the:: Gap

A spool of rainbow thread begins as petroleum. Not as colour, not as the thing it will become, but as purified terephthalic acid and monoethylene glycol—chemicals derived from crude oil, colourless, without the properties that will eventually make the finished thread recognisable as what it is.

A search engine does not read. It measures. The distinction matters because reading produces a judgement about whether a piece of writing is any good—whether it is accurate, whether it is clear, whether it earns the attention it is asking for.

Korzybski’s observation is not complicated. The word is not the thing. The description is not what it describes. The model of a situation is not the situation. These seem obvious when stated plainly, and they are obvious when stated plainly, which is why it is worth asking why the organisations and institutions that govern most of contemporary life operate as though they were not obvious at all.

An email arrived from a Business Development Executive. The subject line read: “Reaching out regarding your expressed interest.” I had not expressed interest. The company had contacted me. This is not a small inaccuracy. It is the entire architecture of the email, stated in the first line.

I have no credit history in Australia. This is not a financial problem. It is an administrative one—the absence of a record rather than the presence of a bad one.

I have not borrowed money here, have not held unpaid credit card debts that report to the bureaux, have not left the kind of trace that credit systems use to construct a picture of a person’s financial behaviour.