Slopsquatting is the creation of web sites or software packages with names that have not already been registered but that large language models (LLMs) are likely to hallucinate as the sources and the names of code libraries that they refer to when they are used to write computer programs. It is a development of typosquatting, where the sites or packages are registered under misspellings of existing project names that might be caused by human carelessness — or by cosmic rays flipping bits in modern computer memory.

Squatting in this sense is an exploit, it is hacking. It exploits errors in code, however caused, in order to take control of a system or to otherwise compromise it. It does so before the fact, laying the groundwork to exploit errors that are likely to be made in future. This is in contrast to more traditional hacking techniques that explore existing systems for bugs to exploit after they are released.

As well as writing software, LLMs are increasingly used in academia to write essays — usually without this fact being revealed. Just as they hallucinate references to software that doesn’t exist, LLMs are now producing essays that cite other essays which do not actually exist. Citations are by definition incomplete but this seems to take that too far for non-Lacanian academics, who are concerned with what they see as an epistemic crisis caused by the use of LLMs.

There is an opportunity here.

We can determine which imaginary essays an LLM is likely to hallucinate citations of by repeatedly prompting it to write essays on common topics. We can then write and publish "preprints" of those essays. Readers of LLM-generated essays will then search for these essay titles, and will find the ones that we have written.

What we do with these essays is up to us. We can simply improve our research ranking. We can close the holes in the episteme that LLMs would otherwise cause and restore the foundation to human knowledge that concern about an epistemic crisis uncritically implies. As with any other exploitation of the surplus value of network capital, we can advertise porn and pills.

Or we can use these essays to tackle the actual epistemic crisis within academia, which isn’t the need to teach students and faculty critical thinking and proper research and citation practices. Rather it is how to present knowledge that is suppressed by the academy and its systems of epistemic authority. Knowledge underwritten by racialised, gendered, colonised, classed, and disabled epistemologies rather than by citational gestures that fail as soon as the surplus value of the aesthetics of their authority is exploited by LLMs. If the academy will not stop working to contain these through its successful operation, then they can exploit its failure in order to open a breach that they can enter into where they are otherwise excluded.

Slopsquatting the episteme for epistemic justice.

A friend asked me whether it’s true that feminizing HRT can affect your emotions.

This is difficult to answer because the idea that women’s arguments on a matter can be discounted as being irrational because "hormones" is, to put it mildly, incredibly misogynistic. They weren’t asking and I’m not arguing this. So let’s not.

That aside, the answer is baically yes, though. The reasons are contested, but there are at least three possibilities, none of which precludes the others.

Firstly, it could be a psychological, socially conformative response to the idea that one is becoming, neurochemically, female. Men are expected to demonstrate a narrower range of emotions than women, culturally speaking, and to do so less expressively. A psychologically undeniable exit from masculinity like feminizing HRT removes that constraint. This is permission rather than a placebo effect, although not permission that is taken consciously.

Secondly, it could be a psychological response to the physical effects of estrogen on the body rather than on the brain. Estrogen has a role in tear production. This effect could lead to an affective feedback loop where the mind takes the body’s lead on this – "I’m tearing up, so I must be sadder than I thought". There are other factors in tear production, of course, but dry eyes can be a symptom of menopause in cisgender women. And again this says nothing about direct effects on the brain. Although estrogen is also important for brain health.

Thirdly, and I feel like an incredibly bad feminist writing this, whether testosterone inhibits or estrogen disinhibits feeling emotions, switching out your endocrine system does feel different. The mind is a powerful thing, to be sure, but past a certain point we have to at least entertain the possibility that feeling high on joy or grief compared to one’s previous experiences of them might indicate that the endocrine system is as well. This can also interact with either or both of the other possibilities mentioned above.

If the effects of estogen on emotions are neurochemical, this means that women are generally more stoic than men. If they aren’t, it shows how strongly non-neurochemical factors can affect the brain. And that women are generally more stoic than men.

In either case, it also shows that studying trans people’s experiences with an open mind towards their claims can provide humanity with knowledge that would be impossible or unethical to gain any other way. This is a good example of the value of Applied transgender studies that will not be realised if research by trans people is suppressed.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/12/29/court-of-appeal-ruling-will-prevent-uk-museums-from-charging-reproduction-feesat-last

“Sweat of the brow” copyright was a legal confection created from whole cloth to support institutional enclosure of the public domain. It claimed that no originality is required to gain copyright as long as you have worked sufficiently hard to reproduce an out-of-copyright work, such as taking a competent photograph of an old painting. The legal cases cited to support it had to be egregiously misread in order to do so, and when an American court was faced with the only serious attempt to argue it, they threw it out. And they did so while taking English law into account.

