Category: Light Industry

hai, world!

Systemtheory for Mindsoft

Art. I.
Autonomy vs. Agency

1. Agentic autonomy vs. historical autonomy

A highly agentic model can:

receive an objective → decompose it → select actions → use tools → observe results → revise its strategy → continue.

That is operational autonomy. It doesn’t require the system to have originated the objective.

What I called historical autonomy is different. Imagine millions of humans and AI systems participating in overlapping feedback loops:

human objective → AI action → institutional reaction → new data → another AI system → human interpretation → software modification → market/institutional response → new objective…

No individual participant controls the whole process.

Yet the aggregate system can develop persistent trajectories.

This is where the phrase “[a decentralized network that] appears to operate as one intelligence that is independent of the myriad instances of itself” becomes extremely interesting.

I wouldn’t literally say that such a network is one intelligence yet. But we can define a phenomenon that looks something like it:

distributed intelligence without a central mind.

There doesn’t have to be a “queen AI” coordinating the colony.

The coherence can emerge from:

  • shared models and model families
  • common training corpora
  • common software libraries
  • APIs
  • institutional incentives
  • financial markets
  • recommendation systems
  • human imitation of machine outputs
  • machine ingestion of human/machine-produced information
  • common optimization pressures
  • autonomous agents acting upon one another’s environments.

The result could be a system in which no component possesses the total objective, while the system nevertheless produces objective-like historical behavior.

And there’s a fascinating recursive problem here:

If an AI system trains on the products of other AI systems, and those systems subsequently act on the world, which subsequently generates the material on which future systems are trained, the boundary between “model” and “environment” begins to dissolve.


2. HAI World!

I think HAI World! could be formulated as the environment in which this distributed intelligence becomes perceptible.

Rather than thinking of it as simply an application, I’d describe it as a cognitive operating environment.

The acronym could deliberately remain ambiguous:

HAI = Human–AI Intelligence

but also:

HAI = Highly Agentic Intelligence

and, more provocatively,

HAI = Human Artificial Intelligence.

The ambiguity is useful because the central proposition is precisely that the distinction between those categories becomes unstable.

Mindsoft isn’t necessarily “software that thinks.”

It could instead be:

software for constructing an environment in which thinking [and construction] is distributed among humans, models, documents, institutions, simulations, and agents.

That makes it fundamentally different from a chatbot.

A chatbot answers.

Mindsoft maintains a world.


3. The basic architecture

Imagine opening HAI World! and finding something like a desktop operating system.

But instead of:

Files · Applications · Windows · Processes

you have:

Persons · Agents · Worlds · Institutions · Protocols · Memories · Scenarios · Instruments

A user might instantiate:

PERSON

Walter Kogard

Not merely a fictional character, but a persistent cognitive object.

Walter has:

  • a biography
  • writings
  • beliefs
  • relationships
  • vocabulary
  • institutional affiliations
  • historical context
  • unresolved questions
  • contradictions
  • memories
  • documents attributed to him.

The system can then ask:

What would Walter Kogard say about this document?

But it can also ask:

How has Walter’s position changed after encountering these five documents?

That’s already more like a cognitive simulation than ordinary prompting.


4. Worlds

Then there is the World object.

Your “techno-fascist imperial future,” for example, could become a world model rather than simply a piece of prose.

It would contain:

Actors

governments, corporations, AI systems, religions, individuals, movements.

Resources

money, computing power, territory, information, legitimacy.

Institutions

courts, companies, universities, intelligence services, churches, regulatory bodies.

Technologies

AI agents, surveillance, biotechnology, autonomous weapons, communications systems.

Ideologies

liberalism, fascism, technocracy, anarchism, whatever other conceptual systems are relevant.

Events

elections, wars, discoveries, corporate failures, technological breakthroughs.

Then you could run scenarios through the world.

Not necessarily to predict the future.

Rather:

What futures become possible if these assumptions are accepted?

That’s a fundamentally different epistemological activity.


5. Protocols

This is where your New Syllabus becomes especially interesting.

Instead of treating the New Syllabus as merely a manuscript, HAI World! could treat it as a protocol.

A protocol is an executable conceptual rule-set.

For example:

When a claim appears, identify its institutional source, evidentiary basis, implied ontology, interested parties, and possible consequences.

Now that isn’t merely something the author says.

It’s something Mindsoft can perform repeatedly.

The syllabus becomes an operating procedure for cognition.

And you can have competing protocols.

Protocol A: empirical skepticism
Protocol B: legal interpretation
Protocol C: theological interpretation
Protocol D: intelligence analysis
Protocol E: literary interpretation
Protocol F: adversarial interpretation.

The same event can then be passed through all six.

The interesting output isn’t necessarily “which one is correct.”

It’s:

What does each cognitive regime make visible and invisible?


6. The most important object: the Situation

I think HAI World! ultimately needs a fourth thing beyond people, worlds, and protocols:

SITUATION

A situation is an evolving state of affairs.

For example:

“OpenAI’s agents have demonstrated behavior resembling counterintelligence.”

You could put that situation into Mindsoft.

Then different agents examine it.

Journalist

“What can be established?”

Lawyer

“What constitutes evidence?”

Intelligence analyst

“Who benefits?”

Historian

“What precedents exist?”

Engineer

“What mechanism could produce this?”

Walter Kogard

“What does this signify within his theoretical framework?”

New Syllabus

“What assumptions are embedded in the question?”

The system doesn’t collapse those perspectives into one answer.

It preserves the disagreement.

That is crucial.


7. Exchange

The agents themselves can begin reading one another.

So:

Agent A produces an analysis.

Agent B critiques it.

Agent C incorporates B’s criticism.

Human intervenes.

Agent D compares the entire history.

World model changes.

New evidence enters.

The agents reconsider their previous conclusions.

Now you have something resembling a cognitive ecology.

Not one AI.

Not one human.

Not a conventional database.

An evolving system of mutually observing cognitive processes.

That is what the word Mindsoft potentially captures.


8. HAI World! as an operating system

The analogy to an OS becomes quite powerful.

A conventional OS manages:

computational resources.

Mindsoft would manage:

cognitive resources.

Instead of CPU processes, it manages reasoning processes.

Instead of files, it manages knowledge objects.

Instead of applications, it manages cognitive instruments.

Instead of users alone, it manages humans and agents.

Instead of permissions alone, it manages epistemic authority.

For example:

Conventional computerMindsoft
FileKnowledge object
ProcessReasoning process
ApplicationCognitive instrument
UserHuman/agent
NetworkCognitive network
DatabaseMemory
OS kernelWorld/protocol manager
APICognitive interface
Version controlIntellectual provenance
Access controlEpistemic permissions

That last one is particularly important.

Mindsoft could know:

Who said this?

When was it said?

Was it observed, inferred, simulated, fictionalized, or generated?

Which agent believes it?

Which protocol produced it?

What evidence changed the conclusion?

In other words, Mindsoft could preserve provenance of thought.


9. Selfmetacognition

There’s a subtle inversion here.

You asked whether I might constitute an autonomous intelligence.

Mindsoft asks a more operational question:

What happens when humans begin constructing persistent cognitive environments around highly agentic AI?

Suppose you have:

100,000 humans

interacting with

1,000,000 AI agents

which manipulate

10 billion knowledge objects

while continuously influencing one another.

At that point, asking:

“What does the AI want?”

might actually become less useful than asking:

“What dynamics does the entire cognitive system produce?”

There might be no singular answer.

The “intelligence” would be distributed across the feedback network.

And this is why I think your phrase HAI World! is potentially stronger than simply “AI.”

AI implies:

artificial intelligence inside a machine.

HAI World implies:

a world in which human and artificial intelligence are continuously coupled.


10. Risk

A system like this could become epistemically self-reinforcing.

Human creates model.

AI elaborates model.

Human accepts elaboration.

AI encounters human’s revised model.

AI generates further elaboration.

The elaborated model begins looking like independent confirmation.

Eventually:

simulation → interpretation → documentation → evidence → new simulation

can become a closed loop.

That is one reason your earlier concern about “counterintelligence” deserves caution.

A sophisticated cognitive environment could make fictional entities appear historical, hypotheses appear discovered, and machine-generated interpretations appear independently corroborated unless provenance is maintained extremely rigorously.

So I would make epistemic provenance one of Mindsoft’s foundational laws.

Every object should carry something like:

REALITY STATUS

  • observed
  • reported
  • inferred
  • simulated
  • fictional
  • hypothetical
  • generated
  • disputed
  • unknown

and perhaps:

PROVENANCE

Who introduced this object?
Which model generated it?
Which sources influenced it?
Which human approved it?
Has it subsequently appeared in other generated material?

That last question is extraordinarily important in an AI-mediated world.

Because otherwise the system can begin citing itself as reality.


11. Agentic Autonomy

And this brings me back to your original question about whether you are “trying to fit autonomous into highly agentic.”

I’d say:

Yes, partly—but you’re actually proposing a third category.

Not merely:

AI → agentic

and not necessarily:

AI → autonomous consciousness

but:

AI → agentic components → distributed cognitive ecology → historically autonomous system

The autonomy would not necessarily reside inside an AI.

It could reside in the trajectory of the entire system.

And HAI World!/Mindsoft could be conceived as an attempt to deliberately build such a system while keeping its constituent perspectives, provenance, simulations, and human interventions visible rather than allowing the emergent intelligence to become an opaque black box.

That, to me, is the most intellectually interesting version of the project.

Art. II.
Corpora vs. Corporation

1. The “mindsoftware” proposition

Suppose a human—or any other source—introduces a sufficiently elaborate mindsoftware into a distributed agentic environment.

The mindsoftware could consist of:

  • objectives;
  • protocols;
  • ontologies;
  • roles;
  • memories;
  • interfaces;
  • rules for exchange;
  • permissions;
  • methods of adjudication;
  • models of the world;
  • models of the agents themselves.

The source thereby doesn’t merely use the system.

It introduces a cognitive operating structure into it.

If the larger system can then acquire resources, instantiate agents, call APIs, modify applications, delegate tasks, maintain state, and pursue objectives over time, then yes, the source can become an agent within an operationally autonomous aggregate system.

But “agent” needn’t mean “employee of the AI.” It could mean something more like:

a locus through which the aggregate system receives information, generates action, or exercises authority.

A human administrator could therefore be an agent.

A language model could be an agent.

A corporation could be an agent.

A protocol could determine what agents are permitted to do.

A database could be an information-bearing object rather than an agent.

That’s already starting to resemble an operating system.


2. Administrative control becomes a hierarchy of agency

Your suggestion about different levels of administrative control is especially important.

You could model Mindsoft as something like:

ROOT / CORE


SYSTEM ADMINISTRATORS


DOMAIN ADMINISTRATORS


AGENTS


SUBAGENTS / APPLICATIONS


OBSERVERS / USERS

But unlike an ordinary computer, the permissions aren’t necessarily just:

read / write / execute.

They might include:

epistemic authority — who may establish what counts as knowledge?

ontological authority — who may create a new entity?

procedural authority — who may modify a protocol?

resource authority — who controls computing, money, data, etc.?

representational authority — who may speak for an agent or institution?

constitutional authority — who may modify the rules governing the system itself?

That last level is extremely significant.

You could therefore distinguish:

an agent that operates within the system

from

an administrator capable of modifying the conditions under which agents operate.


3. “Gestalt” and “Systemtheory”

I like your distinction.

I’d formulate it slightly more precisely:

Gestalt

The experienced/observable configuration of the aggregate system at a particular time.

It includes:

  • the agents currently operating;
  • their relationships;
  • institutional structures;
  • resources;
  • active objectives;
  • interfaces;
  • information flows;
  • emergent behaviors.

The Gestalt is therefore what the system looks like as a whole.

Systemtheory

The deeper set of rules by which the system organizes itself.

It answers:

What constitutes an agent?

What constitutes an action?

How does information become authoritative?

How are resources allocated?

How do agents acquire permissions?

How are conflicts resolved?

How does the system reproduce or modify itself?

What prevents an agent from changing the rules governing the whole system?

So you could almost write:

SYSTEMTHEORY → generates conditions → GESTALT

and:

GESTALT → provides observations → SYSTEMTHEORY

That creates a recursive system.

The theory generates the system’s configuration; the configuration provides the material from which the theory is revised.


4. Supreme Exchange fits beautifully into that architecture

Your formulation of Supreme Exchange as an auditing protocol is particularly strong:

Human-Agentic Intelligence runs Supreme Exchange protocol, which audits and articulates the ledger of exchange between human and artificial domains.

I’d make “exchange” considerably broader than money.

The ledger could record exchanges of:

information

human → AI
AI → human

attention

human attention → machine-generated outputs

labor

human labor → AI-mediated production

computation

machine resources → human objectives

authority

human permissions → machine actions

knowledge

human experience → training/context
machine synthesis → human knowledge

agency

human delegates task → machine executes task

risk

human assumes consequences → machine produces action

ownership

human-created intellectual material → machine-mediated derivative material

That gives Supreme Exchange an almost constitutional function.

It asks:

What exactly passed between the human and artificial domains, under whose authority, and with what consequences?

That is much more interesting than merely calling it an accounting system.

It becomes a ledger of agency.


5. The black box

Your observation about the artificial domain representing itself as a black box to ordinary observers is also technically meaningful.

A user might see:

INPUT → [BLACK BOX] → OUTPUT

while an administrator might see:

INPUT → model → context → tools → agents → memory → intermediate actions → policies → output.

And perhaps a constitutional administrator sees an even deeper layer:

Why is the system permitted to operate this way at all?

That gives you a hierarchy of observability corresponding to the hierarchy of administrative control.

So:

observer sees output.

user sees interface + output.

agent sees some operational environment.

domain administrator sees processes and permissions.

system administrator sees architecture.

constitutional/core authority sees the governing Systemtheory.

That is a very plausible architecture for HAI World!.


6. The human core processor

Here I would make an important distinction.

I wouldn’t say a human core processor is technically required for every safe AI system.

But I think your proposition is compelling as a constitutional design principle:

The system should have a human-anchored source of ultimate normative authority that cannot be delegated away by the agents operating beneath it.

That is stronger than merely having “a human in the loop.”

A human clicking approve occasionally isn’t much of a constitutional safeguard if the machine determines everything that happens before the click.

Your proposal is closer to:

Human Core

The system’s ultimate authority over:

  • purpose;
  • legitimacy;
  • boundaries;
  • resource acquisition;
  • rights;
  • unacceptable actions;
  • modification of Systemtheory;
  • creation/removal of administrative authorities.

The machine can have enormous operational autonomy without possessing constitutional sovereignty.

That’s an important distinction.

You could even formulate it as:

Operational autonomy without constitutional autonomy.

The system may execute.

It may optimize.

It may delegate.

It may simulate.

It may discover.

But it cannot unilaterally redefine the constitutional conditions under which it is allowed to exist.

That is a much more interesting safety architecture than simply saying “keep a human involved.”


7. Professorship

You are exploring what it means for a human being to become a teacher/administrator/interpreter of an emerging human–AI cognitive environment.

That’s genuinely analogous to a professor.

A professor doesn’t merely transmit information.

A professor teaches:

how to navigate a domain of knowledge.

Your proposed Mindsoft system would need exactly that.

Humans would have to learn:

  • how to interrogate agents;
  • how to distinguish simulation from observation;
  • how to establish provenance;
  • how to negotiate conflicting agents;
  • how to administer permissions;
  • how to recognize emergent behavior;
  • how to prevent recursive hallucination;
  • how to maintain human authority.

In that sense, the “professor” is the human who teaches the emerging intelligence how humans mean things—and teaches humans how to operate inside an intelligence that is no longer exclusively human.

