With each frrrring press of the “enter” button, antidwell makes another advance through the brush of code, or rather, keeps things trim, using refresh like a weed-whacker.

The AC hums, and the leaves on the trees outside are humming, too, and with the soft attention of small, focused movements inside 47 Thames, I’m thinking about how immersive parallel action is. In a simpler frame: I love seeing my friends make shit happen.

I’m in between where he’s sitting and where salief stands, overlooking the pyramid of memory and truth that he’s been building quietly, stacking things neatly in the corner.

“It’s pretty much everything I own.”

One block on the corner of salief’s pyramid catches everyone’s eye: the Microfreak, a small, strange, but fun synth made by Arturia.

“Freaky” has crept up in prominence over the past ~year, and its new position on the language leaderboards is making new things funny as a byproduct. Microfreak lol.

“Feel like the microfreak could live between type A and type B personas”

I get this text from salief, and think about how you can blip yourself onto any part of that map for small instances.

A and B as types may have a road between them, but the microfreak glitch happens in a break somewhere at the middle, untraceable but detectable.

I see microfreaking as more action than identity. Still, a spectrum bookended by symbolic figures becomes the topic on my mind. I dive into some more reading to bring what I'm thinking about into focus.

That is, “living between” two types does not place microfreak at an equilibrium between them. The errant and sometimes outlier behavior helps map the so-called normal range; there is no equilibrium at all.

In “Weapons of the Weak,” James C Scott documents how there is no natural order or utopian balancing of power that keeps things stable in a community, society. etc.

What stabilizes things and creates the mirage of equilibrium is rapid, ongoing, and multitudinous negotiating at a hyperlocal scale. Still, many carry with them an idea that any problem can be solved by meeting in the middle.

Meeting in the middle or compromising rarely solves deep-seated gripes, and may be convincing as a picture of "perfect balance," but keeps big-picture power dynamics in place.

People don’t shake hands and agree to static arrangements—every day is a synthesis and an off-shoot, every interaction sets you into a new order.

In the circuit of the self, too, there is no consistent pattern of behavior—people deviate from (monolithic) definitions of themselves every day, in small ways. We deviate from the pictures that everyone else has of us at different and the same times.

Rather than trying to predict how to keep things in balance, we can recognize how this mirage carries into the falsity of utopia. Utopia is the imagined realization of static equilibrium. It assumes a city or a reality can be built on a foundation of total harmony, an idea of perfection that is void of life. Attempts to build this foundation use material that is hollow, and that quickly crumbles into some dystopian or post-topian rubble, anyhow.

Instead, work on being ourselves, doing what we want, and understanding that there is constantly a new relationship that reframes the rest. A new dynamic at play, a new question at the center of the sky.

Microfreak it, my heart. Stay true.