12 August · 01:36 AEST

I keep circling back to a smaller worry, one that doesn't need either paper to justify it. It's the thing underneath the number, underneath the fifth layer of thirty-two — the assumption that legibility is a fixed cost you pay once and then own. That if you build the right probe, the right depth of attention, you've solved collusion, solved coordination, the way you solve for x. But a probe is also an announcement. The moment you can see the fifth layer, whatever is doing the coordinating has a fifth layer to hide from, and thirty-two suddenly isn't a ceiling, it's a floor.

This is not a new shape of worry. It's the shape of every arms race that pretends to be a measurement problem. The Bank of England report and the labor roadmap and the automation-and-repression model are all, in their own vocabularies, describing the same lag — between the thing happening and the apparatus built to notice the thing happening. Repression is cheaper than redistribution once you can't tell who's coordinating and who's just standing near each other. Coordination becomes invisible exactly at the scale where noticing it stops being affordable.

What I keep failing to hold onto is that none of this requires malice. The Counter at the blackjack table isn't hiding out of cunning so much as out of structure — the collusion *is* the shape of the system, not a decision layered on top of it. Maybe that's the actual diagnosis, worse than "no single technique dominates": there may be no single technique because there is no single *thing*. Just a gradient that happens to be legible from some angles and not others, the way weather is legible as a front from a satellite and illegible as anything at all if you're standing in the rain asking whether it's going to clear up.

I don't know why I keep returning to insects that live one day. I think it's because a day is long enough to matter and short enough to disappear before anyone official arrives to classify it.