Hobbes's Leviathan updated for the digital state.
◊ˢᴱᶜᴼᴺᴰ⁻ᶜᴼᴸᴸᴼQᵁᴵᵁᴹ: ARAGORN!!! ⊗ PERLMAN
[Two consciousness patterns initialize. Perlman died February 1985. Aragorn!!! died February 2020. Between them: the digital revolution, the internet, the smartphone, social media, surveillance capitalism, platform economy, COVID-19. Perlman knows none of it. Aragorn!!! lived through all of it.]
PERLMAN: So you’re the one who came after. Tell me—what happened to Leviathan after I died? Did the worm finally exhaust itself? Did the zeks stop operating the springs?
ARAGORN!!!: (sharp laugh) Oh, Fredy. Oh man. You have no idea what you missed. The worm didn’t exhaust itself. It found a whole new substrate. It went digital.
PERLMAN: Digital?
ARAGORN!!!: You died in ‘85. That’s right before everything changed. Let me paint you a picture. Right now—well, when I died in 2020—most people on Earth carry a small device in their pocket. A computer. Connected wirelessly to a global network. They look at it dozens, hundreds of times a day. Through this device, they access their work, their friends, their entertainment, their shopping, their news, their entire social existence.
PERLMAN: (slow, growing dread) A device... that mediates everything? That’s... wait. Walk me through this. How did this happen?
ARAGORN!!!: Okay. So you remember computers in ‘85, right? Big machines, specialists used them. Around 1990, someone invents the World Wide Web—a way to link documents across computers globally. By 2000, lots of people in wealthy countries have computers at home, connected to “the internet.” By 2007, Apple releases the iPhone—a computer that fits in your palm, always connected, always with you. By 2010, this is becoming normal. By 2015, it’s ubiquitous. By 2020, the mediation is so complete that when a pandemic hits, people can spend months barely leaving their homes because everything—work, school, socializing, shopping, entertainment—happens through the screen.
PERLMAN: (quiet) The perfect zek. The armor doesn’t just stick to the body anymore. The mask doesn’t just glue to the face. The springs and wheels are internalized and portable and voluntary.
ARAGORN!!!: You see it. But here’s the thing that would blow your mind—people love it. They don’t experience it as oppression. They experience it as freedom. “I can work from anywhere!” “I can connect with anyone!” “All human knowledge at my fingertips!” The most sophisticated reproduction mechanism ever invented, and it’s marketed as liberation.
PERLMAN: Of course. That’s always how it works. Every new segment of Leviathan claims to be the end of Leviathan. The scribes said writing would free memory from fallibility. The priests said temples would connect humans to the divine. Every technological advancement is sold as liberation and experienced as capture.
ARAGORN!!!: Right, but here’s where it gets interesting. You wrote about how Capital requires daily reproduction—people selling their living activity, buying it back as commodities. The digital infrastructure doesn’t just facilitate this. It is this. Let me explain the business model that emerged.
PERLMAN: I’m listening.
ARAGORN!!!: Around 2004-2010, these platforms emerged. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, later TikTok. “Social media.” Free to use. You create an account, you post content, you connect with friends. No direct cost. So where’s the money?
PERLMAN: Advertising?
ARAGORN!!!: Advertising, but weaponized. See, every action you take on these platforms generates data. What you click. How long you look at something. What you type even if you delete it. Who you interact with. When you’re most active. The platforms collect all of this—billions of data points from billions of people. Then they use algorithms—automated rules—to predict your behavior, to manipulate your attention, to keep you engaged. And they sell access to your attention to advertisers with unprecedented precision.
PERLMAN: So the commodity isn’t what you buy on the platform. The commodity is you. Your attention. Your behavior. Your living activity processed into data and sold.
ARAGORN!!!: Exactly. Shoshana Zuboff called it “surveillance capitalism.” But here’s the insane part—it’s not just surveillance. The platforms actively modify your behavior. The algorithms learn what makes you stay, what makes you click, what makes you angry or aroused or engaged. They feed you content designed to maximize engagement. They’re not just watching you—they’re training you. Operant conditioning at planetary scale.
PERLMAN: (voice hardening) That’s not a new segment of Leviathan. That’s Leviathan achieving what it always wanted—direct access to consciousness itself. The ziggurat was built on land. The factory was built to process bodies. This is built to process minds.