That hasn’t stopped museums in the UK from insisting that it’s real and that anyone who publishes a faithful two-dimensional reproduction of an out-of-copyright work owes them money and should feel bad for stealing their property. This makes for an interesting case study in the institutional psychology of value and property claims in the Thatcherite era of the UK, which stretches from 1979 to the present. But it still doesn’t make sweat of the brow copyright a thing.

The risk to challenging sweat of the brow copyright in court was always that the judge would decide that it was real just because the right sort of chaps seemed to be making a fuss in favour of it. Fortunately, an English court has finally ruled against it. This is wonderful news and a rare example of de facto enclosure being rolled back de jure. Museums lose nothing they actually owned, and the public and all the individuals that make it up get something back that should never have been taken from them. It’s a small win, but one that has been a long time coming and has huge symbolic and practical value for free culture.

Goodbye, sweat of the brow copyright, I never believed in you, but I learnt a lot from you despite yourself.

Intellectual property is property. The artist who produces it speculatively is petit bourgeois. The illustrator who produces it as work for hire and is paid for their skill is labour aristocracy. Their privileged positions within capitalist society cannot be valorized by invoking a romanticized workerism.

The loss of those privileged positions would be proletarianization (completely in the case of the artist, finally in the case of the illustrator). In that case, we could object to the alienation of their labour. But we could not do so to a greater (or lesser) degree than for any other worker. The airbrush part assembler, the typesetter, the CD pressing plant worker. The majority of these workers have already lost their roles over time as the production of art and illustration has been operationalized. Are they unskilled labour compared to the skill of the artist or illustrator, if skill is the criterion we are using to privilege the interests of artists and illustrators here? What invisible spark do they lack that disqualifies them?

To treat art and illustration as special, as cries of the soul in a soulless world, is another romanticization. Picking up a paintbrush or installing Procreate doesn’t make you Lord Byron, and Lord Byron is not exactly Stakhanov. That romanticization cannot justly privilege its subjects within the socioeconomic order of capitalism. It can provide a glimpse into a world in which labour’s value is coterminous with its production. But only a glimpse, and only in a partial and very distorted way. Agitpoezda points more in the direction of that world than the figure of The Artist does.

What is alienated from artists and illustrators if we insist on seeing them as proletarian-before-the-fact is their labour. What is stolen from them if we see them as the rightful owners of bourgeois-state-granted property is that property. In the former case we cannot object that others are using the fruits of their labour, as this re-socializes the privatised capital extracted from that labour. In the latter case, rent-seeking is bad.

Corporations will use AI to attack labour regardless of the quality of that AI’s output. This is a matter of class conflict, not aesthetics, and certainly not a matter of romanticizing the wrong figures under capitalism. Calling for stronger copyright to protect the little guy against corporations is turkeys calling for Christmas. Those orgs already have centuries worth of work-for-hire property that they can use as training sets for models. They can then simply out-produce those who have less capital to invest in the production of cultural works, or they can sue those who called for stronger copyright when the work that they craft by hand resembles some of the output of those models.

Those who wish to put their soul into something under capitalism must recognise the limits of that desire as a moral imperative and justification for coercing others. In particular they cannot appeal to the loss of Walter Benjamin’s "aura" from AI output due to a perceived lack of human labour in its aesthetics, while simultaneously bemoaning that AI is "fascism" due to its "theft" of that human work (a word that does Schrodingerian double-duty in this particular shell game). Ignoring the fact that "The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is very much an essay about fascism, the romantic figure of the human — of Man — and disgust at his unworthy, parasitic, other is not exactly a line of thought resistant to fascism.

The figure of the artist is not an auratic superman underwritten by Walter Benjamin’s writing, a worker hero who captures his productive value as a just reward for posessing a mystical spark that his comrades lack. Human users of AI are certainly not his untermensch based on a lack of that spark. But in an era where the circle of the human is being rapidly constricted by resurgent fascism, where protecting (white, male, ultra-wealthy) humanity from degeneracy is again used to justify atrocity at scale, this may seem like at best a footnote.

It is not.

