Two-Factor Authentication Blues
I’ll be honest, I’m not exactly sure how to describe this one. It’s kind of like a description, or a hint at a story that hasn’t been written. It’s like an Extremely Online reincarnation of Borges having a joke with us. Quite possibly at our expense.
And there’s every chance you will have a completely different interpretation.
So while I may be scratching my head as I try and explain it here, I’m also smiling too, like a child who is staring at the stereogram and thinks they may possibly see the sailboat hidden within it.
Anyway. What I do know for a fact is that the last time Ryan ( 𐌉𐌃𐌉Ꝋ𐌕𐌄𐌒𐌵𐌄 ) contributed to the STSC he gave us one of out most popular post to date. Of course, I trust his artistic sensibility regardless of the numbers, but it’s worth pointing out all the same.
So our man Ryan clearly knows what he’s doing, even if it might take some of us a little while to catch up to him.
Enjoy.
TJB.
Most young members of the Islamic faith take a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca once they come of age, but for Saul Jordin, growing up as he did among a generation of terminally-online male ascetics with few career prospects and little to no upward mobility, the destination of his eternal return lies thousands of miles to the north, in a far less spiritual milieu. See, Saul supports unilateral digital privacy measures, preferring a loose approach to governance away from the prying eyes of state spies and financial regulators, the internet as a festering wound of lawlessness comparable to the unreconstructed vision of the west dreamed up by the cattlemen turned studio heads of olde Hollywood.
For the service of heavily-encrypted communication, Saul pays his tithes to Protein Mail, a verified virtual fortress with secure servers stashed in the anti-bureaucratic nation of Estonia; unfortunately for his travel budget and next two weeks of free time, he must journey all the way there to reset his password. The Proteinites welcome him with open doors, yet not open arms, as the company’s employees are all totally intangible, lines of living code within a fully-automated business, structured to resist not only the possibility of hostile takeover by any number of well-funded ideological opponents, but also all forms of natural disaster, be it the rising rides of the ocean or the threat of inferno—arsonic, biblical, or otherwise.
In the hallowed halls of Protein, Saul finds the erotic bliss of pure information, a data-driven anima, tendrils snaking forth to absorb his mortal flesh and convert it into PDF.