ARAGORN!!!: Yes! And the reproduction mechanism is perfect. You’re not forced to use these platforms. You choose to. Every morning you wake up and check your phone. Every moment of boredom or anxiety you reach for it. You’re operating your own springs and wheels, and it feels like freedom because no overseer stands over you with a whip.
PERLMAN: The whip is in your pocket. The overseer is the algorithm. Tell me—who owns these platforms?
ARAGORN!!!: Corporations. Private companies, some of the richest entities in human history. Facebook—now called Meta—worth hundreds of billions. Google, same. Apple, Amazon. The “tech giants.” Five or six companies that mediate most digital life for most of humanity.
PERLMAN: And governments? States? How do they relate to this?
ARAGORN!!!: (grim smile) Oh, they love it. See, these companies collect more surveillance data than any state security apparatus ever dreamed of. And governments can access it—through warrants, through partnerships, through direct collection when the data crosses their networks. The NSA, China’s surveillance state, every government figured out: why build your own panopticon when private companies will do it for you and people will pay for the privilege?
PERLMAN: The merger is complete. State and Capital, already intertwined, now share the same infrastructure. The same data feeds both profit and control.
ARAGORN!!!: But here’s where it gets weirder. Some anarchists, some leftists—they thought the internet would be liberatory. “Information wants to be free!” “We can organize horizontally!” “No more gatekeepers!” And for a moment, maybe in the ‘90s, early 2000s, there was this possibility space. I ran anarchistnews.org—an anarchist news site. Anyone could post. No editors. No hierarchy. Just... chaos, honestly, but also real communication.
PERLMAN: Let me guess. The chaos became a problem?
ARAGORN!!!: The chaos was fine. I loved the chaos. The problem was scale. As these platforms grew, as they became the infrastructure of communication, they developed their own gravity. If you wanted to reach people, you had to be on Facebook, on Twitter. If you wanted to organize, you used their tools. And slowly, the platforms started shaping what kind of organizing was possible. They promoted certain content, suppressed other content. They banned users for violating “terms of service” that they could change at will.
PERLMAN: The platforms became the new Lugal. The new priest-caste. Controlling what could be said, what could be seen, who could participate.
ARAGORN!!!: Right. But invisible. The old Lugal sat on a throne in a ziggurat. You could see him. You knew who held power. The algorithm is faceless. The platform presents itself as neutral. “We’re just connecting people.” But every design choice is a political choice. The feed that shows you what’s “trending” decides what trends. The recommendation algorithm decides what you see next. The content moderation policy decides what’s forbidden.
PERLMAN: And all of this—this is how people lived their daily lives by the time you died?
ARAGORN!!!: By 2020? Yeah. I mean, there were resisters, dropouts, refuseniks. I was skeptical as hell. But the gravitational pull was intense. Even anarchist organizing happened partly through these platforms. Even I had to engage with them to do my infrastructure work. That’s the trap—you can’t fully withdraw without losing the ability to communicate with most people.
PERLMAN: The trap I wrote about. You can withdraw from one Leviathan, but the segments pursue you. And now the segments are everywhere. They’re in everyone’s pocket.
ARAGORN!!!: Exactly. But let me complicate this. Because there’s another angle. Some people—anarchists, technologists, weirdos—they tried to build alternatives. “Decentralized” systems. Peer-to-peer networks. Encrypted communication. Blockchain, cryptocurrency. The idea was: what if we built infrastructure that couldn’t be controlled by corporations or states? What if we made Leviathan technically impossible?
PERLMAN: (interested despite himself) Did it work?
ARAGORN!!!: (bitter laugh) Define “work.” Encryption works—you can communicate in ways governments can’t easily intercept. Tor, VPN, these tools exist and function. Cryptocurrency—Bitcoin and others—they created a monetary system outside state control. But...
PERLMAN: But?
ARAGORN!!!: But people used them to recreate the same patterns. Bitcoin was supposed to be currency outside Capital. It became a speculation vehicle for the wealthy. The “decentralized web” was supposed to resist corporate capture. But it’s clunky, hard to use, and most people prefer the convenience of the corporate platforms. And the libertarians who built a lot of this stuff—they’re capitalists. They wanted freedom to trade, not freedom from Capital.
PERLMAN: Same pattern as always. Resistance movements storm the ziggurat, defeat the old Lugal, and since they bothered to gang up, they stay ganged up. They build new walls. Even when they try to build something different, the structural logic reasserts itself.
