresence - everything from Facebook Disconnect to HTTPSEverywhere and of course Ghostery

[Ed For a full list seeing Appdenix X A guide to ghostingonline - when it exists lol]

ldquoI will not make any deals with you Ive resigned I will not bepushed filed stamped indexed briefed debriefed or numbered Mylife is my ownrdquo ~ The Prisoner

And whatrsquos the motto at The Village where the Shadow State hasits unpersons disappeared to BE SEEING YOU

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

23

learn the password of the day Now they used to just write thaton a noticeboard but clearly - for whatever reason - they onlywant members - people legible to the library - to be able to login Prolly becuz childpr0n and the terrieshellip

So thatrsquos one trace Irsquove left that Irsquom here But I donrsquot havemy phone with me - I left that at home - so therersquos no pingsfrom it to the nearest cell tower or IMSI-catcher10 Whilstwriting all this Irsquom listening to music using Mediamonkey whichIrsquove setup to lsquoscrobblersquo its tracks to lastfm Need proof Irsquovejoined the Cult of Tay and gone on to let the dark light of LanaDel Rey into my life Click here

Excepthellip maybe Irsquom deliberately muddying my trail Leaving themusic playing at home and my phone behind whilst in realitygoing on such grand adventures as wandering around abandonedschool grounds with faithful Shiva listening to ok probablythe exact same music but on my non-networked non-geolocationbroadcasting calm af dumb mp3 player

And whilst Irsquom obviously going online while writing this -mostly just to make sure I get such quotes as one of the men whovery much inspired Morrison in writing The Invisibles - the manknown only as Number Six [TODO XXX FIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxx] - Irsquomdoing so with everyone plugin I know of that might mask mypresence - everything from Facebook Disconnect to HTTPSEverywhere and of course Ghostery

[Ed For a full list seeing Appdenix X A guide to ghostingonline - when it exists lol]

ldquoI will not make any deals with you Ive resigned I will not bepushed filed stamped indexed briefed debriefed or numbered Mylife is my ownrdquo ~ The Prisoner

And whatrsquos the motto at The Village where the Shadow State hasits unpersons disappeared to BE SEEING YOU

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

24

[The Prisoner (UK)]

ldquoA human will murder a baby if they think can away with it but willgive their address to a policeman if askedrdquo ~ Unknown

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

25

[The Night Of]

The mini-series The Night Of - which just recently concludedand has me wishing Shiva could get along with cats lsquocause Iwanna get one now and name it Turturro - had a scene in its 5thepisode11 where the alleged offenderrsquos movements on the night ofthe murder are recreated using the data trail hersquos left Thewhole series is frankly a superbly crafted piece ofentertainment the way they use the camera in the first episodeto show (but never tell) just how the protaganistrsquos movementsare tracked traced and recorded is nothing short of masterfulSo I guess that genre is completely played out yet

Speaking of cats we got some new neighbours recently and mostmornings as I sit out with Shiva andor the chickens we listen

to them call it to be fed Its name GANDALF My mornings nowinclude the ritual summoning of a goddamn wizard in feline form

as I feed my own old god incarnated into the cutest dawg evaSigns and freaking portents yo

[TODO XXX finish thishelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphellip]

[TODO XXX FINALLY link to Appendix with detailed instructionsgoes HERE]

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

26

1 httpviridiandesignorg - itrsquos kinda insane how many people I didnrsquot meet til the early Twitter daze were allsubscribed to this list Lil bit influential it was2 httpswwwtheguardiancombooks2016aug24homo-deus-by-yuval-noah-harari-review3 httpswwwyoutubecomwatchv=dQpGwnN3dfc4 httpwwwmetafiltercom95152Userdriven-discontent32560465 httpswwwwiredcom201102transcript-of-reboot-11-speech-by-bruce-sterling-25-6-2009 - in which bruces didhis usual charismatic preaching and added not just Gothic High Tech but its compliment Favella Chic to our evergrowing post cyberpunk lexicon6 httpsmediumfreecodecampcomlive-asynchronously-c8e7172fe7ea7 httprunesoupcom201606the-first-world-without-sin8 A join is how you connect the entries in one table or database with another table or database Usually by a key -say in this case your name residential or email address or date of birth OR ALL OF THE ABOVE9 httpstwittercomRawnzillastatus73621058944651264110 httpsenwikipediaorgwikiIMSI-catcher11 httpsvimeocom182493489 because I like you herersquos the entire scene for you to watch and freak dafuq outover lol

