Omnis mundi creatura / quasi liber et pictura / nobis est in speculum
every creature of the world is to us like a book, and a picture, and a mirror
五千年だって君は文字を綴れるかい
Write write down
Write write down
二三年だって君の声は響くのかい
Loud loud loud
Loud loud loud
-- 「小さなレノン」、Asian Kung-fu Generation
We adhere to the standards of the No CSS Club, with the exception of certain style attributes used for TeX and Typst conversion.
Project Von Repository (Sourcehut)
A Greeting Worthy of its Place by LogCabin
Garden (Digital Metaphysics Research Guild)
[email protected]
2025
We're tired of trees. We should stop
believing in trees, roots, and radicles.
They've made us suffer too much.
— A Thousand Plateaus
The wired might actually be thought of as a highly
advanced upper layer of the real world. In other words,
physical reality is nothing but an illusion,
a hologram of the information
that flows to us through the wired.
— Serial Experiments Lain
In the past, for a long time, philosophical thought, morality, ethics, and scholarship were held in high esteem despite their momentary uselessness. However, under the neoliberal regime of the 21st century, their value has been dragged through the dirt and trampled. The intelligentsia class, once dispersed across broad fields and leading social innovations, has now become an overwhelming majority due to the popularization of knowledge—to the extent that it is difficult to distinguish who truly counts as an intellectual. Thus, the minority tendency that characterized the intelligentsia has vanished, and it is more accurate to say that it now bears the features of a proletariat class. The traditional class dichotomy has been appropriated (détourned) into digital space, while the material-world class structure it once mirrored has faded into being a mere shadow of the digital order. Without analyzing this archetypal digital space, the structure of contemporary reality remains a mystery akin to Plato’s cave—essentially meaningless.
So, who now constitutes the intelligentsia within today’s proletariat? The philosophers. The thinkers. Obviously, this does not refer to professional philosophers. Rather, those who embody the original sense of philosophie—lovers of wisdom—constitute the new intellectual minority, much like the intelligentsia of past revolutionary eras.
The information revolution has brought about a democratization of knowledge, but it has also exacerbated qualitative gaps in understanding. We now inhabit a society where everyone performs the appearance of expertise. Milan Kundera’s premonition is realized: "Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding… (Kundera, 1979)"
Eventually, this has weakened the pen—the weapon of the intellectuals. Needless to say, this was no accident. The primary cause of academic inflation lies here. In our time, the intellectual bourgeoisie is not the collapsing class of the highly educated (the aristocracy), but the influencer class (the bourgeoisie). Their accounts and channels, brimming with followers and subscribers, are the supreme means of production in the modern age. This is also the consequence of the web evolving to the point where Noam Chomsky’s “manufacture of consent” can now be performed not by a central institution but by anyone.
Unlike in the past, reformers today are no longer severely hindered by law. In many democratic nations, the law more or less reflects public opinion. The problem lies in the paradox that the agents of that opinion do not understand it. Judicial systems in advanced capitalist democracies have evolved over time, becoming less obstructive to change and progress. Our true enemy lies not in the state but in social conventions and popular norms.
Take Japan, once a nation of bibliophiles, which is now being described as “a country where bookstores are disappearing.” The decline of books offering extended arguments is a clear suppression of democracy—for democracy only functions atop quality speech and serious reading. Comments and short-form videos cannot sustain democracy. Why, then, is this happening? Is it state censorship? No. The problem is that society itself has begun discarding narrative knowledge. Even without direct action by the state, such phenomena arise. In these situations, the state is powerless—no government can compel its citizens to thirst for knowledge. This proves that Hobbes’s “war of all against all” can occur even within a capitalist democracy.
Today’s informational bourgeoisie—our influencers—use anti-intellectualism as a weapon to suppress reading and thinking. This suppression of thought is our true enemy. It is what destroys democracy and the open society.