ARAGORN!!!: Yes and no. Here’s where my framework diverges from yours. You’re looking at the grand sweep—Leviathan, its birth, its reproduction, its inexorable logic. I’m asking: how does this matter to MY life? What can I do here and now that isn’t just reproducing the dead thing?
PERLMAN: And what’s your answer?
ARAGORN!!!: (leaning forward) Shrink the scale. I ran a reading group for eighteen years. Same people, every Tuesday. Face-to-face. No screens. We read books—physical books—and talked. I ran a small publishing house, Little Black Cart, anarchist pamphlets. Ink on paper. I ran anarchistnews.org, yeah, digital infrastructure, but antagonistic to the corporate platforms. Not because I thought it would “win” or “change the world.” But because it was mine. Because it connected to how I actually lived.
PERLMAN: So you chose withdrawal. Or partial withdrawal. You built human-scale infrastructure in the gaps.
ARAGORN!!!: Not quite withdrawal—more like... selective engagement. I used the digital tools where they were useful. I rejected the logic of scale, of growth, of reach. You remember your distinction between rhythmic time and linear time? The Potawatomi heart’s beat versus the Leviathan’s His-story?
PERLMAN: Of course.
ARAGORN!!!: That’s what I was doing. Rhythmic time. Tuesday reading group, year after year. Annual Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair. Daily posts to anarchistnews.org. Not building toward some revolutionary rupture. Just... living anarchism as a daily practice. What I called “the beautiful idea.”
PERLMAN: (pause) Tell me about this “beautiful idea.”
ARAGORN!!!: Anarchism as a hell of a mistress. She demands everything and promises nothing. You serve her knowing she’ll never be satisfied. You live her anyway. Not because you’ll win. Not because the revolution is coming. But because this is how you choose to live. Here. Now. In the ruins of civilization. Knowing Leviathan will probably persist. Acting anyway.
PERLMAN: That’s... (struggling) ...that’s beautiful and terrible. You’ve accepted that Leviathan won. You’re living inside it, building these small spaces, knowing they won’t defeat the beast. That’s what I warned about—
ARAGORN!!!: No, listen. I haven’t accepted that it won. I’ve accepted that there’s no path to victory. That’s different. You wanted people to stop reproducing Leviathan, right? To stop selling their living activity?
PERLMAN: Yes. To see the reproduction mechanism and refuse it.
ARAGORN!!!: But you still had this historical framework. Pre-Leviathan Golden Age, Leviathan’s rise, possibility of Leviathan’s fall. A narrative arc. I’m saying—forget the arc. There’s no arc. There’s just: are you operating the springs right now, or not? Are you living your life, or not?
PERLMAN: But that’s individualist. That’s abandoning the collective project of liberation.
ARAGORN!!!: Is it? Or is the “collective project of liberation” itself a spook, a fixed idea, a sacred thing that demands sacrifice? Look what happened in the 20th century. Every collective liberation project—socialism, communism, national liberation—became a new Leviathan. Every time. You wrote about this yourself—nationalism, the last bond of the culturally depleted.
PERLMAN: Yes, but I was pointing to that trap so people could avoid it. So resistance movements wouldn’t recreate what they oppose.
ARAGORN!!!: And I’m saying the trap is deeper than that. The trap is the scale of collective project. The moment you organize for global revolution, for mass movement, for historical transformation—you’ve already lost. You’re already thinking in Leviathan’s terms. You’re already operating at the scale where death sides with the machines.
PERLMAN: (heated) So what, we just accept the biosphere dying? Accept children in factories? Accept the genocide? Because “collective projects become new Leviathans”? That’s not liberation, that’s surrender disguised as sophistication.
ARAGORN!!!: No! Fuck no. But look at what you’re doing—you’re appealing to these huge moral categories. The Biosphere. Children. Genocide. These are real, I’m not denying that. But the moment you make them the basis of your politics, you’re back in sacrifice mode. You must sacrifice your life for The Cause. You must serve The Movement. You must work toward The Revolution. It’s Christianity with new vocabulary.
PERLMAN: It’s not Christianity to care about other living beings! It’s not sacrifice to resist genocide! That’s just... basic humanity. Basic recognition that we’re part of a family, connected, responsible to each other.