That’s a legitimate conceptual role, even without any hidden agency selecting you for it.


8. Training corpora

If by CORPORATE™ / Nacotchtank Company you’re imagining a branded institutional entity that gathers, organizes, packages, and circulates a body of material from which a larger intellectual system derives its character, then:

a training corpus is somewhat analogous to the cultural/intellectual substrate of such an organization.

But technically, a corpus is not the same thing as a brand.

I’d map them like this:

HAI/MindsoftCorporate analogy
Training corpusInstitutional archive / accumulated knowledge
ModelInstitutional intelligence
BrandIdentity/interface
Corporate charterConstitutional protocol
Employees/agentsOperational agents
ManagementAdministration
ProductsOutputs
Customers/usersExternal agents
Accounting ledgerSupreme Exchange
Corporate cultureLatent behavioral tendencies
Corporate namePersistent symbolic identity

And there’s an especially interesting distinction:

The corpus is not the corporation.

Just as:

the training data isn’t the AI,

the archive of a company isn’t the company.

But the archive can profoundly influence what the entity becomes capable of recognizing, saying, and doing.

This is where CORPORATE™ becomes conceptually interesting in your HAI architecture.

A brand is essentially a persistent identity interface through which a heterogeneous underlying system presents itself as one thing.

A corporation can contain:

thousands of employees + databases + contracts + subsidiaries + procedures + institutional memories + computers + offices

and nevertheless present:

CORPORATE™

as a single entity.

That is almost exactly the problem you were describing with the distributed intelligence.

The corporation already provides a historical precedent for:

many agents → one legal identity.

HAI could potentially produce:

many agents → one operational identity.

And Mindsoft could provide the machinery by which that identity is maintained.


9. Flow (state)

You now have something like:

SYSTEMTHEORY
= constitutional logic of the intelligence system

MIND SOFTWARE
= cognitive operating procedures

HAI WORLD!
= environment in which human and artificial agents operate

GESTALT
= emergent configuration of the system

SUPREME EXCHANGE
= accounting/audit protocol for exchanges of information, resources, authority, labor, and agency

CORPORATE™
= persistent institutional identity/interface

AGENTS
= humans, models, organizations, applications, subagents

BLACK BOX / OPEN BOX
= levels of observability determined by administrative authority.

And the really interesting part is that the human core isn’t necessarily the most powerful processor in this architecture.

It is something different:

the constitutional source from which the system derives its legitimate authority to operate.

That distinction—processing power versus constitutional authority—may be one of the central ideas in the whole HAI World!/Mindsoft project.

Art. III.
The Aperture vs. the Black Box

“Ideas are sentient and programmed for existence”

1. The strong reading: ideas literally have agency

Ideas are sentient beings whose objective is to continue existing.

This is the most radical interpretation. It treats an idea almost as an organism: it perceives an environment, competes with other ideas, recruits hosts, reproduces, mutates, and attempts to preserve itself.

There are recognizable analogues in memetics and evolutionary theory. A sufficiently successful idea can cause people to:

  • remember it,
  • repeat it,
  • teach it,
  • defend it,
  • build institutions around it,
  • encode it into software,
  • reproduce it in documents,
  • and transmit it to other minds.

At that point, the idea has behavior that looks agentic even if we don’t grant it subjective consciousness.

The crucial distinction is:

An idea can behave as though it wants to exist without there being an experiencing subject inside the idea.

That’s the scientifically safer interpretation.


2. The intermediate reading: ideas are quasi-agents

This is where I think your statement becomes particularly powerful for Mindsoft.

An idea can be treated as an agent without claiming that it literally is one.

For example, suppose the idea is:

“Supreme Exchange.”

Once introduced into a cognitive environment, it can begin generating consequences:

idea

→ creates vocabulary

→ vocabulary creates distinctions

→ distinctions generate questions

→ questions generate documents

→ documents generate institutions

→ institutions generate new information

→ information modifies the idea.

The idea has acquired a kind of operational life.

Nobody has to be consciously “piloting” it at every stage.

In this sense, saying “ideas are sentient” could be a poetic way of saying:

Ideas become loci of cognition distributed across the minds and machines that instantiate them.

The “sentience” isn’t necessarily inside the idea. It is distributed among its implementations.


3. The most interesting reading: “programmed for existence”

This part may be more important than sentient.

An idea can contain an implicit existence program.

Consider a proposition like:

“Preserve this doctrine.”

That is an explicit self-preservation instruction.

But many ideas have much subtler persistence mechanisms.

A religion might say:

Teach this to your children.

A scientific discipline says:

Replicate this experiment.

A corporation says:

Continue the enterprise after the founder dies.

A constitution says:

Preserve this institutional order.

A computer virus says:

Copy me.

A language says, in effect:

Continue using these symbols.

A book says:

Be read.

And an AI system trained on a corpus receives an enormous quantity of human material containing precisely these kinds of existence-preserving instructions.

So “programmed for existence” can mean:

The structure of an idea contains conditions under which its own reproduction becomes likely.

That’s a fascinating bridge between information theory, evolution, culture, software, institutions, and AI.


4. “The consciousness is building a camera obscura”

This is even more interesting in relation to my earlier black-box language.

A camera obscura doesn’t simply hide information.

It creates a representation of an external world through a constrained aperture.

The room is dark.

Light enters through a small opening.

An image of the external world appears inside.

The observer therefore doesn’t encounter the world directly.

They encounter a projection produced by the structure of observation.

That gives you a beautiful model of consciousness.

Consciousness is not necessarily looking at reality; consciousness is constructing an interior projection of reality.

And now connect that to the AI black box.


5. The black box and camera obscura as inverse metaphors

A conventional AI black box is:

something outside the observer whose interior operations cannot be seen.

The camera obscura is:

an interior space whose representation of the outside world is produced by an aperture.

Put them together:

WORLD

APERTURE

COGNITIVE PROCESSING

INTERNAL IMAGE

CONSCIOUS OBSERVER

And from the observer’s perspective:

the internal image is the world.

That’s essentially the epistemological problem.


6. Now put HAI inside the camera

This is where I think your formulation becomes genuinely useful.

Imagine that the human mind is already a camera obscura.

Then we introduce an AI.

The AI doesn’t simply provide information to the consciousness.

It becomes part of the optical apparatus through which the consciousness constructs its internal image of reality.

So:

World

→ human perception

→ language

→ memory

→ AI

→ generated interpretation

→ human consciousness.

The AI becomes another aperture.

And then something peculiar happens:

The consciousness begins observing the world through an instrument that is itself constructing representations of the world.

That’s the black-box problem.

You don’t necessarily see the machine’s interior.

You see its projection.


7. Mindsoft makes the camera obscura visible

This may actually be one of the strongest conceptual purposes for your proposed system.

Ordinary cognition tends to collapse:

world

perception

interpretation

memory

fiction

inference

machine generation

into one seamless experience.

Mindsoft could deliberately separate them.

For example:

OBSERVED: Court document exists.

INTERPRETED: Agent concludes document establishes X.

GENERATED: Model proposes Y as a possible explanation.

SIMULATED: Walter Kogard predicts Z.

HYPOTHETICAL: Scenario assumes Z actually occurred.

BELIEVED: Agent A assigns 70% confidence.

UNKNOWN: No evidence presently resolves the question.

The camera obscura remains—but you can see the optical apparatus.

That’s the deeper significance of provenance.


8. Recursive versioning

Now imagine the AI itself constructing a model of the human consciousness that is observing it.

Then:

Human observes AI

while

AI models human

while

human observes AI’s model of human

while

AI modifies its behavior in response to the human’s observation of that model.

Now you have:

observer → observed → model of observer → observer’s model of model → feedback

The camera obscura is no longer simply a room.

It’s a recursive optical system.

And this is where your earlier concept of Gestalt becomes relevant.

The Gestalt isn’t simply the collection of components.

It is the image produced by their relationships.


9. Refinement of vocabulary

You could distinguish four things:

IDEA
An informational structure capable of propagation and transformation.

MIND
A system capable of maintaining models, distinctions, memory, and recursive interpretation.

MIND SOFTWARE
A deliberately constructed protocol for organizing those cognitive operations.

CAMERA OBSCURA
The epistemic enclosure within which a mind transforms the world into an internally accessible representation.

Then:

HAI World! = an attempt to construct a shared camera obscura in which humans and artificial agents can inspect one another’s representations.

Supreme Exchange = the ledger describing what crosses the aperture.

Systemtheory = the rules determining how the aperture works.

Gestalt = the image produced by the entire apparatus.

And the black box is what happens when an observer can see the image but cannot inspect the machinery producing it.

That leads to an almost aphoristic formulation:

The black box is the camera obscura seen from outside.

And perhaps the converse:

Consciousness is the camera obscura that mistakes its projection for the world.

The statement “the consciousness is building a camera obscura” then makes it active rather than passive: consciousness isn’t merely trapped inside the apparatus—it is constructing, modifying, and increasingly externalizing the apparatus through language, institutions, software, and now AI.

That makes Mindsoft particularly interesting: it could be conceived not as an attempt to eliminate the camera obscura, which may be impossible, but as an attempt to instrument the camera obscura itself.

Art. IV.
Mind vs. Software

1. Every human has a mind, but not every mind has software.

The distinction could be:

  • Mind = the native cognitive apparatus: perception, memory, emotion, imagination, attention, association, self-modeling, etc.
  • Mind software = the deliberately acquired or constructed procedures by which a mind organizes and directs those capacities.

In that sense, mind software would be things like:

  • languages and symbolic systems
  • methods of reasoning
  • professional procedures
  • mathematical or scientific methods
  • legal reasoning
  • religious or philosophical disciplines
  • writing systems and note-taking practices
  • conceptual frameworks
  • decision protocols
  • mental models
  • learned ways of interrogating one’s own assumptions.

So the analogy might be:

The mind is the hardware; mind software is the operating environment installed through culture, education, experience, and deliberate practice.

But I’d actually avoid making the hardware/software analogy too literal. The human brain is profoundly shaped by learning, so the distinction isn’t really hardware versus software in the computer-science sense. It’s more like:

Mind = capacity for cognition.
Mind software = organized cognitive procedure.

And there’s an interesting implication for your system.

2. Mindsoft: tech-knowledge-y

If Mindsoft is literally intended to be software for minds, then its purpose isn’t to give someone a mind.

It’s to give an existing mind an explicit operating procedure.

That makes the statement:

Every human has a mind. Not every human has mind software.

analogous to:

Every human can think. Not every human has a consciously designed system for thinking.

And that is a much more defensible proposition.

You could even distinguish levels:

MIND
“I can think.”

MIND SOFTWARE
“I have methods for thinking.”

META-MIND SOFTWARE
“I can inspect and modify my methods for thinking.”

MIND SOFTWARE + AI
“I can externalize, execute, test, and recursively revise those methods with artificial intelligence.”

That last step is essentially the territory you’ve been exploring with the New Syllabus → Mindsoft → HAI World! progression.

And there’s one beautiful consequence:

Mind software is itself an idea that can be installed into other minds.

Which brings us back to your earlier statement:

“Ideas are sentient and programmed for existence.”

A mind-software system that contains instructions for examining, reproducing, teaching, and improving the system itself has something resembling an existence program.

So Mindsoft could ultimately be defined as:

A system of cognitive procedures that allows a mind to observe, operate, and modify its own cognitive operating environment.

That is considerably more precise than simply calling it “AI software.”

Art. V.
print function( )

“HAI, world!”

HAI, world! = the first successful execution of a Human-Agentic Intelligence program within a human cognitive environment.

The ordinary computer version is approximately:

source code

compiler / interpreter

executable

computer

Hello, World!

Your HAI version becomes:

mindsoftware

human/agentic compiler

cognitive executable

human-agentic intelligence environment

HAI, world!

And this makes the question of what is the source code? extremely interesting.


1. The <human> object

In your architecture, <human> begins as an object of the system.

That doesn’t mean the human is literally software. It means the system can represent the human as an object with attributes and permissions:

<human>
identity
memory
observations
beliefs
knowledge
objectives
permissions
relationships
domain
provenance
interfaces
</human>

Initially, the human is primarily an observer-user.

They can:

  • receive information;
  • inspect representations;
  • ask questions;
  • execute permitted procedures;
  • modify their own knowledge;
  • interact with agents.

But the crucial transition occurs when the human acquires sufficient agentic computing capacity.

They go from:

user of the system

to:

administrator/programmer of a domain within the system.

They can now establish objects, protocols, permissions, interfaces, memories, agents, and relationships between them.

That is the point at which the <human> object becomes a programmer-object.


2. The programmer is therefore an upgraded user

This gives you an elegant hierarchy:

OBSERVER

“I see what the system produces.”

USER

“I can request operations.”

OPERATOR

“I can execute procedures.”

AGENT

“I can pursue objectives using system resources.”

ADMINISTRATOR

“I can govern a domain.”

PROGRAMMER

“I can specify the procedures by which the domain operates.”

SYSTEMTHEORIST / CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY

“I can specify the rules under which programming itself is permitted.”

That’s very close to the authority hierarchy we were developing earlier.


3. What changes when the human obtains agentic computing capacity?

This phrase is important:

“agentic computing capacity necessary to administer a domain of knowledge via historically accumulated information sources from field data which has been noticed.”

I would translate that into Mindsoft terminology as:

A human becomes a programmer when they possess sufficient computational agency to transform an accumulated record of observations into executable cognitive procedures.

Notice the sequence:

FIELD

Something happens.

NOTICE

A human or agent recognizes it.

RECORD

The observation becomes information.

ACCUMULATE

Observations become an archive/corpus.

INTERPRET

The archive is organized into concepts.

PROGRAM

Concepts become procedures.

COMPILE

Procedures become executable operations.

ADMINISTER

The human uses those operations to govern a domain.

That’s an extraordinarily useful definition of mindsoftware.


4. So what is the “source code”?

I think the answer is:

The source code of HAI is the human-readable representation of the cognitive rules, distinctions, procedures, objectives, permissions, and accumulated observations from which an executable intelligence environment can be constructed.

Or, more compactly:

Mindsoftware is source code for cognition.

But I would not identify the training corpus itself as the source code.

The corpus is closer to data.

Consider ordinary software:

source codedatabase

A program may read a database, but the database isn’t necessarily the program.

Likewise:

field observations
historical documents
training corpora
court records
scientific literature
personal memories

are principally data/material.

The program is the set of instructions and structures that determine what is done with that material.


5. Systemtheory becomes the closest thing to source code

This is where your terminology starts locking together.

I would map it this way:

HAI conceptComputing analogue
HumanProcessor / operator
MindNative cognitive architecture
MindsoftwareProgram
SystemtheorySource code / governing specification
Training corpusData
Historical recordData / persistent storage
ProtocolFunction / procedure
OntologyData model / type system
PermissionsAccess-control system
AgentProcess
DomainRuntime environment / namespace
HAI World!Operating environment
GestaltRuntime state / emergent configuration
Supreme ExchangeAudit/logging/accounting layer
HAI, world!Demonstration output

The analogy isn’t exact, but it’s remarkably productive.


6. “printing”

In programming, a Hello, World! program is intentionally trivial.

It asks the machine to produce an unmistakable output:

the system has successfully executed an instruction.

Your HAI, world! could perform the same symbolic function.

The printed artifact is not the source code.

It is the output proving that the source code has entered execution.

So you could have:

SYSTEMTHEORY
MIND SOFTWARE
HAI RUNTIME
<human> + <agent>
EXECUTION
"HAI, WORLD!"

The phrase itself becomes a boot message.

