sync city

definition: when something happens that's significant to you, a synchronicity, that's when you feel that some observer that isn't you is observing you and the event and its meaning (think: a murder of crows flying past your 49th floor window at that exact moment; a message, from who?). the experience of synchronicity is characterized by the feeling of some hidden observer, like some other meaning-maker is, in that moment, intending for the significance you're experiencing, and observing you to see if you got the message.

theory: the event itself is always observable by everyone else in the same physical system (your neighbors, motion sensors, whoever), and there's always at least one mundane causal path that doesn't involve a hidden other observer (think: updraft, food/nesting site).

this might be why all of our stories can overlap in ways that end up being physically structural without semantic conflict (think: commerce can be described in terms of synchronicity, a timely motion with meaning, mutually observed), until observers create opportunity for semantic conflict by straddling stories (think: gentrification)

this doesn't prove anything. this is an effort to stabilize the observer who's convinced they saw something they know is unconvincing, their goalposts rattling free from the dissonance of it. systems tend to cycle like stories tend to cycle, and a story is an easy way to keep a system going like a song is an easy way to keep the beat. however all this runs, player-specific story is undeniably a really low-energy tool for coordination, rhymes with narrative-as-stigmergy. there can be more than one desire-path to the same park bench, and more than one reason to want to maintain it. where does your story go, knowing that its players are contributing to a million other stories too? a hero's journey is a whole deal, yeah, but aggregate a thousand of them and you've got one standard-issue evolving society.

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writing this out and looking at it, it feels electric to me, like alternating current, the void/all/void/all strobe

this sort of creates the possibility that layers of consciousness (whether subconscious or collective conscious) might relate to inter-layer meaning kind of opaquely? or, yeah, teleologically? like from that perspective the story isn't the point, it's what it does to you? or through you? in strict terms, you're the only one for whom any story-experience you can observe exists, because you're the only one who can experience it like you. the conserved quantity isn't the story, it's you prior to narrative identity: you, gerund, the observing

... and, maybe, the lattice formed by the weave of that line

(protip: hook your rattling goalposts up to the grid, it's a piezo generator that runs on your observing, and its current can (can) be your primary export)