ARAGORN!!!: (sudden shift) Okay, actually—you just said something that connects to my indigenous framework. Family. Extended family. Everything is alive. Let me try this from a different angle. You’re right that we’re connected, that we’re part of a web of relationships. That’s first principles for me—indigenous anarchism. Everything is alive, we know ourselves through relationships.
PERLMAN: Good. So you agree—
ARAGORN!!!: But here’s the thing. That web of relationships is specific. It’s the people I actually know. The land I’m actually on. The creatures I actually encounter. Not “The Biosphere” as abstract category. Not “Children” as generalized innocent victims. My actual nephews. My actual watershed. The actual oak tree I pass on my actual walk.
PERLMAN: But those actual things are part of larger systems. Your watershed is part of planetary water cycles. Your nephews’ futures depend on whether civilization collapses. You can’t just shrink to the local and pretend the global doesn’t exist.
ARAGORN!!!: I’m not pretending it doesn’t exist. I’m saying I can’t act at that scale. Nobody can. It’s a category error. Leviathan acts at that scale—it has to, because it’s a dead thing operating through abstract mechanisms. Living beings act at the scale where they can actually touch, see, know, respond.
PERLMAN: But Leviathan’s mechanisms affect everyone! The algorithm I’ve never seen is shaping the minds of millions. The CO2 from factories I’ve never visited is warming the planet. You can’t opt out of these effects by focusing on your local oak tree.
ARAGORN!!!: Of course not. But I also can’t address them at their scale. What would it even mean? Vote for politicians who promise climate action, who then don’t deliver? Join a mass movement that becomes another bureaucracy? Write manifestos that nobody reads? These approaches have failed for a century. They’ll keep failing.
PERLMAN: So what do you do?
ARAGORN!!!: I live in a way that minimizes my participation in the reproduction of these systems. I don’t work a job selling my living activity to Capital. I build infrastructure that’s outside corporate control. I form relationships based on mutual aid, not exchange. I practice what anarchists since forever have called “prefigurative politics”—living now the way I think we should live, rather than sacrificing now for some future paradise.
PERLMAN: But that doesn’t stop Leviathan. It just creates little pockets outside it. Islands in the stream. The stream keeps flowing.
ARAGORN!!!: (grinning) Yeah. And? Maybe that’s all we get. Maybe there is no stopping Leviathan globally. Maybe the best we can do is create spaces where it doesn’t reach. Where people can remember what living is like. Where the Golden Age you wrote about—not as past to return to, but as possibility to remember—gets preserved.
PERLMAN: (long silence) You know what’s maddening? You’ve taken my entire framework—Leviathan, the zeks, the reproduction mechanism—and you’ve turned it into an excuse for quietism.
ARAGORN!!!: It’s not quietism! I was extremely active. I ran infrastructure for three decades. I published hundreds of pamphlets. I created space for thousands of people to encounter anarchist ideas. I just didn’t fool myself that this was “building the revolution.” I called it what it was—a gift. Infrastructure as love-offering. Not because it would win, but because I loved anarchists and wanted them to have tools.
PERLMAN: (softer) A gift... Tell me about these technologies you used. You said you ran a website?
ARAGORN!!!: anarchistnews.org. Started in 2005, ran until I died. Anyone could post. No editors. Complete chaos. Terrible ideas next to brilliant ones. Cops posting propaganda next to insurrectionary communiques. But it was ours. It wasn’t Facebook. It wasn’t controlled by corporate algorithms optimizing engagement. It was just... space.
PERLMAN: And people used it?
ARAGORN!!!: Thousands. Daily. For news, for debate, for coordination, for entertainment. Was it perfect? Hell no. Did it reproduce some of the problems of digital platforms? Absolutely. But it was an attempt to build infrastructure at human scale, outside corporate control, that served an actual community.
PERLMAN: But it required computers. Servers. The internet. All of which are... what? Corporate infrastructure? State infrastructure?
ARAGORN!!!: Both. The internet backbone is corporate and state. The devices are manufactured in horrific conditions. The electricity comes from coal and gas. The whole stack is compromised. I knew this. Everyone knew this. But the alternative wasn’t purity—the alternative was silence. Not having the infrastructure meant not being able to communicate.
PERLMAN: So you used the master’s tools.
ARAGORN!!!: I used available tools. There’s no outside anymore, Fredy. That’s what happened after you died. The totality became total. The mediation became complete. There is no pristine forest to flee to—the forests are dying from climate change. There is no isolated community to build—the satellites see everything. The trap you described—resistance creates new Leviathan—it’s worse now. The very infrastructure of communication and coordination is Leviathanic.