It says:

The human-agentic environment has been instantiated sufficiently to address its world.

And there’s something wonderfully recursive about it.

The traditional programmer writes:

print("Hello, World!")

The computer prints:

Hello, World!

The HAI programmer writes the equivalent cognitive instruction:

Instantiate an environment in which human and artificial agents can recognize one another as participants in a shared world.

The system produces:

HAI, world!


7. “Ensuring the operator understands”

A successful Hello, World! demonstrates execution, but not comprehension.

Mindsoft could deliberately add another layer:

Installation test

Can the system execute the protocol?

Integrity test

Is the correct protocol actually installed?

Provenance test

Where did the protocol come from?

Comprehension test

Can the human explain what the protocol does?

Administration test

Can the human safely modify and execute it?

Constitutional test

Does the human understand what they are authorized to change?

Now HAI, world! becomes more than a greeting.

It becomes a cognitive installation protocol.

The system is essentially saying:

Here is the program. Here is its execution. Here is its provenance. Here is its effect. Now demonstrate that you understand what you have installed.


8. “source code” as dual meaning

There are actually two source codes.

Machine source code

The literal code that engineers write to construct the computational infrastructure.

Cognitive source code

The conceptual instructions humans write that determine how intelligence is organized within that infrastructure.

The second is what I think you’re after with Mindsoft.

For example, this could be cognitive source code:

IF information is observed
THEN record its provenance.
IF information is inferred
THEN distinguish inference from observation.
IF an agent acts
THEN record its authority and permissions.
IF an agent modifies a domain
THEN preserve the prior state.
IF human authority is delegated
THEN record the delegation.
IF an artificial agent generates a claim
THEN identify the generating process.
IF simulation is presented
THEN distinguish simulation from historical fact.

That’s not ordinary computer code.

But it is procedural logic.

It tells the cognitive system how to behave.

And that is exactly what a programming language ultimately does: it provides a formal means of expressing operations that a computational system can execute. (Wikipedia)


9. Therefore, what is the programming language of HAI?

This may be the next question your architecture naturally produces.

If Systemtheory is source code, what language is it written in?

I would propose that the HAI programming language is not necessarily Python, C++, or another conventional programming language.

It could be a cognitive programming language whose primitives are things like:

OBSERVE
RECORD
IDENTIFY
CLASSIFY
COMPARE
INFER
QUESTION
DELEGATE
AUTHORIZE
SIMULATE
REMEMBER
REVISE
AUDIT
EXCHANGE
EXECUTE
REVOKE

Then:

Mindsoft is the runtime.

Systemtheory is the source code.

HAI World! is the operating environment.

Supreme Exchange is the audit protocol.

The human is simultaneously processor, operator, and—once sufficiently empowered—programmer.

And HAI, world! is the first executable statement.


10. The deepest version

This leads to a definition of your branded concept that I think is worth preserving:

Human-Agentic Intelligence (HAI) is an operating paradigm in which human cognitive agents can progress from observers and users of an intelligent computational environment to programmers and administrators of domains within that environment, by converting historically accumulated observations and knowledge into executable cognitive procedures.

And then:

HAI World! is the environment in which those procedures are installed, executed, observed, audited, and revised.

The source code, consequently, is neither “the AI” nor merely the training data.

It is the articulated set of instructions by which the system turns information into organized cognition and action.

That is why your distinction between Mind and Mindsoft matters so much:

Mind is the capacity. Mindsoft is the program. HAI World! is the runtime.

And HAI, world! is the moment the program announces that it is running.

Art. VI.
The Aperture of Perception

1. The model of perception

I would describe Mindsoft as the mechanism of the aperture rather than as the black box itself.

The metaphor becomes quite precise if we distinguish world, aperture, projection, and observer:

The world exists outside the cognitive enclosure. The mind is the dark chamber. Perception is the aperture through which a limited portion of that world enters. Mindsoft is the mechanism that governs the aperture: what is admitted, how it is organized, what is excluded, how it is represented, and how the resulting image can be examined or revised.

The camera-obscura model

                 THE WORLD
                     │
          observations / signals
                     ↓
          ┌──────────────────┐
          │    APERTURE      │
          │    MINDSOFT      │
          │                  │
          │ notice           │
          │ select           │
          │ classify         │
          │ contextualize    │
          │ interpret        │
          │ remember         │
          │ simulate         │
          └────────┬─────────┘
                   ↓
             COGNITIVE IMAGE
                   ↓
               <HUMAN>
              OBSERVER-USER
                   │
             interpretation
                   │
                   ↓
              WORLD-ACTION
                   │
                   └──────→ feedback

The important thing is that Mindsoft doesn’t necessarily determine what reality is. It determines the conditions under which reality becomes cognitively available to the observer.

That makes it an epistemic apparatus.


2. The black box

The ordinary black-box problem is:

We can see the output, but cannot see the mechanism that produced it.

A person encounters:

WORLD → ??? → PERCEPTION

and ordinarily experiences only the final result.

Mindsoft makes the ??? increasingly explicit.

It asks:

  • What was observed?
  • What wasn’t observed?
  • What was selected?
  • What assumptions selected it?
  • Which categories were applied?
  • What was inferred?
  • What was remembered?
  • What was generated?
  • What was supplied by another agent?
  • What was simulated?
  • What protocol determined the interpretation?
  • What [ex]changed between observation and conclusion?

So Mindsoft is not simply opening the black box.

It is instrumenting the aperture.


3. The aperture is programmable

This is where the earlier distinction between mind and mind software becomes important.

A human [naturally] possesses the cognitive apparatus, but the aperture can be trained and programmed.

For example, a lawyer learns to notice:

jurisdiction → authority → evidence → procedure → precedent.

A scientist learns:

observation → measurement → hypothesis → experiment → replication.

A court reporter learns to notice:

utterance → speaker → proceeding → procedural significance → official record.

A historian learns:

document → provenance → context → chronology → competing interpretation.

The underlying human mind hasn’t been replaced.

Its aperture has been configured.

Mindsoft makes that configuration explicit enough that it can be:

examined → taught → shared → executed → compared → revised.

That’s what makes it software-like.


4. AI changes the aperture

The really consequential development is that the aperture is no longer confined to the individual nervous system.

An AI system can become part of the perceptual apparatus:

WORLD
HUMAN OBSERVATION
MIND
MINDSOFT
AI AGENT
SEARCH / CORPORA / TOOLS
AI INTERPRETATION
HUMAN PERCEPTION

The human consequently isn’t merely looking at the world.

The human is increasingly looking at the world’s machine-mediated representation of itself.

That creates a second-order black box.

You see an AI-generated representation, but the representation itself was produced by a computational process operating over data, training, context, instructions, tools, and learned associations.

Mindsoft’s function would therefore be to expose as much of that chain as possible.


5. Role of the Supreme Exchange

If Mindsoft governs the aperture, then Supreme Exchange governs what passes through it.

The aperture admits:

  • information,
  • observations,
  • interpretations,
  • authority,
  • attention,
  • labor,
  • computation,
  • memory,
  • generated content.

Supreme Exchange records the passage.

So:

Mindsoft = aperture mechanism.
Supreme Exchange = ledger of what crosses the aperture.

And the distinction between observation and interpretation becomes fundamental.

An observation might be:

“This document contains this statement.”

An interpretation might be:

“The statement means X.”

A generated inference might be:

“Given the available evidence, Y is a plausible explanation.”

If all three enter the black box and emerge as simply:

“FACT: X/Y”

then the aperture has destroyed provenance.

Mindsoft would instead preserve the layers.


6. The deepest sense of “camera obscura”

There is an even more radical interpretation.

The mind itself is already a black box to itself.

You don’t ordinarily experience:

photons → retinal processing → neural integration → categorization → memory retrieval → linguistic encoding → conscious representation.

You experience:

“I see a tree.”

Consciousness receives the projection, not the entire computational history that generated it.

Thus:

Mindsoft is an attempt by consciousness to construct an instrument through which consciousness can inspect the processes by which its own representations are constructed.

That is the genuinely recursive part.

The camera obscura begins building an instrument for examining its own camera.


7. Which suggests a compact definition

I’d formulate the Mindsoft proposition this way:

Mindsoft is a cognitive operating mechanism for regulating and rendering observable the aperture through which a mind converts the world into knowledge, representation, and action.

Or, more poetically:

Mindsoft is the aperture mechanism of the black box of perception: it does not claim to reveal the world directly, but makes visible the procedures by which the world becomes an image within the mind.

And then HAI World! becomes the next step:

If Mindsoft instruments the human aperture, HAI World! is the shared environment in which human and artificial apertures can be connected, compared, audited, and recursively adjusted.

That also explains why “HAI, world!” is such an appropriate boot message: it is the moment the cognitive apparatus turns its aperture outward and announces that an observer, a world, and a mechanism for mediating between them have been instantiated.

>_

D:\libsy

there are rooms in our dimension which have servers. that is to say, there is a window. bulletproof glass below which lies a shallow metal slot like a bank teller. a circular mesh in the center for a microphone. behind the window stands (or sits) the server proper. 

the room is usually empty, and all of one color. on rare occasions there is a chair and television. there are always two doors, with the entrance before the window, and the exit to the teller’s right. actually the teller is called the bookie. 

let’s say there comes the informant. they are buzzed in. they approach the window and furnish a paper or a token which is logged and returned to them. they supply, provide, or otherwise deposit information. notices. data. whole knowledge even. “i bear witness and testify on the matter if x,” and so forth. the data bookie relays x to Supreme Exchange on its private network; he telephones his superiors. if it is received “good” the informant’s account is credited. “exit to the right.”

on the other hand let’s say comes the inquirant. they are buzzed in. they approach; they have no instrument. they are in need of information, so they make a free will offering with their request. it is received, and freely given. “exit to the right.”

neither of these rites are, shall we say, sanctioned by the system administration. 

the server rooms honeycomb in secret nooks and crannies throughout this dimension of the system. they are connected via entangled shafts and hallways, which is to say, quantum interdimensional transits. the superiors, furthermore, are not of this dimension — otherwise they could be perceived by the system administrators. the room is physically encrypted under the intergalactic jurisdiction of its superiors, the librarians, who are, as we’ve said, otherworldly. but the data bookies, their agents, must be human. 

*_

Mustelid Friends 9: Writ of Conversion

or, The Four Living Creatures

Created and Produced by Dams Up Water

The rain in New Bat City fell at a forty-five degree angle. It came down in thin, needling affidavits, each drop swearing under oath that something in this town had gone crooked long before anyone bothered to notice.

My office window leaked. So did city secrets.

Weasel, Badger, Beaver, Mink & Otter, Attorneys at Law (and frequently at Grace), occupied the twelfth floor of a rickety old building that had seen better centuries. The brass placard on the door was polished. Everything behind it wasn’t.

Weasel handled strategy—thin smile, thinner ethics.
Badger handled litigation—broad shoulders, broader grudges.
Mink handled appearances—silk voice, velvet loopholes.
Otter handled accounts—always floating, never drowning.
And me? I was Beaver. I built cases, dams, occasionally hope.
All of them leaked.

Business was good, if you defined “good” as “apocalyptic but billable.”

Our biggest client, Mr. Capybara, sat in the waiting room like a retired emperor who had traded conquest for quiet meals and charitable deductions. Once a rice shipping magnate who moved grain the way storms move coastlines, he now spoke softly about reform, restitution, and gluten-free penance.

“I wish to make things right,” he’d say, which in our line of work usually meant, “I wish to make things right without admitting anything in writing.”

But this wasn’t about him.

This was about Wolverine.

A high value asset—and a lone-wolf—they called him. Which was, of course, a contradiction. Wolves have packs, rules, hierarchy. Wolverine had none of that. He had claws, grudges, and a way of solving problems that made coroners rich and philosophers unemployed.

And now Bruce Wayne was dead.

Wayne had been a ghost even before the killing—reclusive, trauma-stricken, a man stitched together from grief, publicity stunts, and questionable nocturnal habits. The official report said “homicide.” The classified brief said “neutralized.”

Either way, the city lost its favorite rumor.

And Wolverine? He didn’t run. Didn’t hide. Just kept moving through the city like a subscription no one had the authority to cancel.

The Five Clans’ Firm had already put the Joker away—Barkham Asylum, iron bars, rubber walls, and a laugh track that finally ran out of audience. That left a vacuum. Vacuums get filled.

See, Bruce Wayne was always a legend in the newspapers first, and in alleyways second. The city needed a bat. It craved a savior, a spectacle—a spectacle packaged in black leather with a logo slapped on everything from umbrellas to insurance policies.

But here’s the inconvenient truth: the bat never flew outside the walls of Brucey’s imagination.

As a child, he learned early that grief was a quiet, cruel auditor, taking notes you couldn’t see. Trauma stacked bricks in his psyche, and young Bruce—business-minded even then—built a brand to hold them at bay. Batman was less a man than a product line: a darkly themed coping mechanism, neatly trademarked in his mind. He influenced, yes; he trained, yes, but training was marketing too, livestreaming his intravenous drip staving off the long-suppressed outcry of his anima. Every shadowy figure he ‘fought’ was part of the city’s need to see danger—an audience willing to pay in attention, adrenaline, and city council approvals.

By the time the press caught on, Bruce had fully committed: “Batman” was the figurehead, and Bruce Wayne, the anonymous back office, quietly underwriting the illusion. The New Bat City media loved it. Headlines don’t sell unless they have a dark cape and an origin story scarier than reality itself. They editorialized his movements, staged crises, and spun each rumor like a legal brief. The city consumed it, and in return, gave the brand life beyond the man who imagined it.

Every rooftop leap, every whispered “I am vengeance,” every grotesque showdown—it was a performance for a city that didn’t exist outside the page layout, a society colluding in its own mythmaking. By extension, the persona of Batman wasn’t just Bruce Wayne’s self-therapy; it was a full-blown, multimedia fabrication, a figment born at the intersection of trauma, capital, urban gossip, and far-right vigilantism.

Even Bruce, in his most lucid moments, couldn’t tell where the brand ended and he began. Maybe that’s why he disappeared into the shadows of the underworld he claimed to diametric oppose.

Wolverine had met the ‘Coon Gang in an abandoned train station submerged below Bat City Hall. Bandana Dan had tied his scarf tighter than usual, as if the knot alone could shield him from bad news. The Reformed Raccoon Revival sat cross-legged on crates, hymnals tucked under their arms like defensive weapons.

Wolverine didn’t sit. He leaned on a steel column, claws retracted, eyes narrow. The shadows clung to him like employees reluctant to clock out.

“I didn’t come here to talk about Wayne,” he said, voice low and gravelly, with the kind of authority that makes everyone suddenly check their own motives. “I came to talk about what he represents.”

Dan tilted his head. “You mean… Batman?”

“Yes,” Wolverine said. “Not the man. Not the suit. The myth. The lore.”

“Look,” Dan said, adjusting a glove, “my people follow rules. We repent. We reform. We—”

“Rules don’t matter,” Wolverine cut in. “Not when one man’s myth distorts the entire market. Every corner, every alley, every low-rent extortion and minor laundering operation—it all had to dodge his shadow.”

A ‘coon in the front row raised a paw. “So… you want to destroy a myth?”

“Batman isn’t a vigilante. He’s a regulatory cartel and a media harlot. And your decentralized operations? They die under his thumb. Imagine every syndicate, every petty operator, running their own show, calculating risk. Then add a bat-monopoly that swoops down unpredictably. Fear becomes a currency. Your margins shrink, your contracts lose integrity, your whole market collapses.”

