I’ve been thinking about the concept of flow.
If you haven’t, you should check out the Amazon show “Patriot†which is an all-time underrated great IMO and inspiration for this thought, also inspired by JMH’s Word of the Day thread.
“Think back to the last time you ram chawed a partial chim set. Standard right? We’ve been ram chawing chim sets since the aqueducts of Rome, hey. But what if I told you that’s the basis for the empire’s collapse?â€
Our piping is at risk of collapse. It happens little by little, then all at once.
Where do things flow? Thanks to failures of the imagination about globalism (Clinton), the internet (Bush), and social media (Obama), they increasingly flow in a post-institutional, post-modern, post-sovereign, transnational, supranational interstitial shadow space that we can’t see or touch and moves to fast for our old school leaders to understand or affect or protect our interests from. Mycelium.
What flows? Even if it’s invisible you can tell what flows from the literal or figurative piping and joists that carry the flow, but no matter it’s all the same. Traffic and laundry. Capital, information, people, goods and services, weapons, and illicit molecules. The entire world runs on only two business models for five or six enterprises or flows.
How would you leverage this knowledge without the risk of your own business? You’d create a stream, or several streams, tapping into the various flows. You wouldn’t need any expertise, you’d just need to get your piping in order. Joists and jib joints. The flow would flow like wine.
Lets say you know your local city and state piping cold because you’ve been piping all your life but you want to get access to the transnational interstitial flow because you think you know, based on your experience but also a savant-like GOAT ability to find the cracks and seams in things, what flows how and where and why and to and from whom, it’s just a matter of scale, the usual suspects. You’d just merely need to get access to the transnational flow, a place to stand from which you’d erect your piping and joists and jib joints and construct your streams off of the flows to enrich yourself.
You wouldn’t interfere with the flows or the two business models, you’d just capitalize on your superior piping knowledge and maybe even add to the velocity of the flow for the good of the system. If you get caught? Well, first the fire hose of money and distraction. But after that you’d have things to trade, the threat vectors of your piping and the threat surface you’re standing on for two. Yes, even the internet and it’s lingo is just made up of piping and joists and jib joints and chim sets. The flow can go both ways. You don’t tap into the flow, the flow taps into you.
How would you protect this system? You’d divert a stream as a fire hose of flow onto anyone who would dare to look at or uncover or investigate the system in order to overwhelm them. “Influencers†or “investorsâ€. The system both requires secrecy AND assimilates anyone who would discover its existence. That’s the beauty of flow. You can make anyone who taps in or tried to tap in do your business and further your interests for you. Kayfabe.
Now, if the piping and joists and jib joints are owned or leveraged or managed by a nation state in furtherance of their interests then all good, but if a nation state is servile to the piping and joists and jib joints we have a problem, the institution is captured by the flow, the flow owns the institution, the demos, the res publica, which is what you’d want if you were in the business of flow in the mycelia interstitial. The fascism, the ownership becomes baked in.
It would be forgivable if, as the CIA agent solely responsible for the uncovering and mapping of the network, you went AWOL in Amsterdam to smoke pot and play folk songs on your acoustic guitar to soothe your PTSD from institutional trauma and just try to forget about the enormity of it all. I mean, why bother? Your boss doesn’t know his piping, your boss’s boss is distracted by the fire hose, and your boss’s boss’s boss is actively trying to set up a stream off of the flow. Everybody wants a piece, guardrails for thee, not for me. Overnight success for grotesque caricatures of an actual successful person. It’s a shit show.
So flow, and “Patriotâ€, whose main character was a real patriot by the way, who loved his country and his family and folk music and who didn’t hate anybody despite his bosses. He knew his piping cold and how things flow, but his agency was still using paper copies and Cobalt and nobody moved at threat speed or spoke piping, or even aqueducts, the basis for the empire’s collapse.
Check it out. Flow. And Patriot too if you like.
E