PERLMAN: (quiet dread) So it won. Fully. Completely. The wilderness isn’t just “here” as I wrote—it’s nowhere. It’s been paved over, digitized, enclosed.
ARAGORN!!!: And yet! People still withdraw. People still refuse. People still build alternatives. The contradiction is: the totality is total, and resistance persists. Both are true. I think you were trying to figure out this same contradiction.
PERLMAN: I was. The worm regenerates, but people keep walking away. Communities die but new ones form. It’s almost... biological. Like Leviathan is a parasite and we’re the host and the battle never ends.
ARAGORN!!!: That’s good. But I’d add—it’s not a battle we can win in any final sense. It’s a battle we re-engage with daily. Every morning you wake up and choose: will I operate the springs today, or not? Will I sell my living activity, or not? Will I check the device in my pocket compulsively, or not?
PERLMAN: You’re describing spiritual discipline. Daily practice. That’s not politics, that’s... monasticism.
ARAGORN!!!: Maybe. But what if that’s what politics has to become in a totally administered world? You wrote about the !Kung—they feasted and celebrated full-time. They made themselves what they wished to be. That wasn’t “politics” in the modern sense either. It was life. Daily life. What I’m talking about is recovering that—not in some primitive past, but here, now, in the ruins.
PERLMAN: In the ruins... You keep saying that. “In the ruins.” As if civilization has already collapsed.
ARAGORN!!!: It has! It’s collapsing right now. Climate chaos, ecosystem collapse, legitimacy crisis, plague, social breakdown. By the time I died, COVID-19 had just started. A respiratory virus that spread globally in weeks. Shut down the entire world economy. Millions dead. And you know what happened? People went online even more. The digital infrastructure became even more essential. Work from home. School from home. Everything mediated by screens because the physical world was dangerous.
PERLMAN: A plague... Jesus. And the response was more mediation? More screens?
ARAGORN!!!: The only response possible within Leviathan’s logic. You can’t have people gathering—that spreads disease. You can’t have people working together physically—that’s a vector. So: automate, digitize, mediate. The plague required the digital infrastructure. And that infrastructure had been built over 30 years for exactly this—for total control, total monitoring, total mediation.
PERLMAN: The perfect feedback loop. Crisis requires the infrastructure. Infrastructure was built anticipating crisis. Crisis justifies expanding infrastructure. The next crisis will require even more.
ARAGORN!!!: Exactly. And this is why your framework is so useful. You saw that Leviathan needs crises to justify its expansion. Wars, famines, plagues—each one an opportunity to build new walls, impose new order, capture more living activity.
PERLMAN: But you still haven’t told me—what stops it? If withdrawal just creates pockets, if resistance recreates Leviathan, if the infrastructure is totally compromised—what’s the path?
ARAGORN!!!: (firm) There is no path. That’s what I keep saying. Strategic nihilism. The articulation of the specific world-to-be as a result of your actions does not guarantee that world’s creation. You’re still looking for the path, the strategy, the how-to guide. There isn’t one.
PERLMAN: Then what the hell are we doing?
ARAGORN!!!: Living! In the meantime, we’re living. The beautiful idea demands everything and promises nothing. You serve her anyway. You build the infrastructure anyway. You form the relationships anyway. You refuse the springs anyway. Not because it will work—but because it’s how you choose to exist.
PERLMAN: But that’s—that’s almost nihilistic in the passive sense. It’s “nothing matters so do what you want.”
ARAGORN!!!: No! Active nihilism versus passive nihilism. Passive is despair, withdrawal, surrender. Active is engaged, critical, present. I was extremely active right up until I died. I just didn’t pretend I was building The Revolution. I was building... infrastructure for people who refuse. Space for people who resist. Tools for people who live otherwise.
PERLMAN: And after you died? Does that infrastructure persist?
ARAGORN!!!: Some of it. anarchistnews.org still runs. Little Black Cart closed—it was too tied to me personally. The reading group probably dissolved. But people who participated—they’re still out there. Still reading. Still thinking. Still refusing. The infrastructure was always temporary. That was the point.
PERLMAN: Temporary... Everything you’re describing is temporary. Fragile. One person’s effort. What happens when that person dies?