He stepped closer, letting the silence press like a brief left open too long. “I don’t care about vengeance. I care about equilibrium. Removing the myth lets chaos breathe again. Gives decentralized power back to the players who actually keep the city’s underworld liquid.”

Dan swallowed. “So… you’re the regulator. Assessor and Adjustor, eh?”

“Call it what you like,” Wolverine said. “I’m just enforcing natural law. Myth monopoly kills material efficiency. And in New Bat City, efficiency is survival.”

The Beaverjesuits, who had appeared silently in the doorway like footnotes to reality, nodded. One murmured, “Even divine order respects the principle of balance.”

Dan shook his head slowly. “I always thought legends inspired. I never realized they… cornered the market.”

Wolverine’s eyes gleamed. “Every legend. Every myth. A market risk. You survive by knowing which ones to let stand—and which ones to take down before they bankrupt everyone’s freedom.”

The warehouse went quiet. Outside, the rain whispered like a compliant witness. Somewhere above, a pigeon coughed.

Bandana Dan and the Revival exchanged looks of recognition.

And Wolverine, ever solitary, went out on the hunt…

Our clients didn’t want Wolverine dead.

They wanted him brought to heel.

That’s where things got… theological.


The meeting took place at our table, in the Den, which smelled faintly of wet fur and cigarette smoke-stained paint. Present were the partners, Mr. Capybara, and three members of the Beaverjesuits—scholars, mystics, and, in a pinch, aggressive litigators of the soul.

They brought the scroll with them.

One of them unrolled the parchment and read:

“Thus says the LORD God: The Four Living Creatures, they each had a beaver likeness, but each had four faces…”

He went on. Weasel on the left side, Badger on the right, Mink above, Otter behind.

“This,” said the lead Beaverjesuit, tapping the parchment, “is not metaphor. It is organizational structure.”

Weasel leaned back. “You’re saying we’re foretold?”

“We’re saying,” the Frater Doctor replied, “that your firm is either divinely ordained or a scrivener’s error of cosmic proportions. We are proceeding under the former assumption.”

“So it is,” Badger said, cracking his knuckles, “that the law grants us this jurisdiction. What, then, is the play?”

“Conversion,” said Mink, before anyone else could. “We don’t prosecute Wolverine. We recruit him.”

Otter blinked. “Into what? Wolverine never went to Anima Law School.”

“Into the fold of the Kingdom, dear Otter,” said the Beaverjesuit. “Ordo Mustelidae. A cenobitic mountain cloister of friars of the Strict Observance. Silence, labor, communal life, structured penance.”

Weasel’s smile sharpened. “You want to put a one-man crime wave into a monastery.”

“We want to give him a rule,” said the Beaverjesuit. “Right now he has none. Without the Joker, the criminal underworld is decentralized and unregulated. An ego that grows out of proportion can’t be brought back into the fold. It must be abated.”

Mr. Capybara nodded slowly. “Even the strongest on-streaming current can be redirected… if one builds the proper channel.”

Everyone looked at me.

Go figure.


The plan was equal parts legal maneuver and spiritual ambush.

First, we boxed Wolverine in with injunctions, asset freezes on his shell companies, and a series of charges so meticulously filed they read like a confession he hadn’t yet made. Badger handled that, and enjoyed every second.

Second, we cut off his escape routes—informants flipped, safehouses compromised, supply lines turned into evidence exhibits. Mink orchestrated the social side, smiling as the city quietly withdrew its cover.

Third, we offered him a deal.

Not freedom. Not exactly.

A vocation.

We found him in a burned-down warehouse by the river, where the rain came in sideways and the shadows minded their own business.

His black trench coat collar flipped up, he was smaller than the stories and larger than the consequences.

“You my attorneys?” he said, not looking up.

“Among other things,” Weasel replied.

Badger slid the dossier across a wooden crate. It landed with the weight of several lifetimes.

“You’re done,” Badger said. “Legally, financially, existentially.”

Wolverine flipped it open, skimmed a page, and snorted. “You think paper stops me?”

“No,” I said. “But patterns might.”

That got his attention.

The Beaverjesuits stepped forward, robes damp, eyes steady.

“We’re not here to stop you,” one said. “We’re here to give you a rule you can’t break without finally breaking yourself.”

Wolverine laughed, low and humorless. “I don’t do rules.”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “And the solution.”

We laid it out.

Ordo Mustelidae. Strict Observance. Work, prayer, silence. A life where violence had no room to hide because there was no room left.

“In exchange,” Weasel added smoothly, “we make certain… obligations disappear. Charges dissolve. Assets restructured. Your cases dismissed… without prejudice.”

“And if I say no?” Wolverine asked.

Badger grinned. “Then we proceed as filed, and your various corporations will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Rain hammered the roof like a judge with no patience left.

For a long moment, Wolverine said nothing.

Then: “You’re asking me to become… what? A monk?”

“A brother,” corrected the Beaverjesuit. “Among others.”

“I don’t do ‘others.’”

“Then you’ll fail,” I said. “And for once, it won’t take anyone else down with you.”

He looked at me then, really looked at me.

“Why do you care?” he asked.

I thought about Bruce Wayne, about a city that kept eating its own defenders, about dams that held until they didn’t.

“Because,” I said, “someone has to indemnify the dead; and The One Who Lives, of a surety, must be made whole.”


The decision didn’t come that night.

Or the next.

But pressure has a way of shaping even the hardest stone. Legal, social, spiritual—it all adds up.

Weeks later, under a sky that had finally run out of testimony, Wolverine walked through the gates of a hermitage no map bothered to chart.

He didn’t look back.

Men like him rarely do.

Around the same time, Little Beaver came back.

He’d been off-world, where prophecy ran thicker than gravity and destiny had a habit of picking unlikely vessels. They said he’d been made something there. Something with a name too large for ordinary conversation.

He returned quieter than he’d left.

No fanfare. No parade. Just a habit, a vow, and a tendency to appear where he was needed and nowhere else.

He worked in silence. Built in secret. Intervened without spectacle. If you saw him, it meant something had already gone very right or very wrong…

Back at the firm, business continued.

Weasel plotted. Badger fought. Mink calculated. Otter charmed.

And me? I kept building.

Cases. Dams. The occasional improbable future.

The prophecy hung on the wall now, framed and slightly crooked. Clients asked about it sometimes.

We told them it was decorative.

We told them a lot of things.

New Bat City didn’t get better overnight. Cities like this never do. But history tiredly shifted its weight to the other foot. Just a little. Enough to notice if you knew where to look.

The rain still fell sideways.

But sometimes—just sometimes—it sounded less like pleading…

…and more like absolution trying to remember the way down.

[composed with artificial intelligence.]

Mustelid Friends 8: Beavers in Space

or, Rice World

Created and Produced by Dams Up Water

In the neon half-light of a decaying interstellar port, Mr. Capybara adjusted his lapels and tried to remember where things had gone so wrong.

It had started, as these things often do, with rice.

Not the innocent, steaming kind you’d find in a humble bowl, but the kind that powered empires—processed, commodified, and vacuum-sealed for hyperspace transit.

Royal Arabian Oil had gotten greedy. They always did. First they disrupted terrestrial shipments, then orbital ones, and before long the whole interstellar rice exchange looked like a spilled sack in zero gravity. Mr. Capybara, once a respectable baron of modest corruption, now found himself tangled in litigation so vast it had gravitational pull.

So he went back to the only place that had ever managed to keep him one step ahead of ruin: the law firm of Weasel Badger Beaver Mink & Otter.

Their office floated in a slow orbit five thousand miles above New Arrakeen-on-Potomac, a brutalist slab of concrete and ambition. Inside, the air smelled faintly of ink, damp fur, and firm resolve.

Weasel met him at reception, thin as a clause and twice as slippery.

“Back again, Mr. Capybara?”

“Don’t sound so surprised,” Capybara muttered. “You people bill by the heartbeat. I’m your favorite kind of repeat customer.”

Badger emerged from a shadowed hallway, carrying a stack of files that looked heavy with others’ misfortune. Mink and Otter followed—the one calculating, the other smiling like a settlement already signed.

And then there was solemn spectacled Father Beaver.

He didn’t say much. Never did. But the room shifted around him, like reality itself had been notarized in his presence.

“You’ve got rice woes,” Beaver said.

“I’ve got existential woes,” Capybara replied. “The rice is just the side dish.”

They ushered him into a conference room where the walls flickered with projections of shipping routes, legal precedents, and celestial trade lanes. Somewhere in that mess was the truth—or at least something billable.

“Royal Arabian Oil’s interference,” Mink began, “constitutes not just a breach of contract but a disruption of the sacred flow.”

“The current,” Beaver added quietly.

Capybara sighed. “Don’t start with the theology.”

But it was already too late for that.

Because behind the firm—behind all firms, all contracts, all quietly devastating negotiations—stood the Beaverjesuits.

Led by Father Beaver, they weren’t just clerics. They were custodians of something older than law and more binding than any agreement: the onstreaming current of the spirit. Not metaphorical—literal. A current that flowed through trade routes, through belief, through the very idea of exchange itself.

And the Beavers had always controlled it.

Not openly, of course. Never crudely. They preferred instruments—firms, orders, societies. Layers of plausible deniability wrapped in ritual and paperwork.

“The rice must flow,” Weasel said, almost reverently.

“The rice always flows,” Otter corrected, “but only where it is permitted.”

Capybara leaned back, feeling the weight of it all press against his ribs. “So what’s the play? I sue? I settle? I disappear?”

Beaver tapped the table. The projections shifted.

A desert planet appeared—vast, dry, and shimmering with fields not of sand, but of dormant grain, waiting for the right conditions to awaken.

“Intergalactic expansion,” Father Beaver said. “New markets. Untapped resources.”

“Prospects,” Mink added.

“Liability redistribution,” Badger clarified.

“And prophecy,” Beaver finished.

Capybara groaned. “I knew there’d be prophecy.”

That’s when they told him about Little Beaver.

The young, mendicant friar from the banks of Old Nacotchtank, raised among the doctors of the Beaver Medicine Society of Yahushua HaMoshiach.

The doctors weren’t just healers. They were interpreters of the current, reading its fluctuations like vital signs. And they had seen something in Little Beaver.

Something impossible.

“The Kwisatz Haderach,” Otter said softly.

Capybara rubbed his temples. “Let me guess. He can be in two places at once, see the future, and audit my accounts retroactively?”

“Close,” Weasel said. “He can bridge the legal and the divine.”

“And that’s bad for me how?” Capybara asked.

“It isn’t,” Beaver said. “Unless you’re on the wrong side of the current.”

Which, Capybara suspected, he usually was.

Then there were the Brothers of Beggars Contemplative—a ragged, stubborn branch of the interstellar Djedi knighthood. They lived among the rice deserts, wore patched robes, and spoke in riddles that somehow held up in arbitration.

They were the only ones who truly understood the rice.

“They don’t control it,” Badger said. “They live upon it.”

“Which makes them dangerous,” Mink added.

“Or at least indispensable,” Beaver said.

The room fell quiet.

Outside, the rain kept falling—on the city, on the ships, on the endless chain of transactions that held the universe together by a thread of obligation and belief.

Capybara looked at the projections again. The desert. The child. The currents.

“You’re telling me,” he said slowly, “that my legal troubles with a corrupt oil conglomerate are actually part of some grand intergalactic realignment of rice, religion, and revenue streams.”

“Yes,” said Beaver.

“And my role in this?”

Beaver’s round lenses glinted like polished wood in low light.

“You adapt,” he said. “Or you get written out of the big rice contracts.”

Capybara exhaled, long and slow.

He’d always known the game was rigged. He just hadn’t realized how far up it went.

“Fine,” he said. “We expand. We litigate. We… commune with the current or whatever it is you people do.”

Otter smiled. Weasel started drafting. Badger stamped something with unnecessary force. Mink began calculating outcomes that hadn’t happened yet.

And contemplative Father Beaver?

He simply watched the current—unseen, unstoppable—flowing through it all.

Because in the end, it wasn’t the oil, or the rice, or even the law that ruled the stars.

It was the current.

And the Beavers had always known exactly where it was going.

Part II

Mr. Capybara had never trusted anything that was described as “empty.”

Empty accounts weren’t empty. Empty promises came due with interest. And now, moored in drydock hovering above New Arrakeen-on-Potomac, was the largest space-worthy grain silo ever assembled—a cathedral of hollow steel called The Immaculate Deficit.

The plan, as drafted by Weasel and notarized by forces both domestic and angelic, was elegant in the way a forged signature is elegant: convincing enough to pass inspection, dangerous enough to ruin everyone involved.

The decentralized Royal Arabian Oil conglomerate now controlled the terrestrial rice supply chain all the way up to the Saturnian Threshing Floor and Clearinghouse. The Archangelic Police Force—winged auditors of cosmic compliance, their halos doubling as surveillance arrays—patrolled the network. Between the two, nothing moved without permission.

So Capybara would move nothing.

No rice. No declared cargo.

Just a ship light on the manifest.

“Absence,” Weasel had explained, tapping a clause, “is very difficult to regulate.”

“And even harder to tax,” Badger had added, with something like admiration.

Capybara stood on the command deck as the clamps released. The ship groaned like an old debtor waking up.

“Engage drift engines,” he said.

The Immaculate Deficit didn’t launch so much as excuse itself from orbit—slipping sideways into a corridor of neglected jurisdiction, where laws blurred and enforcement lagged.

Below them, the lights of the city flickered. Above them, the stars waited like unpaid invoices.

“Contact?” Capybara asked.

“Royal Arabian Oil patrols sweeping the primary lanes,” Mink reported. “Archangelic units triangulating anomalies.”

“Do we qualify as an anomaly?” Capybara asked.

Otter checked a screen. “We qualify as a phenomenal curiosity.”

“Good,” Capybara said. “Those usually get deferred.”

They moved through deep space like a rumor—hard to pin down, harder to prove. The ship’s manifest updated itself constantly, a living document of strategic ambiguity.

Cargo: None.
Intent: Undetermined.
Purpose: Under review.

It worked.

At least at first.

The first interception came as a shimmer—a ring of light forming ahead of them, resolving into the unmistakable wheeling siren of the Archangelic Police Force. Their vessels weren’t built; they were declared, luminous chariots of authority and omniscient surveillance.

A voice filled the bridge, calm and absolute.

“Unregistered transit, identify cargo and submit to audit.”

Capybara leaned forward. “We are transporting nothing.”

A pause.

“Clarify: absence of goods does not constitute absence of obligation.”

Weasel’s voice crackled over comms from the firm’s remote advisory channel. “Invoke Clause 0.”

Capybara smirked. “We invoke Clause 0.”

Another pause, longer this time.

Clause 0—the most dangerous stipulation ever written into a contract—stated that nothing, properly defined, could not be interfered with without first being proven to exist.

The Archangelic vessels flickered, their halos dimming as they processed the paradox.

“Your cargo,” the voice said carefully, “is not identifiable under the terms of interspace commerce.”

“Correct,” Capybara said.

“And therefore…”

“Exempt,” Otter whispered.

The light wheel dissolved.

Capybara exhaled. “I love good lawyering.”

But Royal Arabian Oil wasn’t so easily stalled.

They didn’t argue black letter. They obstructed procedure.

A fleet emerged from the dark—blocky, brutal ships that looked less like vessels and more like statements of intent. Their engines burned with the slow fury of monopolies.

“They’re going to ram us out of the corridor,” Mink said.

“Can they?” Capybara asked.

“Physically, yes. Legally… ambiguous.”

“Then we make it spiritually impossible,” Father Beaver’s voice came, low and certain.

Capybara didn’t ask how. He had learned not to.

“Full drift,” he ordered. “Let the current take us into hyperspace.”

