Welcome To The Machine
You can really feel it in the liminal spaces, where you feed yourself to the machine. Where they scan you, pat you, and ask you for ID; evidence that you've been scanned, patted, and ID'd already, by some other part of the machine. It's a very big machine and the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing.
Places like airports, courts, or the police. If that's your cursed destination, you can feel the state's mastication, running you across their teeth to see if they should bite you or let you be. You can feel palpitation of nations—each office an orifice—whispering what is thissss? Fingering IDs, IDing fingerprints, so that the blind state may see. We are always subliminally inside the machine, but in these liminal spaces, you can really feel it.
I was in the cop shed today, a place which always inspires poetry because it takes so much time and I'm just staring into space. I had a parking ticket but I lost the parking ticket which thrust me deeper into the bowels of the machine. There, in the main hall the presumed kudu karayos (drug people) and homeless men were locked behind the iron teeth of the machine. I could hear them washing in the open latrine. These men are lost as men, they are now only what's meant. They are just lines in a database which I could physically see because it's all paper, and the cops plonked the file down in front of me.
The Sri Lanka Police predate Sri Lanka. These police are really an age-old predatory system, a giant cybernetic computer, using people and paper to computate paupers. This is why I say that we have been ruled by AI for centuries. When you're in the belly of the beast, who cares if it's based on silicon or carbon copies? It's like debating whether it's a crocodile or alligator while the thing is eating you. A machine can be made of men and paper as much as other machines and electricity. And paper has caged these men as it cages entire countries.
The paper database in my face had the men's names, metadata, and their court numbers, wherein they're fed into that other machine, some day. If you mess up any bit of this paperwork the whole works gum up and you have to talk to at least four people to get back into the machine before you ever get out again. You daren't give the machine indigestion because then it devours your time unendingly. This is basically why I'm in the cop station today. I got a parking ticket and lost the parking ticket and the machine is 404ing me. What is this thing, squirmed out of its packaging? How do I treat it, how do I eat it, what does it mean?
So I sit there staring into space waiting for them to get to me, while the guys in remand are staring at me. We're all in the machine, just at different comfort levels (you too, comfortably reading). We are all in the belly of the beast, we are all part of its metabolic cycle, some given better eats near the head or stomach while others have to eat shit. But the machine is always there, whether its gears grind your bones or make your bread.
You have to be ID'd, tagged, and bagged so you can pass not only from place to place, but from literally cradle to grave. For example, the lady next to me at the copshed, she's lost the deed to her father's grave. She needs to file a police report to reclaim it and they are not understanding this, least of all in her English. It only adds to my purgatory but I try to help this lost soul by translating. She shows the cops a photograph of the grave and they ask if the grave is missing. I'm a shitty translator. It really is like speaking to another species, trying to get the alien state to understand you through the flickering transistors of a few police constables. They get it eventually. In this way I get the machine.
In Sri Lanka you can see the machine because it's so old and creaky. It still has a lot of visible databases and many moving parts in the form of human beings. Everything is recorded in giant notebooks, the one use of handwriting is being a Sri Lankan cop, they're writing constantly. They write my name in red, the facts of the case in blue. Every time they write my name, my address, and religion, because the state AI has a very small context window. Then the cop writes a page-long essay on my missing parking ticket—what it contains I can't ascertain—and then I sign the thing because I'm just trying to leave. Why should a fish debate with the crocodile's teeth? I've long since given up and try to let them shit me out in peace. And I'm almost there, I can feel it.
The cop carbon copies me into the system and then suddenly I and my parking ticket exist again, in the eyes of the state. The cops now feel their ass is suitably covered and I can pay my fine (at the post office) and leave. I'm reminded that the cops also fear the machine and keep it well greased with either pedantry or bribery if needs be. Fine paid, I return to the cop shed where everything is fine and I can finally leave. So that's my pointless journey into the machine.
But my point here is that we're always in the machine. Get into any bad situation and you'll see how bad the situation actually be. Every day, in every way, we are not us but representations of us, fed into a machine that can either feed us or grind us into dust, depending on how it's feeling. Kudu means something like dust and karayo means people, of sorts, and that's all we are. Dust in the wind turned into grist for the machine. They let me out for a moment, but there is no out, it's an illusion. Ask the lady trying to bury herself, and needing the machine's permission.