Markers

And what should be the markers of a generally reputed social entity? What should be the framework in which reputation is thought about? The identification of positive reputation with exclusive social places and tightly-curated venues is false. This way perfectly good names and places, very exclusive, very selective gradually lose their recall value. This happens because citations can be indexed for many reasons and there is no way to control referencing.

It is very difficult to control the referencing. Not just that, it might actually be impossible. Doors are open, anyone can walk in. It is like memory, if for some reason remembering someone could kill them and the security services decide to make that person impossible to remember, they would fail. It is not possible. It might be within the scope of science fiction to trigger an episode of forgetting, of selective amnesia. But even for science fiction to model a scenario in which there is an idea of a shield which does not allow anyone to think of us, which replaces the space we occupy in people's heads with nothingness, emptiness, something that does not even register our absence.

So the project to control the right to reference is a failed project which is likely to never yield anything.

Association with markers is like referencing. It cannot be controlled. So societies are full of hot fuzz, full of hot air which construct themselves on the basis of hollow referencing and crimes of association. Society will never be bankable, never be streamlined enough to afford transparency between layers which are visible and layers which constantly inject content into them. So a different system has to be invented. A game world which privileges the right to reference. A game world in which the referenced can easily enumerate and know for sure of every instance they are invoked. This way the currency of markers and the layers of reputation parameters they link to can be controlled. Control is essential to state and specify the system of markers outside trivial mimicry based gestures and something more complex. Something like a scenario which has to be played and scored well in to be passed. To be able to reference being a privilege which has to be earned.

In that situation, at that point, markers regain their symbolic quality and become enigmas again. They regain their mysteries and celebrate them again. From a game-not-worth-playing because of the cheat codes that exist in common knowledge, life becomes an enjoyable game again.

At that point art becomes a way to communicate hints and codes to progress in game scenarios. There are popular reasons to look at art as being something which has something to say. Art will become an entity which is not just a placeholder for variable meaning, a speck of dust magnified a million times but rather it becomes a maze for unravelling answers for moving along further in the game.

More than that, much more than that actually, the markers of notability, the parameters of reputation that we idly play with today will becomes actors in a algorithmic mesh of dynamic data. You say that sounds like how on the Internet reputation has become a currency and not all references are equal, how the search engine called Google plays its cards very sly and actually has got it all figured out. And we will respond. We will put our answer in context how the databases of Google are so incredibly flat that if you ever modelled them for real they would look like spaghetti. How in a world of less confusion and no fear, we would let algorithms of ordering, hierarchy and retrieval deal with more than tabular data. We would let them deal with the raw spillage in our minds, the bulk of anti-matter as it bounces about in the fish soup of charged minds.