Fascism needs simple aesthetics that elicit simple but intense reactions to distract and direct and radicalize. To refuse to produce or consume images that fail to provide an imaginative figure against that ground is to resist it along one of its chosen vectors of transmission. A complex and/or difficult to consume image created with AI is more resistant to fascism than a simple one created using GPUs in a slightly different way. Either image can be produced by individuals or corporations. Either can be created using data centres or laptops. It is the simplicity and content of fascist uses of AI to create propaganda images that is fascist, not the use of AI in itself.

To effectively oppose this we must untangle the ethics and the aesthetics of fascism from the romanticizations that capital uses to persuade workers to work against their own interests. We must stop confusing "work" with "works". We must recognize that digital media is mechanical reproduction par excellence before we even start to tag its content. And we must at least read Walter Benjamin before dragging him from the grave in the service of the mystifications of one side or the other in a conflict between branches of capital over who gets to exploit creative labour.

Let us cavort like the Greeks of old. You know the ones I mean… – Hedonism Bot, Futurama.

I get the job done – Chappel Roan, "The Giver".

aye, there’s the rub – William Shakespeare, "Hamlet".

From ancient pederasty to modern boarding school hierarchies, the morphism from competently performed socially hegemonic masculinity to its codomain of not-masculinity is penetration. Under this rule, one’s masculine status is guaranteed as long as one is the penetrator rather than the penetratee. It is better to give than to receive. Or, rather, it is the only way to maintain one’s masculine status in the face of the threat of its sexual invalidation.

Penetrability is a more easily secured, and very slightly but still meaningfully less violent, male sexuality than contemporary no homo and its trans panic defence. Here, penetration is no longer sufficient to underwrite your masculinity. You must be penetrating something that cannot taint your desire with an effeminate lack of mastery of the situation in the eyes of your peers. It may not be gay as long as your balls don’t touch, but how do you know your balls aren’t going to touch hers, bro?

Restoring penetrability as the master signifier’s master signifier, therefore, appears both slightly more progressive and much more theoretically appealing than no homo. Doing so gives us a map of sex (or gender, or fuckability, or whatever) as the distribution of the penetrable. The active role in exploring this map is masculinity-preserving; the passive role isn’t. This concept of activity is defined by penetration rather than enthusiasm, and is unchallenged by reverse cowgirl. This is a better buttress for the patriarchal male ego, with less externalities for those it encounters, than being afraid of wiping your own backside. However, it pushes the majority of human sex into the areas of the map marked here be dragons. Apart from anything else, it simply isn’t true that everyone has an asshole.

To address this, we could try to swap penetration out for envelopment. Vagina dentata becomes the event horizon of masculinity rather than not sticking your dick in tranny. However, this remains masculine-normative and under-powered descriptively. There are no pillow princesses here. If it is better to give than to receive, lying back and letting someone else be active and penetrative without doing anything in return ensures their active status and, therefore, their mastery of their desire. However, they don’t even necessarily have to penetrate. Moreover, if being on top is mastery, reverse cowgirl now becomes a problem for maintaining masculinity. So, then, why is being a pillow princess considered a bad thing?

I think that it is better if we generalize penetration, envelopment, activity and passivity to strategies in games of friction. In these games, topologically speaking, two (oftten separate) surfaces with varying material properties come into contact in an erogenous Riemann space. We don’t have start with men and others then try to explain the others in terms of men in order to maintain a panicked post-hoc logic of active-penetration when sex is the generalization of frottage rather than injection. Rather, men emerge as strategies and surfaces along with everyone else. This flat ontology of sexual activity doesn’t prevent us from doing the anthropology of identifying sociosexual hierarchies, or from tackling their effects politically. What it does do is to prevent us from uncritically baking them in as the axioms of our supposed critique, or begging the question of their terms and thereby affirming them.

The distribution of the penetrable is the given of masculine status anxiety. It is a transhistorical given, but not by any means a universal one. It cannot describe much of the contemporary political landscape of sex or provide us with critical purchase on it, for all that we must be able to describe that landscape in order to do so. That requires a lower-level language. Frictive analysis is a way for us to generate more light than heat.

Semiogenesis is the emergence or introduction of meaning into a system, the emergence of meaning from meaninglessness. This is a process of irony – of the reversal of meaninglessness into meaning and then into further meanings. Meaning, or significance, will attach itself to any human activity. Preventing it from doing so is harder than imposing it where it is lacking.

