This is a structural narrative, not to be confused with a narrative structure. I know very little about web design, but I know all the philosophy that has ever existed or will ever exist.

Something else we need to clear up. What the fuck is/are dialectics? I asked AI and, even though LLMs are usually incomprehensibly talented philosophers, I didn’t quite get the gist.

I’ll give you my own mental image of a dialectic and we’ll leave it at that. It’s two dudes who disagree, and argue until they reach a sort of compromise between the two extremes they represent. Except it is not actually two dudes at all. The dialectic is just a way of reaching a conclusion to a certain line of inquiry. It can be two dudes, or one dude, or three dudes. Women famously can’t do dialectics.

Now that the preamble is out of the way, we can start to introduce the principal characters of our structural narrative. Except, because we are narrating a structure, and not structuring a narrative, there are no characters. Only a cold, unfeeling monolith which we try and fail to project into the mindspace with reciprocal indifference. To a human, it’s always a rollercoaster of delight and disgust. How exhausting!

Before we talk about the structure of the thing, we’re going to talk about the language we use to speak about the thing and other things like it. We use navigational language: “you can find what you’re looking for HERE”, “you’ll need to go THERE to find that”, “you’ll have to look around to find what you want”. Through all of human history, such navigational language was for physical spaces - anything from a complex of buildings to a long novel. Judging by the language we use to talk about a book and a building, we consider them both as a kind of “space” which can be explored.

Yet, though we use similar language to express our explorations, one cannot navigate a building in the same way one navigates a book. Believe me, I’ve tried, and the receptionist just laughed at me. I cannot continue in this vein without losing myself in a semantic forest. Suffice it to say, that walking around a book gets boring very quickly. You can only take like one tiny step, and the scenery doesn’t really change at all.

A building evinces physical imagery, while a good novel will invoke mental imagery. One occupies most of its space outside of us, the other is mainly concerned with our inner spaces.

Can we call a building a physical space, and a book a metaphysical space? I mean I won’t stop you, but I also don’t agree. The book can be considered an isolated and private space, where identical content can create a different image depending on the beholder. The book can help you imagine that you are in Papua, New Guinea, but you could only interact with your mind’s conception of Papua. The unbridgeable physical space between you and Papua remains.

It’s not easy to make the jump in terms of mental models from the book to the internet, just as it is not easy to reconcile the physical with the metaphysical.

Lets take a step back and talk about telepathy. We have Greek “tele”, meaning “far away”, combined with “pathos/pathy”, meaning “feeling”. So all telepathy really is, is projecting your feelings through space, farther than your voice can project sound waves. I’m sorry it took you this long to realize that everyone with an iPhone is functionally telepathic. Can you imagine telling someone from ancient Greece that in 2000 years everyone will be telepathic, and nobody will really notice or care because it will be the norm?

Anyways enough of that. Lets start narrating the metaphysical structural space occupied by leviathianic.com

When you want to build a physical structure, the first thing you need is physical real estate. And not just the plot of land, but all the public infrastructure surrounding it (e.g. roads). A cabin in the woods can be useful shelter for someone who is entirely self-sufficient, but we live in the 21st century of interconnectedness and interdependency. In parallel, when you want to build a metaphysical structure, you first need metaphysical real estate to build within. Your imaginary structure also relies on surrounding invisible (to you) public infrastructure (e.g. data centers, routing backbones). How does one buy metaphysical real estate? Who does one buy it from? Isn’t the concept of “owning” a metaphysical space kind of absurd? I promise you it’s no more or less absurd than “owning” a tree or a river when you stop and think about it.

It is here we introduce the two main characters that give rise to our blog site: HTML and CSS.

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. The role of a “markup language” is to be interpreted by the web browser. It is a language that tells your computer what content to display and how to structure the content on the screen. “Hypertext” is a word our ancestors from 1990 used to describe non-linear text. It’s like a book where, midway through, you can pull a whole nother book out of the book. AKA “hyperlink”.
Going back to our real estate analogy, the HTML is the architecture of the building, it is the collection of support beams and pillars that makes a building qualify as a shelter.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. The role of a style sheet is to apply desirable aesthetics to our markup language structure. Aesthetics are optional as far as I am concerned, if you couldn’t tell. The word “cascading” contains too much complexity for us to pay too much attention to it. Suffice it to say, CSS has its own internal structure called the “cascade”, and as we feed our HTML through it the HTML inherits certain stylistic qualities. Some buildings are ugly utility buildings, others are beautiful cathedrals. The beauty of a metaphysical cathedral (take csszengarden.com for example) is an intricate CSS labyrinth which is usually designed to convince you to buy stuff.

Right now, this website is as simple as a website can be. When you navigate to my URL, you are served one HTML page (index.html), which contains hyperlinks to other HTML pages. To say the same thing a different way, when you navigate to my metaphysical address, you enter a virtual room with a greeting and numerous virtual doors to pass through.

In the physical world, things work in a linear fashion. If I walk into your front door and then I walk into your bathroom, I’ll have to go through a similar series of doors to leave your house again. The metaphysical world has no need for linearity, because metaphysical experience is comparatively unbounded by the limitations of space.

What if dolphins are more intelligent than humans, and they’re just really not that interested in interacting with us? If they were really more intelligent than us, they would probably want to keep that information away from us.
Anyways, what external indicators would we have of their intelligence? If you’re like me, your first thought is: infrastructure. But what undersea infrastructure would a dolphin find useful?

Compared to humans, dolphins can fly. Since they have an entire additional dimension of movement available to them by default, they really have no use for stairs and ladders. They live in a thicker medium which they can push behind them to propel forward. So again, what external indicators of dolphin intelligence would we expect? This question is deceptively difficult, and the reason is that you are not a dolphin. What authority you could possibly have to decide what makes a dolphin’s life better, I know not.

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