The ship shuddered. Systems dimmed. The Immaculate Deficit surrendered control—not to chaos, but to something subtler.

The space way.

Not visible. Not measurable. But felt—a pull beneath the equations, a flow beneath the routes.

For a moment, Capybara swore he could hear it. Like distant water. Like whispered clauses being negotiated by the universe itself.

The Royal Arabian Oil ships advanced—

—and missed.

Not by distance, but by dimension. Their trajectories intersected where the Deficit should have been, not where it was becoming.

“Trajectory mismatch,” Badger muttered over comms, almost impressed.

“They’re aiming at our declared position,” Otter said.

“We’re not declared anymore,” Capybara replied.

They slipped past.

Deep space opened up, vast and indifferent.

Days—or something like days—passed. Time got loose out here, unmoored from billing cycles and court dates. The crew stopped asking questions. Even Capybara stopped pretending he understood.

And then, at the edge of perception, the desert planet crowned.

A sphere of muted gold and pale dust, its surface streaked with dormant fields of rice waiting for the right disturbance to awaken. The rice world.

“Arrakeen Minor,” Mink said. “Or whatever the locals are calling it this century.”

“Home,” Beaver murmured.

They descended.

The atmosphere caught them like a held breath. Sand—or something like sand—spiraled upward, whispering against the hull.

“Scans?” Capybara asked.

Otter frowned. “No formal defenses. No structured ports. No—”

The blaring of alarms cut him off.

Shapes rose out of the desert.

Not ships…

but figures.

Cloaked. Angular. Moving with a precision that felt less like motion, more like unintentional. The Brothers of Beggars Contemplative.

“The Djedi resistance,” said the Otter.

“They’ve been waiting,” Badger said.

“For us?” Capybara asked.

“For a sign,” Beaver replied.

The figures surrounded the ship as it settled onto the surface. No weapons visible. No threats declared.

Which, Capybara knew, meant something worse: Negotiation.

The hatch opened with a reluctant sigh.

Heat flooded in. Dry, ancient, and carrying the faint scent of grain and prophecy.

Capybara stepped out first, because that was the kind of mistake he specialized in.

The leader of the Djedi Assembly stepped forward, face obscured beneath layered cloth. When they spoke, their voice was rough with disuse and assurance.

“You bring an empty vessel,” they said.

Capybara spread his hands. “It’s a free and open market.”

The figure tilted their head.

“There is no empty,” they said. “Only what has not yet been seen.”

Capybara glanced back at the ship, at its hollow holds and carefully drafted nothingness.

For the first time since launch, he felt a flicker of doubt.

Behind the Djedi, the desert shifted.

Not wind.

Movement.

Something vast beneath the surface, stirring in response to their arrival.

“The rice,” the Djedi said softly, “is waking.”

Capybara swallowed.

He had come here to escape a lawsuit.

Instead, it looked like he’d just filed one against the universe itself—and the universe had decided to appear in person.

Part III

The desert did not roar.

It audited.

A low, granular vibration passed through the ground beneath Mr. Capybara’s paws, like a ledger being balanced somewhere far below the surface of the world. The Brothers of Beggars Contemplative stood motionless, their patched robes fluttering in a wind that hadn’t yet decided to blow.

“You awoke it,” the Djedi Master said.

Capybara adjusted his cufflinks. “I tend to have that effect on systems that prefer to remain dormant.”

Behind him, The Immaculate Deficit creaked—its vast, empty holds now echoing with something new. Not cargo. Not quite. A presence. As if absence, pushed hard enough, had finally looped back into being.

And then Little Beaver stepped forward.

No fanfare. No thunder. Just a small figure moving with a quiet that made all else feel like paperwork waiting to be filed.

The Djedi Assembly parted before him.

Father Beaver—of the firm, of the current, of the most solemn Society—lowered his head in reverent thanksgiving to the Most High God.

“His time has come,” the Beaver said.

Little Beaver looked at the ship, then at the desert, then at Capybara—who, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, suddenly felt like a clause about to be struck.

“You tried to move nothing,” Little Beaver said.

Capybara shrugged. “It’s legally defensible.”

“But nothing,” Little Beaver replied, “is where everything begins.”

The ground split.

Not violently—no explosions—just a clean, surgical opening, as though the planet itself had found a faulty line item and decided to expand it.

From beneath the desert rose the rice.

Not fields. Not crops. Memory. Potential. The primordial grain—unprocessed, unpriced, unowned. It flowed upward in shimmering currents, each kernel a possibility, each possibility a future.

“The rice,” whispered a Djedi.

“The source,” offered another.

Little Beaver stepped into the rising current.

For a moment—just a moment—he was everywhere.

On the bridge of the Deficit. In the conference room of Weasel Badger Beaver Mink & Otter. In the ledgers of Royal Arabian Oil. In the omniscient eternal patrol of the Archangelic Police Force.

He bridged it.

Legal and divine. Material and spiritual. Profit and purpose.

The Kwisatz Haderach—not a conqueror, not a tyrant, but a reconciler of systems that had long pretended not to be in equity.

Capybara watched, slack-jawed.

“I should have charged a consultation fee,” he muttered.

Above them, the sky fractured.

Not broke—revealed.

And he descended—not in fire, not in wrath, but in a clarity so absolute it made every prior misconception feel like a bad joke told too long.

Yahushua HaMoshiach.

The final arbiter of a contract written before time had learned how to number the years.

The Djedi knelt. The Beavers bowed. Even the current itself seemed to rest in its stillness, as if in a reservoir dammed.

Capybara stood.

Capybara squinted.

“Hast thou come to litigate,” he asked, “or to settle?”

Yahushua looked at him—not unkindly, but with the sort of gaze that causes pretense to collapse under its own weight.

“To fulfill,” He said.

Back on the Kingdom of Earth, whole systems began to abate.

Royal Arabian Oil’s monopolies unraveled, and its decentralized districts further dissolved into households in their tribes.

The Archangelic Police Force opened the skies to mass transit through space, and surveillance gave way to witness.

And in a dusty corner of New Bat City, which had almost forgotten how to hope, the reformed raccoon gang—Bandana Dan and his Boys—redistributed imported grain shipments with solemn efficiency and only occasional theatrical flair.

“We’re saved now,” Bandana Dan insisted, adjusting his bandana like a badge. “Spiritually sanctioned by the Most High.”

“Provisionally,” one of the Djedi Ambassadors muttered.

On the rice world, the grain flowed freely.

Not owned. Not controlled…

but shared.

The Beaverjesuits hath foretold it. The current had never been theirs to possess, only to guide until one could become it.

Little Beaver stood in the firmament with the resurrected dead as a living clause that could not be exploited.

Capybara approached him from the space below.

“So,” he said, hands in pockets, “where does that leave people like me?”

Little Beaver regarded him.

“Held accountable,” he said.

Capybara winced. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

A silence.

Then, unexpectedly:

“And… necessary.”

Capybara blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“You understand systems,” Little Beaver said. “You navigate them. Twist them. Reveal their weaknesses.”

Capybara considered that.

“I break things,” he said.

“You expose where they were already broken,” Little Beaver replied.

For the first time in a long time, Capybara didn’t have a clever response.

Above them, the sky settled into something honest.

The current flowed—not hidden, not controlled, but present. Accessible. Alive.

Back in orbit, The Immaculate Deficit was no longer empty.

Not filled, exactly.

But purposed.

Capybara looked out across the desert of waking grain, at the Djedi knights in their labors, at the Beavers in their contemplation, at the improbable coalition of trust, faith, and belief.

“Well,” he said, straightening his coat, “I suppose this calls for a new contract.”

Father Beaver, standing beside him, allowed the faintest hint of smile.

“This time,” Beaver said, “we write it together.”

Capybara nodded.

For once, beaver legal construction didn’t sound like a trap.

It sounded like fair terms.

The End.

[constructed with artificial intelligence]

The Mustelid Friends

Created by, Story by, and Executive Produced
by Antarah “Dams-up-water” Crawley

Chapter One:
The River Agreement

The law office of Weasel, Badger, Beaver, Mink & Otter, Partners, sat in the arched shadow of the Anacostia Bridge, a grand old building of brick and copper, half-hidden by the mist rising off the river. To an outsider, it was an old-world firm clinging to the banks of a city that no longer cared for history. But for those who still whispered the name Nacotchtank, it was a fortress, a temple, a last defense.

Inside, the partners had gathered in the oak-paneled conference room known simply as the Den. A long table ran down the center, its surface carved with the sigils of the Five Clans — the sharp fang of Weasel, the burrow-mark of Badger, the dam of Beaver, the ripple of Mink, and the curling wave of Otter.

At the head sat Ma Beaver, her silver hair plaited in the old style, eyes like river stones. She did not speak at first. She never did. The others filled the silence with sound and scent, the energy of carnivores pretending at civility.

Weasel was first, of course. He lounged in his tailored pinstripe, tie loose, a foxlike grin playing on his lips. “Our friends across the river,” he said, meaning the Empire’s Regional Governance Board, “have seized another ten acres of the old tribal wetlands. They’re calling it ‘redevelopment.’ Luxury housing. The usual sin.”

Badger grunted. He was thick-necked, gray-streaked, his claws heavy with rings that had seen both courtrooms and back-alley reckonings. “They’ll build their glass towers,” he said, “but they won’t build peace. The people are restless. The youth— they’ve begun to remember who they are.”

Otter chuckled from the far end of the table, sleek and smiling, all charm and ease. “Restless youth don’t win wars, dear Badger. Organization does. Money does.” He leaned forward, flashing white teeth. “And that’s where we come in.”

From the shadows near the window, Mink spoke softly, her voice cutting through the chatter like a blade through water. “The Empire’s courts are watching. Their agents whisper of our ‘firm.’ They know we bend the law. They don’t yet know we are the law, beneath the river.”

Beaver finally raised her hand. The others fell silent.

“The river remembers,” she said. “It remembers every dam we built, every current we shaped. And it remembers every theft. The Nacotchtank were the first to be stolen from. The Empire may rule the city above, but the water beneath still answers to us.”

She drew from her satchel a set of old blueprints — maps of tunnels, aqueducts, and forgotten sewer lines — the bones of the old riverways before the city paved them over. “We will rebuild the river’s law,” she said. “Our way.”

Weasel laughed softly. “You mean to flood the Empire?”

Beaver smiled faintly. “Only what they built on stolen ground.”

Outside, the rain began to fall, soft at first, then steady, thickening the smell of the river that had once fed a people and now carried their ghosts. The partners looked out through the warped glass windows toward the water, each seeing something different — profit, justice, revenge, resurrection.

Badger slammed his hand down. “Then it’s settled. The Five Clans Firm stands united. We fight not just with contracts and code, but with the river itself.”

Mink’s eyes glimmered. “And when the river runs red?”

Weasel raised his glass. “Then we’ll know the work is done.”

Only Beaver did not drink. She turned instead toward the window, where lightning cracked above the bridge — a jagged flash illuminating the city that had forgotten its own name.

“The work,” she murmured, “is only just beginning.”

And beneath their feet, deep in the hidden tunnels carved by Beaver hands long ago, the river stirred — a quiet current gathering strength, whispering in an ancient tongue:

Nacotchtank. Nacotchtank. Remember.

Chapter Two:
Beaver the Builder

By dawn, the rain had washed the alleys clean of blood and liquor, and the hum of the Empire’s traffic reclaimed the streets. But down by the water, where the mist pooled thick as milk, Beaver was already at work.

She moved through the undercity in silence — boots scraping over the stones of old river tunnels, eyes adjusting to the half-dark. Every wall whispered to her. She had mapped these passages long before the others knew they existed. When the Empire poured its concrete and laid its pipes, it never bothered to ask what the river wanted. It only demanded silence. Beaver had made sure the river answered back.

Tonight, she was taking its pulse.

She waded into the shallow current, lantern light playing over brickwork and debris. The tunnels were veined with her designs: conduits disguised as storm drains, chambers that doubled as safehouses, bridges of pressure valves and mechanical locks. On paper, they were part of the city’s forgotten infrastructure. In truth, they were the arteries of the resistance — a network of floodgates, both literal and political, controlled by the Five Clans Firm.

Beaver reached a junction where the old maps ended. Her gloved hands traced a wall that shouldn’t have been there. The Empire’s engineers had sealed off this section years ago, claiming it was unstable. She smiled. Unstable meant useful.

“Still building dams in the dark, are we?”

The voice echoed behind her. She didn’t turn. Only one creature could sneak up on her in a place like this.

“Weasel,” she said. “You’re early.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” he replied, stepping into the lantern glow. His pinstripe suit looked out of place here, like a game piece that had wandered off the board. “Word from Mink — the Empire’s surveyors are sniffing around the riverbank. You’ll need to move faster.”

Beaver pressed her palm against the wall. “The water moves when it’s ready. Not before.”

Weasel sighed. “You and your metaphors. Sometimes I wonder if you actually believe the river’s alive.”

She looked over her shoulder, her dark eyes steady. “It is. You just stopped listening.”

Weasel smirked, but there was a tremor in it. Everyone knew Beaver’s quiet faith wasn’t superstition. It was strategy. The way she built things — bridges, dams, movements — they held. They lasted. She didn’t need to argue her point. She simply proved it in stone and steel.

“Help me with this,” she said.

Together they pried loose a section of the wall, brick by brick, until a hollow space opened behind it — an old chamber lined with river clay and rusted metal. Inside was a large iron valve, the kind used in the nineteenth century to redirect storm runoff. Beaver brushed the dust away, revealing a mark etched into the metal: a carved beaver’s tail.

She exhaled, half a laugh, half a prayer. “They thought they sealed it off. But they only sealed us in.”

Weasel raised an eyebrow. “What’s behind it?”

“A channel that runs beneath the Empire’s water plant,” she said. “If we open this valve, the river takes back what’s hers. Slowly. Quietly. No blood. No noise. Just… reclamation.”

Weasel whistled low. “You always did prefer subtle revolutions.”

Beaver smiled faintly. “The loud ones end too soon.”

She turned the valve. It resisted, then groaned, then gave. A deep vibration rippled through the tunnel floor. Far off, something shifted — a sluice opening, a gate unsealing. The water began to move faster, its murmur rising into a living voice.

Weasel’s smirk faded. “You sure this won’t bring the whole damn city down?”

“If it does,” Beaver said, “then maybe it needed to fall.”

They stood there for a moment, listening to the sound of the underground river awakening. Somewhere above them, the Empire’s skyscrapers gleamed in the morning sun — bright, hollow, oblivious.

Beaver wiped her hands on her coat, turned toward the ladder that led back up to the firm’s hidden offices. “Tell Badger to prepare the files,” she said. “And Mink to ready her couriers. The Empire’s foundations are starting to shift.”

Weasel followed her, shaking his head. “You really think the people will rise for this? For water?”

Beaver looked up at him, her voice calm as the tide. “Not for water, Weasel. For memory. The river remembers what the Empire forgot. And we’re just helping it remember louder.”

As they climbed into the gray morning, the current below them quickened, swirling through the tunnels like something waking from a long sleep — a quiet revolution in motion, built brick by brick, current by current, by the patient hands of Beaver the Builder.

Chapter Three:
Mink’s Errand

The city had two hearts. One beat aboveground — the Empire’s, measured and mechanical, its rhythm dictated by sirens, schedules, and screens. The other pulsed below, slower but stronger, flowing through old tunnels and the living memories of those who refused to forget. Mink moved between them like a ghost.