The hopeful truth is this: we no longer need to oppose the law. The law already guarantees us the freedom of speech, action, and publication. The real issue is the spontaneous anti-intellectualism of mass society. Thus, our struggle can—and must—remain entirely lawful. We must remember that many social conventions function like customary law. Enemies of the open society often try to blur the distinction between custom and customary law in order to lend authority to the customs they have established within their narrow, insular communities. In East Asia, this tendency is especially severe. Even actions fully respectful of the legal system are subjected to witch hunts, simply for violating collective disgust. These attacks are often led by the informational bourgeoisie—those who possess the means of production in the form of speech privilege online—known as influencers. Before their rise, logic, discourse, and narrative vanish without a trace. They incite the masses not through argument, but through an endless stream of images.
Some influencers use this power in a Promethean sense—to empower others intellectually. But many more exploit it, inciting others and parasitically appropriating the intellectual achievements of others.
For example, while many influencers proudly label themselves “digital creators,” few actually create anything. Rather, they edit and recombine pre-existing elements into derivative works, thereby influencing others. "Reconnect the copies to the map"! Though some generously share their knowledge, the presence of this minority does not resolve the structural problem.
However, this version of reform has its own unique method. The digital liberation of the previous generation gained its reputation through its radicalism and acceleration, but due to the arborescent genealogy of Manicheism (rebellion v. the empire) it left behind numerous incidents, mishaps, and tragedies (Swartz, 2016).
What we need from now is not a Manichaean assault on the concept of paywall and surveillance, but a line of flight toward a plateau where striated surfaces do not exist. Thus, our response to the decayed episteme of venture-funded academia is not confrontation, but migration—an ontological departure toward Wired-level plateaus, written in resolutions too high for the analog institutions to perceive. The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (Swartz, 2008) was a method born of compulsion and necessity within the digital Ancien Régime. It fought in the terrain of the old; we now need a new topology. "This revolution must once and for all break with its own prehistory and derive all its poetry from the future. Little groups of 'militants' claiming to represent the 'authentic Bolshevik heritage' are voices from beyond the grave; in no way do they herald the future (Strasbourg, 1966)." Let us put it more casually, but more clearly: Why should we even bother with paywalled PDFs when we can write more freely, more intellectually, more beautifully, and more powerfully than they ever could?
This will require a vast number of texts and connections. "Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks men take a long time to accomplish, that's all (Camus, 1939)."
"Our task as men is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls."
Our task is to protect critical thought—minority dissenting views suppressed by Bolshevik-style majorities—from the fanaticism of the masses, and to create spaces where such thought may flourish. We must support a critical public sphere (Habermas, 1991) for non-integrated forces of minorities, outsiders, and radical intellectuals (Marcuse, 1980).
"Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it (Marx, 1845)." But we would like to add one condition: "That change must occur within the Wired, because if it remains in the physical layer, it will inevitably be reversed." It is crucial to see the mirrored image under the OSI 7-layer hierarchy, flipped under the physical layer, and that is what we call the core of the Wired, the fundamental.
The thesis is indispensable for the formation of the public sphere. Unlike physical forums of the past, today’s infosphere lacks bonds beyond information itself. Physical forums were held together by human relationships and shared location, but were limited in reach. The internet, in contrast, gathers people with ease—but the only glue is information itself.
In such a society, information that is easily deleted, censored, or lost due to the closure of service providers is equivalent to expelling or physically punishing the organizers. Thus, to maintain a properly functioning public sphere, we need a file system where anything published with consent becomes permanently preservable.
To realize this, we actively adopt and promote distributed filesystems (Benet, 2014; Daniel & Tschorsch, 2022), digital signatures through GnuPG and decentralized timestamping technologies (Gipp et al., 2015; Hepp et al., 2018). We also provide assistance in using these tools.
On the other hand, we can leverage the strongest weapon called "forgetting".