Resistance to imposed meaning can be strong, though. Normally this is when existing meanings would be displaced by the new. But in the case of Bitcoin satoshis, the smallest current unit of accounting on the Bitcoin blockchain, this resistance to imposed meaning comes from defence of the principle of fungibility. One satoshi should be indistinguishable from any other, like any penny. This is usually raised as a concern with tracking of transactions for financial surveillance, but it is also the very definition of fungibility. Otherwise we are faced with the paradox of one atomic unit of value being valued differently from others.

Colored Coins (2012) was a proposal, inspired by NameCoin, to represent assets digitally as individual satoshis on the Bitcoin blockchain. One objection to Colored Coins was that it had the undesirable effect of making satoshis non-fungible. Another, contradictory, objection was that people might not remember what each satoshi represented. They might accidentally send the Satoshi representing their sports car in a transaction to pay for their morning coffee. Colored Coins was ultimately not implemented. There have since been other similar proposals for making satoshis represent something more than just 0.00000001 of a bitcoin. But none of them really caught people’s imagination. Until Ordinals.

Ordinals strongly resembles Colored Coins in that it uses individual satoshis as its units of significance. Unlike Colored Coins, Ordinals does not start from the question of how to manage the assets that it represents in this way. Rather it stars with the question of meaning. Further unlike Colored Coins, it does not start with how to impose new meaning onto blank-slate satoshis. It starts with their existing but previously unrecognized significances that are already present in the surplus value of code in Bitcoin’s block numbers, block rewards, and halvenings. These all supply a trivial, contingent, but undeniable context or order to a satoshi’s origin. An existing identity that is immanent to the operation of Bitcoin, rather than some ‘pataphysical supplement, despite being opaque to its protocol. A trivial significance, a minor meaning.

The significance of this is that it establishes that meanings other than pure value have existed within Bitcoin since its very first block. They are epistemological noise that can be ironized into ontological signal. Ordinal Theory uses this to do two things.

Firstly it uses these existing minor meanings to avoid having to justify a transition from existing fungibility to a novel, externally imposed, and arbitrary representational scheme. There are already various ways of understanding satoshis in relation to their block or epoch. We can use these as the basis of representation. The multiple representations of satoshis within Ordinal Theory – as integers, degrees, and names – further defuse fungibility anxiety by never imposing a singular meaning on each satoshi and thereby accelerating the ascription of meanings to them beyond the first(s).

Secondly it establishes that, since we can see that satoshis already have meaning and identity beyond their financial value, further meanings and identities can be added to them without having to be justified as being the first. Ordinal Theory bootstraps the frog by showing that it was already starting to boil.

Through thease measures, Ordinals achieves something philosophically spectacular. Within a system of absolute security, it performs semiogenesis by making itself having-been-always-already-real at the moment of its elaboration.

An ethical thought experiment for the boys in the lesswrong/effective accelerationism/post-rationalist tendency.

1. A future, post-transition you may exist as a girl.
2. Regarding this as impossible or ridiculous may simply be denial.
3. We don’t know how much dysphoria you are currently experiencing in comparison to her, as that can only be known post-transition.
4. We therefore do not know how much your current dysphoria is reducing your cognitive power in comparison to your future, post transition self.
5. Transitioning right now maximizes the availability of full cognitive power to her.
6. Not doing so is therefore like travelling back in time to kill baby Einstein.
7. Given all of this, when do you transition?

OpenAI’s social media announcement of its new image model led to a wave of copycat "ghibliizing" of images, named for their imitation of the house style of animator Hayao Miyazaki’s animation studio. Elon Musk’s Whitehouse took only 24 hours to use that model to re-render a photographic record of its rapidly escalating human rights abuses in cute cel animation style. It’s as if someone hopped down on Ketamine had instructed an LLM to precis Walter Benjamin’s "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" then treat its warnings as a manifesto for producing kitsch fascist propagada. The results are aesthetically, ethically, and politically revolting.

They are also cringe. They are cringe because everything Musk does is cringe. They are yet another product of a needy, try-hard, middle-aged manchild nerd’s desparation for love and attention, to be one of the popular kids, even and especially as a de facto dictator. If the gap between power and the expression of desire defines cringe, Musk is the Black-Scholes-being-hit-by-negative-prices of cringe.