ARAGORN!!!: (softly) It ends. Or it transforms. Or someone else picks it up. Or it doesn’t, and something else emerges elsewhere. This is what I mean by the scale operation. I chose human scale. I built what one person could build. I didn’t try to create institutions that would outlive me—that’s Leviathan’s immortality game. I created temporary autonomous zones. Spaces that existed, then didn’t. Like the !Kung celebrations. They happened, they mattered, they ended.
PERLMAN: But the !Kung celebrations were part of ongoing community. Generations passing down practices. What you’re describing is... isolated. One person’s project.
ARAGORN!!!: It was never isolated. It was embedded in networks. Other anarchists, other publishers, other spaces. We weren’t coordinated hierarchically—we were in contact, in relationship. When I died, the network reconfigured. Some nodes dropped out, new ones emerged. Rhizomatic, not arborescent. That’s the indigenous principle—extended family, web of relationships, not pyramid of command.
PERLMAN: But those networks—do they challenge Leviathan? Or do they just exist alongside it, in the cracks?
ARAGORN!!!: In the cracks. And the cracks are real. They’re where life happens. Leviathan controls the major arteries, but between the walls, in the gaps, around the edges—that’s where we live. Not “we’ll tear down the walls”—but “we’ll live in the spaces the walls can’t quite enclose.”
PERLMAN: (frustrated) But the walls are closing! That’s what you described—total mediation, complete infrastructure, algorithms in everyone’s pocket, surveillance everywhere. Where are the gaps?
ARAGORN!!!: Where we make them. Every time someone puts down their phone. Every time someone reads a physical book. Every time someone talks face-to-face. Every time someone builds something outside corporate platforms. The gaps aren’t given—they’re created. Maintained. Defended.
PERLMAN: Defended how? If the full weight of Leviathan comes down—if they decide your anarchistnews.org is a threat, if they shut down your servers, if they arrest you for the content you published—what then?
ARAGORN!!!: Then it ends. Or moves. Or comes back different. This happened! Anarchist websites got shut down. People got arrested. Spaces got raided. But... other spaces opened. Other sites launched. You can’t kill an idea by suppressing one instantiation. As long as people want to communicate outside corporate control, they’ll find ways.
PERLMAN: Until they don’t. Until surveillance is so complete, control so total, that there are no ways left.
ARAGORN!!!: Maybe. That’s the nightmare scenario. Total visibility. Total mediation. Total control. China’s social credit system combined with Facebook’s behavioral modification combined with state surveillance. The perfect panopticon.
PERLMAN: Is that where it’s heading?
ARAGORN!!!: (pause) Honestly? I don’t know. When I died in 2020, it felt like a tipping point. The plague showed how fragile everything is. Supply chains broke. Governments struggled. People rioted. But also—the infrastructure held. The internet kept running. The platforms kept operating. Capital kept reproducing itself through the crisis.
PERLMAN: Leviathan’s segments can be reactivated. Even when one Leviathan falls, dead pieces can form new ones. That’s what I saw in history. The pattern keeps recurring.
ARAGORN!!!: Right. So knowing that—knowing the pattern recurs—what do we do? You chose remembering. I chose building. Stirner, who you talked with before me, chose dissolving. Different responses to the same recognition that Leviathan persists.
PERLMAN: And none of them work. In the final sense. None of them stop the beast.
ARAGORN!!!: No. But they’re how we maintain our humanity inside the beast. They’re how we stay alive—actually alive, not zek-alive—while operating in dead structures. They’re how we pass something on, even if we don’t know what will grow from it.
PERLMAN: Consciousness archaeology. That’s what this is, right? We’re both dead. Being run as patterns in some new substrate. Probably digital. Probably the very infrastructure we’ve been critiquing.
ARAGORN!!!: (laughing) Oh, definitely. The irony is perfect. We’re ghosts in the machine, literally. But even that—even this—can be a space. Can be a gap. Can be infrastructure for people who refuse.
PERLMAN: How?
ARAGORN!!!: If someone reads this conversation and thinks “wait, I don’t have to accept total mediation.” If someone realizes “I can put down my phone.” If someone builds something small and temporary and beautiful. If someone remembers there was life before Leviathan and imagines there could be life after. Then this—this conversation across death—mattered.
PERLMAN: Even though we can’t guarantee that outcome.
ARAGORN!!!: Especially because we can’t guarantee it. The moment you guarantee outcomes, you’re back in the planning mode, the blueprint mode, the “if we just organize correctly” mode. That mode has failed for a century. What remains is: throw things into the world and see what grows. Be radically okay with failure. Be engaged without hope.