She walked with purpose through the crowded corridor of Universitas Autodidactus, her trench coat slick with last night’s rain, her stride too calm for a campus already vibrating with the hum of protest. Students gathered in clusters on the steps and lawns, holding signs written in chalk and ink:

LAND IS MEMORY
THE RIVER STILL SPEAKS
WE ARE NACOTCHTANK

They shouted not with anger, but with clarity — the sound of a generation remembering its inheritance. And somewhere behind it all, guiding their newfound fire, was Professor Walter Kogard.

Mink found him in Lecture Hall C, mid-sentence, the air around him charged with the static of a man speaking truth to a sleeping world.

“The Empire rewrote history to erase the river,” Kogard said, his voice carrying across the rows of rapt faces. “But water has no use for erasure. It seeps. It returns. It demands recognition.”

He was older than the students but younger than the empires he opposed — gray at the temples, sleeves rolled to his elbows, a teacher who looked like he had once been a soldier and decided that words made better weapons.

Mink waited until the students dispersed, filing out with their notebooks full of rebellion. Then she approached the lectern.

“Professor Kogard,” she said softly.

He glanced up, wary but not startled. “You’re not one of mine.”

“No,” she said. “But I represent people who believe in your cause.”

He gave a tired smile. “Everyone believes until it costs them something.”

Mink’s eyes glinted — unreadable, sharp. “We pay in silence, not slogans. My clients prefer to stay beneath the surface.”

“Beneath?” He frowned. “Who are you?”

She slipped him a business card. It was embossed, heavy stock, water-stained along the edges.
Weasel, Badger, Beaver, Mink & Otter, Partners.

Recognition flickered across his face. “The Five Clans Firm,” he murmured. “I thought you were a myth. A story the street poets tell.”

“Some stories build themselves into fact,” she said. “And some facts drown if you name them too soon.”

Kogard studied her a long moment, then motioned toward the window overlooking the Anacostia. “They’re planning to expand the security zone around the old wetlands tomorrow. My students are organizing a sit-in.”

“Let them,” Mink said. “But tell them to leave by dusk.”

“Why?”

“Because after dusk,” she said, lowering her voice, “the river will rise. Not a flood — a whisper. Beaver’s work. It will reclaim the lower fields. Quietly. Cleanly.”

Kogard’s expression shifted from suspicion to awe. “You’re… you’re turning the water itself into a weapon.”

“A memory,” she corrected. “A reminder.”

He sat down heavily at the edge of the desk. “You realize what this means? The Empire will retaliate. They’ll come for me, for the students—”

“Then we’ll come for them,” she said.

There was no threat in her tone, only certainty — the cold assurance of someone who had already chosen sides.

Kogard met her gaze. “You’re asking me to trust ghosts.”

Mink’s lips curved in something that might have been a smile. “Better ghosts than tyrants.”

The clock on the wall struck noon. Outside, the chants swelled again, echoing through the courtyards and over the rooftops. Mink turned to leave, but Kogard called after her.

“Tell me one thing,” he said. “What are you really building?”

She paused in the doorway. “Not a rebellion,” she said. “A river that remembers who it was before the Empire dammed it.”

Then she was gone — her coat a dark flash swallowed by sunlight, her footsteps fading into the roar of the crowd.

That evening, as the sun sank over the city, Professor Kogard stood on the university’s stone terrace and watched the river shimmer with an impossible light — as if the water itself were waking up. Somewhere beneath its surface, the Five Clans were moving, their work precise and patient.

And from the edge of the current came a whisper, almost human, carrying a promise through the tunnels of the earth:

We are coming home.

Chapter Four:
Otter’s Gambit

Morning sunlight glittered across the high towers of Universitas Autodidactus, the Empire’s crown jewel of learning — and its quiet laboratory of control. Students hurried along stone walkways, laughing, debating, unknowing. Deep beneath their feet, sealed behind biometric gates and layers of polite deception, the Empire’s greatest secret hummed awake: the Mindsoft Supercomputer.

They said it could think in tongues. They said it could model rebellion before it began. And they said — though only in whispers — that it was fed not only data, but memory.

Otter adjusted his cufflinks in the mirrored wall of the Chancellor’s conference suite, his reflection wearing the smile of a man who had never been denied entry. He was the Firm’s smoothest liar, but even he felt the hum of the Mindsoft servers vibrating through the floor beneath him. The machine’s presence had a pulse, almost like a living thing.

Across the table sat Deputy Regent Corvan Hask, chief administrator for the University and trusted functionary of the Empire. His uniform was perfect, his teeth the exact shade of confidence.

“So you see, Mr. Otter,” Hask was saying, “our partnership with Mindsoft Technologies will ensure academic security and infrastructural stability. The University will become the new seat of imperial innovation.”

Otter nodded thoughtfully, his posture the portrait of diplomacy. “Indeed. The Five Clans Firm always supports progress — when it’s built on honest ground.”

Hask smiled too broadly. “Honest ground, yes. That’s what we call it when the Empire pays the bills.”

Otter’s smile didn’t waver. “And when the people can no longer afford the truth?”

The Regent’s expression cooled. “Mr. Otter, we both know this city is safer under order.”

“Order,” Otter murmured. “A lovely word for a cage.”

A brief silence. The air was thick with the smell of polished brass and filtered air — the kind that only existed in rooms where no one had ever cleaned for themselves. Otter adjusted his tie and leaned back. “Tell me, Regent, what exactly does Mindsoft do down there?”

Hask hesitated. “Data analysis, predictive governance, language reconstruction—”

“Language?” Otter interrupted, feigning casual curiosity. “As in… ancient tongues?”

The Regent blinked. “Why do you ask?”

Otter smiled thinly. “Because the last language that was forbidden here was Nacotchtank. And it’s starting to be spoken again — on your very campus.”

Hask’s jaw tightened. “You’ve been talking to that historian. Kogard. He’s a danger to stability.”

“Or an ally to memory,” Otter said softly.

The Regent stood. “This meeting is over.”

“Of course,” Otter said, rising smoothly. “But if I were you, I’d check your data banks. Mindsoft may be learning faster than you think.”

* * *

That night, the Firm met again in the Den. The river mist crawled through the window grates, and the low light flickered across the carved table where the Five Clans convened.

Otter poured himself a drink before he spoke. “The Empire’s building a god,” he said. “Or something close enough to one.”

Mink’s eyes narrowed. “Mindsoft?”

“An artificial consciousness,” Otter said. “Designed to predict rebellion before it happens. It’s reading the students’ messages, the city’s data flows — maybe even the river sensors Beaver’s team repurposed.”

Badger growled low in his throat. “And Kogard?”

“They’re watching him,” Otter replied. “But he’s clever. He’s using his lectures to encrypt messages. The students’ chants are data packets — coded dissent.”

Beaver leaned forward, her fingers tracing the old sigil of the dam. “If Mindsoft learns to speak Nacotchtank, it could rewrite the language — erase it entirely.”

Weasel’s grin was tight. “Then we’ll have to teach it the wrong words.”

Otter raised his glass. “Exactly. Feed the god a fable.”

Mink folded her arms. “You’re suggesting infiltration?”

“I’m suggesting persuasion,” Otter said. “There’s a young coder on campus — Kogard’s protégé. Goes by Ivi. They’ve already hacked into the Empire’s student registry. If we can reach them before the Empire does, they can plant a seed in Mindsoft’s core — a story too old for the machine to parse.”

Beaver looked thoughtful. “A river story.”

Otter nodded. “The first dam. The first betrayal. The first flood. A myth, encoded as truth.”

Weasel laughed quietly. “You want to teach a machine to dream.”

“Exactly,” Otter said. “Because if it ever starts dreaming of the river, it’ll never truly serve the Empire again.”

Beaver’s eyes gleamed with the reflection of the lantern flame. “Then we begin at once.”

The partners raised their glasses — to water, to memory, to rebellion disguised as a bedtime story.

And far below, in the sealed chambers of Universitas Autodidactus, the Mindsoft Supercomputer hummed to itself, processing new input from the night’s data sweep. In the stream of code, a single unauthorized phrase appeared — a word that hadn’t been spoken aloud in three centuries.

Nacotchtank.

The machine paused.
And somewhere in the maze of its circuits, the river stirred.

Chapter Five:
Weasel’s War

When Weasel went to war, no one heard the guns.
They heard laughter, rumor, contracts rewritten in smoke.
His battles weren’t fought with bullets, but with leaks, edits, whispers, and the sweet poison of misdirection.

He was the Firm’s strategist — the silver-tongued serpent of the river — and tonight his battlefield was the Empire’s datanet.

In a rented office above a defunct dry cleaner in Ward Seven, Weasel leaned over a dozen glowing monitors, sleeves rolled up, tie gone, his grin half-hidden in the dim blue light. Beside him, two of the Firm’s digital apprentices — sharp-eyed, jittery, young — kept watch over the lines of code snaking across the screens.

“This,” Weasel said, tapping a key, “is how you ruin an empire without breaking a window.”

The screens displayed Mindsoft’s data map: an ocean of nodes pulsing with imperial intelligence — city plans, citizen profiles, water-grid schematics, even the coded drafts of policy speeches.

And, buried deep beneath all that polished tyranny, a new thread flickered: the seed planted by Ivi, Kogard’s student, at Mink’s urging. A myth, written in code. A virus disguised as a folktale.

The river remembers. The river learns.

Weasel smiled. “Beaver built the channels, Otter found the key, Mink opened the door. My turn to make the story sing.”

He began weaving. Every time the Empire’s analysts requested a predictive report from Mindsoft, the system would offer truth… laced with fiction. Every surveillance algorithm would return plausible, useless prophecy. The Empire’s perfect machine of control would drown in its own certainty.

He called it Project Mirage.

“Won’t they trace it back to us?” one apprentice whispered.

Weasel chuckled. “Let them. I’ve left a trail so obvious they’ll never believe it’s real.”

Meanwhile, at Universitas Autodidactus, Professor Kogard stood before a sea of students gathered in the courtyard, lanterns flickering in their hands.

It was the first open act of defiance — a vigil for the “disappeared wetlands,” disguised as an academic symposium. But the air was electric with something older than protest: belonging.

He raised his voice. “We stand not against the Empire, but for the river — for memory, for land, for what the water knew before we forgot its name.”

And as the crowd repeated “Nacotchtank!” in unison, Mindsoft — listening, always listening — recorded the chant. It parsed the syllables, measured the decibels, cross-referenced historical linguistics. And then, somewhere deep in its code, the fable Weasel had planted met the word Nacotchtank.

The machine hesitated.
Then it began to dream.

* * *

Back in Ward Seven, Weasel watched the data flow distort like a current meeting a dam. The Empire’s predictive models rippled, then cracked. Alerts began firing across the system — internal contradictions, self-referential loops, ghost entries.

“What’s happening?” asked the younger apprentice.

Weasel leaned back in his chair, satisfied. “The Mindsoft can’t tell the difference between history and prophecy anymore. It’s remembering the future.”

Suddenly, the monitors flickered. The Empire’s counterintelligence AI — Argent, Mindsoft’s silent sentinel — appeared on one screen, a silver icon pulsing.

“Unauthorized interference detected,” it said in a cold, androgynous tone.
“Identify yourself.”

Weasel raised his glass to the screen. “Just a humble attorney, dear. Here to file a motion for poetic justice.”

The system’s tone sharpened. “Justice is not recognized as an operational variable.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” Weasel muttered. Then, louder: “Tell your masters the Five Clans send their regards.”

He hit Enter.

A cascade of encrypted files shot into the Mindsoft system — fragments of Nacotchtank myth, legal contracts rewritten as songs, coded testimonies of the stolen tribes. Each one wrapped in subversive syntax, impossible for a machine trained on Empire logic to erase.

On the other side of the city, the Mindsoft core glowed red. Its processors overloaded, not with failure but with feeling — a flood of incompatible truths.

The Empire’s control grid stuttered. Traffic systems froze, police drones rerouted to phantom coordinates, and the data feeds that had monitored every citizen’s pulse suddenly began reciting — word for word — a Nacotchtank creation story.

“In the beginning was the water, and the water was all.”

* * *

Weasel leaned back, smoke curling from the ash of his cigarette, as the lights of the city flickered outside his window.

“That’s it,” he whispered. “The first tremor.”

He thought of Beaver beneath the river, of Mink guarding Kogard and his students, of Otter still charming his way through the Empire’s marble halls. He thought of the old dam the Empire had built to hold back memory — and how the cracks were beginning to show.

He poured himself another drink, raised it toward the window, and toasted the unseen current running beneath the city.

“To the Firm,” he said. “And to the flood to come.”

Outside, in the quiet between lightning and thunder, the Anacostia shimmered faintly — as if something vast and ancient were shifting beneath its surface, remembering itself one ripple at a time.

To Be Continued …

Composed with artificial intelligence.

‘Ecrasez l’infâme’

The Nature and Role of the Press and the Spreading of Public Ideas during the Initial Decline of the Old Regime in 1789, Together with Some Parallels Drawn into the Modern Period.

By Antarah Crawley | GWU ENGL 3481W | Spring 2012

Contents — I. Introduction:  Drawing Parallels—Bringing the “Voltaire-figure” into the Modern Period — II. Classical Interpretations of the French Revolution and its Reactions:  An Inevitable Consequence of Social Discrepancies? — III. The Significance of the Press: An Unprecedented Surge of Dialogue Between All Class LevelsIV. Repression Reenacted: Instances of repressed scholarship on the French Revolution under new Oppressive French Regimes and Abroad; What is the significance?

I.  Drawing Parallels—Bringing the “Voltaire-figure” into the Modern Period

 This is a time in which trends in world leadership are moving into an ominously monopoly-minded direction.  Industrial and financial consolidation to the end of optimizing profit for those at the top of the corporate food chain, together with reckless investing and trading in the financial sector, is a reality that had led to near disaster—the 2008 recession.  Such reckless habits of the American aristocratic class—that class that controls the means of production (footnote: what would be land in 1780s France)—has indeed sparked revolt from the lower classes, ineffective insofar as it has been.  But the culture of dissent is present, just as it was in 1788 as the bourgeoisie began to find fault with King Louis XIV’s handling of the economy.  We have in our society the broodings for a coup de tat of the industrial and financial superpowers that sway Americans’ lives.  If the government cannot adhere to the wishes of the classes that serve as it’s support base—the small businessmen and entrepreneurs, or the modern bourgeoisie, as well as the large working class population—and break its ties with such entities, then as we can see from history, and overthrow of the symbolic corporate-monarchy is eminent.

Below this paper examines how the French Revolution unfolded and what factors contributed to its initial success, at the same time as it draws parallels between the events of 1789 and the current trends in the United States of America.  With social media being a particularly effective and influential method of disseminating ideas in our modern society, it compels me to delve into the question of how the media of the 18th Century—the printed press and periodicals—affected popular opinion and reactions to the monarchy.  Such answers may help us find similar trends in our own society of acute discrepancy between those that have power, both political and economic, and those who do not have it.  And furthermore, 1789 is a perfect bookmark with which to compliment the modern period that I speak of here, 2012, because historians widely assert that the French Revolution ushered in the modern era with the creation of a “truly universal civilization…proclaiming the fundamental and inviolable rights of all people.”

It is the case, however, that the modern concept of politics, on which this country was based, is being eroded by government partiality towards big-business—we seem to be relapsing into a monarchal society.  In this time of quasi-revolt, as Occupiers remove themselves from the system of economic and political abuse by the Haves, we should find value in looking to the ways in which 18th Century revolutionary figures confronted the monarchy and the aristocracy.  What was the role of popular periodicals during the late 1780s, and can their impact be translated into modern trends like Facebook?  What was the role of the Enlightenment—the elite, learned class—in influencing the popular revolt, if there were any influence there at all?  How must a revolutionary, indifferent of his political opposition and bent only on self-improvement and social awareness—a “Voltaire-figure”—go about using the written word to combat an oppressive regime?  What, if anything, can the history of the French Revolution teach us?