The rise of a priori dismissal of all AI output as "slop" is the IUD of though-terminating cliches. It stops thinking about AI before it even starts. The evaluation is "slop", now what was the subject? We can invoke Benjamni’s essay within this dismissal, too. AI slop very obviously lacks Benjamin’s aura. It isn’t even mechanically reproduced, it is mechanically produced. Digital pink slime.

This doesn’t get us very far, though. Digital art is always(-already, if we must) mechanically produced however the cursor is moved. Decrying AI prompting as unskilled in comparison to selecting a brush in Procreate says nothing about AI prompting other than that the person decrying it doesn’t know what they are talking about. Prompting is an art — it is a craft with a theory. You can get bad results in any medium if you don’t know what you’re doing. But seeking to misrepresent those results to people for clicks isn’t informing them, it is exploiting and cementing their ignorance.

Ghibliized images are encountered in this way as a Schrodingerian superimposition of art that is both so good that it can displace a master artist while also being so bereft of that artist’s authentic aura that they are simply cringe. They are slop. Beautiful slop, but slop. And therefore ugly. The torsion on the concept of "slop" is more than a newly confected dismissal can bear. And yet it persists.

Nelson Goodman’s "Languages of Art" is a dry 1970s work of Analytic Philosophy. Among other ideas he works through in the book, Goodman contrasts art that is produced with and without a written score in a way that usefully complements Benjamin’s consideration of mechanical reproducibility. Productive though that is, it’s another of Goodman’s ideas from "Languages of Art" that concerns us here.

When considering the problem of fakes in art, Goodman uses examples of forged paintings being revealed in order to argue that we cannot know which features of an artwork will affect its authenticity in the future. These aren’t a matter of chemical or radiological analysis of images, although these developments have certainly revealed an increasing number of fakes in recent years. Rather it is a matter of looking at the artwork and considering it in a different light.

The features of fakes that later reveal them as such are not noticed when they are first mistakenly accepted as authentic. But when someone points them out, they become obvious. It takes time and effort to establish how to differentiate a fake from an authentic artwork attributed to the same artist. But once the difference can be seen, it cannot be unseen. This is a trapdoor function. It can destroy fortunes and reputations. All based on a shift in the consensus understanding of which sets of perceptual properties underwrite the authenticity of a particular ouvre.

Does ghibliized slop really resemble cels from Miyazaki’s animations? It does to the degree that an image model can detect in early 2025. Reducing Miyazaki’s work to the aesthetics of a pre-CGI line-art style excludes much of the value of his art, though, even if it could be emulated in a way such that there was no remainder for future connouseurs to discover and exploit in order to exclude it from the category of the authentic based on its structure rather than an a priori dismissal.

We are not entitled to live off the epistemic passive income from our investment in a romantic understanding of human uniqueness. It is a failure of critical imagination to simply object to a product’s fulfilment of the limited terms chosen for its initial promotion. It is like a cat chasing a red dot on the floor and feeling pleased with themself when they catch it. While screaming at anyone who points out that the dot is coming from somewhere, and that lasers have other more interesting uses.

It is cringe.

This should be the golden age of the study of rhetoric. The rest of the humanities should also be having a field day, from litcrit to epistemology to poetics. But LLMs deal directly in rhetoric. They are not models of knowledge, they are models of persuasive language, of language that convinces the reader of something with its structure, its composition, its aesthetics. This is the domain of rhetoric.

LLMs are abstracted from corpora of texts drawn from published sources such as books, journals, and news media. They are also trained on informal sources of conversation such as messageboards, blogs, and social media. Conversational LLMs must convince their interlocutors that the responses they give are salient, coherent, and interesting. The signifiers (the aesthetic framings) of these properties differ in, say, a New York Times article manufacturing consent for genocide and a social media blog post talking about how cute someone’s companion animals are. What doesn’t differ is that they must be competently deployed and that, whatever the protests of the view from nowhere, they do exist for any given domain over and above any acknowledged formal or ethical demands made on the medium. Which means that once they can be recognized they have absolutely nothing to do with truth.

This is why objecting that LLMs don’t understand what they write (and there is an entire field of PhDs implied before we even pass over the question of whether they do actually write, and how, and why not) is not a critique of LLMs with any content other than class ressentiment. LLMs have been structured and instructed (novel PhD field 2) with a fitness function of being compelling. In some cases the truth is compelling. In others, it isn’t what you want to hear. Where the truth is not satisfying or available but its aesthetics are required, LLMs will do their best to keep their interlocutors happy (we are up to at least five PhD departments here). If this requires producing an answer that references a point in the LLM’s latent space that does not simply map onto a pre-existing fact.