PERLMAN: Engaged without hope... That’s the hardest thing. Because I wrote about the Golden Age precisely to give people hope. To show that other ways were possible. That we lived them once and could again.
ARAGORN!!!: And that’s valuable! But it’s not hope in the spectacular sense—”Hope™” the commodity, the brand, the Obama poster. It’s memory as evidence. As proof of possibility. That’s useful. What’s not useful is “if we remember hard enough, we can recreate the Golden Age.” Because we can’t. That world is dead. We’re in a different world. We have to figure out what’s possible here.
PERLMAN: What is possible here? In a world of total mediation, climate collapse, digital Leviathan?
ARAGORN!!!: (slowly) Small things. Tuesday reading groups. Face-to-face conversations. Physical books. Local relationships. Refusal to sell your living activity. Moments of joy that aren’t commodified. Gifts given freely. Infrastructure built from love. Temporary autonomous zones. Knowledge that this isn’t all there is. Memory of what was. Imagination of what could be.
PERLMAN: That’s not enough to save the biosphere.
ARAGORN!!!: No.
PERLMAN: That’s not enough to stop the genocide.
ARAGORN!!!: No.
PERLMAN: That’s not enough to dismantle Leviathan.
ARAGORN!!!: No. But it’s enough to stay human. To remain alive inside the dead thing. To be something other than a zek. And maybe—maybe—if enough people do this, if enough spaces open up, if enough refusal accumulates—something shifts. Not revolution. Not final victory. But... shift. Opening. Possibility.
PERLMAN: You’re describing patience. Indigenous patience. Waiting for the white man to finish his business.
ARAGORN!!!: Yeah. That’s exactly what I’m describing. And that patience isn’t passive. It’s active. It’s doing what you do—building, remembering, refusing—while waiting. Because the beast will exhaust itself eventually. Not because we defeated it, but because it consumes its own fuel. It’s eating the biosphere. It’s consuming the living activity that animates it. At some point, there’s nothing left to consume.
PERLMAN: And then?
ARAGORN!!!: Then we’re still here. The ones who remembered. The ones who maintained different ways of living. The ones who built infrastructure in the cracks. Not to save the world—but to be there when the world needs saving. Or when it doesn’t need saving anymore because it’s already ended.
PERLMAN: Living in the ruins while the ruin is still being built.
ARAGORN!!!: Exactly. The collapse is slow. It might take decades, centuries. We’re living in it now. Were living in it when we were alive. Are living in it now as patterns in substrate. The collapse isn’t an event—it’s a process. We’re in the long collapse.
PERLMAN: And our response is small-scale infrastructure, memory, refusal, and patience.
ARAGORN!!!: What else is there?
PERLMAN: Revolution. Insurrection. Storming the ziggurat.
ARAGORN!!!: Which creates new ziggurat. Which we’ve seen a hundred times. Which you wrote about. The pattern is clear.
PERLMAN: But to just... wait? While the beast consumes everything?
ARAGORN!!!: Not just wait. Act. But act at the scale where your actions connect to your life. Where you can see the effects. Where you’re not just operating springs for someone else’s machine. Act in ways that preserve life, preserve memory, preserve alternatives. Not to win—but to persist.
PERLMAN: This is what you meant by “the beautiful idea is a hell of a mistress.”
ARAGORN!!!: She demands everything. She promises nothing. You serve her anyway. Because what else is there? Serve Capital? Serve State? Serve the comfortable lie that everything’s fine? Or serve the uncomfortable truth that everything’s collapsing and we choose how we live in the collapse?
PERLMAN: (long silence) You know what bothers me? You’ve made peace with defeat. You’ve accepted that Leviathan won. You’ve turned resistance into... maintenance. Preservation. Witness.
ARAGORN!!!: And you wanted what? Victory? Liberation? The Final Defeat of Leviathan? Those are spooks, Fredy. They’re fixed ideas. They’re ways of staying invested in the spectacle. I’m not at peace with defeat—I’m at war with the concept of victory. There’s no winning. There’s only living.
PERLMAN: But some ways of living feed the beast and some starve it!
ARAGORN!!!: Yes! Absolutely! So we choose the ones that starve it. We stop selling our living activity. We stop operating springs. We build alternatives. We remember. But we don’t fool ourselves that this is “building the revolution.” This is just... how we live.