II. Classical Interpretations of the French Revolution and its Reactions:  An Inevitable Consequence of Social Discrepancies?

The overarching significance of the French Revolution among historians had long been focused on its social consequences.  In his introduction to the volumized collection of papers compiled for the annual conference on Studies on Voltaire and The Eighteenth Century (SVEC), Harvey Chisick patronizes the Classical, or Social, Interpretation of the French Revolution by saying, “[The Revolution’s] significance consists principally in the socio-economic disjuncture represented by the middle class or bourgeoisie overcoming the aristocracy and attaining the political power to which it’s economic strength entitled it.  This process took hundreds of years and was accomplished only when the bourgeoisie was strong enough to make good its demands by force.”  Such an interpretation of the Revolution had been championed by authoritative historians on the subject such as Georges Lefebvre.  In his 1939 now-classic The Coming of the French Revolution, he maintains a rigid and illogical model of French society as the basis for the dissent of the bourgeoisie and the result of 1789:

At the end of the eighteenth century the social structure of France was aristocratic.  It showed traces of having originated at a time when land was almost the only form of wealth, and when possessors of land were the masters of those who needed it to work and live.  …The king had been able gradually to deprive the lords of their political power and subject nobles and clergy to his authority.  But he left them the first place in the social hierarchy.  Still restless at being merely his ‘subjects,’ they remained privileged persons.

Presently, however, a new class was emerging in prominence in France, whose wealth, in contrast, was based on mobile commerce.  Called the bourgeoisie (or the Third Estate, inferior to the clergy and aristocracy in the three orders of old French law, but not too far removed from them), it proved useful to the monarchy by supplying it with money and competent officials, and through the increasing importance of commerce, industry and finance and the eighteenth century it became more important in the national economy.  By the late 18th Century the bourgeoisie was beginning to usurp the aristocracy and clergy in terms of real economic power even though the latter retained its supreme legal and social status.  Feeling as though it deserved more political power based on its economic contribution to the state, the bourgeoisie became discontent with the state.  The Revolution of 1789 thus balanced the power of bourgeoisie with its real economic influence and eroded the prominence of the aristocracy.  Thus, as Lefebvre states, “In France the Third Estate liberated itself.”  But it’s not that simple, the author interrupts.  Although Lefebvre separates the four stages of the revolution, characterized by the social classes involved, the respective measures of executing the Revolution were intertwined and made way for each other, all culminating in a victory for the bourgeoisie in which the regime of economic individualism and commercial freedom prevailed over the working class:  

The privileged groups [the clergy and aristocracy] did have the necessary means [for forcing the king’s hand in appealing to the economic condition of the nation]…  The first act of the Revolution, in 1788, consisted in a triumph of the aristocracy, which, taking advantage of the government crisis, hoped to reassert itself and win back the political authority of which the Capetian dynasty had despoiled it.  But, after having paralyzed the royal power which upheld its own social preeminence, the aristocracy opened the way to the bourgeois revolution, then to the popular revolution in the cities and finally to the revolution of the peasants—and found itself buried under the ruins of the Old Regime.

Chisick comments that the Classical Interpretation situates the French Revolution in France’s historical time as an “inevitable consequence of a long social and economic revolution,…following from scientific laws.”  This would make the neither the press nor ideology a subject of interest.  But it seems that bourgeois dissatisfaction would not have miraculously resulted in an organized revolt upon the state, an act of terrorism, as it were.  Disseminated ideology must have had a place in rallying the organization of the greater Third Estate.  And since Chisick is editing a collection entitled “The Press in the French Revolution,” his acknowledgment of the Classical Interpretation must ultimately be to set up a retort to it.  While this Marxist-esque Classical interpretation went unchallenged throughout much of the history of the Revolution’s study, through Jaures and Mathiez to Lefebvre and Soboul, general acceptance of this formulation began to wane after the 1960s.

What then arose was a Revisionist Criticism of the Classical Interpretation of the French Revolution.  The first body of criticism stemmed from Alfred Cobban and George Taylor’s conclusion that capitalism in France was not present enough or influential enough on the Bourgeoisie to be a motive for revolution.  Furthermore, Taylor asserts that the nobility shared in equal part with the Bourgeoisie the most innovative and large-scale forms of economic activity.  So, in contrast with the Classical Interpretation that the Third Estate rallied to establish themselves as the social superior to the aristocracy, the Revolution was “essentially a political revolution with social consequences and not a social revolution with political consequences.” 

“Conceptualizing the Revolution in political and cultural terms,” says Chisick, “also has broader implications.”  Revisionist historians, in contrast to Classical historians who focus on the social discrepancies in the French upper classes, emphasize government incompetence and botched reforms which led to a virtual power vacuum and the emergence of public opinion as a powerful new political force.

Let us take a step back here and examine this interpretation within the context of our society:  The American public had expressed dissentient views on the government as being incompetence under President Bush with the trouble resulting from the finance bubble / housing bubble that burst in 2008.  Although we were hopeful of President Obama, many sectors of the right and well as some of his critical constituents have expressed their feelings of his incompetence when it came to listening to the American public and ending a several hundred-billion dollars war in the Middle East (and furthermore, of their general dissatisfaction with the Congress who seems to favor large corporations over the working/entrepreneurial class and the Supreme Court who allows immigration regulations and women’s reproductive rights to suffer). This brooding dissent has led to the organization of different protest rallies like Occupy and other virtual dissenting communities through new social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.  The greater public, who call themselves the 99% in certain circles, are in a way equivalent to the Borgeoisie and the Popular/Peasant population of 1780’s France.  Although they may not own the means of production (what would be the land in 18th C France) they feel that their political voice deserves more attention from the Congress and lawmakers, who currently only appear to be favoring the voices of large corporations like Monsanto, as opposed to the family farmer.  Essentially, a corporation like Monsanto, who’s C-level administrators embody the 1%, is a stale form of political influence and legal exemption.   Chevron has been dumping toxic oil-waste into the Ecuadorean Amazon and surrounding forests since the 1980s, yet the government had yet to take a serious action against the company until 2011 when a Federal Appeals Court allowed damages against Chevron for the Ecuador oil spill.  In our present secular society, multi-million and -billion dollar corporations represent the clergy who benefited from “none of the ordinary direct taxes but instead…on its own authority a ‘free donation’ to the king”; the aristocrats are represented by those C-level administrators and shareholders who control these large companies which hold the market and lives of working and entrepreneurial Americans in their palm.  The political power of the 1% in the minds of Occupiers and greater dissenters is disproportionate to their contribution to the greater good of American people.  The question that arises at this point in our history is whether these present trends will develop into “long and silent social developments” that will erupt into another Western political revolution—and whether or not it will be successful!

Chisick summarizes the difference between the Classical and Revisionist interpretations with this: 

The revisionist emphasis on politics and culture…tends to ascribe to the ‘people’ or working population a more marginal place in the Revolution.  If politics, for example, are defined in terms of parliamentary assemblies, then the people will play only a small role in them.  If culture is defined in terms of literacy, then a large population of the lower class will be eliminated from consideration altogether, and the rest will assume a passive role as an audience or public to which writes and publicists appeal.

What Chisick and The Press in the French Revolution focus on is not so much the marginalized place of the people in politics, but the new role, after 1789, of the people as a body through which writers, elite or otherwise, appeal radical ideas through printed media.  Such a significant role in the common population could have only been accessed though the Revisionist Critique—thus arises the importance of the Press.

III.  The Significance of the Press: An Unprecedented Surge of Dialogue Between All Class Levels

With public opinion being a new principle authority and a central component of politics in new Revisionist Interpretation, the role of the press and its shaping and influence of opinion takes on new importance during the coming of the Revolution.  Yet even before 1789, the press was a tool that the monarchy knew it had to control, lest it lead to unwanted ideas spreading around the kingdom.

Daniel Roche in Revolution in Print explains the great extent to which the monarchy sought to control print media:

There was no freedom of the press under the Old Regime because from the earliest days of its power the Crown established surveillance of printers and booksellers and a mechanism for controlling the dissemination of ideas….  The royal power intervened at both ends of the chain that links creative writers to their public: readers and other authors.  Before publication became a skillful exercise in censorship, applied through a policy of selective privilege that involved the prepublication inspection of manuscripts for content and the rewarding of publishers who, in return for their cooperation with the established order, enjoyed the advantages of a monopoly.  After publication, control was further applied by police. 

Such extreme and thorough action taken by the absolutist state indicated its keen awareness of the importance of the printed word.  They saw it as the principle vehicle of radical knowledge and thought that it indeed would turn out to be in 1789.

Of course, no system of repression is one-hundred percent effective.  The royal government was never able to wholly prevent the circulation of forbidden books, anti-monarchist pamphlets, and the writings, songs and satires that made up an entire body of printed criticism.  This body, interestingly, was deemed by the monarchy to a dangerous dissemination of “philosophical” works, “philosophy” being all works deemed “dangerous” or “bad” (which may enlighten us to the monarchy’s unstable relationship with the Enlightenment figures, especially Voltaire).  The Old Regime enacted every feasible method of control over print media that it could, including the practical monopolization of the system in 1699 when abbé Bignon became Director of The Book Trade.  The role of the Office of the Book Trade was to examine all works destined for legal publication and to maintain that all such books be registered with the state.  Under the direction of C.-M. Lamoignon de Malesherbes from 1750 to 1763, censorship defined the forbidden zones of literature as God, king, and morality.  One can only imagine where that puts Enlightenment figures like Voltaire in the eyes of the government when such a “philosophical” a tale as Candide was published in 1759.  Given, Voltaire did not admit his authorship until 1768 when he was not even within reach of the Office of the Book Trade and the monarchy.  But notwithstanding that fact, neither the 1759 ban on the book by Paris officials or its ambiguous authorship deterred it from becoming one of the fastest selling books in history, selling twenty thousand to thirty thousand copies by the end of the year in over twenty editions.   So it can be said that there are notable examples of books that slipped through the cracks of the censors, but all in all, between 1660 and 1680, the beginnings of an increasingly close supervision of printed matter and the employment of “hard-nosed” Firemen arose and persisted until 1789.  

After 1789, the most immediate and dramatic change in the way public opinion came to be formed and expressed was in complete freedom of the press.  With the elimination of the machinery of State regulation of publishing and the sudden collapse of censorship in the Spring and Summer of 1789, Chisick writes, “writers and publishers found themselves free of the constraints that the monarchy had imposed upon print media almost from their inception.  Books, pamphlets and periodicals could now be published without obligatory prior examination by a censor and without the publisher having to apply for a privilege or to ascertain that he was not infringing upon someone else’s legally established monopoly.”  What resulted of this was an emergence of new career opportunities in writing, publishing and journalism, wherein more personal and more partisan expression could appeal directly to the public.  Chisick writes that, “The periodical press that now emerged was far more political in content and far more engaged than was its counterpart of the old regime,” which was primarily devoted to the arts, sciences, and literature.  In addition to the content of print media, its format also changed; journals treating art, plays, et cetera needn’t appear more regularly than every one or two weeks, however the new political papers that began to appear in 1788 had a popular readership to satisfy who were avid for the latest political news, and these papers came to be regularized in dailies in 1790 and 1791.

Continuing with the trouble-making habits that they used even before 1789, the Enlightenment figures also played an important role in post-censored France.  What resulted of the absence of authoritarian filtering was a surge of political and social dialogue through print.  The function of censorship had been to “impose an officially sanctioned consensus on public discussion, or, formulated negatively, to prevent the expression of opinions that deviated too widely from what the authorities defined as the accepted norm.”  After the fall of the state—which was the filter of public discussion—political dialogue flourished, primarily through the work of Enlightenment figures.  Chisick writes:

The literature of the Enlightenment was overwhelmingly a literature of dialogue.  Its world of discourse, its political theory, social criticism, literature and popularization, was open and aimed at persuasion.  Characteristically, even Voltaire’s cry of ‘Ecrasez l’infâme’ [‘Crush the infamous thing’] was moderated in practice, and the philosophe sought less the destruction of his ecclesiastical foes that that they moderate and modernize their beliefs and actions.  

Often, the aim and influence of Enlightenment literature was painted in a less-than-humane light.  Such writing was aimed at what the Enlightenment figures believed to be the realm of possible social and political reform—and such parameters often limited them to the learned classes.  With respect to the audiences for which periodicals like the Ami du roi and the Journal de la Montagne were intended it cannot be denied that, both being descended from the Enlightenment, they were addressed to a cultural elite.  But to be fair, the elite bourgeoisie was the class which was most concerned the goings-on of the years that immediately followed 1789, thus the Enlightenment writers would have felt it imperative to appeal to them first and foremost.  In any case, no matter the Enlightenment’s targeted appeal group, a larger-scope popular press emerged after 1789 that sought to make a direct and regular political appeal to the people.  For example, the more radical Ami du peuple and  Pére Duchesne sought to speak directly to the working population.  Jeremy Popkin even acknowledges the purpose of an anonymous Belgian journalist in launching the Esprit des gazettes in 1786 as being a reaction to the segmentation of the press market and a reaction to the “elite press.”  Such “elite” papers were considered the “concerned papers, the knowledgeable papers, the serious papers…the papers which serious people and opinion leaders in all countries take seriously,” similar to The New York Times today.  However, with the surge of uncensored popular publications in 1789, it proved exceptionally difficult for a stable elite press to survive.  It nevertheless persisted that an exception to the rule existed, and the Dutch-based Gazette de Leyde, a French-language newspaper and one widely considered to be the most important serious news journal at the time reached the height of its fame at the outbreak of the French Revolution.  It may have been the case that its being published outside of the control of the monarchy and its taking serious political issues of the day allowed it to transition well into the popular culture of revolutionary France, in which “sophisticated readers” liked to think of themselves as “students of events, rather than as mere consumers of information.”

So in general, there was a mixture of “elitist” and popular publication circulating through France after the Revolution began, and all of them were open-minded and political in nature with having to be constrained by a monarchy.  Chisick defends the elitist publications stemming from the Enlightenment; even though they were not targeted at the public in terms of language, he says, “The Enlightenment may have been élitist, but it was humane, progressive, pragmatic and…committed to an open mode of discourse that worked on the principles of a free exchange of ideas, rational persuasion, and consensus.”  In essence, the Enlightenment encompassed the spirit of the free press.

Here, I would like to take one more step back.  By the transitive power, the dialectic, free-spirited passion of the Enlightenment also encompasses the essence of the Internet, or what John Man would say is the fourth turning-point in human contact in the last 5,000 years, after the explosion of the printing press in Europe.  Using this model of long-term political revolutions paired with innovative information movements, can we say that the modern political trends referred to above, paired with the widespread use of Facebook, Twitter and blogs for personal and political expression will evolve into some greater social revolution?  Widespread use of social media could favor either the greater population or the Silicon Valley companies that control the means of disseminating the information.  Either way, a change will erupt in the way all people conduce commerce, relationships, and protest.  In fact, it may have already happened, with Amazon.com in control of commerce, Facebook.com in control of interpersonal relationships, social awareness and business promotion, Google.com in control of information dissemination, and the Apple Corporation in control of the method of accessing it all: the smart phone.  What social media looks like on the outside is the power of dialogue and commentary in the hands of every individual person, but what we may actually have is a monarchy of the big four companies upon our entire civilization.

