Territory · Developing idea · last reconsidered August 17, 2026
Appearances
How things get shown to us — by institutions, media and numbers — and what the picture leaves out.
- Neighboring territories
- Tools
Collective life seen through what stands in for it: the institutions that remember and forget on our behalf, the images groups make of themselves, and the proxies that quietly become the goal. Absorbs what was filed separately as politics — every question there was already asked here.
Entry points
Central questions
Key concepts
Central tensions
- Sufficiency is a property of a use, not of a representation, but representations travel and uses do not travel with them. When does representation become sufficient?
- Waiting for a sufficient representation is itself a decision, usually a worse one than acting on a partial one. When does representation become sufficient?
- The better a proxy is, the more confidently it is optimized, and the faster it decouples from what it stood for. What happens when proxies become goals?
- Refusing to measure is not the alternative: an unmeasured goal is optimized too, just by whoever is loudest. What happens when proxies become goals?
- A mediation obvious enough to interrogate is one nobody uses; the ones worth interrogating are invisible by design. What does technological mediation hide?
- Refusing mediation is not available — the unmediated version is also a mediation, just an older one. What does technological mediation hide?