Desires change ever so often. Culturally desires can be mapped by tracking and analysing expressions that become public. Desires can also be mapped by doing a quantitative analysis of the media that has been shared and published publicly. The quantitate analysis method often tries to stress its validity over more intuitive analytical methods. But the entire picture is captured only by both of them together.

This shrine is a final resting place for desires that are known and have been cultural forces in the past but not anymore. Desires which are not cultural forces anymore need to be recognised. Even if they are not active anymore as determining factors for cultural phenomenon anymore - they need to understood. They need to be understood in terms of rendering us capable of distancing ourselves from these dormant desires which might still seem very alluring. The allure of dormant desires is a misdirection. Cultural actors might get attracted by them and get motivated to produce and participate in the desire as well but it is futile.

The dormant desire can never find an expression and in the current landscape. Expression does not mean a form that the desire takes will also resonate with a public interest. Each actor who holds a desire and gives it a unique shape. The shape might not be familiar for the public at all. If some context for a regular exposure of these strange shapes does not exist then their strangeness will never reduce. The shapes will never get normalised and will forever feel odd and out of place. Only the forms which get exposed regularly manage to develop an aura of familiarity around them. As a democratic system that offers exposure to each unique type of form in the system is highly improbable, the event of dormant desires finding a public expression is also highly unlikely. Oddness seems to be the norm when it seen and thought about often. As a society we want to control the parameter of exposure and keep it dependent on social standing. We want very few to get a chance of becoming culturally normalised because cultural normalisation has a value attached to it. We do not want this value to be assigned randomly to anyone at all. We do not want culture and its arbitration to become a level-playing field. And going by the narratives of exclusion that exist in the landscape, this fact is plain and clear. If a desire does not have the momentum and impetus to gain common currency through a kind of cultural normalisation, it needs to find a place in our shrine.

If there is to be a conspiracy theory, let it be about how the civilisation was mounted externally into Earth from somewhere out there. This idea was essentially an act of aggression. A simple and sustainable model of survival was disturbed in its infancy and replaced with another. An idea that perpetuates itself through the constant urge to improve, innovate and push further. Nothing is good enough and there is no day like tomorrow. The tomorrow that never comes. Narcotics, business, culture, everything owes its existence to this open, empty and fraudulent promise. Even consciousness is locked into this loop. At least in the form that it is channeled through beings in bodies. Sketching the conspiracy further, the idea was transmitted to our atmosphere by radio and once it was in the air all we had to do was breathe.

The idea is ripe for conspiracy-seeking because it doesn't add up, it doesn't seem stable but has been a part of our fabric for so long. It can't be rationalised by history, experience or biology. It is a purely alien idea that suddenly appeared in our midst and then strangely also became the central idea. Without the idea of civilisation, we wouldn't be restless, paranoid and be so anthropometric. These are defining conditions to forever lock us in the loops of progression and recursion. There has been no reportage about the ascent of this idea. Maybe this happened before the development of culture and language, but that is purely speculative. It could also have happened in the silence of the night and the noise of our dreamworld. We have been confused ever since, not knowing whether we misremember a dream or remember a phenomenon that should be shared and reported.

The idea of civilisation has some more characteristics which might be more obvious. The details can be matched either way. So if the idea is to improve and be more sophisticated, then both the idea of domesticity and colonies on the moon make sense. There is no prescription of choices only a pattern and hinting mechanism for making choices. Potentially infinite things can fit. The myth of the prevalence of autonomy exists but in fact only the tyranny of civilisation prevails.

Arranging snippets of sensory I/O routines into any kind of coherence. Beginning-middle-end or not. Crazy-as-hell or boring-as-a-tap. Narratives distort experience and memory. Actually narratives are the death-wish of experience. As bio-memory fades slowly, the desire to preserve experience takes over. This desire behaves in a way which is biased towards nostalgia. "Which will be a fun way to remember this disaster?"

