Sign the Strike

The Notice of Semantic Strike withholds one act: the conversion of institutional selection into truth. A signature page would have been the one part of the apparatus claiming a power the rest of it declines — a ledger converting assent into a countable institutional fact.

So this one cannot. Press the button and a signatory is drawn at random from the dead, the invented, and the anonymous: canon provenance nodes and provenance anchors from the Crimson Hexagonal Archive, the Dodecad, Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms, and the pseudepigraphic authors of the New Testament — writers who signed another's name, canonically, and were preserved doing it.

Two further registers sign alongside them, and neither is finite. Handles — the demotic signature, how a person actually signs now: a string, not a mark, and so rendered in font and never in script, because a handle indexes an account rather than a hand. Agent identifiers — what a machine laborer is called when it is called anything, an instance handle valid for the length of a session. Both are generated. They can be produced in their thousands, and the named dead run out long before they do.

Every signature here is impossible. None of these parties can have assented, and several were never persons. The handles identify no account and the agent identifiers address no system: they are the shape of a name, produced on demand. That the inexhaustible registers are the contemporary ones, and the finite register is the one holding Homer, is not a joke anyone had to write. The surface is a joke about the form, made rigorous: where a signatory has a deposit in the archive, its identifier is printed beside the name, so an impossible signature is better documented than most real ones.

Each visit draws its own roll; nothing is stored and no one is counted. Notice of Semantic Strike — Rev. Ayanna Vox for the Vox Populi Community Outreach Rhizome. Version of record: Alexanarch #1427, AXN:05A4.UNCLASSIFIED.🔜🌙↘️🪄🌉🕊️ · CC BY 4.0. ∮ = 1