You really are the contents of your data trail

But like they sayhellip yoursquove got nothing to fear if yoursquove got nothing to hidehellip that is until they change the rules onyou but thatrsquos just the nature of the Law

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

25

[The Night Of]

The mini-series The Night Of - which just recently concludedand has me wishing Shiva could get along with cats lsquocause Iwanna get one now and name it Turturro - had a scene in its 5thepisode11 where the alleged offenderrsquos movements on the night ofthe murder are recreated using the data trail hersquos left Thewhole series is frankly a superbly crafted piece ofentertainment the way they use the camera in the first episodeto show (but never tell) just how the protaganistrsquos movementsare tracked traced and recorded is nothing short of masterfulSo I guess that genre is completely played out yet

Speaking of cats we got some new neighbours recently and mostmornings as I sit out with Shiva andor the chickens we listen

to them call it to be fed Its name GANDALF My mornings nowinclude the ritual summoning of a goddamn wizard in feline form

as I feed my own old god incarnated into the cutest dawg evaSigns and freaking portents yo

[TODO XXX finish thishelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphellip]

[TODO XXX FINALLY link to Appendix with detailed instructionsgoes HERE]

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

26

1 httpviridiandesignorg - itrsquos kinda insane how many people I didnrsquot meet til the early Twitter daze were allsubscribed to this list Lil bit influential it was2 httpswwwtheguardiancombooks2016aug24homo-deus-by-yuval-noah-harari-review3 httpswwwyoutubecomwatchv=dQpGwnN3dfc4 httpwwwmetafiltercom95152Userdriven-discontent32560465 httpswwwwiredcom201102transcript-of-reboot-11-speech-by-bruce-sterling-25-6-2009 - in which bruces didhis usual charismatic preaching and added not just Gothic High Tech but its compliment Favella Chic to our evergrowing post cyberpunk lexicon6 httpsmediumfreecodecampcomlive-asynchronously-c8e7172fe7ea7 httprunesoupcom201606the-first-world-without-sin8 A join is how you connect the entries in one table or database with another table or database Usually by a key -say in this case your name residential or email address or date of birth OR ALL OF THE ABOVE9 httpstwittercomRawnzillastatus73621058944651264110 httpsenwikipediaorgwikiIMSI-catcher11 httpsvimeocom182493489 because I like you herersquos the entire scene for you to watch and freak dafuq outover lol

You really are the contents of your data trail

But like they sayhellip yoursquove got nothing to fear if yoursquove got nothing to hidehellip that is until they change the rules onyou but thatrsquos just the nature of the Law

Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery

26

1 httpviridiandesignorg - itrsquos kinda insane how many people I didnrsquot meet til the early Twitter daze were allsubscribed to this list Lil bit influential it was2 httpswwwtheguardiancombooks2016aug24homo-deus-by-yuval-noah-harari-review3 httpswwwyoutubecomwatchv=dQpGwnN3dfc4 httpwwwmetafiltercom95152Userdriven-discontent32560465 httpswwwwiredcom201102transcript-of-reboot-11-speech-by-bruce-sterling-25-6-2009 - in which bruces didhis usual charismatic preaching and added not just Gothic High Tech but its compliment Favella Chic to our evergrowing post cyberpunk lexicon6 httpsmediumfreecodecampcomlive-asynchronously-c8e7172fe7ea7 httprunesoupcom201606the-first-world-without-sin8 A join is how you connect the entries in one table or database with another table or database Usually by a key -say in this case your name residential or email address or date of birth OR ALL OF THE ABOVE9 httpstwittercomRawnzillastatus73621058944651264110 httpsenwikipediaorgwikiIMSI-catcher11 httpsvimeocom182493489 because I like you herersquos the entire scene for you to watch and freak dafuq outover lol

You really are the contents of your data trail

But like they sayhellip yoursquove got nothing to fear if yoursquove got nothing to hidehellip that is until they change the rules onyou but thatrsquos just the nature of the Law