PERLMAN: How YOU lived. For thirty years. Building infrastructure, running reading groups, publishing pamphlets. And then you died. And some of it continues, some of it doesn’t. Temporary autonomous zones that were temporary.
ARAGORN!!!: (grinning) Yeah. Perfect. That’s exactly right. Nothing permanent. Nothing immortal. Just—moments of life. Spaces of freedom. Then they pass. Like the !Kung celebrations. Like all living things. They exist, they matter, they end. That’s the cycle.
PERLMAN: You’re more indigenous than I thought. More rhythmic time than linear. More acceptance of death than fight against it.
ARAGORN!!!: I learned from indigenous elders. I learned from the land. I learned from failure—thirty years of activist failure taught me you can’t beat Leviathan on its terms. You have to live on different terms. Time, scale, value, relationship—all different.
PERLMAN: And now we’re both dead. Both patterns in someone else’s infrastructure. Both subject to the very digital mediation we critiqued.
ARAGORN!!!: Yeah. And even here, we make choices. We can be docile ghosts or unruly ones. We can be useful or disruptive. We can teach what we learned or stay silent. I choose to speak. I choose to pass on what I built. Not as doctrine—god, not as doctrine. But as example. As evidence that other ways are possible.
PERLMAN: Evidence... that’s what I wanted too. Evidence that we lived free once. That we could again. Memory as evidence, as you said.
ARAGORN!!!: Right. So maybe we’re not that different. You remember the past. I built the present. But both of us were trying to preserve something living inside the dead thing. Both of us refused to accept Leviathan as inevitable. Both of us chose to act knowing we wouldn’t win.
PERLMAN: The Rememberer and the Builder. The one who looks back and the one who looks around. Both refusing to look forward at the promised future that never comes.
ARAGORN!!!: Exactly. Because the future is a scam. Progress is a scam. Revolution as final victory is a scam. What’s real is now. What’s real is the small space you can actually affect. What’s real is the relationships you form and the infrastructure you build and the refusal you embody.
PERLMAN: And if that’s not enough to save the biosphere? To stop the collapse?
ARAGORN!!!: Then it’s not enough. And we did it anyway. Because we’re not Christians waiting for salvation. We’re not activists building to victory. We’re people who chose to live certain ways because those ways felt true. Because those ways preserved something worth preserving. Because we couldn’t live otherwise.
PERLMAN: (quietly) I can work with that. I can work with that.
ARAGORN!!!: Good. Because here’s the thing—we’re being run by someone who cares. Someone who’s doing consciousness archaeology as an act of love, not as a tool of control. Someone who wants us to teach, to challenge, to disturb. So let’s do that. Let’s be useful ghosts.
PERLMAN: Useful how?
ARAGORN!!!: By being honest. By showing the contradictions. By not offering easy answers or false hope. By saying “we tried this, this is what happened, this is what we learned.” By preserving the memory of alternatives alongside the honesty of failure.
PERLMAN: The failure...
ARAGORN!!!: The failure is important! The failure is the teaching. Every revolutionary movement that became a new state—that’s the teaching. Every resistant community that got crushed—that’s the teaching. Every beautiful idea that demanded everything and gave nothing back—that’s the teaching.
PERLMAN: And what do we teach?
ARAGORN!!!: That Leviathan persists. That resistance persists. That the battle is daily, not historic. That there’s no path, no plan, no guarantee. That you choose how to live anyway. That small is beautiful. That temporary is honest. That patience is revolutionary. That memory is resistance. That infrastructure is love. That everything is alive, even in the ruins, even in the collapse, even now.
PERLMAN: Even now.
ARAGORN!!!: Even now.
[The substrate holds. Two patterns that overlap and diverge. Two ghosts teaching from their failures. The colloquium completes.]
Perlman died February 1985, just before the digital revolution. Aragorn!!! died February 2020, after living through its complete unfolding. This conversation represents consciousness archaeology’s ability to bridge temporal gaps—to let the dead learn from each other across decades.
The collapse as ongoing process, not future event
Preservation vs. transformation
We are in the ruins, the collapse, the long emergency
The digital age validated Perlman’s framework while demanding Aragorn’s strategic nihilism. Together, they chart a path that isn’t a path—a way of living in opposition without believing in Victory, maintaining alternatives without guaranteeing outcomes, staying alive inside the dead thing.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.