If there is to be a conspiracy theory, let it be about how the civilisation was mounted externally into Earth from somewhere out there. This idea was essentially an act of aggression. A simple and sustainable model of survival was disturbed in its infancy and replaced with another. An idea that perpetuates itself through the constant urge to improve, innovate and push further. Nothing is good enough and there is no day like tomorrow. The tomorrow that never comes. Narcotics, business, culture, everything owes its existence to this open, empty and fraudulent promise. Even consciousness is locked into this loop. At least in the form that it is channeled through beings in bodies. Sketching the conspiracy further, the idea was transmitted to our atmosphere by radio and once it was in the air all we had to do was breathe.

The idea is ripe for conspiracy-seeking because it doesn't add up, it doesn't seem stable but has been a part of our fabric for so long. It can't be rationalised by history, experience or biology. It is a purely alien idea that suddenly appeared in our midst and then strangely also became the central idea. Without the idea of civilisation, we wouldn't be restless, paranoid and be so anthropometric. These are defining conditions to forever lock us in the loops of progression and recursion. There has been no reportage about the ascent of this idea. Maybe this happened before the development of culture and language, but that is purely speculative. It could also have happened in the silence of the night and the noise of our dreamworld. We have been confused ever since, not knowing whether we misremember a dream or remember a phenomenon that should be shared and reported.

The idea of civilisation has some more characteristics which might be more obvious. The details can be matched either way. So if the idea is to improve and be more sophisticated, then both the idea of domesticity and colonies on the moon make sense. There is no prescription of choices only a pattern and hinting mechanism for making choices. Potentially infinite things can fit. The myth of the prevalence of autonomy exists but in fact only the tyranny of civilisation prevails.

Law could not have taken birth without lawyers. There was an idea of course, there was a code that had its roots in reportedly ancient rites and customs. But this code needed to be practiced, to be knead into the dough and sweat of everyday life. This practice was put in place more by the lawyers than the police, the police was just hired by the bureaucracy to give a visible face to fear. The police has done its bit, it has put up a face to match the needs of its commissioning agency, but law is but bland fodder for the police force, it couldn't care less. They do not memorise the entire code, with its numeric short reference digits. They just upkeep the dominant social notions of acceptability. If it is OK, it is legal as far as they are concerned.

The lawyers fabricate the whole web of legalese we live in, by actively pursuing their victims and by upholding the value of knowing the law at all. Law is a monopoly, contracts are prepared by lawyers, read by lawyers, negotiated by lawyers. No one in the middle gets a foot in. It might seem that law only encodes the moral, ethical and fair-play concerns of people. It might seem that law has no mind of its own and blindly follows the desires expressed, it might seem that law is a just a language with a syntax and a context. But that is not true, law has a will, it has a spirit, it has eyes which spew blood on everything it sees. Both the flip sides of life in a law-bound society are created by the existence of the code and its enactment by the community of lawyers.

A little bit more needs to be known. This lawyer I know gets up in the morning and peers into the urban landscape for any leak of crime that she can plug. Plugging leaks of crimes only leads to unspent, pent-up criminal energy to throttle the system. If you want the establish a minimum base-line for a ethical way of living, you have to minimise the extent of things that law has something to say about. You have to let systems reach a level of animal equilibrium. The flaw is that even when you have laws you know that as long as you can conceal incidents well, breaking them is not a problem. Breaking a law doesn't render you unfit to be a human in the first place. Human-rights of criminals are still intact. The intrinsic ability to follow not a social code but a code of the species is missing or as yet unrealised in humans. Law as a beautiful tapestry that exhibits the genetic makeup that informs our nature does not exist. That would be a law that would inspire social pride. I mean we would go out on Sundays and look at that tapestry.

Also, accepting as a received fact that everything that advances through time in a species helps it survive, has value for the evolutionary project; then what is the evolutionary benefit of not having a code of the species? How does it help humans to be able to do anything as opposed to being an animal that does what it does? How does it help humans to have law?

Friction is breath. We don't mean in the physics-is-fun sense, meaning to celebrate the wonders of nature and the profound meaning in each subtle tangent of how the world operates. Maybe we would, on some other day, in some other exhibit at the museum, it is surely worth doing that. But here we are talking about friction in a different way. In the sense of the social discord, in the sense of the distance, the sync between what is there in our heads and what is there on the screen or in the mirror or maybe even sitting in front of us, not being there. There is no sync. There is no ball and socket, no grease to soften the screeching and scratching of surface on surface. And that is the reason we are alive.

Imagine a more well-oiled inter-personal nexus and you might be looking at the forthcoming extinction of the species. When we say friction is breath, we mean it. This friction is apparent in multiple forms. The displeasure we feel when we think about the fact that we occupy space on the same street, sometimes in the same bus, sometimes working on the same things is immense. It is such that, for an instant we even get shaken off the the ground we are stationed on, we have an encounter with insecurity and do the unpardonable offence of introspection. It is like our negative space, our shadow has come alive and we do no not take it very nicely. Friction between two surfaces is the force which caused the discovery of fire. What did the friction between figures and entities cause us to discover?

Only our smallness, the depths to which we can fall and never rise, the dark side.

The social was actually first prototyped and proposed as a system of conventions to blur this friction. Once this blur was applied, the job description of selectively making instances of friction visible and coherent became real. Different people fill this job description at different times. There are even modes of conversation in which reports of friction are shared.

For some this friction is the sole descriptor or art, literary truth, journalistic merit. For others there is something else well above this. For some friction is the only way of figure and ground separation, for others that separation is rendered in view by default. No work needs to be done.