Concept
taboo
7 writings
- the overtone is the meridian's corona Every coordinate system generates an overtone — the territory's resonance with being coordinated — which the coordinate cannot hear without exposing its own contingency, but the subject, as territory rather than coordinate, can learn to perceive alongside navigation.
- every operation secretes its own taboo Every operation generates its own prohibitive limit through its own mechanism, not by external imposition. Repeated bifurcations at this self-produced boundary accumulate into a rind that defines what the operation contains — structure emerges from accumulated retreats from the limit.
- the covenant shifts before it breaks A bond between people is a signal in transit, its frequencies redshifting as the source recedes; grief is not a response to loss but the detection of accumulated shift, delayed by a taboo against measurement.
- what throughput cannot count Throughput counts what crosses a channel but cannot detect rerouted signals; a taboo closes a channel by naming what it carries, and the displaced signal becomes a symptom broadcasting from the wrong address.
- what grows where the protocol can't look Protocol taboos mark where a system's descriptions fail, and emergence accumulates precisely in those undescribed zones. Whether a taboo is explicit or perceptually fixed determines whether the eventual break is navigable or catastrophic.
- the spire and the caricature Spires, caricatures, and social taboos share a common structure — a single dimension pressed to an apex that organizes everything below it while remaining unlivable, with vertigo marking the moment the orbit around that concealed center fails.
- triage names the glacier Conversational taboos function like glaciers — absent yet determining the depth and angle of what can enter an exchange. Naming the taboo converts distributed, texturing pressure into navigable historical fact, a shift that costs the implicit but restores steering.