Distribution

How do you let it all out?

How do you hear what is being spoken by the rustle of the leaves and the hush (behind the space that children assemble in the playground to make their plans for secret adventure)?

Distribution is a two-way exchange of information. You share your resource and others share their resource back with you. No one can be a source in this system, but anyone can be a resource. It is like anyone can be a mirror but no one can be an image.

It happens this way because air is reflective and after a point the internal reflection cannot be contained. After a point replication is the only way of lightening your load, it is only possible to disappear if there is another copy of you.

So distribution is about the process of making so many copies of an entity that it fills up all the space between sender and receiver.

The way things travel is through the function of tiling and stacking. Space gets reduced.

Distribution is about letting things reach their targets. To be able to think of tunnels that are empty only because they are waiting for you is to be able to understand the existence of conduits.

When we shout, we pull our voice out of the magnetic intensity of silence.

Talking is an efficient means of distribution of content.

If we don't talk, the air around us is thin.

Mimicking talking as a distribution framework is difficult. Words when they are written and are printed on paper become something else. The written word find its reader with a lot of difficulty. Sometimes, like bombs lying undetonated in the cellar, the written word lies unread for too long and loses its sting. Reading a word after it has lost its sting is not effective and is benign. It does not communicate anything anymore. Sometimes they even become an overly cumbersome burden.

Having too many unread books around you is a problem. They are like a traffic jam, like a cloudy head, like a window with a cupboard in front of it.

The problem we are dealing with is the opposite of the problem that the system administrators have. The system is being designed in a way that is at cross-purposes to our interests. We want to distribute our words as widely as possible and the sysadmins do not want to let our words get out. If we could stand somewhere and shout and have the whole world hear us, that place would be guarded by a whole army.

Either media has to be bought, corrupted or clamped down on, it can't be free. But media is a very ordinary and primary form of distribution of words. Let's talk of the city. If we walk every street of this city reading our text aloud, this city might perish. It is only because we do not read aloud, it is only because we quietly go about our writing and keep our hands off the pavements, off the public face of architecture that this city is able to exist all.

Life exists because we agree to behave ourselves.