"…it is precisely the youth who have first asserted an irresistible rage to live and who are spontaneously revolting against the daily boredom and dead time that the old world continues to produce in spite of all its modernizations (Strasbourg, 1966)."
Byung-Chul Han, in his book The Scent of Time (Han, 2017), calls for a revolution of time in our experience. What is a revolution of time? It is the resistance to the crisis of καιρός (kairos)—the qualitative moment—that now looms over us. The simultaneous nature of all things in the digital era obstructs deep experiences and inner reflection made possible by the spatial limits of distance. With ubiquitous connectivity, we now live in work-time whether on vacation, at home, or abroad.
We must provide a technological sanctuary from this, a shelter for people heisted by the logic of philosophical zombies (Chalmers, 1997). A shift in the quality of time requires a new understanding of time, and support for reconstructing modes of life. But will such a sanctuary only be arborescent?
Han’s critique of Deleuze focuses on the atomization brought by rhizomatic thinking. Yet he also speaks of a target we can throw ourselves into—a source of projective subjectivity—a hope that emerges through negative thought against the current cheap optimism. So what is hope? It is all forms of becoming within a circulating system, and their sum total. It is the truth that the highest line of flight always exists—and it is you who draws that line. “Multiplicity must be made.”
Thus, the arborescent rituals that Han proposes are valid—yet it is equally vital that such intellectual shelters arise from within the rhizome itself. To resolve the contradiction that rhizomes, when forced upon a structure, revert to trees, we need trees that can become rhizomes, and rhizomes that can birth trees. For the minority, the outsider, the radical thinker—arboreal rituals must serve as temporary shelters, safe houses. But these shelters, formed through folds, will one day meet other folds, form concentric circles, and momentarily act as organs upon the body without organs. “The desert is populous.”
For decades, there has been a certain flow on the Internet that can be temporarily named as "American Software Freedom", "Cypherpunks", "Hacker Ethics", and so on. Their achievements are remarkable—they have protected human freedom in the infosphere, whether intended or not. But it's also true that their efforts focus primarily on technical/political support and lack a philosophical structure. They may be seen as nomadic war machines appropriated through Shannon's information theory. This contributes to the perception that their movements are radical and hard to understand by the public, who do not grasp why software and networks must be free.
Stallman's GNU Manifesto and Freedoms 0–3 are akin to a Magna Carta (Stallman & others, 1985). But just as the Magna Carta was not merely a legal document but a social fold of memory and imagination about liberty, Stallman’s declaration must also function beyond technical guidance—it must operate as a metaphysical signifier structuring the digital subject. This is not merely a legal right to information freedom, but a rethinking of our era's conditions of becoming and coexistence. Thus, a new metaphysical language is needed—one that elevates technological liberty to the level of social interiority.
Through this language, we must re-rhizomatize ethical structures hardened into trees, seek new terrains and create smooth spaces for communal becoming.
Thus, it is through the thesis of the ritualization of the nomadic war machine — or the return to such rituals — that we may finally glimpse what must be done, and how it is to be done. Meta–meta–meta–… onward. The only way to avoid the permanent arborescence of the rhizome is to keep moving ever further, to gaze upon the forest — which becomes an idea — from the furthest distance, with the eyes of migratory birds.
Therefore, we aim to provide the intelligentsia across all strata with rigorous analysis and argumentation to articulate the vision of an open society in the infosphere. This is a philosophical re-appropriation of the structures formed by the free software movement—toward re-rhizomatization.
Our project is to simultaneously reduce plateaus into digital space, while also overlaying those plateaus upon the very concept of reality. Document-sharing/archive instances are plateaus.
"Each plateau can be read from any point, and may connect to any other plateau. To make multiplicity, one must find ways to produce it."
To ensure that an instance does not end as a dot but becomes a line, we must design structures that enable continual movement to the next point—a continuum. We believe this is best achieved through none other than the webring (Webring, n.d.).