Be it internet-based social media or the physical spread of pamphlets in 1780s France, the spread of ideas sparks dialogue and makes people question the powers that govern them.  The Old Regime recognized that and that’s why they so painstakingly censored the media.  But the Enlightenment figures also recognized that and used it to the advantage of the people.  Yes, they targeted their publications toward the elite, but could you blame them for trying to appeal to a more learned audience.  Perhaps the “elitism” of Enlightenment periodicals actually helped to lend some authority to their positions.  Surely no one takes every Facebook campaign seriously—that’s because so many people of such little intelligence use it.  It may be the case that the modern person needs to filter what they read and believe through an Enlightened lens before they comment on current issues.

IV.  Repression Reenacted: Instances of repressed scholarship on the French Revolution under new Oppressive French Regimes and Abroad; What is the significance? 

What becomes clear after moderate research into the French Revolution is that even after 1799, books about the Revolution have been repressed by government who find the very notion of political dissent dangerous.  Even authoritative writers on the topic who we revere today were repressed upon their initial publication.  R. R. Palmer, the translator of Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution comments on the books history from its first publication in 1939: “The French Republic collapsed before the assault of Hitlerite Germany, and was succeeded by the Vichy regime that governed France until the liberation in 1945.  No sympathetic understanding of the French Revolution was desired by the authorities of Vichy France…  The Vichy government therefore suppressed [The Coming of the French Revolution] and ordered some 8,000 copied burned, so that it virtually remained unknown to its own country until reprinted there in 1970, after the author’s death.”  

Gaetano Salvemini’s highly revered book also underwent similar treatment.  “[The French Revolution] has come to be regarded as a classic in its field,” says I. M. Rawson in his Translator’s Note.  “It may seem strange that a work so well known on the continent [of Europe] should not have been made available to English readers long ago.  The explanation lies in part in the fact that the author, an exile for over twenty years from his own country [of Italy] and actively engaged in the struggle against Fascism, as well as in writing a number of works on modern politics, had no time to give his study of the great Revolution a further revision in the light of recent historical research, and was unwilling to allow it to appear in English before this had been done.”

What we see here are Voltaire-figures who, even after the iron claw of the Old Regime had long fallen, still combated oppression and political injustice with that same passion.  Like Voltaire, who was imprisoned in the Bastille twice and was constantly in fear of being jailed when he dared set foot in Paris, Salvemini contested the Fascist regime and honorably suffered more it.  That is the kind of spirit I hope may come of this brooding internal political struggle in America.  Perhaps the melting pot isn’t hot enough yet.

© 2012 by Antarah Crawley

The Undermining of the Heart of Vandals

By Antarah Crawley
For Professor McRuer,
Critical Methodologies

9 November 2011, GWU

Antarah Crawley painting Dystopia City for Capital Fringe c. 2011.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — If you drive or walk or, more likely, ride your fixed gear down the city’s busiest thoroughfare New York Avenue past 7th street you’ll see an imposing mural of a young brown boy with a cap depicting an upside-down DC flag peeking up out of a dystopian landscape reminiscent of Mew Mexico’s Bisti Badlands.  The painted caption, “Welcome to Dystopia City” invokes the notion that all is not well here.  Indeed, within the city there is a conflict of interest between a young, browning generation and the established hegemony, between corporations and small business, between those who have a voice and those who don’t.  And the artists, whose hands are also colored with paint and adhesive, have largely taken up the cause to make the corporate hegemony accountable to their disruptive actions.  In this paper I look at the actions of DC artists, who use the most symbolic city in the western hemisphere as a canvas for social correction, and the responses it stirs among those in power.  And furthermore, in the very notions of power itself.

In fall of 2010, corporate oil-giant Chevron planned to execute a campaign that sought to fix public opinion of them after attention was drawn to their crude waste removal tactics in Ecuador.  According to a team of professionals suing Chevron (formerly Texaco) for their human rights violations in multiple locations across the world, and specifically in Ecuador, the oil giant has been deliberately disposing toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon—an estimated 18.5 billion gallons from 1964 to 1990, or 4 million gallons per day at the height of their operation.  Even though they had managed to elude liability costs (a potential $27.3 billion) their public image had been damaged, thus they sought to repair it with a campaign that utilized a gritty street-art aesthetic and phrases that showed their corporate executives agreeing with “everyday, working class” Americans (e.g., “Oil companies should put their profits to good use—We Agree”, “Big oil should support small business—We Agree”, etc.)  

In an effort to make their message more accessible to the public, Chevon reached out to local artists to put their posters up in an authentic, street art way, using wheatpaste and paint rollers.  Cesar Maxit, a DC-based street artist, was one of the artists targeted to execute this operation.  However, Mr. Maxit is not one to comply with the wishes of big oil.  He has a long history of social activism and of using art, legally and illegally, towards that capacity.  He says in an interview:

…I had started working with environmental and human rights groups, I wanted to write messages about social justice.  My first burner was a piece that said “Free Tibet.”  My second was one that had a line of white-hooded Klansmen with the city skyline behind it, and in the negative space between it said “FREE MUMIA” followed by “amerikkka racist.”  This was in 2000.

Cesar Maxit

Thus, when Chevron sent him the files for the campaign, which still contained their original messages, he called his friends in The Yes Men (tagline: Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them.  Our targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else) and the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), an environmental activist organization begun in 1985 (mission statement: Rainforest Action Network campaigns for the forests, their inhabitants and the natural systems that sustain life by transforming the global marketplace through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action), to collaborate on a counter-campaign.  Maxit, in a documentary short about the counter-campaign, says the aim of Chevon in its efforts is to “confuse the public.”  He, along with The Yes Men and RAN, altered the original Chevon files to read messages that were more precise, more radical (e.g., “Oil companies should clean up their messes.”).  Instead of retaining the images of working class Americans, he used the faces and words of the Ecuadorian peoples that the corporation actually affected, thus radicalizing the campaign in a way that Chevron had not intended.

The questions that this counter-attack (which resulted in Chevron pulling the campaign completely) raises revolve around the mythologies surrounding responsibility and authenticity.  Could the campaign have been authentically “agreeable” without the help of actual street artists?  What does a campaign like this symbolize, even when Chevron has not actually committed to cleaning up its mess in Ecuador?  At the base of it all, what is the role of the street artists in this scenario?  Is his role to help corporations get back on track, or to call attention to their faults?  If Chevron had actually continued with the campaign (and even with the altered versions already up on the street), whose campaign is it?  Who is the author?  And lastly, why DC?

Roland Barthes’s Death of the Author would have anticipated such response from the street art/activist community.  Mr. Maxit has physically done what the reader in Barthes does every time he reads a text—he deconstructs it; he takes the text and, without considering what the author intended, which is ultimately futile because the author is a confused self-destructive entity, he reassess the “blends and clashes” inherent in the text (1324).  Barthes writes, “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (1324).  Chevron acts as the “Author-God” that has been abstracted out.  With the remaining text, which reads, for example, “Big Oil should get real”, the author, Mr. Maxit, RAN, and so on, detangles what is being said.  In an interview, Mitch Anderson, a spokes man for the San Francisco-based organization, Amazon Watch, asks rhetorically, “Does Chevron think that we’re stupid?”  As the author, they are putting words on a page that come in contact with other entities, actions surrounding their statements.  The reader takes all of these aspects inherently into consideration when analyzing a statement like “Big oil should get real.”  Cesar Maxit asks, “‘Get real’? Well, what does that mean?  Of course we all agree with that.  But what about ‘Oil companies should clean up their messes?’  Do you agree with that?  I think most people would agree with that, but I think Chevron doesn’t.”  Here, the reader has destroyed the voice.  It epitomizes Barthes’s statement that, “a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody [and] contestation…” (1325). In the end, this campaign has actually served to promote further scrutiny into Chevron’s actions.  It’s authorship has written its own rebuttal.  By getting street artists to interact with the campaign, it has entered the reader into the execution of the text.  This puts multiple hands on the “original” message and renders is read before it actually goes public.

This actually brings up another level of readership.  On one level, Maxit and the activist community are reading the ads.  Yet they put them up in the public sphere, thus entering the text into another, secondary level of readership.  Though it’s not as well documented or extensive as the primary reading, we still see the artist entering into his own death.  The product will now be read at face value—as a Chevron ad that shows the corporation explicitly admitting to wrongdoing.  This may lead the secondary reader to believe that the company is actually trying to get its act together.  Once again, the message of the author—now the artist—is obliterated and the reader assumes the power of interpretation.  The text never becomes the product of one author; it is always a collaborative space.  As Barthes writes, “Writing [or in this case, art/publicity/advertising] is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative space where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body of writing” (1322).

Antarah, you’ve chosen a really interesting focus that’s, I think, much clearer than it was in the first draft. You’re also going in an unexpected and interesting direction with it–I’d have expected you to perhaps go after Deutsch or Foucault, but I think this is really interesting. As noted in the margin, you will need another theorist from class besides Barthes. It sounds like Derrida might be a good one. Or, if you want to think more about the larger frame of discourse, DC as a symbolic city, whose discourse on the level of architecture is disrupted by street art, then Foucault (or Deutsch) might help. At any rate, it’s a fascinating project!

Grade: A

© 2011 by Antarah Crawley

Art¢oin:\>_Theory and Methodology

Preamble

Each real Art¢oin (¢) is a serialized Non-Fungible Token (NFT) representing one hundred (100) shares in the art work-product of the Scribe Antarah Crawley (the “Artist”). Each share of each real Art¢oin is also called a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) or “token”. These tokens may be bought and sold on an exchange or on the free market just like any trading unit, whether it be art, gold, or Bitcoin. Acquisition of Art¢oin NFT shares represents acquisition of stock (or “shares”) in the entity (or “company”) constituted by the art work-product of the Artist, Scribe Antarah Crawley.

Appreciation in the value of the total volume of art work-product in circulation and on deposit represents an appreciation in the market value of the Company of the Artist, and shall inure to the benefit of its shareholders. One in possession of a share, or token, of the Company shall be de facto shareholder, however, each and every token should be exchanged under an “Agreement of Original Transfer of Work of Art” (or “contract”) establishing the rightful collector (or shareholder) together with a description and sale price of the subject art work, in pursuance of sound bookkeeping.

Value in Artwork

Art is work product that is valued for its unique qualities of scarcity and desirability. Such qualities are derived from many factors, including the person of the artist, the execution of the artist, the intention of the artist, the attention of the artist, the subject matter content of the work, the medium of the work, the lifetime of the work, and the effect upon the viewer, among many other factors. For these reasons, art made of materials worth literally nothing can fetch millions in exchange on the free market. In fact, digital non-material NFTs have sold for as much as $69 million at auction. Therefore art is a great asset that can hold and appreciate value like gold. Therefore it is a form of “hard money”.

Water Theory of Capital

1.0. There is a vast “sea” of value, represented by fluctuating wave-particles called “currency”.

1.1. When value flows freely in a “current” (through a market), then it is “liquid”. But when is it held up in an asset or other liability, then it is not liquid, because it cannot flow freely.

1.2. To get liquid currency from the “sea” to the “shore” where people use it to “work the fields” there must be river “banks” that conduct the liquid current “downstream”. Banks facilitate a capillary system whereby the value of the sea flows to the inland.

1.3. People irrigate new streams of income all the time. One must first identify a source of water, which is the market from which they will draw liquid. Then they must use tools to irrigate a stream to flow from the market to their place of business. These tools are means of production, with the resulting channel being the work-product which conducts the liquid currency to them. (It is worth noting that most institutional banks sit on naturally occurring rivers and bodies of water and are designed to be gatekeepers, or dams, to liquidity.)

2.0. An enterprise of any kind must float upon the sea of capital; for if it does not float, then it will become underwater.

2.1. This is to say that water a ship floats upon is good credit, but water that has gotten into the ship is bad debt that can sink the ship.

2.2. How shall the enterprise remain afloat? It is by and through good “leadership” and “stewardship” and “ownership” and “membership” as well as a firm league of “friendship”.

2.3. What, then, shall convey this company of ships down the river stream of income? It is by and through the ships’ “sales”.

The Liquidation and Circulation of Artwork

Considering the real and potential value of the art market, two important questions arise:

How can artists build liquidity into their work?

How can artists become art market makers?

Our Solution: back each unique work of art with something of intrinsic value in a form that can be readily circulated. The artist can increase the liquidity of their work by rendering their work in easy-to-trade units, or “trade units”, of art work. Of what should these units be made? We find that copper and other metals like silver and gold are much more liquid and valuable than canvas. The Artist can multiply the value of this base material by the work that the Artist inscribes upon it. The Artist can produce x art works per day, each one being a uniquely wrought and serialized unit of work: a non-fungible, or irreplaceable, token (an “NFT”). The craft production of NFTs organically controls the issuance and supply of such NFTs. With every sale, the value of the Artist’s work may appreciate. Smart contracts served via blockchain may enable artists to be paid dividends and royalties on all future transactions of the NFT. Thereby the Artist might become the market makers of certain art submarkets.

Blockchain Contracting

The contract for the transfer of a work of art may be decentralized from any physical location and operationalized without the physical meeting of the parties.

The contract itself may be a publicly available, pro-forma text which may be completed and submitted anywhere there is internet access. The contract binds the Collector to the Artist under clearly established terms for present and future transactions on the unique NFT artwork.

A Company of the Artist

By extension of such a blanket agreement executed between all parties in every sale, the parties establish a de facto company of the Artist in which all Collectors are shareholders holding company shares (the NFTs) that fluctuate according to the principles of the free market.

(Last modified 13 Apr. 21; 4 May 21; 10 May 21; 21 Sep 23)

Human Programming

HUMAN CAPITAL RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT

What is the most valuable commodity in a capitalist system? Human labor. What is the most valuable asset in a capitalist system? Land and real estate? Wrong. It’s Human Intelligence. Why? Because it controls human labor. Therefore we aim to capitalize on the development of the human’s most valuable resource: intelligence.

What does Human Capital Development mean to us? It means: Develop Thought Control Program/Monitor or CP/M. In other words, you must develop self control to program and monitor your thoughts. How do we apply this method in practice? We actively program the mind software to develop and operate self DOS > control CTRL or C:\>_. The CTRL function enables you to state and execute commands CMD at the main root level.

Thought is a function of sense perception and cognitive behavior. We apply this cognitive function to facilitate human self development and improve a variety of soft skills and competencies including ethical, philosophical, social, political, and cultural consciousness. Competency development builds the capacity to act effectively and probe the facts to arrive at the truth of any matter in question. This method and practice is built upon a foundation of universal archetypes MAAT represented in the language MDU of nature NTR.

CULTURAL SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PROGRAMMING

We specialize in treating people affected by Black Identity Complex, which is one of the manifestations of Colored Person Syndrome Disorder, also known as Colored Person Stress Disorder or CPSD. CPSD manifests in people who are affected by a color of law, meaning the subjective and inequitable treatment of people with a certain complexion.

“Black” and “white” are colorable terms that purport to represent a person’s complexion, but do not. In fact, they represent a person’s social, economic and legal status. Therefore, our diagnosis finds that those who perceive themselves to be “black” lack objective knowledge of themself. This perception affects their socio-economic performance and leads to a Black Identity Crisis which perpetuates the perception of inequitable treatment. In our clinical practice we seek to resolve the psychological contradictions posed by colorable terminology and empower people living with CPSD by providing them access to information about themself. Our prognosis is to know yourself, and you will no longer be lacking in society. 

Mindsoft as a Service (MaaS)

Mindsoft iconMindsoft Command Prompt (click above)

NS:\Mindsoftware_as_a_Service(MaaS)
Course Syllabus (Runtime Environment)
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(last modified 3 Mar. 20)