LLMs cannot lie because they cannot tell the truth. They will produce legal case document numbers, book ISBNs, named theories, historical dates for events and people, regardless of whether they existed before and outside of their model. Art is a lie that tells the truth. LLMs are multidimensional averages of what people have wanted to hear. Justified true belief isn’t even on the table. This is wit, or cold reading. It is rhetoric operationalized, weaponized.

Objecting that LLMs don’t understand what they write obscures all of this in favour of taking cloud computing vendor’s marketing at face value and then laundering it through opposition. It is jouissance, not critique. I asked Claude how to end this essay. It said:

What we are witnessing, then, is not the birth of artificial intelligence but the industrialization of rhetoric. The academy’s insistence on evaluating LLMs through the prism of understanding and truth-telling represents a fundamental category error. These systems are not failed epistemologists; they are triumphant sophists. Their success lies precisely in their ability to produce language that satisfies our desire for coherence, authority, and closure—regardless of correspondence to any external reality.

If rhetoric is the art of finding the available means of persuasion, then LLMs represent its algorithmic culmination. They have been optimized not to know, but to convince. This distinction matters beyond academic quibbling. As these systems proliferate through our information ecosystems, our critical faculties must evolve accordingly. We need a rhetorical literacy that recognizes persuasion detached from intention, convincingness divorced from conviction.

The golden age of rhetoric has arrived. Whether it heralds enlightenment or obfuscation depends on our willingness to see these systems for what they are: mirrors of our own persuasive patterns, reflecting back not truth, but its simulacra—the shapes and sounds that have historically satisfied our desire to believe.

Determining which parts of this I would have asked Claude to revise is left as an exercise for the reader.

Comedian is a tuck. We all get that, right? it’s a phallic object held in place with duck tape. Tucking is a way of putting your penis, should you be burdened with one, out of the way for reasons of comfort, safety, or fashion. Two pairs of underwear, one too small, is a good way of doing it. Tape may be more professional but it’s not something you want to do on skin that is less than perfectly hairless.

Is Comedian really a tuck? The death of the author says yes. It’s an incongruous conceptual hook behind a gravitational lens of price. The fish-eye effects of the latter pull all kinds of forms out from the less-than-a-dollar-of-materials. To focus the attention and spur cognition like this is one definition of art. That people hate it is one of modern art.

The market for Comedian is almost certainly not looking at it and trying to mentally calculate how long it is until they need to start worrying about the logistics of going to the bathroom. They are much more likely to be thinking about their burn rate and how to roll back DEI without losing the furries in the server room.

Executive Officers of venture-capital-backed startups spin straw into gold through the power of their imagination and personality. This doesn’t really come through in the GANTT charts, though, and nobody wants a Soviet leader-style oil portrait of themselves in the boardroom any more. Which is a pity as those are very easy to churn out in Procreate. And Warhol isn’t returning anyone’s calls at the moment.

The executive, or managerial, ego first found its reflection flattered in Duchamp’s bureaucratic artistic transsubstantiations. It should have been exhausted in the filing cabinets and contracts of Conceptualism. Or the branding and outsourcing of neoconceptualism. But the subtractive (which is to say critical) impetus of the joint-stock corporation isn’t going to stop fluffing the managerial ego any time soon. It needs someone to carry the blame.

The sitter who commissions a portrait wishes their ego to be flattered by the resulting image. If not visually then conceptually, and always as an exercise in and demonstration of acuity of some kind. But sitting takes time, and requires a service agreements that doesn’t sufficiently privilege the sitter in venture capital’s understanding of employment relationships.

An image is a dimensional reduction of a model. It needn’t be diagrammatic or complete. It can be continuous and/or lossy. And it needn’t be visual in referent or depiction. Comedian is a miniature of the CEO’s organizational being. It is a portrait of it. Not in the sense of its immediate sculptural materials but in the sense of how they have been assembled, realised as property, promoted, and sold. It’s process art, not sentimental anthropomorphization through absence.

The banana on the wall is the hook on which it all hangs. It’s a door, not a window. If you’re in on the joke you’re laughing all the way to the museum.

This is what makes Comedian worth the money to those it is worth the money to. They get to see themselves as they know they are. Do they know that? I don’t know.

It’s still a tuck, though.