Of all early internet protocols, USENET was among the most rhizomatic. Each newsgroup constituted a plateau—distributed, non-hierarchical, and sustained through mutual mirroring across decentralized servers. These networks fostered multiplicities rather than totalities, and relations rather than positions.
The Web did not begin as a tree. It began as a field of references, an invention of intertextuality made operational. It allowed each text to link freely and to coexist without subordination. But problems emerged when certain texts no longer sought dialogue. They aimed instead to constitute themselves as the organizing principle of all others, positioning every remaining text under their signifying regime and leaving nothing outside their grasp.
As certain texts began referencing, organizing, crawling and "indexing" other texts, they assumed the role of master signifiers, fixing chains of meaning and structuring the symbolic order of the Web itself. By positioning themselves in a meta-level relation to other texts, they effectively elevated themselves into a higher logical type (super-text) in the sense described by Russell’s type theory (Russell, 1908), inaugurating an arborescent logic within a previously rhizomatic space.
Retrieved from: https://networkencyclopedia.com/usenet/
What we seek is the revival of such a writerly network. What this era demands is adventure as a line of flight; for every adventure begins with a signifier. Imagine a relay server that shares bundles of signifiers through narrative. It has existed since ancient times under many names (folklores, oral literature) and can be seen as a concept tasked with returning adventure to little Hans, who weeps after the adults have taken his map. This concept itself is also a signifier.
As a tool to initiate such a journey, we have developed a software kit for building a folklore-transmission relay server and its accompanying network. Installing it on a web server is an act aimed at composing the δύναμιςpotentiality of the plane of a plateau. It may take the form of a document archive — a kind of blog — that is not connected to any other instance; or it may become part of a rhizome, relaying and emitting a multitude of texts; or perhaps, rather than generating its own texts, it may choose to disseminate the drifting texts of the rhizome into the established surface web, sustaining the vitality of the rhizome at the hardened roots. The possibilities are infinite.
What matters is to reimagine the non-surface Web (often independent from the aggressive crawling and indexing of higher-order typed super-texts, then often dismissed as a digital leper colony of the Middle Ages) as an oceanic space, where, in Foucauldian terms, the ship of fools sets sail: unpredictable, yet carrying the possibility of something that reason itself cannot forsee. In doing so, we reclaim the prophetic value of madness.
Foucault described the ship of fools as a floating quarantine, a symbolic and material device through which early modern societies expelled those who no longer fit within the order of reason. Madness, in this schema, was not simply misunderstood, but made unspeakable, set adrift beyond the boundaries of rational discourse.
A similar topology emerges in digital space. What is dismissed as the "hidden/non-surface web" (invisible archives, forgotten nodes, anonymized networks) is often pathologized as a chaotic waste. But we see in these zones a different kind of potential: not the inverse of reason, but its outside. A space not of madness or wisdom, but of something else…something that escapes categorization, where new forms of thought may begin to stir.
We propose a reappropriation of the ship of fools; not as a metaphor for pathology, nor as a vessel of subversive genius, but as a figure of drift along the edge of intelligibility. Let it sail again, not toward meaning, but through the open sea where neither meaning nor unmeaning holds.
We do not reclaim madness as wisdom. We reclaim the silence imposed upon it. We reclaim the possibility that thought still stirs outside visibility, and that digital space—if fractured rightly—can once again carry something the portrayed physical shadow of the network could not contain.
And thus…
And therefore…
Henceforth, endlessly…
This absence of closure is what we require. We care little for beginnings or endings. Hence, we attempt to draw the map of our body without organs through the following words of Deleuze and Guattari:
"Write to the th power, the power, write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow offshoots! Don't be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line! Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight. Don't bring out the General in you! Don't have just ideas, just have an idea (Godard). Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not photos or drawings. Be the Pink Panther and your loves will be like the wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988)
This is not the end of this text, nor its completion. Somewhere, it continues. We only hope you might accompany us from time to time in this dispersed, fragmentary, and loosely entangled journey.