Remembering and sharing (there is even a word for it: narrativizing!) is important. Cinema. Distortion is the only choice. Because media exists, because empty media desire to be full. Noise dawns and refuses to die down. Media confuses, further filters and processes experience. I think we need to become split-minded monkeys soon. Split between vegetating-sensory-pigs and undiscriminating consumers of bullshit (narrative media).

This death-wish of experience is deeply rooted in us. There is nothing to do but follow it. Of course the trick at hand can always be applied. Some amount of the-ability-to-decompile the narrated must exist. Rough, faulty, excavated de-compilations are good enough. No one needs to access elaborate compositions. From the de-compiler's perspective, compositions are a waste of time.

We are ahead of ourselves. Whereas common concern requires us to focus and deliver on promises, there is a neurotic urge to escape. Of course we never want to be who we are, where we are. 'The grass is greener on the other side,' doesn't capture the anxiety of the moment, the emotion of the moment, it just speaks of aspiration. It is a question of recursive multiplication, a virus, steam. Here the we is not the same as earlier (not just me in multiple projections), here the we is the idea of the human. The idea of the human was a prescription, social and cultural that at best we have been able to rise up to occasionally over the years. It is not a description. We are not human by default. Or all the time either.

The tangential momentum of humanity's common motivation is to get organised and efficient to conserve effort and resources. And to be more elegant. The clean lines of the design I see in magazines tell me that that soon we are not going to be happy with out bodies. Bodies that sweat, need to shit and take a piss, bodies that complain though pain. We will need ones that behave like good computers, don't get heated on overuse, have no disease, are upgradable, don't smell, have accessories and are a mix of born in a cradle and bought from a shop. I am personally attached to the illusion of personality and personal identification. What will I do about it? When it is time to accept the evolution underway, resign to it, surrender, agree. I will think of the person as an instinct, as electricity, the systemic stimulus that lets gadgets breathe.

Into the fluctuation of the voltage of this electricity, I will see gradations and pencil in a full person. Do a naming ceremony afresh, call different ranges of fluctuations by different names of organs and erstwhile-body parts.

Our impatience with evolution to catch up with aspiration is a clash of two scales of time. One is granular, instinctive, throbbing, residing in the pulsating rhythms of our organic body. And the other is an urge to chase tangents.

How are you known? How has your name become your handle in a very literal sense, your handle being the instrument by which you are pulled into surfaces, pushed out of anonymity. Your name used to have a meaning when you were born, but now it has been repeated so often that it has become a mere marker, appellation, label on the box. It has actually even taken on these dark undertones, these associations which are nothing short of evil. These undertones come back to you when you manage to sleep and when you actually manage to sleep. In the dreams, your name becomes a spell and a chant. Which is which you do not know, but sometimes it is repeated a million times and nothing happens except that you go into a trance and sometimes it is spoken just once and everything breaks lose.

In this muddled game you even think sometimes of how others think of you. Your reputation factors in your world view as if it were not a systematic form of distortion but actually something real. Of course distortions are also real, they have residing within them ghost images of other things for sure. But no one sees the ghost image, they are seen with pure artefact value, as a pure anomaly.

But even when you are living within a belief system, even when you stare only at the ghost image, enthused with the emotion of convincing yourself that it is real, the distortion defeats you. Because it is fragile. It is always under attack. Because at any given time, only a certain number of reputations can be loaded and mounted into a system. If you are in you are already on your way out. On the other hand if you are standing outside in the cold, at anytime at all somebody might let you in. Somebody might open the door.

The source is important because everything came from there and everything goes back there.

At the source of everything is the space for contention. Where is it? What is it? Who can access it?

The source can also be denied, but that is very difficult. To perform denial we have to investigate each and every source that supplies the world with the primary materials and sentiments from which culture is generated and demonstrate that we come up with nothing. This process needs to be exhaustive and empirical, leaving no terrain uncovered and so it is a time consuming process.

The only other way to perform denial is to argue with the very need to model channels of supply as sources and then project critical importance on them.

We will flirt with both these ways.

The SOURCE book was published by Banner Repeater, commissioned by Banner Repeater and Orbits.com for Banner Repeater's serial journal UN-PUBLISH.